Nordiska Museet Research Articles

Skola på museum: Ernst Klein och Nordiska museets undervisningsavdelning 1929–1938

School at the museum: Ernst Klein and the Teaching Department at Nordiska museet, 1929–1938. This article examines the dynamic relationship between schools and museums during the 1930s. It investigates how elementary school teachers and students became a prioritized audience for Nordiska museet in Stockholm by analyzing the foundation of the museum’s teaching department (“undervisningsavdelningen”) and the work of the museum’s first lecturer Ernst Klein (1887–1937). Material from the museum’s archive reveals how a mutual beneficial relationship was established between the museum and local schools in the 1930s and how visits to the museum gradually was included in the elementary school curriculum. The study cast new light on the reciprocal development of the two institutions in the interwar years and stresses the importance of local circumstances and individual actors’ initiatives when analyzing past teaching practices.

‘A landmark of the transience of all earthly greatness, glory and power!’ Versailles and the Myth of the Ancien Régime in the Writings and Collections of the Swedish Marquis Claes Lagergren (1853−1930)

Born a Swedish farmer’s son, Claes Lagergren trained as a tradesman in Paris in the early 1870s. An unexpected inheritance made him financially independent and enabled him to begin his travels in Europe. Whilst in Rome, he converted to the Roman Catholic faith, an important step in a social career that rapidly introduced him to the upper echelons of Roman nobility – and particularly to those families that had stayed true to the Pope in the aftermath of the unification of Italy. Lagergren was introduced to the Papal court and to Pope Leo XII, who favoured him. Eventually, he was honoured with the title of marquis and became one of the Pope’s chamberlains. The Marquis was a diarist and published his memoirs in nine volumes in the 1920s. His writings are a barely explored source of his political and cultural views – and of his love for Versailles. During his many visits to the palace, informed by his reading of guidebooks and memoirs, he wrote about his sensations and experiences of the former royal site. Politically, Lagergren considered himself a legitimist who honoured the values of the Ancien Régime, and he treasured the Restoration. From this perspective, Versailles and its palace constituted a strong symbol and lieu de mémoire of pre-revolutionary Europe. In the early 1880s, Lagergren married the wealthy American Caroline Russell. The couple bought seventeenth-century Tyresö Castle, outside Stockholm − a home that Lagergren would bequeath to a Stockholm museum, the Nordiska museet, after his death in 1930. Tyresö became a place where Lagergren displayed his collections, in particular portraits of members of the French Bourbon dynasty that he had seen at Versailles.

Crisis Documentation and Oral History: Problematizing Collecting and Preserving Practices in a Digital World

ABSTRACT Collecting in times of crisis is a precarious task. In recent years, oral historians have considered the risks and pitfalls that so called crisis or rapid response collecting entail. However, in countries where oral history practices are not dominant within the cultural heritage sector, these discussions surrounding ethics and collecting have had little impact. In this article we problematize the absence of oral history perspectives on the ethics of crisis collecting through a Swedish case study involving the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) and Sweden’s most prominent cultural heritage institution, Nordiska Museet (the Nordic Museum). In 2015, DN started interviewing refugees for a social media-based project entitled RefugeeSweden. Excerpts from the interviews as well as photographs of the refugees were published on Instagram and Twitter, with Nordiska Museet later acquiring this material. Through this case study we show how the act of digitization constitutes a process of transformation which fundamentally affects collections and how they can be understood. In addition, we demonstrate how seemingly inclusive notions of digitization and representation can obscure exclusionary practices of institutions that have not considered cocreation or participatory practices.

International Magic?

This paper explores international aspects of Finnish folk magic. Folk magic objects in two Finnish museum collections (the National Museum of Finland and Museum Centre Vapriikki) are compared to analogous objects in the Nordiska museet in Sweden and the Pitt Rivers Museum in the UK to reveal the collections’ resemblances and differences. The material in question dates to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many similar objects occur in these collections. Explanations for this are sought in historical networks between peoples. Yet a closer inspection also reveals variation in practices and beliefs. This reveals the dynamic nature of folk magic traditions, although collection and curation policies also play a role. Moreover, the complex connections between religion, medicine, and magic are uncovered.

