Invitation
The International Society for Ethnology and Folklore holds its seventh international congress in Budapest, Hungary between 23.04. and 29.04. 2001. It is the aim of this congress to provide a forum for ethnologists, anthropologist, and folklorist as well as for historians and sociologists, who are working in ethnological perspectives. The Congress will be supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and will be organized by local Organizing Committee chaired by Prof. Dr. Attila Paládi-Kovács, Director of Ethnographic Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The official languages of the congress will be English, French and German.

Europe has changed dramatically since 1989, as has the globe. The year 2001 represents both the end of a millennium in which unparalleled developments in human social organization have occurred, as well as the beginning of a new millennium which will witness changes that we cannot yet perceive. We are told that we have arrived at a moment that is not only a fin de sičcle, but also "the end of history", "the end of modernity" and "the end of industrial society". But we are nevertheless surrounded by renewed nationalism, primordialism, wars, violence, ethnic tensions, poverty, unemployment, social polarization, new forms of migration, and new symbolic and political forms of exclusion and marginalization. The last millennium follows us into the next.

This ethnological congress, held at the beginning of the new millennium, will take its inaugural role seriously. It demands of us that we try to imag ine what it will portend for human society, and it will seek to assess the historical moment of transition: where we have come from, where we are now, and where we are going in the new era we are entering. Such a task requires a critical and reflexive exploration of the theoretical and methodological possibilities of ethnology, including the new politics of ethnological knowledge making in a global world.

Call for session topics
The congress consists of six major themes set up by the International Programme Committee, of special sessions, and of round table sessions or panels, which will complement the major themes. Major themes are:

• Time of ending: past, history, and memory
• The ethnography of states: nation, transnationalism and globalization
• Theories and politics of cultural identity: ethnicity, gender and milieus
• Urban transformation and urban ethnography
• Producing locality: strategies of culture and power
• Production of ethnological knowledge: fieldwork, text, public folklore and museum