2021 SIEF Congress – Breaking the rules

This year’s congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) was characterized by the challenging but also often rewarding online format. More than 1000 delegates simoultaneously used Zoom and Whova platform with many innovative formats – panel on Symbiotic living: human-microbial relations in everyday life with a workshop on sourdough baking and cheese fermentation is a good example of this. Many panels, including ones on heritage-making, focussed around topics of rules and transgressions in the time of crisis. 

The program group Heritage on the margins participated with panel organization as well as with three papers in various other panels. Together with Simeng Wang from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Martina Bofulin convened a panel Restaurants as meeting places: the inclusion of migrants through the lens of the micro-scale institutions with insightful papers from US, Europe and South Korea on various role restaurants play in the process of migration. Špela Ledinek presented the paper Between collections of objects and narratives’ museum: minority heritage-making in the Province of Udine in the panel Minorities objects: materiality, agency and heritage in minoritized contexts; Marjeta Pisk the paper Language hybridity in Slovenian folk songs in the panel Silenced traditions, marginalized genres, and hidden sources in the creation of cultural heritage and literary canonsand lastly; Nataša Rogelja Caf (together with Alenka Janko Spreizer) a paper Golden coins, hard bread or wild times: fishers narratives on transgression and transformation of borders and boundaries in the Eastern Adriatic in the panel Ethnographic explorations on the semiotics of borderlands – deconstructing hegemonic discourses through cultural transgressions at the margins.