The Artist/Scenographer and the Museum Exhibition

Summary There are several professional competences involved in the creation of a museum exhibition. This article investigates the collaboration between the artist/scenographer and the museum. Further, it seeks to contribute to a historical understanding of such collaborations by exploring the work created by the Swedish artist/scenographer Lennart Mörk in the 1960s and 1970s. It analyses the arguments used to justify the involvement of an artist/scenographer, and looks more closely at the nature of the collaborative work that ensued when the two exhibitions Oskuld – Arsenik (1966/67) at Nordiska museet and Gustaf III (1972/73) at Nationalmuseum were created. The article argues that the recruitment of a theatre decorator/stage artist, as this group of professionals were referred to at the time, was part of a strategy that allowed the museum to realize complex exhibition concepts, while also making the display more emotionally engaging and accessible, something that was increasingly demanded of the museums at the time. Moreover, it challenged a traditional museum exhibition format, placing less focus on the authentic museum objects and more focus on sensory experience and aesthetics.

Special Issue: Tracing the Arctic; Arctic Traces

Nowhere on earth is global warming happening as fast today as in the northernmost region. In many cases the situation is acute for both humans and other animals. But it is not only biotopes, but also long-since intertwined systems of nature and culture that are in accelerating processes of change. What was once portrayed as almost invincible is now associated with vulnerability. The situation is one of urgency for the four million people living in Arctic areas, but it may ultimately affect many more. The northernmost area on earth once again reminds us that humanity too has a limit. This introduction starts with a fieldwork note from contemporary Greenland, where the contested colonial heritage also exemplifies the entanglement and friction of global interests and environmental change. In this broadly multidisciplinary collection of scholarly articles the Arctic will be discussed both as nature and as culture, and in ways that stress change and complexity. Unexpected alliances and tentacular methods are crucial in our challenging times, according to environmentalist Donna Haraway. The contributions of this journal issue also share the context of support for a co-curated exhibition at the Nordiska museet on “The Arctic—While the Ice Is Melting” (from 2019).

Modele europene și realități românești în muzeografia transilvăneană. Înființarea Parcului Etnografic din Cluj (1929)

"European models and Romanian realities in the Transylvanian museography. The foundation of the Ethnographic Park in Cluj (1929) This paper aims to clarify which were the sources that inspired Vuia in the creation of the ethnographic park. For this synthesis we resorted to understanding the phenomena that formed the basis of designing the museums and ethnographic parks, we investigated the notion of social unity and its constituent elements. We demonstrated how the historical framework of the early twentieth century generated the acute need to express national identity. We paid special attention to the radiography of the museum landscape in Transylvania, which were the first debates after the Great Union of 1918. We reviewed the history of the main open-air museums in Europe and the defining moments for the evolution of the concept. We focused on highlighting the innovations brought by each one. We detailed the evolution of the organization of the Swedish Nordiska Museet and the open-air section, Skansen, in order to highlight the common points between Skansen and the ethnographic park in Cluj. In the case of the open-air section in Cluj, we followed the initial challenges and the sequence of events that marked the existence of this institution as well as its founder. Following the analysis of the models that were the inspiration for the ethnographic park in Cluj, we made a parallel of the common elements between it and the Swedish museum as well as an analysis of the common features of the two personalities who created museums: Hazelius and Vuia. Keywords: Romulus Vuia, ethnographic park, national identity, The Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania, Skansen "

British—Ever So Nordic: Nordiska museet, Stockholm, March 29, 2019, Until Further Notice; Wild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland: National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, June 26–November 10, 2019

