This volume starts out with two contrasting studies of monuments. How does the seemingly stability of stone and bronze hide a constantly changing cultural use? Anne Eriksen looks at the history of ruins in Norway. The murmur of ruins turns out to be a speech of modernity, a way of emotionalising place and history. Viktoriya Hryaban discusses the fate of socialist monuments in Ukraine and shows how the attempts to create alternative post-socialist memorials reproduce a traditional Soviet cultural grammar. Lace is a dominating decorative element in many Turkish Dutch homes. It has become a sign of "Turkishness" but as Hilje van der Horst points out, people's relations to this mundane domestic element mirror some important conflicts and ideas about modernity and ethnicity. From the cultural media of monuments and lace, the discussion moves on to two more classic mass media and their role in identity politics. Stijn Reijnders explores a popular Dutch game show that has managed to survive for decades, becoming something of a national institution for some, an example of an outmoded genre for others. How does the involvement mirror ideas of an imagined national community? Finally, Silke Meyer looks at an 18th century national stereotype of "The German quack" in English popular debate and mass media. How did this caricature of Germanness become an alter ego of the English?

Since its start in 1967 Ethnologia Europaea has acquired a central position in the international cooperation between ethnologists in the different European countries. It is, however, a journal of topical interest not only for ethnologists but also for anthropologists, social historians and others studying the social and cultural forms of everyday life in recent and historical European societies. This journal appears twice a year, sometimes as a thematic issue.

Since its start in 1967 Ethnologia Europaea has acquired a central position in the international cooperation between ethnologists in the different European countries. It is, however, a journal of topical interest not only for ethnologists but also for anthropologists, social historians and others studying the social and cultural forms of everyday life in recent and historical European societies. This journal appears twice a year, sometimes as a thematic issue.

This book discusses the history and contemporary practice of studying cultures 'at home', by examining Europe's regional or 'small' ethnologies of the past, present and future. With the rise of nationalism and independence in Europe, ethnologies have often played a major role in the nation-building process. The contributors to this book offer case studies of ethnologies as methodologies, showing how they can address key questions concerning everyday life in Europe. They also explore issues of European integration and the transnational dimension of culture in Europe today, and examine how regional ethnologies can play a crucial part in forming a wider 'European ethnology' as local participants have experience of combining identities within larger regions or nations.

Special issue: Muslim Intimacies In every society, individual choice and freedom are shaped at least to some degree by the needs of familial and marital institutions. Currently, negotiations between individuals and families are undergoing transformations due to late modern processes such as recent waves of mass migration, the increasing transnationalism of everyday practices, global commerce in ideas and images, and the expansion of information technology into all corners of people’s lives. Some of the greatest challenges are experienced by Muslim families; the majority of the world’s Muslims live in extreme poverty, and in Europe, anti-Muslim sentiment has found a firm foothold in public attitudes and debates. This special issue explores the dilemmas facing transnational Muslim families as well as those who feel the impact of late modern transformations in societies where they have lived for generations. Five scholarly articles address family dynamics among Muslims in Finland (Anne Häkkinen), Ethiopia (Outi Fingerroos), Italy and Sweden (Pia Karlsson Minganti), Morocco (Raquel Gil Carvalheira), and Tanzania (Laura Stark); these are complemented by the insightful commentary by Garbi Schmidt. The aim of this theme issue is to develop new ways of talking about the links between Islam, family and the individual, which move away from the ethnocentrism of Western concepts and pay greater attention to the desires and goals of those studied. This volume includes two open issue contributions: Magdalena Elchinova scrutinizes identity construction among Orthodox Bulgarians based in Istanbul, and in the context of the post- Fordist “creative city” Ove Sutter analyses the playful and performative protests of activists following the declaration of the so-called Danger Zone 2014 in Hamburg, Germany.

This issue opens with Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander's inquiry into mobile physicians and their pragmatic use of proto-ethnographic insights so as to facilitate their day to day work with culturally diverse patients. Gabriella Nilsson uncovers how school nurses, too, habitually draw on their knowledge of class and family background while implementing normative medical guidelines on childhood obesity. Maria Zackariasson seeks to show how members in a faith-based youth organization experience and handle the pull and push of faith and peer group sociability. Ewa Klekot examines different traces and registers of memorialization of recent Polish history in two districts of Warsaw. Disciplinary memory is augmented through Konrad J. Kuhn's analysis of Swiss scholars' participation in the Europeanization of Volkskunde. With Laura Hirvi's observations among young Finnish artists in Berlin, the issue concludes with another set of transnationally mobile actors.

How did an African elephant reach a North European museum? What makes fashion displayed in museums such a hot topic today? Two of the articles in this issue of Ethnologia Europaea deal with museum ideologies. Liv Emma Thorsen’s essay follows the story of a museum elephant. What lessons can be drawn from its death, transport and exhibition in a postcolonial world? Marie Riegels Melchior looks at the intersection of the fashion industry and nation branding as an arena for developing new museums. These two articles tie in with Alexandra Schwell’s reflections on ideological shifts in Austrian state officials’ concept of the nation’s place on the political landscape, past and present. Patrick Laviolette explores metaphors of emplacement to understand regional character through its linguistic idiom. Relying on extensive fieldwork, Vihra Barova employs classical kinship scholarship to understand present-day Bulgarian village ties as they are expressed in the festivities of extended families.

Ethnologia Europaea is an interdisciplinary, peer reviewed journal with a focus on European cultures and societies. It carries material of great interests not only for European ethnologists and anthropologists but also sociologists, social historians and scholars involved in cultural studies. The journal was started in 1967 and since then it has acquired a central position in the international and interdisciplinary cooperation between scholars inside and outside Europe. Ethnologia Europaea is an A ranked journal according to the European Science Foundation journal evaluation (European Reference Index for the Humanities initial list).

The leitmotif of this special issue is "revisiting": Swedish and Danish scholars pay a visit to concepts and approaches of the field of European ethnology. In re-examining, revising, reawakening and relaunching concepts and approaches that might have otherwise been overlooked, worn out or rejected, they explore and explicate new dimensions of research that have remained tacit knowledge. In engaging with past knowledge claims, concepts and research endeavours, the volume offers original reworkings of the role of everyday life in user-driven innovation projects (Tine Damsholt and Astrid P. Jespersen), on the possible links between the historic-geographic atlas works and controversy mapping (Anders K. Munk and Torben Elgaard Jensen), understanding the meaning and creation of archival knowledge (Karin Gustavsson), and of fieldwork engagements (Frida Hastrup). Discussing the role of continuity and rupture in past and present analyses (Signe Mellemgaard) and rethinking borders (Fredrik Nilsson) are further avenues explored. Four main themes forge the connections of this volume: reworking everyday life, fieldwork as craftsmanship, mapping connections and conversing with the past create a dynamic matrix of novel takes on ethnologies for the future. The six contributions are supplemented with four comments; in commenting on the revisits, they contribute their own reflections on revisiting European ethnology.