Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

Matters of Time and Space: Towards Sustainability in Everyday Life

Tomas Errazuriz — 2026-06-11

This article critically examines dominant sustainability narratives that prioritise technological innovation, market-based solutions and individual behaviour while often neglecting the socio-economic structures driving overconsumption. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in urban and rural Chile over the past decade, it explores how practices of care, repair and material creativity emerge in contexts marked by isolation, scarcity or exclusion. Far from advocating a return to pre-industrial simplicity, the text challenges the binary between modernity and tradition, suggesting that autonomy and material endurance are not incompatible with technological advancement. Through cases ranging from rural repurposing to urban protest adaptations, the article highlights how creative responses to material constraints reveal pathways to rethinking sustainability. It calls for a reimagining of our relationship with objects and consumption, fostering alternatives to the linear logic of production and disposal.

“Now It Got a New Life”: On Reuse as a Technology of Transformation

Ann-Helen Sund — 2026-06-11

This article sets out to explore how reuse is enacted in a Swedish-language Facebook group called Reuse More. In this forum, people are encouraged to post photos and descriptions of what they have reused and how, share with and inspire others to be creative, and act sustainably. By viewing reuse as a technology of transformation that involves valuation, moves and movements, assembly and disassembly, I will, through empirical examples from the forum, discuss how people relate to, work and negotiate with, things and materials in their homes that are in the process of disposal, redirecting them to a ‘new life’.

The Changing Meanings of Repair in post-Soviet Estonia: From Necessity to Resistance

Tenno Teidearu — 2026-06-11

Repair in the post-Soviet context shows a specific historicity, linked with Soviet consumer culture, that has caused the Soviet socioeconomic system be characterised as a ‘repair society’. People’s experiences and their narratives of the lively repair culture in the Soviet era are a vivid part of Estonian cultural memory. This article analyses how repair in Estonia has shifted from being an economic necessity to a form of resistance both to consumer society and the capitalist socioeconomic system. Criticism of consumer society has ecological and material foundations arising from experiences of the poor repairability of contemporary commodities. This article proposes that the changing materiality of commodities has political significance, shaping evaluations of the socioeconomic system and facilitating resistance to it. This resistance, including recently emerged repair movements, can be culturally informed, inspired and empowered by local cultural memory and legacies, as well as presenting more sustainable ways of managing.

Mending Knowledge: Community Transmission and Its Challenges in Formal Education

Sam Bennett — 2026-06-11

This paper examines how community-driven mending knowledge travels across time and into contemporary schooling, and what conditions allow it to persist. We pair a concise historical backdrop through a timeline called “How Mending Survives”, with a practice-led, design-ethnographic case study in a New York City public high school titled the ReGenerational Repair Program. Using a Value-Sensitive Design lens, we compare a spring after-school class series and autumn in-class intensive study and find that transmission flourishes where learners share time, table, tools and conversation, and falters where those conditions are scarce. Rather than adding a repair unit, we argue for designing classrooms as sociotechnical environments that provide the temporal, spatial and relational fabrics that mending requires, positioning schools as credible co-sites of transmission alongside community venues. The paper clarifies how historical dynamics are re-enacted in the present and why community remains not a supplement to education but a reciprocal site of transmission.

Domestic Building Repair as a Learning Process

Iida Kalakoski — 2026-06-11

This article examines how domestic building repair is represented as a site of experiential learning in Finnish interior design magazines. Situated within heritage studies, the analysis explores how lifestyle media portray the relationships between people, material traces of the past, and the everyday practices of maintaining buildings. The research material consists of interviews with home renovators published in widely circulated home decoration magazines in 2022–2023. As mediated accounts rather than direct testimonies, these narratives reveal how learning through repair is constructed and communicated to the public. Thematic content analysis identifies three recurring representations of learning: learning from the building, learning through constraints and contingencies, and learning through hands‑on engagement and care. Across the material, repair is depicted as a transformative process that not only restores physical structures but also reshapes the repairers’ skills, attitudes, values and sense of home. Renovators describe acquiring technical knowledge, developing patience and flexibility, and cultivating dedication through embodied, hands‑on work. The magazines function as cultural texts that articulate aspirational lifestyles and ethical orientations toward older buildings. Their repair narratives promote appreciation of material heritage, highlight forms of domestic care, and frame repair as an everyday practice through which individuals negotiate identity, continuity and belonging.