Previous articleNext article No AccessExhibition ReviewsBritish—Ever So Nordic: Nordiska museet, Stockholm, March 29, 2019, Until Further Notice; Wild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland: National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, June 26–November 10, 2019 CatalogueBritish—Ever So NordicHelen Persson and Leif WallinStockholm: Nordiska Museets Förlag, 2019.32 pp.; 48 color ills.Paper Kr50ISBN 9789171086105 CatalogueWild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of ScotlandPatrick Watt and Rosie WaineEdinburgh: National Museum of Scotland, 2019.96 pp.; 87 color ills.Paper £9.99ISBN 9781910682241Charlotte AshbyCharlotte Ashby Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by West 86th Volume 26, Number 2Fall–Winter 2019 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708800 Views: 17Total views on this site © 2019 by The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display by Peggy Levitt

Reviewed by: Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display by Peggy Levitt Scott Magelssen ARTIFACTS AND ALLEGIANCES: HOW MUSEUMS PUT THE NATION AND THE WORLD ON DISPLAY. By Peggy Levitt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015; pp. 268. Peggy Levitt writes out of a sense of concern. In a world “plagued by economic crisis, heightened ethnic and religious strife” in which “one out of every seven people is an internal or international migrant” (133, 142), more and more individuals face “declining social protection … outside the traditional nation-state framework” (133). Museums have, since their inception, seen themselves as civilizing and uplifting their populations, but as the world becomes increasingly global and transnational, Levitt finds bankrupt the traditional model of a national museum that organizes and stages a comprehensive vision of a stable and unified nation-state for its own citizens and the world. Institutions all over the globe are feeling the push to incorporate more cosmopolitan visions into their exhibits to keep apace with changing politics and human migration. Indeed, museums themselves are part and parcel of the new reality where national power is being decentered, as seen in a global museum industry increasingly built and programmed by a transnational class of curators and “starchitects,” such as I. M. Pei. Levitt begins by categorically refusing to offer a grand unifying theory of recent museum history; instead, she aims for a broad inventory of practices in a book accessible to readers from the museum profession to academia to her “ninety-five year old father” (12). Nevertheless, several central arguments and threads emerge in the introductory and concluding chapters. Based on her interviews and field research, a picture emerges in which museums are “messy arenas” (5), where cosmopolitanism and nationalism fall along a continuum and “mutually inform and transform one another” (3). Levitt posits that cultural institutions’ practices of responding to increased diversity are specific to the history and context of the cities within which they develop, what she terms their “cultural armature,” and that “[h]ow cities manage difference contributes to but is not always the same as how difference gets managed nationally” (3). How Boston and New York perform cosmopolitanism, for instance, might differ from the ways that other parts of the US negotiate the presence of others, whereas city-states like Singapore and Doha, Qatar, can basically be used interchangeably with their respective nations. Furthermore, in spite of perceived efforts toward progressive change, the nationalist and imperialist genealogies of a particular institution can thwart true democracy and egalitarianism (7). [End Page 440] The three chapters that comprise the body of Artifacts and Allegiances serve as a kind of loosely structured travelogue documenting Levitt’s case studies, described in the conclusion as giving “equal credit to what the hedgehog or the forest-seer contributes—a broader, thinner, but equally valuable snapshot that complements, rather than tak[ing] a backseat to, deeper, narrower, long-term approaches” (139). Chapter 1 describes museums in Scandinavia, such as the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, the Nordiska Museet and Ethnografiska Museet in Stockholm, and the Museum of World Culture in Gothenberg. Chapter 2 looks to North American institutions like the Brooklyn Museum in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, while the third chapter focuses on museums in the Middle East and Asia, such as the National Museum of Qatar and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the Asian Civilizations Museum (ACM) in Singapore. Each chapter carefully situates its institutions within their city’s “cultural armature.” Levitt provides her Swedish examples, for instance, with a full backdrop of Sweden’s historic flux between medieval global superpower and a much less puissant though fairly well-to-do modern nation that, based on its robust cultural export industry, the rest of the West would never guess was one-fifth immigrant (34). On the flipside, in Singapore, while the ACM boasts a story of a diverse and hybrid nation connected to the global, what gets left out “is a discussion of the assumptions underlying the diversity management regime in place and the absence of human rights,” which “would challenge the government and the status quo...

