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SIEF statement on ongoing assaults on academic freedom in the US

The International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) expresses its solidarity with colleagues, students, and friends, who represent our scholarly fields of Ethnology and Folklore at US academic institutions.

SIEF is deeply concerned with recent initiatives and executive orders by the US government aimed at cutting back funding for research and higher education, banning key words relating to diversity, equity and inclusion, and defunding scholars and academic programmes. It is troubling to see visas being revoked and colleagues being threatened with deportation from the US, simply for exercising their right to free speech.

SIEF promotes academic and personal freedoms and advocates for the critical role that scholarship can play in society. Important conversations in research and higher education must be carried out in a climate of collegiality and respect without fear of repercussion, even if they are sometimes not politically convenient.

Independent research and international collaborations must continue freely. We therefore call for an immediate halt to intimidation, de-funding, and the ongoing delegitimization of vast areas of research based on political ideologies and expediency.

At the upcoming SIEF2025 Congress in Aberdeen we cordially invite delegates to participate in our Academic Freedom Sanctuary:

Academic Freedom Sanctuary
Moderators: Hande Birkalan-Gedik and Dani Schrire
Date & Time: Wednesday June 4, 19:45 - 21:00

On behalf of SIEF
Marie Sandberg, President, Sophie Elpers, Executive Vice-President, Thomas McKean, Vice-president

The 15th Conference of the SIEF Ritual Year Working Group: Food, Feasts, Festivities, & Folklore

The theme revolves around the importance and meaning of food. The conference aims to highlight the centrality of gustatory experiences and gastronomical practices in various ethnolinguistic groups around the world. Read more here >>

New issue of Ethnologia Europaea, Vol. 54, no. 2

We kick start this issue with the ever so thought provoking reflections of Marilyn Strathern, this time from the Keynote Lecture that she delivered at the 2023 SIEF Congress. Her paper explores the idea of uncertainty via the well established anthropological concept of relations. She asks whether considering relations as uncertain in their capacities and effects can help us uncover what is asked from knowledge practices in order to enlarge and/or shrink our physical and social worlds. We hope that the publication of this essay will launch a new tradition for EE of publishing other keynote addresses from major conferences and events.

Heidi Henriikka Mäkelä then examines the Finnish tradition of metered oral poetry, often referred to as “Kalevalaic” poetry or “runo” singing. Her angle is to analyze the re-heritagization of such contemporary poems. She situates these sexualized poems within a feminist discourse as well as a context of transnational body politics such as the #MeToo movement.

For their part, Francisco Martínez & Patrick Laviolette offer a thought-piece on the relationship between the concept of hacking and the practice of hitchhiking. Their analysis, based largely on multi-sited findings from Eastern Europe, also plays with such notions as passenger ethnography and the hospitality that can take place in the enclosed confines of a four-wheeled, mobile space.

With fieldwork amongst Italian and Polish informants, Aga Pasieka’s article provides an ethnography into far-right activism. Her material is timely in terms of the current political landscape since it at once transgresses the national context and yet remains firmly embedded within various populist constructions of nation-state identities.

This issue also features a short ethnographic snapshot by Mira Menzfeld who presents some field data that examines how the conversion to Salafism by the controversial f igure Andrew Tate is being discussed in parts of the Germanophone salafiyya.

New Issue of Cultural Analysis, 22:2 (2024)

Special Issue "In relation to microbes"
Special issue editors: Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, Áki G. Karlsson, and Veera Kinnunen

This special issue explores various aspects of multispecies symbiotic practices where humans and microbes relate to each other. Whether making and digesting food, composting and caring for soils, or managing waste, some of these practices have been actively cultivated for millennia, others recently glimpsed through advances in microbiology, while others await discovery, but may prove vital for the future shape of life on Earth.

Scientific knowledge, popular interest and commercial investment in intimate relationships between humans and microbes has grown exponentially in the first decades of the 21st century. Known as the “microbial turn”, this explosion of interest has brought forward new questions and challenges to scientific research. The papers in this issue address the symbiotic living of humans and microbes and how their coexistence is shaped through everyday cultural practices. The studies shed light on the creative agency of microbes in vernacular food practices – from growing, baking, brewing, pickling and dairy making, through the digestive system and back to the soil through composting – and their implications for the physical, mental, and social wellbeing of humans.

The special issue brings together folklorists, ethnologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and nutrition scientists to examine such living cultures of living cultures through multispecies and multidisciplinary research. It provides new insights into the complex interactions of human and non-human agencies and their conjoined impact on the physical world, including human bodies, through research on joint cultural practices of humans and microbes. The study of these symbiotic practices offers an important vantage point on human health, foodways, sociality, and interaction with the environment, and may suggest viable pathways towards a more sustainable future.