#Byggnadsvård: Mobilising Alternative Narratives of Building Care

Sigrun Hanna Thorgrimsdottir — 2026-06-11

Old buildings are imbued with problems and possibilities shaped by their material condition. This article unfolds around material stories circulating on Instagram with the hashtag #byggnadsvård, using the Swedish concept byggnadsvård (‘building care’) as a lens to investigate material-discursive entanglements of heritage, sustainability and material care. Drawing on ethnographic and diffractive approaches, the article explores how conservation principles and sustainability are articulated in vernacular accounts of building care and how materials participate in the renegotiation of old buildings and maintenance and repair practices. The analysis shows how conservation ethics and environmental concerns are worked out through ordinary repair decisions and material encounters in a highly mediated social media setting. In this context, building care emerges as a regime of care that rethinks material relations and buildings as sustainable.

The Revitalisation of Cultural Heritage and Traditional Crafts: Lessons Learned from a Master Thatcher

Lizette Gradén — 2026-06-11

Gamlegård farm at the Kulturens Östarp open-air museum, the von Echstedtska Manor farm at Värmland’s Museum, and Oktorpsgården farm at the Skansen open-air museum are three disparate farmhouses scattered across southern Sweden whose histories have very different trajectories. What unites them are their roofs, a craft, and a man. They are all buildings considered essential expressions of Swedish cultural heritage, with thatched roofs laid by the same thatcher. For museum visitors, thatched roofs represent a picturesque, somewhat romanticised image of the Swedish past. For the thatcher, roofs mean a livelihood and a crafting process dating back thousands of years. The authors argue that the relationship between the individual craftsperson, the material, and the crafting of traditional knowledge is central to the dynamics of intangible cultural heritage. This paper focuses on a thatcher and his role in engaging a broader public in a ‘fading’ craft and in creating renewed interest among people interested in sustainable living.

“I Still Believe That One Picture Can Tell More than Many Written Pages”: Interview with Mihály Hoppál

Liivo Niglas — 2026-06-11

Mihály Hoppál (b. 1947) is a well-known scholar in shamanism and visual anthropology. Liivo Niglas conducted the interview at Hoppál’s home in Budapest in spring 2022. The conversation focuses on his long-term engagement with visual anthropology.

Book Review: Theory, Tradition, and Teaching: The Significance of Concept Work

Ülo Valk — 2026-06-11

Book Review:

Jackson, Jason Baird. 2025. Concept Work: Constructing Frameworks for Folklore Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 204 pages.

Book Review: Worth a Thousand Words

Anastasiya Fiadotava — 2026-06-11

Book Review:

Mieder, Wolfgang. 2025. Worth a Thousand Words: Cultural, Literary and Political Proverb Studies. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 401 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496858283.001.0001

Book Review: Family, Sex and Faith: The Biopolitics of the Russian Orthodox Church

Irina Paert — 2026-06-11

Book Review:

Kolstø, Pål. 2025. Family, Sex and Faith: The Biopolitics of the Russian Orthodox Church. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press. 324 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501779435

Working Relations

Steven J. Jackson — 2026-06-11

This paper offers a concept of working relations as a complement and extension to existing theories of maintenance, care and repair. Building on the cases of an umbrella, a tractor and a pond, it advances seven propositions that might guide and inform further work and thinking in this space. It concludes with the challenging figures of Chernobyl, nickel extraction, and AI, and argues for the centrality of working relations to more generative and pluralistic relations with the things and worlds around us.

Repair: Towards a Vernacular Sustainability

Tenno Teidearu — 2026-06-11

Preface to the Special Issue Repair and Reuse: Sustainable Material Transformations in Everyday Life