Historiography of Swedish Building Types

SummaryThis article investigates Swedish building type research as a methodological genre formed by the idea that architectural history is a history of construction tasks and functions. Departing from an analysis of 50 studies carried out mainly by art historians and ethnologists, we delineate the formation of a genre, its characteristics and changes over time. As the concept of building type can refer either to form or to function, we argue that it is necessary to pinpoint the scope of building type studies. Otherwise, when speaking of activity types as if they were synonymous with form types, there has been a tendency to omit from architectural history those buildings that were not planned to serve the function they eventually came to hold. The starting place of the methodology is the early twentieth-century mapping activities of Nordiska museet, initially covering peasant settlements and manors. Following this era, the Svensk stad project introduced function as the central point of departure for built environment studies. The third stage is the development of a professional conservation practice, which, in the 1960's, brought critique of the modernist post-war rebuilding programmes and emphasised sustainability. Finally, most building type studies have abandoned their buildings at the moment when they are ready for use, or even earlier. We suggest that, to comprehend a building's historical function and significance, we need to include reconstructions and modifications, both blueprints and usage. Such research may open doors to new possibilities, which will require a deepening of theoretical outsets and methodologies.

Folklife and Museum Practice: An Intertwined History and Emerging Convergences (American Folklore Society Presidential Address, October 2011)

Folklore and museums have had a long and intertwined history. Among those responsible for the founding of the American Folklore Society (AFS) in 1888 were museum-based anthropologists, curators, and collection managers. Since that time, folklorists have worked in and with museums in a variety of ways -- work that has reflected intellectual and political shifts in folklore studies as well as changes in museum practice. As cultural heritage work in the twenty-first century seeks simultaneously to document, interpret, present, preserve, and protect tangible and intangible heritage while at the same time address the needs of civil society, the logical interfaces between folklore and museum work have increased. The first development was the emergence and growth of open-air museums and living history programming. In 1872, Swedish teacher, scholar, and folklorist Artur Hazelius established a museum in Stockholm for Swedish ethnography, now called Nordiska museet, to house the peasant life materials he bought or managed to get donated from all over Sweden and the other Nordic countries.

Women and the Formation of Swedish Folklife Research

Abstract This assessment of the role of women in Swedish folklife research (or ethnology) begins with the decades before 1900 and ends with the present. Paying special attention to the Nordiska museet in Stockholm (founded 1873) and shifting between portraits of individual actors and comparative generalizations, the article demonstrates that reformist middle-class women were essential in shaping the research topics and exhibitions at the Nordiska museet and other budding institutions within the folklife sphere. Changes set in around 1910, when efforts to professionalize the museums and create a truly scientific discipline began. This entailed a masculinization in which men were hired as the superiors of women who continued working as they had before. Although a few women did earn doctorates in folklife research in the 1950s and 1960s, the first appointment of a woman as a full professor in the field took place as late as 1973, and it was not until 2000 that several women reached top positions. Subsequent developments were rapid; by 2010, the majority of the active full professors of ethnology in Sweden were women (as were their students). The question remains what this speedy feminization will mean for the field.

