Swedish Museums Research Articles

Between objects of science and lived lives. The legal liminality of old human remains in museums and research

ABSTRACT Collections of old human remains in museums are currently under increased scrutiny and pressure. On the one hand they are problematised from a post-colonial and human rights point of view as the material remains of historic and ongoing structural violence connected to scientific knowledge production. On the other, new methods in archaeological science have led to increasing demand for destructive sampling. Without guidance and support by laws and formal standardised professional guidelines, museums may find themselves squeezed from two opposing sides. Based on an analysis of laws and professional guidelines, and a large-scale survey of the practical handling of old human remains in Swedish museums, this article argues that the lack of a shared professional process that recognises the complexity of old human remains as both objects of science and lived lives, risks undermining the role of museums in their relationship to both the public and the research community.

Foliate Mask in Vernacular Material Culture from Medieval to Modern Norway

In this article, we explore the contexts and appearances of what we argue is a Norwegian version of the Green Man – the Glibb – in vernacular settings. We also discuss the figure’s possible meanings in Norwegian secular culture. Most of the objects are part of the digital artifact collection called DigitaltMuseum (Digital Museum), which is a common database for Norwegian and Swedish museums and collections. Our collection and analysis of this material provides an initial step toward documenting the figure’s appearances and uses beyond the ecclesial material culture; however, it does not represent an exhaustive list of sources. We investigate the appearance of this particular ‘Green Man’ figure, discussing its material form and iconographical features and analysing its placement and occurrence. We argue that the Glibb’s ambiguous and flexible imagery is also a flexible symbol. Over the centuries, such symbols can enter into new constellations and interpretations of meaning with is new generation that continues to use their material forms.

Framtidsmedvetande på museer

This study investigates how managers and employees at County Museums in Sweden think about, work with, and relate to the future in their daily practice. We examined which tools and routines the museums employ to work concretely with different future perspectives. The study is thus about those forms of future consciousness that exist in the museums. The results show that the future is implicitly present but often remains unarticulated in the work of the museum. The museums work with short future perspectives which are often linked to concrete tasks or development work. The future perspectives at the museums are largely locked in the present or in a near future. Concrete tools, skills and routines to develop future consciousness are lacking. However, the results show that there is great interest and willingness among Swedish County Museums to implement tools, skills, and routines for a more developed engagement with futures.

Encoding object-oriented democracy in Swedish museums: implementing method of the thing in exhibition-making

ABSTRACT As museums face conflicting demands on maintaining and caring for their collections, opening for visitor engagement, and being more inclusive in their practice, new approaches are needed to museum work. This article introduces a democratic and inclusive approach focusing on the relational properties of the artefact – the Method of the Thing (Tigenes Metode). We use interviews with different museum professionals in Sweden. The method allows knowledge to emerge from the convergence of different actors within and outside the museum who negotiate their expertise, (professional) roles and technical infrastructure of the museum by foregrounding the object rather than the curators’ story. We use the encoding/decoding model to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the method where centring the object allows for a process of democratisation and polyvocality to take shape, thus allowing divergent narratives to emerge.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE PAST? SPOILS OF WAR IN SWEDISH MUSEUM DISPLAYS

The paper’s goal is to attempt to show what narrative Swedish museums conduct on spoils of war and trophies which are in their collections, how this strategy was worked out, and how to understand the responsibility versus the visitor watching such objects. Materials from a symposium and a conference held in Stockholm in 2008 have been analysed, and so have current texts (labels, curatorial texts, entries in online catalogues). Swedish museum curators have considered their responsibility to be proper preservation, studying, conserving, displaying those objects, making them available to the public (exhibitions, online bases), thus the basic museum activity has turned into a synonym of modern responsibility. The key activity which enabled the working out of this joint policy is to be found in detailed provenance studies.

