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1
Arv
Nordic Yearbook
of Folklore 2009
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3
ARV
4
© 2008 by The Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Uppsala
ISSN 0066-8176
All rights reserved
Printed with grants from
Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council), Stockholm, Sweden
Articles appearing in this yearbook are abstracted and indexed in
Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life 1998–
Editorial address:
Prof. Arne Bugge Amundsen
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages
University of Oslo
Box 1010 Blindern
NO–0315 Oslo, Norway
phone + 4722857629
fax + 4722854828
http:// www.hf.uio.no/ikos/forskning/arv/index.html
Cover: Kirsten Berrum
For index of earlier volumes, see
http://www.kgaa.nu/tidskrift.php
Distributor
Swedish Science Press
Box 118, SE–751 04 Uppsala, Sweden
phone: +46(0)18365566
fax: +46(0)18365277
e-mail: [email protected]
Printed in Sweden
Textgruppen i Uppsala AB, Uppsala 2009
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Contents
Articles
Lizette Gradén and Hanne Pico Larsen: Nordic Spaces in the
North and North America. Heritage Preservation in Real and
Imagined Nordic Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
7
Valdimar Tr. Hafstein: Collectivity by Culture Squared. Cultural
Heritage in Nordic Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11
Janet C. Gilmore: Mount Horeb’s Oljanna Venden Cunneen.
A Norwegian-American Rosemaler “on the Edge” . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
Kristinn Schram: Performing the North. Folk Culture, Exoticism
and Irony among Expatriates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
49
Lizette Gradén: Transatlantic Place Making. The Use of Swedish
Bridal Crown as Heritage Performance in the United States . . . . . .
73
Hanne Pico Larsen: Danish Maids and Visual Matters. Celebrating
Heritage in Solvang, California . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
93
James P. Leary: New Legends in Nordic America. The Case of Big
Erick Erickson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Survey Article
Henning Laugerud: The Collection of Norwegian Witchcraft-trials
in the Norwegian Folklore Archives (Norsk Folkeminnesamling)
at the University of Oslo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Book Reviews
Mia-Marie Hammarlin: Att leva som utbränd (Georg Drakos) . . . . . . 143
Gunilla Byrman (ed.): En värld för sig själv (Anne Bergman) . . . . . . 148
Kjell Å. Modéer (ed.): Grændse som skiller ej! (Jesper Falkheimer) . . 150
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Lina Midholm et al. (eds.): The Ritual Year and Ritual Diversity
(Lena Marander-Eklund) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
Fredrik Skott: Folkets minnen (Ulrika Wolf-Knuts) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Bengt af Klintberg: Folkminnen (Blanka Henriksson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Bengt af Klintberg & Ulf Palmenfelt: Vår tids folkkultur (Carola
Ekrem) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
Niklas Nyqvist: Från bondson till folkmusikikon (Patrik Sandgren) . . 159
Palle Ove Christiansen & Jens Henrik Koudal (eds.): Det ombejlede
folk (Fredrik Skott) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Eva M. Karlsson: Livet nära döden (Anders Gustavsson) . . . . . . . . . . 164
Laura Stark: The Magical Self (Camilla Asplund Ingemark) . . . . . . . 167
Kyrre Kverndokk: Pilgrim, turist og elev (Anders Gustavsson) . . . . . . 169
Jonathan Roper (ed.): Charms, Charmers and Charming (Arne
Bugge Amundsen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Ritwa Herjulfsdotter: Jungfru Maria möter ormen (Arne Bugge
Amundsen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Marie Steinrud: Den dolda offentligheten (Arne Bugge Amundsen) . 176
Lars-Eric Jönsson, Anna Wallette & Jes Wienberg (eds.): Kanon och
kulturarv (Beate Feldmann) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
Liv Bjørnhaug Johansen & Ida Tolgensbakk Vedeld (eds.): Mangfoldige minner (Ronald Grambo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Bente Gullveig Alver: Mellom mennesker og magter (Gunnar W.
Knutsen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
Ingrid Åkesson: Med rösten som instrument (Ingrid Gjertsen) . . . . . . 184
Anna-Maria Ånäs, Janina Lassila & Ann-Helen Sund (eds.):
Extremt? Etnologiska analyser av kvinnorock, extremsport och
Ultimate Fighting (Kristofer Hansson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
Lena Marander-Eklund, Sofie Strandén, Nils G. Holm (eds.):
Folkliga föreställningar och folklig religiositet (Ane Ohrvik) . . . . 191
Billy Ehn & Orvar Löfgren: När ingenting särskilt händer. Nya kulturanalyser (Olav Christensen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
Anja Petersen: På visit i verkligheten. Fotografi och kön i slutet av
1800-talet (Anna Dahlgren) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Erik Ottoson: Söka sitt. Om möten mellan människor och föremål
(Bjarne Rogan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Books Received by the Editor 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Nordic Spaces in the North and North America
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Nordic Spaces in the North and North
America
Heritage Preservation in Real and Imagined Nordic Places
Lizette Gradén & Hanne Pico Larsen
This issue of Arv marks the beginning of a four-year project entitled “Nordic
Spaces in the North and North America: Heritage Preservation in Real and
Imagined Nordic Places.” The project group consists of five post-doctoral
scholars from the fields of ethnology/folklore/theatre. A chief strategy is to
pool our experiences and networks to actively engage them as a resource in
our work. Project participants include Chad Eric Bergman (North Park University, Chicago), Lizette Gradén (Konstfack, Stockholm), Valdimar Tr. Hafstein (University of Iceland, Reykjavik), Hanne Pico Larsen (Danish Folklore
Archives, Copenhagen), Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch (Åbo Akademi, Åbo).
The four-year project is funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation’s Nordic Spaces program (www.sh/nordicspaces.se), with additional
co-funding being provided by North Park University, the University of Iceland, and the Danish Heritage Society, USA. In this first publication we welcome the following colleagues for collaboration; Professor Janet Gilmore
(University of Wisconsin, Madison), Professor Jim Leary (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and director/Ph.D. candidate Kristinn Schram (Icelandic
Centre for Ethnology and Folklore/University of Edinburgh). As a result of
this issue, we hope to reach out to scholars in different fields who share our
interests in culture marked by migration and heritage preservation.
Given the scope of this project, we want to say a few words about the concepts Nordic and Space. However, before discussing these two concepts, it
is important to note that both terms are complex, with each having its own
vast body of scholarship and particular institutional usage. Whereas it would
be well-nigh impossible to address all aspects of this scholarly output within
the confines of the present issue of Arv, we have chosen to focus on how
these concepts play out in the performance of heritage in official as well as
domestic spheres. Our research shows that the concept of Nordic is less relevant to the makers and preservers of heritage in spaces outside the places
they refer back to (i.e. the Nordic countries). In the hands of immigrants and
their descendants, institutional usage breaks down into more specific cate-
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gories based on identification shaped by being located “in between” countries, or at an intersection of Europe and the USA, or “here and there”, and
even complicating categories by identifying with at least two places. Identity politics and heritage making are performed in families, groups and
communities relating to concepts such as Scandinavian, Swedish-Finnish,
Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish and particular provinces. So we return to the question of defining the Nordic.
In this issue of Arv, concept of the Nordic begins with the definition by
Kenneth R. Olwig and Michael Jones (2008), namely that: “Norden, literally ‘the North’ comprises the states of Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway,
and Sweden. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are the three nation-states of
Scandinavia (although in the English-speaking world ‘Scandinavia’ sometimes refers to all the Nordic countries). Finland, to the east, was historically
once part of Sweden and includes the internally autonomous, Swedishspeaking island territory of Åland. In the North Atlantic to the west are Iceland, once belonging to Norway and later to Denmark but now an independent state, and the Faroe Islands and Greenland, which are internally autonomous territories under Denmark. Historically, other territories once within
the cultural and political sphere of the Scandinavian countries included
Slesvig-Holsten (Schleswig-Holstein in Germany), Orkney and Shetland,
and Estonia on the Baltic” (Jones & Olwig 2008:ix).
Expanding on this definition however, we also posit that “the North”
reaches beyond territorial boundaries to include numerous cultural and educational networks created mainly after the First and Second World War.
Among these are Nordiska Rådet (Nordic Council) 1952, Nordiska ministerrådet (Nordic Council of Ministers) established in 1971 (DS 2008:80, p.
41) and Nordisk Kulturfond (Nordic Cultural Foundation) 1966. In the field
of ethnology and folklore Nordic and international cooperation goes back to
1905, when Axel Olrik and his Nordic colleagues inaugurated the Folklore
Fellows Communications to further intercollegiate research exchange. Nordic Folklorists had been meeting bi- or tri-annually since 1920 (KaivolaBregenhøj 1983). In 1963, at the 16th Nordic Folklife and Folklore Congress in Røros, Norway, NEFA-Norden was established (Jordan & Ramberg
1993:208, Kaivola-Bregenhøj 1983:204). NIF (1959–1997) was founded to
coordinate endeavors in the field of type-indexing the stock of Nordic folktales and legends. (www.folklorefellows.fi/netw/ffn14/nif.html). The Norden Association was established in 1919 to stimulate cultural cooperation
between the Nordic countries and has since established cultural houses in
Iceland, the Faroes, Greenland, Åland, and Finland.1
For a preliminary working definition of Space we turn to the seminal
work by Yi-Fu Tuan (1977). According to him, place and space are basic
components of the lived world, something most people take for granted
(Tuan 1977). As we work with different Nordic spaces, it makes sense to use
the broad and somewhat generalizing definition of space in the following
Nordic Spaces in the North and North America
9
way: “In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of place.
‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space
becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan
1977: 6). When we start thinking about them, however, they can assume
new and maybe unexpected meanings (Feld & Basso 1996; Ryden 1993;
Tuan 1977). Visible cultural expressions as we observe in our work are intended “to give sensible forms to moods, feelings and rhythms of functional
life” (Tuan 1977: 165–66).
Questions concerning the issue of how Nordic spaces are created and expressed in the Nordic countries and North America and how such spaces
give shape to cultural heritage, delimit identities, and draw boundaries via
recognition of difference are important in our work. Since the time of the
great emigration to North America, ritual, narratives, architecture, museums, and theatre have defined the Nordic in the United States as well as
in the Nordic countries themselves. Today, such Nordic spaces are subject
to contestation, not least among the descendants of Nordic emigrants and the
more recent immigrants to the Nordic countries.
Through fieldwork, literature and archival studies, theory criticism and
theatre projects we aim to explore how Nordic spaces are created in North
America and in the Nordic countries. We want to know how these places
gain importance as cultural heritage sites and how they become invested
with meaning. Of particular concern to this project are our analytical efforts
to discover which emotional and spatial means people make use of when
considering space and place making. Through our research interests, we
also strive to form an understanding of the role of folklore in the light of cultural politics in the twenty-first century. For further information about individual projects, please visit www.nordicspaces.org.
Lizette Gradén, fil. dr.
Researcher/Director of Graduate Studies
Konstfack/University College of Arts, Crafts and Design
LM Ericssons väg 14
126 27 Hägersten, Sweden
Hanne Pico Larsen, Ph.D
Adjunct Professor
Department of Germanic Languages and Literature
Faculty of Arts and Science
Columbia University
319 Hamilton Hall (MC 2812)
1130 Amsterdam Ave. New York, NY 10027
E-mail: [email protected]
10
References
Feld, Steven & Keith H. Basso 1996: Introduction. In Senses of Place, ed. Steven
Feld & Keith H. Basso, 3–11. Santa Fe, NM.: School of American Research
Press.
Jordan, Hans & Klas Ramberg 1993: NEFA Stockholm 1969–1992. En ämnesförening för studenter vid Institutet för folklivsforskning. In: Lusthusporten. En
forskningsinstitution och dess framväxt 1918–1993. Stockholm: Nordiska museet.
Jones, Michael & Kenneth R. Olwig 2008: Nordic Landscapes. Region and Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Kaivola-Bregenhøj, Annikki 1983: The Profile of Folkloristics at Past Congresses.
In Trends in Nordic Tradition Research. Studia Fennica 27. Helsinki: SKS.
Ryden, Kent C. 1993: Mapping the Invisible Landscape. Folklore, Writing, and the
Sense of Place. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Tuan, Yi-Fu 1977: Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
1 See the links at www.kknord.org/?pageID=57. Other institutions strengthening ties between
different Nordic countries have been established, two examples being Voxenasen in Norway
(www.voxenasen.no) and Hanaholmen in Finland (www.hanaholmen.fi).
Thanks to Carsten Bregenhøj for valuable references and suggestions.
Collectivity by Culture Squared
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Cultural Heritage in Nordic Spaces
Valdimar Tr. Hafstein
Cultural heritage is a particular kind of practice. Pointing beyond itself to a
culture it claims to represent, heritage is a culture of culture – it is culture
squared. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has argued, heritage involves a
metacultural relationship to cultural practices (1998:149–151). Heritage
practices also refer themselves to the social field: they invoke a collective
subject such as family, community, ethnicity, or nation. Such heritage practices are performative: they bring into being what they enact. Thus, heritage
practices perform both culture and collectives – they give them substance
and reality. In so doing, they also configure particular spaces as privileged
zones of contact between the past and the present and as metonyms of the
collective – as heritage sites, that is, be they museum collections, festivals,
dances, costumes, or foods.
In brief, heritage is collectivity by culture squared. Thus conceived, heritage is transformative. It transforms people’s relationship with their own
practices, the ways in which they perceive themselves and the things around
them – it “squares” them. The conscious inheritor understands her practice
differently than another who does not pause to consider, e.g., how her needle
sutures the past to the present and, eventually, to the future, nor how her
craftsmanship transmits culture from one generation to the next. This transformation is indicative of how the present relates to history. Indeed, heritage
says more about us than it does about past generations or what they’ve left
behind.
In the last few decades a vast number of social actors have seized upon
the concept of cultural heritage in hundreds of thousands of scattered places.
The success of cultural heritage is almost unprecedented. It can only be
compared to the environmental movement – organized around another
powerful concept – which, in a similar manner, has set about reshaping the
world in its image, reforming discourses, mobilizing people and resources,
and transforming practices. Many explanations have been put forward to account for the rising tide of heritage. Some say it bears witness to an intensi-
12
fied historical awareness, others associate it with the development of the
tourist industry, and others yet see it as part of a nostalgic Zeitgeist, associated with the so-called cultural logic of capitalism. Other explanations include the rise of localisms and patriotisms in the face of globalization, the
dispersion of peoples in a deterritorialized world, the gradual commodification of culture, and the list goes on (see e.g. Bendix 2000; Huyssen 2000;
Klein 2006:65–68; Löfgren 1997; Lowenthal 1998:1–30; Nora 1989; Poulot
2006; Smith 2006:11–43; Turtinen 2006; Yúdice 2004:9–39). No doubt,
there is something to each of these explanations, though no one of them will
account for all the various invocations of cultural heritage around the globe.
