Zeitschrift für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft. Journal for Cultural Analysis and European Ethnology

Buchbesprechungen der Ausgabe 1/2025

2025-05-12

Timo Heimerdinger / Marion Näser-Lather (Hrsg.): Position beziehen, Haltung zeigen!?

Moritz Ege — 2025-05-12

Stefan Wellgraf / Christine Hentschel (Hrsg.): Rechtspopulismen der Gegenwart.

Felix Gaillinger — 2025-05-12

Olga Reznikova: Wut der Fernfahrer.

Jana Stöxen — 2025-05-12

Adrian Ruda: Der Totenkopf als Motiv.

Ina Hagen-Jeske — 2025-05-12

Helen Franziska Veit: Scheitern zwischen Stigma und Show.

Timo Heimerdinger — 2025-05-12

Theresa Perabo: Wilhelm Mannhardt und die Anfänge der Volkskunde.

Felix Linzner — 2025-05-12

Sandra Eckardt: Pferdewissen.

Anja Schwanhäußer — 2025-05-12

Martina Rothl / Barbara Sieferle (Hrsg.): Erfahrung.

Patrick Pollmer — 2025-05-12

Mark Dunkley / Lisa Mol / Anna Tulliach (Hrsg.): Heritage at War.

Regina Bendix — 2025-05-12

Florian Schäfer / Janin Pisarek / Hannah Gritsch: Fabeltiere.

Heidrun Alzheimer — 2025-05-12

Daniel Loick: Die Überlegenheit der Unterlegenen.

Joachim Baur — 2025-05-12

Maximilian Hoor: Urbanes Radfahren und Mobilitätskulturen im Wandel.

Florian Grundmüller — 2025-05-12

Forum der Ausgabe 1/2025

2025-05-12

Politisierung der Wissenschaft

Thomas Thiemeyer — 2025-05-12

Positionen der Positionierung

Marion Näser-Lather — 2025-05-12

Wissen und Wertung

Monique Scheer — 2025-05-12

Von der Suspendierung zum Engagement und zurück

Čarna Brković — 2025-05-12

Ethnografie im Stellungskrieg

Jens Adam — 2025-05-12

Zeit für einen Positivismusstreit 2.0 in der EKW

Olga Reznikova — 2025-05-12

Editorial

Regina Bendix — 2025-05-12

Berichte der Ausgabe 1/2025

2025-05-12

New Normal of Work. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Normalisierungseffekte postfordistischer Lebensführung

Manfred Seifert — 2025-05-12

Die Welt von gestern deuten. Historische Anthropologie als Zugang zu einer komplexen Vergangenheit

Manuel Bolz — 2025-05-12

18. Doktorand:innentagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft

Laura Brammsen — 2025-05-12

Im|Materielles kulturelles Erbe als Praxis. Rekonstruktionen und Reinszenierungen in Mittel- und Osteuropa

Marlene Käding — 2025-05-12

Digitale Methoden und Daten in Ethnografie und qualitativer Forschung

Edda Sofie Schwarzkopf — 2025-05-12

Alle Artikel der Ausgabe 1/2025

2025-05-12

Intraversionen von Mensch-KI-Relationen

Libuše Hannah Vepřek — 2025-05-12

How do human–technology relations develop in so-called human computation systems develop along technological advancements and in everyday negotiations? While the development of these hybrid systems often follows the „human-in-the-loop“ (HITL) approach, which describes the integration of humans into artificial intelligence systems, this paper argues that such an approach does not adequately capture the complexity and dynamics of these relations’ everyday unfolding. Based on several years of ethnographic and co-laborative research and the analysis of the underlying imaginations of the HITL approach, the concept of intraversions is proposed to understand humantechnology relations in their multiplicity and becoming. Using the examples of two human computation-based citizen science projects, Foldit and Stall Catchers, this paper demonstrates how continuous reconfigurations within these relations go hand in hand with the redistribution of agency, tasks, and role-attributions. This perspective also aims to highlight the potential of ethnographic research in shaping hybrid human-AI systems. Intraversions provide a reflective perspective in technology development by offering an understanding of the complex interweaving of humans and technologies in their ongoing evolution. This, in turn, helps to understand how sociotechnical systems become what they are, where they are heading, how different actors, path dependencies, and contingencies shape them, and how to incorporate these insights into implementation.

