The article explores the reflection of gossip in the life stories of folk singers born at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century and in Lithuanian folk songs about love. It examines how the practice of gossiping shaped the emotional community of the village: what emotional expression it encouraged (or discouraged), and what norms for expressing feelings it reveals. The life stories of singers are analysed, highlighting the importance of gossip and its function of social control in the traditional rural community, as well as the singers’ personal experiences and attitudes towards it. The gossip motifs in love songs are discussed, reflecting the community’s prohibitions relating to extramarital relationships and the complex emotional reactions of the young people being gossiped about.
International ideas about education and development, promoted in Cambodia by financial donors such as the World Bank, influence how the second and third generations of Cambodian genocide survivors interpret their reality and history. They believe that the destruction of the education system and the almost total massacre of educated people during the genocide (1975 to 1979) slowed down the country’s development. Young people often perceive the loss of human life as a loss of resources. In this article, I argue that this perception of people as resources is what bridges development, education and the history of Democratic Kampuchea. The historical interpretations among young people are similar to the interpretations advocated by Cambodian politicians, and resonate with the World Bank’s ideas on development.
Between 2014 and 2018, funded by the European Union’s ‘Creative European Programme’, leaders of ten European ethnographic museums met to discuss a new kind of Museum of Other People, one that would come to terms with the legacy of colonialism and take account of large-scale migration to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. Pioneered in Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, this came to be known as the World Culture Museum. It is not a Museum of Other People, because it includes Europe on equal terms, at least in principle, although in practice Europe is present, if at all, only in the form of folk traditions. So what makes a World Culture Museum different from a Museum of Other People?