Following Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, to recycle “sites, buildings, objects,
technologies, or ways of life” as heritage is to give these things a new lease
on life, not as what they once were, but as “representations of themselves”
(1998:151). Take the heritage sport of glíma, an example from my own
country. Glíma is a traditional form of wrestling brought to Iceland from
Scandinavia some time before the fourteenth century. It has been continuously practiced from that time until today, and yet in the past couple of decades glíma has been transformed through its conversion into heritage – it is
a sport you practice or watch not just because it is there, like tennis or football, but because it is marked as a heritage sport, because by doing glíma you
are doing your bit to safeguard the national heritage – it is a metacultural
practice.
The same holds true of heritage foods. Most of us eat them not because
we like the way they taste – at least not where I come from. Rather, in eating
them, we partake of our heritage (or that of somebody else) in an act of communion, i.e., a performance of collectivity in which the word becomes flesh
(Kristinn Schram – with whom I share heritage foods – has more to say on
their consumption in this volume; for a literal example, involving lutefisk
and coffee in a ritual reenactment of the Last Supper in Lindsborg, Kansas,
see Gradén 2003:164–171). These are so many appeals to heritage in everyday life. In each case, these appeals mark the present as fundamentally different from the past. They create a distance between activities that are
marked as heritage, on the one hand, and on the other hand everything else
the same people do. Everything that is not heritage is therefore modern: typing, as opposed to embroidering; tennis, as opposed to glíma; fast food, as
opposed to singed sheep heads, shark, and ram’s testicles. To have a heritage is to experience a distance from the things you consider to be your heritage. The self-conscious heir is alienated from her ancestors from whom she
has inherited her heritage; the heir relates very differently to houses and
sports, to handicrafts and foods that former generations took for granted.
Hers is a metacultural relationship.
The performance of cultural heritage has clearly observable effects,
tangible for example in the physical world of construction work and urban
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development, as well as in the cultural, economic, and social fields. One of
the more important actions that heritage accomplishes is to divide space and
organize populations. In other words, cultural heritage is a practical instrument for constituting social collectives – ethnic, national, or local. Heritage
organizes such collectives around cultural residue: old houses, timeworn
objects, tattered manuscripts, traditional craftsmanship, and so on (Hafstein
2007).
Although Nordic countries were never quite as homogeneous as our official histories used to claim, the populations and culture have never before
been as diverse as they are now. In one or two generations, we have gone
from the singular to the plural. It is no coincidence that it is under these circumstances of intensified migration and visible difference that cultural heritage is all at once everywhere and we have grown concerned about its protection (see Klein 1997; Ashworth, Graham & Tunbridge 2007; Littler &
Naidoo 2005, especially Hall 2005 and Khan 2005). Cultural heritage
creates a discursive space in which social changes may be discussed and it
provides a particular language for discussing them (cf. Klein 2006:68–74;
Rastrick 2007). It enables us to represent our own understandings of our histories and identities. Yet at the same time, the terminology of heritage is a
mechanism of power: it curtails expression by defining the sort of things that
it makes sense to say (Graham, Ashworth & Tunbridge 2000; Hafstein
2006).
Historically, we know, the monuments, landscapes, and folklore, which
later came to be organized under the common rubric of heritage, all played
a significant role in the creation of modern nation-states (Anderson 1991;
Giolláin 2000:63–93). Indeed, heritage continues to be an important instrument for representing the nation, focusing the political imagination on particular representations of the national community. Often, this is achieved by
glossing over difference, demanding allegiance to a uniform national culture and history through selective oblivion, at the expense of alternative
loyalties (Anttonen 2005:79–94, 155–177). Heritage is in many ways well
suited to this task, for, as Regina Bendix has remarked, what distinguishes
heritage from other ways of aligning the past with the present “is its capacity
to hide the complexities of history and politics” (2000, 38).
It has become increasingly difficult, however, to imagine such national
monocultures, what with the multiplication of diasporic and cross-border
communities, and with the resurgence of indigenous groups and regional
identities. Under these circumstances, many governments have come to acknowledge and even promote “communities” as cultural and administrative
units (Rose 1999:167–196; Bennett 2000:1420–1423; Hafstein 2004:132–
180). As nations of immigrants (with relatively small and marginalized
indigenous populations), the United States and Canada represent special
cases, with important differences in the ways in which social collectives are
14
constituted. Strong ethnic identities have long coexisted in rather well integrated societies on the North American continent, at the local as well as the
national level. Nevertheless, the ways in which this multiplicity is conceptualized have changed in the last couple of decades. So has the political vision for its future: the metaphor of the American melting pot has gradually
given way to that of the multicultural mosaic (Gans 1979; cf. Peach 2005).
Actually, the mosaic metaphor invokes a slightly misleading image of a grid
of tiles neatly separated by grout. In fact, the idea of communities as it is performed in North America is far messier, with overlapping and superimposed
identifications, allegiances, and solidarities. These are not mutually exclusive, and they include invocations of the local, the indigenous, the diasporic,
the ethnic, the regional, national, transnational, and universal.
In the context of communities, heritage is a strong but flexible language
for staking claims to culture and claims based on culture. In each case, representations of cultural heritage held in common make a claim on the loyalties of individuals and families. Such representations trace shared trajectories (“routes”/“roots”) through time and space. But the time and space of
heritage do not precede it. In fact, they emerge from its enunciations – from
heritage practices.
As we learn from Michel de Certeau, urban spaces emerge from the practices of their inhabitants – the city only takes on spatial extension when
people walk in it; its spaces are born from their footsteps, from their tactile
and sensory engagement with the facades and sidewalks, streets and parks,
sights and sounds and smells (2002:91–130). Similarly, the trajectories
traced by invocations of a common heritage map out connections and they
configure spaces. Such spaces, in turn, materialize in heritage performances
– in objects, collections, architecture, costumes, and in the bodies of performers.
To be sure, architects and urban planners have structured the city as place,
or as a collection of places, but ultimately it is the practice of social actors
moving through the urban landscape, turning it to their own ends, that performs the city, gives it meaningful materiality. The same may be said of
Nordic places. Particular Nordic structures have been defined by state apparatuses and official institutions, by administrators and cultural engineers,
whose task it is to reproduce national culture and promote the identification
of citizens with that culture. But that is only half the story. The ways in
which social actors practice the structures and the institutions is what gives
Nordicness extension in space. And that practice extends across national
borders – across, even, the Atlantic Ocean (cf. Klein 2001; Gradén 2003;
Österlund-Pötzch 2003; Larsen 2006).
The articles in this volume analyze Nordic space making on the North
American continent and elsewhere, outside what is usually designated as the
Nordic region. Some of the sites that the authors examine include festivals,
15
customs, costumes, dances, foodways, jokes, pageants, collections, and exhibits. At each site, we witness practices that perform Nordicness, practices
which constitute both space and collectivity by invoking heritage relationships. Generally, these practices take the body as its central object – the
body is a site of performance, it traces the trajectories out of which Nordic
spaces emerge, and these spaces in turn are embodied by those who perform
them (Kapchan 2003).
As Hanne Pico Larsen notes in this volume, “kinship and cultural heritage
together make up a system of belonging.” Indeed, a central problematic in
heritage is the relation between these two terms – between social practices,
on the one hand, and kinship or heredity, on the other (Bendix 2000). Heritage is very much concerned with the ways in which culture is embodied and
the ways in which bodies are cultured. This is particularly true of immigrant
heritage, which is predicated on displacement, i.e. the disembedding of ethnic spaces through a transatlantic trajectory and the disembodying of ethnicity through hybrid reproductions of genes and customs.
One can hardly speak of embodiment without speaking of gender, and indeed heritage practices are highly gendered. This is apparent in several articles in this volume, in particular those of Lizette Gradén, Janet Gilmore,
and Hanne Pico Larsen. While men in many cases play a leading role in
safeguarding heritage, protecting its authenticity and integrity, embodying
heritage is the work of women. Thus, for example, Gradén traces in her article on the Värmland gift the biography of a bridal crown sent from Värmland to Swedish America where it was used at weddings all over the continent. In its travels, the bridal crown maps out connections through space and
illustrates the transformative capacity of objects as agents of heritage; it
shows the ways in which an object can help to constitute collectivities and
create spaces. A powerful symbol of virginity, the silver crown is always
worn by a bride, but as Gradén demonstrates, the bride in many cases wears
it not on her own initiative but at the bidding of her father, for whom Swedish identity may play a more central role than it does for his daughter. The
young woman thus embodies the heritage; wearing the crown on her head,
her body performs blood relations, familial bonds, ethnicity, and transatlantic space. She makes these real by giving substance to them. This performance, however, though its locus is the body of a woman, takes place at the
behest of the father; it performs a patriarchal relationship. As object, the
crown enables the word of the Father to become flesh – incarnate in the
chaste Swedish-American daughter.
The Danish Days Maid in Solvang, discussed by Hanne Pico Larsen, offers a parallel yet contrasting case. Appointed each year during the Danish
Days festival in Solvang, California, the Danish Days Maid puts a face – and
body – on the social collective. Larsen analyzes the maid’s body as a site of
performance, her iconicity and the elusive conditions on which her selection
16
is premised. The Danish Days Maid, she argues, represents the community;
the maid is a human icon. In order to perform community and DanishAmerican space in the symbolically overdetermined landscape of Solvang,
the maid must satisfy three criteria: she must have Danish blood, she must
have a Solvang family history, and she must be a maid, i.e. of the right and
ripe young age. Like the women who wore the bridal crown, Larsen shows
that Danish Days Maids are selected based on their families and, moreover,
they take on this role for the sake of their families. In addition, Larsen notes,
“physical attractiveness [is] more important than anyone will admit.” To
sum up, the body of the maid must give substance to hereditary and social
networks, and it must be the fertile body of a young woman (a maid).
The Danish Days Maid thus points to a crucial element in how heritage is
embodied through its performance – an aspect also discernable in the story
of the bridal crown. Heritage practices inscribe a coherent transatlantic
space on the body that traces a trajectory through that space, a body that incarnates complex local and transnational networks of ethnicity and community. But – and this is critical – it is not just any body; it is the fertile body
of a chaste bride entering into marriage, in the case of the bridal crown, or
that of a young maid entering childbearing age, in the case of the Danish
Days Maid. At stake here is the continuity of the community, its reproduction – social, cultural, and sexual. The maid and the bride as heritage incarnate give symbolic expression to the reproduction of ethnic identity. From
their wombs, Danish-America and Swedish-America will be born again.
In spite of all the rhetoric of safeguarding, conservation, and continuity,
heritage involves change. It is a change in relations (Hafstein 2006). Heritage practices are a new way of relating to objects in one’s surroundings and
to one’s own body. Heritage is innovative, in so far as it represents a new
way of constituting social collectivity around representations of culture and
pedigree. The extent to which culture and pedigree – social and hereditary
networks – may conflict is apparent in how Solvang locals critique the selection of the Danish Days Maid by citing the case of Kristine. Kristine was
adopted from the Philippines and raised in a local Danish-American family
of some prominence in Solvang, but she never took on the role of the maid.
The local critics believe that she was excluded from consideration because
of the color of her skin. Kristine herself offers a different explanation, but
she is nonetheless quick to agree about the importance of looks in all things
heritage – including putting a Danish face on her parents’ Danish chocolate
store. In Solvang, heritage is externalized in visual markers like windmills,
flags, pastries, and girls in costumes – Danishness is on display (see also
Larsen 2006). As Larsen makes clear, externalizing culture in human bodies
invites racist distinctions. In Nordic spaces in North America, it is difficult
to get away from the whiteness of heritage.
The narratives of the Swedish bridal crown and the Danish Days Maid
17
thus help to shed light on one another, but they also complement each other
through contrast. The bride who wears the Värmland crown and the girl who
dons the maid’s costume embody different relationships. The body of the
bride traces a transatlantic trajectory, articulating in her wedding ceremony
(and, by extension, her kin and its continuity) her family’s history in the old
world and its emigration to the new world. The body of the maid is primarily
a site for signifying local community, albeit a community that figures itself
as a superlative Nordic space and celebrates its ties to the old world in its
annual festival. True, the maid embodies Danish Days, but Danish Days are
a distinctively new world festival (and pageants are a good, old American
invention; cf. Stoeltje 1996). Danish Days perform the local Danish-American community for locals and for tourists. In brief, from the bridal crown to
the Danish Days maid, we witness a shift of emphasis from the former to the
latter term in the hyphenated “Nordic-American”.
Solvang’s festival thus exhibits more fully than the case of the bridal
crown the characteristics of what Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch terms “American-Plus attitude” (2003). Her coinage points to the differences in the ways
in which social collectives are constituted in immigrant nations like the
USA, as compared to nation states like the Nordic countries. As noted
above, identification tends to be rather more multiple, intersecting, and
loosely organized in the former than the latter. Hybridity, therefore, tends to
be more pronounced in American heritage practices. By the same token, the
spaces that these practices constitute also tend to be less clearly distinguished from one another.
In this volume, Österlund-Pötzsch explores the varieties of Nordic
space-making in North America. From the imagined and the virtual to the
domestic and the culinary, these Nordic spaces are made in heritage practices that trace transatlantic trajectories and perform social networks linking
communities on two continents. Her study focuses on the descendants of
Finland-Swedish immigrants in the United States. This group provides particularly fertile ground for studying the plasticity of heritage practices and
ethnic identification for, as Österlund-Pötzsch demonstrates, Finland-Swedish identity in North-America is trapped in “a position of permanent in-betweenness”. Neither exactly Swedish nor Finnish, it is, in her words, a “stellar example of the elusiveness and diversity of ethnicity.” One thing that appears clear from her account is that while individuals easily identify with
more than one ethnic identity – and can thus for example be both Swedish-American and Finnish-American (as well as, say, Anglo-American and
Native American) – the “American-Plus” attitude does not easily accommodate double-hyphenation: “Finland-Swedish-American”, or “AmericanPlus-Plus”.
Janet Gilmore’s article on Norwegian-American folk artist Oljanna
Venden Cunneen and her practice of “rosemaling” illustrates the way in
18
which particular objects and practices gain iconic status within a community
as a means of externalizing identity and literally tracing the networks relating immigrants and their offspring to the old country. Rosemaling, as a signifier, accumulated signifieds within the Norwegian-American community
and became an emblem in part, Gilmore argues, because it lends itself so
well to commercialization; it enables the making of Norwegian-American
spaces not only through artistry but also, and just as importantly, by means
of consumption – visible in decorative wall plaques, business signs, room
friezes, dinner placemats, cookbook covers, gift cards, and clothing, to mention just a few examples of rosemaling merchandise.
