Etnologin och det förflutna

Plocka russinen ur kakan eller missa Jesusbarnet i krubban?

Abstract

How do ethnologists use historical sources? Do we, as some historians suggests, write without necessary context and just pick the raisins out of the cake, so to speak? Or, on the other hand, is there a risk in being so absorbed with the thickness of context that historians lose sight of what really matters? This has been expressed by Nietschze in a famous sentence where historians can tell everything about the barn in Betlehem, but forget about the person in the center of the scene. The authors suggests that ethnologists are good at finding relevant problems in society today, but in tracing them in history, or when we write history “for its own sake”, we need to consider context, anachronisms and empirical thickness more. That way ethnology can combine the advantages with a micro perspective and high credibility and make history that is both durable and highly topical. With the political developments we face today, ethnology is more than ever needed to complicate the past, to lift voices of the unheard and to persistently write our heterogeneous history.