Johannes Wilm, activist, anthropologist and english teacher in Oslo, two weeks ago blogged a selfmade video shot at the annual celebration of the Danish minority in Ascheffel, Schleswig Holstein, Northern Germany.
I was reading about the "old ethnicities" resp. the "classic minorities" in Germany at that time preparing an introductory paper on 'ethnicity' I was supposed to give in class on June 27th. (Our lecturer did not show up and therefore the session did not take place then.)
This is one of the amazing and sometimes weird things in anthroblogland: visible synchronicity.
I probably would have missed Johannes' film, if Kerim (following Lorenz) had not posted it on Savage Minds, because during the past period of not having i-net at home I could only keep track on a small number of blogs from my blogroll once I was online.
The film itself is interesting. It covers not so much issues of "border-nationalism in Germany", as Kerim put it, but issues of bilinguality and education. My very first reaction though was kind of amusement about the scenes where the ethnographer introduced himself to the field--a situation every ethnographer has already been in: the performance of ethic duty while actually the interviewed neither seem to realize nor to really care about what you do and who you are. At least among the homeless where I ve done my fieldwork, I always had a strong feeling of speaking out an empty phrase that had no meaning to them. Meaningful to them, more or less, was rather the personal relationship that grew throughout the process of fieldwork, attention and interest they were spent and not so much (if at all) one's research reasoning and goals.
As for issues of education and bilinguality that are mentioned in the film: A member of the Danish minority, being asked whether he likes or dislikes that many germans send their children to danish schools and kindergartens in Schleswig-Holstein, is not pleased by the mixing-up. He says its not about taking "the best out of two cultures", but that german parents who decide the danish education system to be better than the german one should also decide for the danish identity or even nationality.
A couple of german Schleswig-Holsteinians who have their grand-daughter attending a danish school consider her german-danish bilinguality to be an advantage e.g. in regards of finding a job later on. And they believe in danish schools better care is taken for the individual pupil, which probably is true. Classes are said to be smaller than in german schools and, well, PISA has shown, the education system in Germany simply is a mess which is so true. But this is another story I one day will rant about in another post.
As for "border-nationalism in Germany" Wilm's film shows that nationalism in this particular case is about distinction from Germany, rather than identifying with Germany.