Das Partineum

Dennis Eckhardt — 2025-05-12

An Ethnographic Place for Sharing Knowledge and Thinking Styles Abstract: Ethnological subjects are playing an increasingly important role in the development and research of technology. They reflexivise technology, above all by revealing the everyday situatedness of technology in interdisciplinary working contexts with the technological sciences. However, the field reality of interdisciplinary technology reflexivisation can pose a number of problems, as shown by the experiences from our own research network on IT security. On the one hand, the research network is too large to be able to interlink all sub-projects with ethnographic mobility across disciplines. On the other hand, in moments of mutual incomprehension, participants tend to overemphasise unsuccessful communication. The article identifies that these problems are conceptualised in various states of research. Inter- and transdisciplinarity, co-laboration and ELSI accompanying research (ethical, law and social implications), for example, lack a clear link between reflexivisation and localisation. However, this connection effectively prevents the aforementioned problems, as shown by the positive experiences from the network. The partineum, as a neologism consisting of participation and place (-eum), represents this kind of localised technology reflexivisation and is presented in the article. On an abstract level, it functions as a boundary site to which knowledge colleagues can relate due to its underdetermination. On a concrete level, the partineum is localised as a workshop that operationalises the participation in knowledge and thinking styles.

Postkarten und die deutsche Wende

FLorian Grundmüller — 2025-05-12

The golden age of postcards at the beginning of the 20th century triggered a fascination and a veritable collecting mania for this medium. After the Second World War, this rush largely subsided and the postcard became an everyday means of communication. Correspondence on postcards also accompanied historical periods of upheaval during this time, including the peaceful revolution and the German reunification in 1989/90. Political events came thick and fast in the noticeable condensation of the present and postal latency could barely keep pace with the rapid changes. Nevertheless, postcards from this period and the messages of the writers capture the world of experience in upheaval and share it with family and friends. In this article, I explore the question of how forms of temporality are inscribed on (picture) postcards from the period of German reunification. The aim of historical-ethnographic research on postcards from the period of upheaval is to work out perceptions and experiences of temporalities and to locate them in the context of political and individual changes. The combined analysis of image and text can therefore depict the actors’ worlds of experience and their horizons of expectation and describe the postcards as a temporal, holistic research object. Postcards thus break with an ethnographic now and take place simultaneously on several temporal levels.

Sind wir stets (trans-)national gewesen?

Frauke Ahrens — 2025-05-12

This article discusses ‚transnational Volkskunde / folklore studies‘ as both a historical phenomenon and an interpretative framework. To this day, the examination of transnational entanglements in the history of Volkskunde / folklore studies – known in German-speaking regions today as Empirische Kulturwissenschaft, Europaische Ethnologie, or Kulturanthropologie – remains a neglected area, particularly with regard to its institutionalization in the late 19th century. Studies on this period almost exclusively follow national or regional narratives. In our article, we first examine the background that may have led to the absence of transnational considerations in the historiography of Volkskunde / folklore studies. Building on this, we demonstrate how new approaches in the history and anthropology of knowledge within our discipline open up fresh possibilities for studying transnational developments in folkloristic knowledge production. The following section addresses the methodological and practical challenges of investigating such entangled histories of Volkskunde / folklore studies. We also outline our approach to tackling these challenges within the DFG project „Actors – Narratives – Strategies: Constellations of Transnational Folklore Studies, 1875–1905“ (funding period: 2022–2027). In the final section, we reflect on how ‚transnational Volkskunde / folklore studies‘ can be understood and used not only as an object of investigation, but also as an instrument of interpretation.