Oljanna Cunneen was a “natural” working within a tradition in which, as
Gilmore describes, women “practiced careful, flat, two-dimensional designs, using patterns, narrow repertoires of motifs and colors” and “collectively self-taught” painting technique. Men, on the other hand, came to
claim authority over rosemaling tradition through official institutions of art
and heritage, wielding an “old country stamp of authenticity”, and eventually divided American rosemalers into specialists and amateurs – or “Gold
Medalist virtuosos” and so-called “local rosemalers” – to a great extent
along gender lines.
This gendering of heritage work rhymes well with the division of labor
apparent in Gradén’s brides and Larsen’s maids. Once again women seem
to be the ones reproducing heritage – through embodiment or other means
of externalization – while men guarantee the authenticity and integrity of
that heritage. The distinction introduced into the ranks of rosemalers echoes
the debates in Sweden about the Värmland collection. The collection was
assembled by the people of Värmland as a gift to the Swedish-American
community in Minnesota and, by extension, in North America. Pulled together in a collective effort by laymen, it flew in the face of professional
conventions for representative collections. As Gradén makes plain, curators
and scholars objected to the collection because it was “un-Swedish”, “motley” and “unaesthetic”, and they put great pressure on the Värmland governor and collection committee to “weed” the collection to bring it into line
with professional standards.
These distinctions bring into relief the politics of representation and beg
the question of who speaks for heritage. They bring us back, in fact, to
communities – the social collectivities invoked by heritage practices.
Communities are not monoliths. Whether they are local or diasporic, indigenous or national, communities are tentative attempts to organize social networks and draw boundaries around them (Noyes 2003). As indicated above, heritage practices are metacultural; they are cultural representations of cultural representations. It is at the meta-level of representation that these conflicts take place, where individuals and factions jockey
for power over who can speak for the community and who decides how it
19
is to represent itself. The stakes are not inconsequential; they involve how
the collective subject is invoked and how its boundaries are drawn, for as
noted heritage practices are performative, they give substance and reality
to the collectives and cultures they represent (Noyes 2006). Authority over
heritage and political power within the community are thus to some extent
mutually translatable.
For that very reason, however, heritage practices are also ideal sites for
challenging authority by contesting collective legacies, tracing different trajectories that map out alternative networks and configure alternative spaces.
Thus, cultural heritage is not just a site for establishing and renewing hegemony by winning consent, structuring allegiance, and orchestrating social
networks around official metacultural representations. Cultural heritage is
also a site of contestation, where individuals and groups can undermine hegemony, display dissent, question structures of allegiance, and blur social
boundaries. This is accomplished either by offering alternative representations or else by suggesting alternative metacultural relations to officially
sanctioned representations. The former is a form of protest, the latter subversion.
Because heritage is a metacultural relationship – a reflexive relation to
one’s own practices – it sets the stage for its own subversion. The heritage
relation is a dialogic process, one that creates a sense of distance by imagining a vista outside one’s own self from where one may observe one’s
own customs and expressions with, as it were, an outsider’s gaze – according to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the hallmark of heritage is “precisely
the foreignness of the ‘tradition’ to its context of presentation” (1998:157).
The distance thus introduced between the subject and itself enables the recognition of the collective subject of cultural heritage. At the same time,
however, this distance allows for detachment; it opens up the prospect that
we might imagine ourselves differently, that we might disrupt the official
representation of who and what we are and what it is we do. As a reflexive,
metacultural relationship to one’s own practices, heritage sets the stage for
the ironic subject – the self-conscious actor whose ironic stance measures
her distance from the culture and collective identity that official representations of heritage attribute to her.
Irony in self-representation is the topic of Kristinn Schram’s article in this
volume. Analyzing the ways in which Icelandic expatriates actively perform
themselves as eccentric and exotic northern nature-folk, Schram argues that
the performances re-appropriate “orientalizing” stereotypes through playful
exaggeration, embracing and subverting stereotypes in “gleeful resignation”. In other words, they are founded on a deliberate misrecognition of the
self, as seen through the eyes of an outsider – a carefully measured ironic
distantiation, which plays on the metacultural relationship of heritage to the
practices thus designated but also disrupts it with hyperbole and humor. Ul-
20
timately, Schram claims that these performances bring into being “new
ironic post-national identities”.
James P. Leary’s article on “New Legends in Nordic America: The Case
of Big Erick Ericksson” closes this special issue of Arv. Unlike the papers
that precede it, Leary’s analysis of the cycle of Michigan legends about Big
Erick does not expressly treat cultural heritage – the legends do not display
the self-reflexive, metacultural relationship that defines it (though the author notes the emergence of such a relationship in the promotion of supersized Big Erick burgers). Through its contrasting approach, however, this
article helps to complete the picture drawn by the articles appearing in this
volume of the ways in which Nordic spaces are created in North America.
A Swedish immigrant who ran large lumber camps employing mostly Finnish newcomers, Erick Ericksson is the protagonist of some fifty different
stories which, Leary argues, “offer a striking instance of new legends in
Nordic America”. Indeed, the article makes a convincing case that narratives about Big Erick can be understood only “through the consideration of
several legend traditions transformed”. Thus the legends themselves – their
texts and subtexts, motifs, plots, and characters – actually trace transatlantic
trajectories, not only that of Erick Ericksson, the man of whom the legends
speak, but more importantly of legend cycles and narrative patterns. In these
trajectories, we glimpse the early creation of Nordic spaces in the New
World, spaces that would later be criss-crossed and endlessly recreated by
new stories, objects, bodies, and practices whose trajectories map social networks and give substance to Nordic-American communities.
Another dimension of heritage practices that the articles in this volume
collectively open up to scrutiny is their sensory spectrum. Although the discourse of heritage reflects the ocularcentrism of Western culture in general
(Brett 1996), the heritage practices described in this volume are by no means
limited to the visual. In particular, the articles of Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch
and Kristinn Schram appeal to the senses in their analysis of ethnic identities
and the ways in which these identities are reproduced, rehearsed, and exploited in everyday life. The ubiquity of foodways – Danish pastries, lutefisk, lefse, rotten shark – in the making of Nordic spaces in North America
only begins to suggest the crucial importance of gustatory, olfactory, tactile,
and aural experience in mapping trajectories and constituting collectivities.
Sensory aspects of metacultural relations warrant further research, and it is
exciting to see here the beginnings of a dialog between recent scholarship
on the senses and scholarship on cultural heritage.
Besides ocularcentrism, the articles collected here also challenge an overly intellectualized understanding of cultural heritage. Practices that create
ethnic spaces, express solidarities, and invoke collective subjects involve
emotions, passions, and instincts no less than they involve the intellect.
Hanne Pico Larsen’s concept of “heritage envy”, introduced in this volume,
21
makes this clear. Referring to intra-community conflicts over the selection
of the Danish Days maid, as well as to inter-community squabbles between
different Danish towns in the US, Larsen explains that “heritage envy is an
irrational and emotional construct, which often leads to emotive, quasirational questions”; questions such as who is more Danish (or Swedish or
Finnish) than another.
While it is not hard to imagine such questions arising within the Nordic
countries themselves, it would seem nonetheless that immigrant communities – such as the “American-Plus” descendants of Nordic emigrants to
North America – are particularly prone to heritage envy. One might even
ask whether heritage envy is a structural condition of “migration heritage”,
yet another analytical concept introduced in this volume, in Lizette
Gradén’s article on the Värmland gift. Because heritage performs collectivity and because migration invites comparison, migration heritage would
seem predisposed to heritage envy.
In addition to “migration heritage”, “heritage envy”, and “AmericanPlus”, some conceptual conjunctures explored in this volume include embodiment and ethnicity (especially Gradén and Larsen); spatialization and
identity (Österlund-Pötzsch); iconicity and commercialization (Gilmore and
Larsen); irony and self-representation (Schram); and narrative trajectories
in local legends (Leary). Each conjuncture imagines new perspectives on
Nordic spaces and cultural heritage and opens up avenues for empirical investigation.
Interpretation in the fields of folklore and ethnology tends more toward
complexity than simplicity, and relies on richness of detail over economy of
explanation. This is one of the great strengths of our fields and our particular
contribution to the analysis of cultural practices and social life. Firmly
grounded in extensive fieldwork and in-depth archival research, the following pages exemplify this strength. Rich in empirical detail, their thick descriptions breathe life into the theoretical reflection on cultural heritage and
Nordic spaces that is sustained throughout the volume and will continue in
the collective project that this special issue heralds.
Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, Ph.D.
Lektor/Assistant Professor
Department of Folkloristics and Ethnology
Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Gimli
University of Iceland
IS-101 Reykjavik, Iceland
22
References
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Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London.
Anttonen, Pertti J. 2005: Tradition through Modernity. Postmodernism and the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship. Studia Fennica Folkloristica 15. Helsinki.
Ashworth, Gregory J., Brian Graham, and John E. Tunbridge 2007: Pluralising
Pasts. Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies. London.
Bendix, Regina 2000: Heredity, Hybridity and Heritage from one Fin-de-Siècle to
the Next. In Folklore, Heritage Politics and Ethnic Diversity. Botkyrka.
Bennett, Tony 2000: Acting on the Social. Art, Culture and Government. American
Behavioral Scientist 43.
Brett, David 1996: The Construction of Heritage. Cork.
de Certeau, Michel 2002: The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley.
Gans, Herbert J. 1979: Symbolic Ethnicity. Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in
America. Ethnic and Racial Studies 2.
Gradén, Lizette 2003: On Parade. Making Heritage in Lindsborg, Kansas. (Studia
Multiethnica Upsaliensia 15.) Uppsala.
Graham, Brian, Gregory J. Ashworth, and John E. Tunbridge 2000: A Geography of
Heritage. Power, Culture and Economy. London.
Hafstein, Valdimar Tr. 2004: The Making of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Tradition
and Authenticity, Community and Humanity. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of
California, Berkeley.
Hafstein, Valdimar Tr. 2006: Menningararfur: Sagan í neytendaumbúðum. In Frá
endurskoðun til upplausnar. Tvær prófritgerðir, einn formáli, þrjú viðtöl, sjö
fræðigreinar, fimm ljósmyndir, einn eftirmáli og nokkrar minningargreinar af
vettvangi hugvísinda. Reykjavík.
Hafstein, Valdimar Tr. 2007: Claiming Culture: Intangible Heritage Inc., Folklore©,
Traditional Knowledge™. In Prädikat “Heritage”. Wertschöpfungen aus Kulturellen Ressourcen. Münster.
Hall, Stuart 2005: Whose Heritage? Un-Settling “the Heritage”, Re-Imagining the
Post- Nation. The Politics of Heritage. The Legacies of “Race”. London.
Huyssen, Andreas 2000: Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia. Public Culture 12.
Kapchan, Deborah A. 2003: Performance. In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture. Urbana.
Khan, Naseem 2005: Taking Root in Britain. The Process of Shaping Heritage. In
The Politics of Heritage. The Legacies of “Race”. London.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 1998: Destination Culture. Tourism, Museums, and
Heritage. Berkeley.
Klein, Barbro 1997: Tillhörighet och utanförskap. Om kulturarvspolitik och folklivsforskning i en multietnisk värld. Rig 1–2.
Klein, Barbro 2001: More Swedish than in Sweden, More Iranian than in Iran. Folk
Culture and World Migrations. In Upholders of Culture. Past and Present. Stockholm.
Klein, Barbro 2006: Cultural Heritage, the Swedish Folklife Sphere, and the Others.
Cultural Analysis 5.
Larsen, Hanne Pico 2006: Solvang, the “Danish Capital of America.” A Little Bit of
Denmark, Disney, Or Something Else? Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Littler, Jo, and Roshi Naidoo 2005: The Politics of Heritage. The Legacies of
“Race”. London.
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Löfgren, Orvar 1997: Kulturarvets renässans. Landskapsupplevelse mellan marknad
och politik. Rig 1–2.
Lowenthal, David 1998: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge.
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Noyes, Dorothy 2003: Group. In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture.
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Noyes, Dorothy 2006: The Judgement of Solomon. Cultural Analysis 5.
Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid 2000: Locating Irish Folklore. Tradition, Modernity, Identity.
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Österlund-Pötzch, Susanne 2003: American plus. Etnisk identitet hos finlandssvenska ättlingar i Nordamerika. Helsingfors.
Peach, Ceri 2005: The Mosaic Versus the Melting Pot. Canada and the USA. Scottish Geographical Journal 121.
Poulot, Dominique 2006: Une histoire du patrimoine en Occident. Paris.
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Oljanna Venden Cunneen, A Norwegian–American Rosemaler
25
Mount Horeb’s Oljanna Venden Cunneen,
A Norwegian–American Rosemaler “on
the Edge”
Janet C. Gilmore
South central Wisconsin features the American Midwest’s classic sense of
wide open spaces and vistas, with its gently rolling topography and cleared
rural farming landscapes expanding predictably into the distance. (e.g. C.W.
Martin 2007: 82, 84) Swiss immigrant Karl Bruni’s first experience with the
terrain in 1902 led him to walk miles beyond the “great big hill” that locals
had specified as an important landmark on the way to his destination. As
“he’d just come from Switzerland and that was a hump in the road” to him,
he had missed his turn. (Bruni Interview 1985) Today municipal water
towers, labelled with the respective place name, make the “stranger’s path”
easier, as motorists speed on four-lane highways through the vast open
plains or sprawling, low, and flat urban conglomerations like Minnesota’s
Twin Cities.1 (Jackson 1957) Communities have used these vertical landmarks for decades to proclaim their civic incorporation and match a name
to space, identifying a place.2 As Boris Pushkarev suggests, as “large, simple
industrial shapes,” water towers “give us articulation along the axis of travel.
They are a source of surprise to the stranger and a source of anticipation and
identification to one familiar with the road.” (1960–61: 14–15)
Today, Karl Bruni would not have any trouble locating Mount Horeb, a
village at the western edge of Dane County, Wisconsin. From miles away,
the traveler can see the name of the place designated on its water towers. For
decades, Mount Horeb had but one water tower, situated downtown in 1908,
then replaced by a modern globe in 1967. (Mt. Horeb: 53) With the new
tower, local activists unsuccessfully proposed adding a symbol of community identity to the village name. (Lee Vogel Interview 1994) But in 2007,
when a second tower arose, “Mount Horeb” was prominently underscored
with decorative rosemaling.
