Abstract

Taking inspiration in Barbro Klein’s work, this article focuses on the production of a particular type of institutional lore that we call heritagelore. Heritagelore, as we are advancing the concept here, is composed of the discursive practices within the walls and the organizations of museums. It is the lore that shapes and at least partially structures the types of stories that directors, museum boards, curators, programing staff, and other museum personnel tell to one another about their institutions. As this article argues, the heritagelore of a museum legitimates certain curatorial perspectives, while making others more difficult to imagine. 

Highlights

  • We mourn the loss of Barbro Klein as an inspirational scholar, enthusiastic colleague, and true friend

  • In 2006 Barbro Klein warned: In a liberal market economy a symbiosis has developed between cultural preservation, entertainment, and money-making, a symbiosis that builds on processes began [sic] long ago by such museum founders as Artur Hazelius and takes these processes to ends of which he and his contemporaries could not have dreamed. (2006: 67)

  • Klein touched on this concern about the commodification of heritage only briefly, in connection with the effects that tourism had upon heritage

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Summary

In Honor of Barbro Klein

This special issue of Ethnologia Europaea is written as a tribute to the career of late ethnologist and folklorist Barbro Klein (1938–2018), who mentored and inspired several generations of scholars in ethnology and folklore, and who connected colleagues in Europe and the United States. After her passing in the spring of 2018, the Nordic-Baltic section of the American Folklore Society put out a call for papers for a session in her honor to take place during the 2018 American Folklore Society meeting in Buffalo, New York. In order to explicate this more concretely, we shall first turn to the Hallwyl Museum in Stockholm, and to Skokloster Castle, located outside of Stockholm

The Hallwyl Museum
Hallwyl Museum in the new Millennium
Skokloster Castle
Concluding Reflections
Contributions to this Issue
Full Text
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