Issue 500: A Message from the Editors

HERSTORY. THE TERM was coined in the early 1970s, at a time when feminist scholars were beginning to dismantle in a systematic way the generations of male bias that had long characterized male-dominated historiography. It suggests pithily that what scholars in the past described simply as is really often a chronicle of specifically male activities, often presented and analyzed to the exclusion of women's activities or roles within the same chronological period. Men writing about men; men equating male experience with general experience; men selecting concerns and interests to focus on in ways that privilege masculine values and marginalize feminine. Male bias has not been exclusively produced by men, of course, nor is it the case that male scholars have consistently ignored female experience in their writings and analyses. But the point is a good one: any received history will display the biases of the people who wrote it, sometimes to the point of erasing other versions of the story entirely. And that has certainly happened, as the authors of the three main essays in this issue contend, in the case of the disciplinary history of folklore and folklife studies, where the work and roles of men have often been allowed to overshadow or even eclipse the substantive contributions of their female counterparts.The magazine before you-nestled in your hands, or, more likely today, residing on your screen-is the five hundredth issue of the Journal of American Folklore. The American Folklore Society was founded in 1888-125 years ago-and, with four issues per year, that makes the present issue, predictably, inevitably, number 500. Any field, any journal, ought to pause to savor such a moment: reaching 500 is no small feat, and represents in fact the combined effort of a vast number of folklorists, past and present, male and female. And folklorists do like to pause; call it an occupational hazard: the product of training that reminds us to view the present always with a cognizance of the past, and often with a level of discomfort at the changes we see around us. So readers of JAF might well expect that issue 500 would take note of its number, and they will not be disappointed on that score.So excited were we, your editors, about the approaching anniversary that we started the commemoration early. You may have noticed if you are a regular reader of the JAF that the last several issues of the journal have focused on communities and topics that were identified as important in the formative years of the American Folklore Society. Issue 497 presents new research on African American folklore; issue 498 on children's folklore. Issue 499 looks at Native American folklore. And here, in issue 500, we focus on women workers of our field. The articles are celebratory in some ways but sobering in others: they focus attention on women who did remarkable work for our field, but they also give us a means of viewing our disciplinary history that is not altogether flattering. And that, we hope, makes these an especially appropriate way of marking our five hundredth issue.In the three main articles of this issue, three female folklorists examine the careers and disciplinary profiles of past female folklorists. The reader will find many points of comparison and occasional moments of contrast in the lives and experiences of the women discussed here, be it in Deirdre Ni Chonghaile's examination of Sidney Robertson Cowell, Elaine J. Lawless's presentation of Zora Neale Hurston, or Barbro Klein's chronicle of women associated with both the Swedish outdoor museum Skansen and the ethnographic collections that became the Nordiska museet. Issues recur in each of these studies: questions of career choices, of exclusion and discrimination, of glass ceilings, of trade-offs between marital or filial duties and the supposed dangers or improprieties of fieldwork. Written with sensitivity and acumen by women who are themselves folklorists, these essays invite the personal reflection of any folklorist reader, female or male, as they examine the norms of feminine behavior both within the academy and within our broader societies. …

Artur Hazelius and the ethnographic display of the Scandinavian peasantry: a study in context and appropriation

Artur Hazelius (1833–1901), founder of the Nordiska Museet and the Skansen Open-Air Museum, was a pioneering figure in the practice of ethnographic display in Europe. Hazelius achieved Europe-wide recognition following his presentation of Swedish and Scandinavian peasant ethnography at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878, where his displays were reviewed positively in the international press. This paper argues that the significance of the Hazelian ethnographic project was embedded in overlapping contextual frames with centres in Stockholm and Paris. If the displays most readily spoke to a general concern with the decline of traditional life as rooted in the countryside, they arguably took on other, different and occasionally conflicting meanings as they were moved from one exhibitionary context to another. Whereas in Stockholm the ethnographic displays were inscribed in the conciliatory rhetoric of Scandinavism, the exhibitionary setting of the exposition universelle imposed an interpretative frame defined by the logic of a competitive nationalism. For Nordic audiences, the scenes reflected the positive historical significance of the peasantry in the unfolding narrative of Scandinavian political modernity; for the French audience, however, those same scenes were either applauded for their life-likeness or seen as reflective of the ethnographic richness of the ‘kingdom of Sweden’.