Positioned more visibly than the first tower, the new tower rises at Mount
Horeb’s eastern border alongside the major northeast–southwest freeway,
26
Janet C. Gilmore
alerting travelers that they are entering a territory with a heightened sense of
Norwegian–American heritage, and denser Norwegian–American settlement. It reveals emphatically that specific design motifs have been adopted
as badges of Norwegian–American identity in the greater Upper Midwestern region. More esoterically, and perhaps more significantly, the water
tower’s decorative pattern and underlying intent are tributes to the late local
rosemaler Oljanna Venden Cunneen, whose “edgy” artistic flair, productivity, and Norwegian–American immigrant heritage influenced Mount
Horeb’s present public face. (Sievers Communication 2007)
***
This article focuses on Oljanna Venden Cunneen as an inspirational Norwegian–American artistic force in the western Dane County area. Her extraordinarily diverse and talented performances of interwoven traditional artistic skills tapped mythic immigrant realms of dazzling, celebratory versions of 18th and 19th century Old Country folk artistic forms and conveyed
personal history and expressions into public and shared community mythologies of immigrant pasts and origins. Cunneen’s creative realizations captivated a broad local rural and village audience at a time when residents were
eagerly re-discovering their varied immigrant pasts—and the Mount Horeb
Chamber of Commerce was seeking a distinctive identity for the area as it
moved from a farm economy to a bedroom community for nearby Madison,
Wisconsin’s sprawling capital city.3 With a persuasive other-directed
personality4 perpetually “on edge”—witty, outspoken, tireless, and wellpracticed at sizing up an audience—Cunneen provides an excellent example
of how a Norwegian–American ethnic folk artist could wield influence in a
community as it moved into yet another era.5
Although she was a highly competent practitioner of many Norwegian–
American artistic expressions, Cunneen’s rosemaling has had a persuasively
enduring public effect in the Mount Horeb area, and it thus demands central
consideration.6 A form of decorative folk painting that thrived in Norway
during the 18th and 19th centuries, rosemaling became preeminent in expressing Norwegian–American identity in the United States during the last
half of the 20th century. Its use in America rivals that of the Norwegian flag,
whose red and deep blue often dominate Telemark style C-scrolls and
tendrils. Marion Nelson, the late former director of the Vesterheim Norwegian–American Museum in Decorah, Iowa, confirms that, “Other Norwegian–American folk arts—such as wood-carving, metal work, weaving, and
embroidery—have not enjoyed the same degree of recent development of
public interest as has rosemaling.” (1980:131) Its two-dimensional flourishes have lent themselves well to application on numerous surfaces, from
small farm and household implements, to decorative wall plaques, to farm,
home, and business signs, to room friezes and building exteriors, to print
27
media in Ideals magazines, on lutefisk dinner placemats, community cookbook covers, gift cards, and clothing.7
In Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, an area of Norwegian immigrant settlement,
public community display incorporating rosemaling took off in the 1960s,
chiefly on the façade of the Open House Imports gift shop, first painted by
Oljanna Venden Cunneen. By the 1990s, rosemaling decorated the interiors
of new buildings that housed the chief grocery store, Kalscheur’s (now
Miller’s), and the local branch of the State Bank of Cross Plains. By the first
decade of the 21st century, in addition to the rosemaling that decorated the
new water tower, banners with rosemaling lined the village’s Main Street,
and a rosemaled “Velkommen” frieze stretched above the entrance to the
Chamber of Commerce’s new Welcome Center.
The contemplation of Cunneen’s rosemaling—or more particularly, her
enthusiastic embrace of it as a source of emblematic designs—suggests how
this artist may have influenced, in part, by fitting in between classifications.
Neither a “local” nor a “virtuoso” rosemaler, the two classic categories of
Norwegian–American rosemalers that Marion Nelson and Phil Martin have
identified (Nelson 1980: 129–131; Martin 1989), Cunneen was instead, as
we shall see, a “rosemaler on the edge,” transcending both of the camps discerned by scholars and achieving much of the spirit and excitement of the
tradition during its heyday in Norway.
I can think of no better way to demonstrate Cunneen’s overall effect than
to present Mount Horeb area resident Marlyn Grinde’s testimony about the
first time she witnessed Cunneen wearing a Norwegian bunad of her own
manufacture, embroidered prominently in common rosemaling motifs:
It was in the middle ‘70s, where I went into the restaurant and I saw her … having
lunch, and she had this beautiful Norwegian bunad on …. at that time I didn’t even
know they were called bunads…. but I knew it was a Norwegian dress. It was just,
the colors in it, and the work, … my eyes just became so glued on it that I could hardly eat what I was eating. I thought, ‘Oh, I’d give anything if I could have a … Norwegian dress like that made,’ because I thought it was so beautiful. (Interview 1994)
When Grinde finally summoned the courage to ask Cunneen to help Sons of
Norway women fashion individual bunads, Cunneen bargained: In exchange for the contribution of her expertise, the group would donate proceeds from a food sale to her chief community project, “Song of Norway,”
an outdoor play based on the life of composer Edvard Grieg.
A Western Dane County Rural Immigrant Pedigree
Folk artist Oljanna Venden Cunneen (1923–1988) was of Norwegian descent and lived in the Blue Mounds-Mount Horeb area of western Dane
County, Wisconsin, one of the county’s chief Norwegian immigrant settlements since the mid-1800s. The south central Wisconsin county remains
28
Janet C. Gilmore
home to the largest concentration of Norwegian–Americans in this Upper
Midwestern state, where ethnic identification is commonplace. The 1990
Census counted over 35,000 residents of Norwegian descent, about 14% of
Wisconsin’s Norwegian–American population, and 10% of the county’s
population (Zaniewski & Rosen 1998: 134, 208–214). With Madison at its
center, the county has attracted Norwegian immigrants to its rural areas,
small villages, and university town since the first significant migrations in
the mid-1800s, mingling populations from different Norwegian regions and
periods of emigration. Through Lutheran churches, fraternal organizations
like Sons of Norway lodges, and shared interests in Norwegian heritage,
pageantry, and folk arts, the county’s Norwegian–Americans have continued to associate across the county and beyond its borders. Equally, in a
familiar Upper Midwestern pattern, Norwegian–American ethnics have also
mingled with residents of other ethnic backgrounds and immigrant histories—in western Dane County, Cunneen’s home turf, Norwegians with Germans, Swiss, and Irish in particular.8
Oljanna Venden Cunneen’s personal history fits right into Dane County’s
immigrant pattern. Born in Vermont Township, north of Mount Horeb, in
1923, Cunneen came from an “edgy” “mixed marriage.”9 While both Norwegian in heritage, her parents uneasily combined different generations of
immigrants, different periods of immigration, distinctive regional backgrounds in Norway, varying religious persuasions, and perhaps most importantly, opposing personalities. Oljanna’s “dreamy farmer” father, Henry
Venden, was a second-generation Norwegian, descended from Valdres immigrants from Norway’s southeastern inland valleys. Inclined to shape
wood into musical instruments, he made a modest living from farming in
Vermont Township, close to the Vermont Lutheran Church, where the extended Venden family still holds a family reunion each summer. In contrast,
Oljanna’s mother, “Gerharda” (Forshaug) as the family calls her today, was
a first generation immigrant from Kjeldebotn on Ofotfjorden, west of Narvik, in Nordland, northern Norway, who had followed a brother to Dane
County in c.1908 and worked as a domestic in exchange for her passage to
America. Tireless, resourceful, and stern, she followed Laestadian Lutheranism in distinction to her husband’s family’s community-based Lutheran
faith and church membership.10 In a mix of Norwegian and English, she told
cautionary nisse stories to her children, and counseled them to keep busy in
productive handwork.
As is common among Wisconsin’s ethnics, Oljanna was quick to establish her ethnic pedigree as completely Norwegian, especially when she “performed her heritage” in public settings as a becostumed Little Norway tour
guide or Norwegian–American joke teller. Beyond its rhetorical strength,
her history brought together many contrasts that gave her a complex understanding of Old Country heritage and connected her to a wide community of
29
Norwegian–Americans. Her pedigree afforded her a broad community appeal—as well as the license to claim it—that she cultivated especially in her
adult life (from roughly the 1950s until her untimely death at 64 in February
1988). Besides the claim of thorough Norwegian-ness, however, she could
also show she had bridged an ethnic divide of greater contrast, when she
married Vernon “Jiggs” Cunneen, of Irish background, in the late 1940s.
Fellow community activist Lee Vogel reasoned that Cunneen’s community
knowledge, sensibility, and authority came about:
… because her family is all over. It included Black Earth, Vermont Township, … the
whole hillside of Blue Mounds, and Jiggs’ family fills in with the rest of the Cunneens, and Ray, Jiggs’ brother, was in the post office. So everything fit together you
know. Between us we had our thumb on the main artery of the town. We knew what
could be done, who had what to do it with, who we could talk to to convince to donate or whatever. (Interview, 1994; cf. Dégh 1966: 554)
Besides integrating community heritage, and positioning herself between
edges, Cunneen also pulled from her parents’ combined repertoires of verbal and handwork traditions to become extraordinary skilled in a spectrum
of artistic expressions, from Norwegian–American joke and story telling to
sewing, embroidering, knitting, painting, rosemaling, and the creation of
miniature troll figures that integrated all of these skills, caricatured local
community members, and emphasized the area’s construction of its continuing Norwegian–American ethnic identity.11 Notably, into her adulthood,
she continued an impressive range of hand skills whose utility in everyday
life was diminishing, yet this perseverance, capability, and her impressive
productivity exuded confidence, mastery, and relevance. Lee Vogel characterized her as a “can do” type person, “You could … ask her to do something,
and she would do it. You didn’t have to draw a plan for her.” (Interview 1994)
Besides her talent in a range of mostly traditional arts, she was also a master at reinventing old immigrant expressions, skills, habits, and patterns into
popular contemporary guises, including an Ole and Lena, from birth to
death, joke cycle that she presented to tour groups during her later years, and
a wardrobe of Norwegian bunads adapted for community events and her
work as a tour guide at the Little Norway outdoor Norwegian–American immigrant pioneer museum located between Blue Mounds and Mount Horeb.
(see Leary 2001: 98–109 & 239–241; Teske 1987: 29, 56, & 93). By linking
verbal and material arts, and localizing them to community needs and times,
she again bridged categories, appealed to her audience, and created a niche
for herself. (cf. Klymasz 1973: 134, 138)
Cunneen’s humorous and artistic bent, matched with industry and resourcefulness, again joined apparent oppositions. It not only unified parental personality contrasts, but lent her an edgy and infectious persuasiveness.
Since she was quick to read her audience effectively, and work it, she knew
how to serve friends, neighbors, and community members, while snaring
them in enterprise. As “Song of Norway” associate Jack Holzhueter has sug-
30
Janet C. Gilmore
Oljanna Venden Cunneen, displaying a pair of her troll sculptures, wears her celebratory everyday garb that she sewed and embroidered: a matching dark blue wool set of vest and trousers,
with a white cotton blouse. Adorned with Norwegian pewter clasps, the vest shows the wool
crewel rosesaum in her characteristic Telemark–Hallingdal mix of floral scrollwork in muted
reds, yellows, and blues. Photo by John Newhouse, Blue Mounds, 1987, courtesy of Fran
Newhouse.
gested, Cunneen engaged in “self-promotion to her own benefit,” which in
turn “benefited the community.” (Interview 1994) She became one of
Mount Horeb’s community activists during the last two decades of her life,
cultivated a reputation as its “Norwegian ambassador,” and applied her engaging artistic talents to numerous community causes with colleagues like
the Vogels.
Of all her artistic expressions, Cunneen’s rosemaling has had a persuasively enduring public effect in the Mount Horeb area. In rosemaling, Oljanna
found key motifs and design flourishes that she used convincingly in dozens
of ways, and in varied media, to express Norwegian–American ethnic identity
for friends, family, community, and self. Her rosemaling also reveals old-time
subsistence patterns, and philosophies of women’s work and artistic expression, that were once common among most residents in this rural community,
regardless of ethnic background—and these qualities undoubtedly contributed to the broad demand for her work and its resulting visibility.
31
From Rural Enterprise to Community Promotion
On the rebound from a World War II stint as a photographer and a first marriage that had taken her to California, Oljanna had married Jiggs Cunneen,
a western Dane County farmer, and began raising a family on their farm just
west of Mount Horeb in the late 1940s. Through the 1950s, she brought up
her daughters there and dominated the tractor work on their 120-acre dairy
farm, where they raised Holsteins, pigs, corn, and oats. Energetic and resourceful like her Norwegian-immigrant mother, Oljanna was always looking to make a buck to supplement the farm income in a rural community
where well-paying jobs are still scarce. Like many farm women of the times,
she tended the chickens and distributed 30 crates of eggs weekly to local
grocers. (Neth 1995: 32, Pederson 1992: 183–184, Smoot 2004: 37–38) She
adhered to a farming model sometimes found among Norwegian–American
immigrant farmers, where farm woman and man were equal yet complementary partners, cooperating to accomplish whatever needed to be done.
(Neth 1995: 22–23 ff.; Pederson 1992: esp. 159–166, 176–177, 184–185)
Because of her mother’s northern Norwegian background, she may have
followed a pattern common among Norwegian fishing families, where
strong women, with legal and economic clout, maintained the land-base,
while men left seasonally to pursue cash income through offshore trip-fishing. (Bjørkvik 1995: 119–120, for example)
As farming provided the Cunneens with less and less income, by the
1960s Oljanna and Jiggs began working a variety of seasonal local jobs,
including Oljanna’s tour-guiding at Little Norway starting in 1961. Besides the part-time work, she began painting and rosemaling for pay, on
artifacts small and large, including rural scenes on farm signs and murals
on walls in her kitchen and at Norway Basin, a nearby ski hill now called
Tyrol Basin. A major early job included the exterior of the Open House
Imports gift store in downtown Mount Horeb, where she began selling embroidery kits for tablecloths and small rosemaled pieces including
Velkommen signs, plates, and children’s furniture. Local farmer and legislator Rick Skindrud commissioned her to apply rosemaling to a pair of
old skis, while the local fire chief, Chuck Himsel, had her rosemal his fire
helmet. Neighbors and friends kept her churning out custom-tailored
variations of the rosemaled plates and Velkommen signs, no two of which
could be identical, according to Mount Horeb rosemaler Olga Edseth.
