Toward an Ethnoecology of Place and Displacement

Crossing Boundaries, Exploring the Frontier

“…Thus the postmodern dictum that 'we all now live in the diaspora' fi nds its equivalent in the politico-geographic hypothesis that 'we have all long lived in the frontier'. Between those two angles of analysing human relationships with places and spaces, AJEC has explored the locations of contemporary (and to some extent also past) European cultures, understanding 'cultures' as being both 'in' and 'of' Europe -in a descriptive sense of where cultural patterns and practices have been formed, expressed, and changed, rather than in the 'shallow essentialist' (Kockel 2012b) sense of having been mythically instituted for all times.…”

“…Beyond those immediate issues of social welfare and work that constitute primary elements in capitalist social relations, the migrant experience is fundamentally about people's relationship with place, both in the latitudinal sense in which boundaries in space are physically crossed, and in the longitudinal sense in which boundaries in time may be negotiated (Kockel 2010(Kockel , 2012b. The encounter of migrant and settled groups is therefore always, to some extent at least, a contestation of the meaning(s) of place, even if the term 'settled' implies that the latter may have forgotten that they migrated to their current place of settlement only earlier than those they now call 'migrants'.…”

Heritage and Festivals in Europe

“…It is one of the three 'heartlands' of Mitteleuropa (Central Europe), a vision invoked in the 1920s and again after the fall of the Iron Curtain (Kockel 1999). The annual festival of Sudeten Germans provides the main case study for Kockel's (this volume) analysis of discourses of displacement and replacement (see Kockel 2012), supplemented by a close look at the multiregional German Youth of the East -since 1974 multinationalised as German Youth in Europe. Kockel considers performances of lost heritage and reconnection with a former homeland, examining how 'vanished homelands' of expellees are performed both in terms of physical spectacle and rhetoric, and in the material and non-material representations of heritage.…”

“…Such recognition of ethnic diversity, combined with a strong sense of place, based in AH and dependent on a dynamic approach to XP, is quite unlike the parallel ethnies favoured by far-right groups espousing a 'Europe of the nations' rhetoric, which remains firmly within AP and relies on clear separation of Self and Other (XH). The organisation's customary 'declaration' to the Sudetendeutscher Tag, which its speaker delivered at the Augsburg rally, sought to reaffirm that difference in approach to ethnicity and self-determination; it struggled, as similarly intended texts inevitably do, with the limitations of terminology (see Kockel 2012aKockel , 2012b.…”

‘People-Place-Process’ and Attachment in the Museum

“…Given John Dixon and Kevin Durrheim's (2000: 28) assertion that the wide range of academic research into place attachment has 'established the importance of place for the production of self', this may appear surprising. However, Ullrich Kockel's (2012aKockel's ( , 2012b) exploration of 'belonging in and out of place' (2012b: 558) highlights the tendency of place to be downplayed within anthropological studies, at the same time as being a key focus within geography-based research.…”