Notes on ‘Not Being There’ Ethnographic Excursions in Eighteenth-Century Stockholm

Bibliographic Data

ID7768263
AuthorsRebecka Lennartsson (0000-0003-1535-4138, National Maritime Museums, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume41
Issue1
Publication date2011-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnologia Europaea (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0425-4597 • E-ISSN: 1604-3030
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.16995/ee.1081
OpenAlexW2981790066
LanguageEN
Citations received8

Although using the past to explain or question the present remains part of ethnology’s self-image, ethnology has become a contemporary-oriented discipline. While we tend to emphasise the complexity of our own time, we risk representing the past as a series of single events with immutable meaning, reduced to a backdrop. This article attempts to discuss the practical implications of using ethnographic methods to describe and understand a lost world. Is it at all possible? Inspired by Barthes’s method for analysing three levels of meaning in the advertising image, and by Ricoeur’s metaphor of history as a map, I shall attempt to outline a method for performing ethnography in eighteenth-century Stockholm, using a notorious ball at the Royal Palace in April 1768 as an example

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Ethnography · Linguistics · Metaphor · Sociology · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Cultural Identity and Representation · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy

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