(Personal Communication, 1994). In her own home, she rosemaled kitchen cabinets, doll wardrobes, a guitar, and clothing. Besides private adornment and public work for pay, she donated her work for ads—placemats
and handbills—for the local “Song of Norway” pageant, and painted rosemaling designs on some of the early costumes for this event. (Lee Vogel
Interview, 1994)12 Joining a crop of fresh local community leaders, including the Vogels of Open House Imports, in producing and promoting com-
32
Janet C. Gilmore
munity events with a Norwegian–American flair (like “Song of Norway”),
she and fellow enthusiasts successfully linked community identity to the
mischievous character of the troll. She then began creating small troll
sculptures to sell, caricaturing locals through occupational or recreational
pursuits, including rosemaling. In a stroke that foretold her own influence
in the community, she undertook a campaign with the Vogels to decorate
Mount Horeb’s first water tower with mushrooms, symbols of troll habitat
(Lee Vogel Interview, 1994)—an idea before its time.13
A Setting for Rosemaling’s Appeal
It is not surprising that the American revival of Norwegian rosemaling
emerged most robustly in the United States by the 1930s in Dane County’s
ferment of urban, village, and rural Norwegian immigrant communities.
(Nelson 1980: 129; Martin 1989: 20–25 ff.) Rosemaling’s flamboyant, intensely colorful, decorative, floral painting flourished especially in Norway’s east central and southern districts from the 18th through the mid-19th
centuries. (Ellingsgard 1993: 12, 1995: 190–193; Nelson 1995: 64–72). A
visual celebration, it partook of the decorative renaissance that swept northern and western Europe after the Protestant Reformation (Ellingsgard 1995:
190; cf. Hellspong & Klein 1994: 33–35, Hellspong 1994: 83–88, and
Jacobsen 1994: 55–59) and played with fanciful Baroque and Rococo plant
motifs from southern Europe. It centered on the home—in contrast to the
church—and new construction technology that featured chimneys, windows, and the flat surfaces of planks and beams (Martin 1989: 15; Nelson
1986: 4). We could say that Oljanna Cunneen’s playful and prolific application of key rosemaling motifs on dozens of items and materials shared in this
celebratory re-dressing of old designs in new, free-flowing shapes, colors,
and two-dimensional application.
Per Lysne, credited as “the father of American rosemaling,” had come to
Stoughton in southeastern Dane County from Sogn during the big wave of
migration in the early 1900s. (Martin 1989: 20–25 ff.; Ellingsgard 1993: 11;
Nelson 1995: 93) He had learned rosemaling from his father in Norway during the late 19th century revival of the tradition. By then, it had transformed
from a differential patron-craftsman enterprise to a cottage craft industry
characterized by mass production of small goods and driven by romantic
nostalgia compared to the earlier tradition of itinerant painting (Nelson
1995: 71; cf. Glassie 1994: 252). In Stoughton as in Norway, Lysne worked
in a shop setting, as a worker for a business, painting decorative trim on farm
implements and wagons at a local factory, for a living. As the economically
challenging Great Depression hit in the 1930s, as well as the transition from
horse-drawn to motor-powered vehicles, he became inspired by American
interest nationwide in decorative folk painting. He began producing rose-
33
maled plates like hotcakes, in the cottage craft Os style, eventually selling
thousands through Marshall Field’s Chicago store. As his fame spread, he
began painting home interiors, following a craftsman model more familiar
to the early Norwegian itinerants.
Cunneen, a prodigious high school doodler in the late 1930s, was old
enough to take notice of the painting, its popularity, and Lysne’s assemblyline type business success. Her rosemaling clearly emerged from Lysne’s
influence, which at first focused on small decorative items for home interiors and featured fairly simple, two-dimensional floral designs in a range
of primary colors and pastels enhanced with detailing, outlining, and underscoring in black. Floral motifs centered on dominant white or pale-colored
backgrounds, leaving a lot of open space around the solid designs.
Up through Lysne’s early success, in Norway and the United States,
typically men had rosemaled, and they had practiced it to earn a living.
Lysne’s example in America, however, inspired mostly women, working in
homes and on farms, to learn the skill and practice it as a pastime (Martin
1989: 30–31; Nelson 1986: 5). Nationwide, interests in decorative folk
painting of varied traditions at first drew women of all backgrounds who
liked to paint. But the trend fueled interest specifically in rosemaling among
women of Norwegian descent—often second- and third-generation Norwegian–Americans who were beginning to explore their ethnic heritage. (cf.
Klymasz, Kivisto) Women like Ethel Kvalheim of Stoughton, and Elma and
Thelma Olsen—twins from Walworth County, southeast of Dane, who
sometimes painted the same object together—were dazzled by Lysne’s productivity, curious about old decorative painting found on the immigrant legacy of material objects, and inspired to paint (Kvalheim Interview 1986;
Martin 1989: 28–40; Siporin 1992: 55–58). They sought models, teachers,
patterns, tools, and paints, locally, nationally, and on trips to Norway. They
found each other, shared resources, and some began to teach, conveying
hard-earned resources to friends and neighbors.
For this first generation of American-born rosemalers in the Upper Midwest, rosemaling was mostly self-taught, with the more experienced painters teaching the less so; it became an artistic and social hobby that connected
friends and neighbors. The activity promoted a community identity that acknowledged a strong Norwegian–American component while honoring the
region’s tradition of ethnic pluralism (Mueller Interview, 1995; cf. Dégh:
554). Soon husbands and sons were involved, often producing the woodenware on which their wives, mothers, and sisters would paint. Less handy
types, like Phil Dybdahl of Madison and Dave Nelson of Stoughton, also
known as “Ole and Sven,” lamented their wives’ obsession with the art form
in song compositions like “Rosemaling Fever.” 14
Oljanna Cunneen’s involvement with rosemaling fits squarely within this
movement. A natural at drawing and painting from an early age, she was in-
34
Janet C. Gilmore
spired by the work of Aaron Bohrod, University of Wisconsin-Madison’s
second Artist in Residence (1948–1973), and entered still lifes and rural
scenes in annual Rural Arts Association shows during the 1950s and early
1960s, after her daughters were both in school. (Mathiak & Fox 1985 esp.
1–5 and 10–13.) During that time she also rapidly absorbed and adapted the
“rosemaling design vocabulary” of the 1950s and ‘60s through her social
networks, local rosemaling classes, and work as a tour guide at Little Norway, where hundreds of artifacts featured the decoration. Her husband even
furnished her with paintable objects during the height of her rosemaling
years. (Woods Interviews, 1994)
Vesterheim’s Hand
Renowned American rosemalers like Dane County’s Ethel Kvalheim and Vi
Thode, the ones Martin calls virtuosos, also emerged from this period and
became its vanguard. For them the art form became “… no routine hobby
activity. Many of the painters create their compositions freely within the basic techniques and principles of design characteristic of the art, and many reveal a creative ability which gives them a special place among artists of the
common people in America.” (Nelson 1980: 130) Impressed with some
rosemalers’ “serious interest in cultural origins and artistic quality,” Marion
Nelson, Director of the Vesterheim Norwegian–American Museum in
Decorah, Iowa, instituted an annual American rosemaling exhibition in
1967, and regular rosemaling workshops with Norwegian painters (Nelson
1980: 129–131; Martin 1989: 44–54 ff.). Through a point system, exhibitors
could work toward Gold Medals that were selectively and competitively
awarded. Vesterheim ushered in an era of formal training by Old Country
“masters,” the formal codification of the art form into distinctive regional
styles, and a different kind of artistic self-consciousness and connoisseurship from the early revival period.
The Norwegian “masters” had the Old Country stamp of authenticity and
authority, yet leading models, like Sigmund Aarseth and Nils Ellingsgard,
generally were young men with professional art training who had not
learned directly from an elder or peer rosemaler.15 Their practice did not represent a continuous, unbroken folk tradition, but instead, inspiration from
study of rosemaling’s historical record in Norway. Nelson appreciated their
confident, freehand representation of the old rosemaling design heritage—
motifs, colors, and techniques—in big, bold, flowing, and almost threedimensional expressions, and felt later that their influence had “not stultified
or academicized the movement; rather it has given it new impetus and
breadth.” (1980: 131) He aimed to energize the American scene—where
mostly women practiced careful, flat, two-dimensional designs, using patterns, narrow repertoires of motifs and colors, and “collectively self-taught”
35
painting technique, on small items. American rosemalers would divide into
specialists and amateurs, into Gold Medalist virtuosos and “local rosemalers.” (Martin 1989)16
Cunneen Between
As a rosemaler, Cunneen stayed true to older rosemaling legacies, yet “on
the edge” in the new. For her, like Nelson’s characterization of artists who
became virtuosos, rosemaling was “no routine hobby activity” either, but
while she composed freely “within the basic techniques and principles of
design characteristic of the art,” and revealed a distinctive artistic style, she
restricted her compositions to a narrower repertoire of popular patterns and
colors, more like “local rosemalers” did at the time. While Cunneen could
have specialized in developing design complexity, refining her technique as
virtuosos do, and experimenting with varied motifs and regional styles, she
adopted a small number of favorite rosemaling motifs from the late
post-Lysne and early Vesterheim period, especially a trademark Telemark
style C-scroll and Hallingdal type florettes, and she played with them in
endless variations, often in strong primary colors with black outlines, and
open, light backgrounds that no longer predominate among Gold Medalists
of today. (cf. Martin 1989: 70) She also tended to work from hand-drawn
patterns that she penciled first on tracing paper before she began applying
the designs in paint, a technique fostered during the immediate post-Lysne
period but discouraged in Vesterheim workshops. (Martin 1989: 72) Nevertheless, Cunneen’s work achieved a big, bold, rhythmical, and open effect
like the young Norwegian “old master” pioneers of the Gold Medalist trend
tried to infuse into the fine, careful, densely and petitely rendered achievements of their workshop students.
By remaining dedicated to designs, colors, and techniques that were more
typical of local, say amateur, rosemalers, Cunneen could maintain speed and
productivity that generally trounced the local rosemaler’s output and range
of applications. Like Lysne and the old itinerant Norwegian rosemalers, she
dispatched the work rapidly to make it economically viable. By contrast,
many local rosemalers might apply rosemaling to rechristen a small selection of everyday items, or produce a few symbolic pieces to grace a kitchen
wall and display Norwegian–American heritage (Martin 1989: 63–65; cf.
Magliocco 1998: 154–156), remaining modest in output and speed. But
Cunneen’s productivity often bested that of the typical Gold Medalist as
well, who might work up deliberately and carefully from simpler to more
complex surfaces and designs according to a personal clock instead of an external demand or market. Cunneen’s example in fact foreshadowed the commercial productivity of latter day Gold Medalist trained rosemalers who
produce a different kind of work to sell in public settings (Martin 1989: 70),
36
Janet C. Gilmore
One of Cunneen’s decorative rosemaled plates (wall medallion) featuring her classic floral
C-scrollwork combination in deep reds, blues, and olive greens, with white and black detailing.
Note open background and the saying in Norwegian, “hvor der er hjerzerum, er der ogsaa husrum,” “where there is heart room, there is hearth room,” one of Oljanna’s favorite mottos. Some
of her rosemaling patterns also appear in the picture. Photo by Janet C. Gilmore, “Art to Enjoy,
Art to Use” Exhibit, Wisconsin Folk Museum, Mount Horeb, 1995.
37
or like entrepreneur rosemaler Suzanne Toftey (Vesterheim 2004: 17), who
industrialize the manufacture of stock pieces in standardized versions of
their designs.
An Old-Time Immigrant Ethic of Work and Play
Cunneen chose not to attend Vesterheim workshops, like some of her peers
did, to deepen her design complexity and painting technique. Some answers
for Cunneen’s choice can be found in the way she practiced rosemaling.
Mainly, Cunneen was not committed, and probably could not be committed,
to one art form, like virtuoso rosemalers generally are. This lack of commitment to one artistic skill appears to stem from three key arenas:
First, Cunneen practiced her artistic skills in a manner reflective of
women’s work that Kay Turner claims informs “femmage,” quoting writer
Terry Wolverton:
… Our attention is often scattered over a lot of things, and in short time periods …
we pull from a lot of places. This gives us more than one source. We understand how
to make use, and make do, with all of what we have. This has to do with being
fragmented, and with having to be resourceful, drawing what we need from many
sources, not one. (K. Turner 1999: 98–100)
Just as Cunneen’s generation of mothers and farm women performed and
balanced all of their life skills (cf. Neth 1995: 26–31, Pederson 1992: 161–
162, 175–176, & 183–184), her artistic attention was scattered over numerous expressive forms, allowed to rest on one for only short periods of time.
Constantly on call on the farm, in mothering, or varied part-time work, jobs
that incorporate a span of diverse activities, she was a champion at practicing many skills, individually in short bursts, or by multi-tasking, accomplishing many activities at once. Her daughter Jo Ann attests that she took
along her bread to rise in the car while she visited with her sister, and her
friend Olga Edseth recounts that even while talking on the phone, her hands
were busy:
I called Oljanna about something one evening. When she answered the sewing machine was going, kept going as long as we talked. I said what are you making, 20
aprons she says (that’s for her troll dolls). When we were done talking, the sewing
machine was still going.
She said one time, if I have six hours of sleep a night, that’s enough. (Personal
Communication, 1994).
She mimicked her mother who, as legend has it, kept her hands busy crocheting, turning to knitting when it got dark, as she walked the three and a
half miles between Black Earth’s train depot to the family farm on journeys
from domestic work for university luminaries in Madison during the Depression (1930s).
Second, besides the avoidance of the “idle hands” of “the Devil’s play-
38
Janet C. Gilmore
ground” that her mother sternly advised, the constant busy-ness and multitasking clearly had potential economic benefit.17 If one task or skill was not
making some money for you, then another one might. Cunneen practiced
this old-time survival strategy like many of Wisconsin’s immigrants, but
also like a gambler—or a fisherman—experimenting with different
products that relied on varied combinations of her skills and resources, hoping that one might be the big one that strikes gold.
Cunneen enhanced the effectiveness of these skills by acquiring a penchant for assembly-line techniques, and she favored tasks like the troll
sculptures and the “Cathedral Window” quilt pattern that lent themselves
particularly well to the production style. With the trolls, for example, she
would first make several copper wire “stick men” at once. Next she placed
a wooden knob inside each form’s head, over and over again. Then she went
to work fashioning one full head of Sculpey clay around each knob, for each
body. She next baked the assemblages in the oven in batches, before wrapping each body in batting, posing the forms, decorating the heads, and adding clothing. “I can get about 3 men in the oven at once, so when the phone
rings and someone says what are you doing? And I say I got 3 men in the
oven, I’m not kidding,” she joked to student Emily Brynildson (1984). Cunneen wanted to produce her artistic work quickly, efficiently, and in steps,
while accomplishing something else on the side, if possible. She wanted to
maximize her potential profit.