Organizing subject access to cultural heritage in Swedish online museums

PurposeThe study aims to paint a representative picture of the current state of search interfaces of Swedish online museum collections, focussing on search functionalities with particular reference to subject searching, as well as the use of controlled vocabularies, with the purpose of identifying which improvements of the search interfaces are needed to ensure high-quality information retrieval for the end user.Design/methodology/approachIn the first step, a set of 21 search interface criteria was identified, based on related research and current standards in the domain of cultural heritage knowledge organization. Secondly, a complete set of Swedish museums that provide online access to their collections was identified, comprising nine cross-search services and 91 individual museums' websites. These 100 websites were each evaluated against the 21 criteria, between 1 July and 31 August 2020.FindingsAlthough many standards and guidelines are in place to ensure quality-controlled subject indexing, which in turn support information retrieval of relevant resources (as individual or full search results), the study shows that they are not broadly implemented, resulting in information retrieval failures for the end user. The study also demonstrates a strong need for the implementation of controlled vocabularies in these museums.Originality/valueThis study is a rare piece of research which examines subject searching in online museums; the 21 search criteria and their use in the analysis of the complete set of online collections of a country represents a considerable and unique contribution to the fields of knowledge organization and information retrieval of cultural heritage. Its particular value lies in showing how the needs of end users, many of which are documented and reflected in international standards and guidelines, should be taken into account in designing search tools for these museums; especially so in subject searching, which is the most complex and yet the most common type of search. Much effort has been invested into digitizing cultural heritage collections, but access to them is hindered by poor search functionality. This study identifies which are the most important aspects to improve.

Introduction to The Changing Roles of Archaeology in Swedish Museums

Introduction to The Changing Roles of Archaeology in Swedish Museums

Souvenirs from North America: Understanding and representing ‘Indianness’ in nineteenth-century Sweden

ABSTRACT Swedish museums curate numerous objects made by indigenous peoples of North America. Collected already in the seventeenth century, their numbers increased in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While some of them were collected systematically by scientific expeditions, majority of these objects were obtained as personal mementoes. Scrutinizing examples of North American souvenirs collected in the early nineteenth century by Swedes visiting America and donated to the Lund University Historical Museum, this article explores souvenirs as a particular category of representational objects. It relates them to the early nineteenth-century popular notions of the American Indian stemming from the popular literature and investigates how these two tools of representation informed one another to create and perpetuate a stereotype of Indianness.

World culture, world history, and the roles of a museum: a conceptual study of the Swedish museums of world culture, debates concerning them, and their roles in cultural politics

ABSTRACT The Museum of World Culture opened in 2004, partially in response to the increased immigration of the 1990s. This article analyses the political process leading to the establishment of the museum, and of the government agency that administers it and three other museums. It also analyses one of its permanent exhibitions, and the recent examples of public criticism of the museum, and of the government agency. Using conceptual history and analysis of historical periodization to analyze understandings of culture, history, and the role of museums, I argue that the museum represents a museum-idea focused on current issues, understanding history in terms of flows and encounters, in contrast to a museum-idea focusing on particular cultures and historical contexts and on understanding these as distinctly separate and context-dependent. Debate about the museum has become intertwined with the debate about the history, and nature, of the Swedish nation, making the museum both, a symbol of, and an actor in, the ongoing debate about Swedish national self-identity. The museum can thus be understood as a national museum, in the sense that it institutionalizes a version of national self-identity, and acts as a focus for debates about it.

From country house to penthouse

In 2011 a new museum opened in Stockholm – Sven-Harry’s Art Museum – named after its initiator and funder, the building contractor Sven-Harry Karlsson. Besides a gallery for temporary exhibitions, the museum includes a permanent collection of art and applied art installed in a penthouse on top of the building. The installation is conceived as a full-scale replica of Karlsson’s former home in an eighteenth-century manor house. This article focuses on the reconstructed home and aims at situating it within a tradition of full-scale displays of architectural interiors – so-called period rooms – in Swedish cultural history museums. Since the start of the twentieth century, eighteenth-century architecture has had a central position in the Swedish cultural heritage. Sven-Harry’s replicated home, a small manor of the rococo era, fits perfectly into the national canon, which for a long time focused on the homes of the elites to illustrate development within the arts. Even though the recreated milieu in Sven-Harry’s museum depends on traditional museum practice, it is also typical of contemporary innovations. In the last few decades, even prestigious cultural history museums have utilized the periodroom format in unconventional ways, and the bold reconstruction of Sven-Harry’s home is clearly a representative of this trend.

Co-Constructing Universal Design in Citizen Science Workshops.

