Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

For decades, Clifford Geertz inspired and provoked controversy with his insistence that ethnography primarily involved the construction of text. His concept of ‘thick description’ was employed to train undergraduates in the basics of participant observation. Works and Lives (1988) became de rigeur reading in graduate seminars in both methodology and the history of anthropology. Senior anthropologists liked to agree that Geertz took the parallels too far and that he should never have strayed so far from his own early empirical work. Geertz's message was amplified and reduplicated into a ‘literary turn’.

The relationship between public and private spheres is a long-standing theme in the social sciences. This introduction presents a framework for ethnographically examining people's access to various spheres and collectives as digital technologies reconfigure boundaries between the public and private. While asking questions of global relevance, our ethnographic focus is specifically on the Nordic countries, all of which rank among the most digitalised in the world. Methodologically and conceptually, we argue for the importance of ethnographic studies to grasp digital sociality across various scales and spheres of social life in specific regions. We propose the figure-ground reversal as analytical device, as it affords a non-digital-centric focus yet gives the digital attention as an always particular phenomenon in its specific context.

Throughout Iceland's years of economic boom and the financial crisis in 2008, many Lithuanian migrants felt a sense of exclusion and hostility. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, these notions were different, and we argue that the use of digital platforms played an essential role in creating sociality among some members of the Lithuanian community and generating a feeling of Lithuanians as a part of Icelandic society. Our article points at the changed role of the Lithuanian association in Iceland established partly to counteract prejudice toward Lithuanians in Iceland but gaining a new role during the pandemic in generating information and posting it on their Facebook page. They thus took part in the digital sociality of migrants and non-migrants that was important during these times in Iceland.

This article examines the implications of digitalisation for the already existing forms of sociality. To do that, we turn to an ethnographic study we conducted remotely in the spring of 2020, which focuses on the online doctoral defences arranged in Finland during the first COVID-19 lockdown. Drawing on participant observation and interviews, we argue that the mechanisms for evaluating online defences are the same ones that govern defences in the offline sphere. They consist of discursive and material practices through which what is considered to be a proper doctoral defence as an academic rite of passage takes shape. We advocate for paying attention to the valuing arrangements of social relations exposed by the move from offline to online across various scales and spheres of social life.

This study explores the interconnectedness between social media, anger, and everyday negotiations of belonging and anti-racist struggles in Norway. The examination draws on an ethnographic approach that does not treat the digital as separate from the non-digital, but recognises the embeddedness of digital technology in people's lives. I demonstrate how digital networking might offer a different set of communicative practices within the same cultural context, challenging existing norms of face-to-face communication. I do so by focusing particularly on anger. Anger is inherently relational, but in Norway the dominant cultural norm confines it to the private domain. I argue that through digital networking sites, anger's transformative power transcends the private and bids for public recognition.

The idea of scaling digital water technologies to simultaneously solve global water-related challenges and stimulate economic growth, currently permeates the Danish water sector. Across public, private, and state institutions, this idea increasingly takes narrative form. In this article, I take the notions of exceptionalism, climate action, and digitalisation that make up the so-called Danish narrative as my empirical point of departure to explore how scaling takes place in practice. By following the work of the Danish water ambassadors, I describe the phenomenon of Water Diplomacy as a new form of transnational sociality made possible by digitalisation. This, I argue, serves as an ethnographic vantage point onto the Danish welfare state as an unfolding history of neo-liberalisation that increasingly blurs boundaries between public and private.

For decades, digitalisation in the news industry has altered boundaries for journalism: Not only the boundaries towards the public, but also the social boundaries between news workers in editorial offices. Based on nearly a year of fieldwork and ten years of ethnographic work in a Norwegian newsroom, this study explores how digital collectives are continuously negotiated and enacted through trust relations in the interplay between digital technology and sociality. By unpacking how digital technology and digital data contributes to reestablish, reshape, and rearrange boundaries of journalism in the era of digital transition, this article shows a shift from altered digital collectives in the newsroom to digital collectives including the public through trust in digital data. Since digital ways of performing journalism hold potential for maintenance and alteration of what is private and shared, negotiation of social boundaries is important for mediating and upholding trust, harmony, and professional autonomy in news work.

In Norway, equality as sameness has been emphasised as the dominant social form, whereas initiatives for individual recognition should be kept to oneself or take place within a culture of equality. However, most Norwegians seek belonging and stimulation in ways that are compatible with equality. In this article, I discuss how communication of prestige-giving individual achievements on digital platforms, while practising egalitarian values in face-to-face interaction, may lead to social distinction as well as inclusion. This is due to a practice I call ‘context control’, where persons tactfully manage boundaries between private and public spheres with different norms, values, and expectations – keeping them apart and bringing them together at appropriate moments.

Jan Beek, Thomas Bierschenk, Annalena Kolloch, and Bernd Meyer (eds) (2023), Policing Race, Ethnicity and Culture: Ethnographic Perspectives across Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 352 pp, £90, ISBN: 9781526165589.

Robert Parkin (2023), White Eagle, Black Eagle: Ethnic Relations in the German-Polish Borderlands (New York: Berghahn Books), 192 pp, $135.00/£99.00, ISBN: 978-1-80539-002-2.

Hugh Firth and Loulou Brown (2023), Love, Loyalty and Deceit: Rosemary Firth, a Life in the Shadow of Two Eminent Men (New York: Berghahn Books), 320pp, £107.00, ISBN: 978-1-80073-976-5.

Robert Rydzewski (2024), The Balkan Route: Hope, Migration and Europeanisation in Liminal Spaces (London: Routledge), 160 pp, £135.00 (Hb), ISBN: 9781032395432.

Anne-Christine Hamel (2024), Die Deutsche Jugend des Ostens: Interessenpolitik junger Vertriebener im Spannungsfeld von Heimat, kultureller Identität und Integration [The German Youth of the East: Politics of interests of young displaced persons in the tension of homeland, cultural identity and integration] (Göttingen: V&R unipress), 1008 pp, €140.00 (Hb), ISBN: 978-38471-1655-4.

Robin James Smith and Sara Delamont (eds) (2023), Leaving the Field: Methodological Insights from Ethnographic Exits (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 264pp, £90.00, ISBN: 978-1-5261-5765-2.

When we were about fourteen or fifteen years old, my two best mates and I ventured over to the house of one of our teachers late at night. He was responsible for teaching moral education instead of religion per se, and we actually liked him. Our mission was simple – to toilet paper his car. That is, to wrap it up completely in kitchen and bog roll. The end result was rather accomplished since we even managed to get the exhaust pipe, windscreen wipers and the aerial for the radio. There were no immediate recriminations, but some fifteen years later this innocent bit of fun would come back to haunt me.