In productivity involving sewing in particular, her chief hand work skill,
she additionally minimized costs through another family-instilled value: the
routine re-use of cast-offs and scraps that could be incorporated in quilts,
doll and troll clothes, and personal clothing. A benefit of her mother’s Depression era work as a domestic in Madison had been a regular, generous
supply of excellent quality second-hand clothing. Oljanna and her sister
Annie had dressed up in these rich and interesting garments as they played
alone at home: “Annie and I would drag out some of these clothes and put
on performances, so to speak, in these fancy clothes,” she relates, adding
earlier in her story sequence that “We’d stand on the front porch and give
speeches to cows in the meadow.” (Cunneen n.d.) Oljanna, who claimed she
“was born under a sewing machine,” learned to cut and shape these clothes
into the family’s wardrobe, and small leftover pieces into doll and kitten
clothing:
If a suit was worn out, they gave it to Gerharda. She packed it home, remade it into
clothes, remodeled it. Even I would take some of these things, for instance, I could
take a man’s pants, rip it apart, turn the material, press it, and make a skirt out of it,
and that’s what I wore. Well, needless to say, we wound up with a house full of
things that had been given to her. There were beautiful dresses, and we girls learned
to sew, simply by cutting them up, remaking them. I remember when it first became
popular to wear slacks, I had a fancy Georgette dress that somebody in Madison had
worn. I slit it up the middle, sewed the two sides together, and I had a jumpsuit as
39
they call it today. I must have been quite something wandering around the countryside in this thing, but nonetheless I learned to sew. (Cunneen n.d.)
Later in life, when Oljanna was the chief costume maker for the “Song of
Norway” pageant, she used ballgown scraps to make Barbie doll gowns. She
produced them in assembly line fashion and sold them at Manchester’s Department Store in Madison. While she owned and managed a small fabric
store in her home during the height of her bunad-making period and acquired much new and as “authentic” cloth from Norway as she could get,
she still did not turn down gifts or windfalls of cloth from friends, neighbors,
and serendipity. These she used for personal family clothing, if not pageant
and ethnic costumes. As her mother had advised, “‘Never turn down a thing,
because if you refuse to take it, they will quit giving to you,’ so she would
say, ‘Don’t refuse even a half cup of bacon grease.’ Well, we could use a
half a cup of bacon grease, believe me we could.’” (Cunneen n.d.)
Third, as Nelson claimed of the virtuosos, Cunneen showed “serious interest in cultural origins,” but less through rosemaling per se than through
observing, and incorporating in the Dane County setting, the contemporary
Norwegian uses of a range of related traditional art forms for district identity
and festive community events. Even as Cunneen would not commit to one
art form, she consistently applied her favorite Telemark style rosemaling C
scroll motif, offset with small Hallingdal type florettes, to varied skills and
media. The acanthus leaf tendrils, sometimes combined with small flowers,
became the enduring emblem of her Norwegian–American heritage.
As she had explored her heritage in Norway in the 1960s and worked with
area Norwegian–Americans to recreate the “Song of Norway” pageant, she
had also expanded her awareness of Norway’s regional costume styles, and
in these she encountered again the Rococo and Baroque decorative flourishes. Unlike most of the descendants of Norwegian immigrants in Dane County, Cunneen actually had first-hand experience with a Norwegian bunad that
her mother claimed to have brought with her from Norway during the first
decade of the 20th century, a time of the “bunad movement” in Norway.
(Colburn 1995: 158) Cunneen’s version of her mother’s story elaborates the
bunad’s design origins:
Well at that time, when my mother was making her costume in the north of Norway,
they didn’t have a costume up there, so she chose the Hardanger and changed it, just
simply changed it to suit the needs of the north. And instead of the bands of flowers
that you find on the Hardanger costume, she used the black and the gold to signify
six months of night and six months of day. (Cunneen 1987)
Gerharda had edged the red vest with black and gold trim to represent the
north’s extremes of daylight and darkness, fashioning the skirt in black to
match. Black, gold, red, and white beading in an eight-point star pattern on
the vest placket unified the black skirt, white blouse and apron (both featuring Hardanger lace cutwork), red vest, and black and gold trim. Her practice
40
Janet C. Gilmore
followed the preeminence and codification of a Hardanger style that became
emblematic of Norway, and the geometric beadwork harkened back to older
and northern Norwegian design traditions. (Colburn 1995: 157) Gerharda
wore the bunad at the reception following her wedding to Oljanna’s father,
and as their daughters grew older, they donned the special garment, in play
and for community show. This costume became the foundation for Oljanna’s chief work garb at Little Norway and for public presentations in other
settings; it was particularly influential in raising the standard for Little Norway guide work clothing (Woods Interview 1994).
In contrast to the geometric beadwork on her mother’s adapted bunad
bodice, the costume decorations in Norway’s southern districts often incorporated wool embroidery in flowers and scrolls familiar to rosemaling.
Janice Stewart refers to this type of work as rosesaum. (Stewart 1999: 183–
187) Besides Cunneen’s father’s large extended western Dane County family, many of her Norwegian–American friends and neighbors were descendants from these florally marked southern districts. Intrigued by bunad kits
available in Norway for these districts, she was eager to experiment with
several in the late 1960s. (Nancy Vogel Interview 1994) Soon, with the help
of books like Yngve Woxholth’s Våre vakre bunader, she had adapted the
kit idea for local distribution, working up dress patterns, designing the floral
crewel embroidery patterns to mark on them, and helping members of the
newly-formed western Dane County Sons of Norway lodge research, design, and make their own bunads with imported woolen cloth and thread.
(Grinde Interview 1994; cf. Mt. Horeb 1968: 85)
With her mother’s prior bunad experience, her curiosity and quick study
habits regarding Norwegian folk arts, and her efficient, assembly-line productivity, Oljanna became a pioneering Dane County resource for Norwegian–Americans to learn about district costume styles. For many of the
county’s Norwegian–American residents, the creation of a bunad that symbolically reflected a Norwegian district of family origins was a one-time
event, much like rosemaling a few personal items for home decoration. But
Oljanna, as usual, had speedily experimented with numerous regional ensemble designs and decorative motifs—for others as well as herself—and
she did not stop there. Soon for herself, her family, friends, and local enthusiasts, she was using crewel embroidery techniques, the satin stitch of rosesaum, to place Telemark scrolls, tendrils, and Hallingdal florettes on contemporary personal clothing, mainly in wools that might be left over from
bunad-making or might make good stand-ins for the expensive wool cloth
imported from Norway. And she routinely wore this contemporary garb,
promoting her community heritage in everyday settings beyond work and
community celebration. By decades she anticipated a trend that has become
commonplace. (See Colburn 1995: 168)
Oljanna’s embrace of revived and cultivated Norwegian artistic traditions
41
that included rosemaling was as much a strategy for making a living as it
was an affection for the totality of celebration (Stoeltje: 239–240; cf. V.
Turner 1982: 16), and the desire to recreate the celebratory feeling she had
experienced in contemporary heritage events in Norway. (Lee Vogel Interview 1994) As colleague Lee Vogel put it, hers was “art to enjoy, art to use.”
(Interview 1994)
On edge and on the edge, Oljanna Venden Cunneen indelibly stamped
western Dane County’s community heritage through an emblematic rosemaling design in particular, strident “femmage,” and clever adaptations of
old yet fast immigrant practices of productivity, economy, and sustainability. Her energy, enthusiasm, inventiveness, resourcefulness, efficiency and
productivity in reinventing family and community artistic heritage were inspirational and infectious. They struck the right chord with thrifty descendants of impoverished forebears who wanted to participate in the construction of new expressions of ethnic and community heritage that relied on Old
Country artistic legacies. Through her quick and efficient productivity, she
could provide them with artifacts and embellishments at an affordable cost,
or could help them do the work themselves in more of a one-time effort.
With the appeal of old immigrant practices and expressions transformed
into the contemporary, Oljanna Venden Cunneen caught a wave of community renewal and creative identity that swept through south central Wisconsin in the mid-20th century and continues to inform present-day sensibilities
beneath and beyond the rosemaled water tower that looms above Mount
Horeb.
Janet C. Gilmore
Assistant Professor
Department of Landscape Architecture and the Folklore Program
Agricultural Hall, 1450 Linden Drive
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, Wisconsin 53706
USA
[email protected]
References
Aarseth, Nils 2004: Rooms, Rosemaling, & All That Jazz. Vesterheim 2:1.
Bjørkvik, Halvard 1995: The Social and Economic Background of Folk Art in Norway. Norwegian Folk Art: The Migration of a Tradition. New York: Abbeville
Press.
Brandt, Tova 2004: The Art of Rosemaling: Tradition Meets the Creative Mind.
Vesterheim 2:1.
42
Janet C. Gilmore
Colburn, Carol Huset 1995: Norwegian Folk Dress in America. Norwegian Folk Art:
The Migration of a Tradition. New York: Abbeville Press.
Dégh, Linda 1966: Approaches to Folklore Research among Immigrant Groups.
Journal of American Folklore 79.
Ellingsgard, Nils 2004: American Flowering: Norwegian Tradition Meets Contemporary Self-Expression in Rosemaling. Vesterheim 2:1.
Ellingsgard, Nils 1995: Rosemaling: A Folk Art in Migration. Norwegian Folk Art:
The Migration of a Tradition. New York: Abbeville Press.
Ellingsgard, Nils 1993: Norwegian Rose Painting in America. Decorah: Vesterheim.
Gilmore, Janet C. 2004: Rosemaling. Encyclopedia of American Folk Art. New
York: Routledge.
Glassie, Henry 1994: Epilogue: The Spirit of Swedish Folk Art. Swedish Folk Art:
All Tradition is Change. Stockholm: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Hellspong, Mats 1994: Folk Arts from a Local Perspective: Some Regional Masters.
Swedish Folk Art: All Tradition is Change. Stockholm: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Hellspong, Mats and Klein, Barbro 1994: Folk Art and Folklife Studies in Sweden.
Swedish Folk Art: All Tradition is Change. Stockholm: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Hoelscher, Steven D. 1998: Heritage on Stage: The Invention of Ethnic Place in
America’s Little Switzerland. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Hoelscher, Steven D. and Ostergren, Robert C. 1993: Old European Homelands in
the Middle West. Journal of Geography 13.
Holzhueter, Jack, Hefty, Sherri J. and Christofferson, Andrea, comps. 1991: Song of
Norway 25th Anniversary Season. Mt. Horeb: Song of Norway Festival, Ltd.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff 1957: The Stranger’s Path. Landscape: Magazine of Human Geography 7: 1.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff 1956–1957: Other-Directed Houses. Landscape: Magazine of Human Geography 6: 2.
Jacobsen, Bengt 1994: The Arts of the Swedish Peasant World. Swedish Folk Art:
All Tradition is Change. Stockholm: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Kivisto, Peter 1990: Ethnicity and the Problem of Generations in American History.
American Immigrants and Their Generations: Studies and Commentaries on the
Hansen Thesis after Fifty Years. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Klymasz, Robert B. 1973: From Immigrant to Ethnic Folklore: A Canadian View of
Process and Transition. Journal of the Folklore Institute 10: 3:131–139.
Leary, James P. 2001: So Ole Says to Lena: Folk Humor of the Upper Midwest.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Magliocco, Sabina 1998: Playing with Food: The Negotiation of Identity in the Ethnic Display Event by Italian Americans in Clinton, Indiana. Taste of American
Place. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Mathiak, Lucy and Fox, Jan Marshall (eds.) 1985: The Art of Rural Wisconsin—
1936–60. Madison: University of Wisconsin.
Martin, Charles W. 2007: Vastness. The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Martin, Philip N. 1989: Rosemaling in the Upper Midwest: A Story of Region & Revival. Mt. Horeb: Wisconsin Folk Museum.
Mount Horeb Chamber of Commerce Centennial Committee: 1961. The Mount
Horeb Centennial Book, 1861–1961. Mt. Horeb Chamber of Commerce.
Mount Horeb Quasquicentennial Committee: 1986. Mount Horeb—Presettlement to
1986: A History Celebrating Mount Horeb’s Quasquicentennial. Mt. Horeb Area
Historical Society, Inc.
Neff, Deborah and Zarrilli, Phillip B. 1987: Wilhelm Tell in America’s “Little Switzerland,”New Glarus, Wisconsin. Onalaska, WI: Crescent Printing Co., Inc.
43
Nelson, Marion John 1995: Folk Art in Norway and Norwegian Folk Art in America. Norwegian Folk Art: The Migration of a Tradition. New York: Abbeville
Press.
Nelson, Marion John 1986: Preface. A Collection of Norwegian Rosemaling in
America. Minneapolis: Pamela Publications.
Nelson, Marion John 1980: The Material Culture and Folk Arts of the Norwegians
in America. Perspectives on American Folk Art. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Neth, Mary 1995: Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940. Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pederson, Jane Marie 1992: Between Memory and Reality: Family and Community
in Rural Wisconsin, 1870–1970. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Pushkarev, Boris 1960–1961: The Esthetics of Freeway Design, Landscape: Magazine of Human Geography 10: 2.
Siporin, Steve (ed.) 1992: American Folk Masters: The National Heritage Fellows.
New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Smoot, Frank 2004: Farm Life: A Century of Change for Farm Families and their
Neighbors. Eau Claire, WI: Chippewa Valley Museum.
Stewart, Janice 1999: The Folk Arts of Norway. 3rd Edition. Rhinelander, WI: Nordhus Publishing.
Stoeltje, Beverly 1983: Festival in America. Handbook of American Folklore.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Teske, Robert T. (ed.) 1987: From Hardanger to Harleys: A Survey of Wisconsin
Folk Art. Sheboygan, WI: John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Turner, Kay 1999: Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars.
London: Thames & Hudson.
Turner, Victor 1982: Introduction. Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Vesterheim 2004: Rosemaling Letter 35: 2.
Woxholth, Yngve 1969: Våre vakre bunader. Oslo: Hjemmenes Forlag.
Zaniewski, Kazimierz J. and Rosen, Carol J. 1998: The Atlas of Ethnic Diversity in
Wisconsin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Interviews and Personal Communications Cited
Bruni, Milt: 1985. Tape-recorded Interview by James P. Leary (German–American
Music Project Collection, University of Wisconsin-Madison Mills Music
Library). Iron Ridge, WI.
Brynildson, Emily: 1984. Paper for James P. Leary’s “Folklore of Wisconsin”
class,University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cunneen, Oljanna: 1986. Interview by Janet C. Gilmore (Wisconsin Folk Art Survey
Collection, John Michael Kohler Arts Center). Blue Mounds.
Cunneen, Oljanna: 1987. Tape-recorded Ole and Lena joke cycle, by James P. Leary
with technical assistance from Reid Miller. Madison.
Cunneen, Oljanna: n.d. Self-tape-recorded biography and stories. Blue Mounds.