This paper reports on a series of workshops that took place at two Swedish museums during 2017. The workshops were inspired by a citizen science approach, where the participants were not only on the receiving end but also active in producing new knowledge. The importance of turning to peoples' lived perspectives are often brought forward as crucial to understanding how inclusion and exclusion are played out in real life. The study aimed to introduce and discuss Universal Design (UD) of museum exhibitions, by engaging visitors and staff in bringing forward content for joint discussions. As there is an ongoing shift from traditional work on accessibility towards UD taking place in Sweden right now, the study was also part of raising the awareness of UD within the disability movement and at the museums. Museum visitors representing different disability organizations worked together with museum staff in photo exercises, supervised by two researchers. In total, 31 participants took part in six three-hour workshops. The workshop format encompassed three steps. First, one of the researchers introduced UD, after which the participants were divided into mixed groups with both visitors and staff. Their task was to take photos of museum features that were in line with, or in conflict with, UD. At the end of the workshop, all groups gathered to discuss what they had found. In this paper, we tell about the examples the participants brought forward and the ensuing joint discussions, and discuss the further implications for UD.

Including issues of migration and ethnic diversity in museum exhibitions: A reflection on different approaches used in Sweden

Abstract Historically, an important role of museums has been to contribute to national homogenization, but their roles are currently in flux. The study shows that Swedish museums of culture and history have begun the journey of adjusting to a new era that is affected by globalization, migration and requests for recognition of cultural difference. These processes began in the 1970s, and have been related to policy developments in the fields of culture, integration and minorities. In certain respects, the museums are moving in the direction of becoming what Eilean Hooper-Greenhill describes as post-museums, for example, museums have begun to include stories that have previously been ignored and are opening up to collaboration with stakeholders. However, the very exhibitions could be improved if museums, for example, more effectively employed new global and transnational perspectives on migration.

Translated Objects: The Olov Janse Case

Th is article explores the movements of archaeological and ethnographicobjects and museum collections connected with the Swedish-born archaeologist andethnographer Olov R. T. Janse (1892–1985). Janse pursued a cosmopolitan career in theyears between 1920 and 1960, in and between the national contexts of Sweden, France,Indochina, the Philippines, and the United States, where he found himself in diff erentpolitical contexts such as colonialism, nationalism, and the Cold War. He initiatedobject exchanges between French and Swedish museums, and he collected archaeologicaland ethnographic objects from Indochina and the Philippines for museums in Sweden,France, and the United States. Th e complexity of object movements in the wakeof Olov Janse’s career suggests that we should think and talk about object mobility interms of translation rather than simple transmission. In seven sections, each exploringone chapter of Janse’s life, we discuss how changes in world politics became entangledwith changes in Janse’s own position as an archaeologist and ethnographer, aff ectingthe movements of objects and contributing to an active translation of their meaning.

Germination of 151-year old Acacia spp. seeds

A collection of seeds from five Acacia species was made in Egypt in 1856. Since then, the seeds have been stored at room temperature in different Swedish museums. Due to the extreme longevity within the seeds of Acacia and related species, germination tests were performed on the now 151-year old seed. Seeds of two of the five species tested germinated. The first, Acacia farnesiana (L.) Willd., had two seeds germinate, and Acacia melanoxylon R. Br. ex Ait. f. had one seed germinate. In addition, DNA was extracted from the aged seed and DNA preservation was analyzed. Four of the tested species displayed well preserved DNA, whereas DNA from Albizia lebbeck (L.) Benth. showed signs of degradation. The 151-year longevity of the Acacia seeds is among the longest of dry-stored seeds reported. Several independent studies now report on extreme survival capacity for Acacia and related genera suggesting that these genera are suitable for studies on the characteristics of seeds with long storage performance. The results also demonstrate that herbaria and seed collections stored in museums and institutional depositories can be alternate sources of plants genetic material and should be given conservation attention.

