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Das IFK_Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften lädt zum Vortrag von Jennifer Jordan, Folk culture and biodiversity in Central Europe’s open-air folk museums, am 11. Juni 2007 um 18 Uhr c.t. (Reichsratsstraße 17, 1010 Wien) ein.
Every year, all across Europe, millions of people walk through the gardens, barnyards, and reconstructed farmhouses of the continent's open-air folk museums. Visitors read plaques about old styles of gardens, line up to buy freshly-baked rolls just pulled from an earthen oven, or simply enjoy the atmosphere created by the houses and barns that have been gathered up and collected in one spot. Many of these museums vividly depict the complex interrelationship between national folk culture and nature, emphasizing issues of biodiversity in many forms: the fields and forests around the museums, the healing and nourishing plants in the gardens and fields, and the sheep, pigs and other livestock to be found on such farms. This talk will examine how the recent trend toward heirloom produce and heritage livestock creates objects and spaces that bear powerful messages about collective understandings of the past and the future. Turkeys, tomatoes, and their compatriots in agricultural biodiversity become media themselves, unsuspecting carriers of shared understandings of a simpler past or a threatened future. In other words, these plants and animals bear not only rare genes but also shared understandings of a gustatory past and a genetic future. Furthermore, the efforts to preserve these genes translate into widely shared messages about collective and regional identity, AND into concrete spaces, including zoos, farmer's markets, and open-air folk museums and living history museums, where rare genes and sometimes nostalgic understandings of past foodways and rural life become deeply intertwined with people's understandings of their locale, themselves, and the genetic past and future. By keeping old-fashioned livestock, planting old-fashioned crops, encouraging the growth of weeds or wildflowers, and selling products made from on-site plants and animals, open-air folk museums in particular often weave a story of edible plants and animals and their relationship to folk culture. This relationship is especially charged in a time of changing conceptions of the nation (in light of the fall of the Iron Curtain and the expansion of the European Union) as well as ongoing debates about organic food, genetically modified organisms, and biodiversity.

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Jennifer Jordan is Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research focuses on the dynamic relationship between memory and materiality in a variety of arenas, including post-1989 Berlin, open-air folk museums in Central Europe, cultural conceptions of biodiversity, and the culture, politics, and sociology of food.
Publications (among others): The Heirloom Tomato as Cultural Object: Investigating Taste and Space. Sociologia Ruralis 2007; Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Cultural Memory in the Present Series), Stanford University Press 2006; A Matter of Time: The Importance of Examining Collective Memory in Historical Perspective in Postwar Berlin, in: Journal of Historical Sociology, 18:2, March–June 2005, p. 37–71; Collective Memory and Locality in Global Cities, in: Patrice Petro and Linda Krause (eds.), Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age, New Brunswick, New Jersey 2003.