Edseth, Olga: 1994. Personal Communication. Mt. Horeb.
Grinde, Marlyn, and Gilbertson, Irene: 1994. Tape-recorded Interview by Janet C.
Gilmore (Wisconsin Folk Museum). Mt. Horeb.
Holzhueter, Jack: 1994. Interview by Janet C. Gilmore (Wisconsin Folk Museum).
Mt. Horeb.
Kvalheim, Ethel: 1986. Interview by Janet C. Gilmore (Wisconsin Folk Art Survey
Collection, John Michael Kohler Arts Center). Stoughton.
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Mueller, Lois: 1995. Interview by Janet C. Gilmore (Wisconsin Folk Museum). Mt.
Horeb.
Sievers, Janice: 2007. Personal Communication. Mt. Horeb.
Vogel, Lee and Nancy: 1994. Tape-recorded Interview by Janet C. Gilmore (Wisconsin Folk Museum). Mt. Horeb.
Winner, Scott: 1994. Tape-recorded Interview by Janet C. Gilmore (Wisconsin Folk
Museum). Blue Mounds.
Woods, Jo Ann: 1994. Tape-recorded Interview by Janet C. Gilmore (Wisconsin
Folk Museum). Mt. Horeb.
1
In his well-known “Stranger’s Path” essay, J. B. Jackson proposes that an outsider visiting
a new place can begin to understand it “once a few of its landmarks are known.”
2 Several websites now celebrate the most striking of these water tower landmarks of place,
for example: http://www.yorklib.org/local/artistic-water-towers. One of the most infamous
water tower icons is the Swedish coffee pot shape emulated on the Stanton, Iowa, water
tower that dates from 1971 and provided a backdrop for advertising featuring “Mrs. Olson’s” promotion of Folgers Coffee. See, for example: http://www.worldslargestthings.com/iowa/coffee.htm and http://www.fmtcnet.com/our-community-stanton.html.
Lindstrom, Minnesota’s “Swedish teapot” water tower rivals Stanton’s. See http:
//www.cityoflindstrom.us/gallery/views.html but also see “A Look at Water Towers: Water
Towers Serve as Identifiers, Reminders, Landmarks,” Waterline, the quarterly newsletter
of the Minnesota Department of Health Public Water Supply Unit, Summer 1997, Waterline, MN, at: http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/water/com/waterline/featurestories/watertowers.html. There’s another Swedish coffee pot water tower in Kingsburg, California. See: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/165 and www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM5QM. All websites current as of December 11, 2008.
3 In the 1961 Mount Horeb centennial history, “Portal to Wonderland” is the stated motto for
the area, linking Little Norway, Cave of the Mounds, the Blue Mounds, and Stewart Lake
as the cluster of attractions. The volume mentions some of the earliest Norwegian immigrant settlers and the Little Norway attraction but clearly shows no coherent Norwegian–
American community identity. By the late 1960s, Lee Vogel claimed that he and others
were searching for an expression that would provide a greater sense of the area’s cultural
and natural ambience than “Portal to Wonderland” (Interview 1994). The 1986 Mount
Horeb quasquicentennial history shows the emergence of both the “Song of Norway” in
1966 and Sons of Norway in 1971 as evidence of wide support for public heritage-making
drawing from Norwegian and Norwegian–American themes (85 & 108–109). By the late
‘60s and early ‘70s, many of Dane County’s second- and third-generation immigrant residents were reaching middle life, and a level of leisure time and affluence, that afforded renewed interest in an increasingly distant immigrant past. (Cf. Klymasz and Kivisto)
4 Hoelscher and Ostergren (1993: 92) use J. B. Jackson’s sense of “other-directed” placemaking–which inspired new ways to look at the highway strip, sprawl, and the epitome of
Las Vegas, New Mexico–to examine New Glarus, Wisconsin’s Swiss–American ethnic
public face. The concept applies well here to Cunneen’s physical presentation of self in
varied public settings as well as in the majority of the interior of her home during the last
decades of her life. Jackson’s idea, as originally expressed, appears in “Other-Directed
Houses,” Landscape: Magazine of Human Geography 6: 2 (Winter 1965–1957), especially
31–33.
5 While Oljanna Cunneen’s local influence and productivity were vast, and her agency in
community heritage-making deep and dynamic, adequate treatment of her community influence must remain somewhat elusive and speculative. Much of the documentation that
6
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45
exists on Cunneen was carefully constructed by Cunneen herself. If she spoke directly of
her ambitions and motivations in generating forms to enhance the western Dane County
sense of Norwegian heritage and place, there is little evidence of it left. By the time I inquired of a small selection of her community-oriented conspirators, colleagues, friends, and
family in 1994, Cunneen had passed on, like her mother and older sister, too soon. It was
clear, however, that Cunneen’s community influence was stimulated by collaboration and
collective efforts.
My interest in Oljanna Venden Cunneen over the years has focused mainly on her folk artistic handiwork in the context of her life story. For a lengthy slide talk, “An Inspirational
Force: Oljanna Venden Cunneen,” that was presented at the Vesterheim Norwegian–
American Museum’s 2004 “The Art of Rosemaling: Tradition Meets the Creative Mind”
symposium in Decorah, Iowa, I first attempted the concentration on Cunneen’s rosemaling
in her life context. (See Jan Etnier’s summary of the talk in Vesterheim 2004: 16). This article draws in part from that presentation and a shorter, more academic version, “Oljanna
Venden Cunneen: Rosemaler on the Edge,” presented at the 2007 Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies meeting in Davenport, Iowa. Editors and other contributors
to the present volume, and outside readers, have enhanced the coherence of the article and
provided much inspiration for future efforts that could draw out many of the latent issues
in a more comprehensive work. The title of this paper was inspired by the name, “Rosemaling on the Edge,” for a juried exhibit of non-traditional treatments of rosemaling that
was on display during the Vesterheim 2004 symposium.
Just a few examples: Mike’s Fish & Seafood in Glenwood, MN, distributes lutefisk dinner
placemats with shipments of lutefisk for Lutheran church and Sons of Norway lodge lutefisk dinners in south central Wisconsin; a Burke Lutheran Church version of it from c. 1992
placed a pronounced rosemaling design in the lower right corner. Oljanna Cunneen’s rosemaling appears decoratively in Ideals Publishing Company’s Mother’s Day Greetings volume (Milwaukee, 1968). Rosemaling designs decorate the covers of Volunteers of the Norwegian–American Museum’s Pioneer Cook Book (Decorah, Iowa, 1969), Bethany Lutheran Bazaar Centennial Cookbook (Rice Lake, WI, 1984), and Vermont Lutheran Church’s
Nisse Book of Recipes (Black Earth, WI, 1993); the latter two cookbooks incorporate rosemaling flourishes between chapters. Skandisk Heritage of Minneapolis distributes “Heritage Stationery” and “Rosemaling Cards” packets for sale that showcase Ethel Kvalheim’s
designs.
Besides immigrants from Norway, those from Ireland, Switzerland, and other Germanspeaking areas of Northern Europe, as well as Pennsylvania Germans and English, are common in the early immigrant mix of Mount Horeb’s rural environs in western Dane County.
Of these groups, the Norwegian- and Swiss-Americans have most notably cultivated their
ethnic images, and Mount Horeb’s proximity to New Glarus and its large, rural Swiss–
American settlement has been instrumental in Mount Horeb’s adoption of a Norwegian ethnic identity. (Cf. Hoelscher 1998 and Hoelscher and Ostergren 1993). In the county overall,
Norwegian–Americans represent the second largest ethnic group, competing with residents
of Irish background; German–Americans make up the largest group, outnumbering Norwegian–Americans four to one. While these immigrants settled originally in a largely rural
patchwork of farmsteads and small villages instead of denser urban settings, Linda Dégh’s
assertion applies, that “The most significant and probably unique feature of the American
groups lies in the fact that their culture was formed by mutual interaction with not one or
several but a greater number of alien cultures.” (1966: 554)
Oljanna Venden Cunneen was one of the first folk artists I interviewed for the John Michael
Kohler Art Center’s Wisconsin Folk Art Survey in 1986. Her bunad work was featured in
the resulting “From Hardanger to Harleys: A Survey of Wisconsin Folk Art” exhibit and
catalog of the same name (Teske 1987). Oljanna passed away at 64 in February 1988, just
before my family and I settled in the Mount Horeb area, but my relationship with Oljanna
46
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Janet C. Gilmore
and her family continued as we exhibited her considerable artistic productivity at the Wisconsin Folk Museum in Mount Horeb, especially in a popular major 1994–1995 exhibit of
her work, “Art to Enjoy, Art to Use: Norwegian–American Folk Artist Oljanna Venden
Cunneen (1923–1988).” In preparation for the exhibit, which was funded with grants from
the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission and the Mount Horeb Community Foundation, and significant private contributions from the Mount Horeb area, I had the pleasure of
interviewing Cunneen’s daughter, Jo Ann Woods; community movers-and-shakers Nancy
and Lee Vogel of Open House Imports; fellow community and Sons of Norway members
Marlyn Grinde and Irene Gilbertson; “Song of Norway” colleague Jack Holzhueter; and
Little Norway Director Scott Winner. Much of the information about Cunneen in this essay
comes from these interviews, repeated communications with Cunneen’s family, visits to
Woods’ home, then in Mount Horeb, to review primary materials including artifacts, review of archival and artifact collections at the Mount Horeb Area Historical Society, and
the exhibit’s installation and special events. Conversations with Lee Vogel, Janice Sievers,
and Bill Kalscheur in 2007 have helped confirm several details in this essay.
The smaller Laestadian group met in members’ homes, visited by a circuit-rider preacher
from some distance away, while Vermont Lutheran Church was an established rural Evangelical Lutheran church well-attended by Vermont Township’s rural Norwegian–American
families. Vermont Lutheran Church is currently affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran
Church of America, E.L.C.A. “A Brief History of the Vermont Lutheran Congregation,”
written by Grace Skalet and updated by Betty Rosenbaum can be found in the church’s
Nisse Book of Recipes (1993), v–vi.
Cunneen provides an interesting case of an “ethnic” who appears to connect both the “first
stage” of retention and the “third stage” of reconstruction as immigrants become ethnics,
according to Klymasz’s hypothesis (1973: esp. 134–138).
The operetta “Song of Norway,” created by Robert Wright and George Forrest and opening
in Los Angeles, California, in 1944, “drew upon the life and music of Norwegian composer
Edvard Grieg” as well as Norwegian nationalism “when that country’s resistance movement against the occupying Nazi forces had attracted international sympathy,” says the
Mount Horeb production’s 25th anniversary season program book (Holzhueter, Hefty, &
Christofferson 1991: ii; see also Mt. Horeb 1986: 108–109). The program book provides a
short history of the Mount Horeb production’s run and attributes its beginnings in 1966 to
community arts leader Lee Vogel, adding “The time was right … for Mount Horeb to honor
its own Norwegian roots.” (ii). Mount Horeb’s neighboring community, New Glarus, just
17 miles to the south, no doubt inspired Vogel, with its longstanding tradition of community plays such as Wilhelm Tell and Heidi that united community members in celebrating
the area’s Swiss heritage and energizing local commerce. (see Hoelscher 1998). Vogel, his
wife Nancy, Oljanna Cunneen, and a number of other energetic and community-minded
area residents, infused the Mount Horeb Chamber of Commerce with new ideas in the
1960s that resulted in the village’s public identification with Norwegian immigrant heritage
and a seasonal sequence of annual festivities in which residents and businesses still collaborate. Within a few years of the 25th anniversary celebration, however, the “Song of Norway” run ended in the Mount Horeb area. The New Glarus Tell production is fast approaching its 70th year. (Neff & Zarrilli 1987)
The troll as a symbol for the Blue Mounds-Mount Horeb area also emerged from the ferment of community discussions among the Vogels, Cunneen, and cohorts during the 1960s,
often at boiled dinner socials held at the Cunneens. Cave of the Mounds had become a local
tourist attraction adjacent to the distinctive high ground of the Blue Mounds; in a valley
close by lay Little Norway, a small outdoor museum featuring Norwegian–American immigrant buildings, a stavekirke replica built in Norway for the 1893 Columbian Exposition
in Chicago, additional small Norwegian-style buildings, and artifacts from Norway. (See
Mt. Horeb 1961: 63) Between Oljanna’s storytelling heritage of Norwegian nisse, huldre,
14
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17
47
and trolls and the group’s fertile imagination, it was not long before the troll, a creature associated with “undermountain” locations, became an ideal “mascot of the local.” Since that
time, the old highway that leads between Mount Horeb and Blue Mounds has become “The
Trollway,” Mount Horeb artists besides Cunneen have depicted trolls in public paintings,
print, and sculptures, certain community leaders dress festively as trolls during community
events, and the village calls itself “The Troll Capital of the World.” Mike Feeney’s
troll-configured tree stumps that line numerous old highway businesses and homes today
are a major tourist attraction, and the sculptor disseminates the imagery through postcards
and stationery available for sale at local businesses.
They performed to great applause at the 36th annual Nordic Fest in Decorah, Iowa, July 26,
2002, for example. Dave Nelson wrote the lyrics to “Rosemaling Fever,” and “The Rosemaler’s Husband’s Lament or A Psychiatric Analysis of the Rosemaling Wife or There’ll
Be No Supper, Kids, Tonight, She’s in Her Paints Again,” dated 1982. These latter lyrics
appeared in the “W.S.P.A. Newsletter [Wisconsin State Physician’s Association?], June
1983, Page 9.”
The Aarseth and Ellingsgard articles in Vesterheim 2:1 (2004) allude to this background,
and it was confirmed during their presentations at Vesterheim’s 2004 “The Art of Rosemaling” symposium.
Vesterheim has continued to offer workshops and the annual exhibition, expanding to include a growing array of mostly revived woodcarving, weaving, and knife-making traditions. Despite greater mastery of technique and knowledge of historic rosemaling styles,
Gold Medalists tend to practice a conservative perfectionism that the Vesterheim still tries
to loosen by bringing together professionally trained painters with regular workshop participants and commercial rosemalers in symposia such as “The Art of Rosemaling: Tradition Creates the Creative Mind.” A summary of the symposium’s proceedings appears in
Vesterheim’s Rosemaling Letter 35: 2 (2004): 10–17. A foretaste, including richly illustrated articles by curator Tova Brandt, and featured keynote speakers Sigmund Aarseth and
Nils Ellingsgard, was published in the museum’s magazine Vesterheim 2: 1 (2004): 4–36.
A videotape captured key portions of the event, that may be available from the museum.