Contested Boundaries: Nation, People and Cultural History Museums in Sweden and Norway 1862–1909

It has become commonplace to assert that museums embody, perform and negotiate national identities. Many researches in museum history have stressed a close relationship between nation building and the origin and formation of the modern public museum. Museums, it is argued, contributes to the construction and representation of the ethnical and historical distinctiveness of the nation’s self’. This article explores the ambiguities of the concept when applied to the establishment of cultural history museums in Sweden and Norway during the latter half of the 19th century. It shows that the relation between nation building and early museum building in the Scandinavian context was more intricate than earlier has been assumed. Museum founders like Artur Hazelius, who opened the Scandinavian-Ethnographic Collection in 1873 (renamed Nordiska museet 1880), was deeply influenced by Scandinavianism, a strong cultural and political force during the 19th century. Union politics played an important role for museum politics, as did the transitions of the concepts of “ethnography” and “nation”. At the very end of the 19th century the original concept of “nation” meaning people and culture gradually was subordinated to the concept of “nation” as state and political territory. In early 20th century museum ideology cultural history museums were strongly connected with “nations” in the modern sense. Consequently, efforts to “nationalise” the folk-culture museum were made both in Norway and Sweden. A contributory force was, naturally, the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union in 1905.

Dated Photographs: The Personal Photo Album as Visual and Textual Medium

This article concerns the practice of making inscriptions in personal albums from the second half of the nineteenth century. The overall aim is to discuss the implications of this practice for interpretation and to investigate the cultural ideas and concepts embedded in it. The results are based on a close study of the heterogeneous collection of photo albums held at the Nordiska Museet (Nordic Museum), a museum of cultural history, in Sweden. Unlike personal photo albums produced after 1900, it is rare to find dates in personal carte-de-visite albums. Rather than a mere lack of data, this may indicate a different relationship between photography, time, and identity; pointing to a significant change in the vernacular uses and functions of photographs. The personal photo albums were conversation pieces that functioned better without text, as the images could prompt social contact in the form of inquiries and discussion. Later on, albums took on a character more reminiscent of a personal diary. The fact that so few privately circulated nineteenth-century portraits are dated indicates the relations between photographic portraits and painted portraits and furthermore it displays the similarities and differences between instrumental uses of portrait photography and private games of reading faces.

Narratives of Birth in Swedish Popular Autobiography

My paper concerns a corpus of workers’ autobiographical writings at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1945, the Nordiska Museet began to systematically collect workers’ narratives (Nilsson 1996). The museum, in collaboration with almost twenty labour unions, urged retired workers to relate the stories of their lives in writing and issued a series of guidelines suggesting appropriate themes. By 1960, the collection of Workers’ Recollections in the museum amounted to approximately 2000 written narratives, comprising more than 30,000 pages of text. The narratives are mostly personally written life stories, in which the narrators, using the first person, tell of their experiences. A significant proportion, however, were written down on behalf of the narrators by local informants who then sent the material to the museum. The primary context for these workers’ recollections was the museum’s investigation into Swedish cultural history and social life. During the inter-war years ethnologists and museum curators began to change the thematic focus of investigation, so as to include the history of the modern working class in addition to the old peasant culture. This new perceptual field was necessitated by the social change that Swedish society was going through at the time. The first phase of industrialisation had been completed and the industrial working class had become one of the main forces in society. When the Social Democrats assumed governmental responsibility in 1932 the construction of a modern welfare state began. In my thesis, Workers’ memories in the Swedish Folkhem. A study of the historical and discursive preconditions of Swedish working class biography (Nilsson 1996), I have shown how descriptions of the old class society gave the development of modern welfare its legitimacy, creating a historic situation where the workers’ class-based “weexperiences” became relevant for the society in large. If my earlier project thus concerned a historic and discursive contextualisation of the collection of material, my present work

Food and Drink and Travelling Accessories. Essays in Honour of Gösta Berg. Herausgegeben von A. Fenton und J. Myrdal. 202 Seiten, zahlr. Abb. John Donald Publishers Ltd. (in association with The National Museum of Scotland, Skansen and Nordiska Museet), Edinburgh 1988. Preis: 12,50 £

Food / NahrungVolume 33, Issue 1 p. 102-102 Rezensionen Food and Drink and Travelling Accessories. Essays in Honour of Gösta Berg. Herausgegeben von A. Fenton und J. Myrdal. 202 Seiten, zahlr. Abb. John Donald Publishers Ltd. (in association with The National Museum of Scotland, Skansen and Nordiska Museet), Edinburgh 1988. Preis: 12,50 £ H. Haenel, H. HaenelSearch for more papers by this author H. Haenel, H. HaenelSearch for more papers by this author First published: 1989 https://doi.org/10.1002/food.19890330138AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume33, Issue11989Pages 102-102 RelatedInformation

