An Ethnography of Nostalgia: Nordic Museum Curators Interviewing Finnish Immigrants in Sweden

Abstract

Abstract In using the concept of nostalgia as defined by anthropologist David Berliner, this article aims to analyze both the exo-nostalgia of the curators of the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, who researched the everyday life of immigrants from Finland in Sweden during the 1970s, and the endo-nostalgia of the immigrants themselves. The research is based on fourteen interviews conducted in 1974 in Upplands Väsby, Sweden, with migrants from Finland, who arrived from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Because of the important role of food in daily culture, especially the importance of heritage food for immigrants, the article focuses on food-related nostalgia. After an introduction to the ideas of the museum project and about the conditions of the fieldwork, the text contains the description of how the interviewers followed their own nostalgia and how they found the expected nostalgia of their interviewees by asking questions about the émigrés' daily food consumption. Most of the Finns interviewed came from relatively urban backgrounds. However, they were still portrayed as rustic.