CFP: Ethnography, Folklore, and 19th-Century Print Culture

A conference, “Ethnography, Folklore, and 19th-Century Print Culture,” will be held June 23-24, 2022 at the Institute of European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. 

This conference explores the connections between the proliferation of print products and an increased public and academic interest in social expressions and dynamics throughout the nineteenth century. Apart from looking at the particularities of journalistic, literary, and pictorial representations of human appearances, behaviors, and environments, it considers the interdependencies between “popular” and “scholarly” forms of social observation, which became institutionalized in the disciplines of socio-cultural anthropology, folklore studies, and sociology by the end of the century. The conference aims to bring together researchers from any field who (re-)construct tales of the history of social study connecting with the print revolution and emergence of a public fascinated with the art of observation. Consequently, it intends to reveal alternative contexts and strands of early ethnographic knowledge production and provide perspectives for a history of social knowledge beyond disciplinary, national, and genre-related methodologies.

Conference organizers ask for proposals for conference contributions (15-20 minutes) in the form of an abstract (max. 2500 characters) and a short CV (max. 1000 characters), in which the relation to the conference topic is explained, and the concrete research from which the contribution is derived is outlined. Accommodation costs will be covered for participants who present a paper. Please send questions and submissions by September 30, 2021 to Christiane Schwab. 

Visit Ethnography, Folklore, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture to learn more about the conference.