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The idea of a 'New Scotland', and the role of 'New Scots' in it, is being debated critically. This essay contextualises this debate with reference to historical antecedents contemporary protagonists draw on, sometimes extensively. It introduces the Scottish Renaissance, which can be regarded as an expression of 'adaptive' modernism. The Scottish Folk Revival after the Second World War, as a form of 'adaptive' modernism, shares the key concerns of that Renaissance, connecting with it through the Carrying Stream (Hamish Henderson). The two movements share more than their ethnological foundations, a focus on language and identity, and a generalist interest in civic improvement. Reflecting on the significance of heritages, authenticity, resources, and sustainability in this context, the discussion concludes with an appraisal of the (anti-)modern/post-modern ethnopoesis at work in contemporary Scotland.

The twentieth century has been described (e.g., Piskorski 2015 ) as a century of displacement. While globally the comparative scale of involuntary population movement may not have diff ered signifi cantly from earlier centuries, its perception has changed radically, leading in the early twenty- fi rst century to the dramatic resurgence of xenophobic populism across Europe and beyond (see Kaya 2017 ; De Cesari and Kaya 2019). Throughout the 'refugee crisis' of the 2010s, the German government's moderate policy towards new migrants was widely criticised. The ideological foundation for that policy was, arguably, the country's experience of integrating millions of ethnic German expellees and refugees from Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Ethnology has long been seen as concerned with, as one would nowadays say, 'constructing the nation', thus invariably lending support to the nationalist project. In the nineteenth century, this was a matter of consolidating the emerging nation states primarily, but not only in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. Whereas in the twentieth-century some Western European states have experienced regional nationalism (e.g. in Catalonia or Scotland) as a significant political force that draws on more or less spurious distinctions of Self and Other, in Central Europe – especially in Germany – there has been a greater reluctance to use any discourse of indigeneity, due to its past and present ideological abuse, making appropriate contextualisation of cultural heritage in terms of place and memory, necessary for any nationalist project, rather difficult. Key words: European ethnology, 'salvage ethnology', Cultural anthropology, Self, Other, Third.

Taking Park's postulate of a 'marginal man' as its starting point, this essay reviews some of the key ideas and approaches that have underpinned the development of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures from its inception. It concentrates on a discussion of the concept of 'cultures' - liminal, hybrid or otherwise - in different contexts and from different perspectives - boundaries and frontiers, places and spaces, migrants and memory - before turning towards the question of what and where Europe is, and what anthropology might have to say on it, concluding with reflections on AJEC's past, present and future contribution. An appendix provides details of the first twenty-one volumes of the journal.

As I settle down to put together this issue, it occurs to me that the development of AJEC in its various phases displays an uncanny correspondence with my personal professional trajectory so far. Its inception and first volume happened during my postdoctoral fellowship when I was happy to place one of my first (coauthored) academic articles in its inaugural issue. The remainder of AJEC's first approximate decade coincides with my time as a lecturer. At the time I took up my first chair, the format of AJEC changed, eventually turning it, for a while, into a Yearbook rather than a journal. And in the year I moved to my second chair, I was invited to take on the editorship of AJEC, which would now be published by Berghahn and returning to the format of two issues per year. This correspondence raises a curious question: What significant turning point for the journal will correspond with my own as I am becoming an emeritus professor?

Welcome to issue one of AJEC's volume 21. In German, a 'volume' of a journal is referred to as a Jahrgang – a year (group), a cohort; when I was in my teens, a cohort still used to achieve 'majority' – and be considered 'grown up', 'mature' – with the completion of its 21st year. So as AJEC approached the completion of its second decade and ideas for marking the occasion were considered, I suggested to the board that we might celebrate the journal's coming-of-age (as it would have been counted when its founders and subsequent editors were growing up) instead of the more common round figure jubilees. Unlike governments the world over, who decided for pop-cultural or other reasons that 1999 years make two complete lots of 1,000, we at AJEC know that the 21st year is completed at its end, not at its beginning, and so the special issue reflecting on the journey so far will be issue two, published at the end of this year.

Arguably, anthropologists have studied the relationship of 'culture' and 'nature' for a long time and from a broad range of perspectives. The close thematic connections between anthropology and ecology reach back well beyond Ernst Haeckel's postulate of ecology as a distinct science in the 1860s. Social historians (e.g. Brunner 1956) have noted how the 'old European economy' of 'the whole house', where 'culture' and 'nature' were regarded as closely intertwined, has been replaced in the course of industrialisation and modernisation by increasing perceptual separation and indeed juxtaposition of the two spheres. In a sense, the culmination of that movement may be seen, for example, in the progressive ousting of an integrative Heimatkunde – the holistic study of localities and regions – from the German school curriculum since the 1960s.

The previous issue of AJEC had 'Ethnological Approaches to Cultural Heritages' as its theme. As that issue was being produced, the Société Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF) held its 9th Congress, entitled 'Transcending European Heritages: Liberating the Ethnological Imagination', at the University of Ulster during the week 16–20 June, 2008 (see Fenske 2008 for details). This offered an opportunity to explore our theme further, and therefore the plenary speakers at that congress, representing a broad spectrum of backgrounds and approaches, nationalities and intellectual biographies, were invited to submit their texts for the present issue.

The folk, who have been exorcised from contemporary academic concern, are now replaced with the populace. Simultaneously, places as ecological loci of meaning and social relations have been discarded in favour of globalised spaces. Arguably, the contemporary obsession with proving the inauthenticity of tradition is itself an essentialising discourse. This obsession has helped destroy places and their ecological relationships. European ethnology originated in the Enlightenment pursuit of good governance and social improvement, which rendered it an instrument of political control - putting the folk in their place. By critically reconstructing the public role of ethnology, we can redirect the ethnological searchlight. Should not the responsible ethnologist, rather than colluding in evictions of the folk from their place, cultivate a respectfully critical understanding of social, economic, political and ecological contexts, working with the folk reflexively, to help reclaim their place.

With this issue, AJEC returns to its original format as a journal with, for the time being, two issues per year. When the first issue was published in 1990 by the European Centre for Traditional and Regional Cultures (ECTARC), Europe was a different place. As the director of ECTARC, Franz-Josef Stummann (1990: 7), explained in his introduction to that issue, the 'magical date of 1992', heralding the Single European Market as a significant step towards European integration, had 'a substantial bearing' on the foundation of the journal. Moreover, the Berlin Wall, symbol of the political divide that cut right through Cold War Europe, had crumbled the previous year. German unification was imminent, but very little else seemed predictable. Eighteen years and two Gulf Wars later, not only has the European Union acquired fifteen new member states, ten of them former Communist countries, but we have also been told to perceive a new divide – between a 'new' Europe and an 'old' one.