Stories to tell? Narrative tools in museum education texts

Background: In the 1950s and 1960s, many children experienced museums as dull and boring. Nowadays, museums seem to be much more conscious of their educational role and the need to make their exhibits attractive and interesting. Making use of narratives is one way of achieving this. Some scholars claim that narrative is central to meaning making in a learning context. This article illustrates the extent to which narratives are used in a museum learning context, the kinds of narratives used and their purpose. Purpose: The overall aim was to investigate the versatility of narratives in a learning and meaning-making context in a museum setting. The three-pronged research question is: to what extent is narrative used in the education texts produced by three selected museums and made available on their Internet websites, what kinds of narratives are used and what is their purpose? Method: Data was gathered in January and February 2006, following an extensive Internet search of Swedish museums and their downloadable education texts. Three museums were selected – Skansen, the Swedish Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Science and Technology – each publishing a comprehensive up-to-date selection of education texts on their websites. A total of 134 digital texts specifically produced for students and teachers in connection with museum visits were studied and analysed. Each text was downloaded, sorted, labelled, saved and categorised electronically. The texts catered for different ages: infant and primary school (7–10 years), middle school (10–13 years) and secondary school (13–16 years). Analysis: A preliminary analysis strategy was developed on the basis of texts from the first museum chosen. Detailed adjustments to the analysis framework were made prior to a full analysis of the texts. Every downloaded text was read and re-read and documented according to the kind of narratives contained and their supposed purpose. Results: An analysis of the web-based education texts indicated that not only did the museums make use of narratives to different extents, but that different kinds of narratives were used for different purposes. Depending on the kind of narrative used, the results showed that the main purposes were to communicate by: (1) describing, constructing or reconstructing information; (2) interpreting what has happened, is happening now or might happen in the future; (3) constructing reality and making sense or meaning of it; (4) stimulating the imagination and encouraging creativity; (5) rendering teaching and learning more entertaining, imaginative and effective; and (6) acting as a resource to aid interaction, negotiation and communication. It was also apparent that the chosen museums used narrative to differing degrees depending on their respective traditions and circumstances. Conclusion: The study highlighted how the narratives used in the three museums' web-based education texts make a significant contribution to meaning making by stimulating imagination, encouraging reflection, drawing on existing experience and knowledge and sharpening visitors' curiosity. This is mainly achieved through the narratives' powers of description and analysis, and their ability to challenge existing attitudes and involve the visitor in historical and contemporary events and situations.

The Ordovician sponge Palaeomanon cratera (Roemer, 1848) as an erratic on Gotland (Sweden)

Recent cataloguing of collections of Late Ordovician erratic sponges from Gotland (Sweden) in Swedish museums has revealed the presence of Palaeomanon cratera (Roemer, 1848), previously known only from Silurian strata in Tennessee (USA) and the Northwest Territories (Canada). The species forms part of a rich sponge assemblage occurring on Gotland, representing one of three associations in north and northwest Europe, and originating from unknown source areas in Baltica. Palynomorphs extracted from adhering sediment document a Late Ordovician (Ashgill) age; thus, they are the oldest representatives of the species known to date. Naturally, this has implications for the palaeobiogeography of Palaeomanon, in relation to faunal exchange between Baltica and Laurentia; a possible migration from Baltica to Laurentia is discussed.

Online service marketing and delivery: the case of Swedish museums

This article addresses service marketing and service delivery over the Internet. Some service activities – information, education and entertainment – can be delivered as well as promoted over the Internet. An empirical study focusing on museums has been carried out. The purpose has been to describe the current use of the Internet by Swedish museums and propose some strategies with regard to its value as a service delivery tool. The 371 Swedish museums that have a homepage have been examined. Of these, 156 museums operate their own Web site. The study has consisted of a content analysis of the sites as well as a questionnaire study and two preliminary in‐depth interviews. A cluster analysis was carried out, resulting in four groups being defined. It is found that the use of the Internet is still in its infancy. Three strategies for Internet service delivery are proposed.

Amatørarkæologer i Danmark

Amatørarkæologer i Danmark

A STUDY OF THE STORAGE CONDITIONS FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL IRON IN SWEDISH MUSEUMS

"A STUDY OF THE STORAGE CONDITIONS FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL IRON IN SWEDISH MUSEUMS." Studies in Conservation, 41(sup2), p. 17

Sweden: ‘Culture is aerobics for the soul’

How can an old-established Association of Friends of Museums adapt to the needs of a museum in the 1990s? By changing its rules and appealing to the public with a snappy slogan. This is exactly what the Association of Friends of two Swedish museums did, thus raising much-needed cash for new projects, increasing membership and introducing a new concept which has now become a byword with the media.