Until very recently, little attention has been paid to folklore, peasant history and French ethnology. After the 1970s, however, French folk traditions have become fashionable. Almost every French cultural institution has devoted time and money to promoting this “new” knowledge. Previously, French folklore and ethnology were considered the poor relatives in the social sciences. But then the Ministry of Culture sanctioned a social movement which had arisen in the early 1960s by creating a directorship and Committee for the patrimony to (...) promote research on popular traditions, the development of ecomuseums, and local campaigns to revive craftsmen's songs and popular theater. (shrink)

Most works dealing with Third World development have been carried out by using Western demographic and economic concepts. Moreover, ethnologically-oriented analyses focusing on the dynamics of development have had little effect on development programs. Finally, a good number of these studies did not go beyond a well-meaning but uncritical empiricism regarding the analytical grids to be applied to new post-colonial and cultural forms. Today no one denies the impact of modernity on the social life of developing countries. Technology, science and (...) economics create social, ideological and cultural models which tend to identify these new nations with the purely Western source that invents and propagates them. (shrink)

Interculturalism and multiculturalism have been the subject of university courses, seminars and international colloquia for two decades, producing a large literature which has become the basis for a general political debate about democracy in the US and Western Europe. These concepts are now central even in discussions about an Eastern Europe recently liberated from the communist yoke — especially in regions with large national minorities. Just mentioning them seems sufficient to resolve the age old problems of the struggles between majority (...) and minority in those regions. Is it legitimate to borrow such concepts? Can the same terms be used to describe the new migrations of people from the impoverished South or East to the rich West and those historical movements which resulted in the Europe of nations? (shrink)