Popular Culture in Norway and Sweden1

If you are interested in the history of European popular culture, you would be well advised finances permitting to make an expedition to Norway and Sweden. The obvious thing to do is to visit the famous open-air museums at Skansen (in Stockholm), Bygd$y (in Oslo), and De Sanvigske Samlinger (near Lillehammer), not to mention scores of smaller collections. At each of these three places you will find yourself combining a museum visit with a country walk, for hundreds of farms, churches, mills, town houses and shops have been moved there and re-erected in the open, by lakes and among trees. The farmhouses are mainly unpainted log cabins with roofs of turf, often small and usually dark. What light there is comes from small windows or from the hole in the roof which let the smoke out. At Bygd4y, some of the houses are provided with chickens and cows so that they look, sound and even smell authentic. A few are equipped with furniture of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not only benches, tables and beds but elaborately carved and gaily painted chests, cupboards, grandfather clocks, huge beer-bowls ('lbollar), and wooden 'irons' for pressing clothes (mangletraer), a reminder that Scandinavia was, like its neighbour Russia, a culture of woodlanders. The larger houses in particular are richly decorated, especially the best rooms, which were for use during festivities or for visitors, welcome or unwelcome, from wedding guests to officials on their rounds who might, in that sparsely populated region, be many miles from the nearest inn. In Norway, the speciality is 'rose-painting' (rosemalning). The walls of the house, or the ceiling beams, or the chests and cupboards are painted in bright colours with floral designs, or with pictures of the Danish King and Queen, or of medieval warriors like Ogier the Dane (reminders that Norway was under Danish rule till I8I4). There are also woven bedspreads featuring the texts of hymns or biblical scenes like the wise and foolish virgins. In Sweden, the speciality is bonadmdleri, painted wall-hangings of paper or cloth, the poor man's tapestries, usually representing episodes from the Bible such as the Marriage Feast of Cana, the Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon, or the Three Wise Men riding to Bethlehem: festive scenes to match the festive occasions when the hangings would be brought out and displayed, with the Feast of Cana represented like a Swedish peasant wedding, so that host and guests, as they ate and drank, could gaze at their idealised reflections on the wall.2 At Skansen and Bygd$y, whole streets of nineteenth-century town houses have been re-erected, with curtains at the now larger windows, painted weatherboarding where the farmhouses had plain logs, prints instead of hangings and crockery replacing the wooden bowls and plates. In the main building at Norsk Folkemuseum, Oslo, there are reconstructions of one-family rooms from working-class districts of Christiania (as it was called then) in the I85Os, complete down to the socks hanging on a line between the rafters. In Nordiska Museet, Stockholm, when I was there, one exhibition was concerned with Nils

Museisamlingarnas sociomateriella dynamik

“The sociomaterial dynamics of museum collections” is an overarching research idea connecting three separate projects, with the aim of creating new knowledge about the roles of collections and collecting in the shaping of culture and society. The program includes three Swedish national museums that have been decisive in defining Sweden, Swedishness and the surrounding world – the Nordiska Museet (Swedish cultural history) the National Historical Museum (history, archaeology) and the Museum of Ethnography (the third/fourth world). In one study each, two ethnologists and one archaeologist will focus on objects and issues that have in some way been pointed out as problematic but which also seem to have a strong ability to define identity, social relations and create both conflict and reconciliation: collections from indigenous peoples, human remains and repatriation. The program includes three separate and ongoing projects, financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and The Swedish Research Council. The projects are connected by a shared interest in the dynamic interplay between material practices and social processes of change. This will be analyzed with an emphasis on turning points in collecting, classification, display and storage, such as the relocation of objects between and from the museums mentioned.