Just as knitting while walking had for Yorkshire Dales piece-work knitters during the 18th
and 19th centuries in England’s Midlands (cf. Hartley, Marie, and Ingilby, Joan: 1978
[1951]. The Old Hand-Knitters of the Dales. Clapham: Dalesman Publishing Company
Ltd.: 45, 53–55, 74–76, 80). Among its permanent exhibits in 1997, when I visited, the
Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes, North Yorkshire, covered the importance of
hand-knitting to the local economy during the 1700s through the early 1900s. Exhibits included representative knitted garments and the distinctive hand-knitting needles and
sheaths that developed to improve speed and productivity. The http://www.yorkshiredales.org.uk/index/enjoying/dales_countryside_museum.htm as of December 2008 leads
to the museum’s website, while http://www.daelnet.co.uk/features/knitting/history1.htm
provides “A Brief History” in 5 pages of the phenomenon. The “Brief History” as well as
the museum’s knitting exhibits have drawn from the Hartley and Ingilby work, which
benefited from interviews with the last of the knitters from this once important Dales
cottage industry.
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Janet C. Gilmore
Performing the North
49
Folk Culture, Exoticism and Irony among Expatriates
Kristinn Schram
“I did actually get the question: a good friend of mine from Taiwan asked me if we
lived in snow-houses. I thought that was absolutely astounding. Of course I had
heard that people had been asked this question. But I just thanked him for asking, it
would make for a great story.”
Haraldur – an Icelander abroad
I begin this article in the liminal space in which the speaker, a participant
in my fieldwork, finds himself. Faced with an exoticizing representation,
multiple responses are possible. As is revealed in the closing comments,
the course he takes is not that of indignant correction of the misunderstanding but of gleeful resignation to its narrative potential. Being an Icelander abroad myself, I am no stranger to the question my informant received with such good humour, nor am I innocent of appropriating it to
various narrative contexts. Firstly, from those few years that I spent as a
young child in California, I remember somewhat hesitantly accepting the
air of northern exoticism my peers had attached to me.1 Later in life, as a
postgraduate in Scotland, I often found myself as cultural commentator,
mediating exotic images of Iceland with my own experiences and identity.
On one such occasion, I had been invited to a film club dinner party and
was placed, aperitif in hand, beside the screen. The film of the evening
was, by no suggestion of mine, the iconic and exotic Icelandic film Börn
náttúrunnar or Children of Nature.2 Still rather unsure if this was in fact a
set-up, I was somehow compelled to answer questions at great length. I
would comment on cultural situations and sometimes mutter self-parodies
such as “been there, done that” as the film protagonist enjoys a hotdog at
the bus station or violates a traffic law before disappearing into a mountain. As in my informant’s experience, I was positioned in a liminal, transcultural encounter, with a heightened sense of difference, prompted and
reinforced by the media images.
The dynamics of reflexive identity-negotiations such as these within
everyday life are a compelling research topic in today’s globalized world.
50
Kristinn Schram
Increasingly, representations in the global media make their mark on the
transnational and transcultural encounters practiced in the liminal space of
“foreignness” and being “abroad”. Folklorists have effectively turned their
attention to the problems of such encounters and the role expressive culture
plays in them. Diverting from the discipline’s prior emphases on the artistic
beauty and skill of folklore, great strides have been taken in examining the
processes with which boundaries are drawn and differential identities solidified through traditional and expressive culture. Folklorists have also gone
further in illustrating the negotiable processes rendering people and symbols
foreign as well as the latent and overt strategies involved in the manipulation
of identity symbols.3
In order to contribute to this work, I will bring into focus how expressive
culture may in turn corrode such strategies and tactically re-appropriate
them. Embedded in the everyday life of migrants and pitted against a backdrop of historical imagery and media representations, folklore is also used
to gain access and integration into host cultures. With reference to stereotypical images of the North in both historical and modern literature, art and
media, I will explore those representational images performed in the expressive culture of everyday life playing on an emergent image of northern exoticism and eccentricity. I will exhibit such reconfigurations through contemporary case studies of how modern-day Icelanders in Northern Europe
and North America have re-appropriated exoticizing representations of their
perceived northern eccentricity through narrative performances of tradition,
a close relationship with nature and archaic foodways.4 Turning these representations to their own ends, these individuals have appropriated vernacular practices as tactics to gain access and influence within the strategies of
new localities. Furthermore I will demonstrate how their self-representation
and identities have acquired a built-in irony as a result of their opting for
playful exaggeration and eccentricity over authenticity.
A Brief History of Exotic Iceland
While the production of literary texts and media images is not the focus of
this article, their relation to vernacular culture warrants some illustration.
The exotic hetero-images (images of the other as opposed to self-images) of
Iceland and its inhabitants are in themselves anything but new. Commonly
referenced in contemporary times, for example in the Icelandic Thule beer,
this exotic image can be traced far back and is in fact much older than the
country’s recorded settlement in the ninth century. While it was first depicted in 140 BC in Polybius’s Histories as Ultima Thule, the strange island of
the far North has long been associated with Iceland, as well as many other
North Atlantic islands. This is only the first known example in a plethora of,
often obscure, geographies of the north, an iconography that can be traced
51
back to the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean, the antiquity of Homeric poems, ancient Greek tragedy and Greco-Roman geography (see e.g.
Sumarliði Ísleifsson 2003; Sherrill Grace 2002).
It is in many cases difficult to discern the images of Iceland from images
of the North in general. The concept of the north is full of extremes and
ambiguities. As revealed in Peter Davidson’s exploration of the concept in
art, legend and literature, two opposing ideas of north repeat and contradict each other from antiquity until well into the nineteenth century. First
of all “a place of darkness and dearth, the seat of evil. Or, conversely, […]
a place of austere felicity where virtuous peoples live behind the north
wind and are happy” (Davidson 2005:21). From savage dystopia to enlightened utopia, the pendulum has swung back and forth between the
civilized and the wild. Researchers have nonetheless discerned patterns in
this dynamic construct, claiming for example that the ancient Greeks, Romans and Christian church associated the north with barbarism while the
south was considered the cradle of civilization. Slowly during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the West European north came
to be seen as progressive, educated, technologically advanced and strong
compared to what was increasingly seen as a reactionary, uneducated and
inconsistent south. Race typologies within the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century only solidified these ideas of superiority. While Iceland’s nationalistic movement rode the waves of these more empowering
images, it is nonetheless clear that the hetero-images of the primitive north
persisted, even among Iceland’s Nordic neighbours. A largely successful
nationalistic movement, nationhood was claimed on the basis of an ancient literary culture, language and historical identity (see Guðmundur
Hálfdánarson 2001; Gunnar Karlsson 1995). The interconnectedness of
the nation to the land and the supposed “purity” of its language were also
regularly stressed and later encapsulated in a sonnet beginning: “Land, nation and language, a trinity pure and true” (Snorri Hjartarson 1952; see
also Gísli Sigurðsson 1999:42–48).
While this process was well under way on the eve of the twentieth century, the Copenhagen-based Icelandic intelligentsia nonetheless found itself
grossly offended. The offence had come in an announcement in 1904 that
Icelanders, hitherto enjoying a status they considered somewhat higher than
that of Danish colonial subjects, were to be exhibited alongside them in the
“Dansk Koloniudstilling”, a Danish Colonial Exhibition to he held in the Tivoli amusement park in Copenhagen a year later. Tivoli exhibitions such as
these were a Nordic offshoot of a long tradition of “world fairs”, involving
the gross objectification and detrimental treatment of “the other”, usually
colonial subjects or indigenous populations of the “new world”, represented
with artefacts and animals. Each race was placed on the scale from the wild
to the most civilized, underlining where they seemed to fit on the scale of
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evolution. The Caucasian was furthermore the standard against which other
races were to be measured. The hegemonic character of these fairs is evident
in the way they naturalized colonial dominance by separating the civilized
“us” from the exotic and primitive “other” (see Said 1978; Greenblatt 1991
on aspects of Nordic Orientalism see e.g. Oxfeldt 2005).
Judging from the flurry of angry protest, this hegemony was not lost on
the Icelanders. The ensuing debate on the prospect was published in the
Danish press. While they themselves evidently had no protests against the
treatment of “the others” on exhibition, they were furious at the prospect of
being seen as on par with “negro ladies and Eskimos”, as one Icelandic commentator put it (quoted from Finsen 1958:12). In a special statement, the
Icelandic Student Association made a clear distinction between the category
of cultural nations (Kulturnationer) to which Iceland belonged and the
primitive nature folk (Naturfolk). In his thorough analysis of this debate Jón
Yngvi Jóhannsson points out that the Icelanders had no problem with the objectification of these alleged “nature folk”. Furthermore: “they never expressed any doubt as to there being a defining line between culture and
savagery, between us and them. The debate revolved around which side Iceland belonged on, how developed Icelandic nationality was” (Jón Yngvi
Jóhannsson 2003:140, my translation). The overt use of this dichotomy reveals with unsettling clarity a facet of the Icelandic self-image at the time of
rising Icelandic nationalism. It is also reveals an image within Denmark, of
Iceland as an exotic colony on the northern periphery. But being well acquainted with the discourses of nationalism and colonialism, these Icelanders (not quite “abroad” being subjects to the Danish king) had caught on and
were not about to be “othered”.
Emergent Ironic Exoticism
It is interesting to compare these representations, and the reactions to them,
with the emergent exoticism in contemporary media a century later. National representations within Iceland have through most of the 20th century focused on modernization and deep-rooted literary culture and saga-cultivated
landscape. To take a few examples, photo subtexts often underline the connections between a given landscape and “history of the much romanticized
Commonwealth or Saga Age, the period in which most of the Icelandic Sagas take place. So-called “pearls of nature” are a reoccurring theme on postcards, art and tourist literature, also featuring söguslóðir: the places of the
Sagas. The pearls are alternatively the vast “untouched” wilderness of the
highland interior considered, by many Icelanders, as their common land and
responsibility (Hafsteinsson 1994). Indeed Sunday television broadcasts always ended with a showcase of the most “national” of Icelandic landscapes,
to the soundtrack of the national anthem. Some people even regarded it as
53
improper to turn off the television before the anthem had played out.
This Herderian emphasis on the inter-dependency of nature and culture
is an increasingly dominant feature in the representation of Icelanders,
whether we come across it in a presidential address to the nation or in a
magazine interview with the musical artist Björk. Images of the primitive
survival of the Icelandic nation in a harsh and barren land, simultaneously
preserving an ancient culture of language and literature, are commonly
conjured up as a means of getting to the heart of what being an Icelander
is. Nature, and those who are seen as living in close contact with it, have
nonetheless been increasingly presented in a more primal and even ironic
light.
Examples of this abound in visual images, especially in advertisements,
film and art, centring on and manipulating an iconography of rugged northernness. Representations, such as two recent books/exhibitions, Icelanders
(Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson & Unnur Þóra Jökulsdóttir 2004) and Faces of the
North (Ragnar Axelsson 2004), directly evoke images of a characteristically
sub-arctic culture, concentrating on those who allegedly have not fully
crossed the threshold of modernity. In the latter a leading Icelandic photographer, Ragnar Axelsson, does just what so infuriated the Copenhagenbased Icelanders a century before, by juxtaposing Iceland with Greenland as
well as the Faroe Islands.5 A common trend in these images is the emphasis
on people in the midst of a challenging and cold climate silhouetted against
a rugged and barren Icelandic wilderness. This is a contrast to the more
subtle aesthetics and sublime representations of landscapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nonetheless we also find, interestingly
enough, an emerging ironic accent on eccentricity in rural culture. Recent
examples may be found in an advertisement campaign for fleece clothing
depicting Icelanders against the backdrop of desolate landscapes and small
towns across the country. Their interchangeable Icelandic and English texts,
rather than referring to sagas, often contain ironic messages such as the following, which refers to a remote airport: ‘Welcome to Kaldárbotnsflugvöllur, only one of many airports in Iceland. Expect delays’6. A statement from
the advertising agency declares that these advertisements are meant to create
the company’s unique profile as part of Icelandic history and the national
spirit or þjóðarsál – a common concept in everyday speech. Their slogan
“Dress well” is said to have “obvious references to the past and is above
all very Icelandic. The advertisements show Icelanders in a cold almost
hostile environment. And there is much drama in the facial expressions as
well as in the landscape.”7 The irony, drama and stylish posturing could perhaps be related to the modern “cool” image of Icelanders spearheaded by business ventures abroad (such as Icelandair’s promotion of Reykjavík nightlife
or the Laundromat café in Copenhagen) and film directors (see for example
Baltasar Kormákur’s depiction of downtown life in 101 Reykjavík).
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Kristinn Schram
The 66° North campaign, started 2004.
Icelandic films, such as those of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, have long depicted
rural Iceland essentially as a wonderland of colourful characters, archaic
customs and mannerisms, traditional ghosts and magic.8 Friðrik had early on
in his career ironically depicted a rural “country-western” festival in north
Iceland, complete with drunken, wild and silly behaviour (Kúrekar norðursins or Cowboys of the North). Often these eccentricities are expressed
through traditional Icelandic food. For example, in Dagur Kári’s critically
acclaimed Nói Albínói or Nói the Albino, the hapless protagonist fumbles
while preparing blood-pudding, spilling the blood from a huge pot all over
his family. In another recent Icelandic film, Mýrin or Jar City by Baltasar
Kormákur, an adaptation of the novel by popular crime writer Arnaldur
Indriðason, there is a scene where the protagonist is seen digging into a particularly gelatinous dish of singed sheep’s head or svið (pronounced “svith”,
meaning something singed). Indeed, in light of the emphasis put on the protagonist’s consumption of svið, one would be justified in suspecting that its
sole purpose was to catch the othering eye of foreign audiences.9 While this
traditional dish consisting of a split, singed and boiled sheep’s head is still
commercially available in Iceland and displayed in the food stores, the
dish’s everyday status and banality has somewhat diminished in recent decades. It has been steadily gaining a place among other traditional dishes such
as sour ram’s testicles and cured skate, which are rarely seen except at the
time of their designated festivities for which they may add a sense of folksy
patriotism. Nonetheless the proprietor of the drive-through restaurant fea-
55
tured in the film claimed a huge boost in sales of this handy and fast food of
the ages after its screening began.10 Yet, the Minister of Agriculture and
Fisheries, not one to recoil in the face of traditional produce, seems disturbed in his personal blog:
We know well that many do not like whaling, have reservations about the invasion
of Icelandic companies, do not appreciate our dams. And perhaps detective Erlendur
feasting on svið in Arnaldur’s and Baltasar Kormákur’s film, Jar City, gives a worse
image than before; this is, at least, not the image of “gourmet” Iceland – the modern
Iceland (Einar K. Guðfinnson 2006).
The minister seems to be suggesting here that this alleged antithesis of gourmet Iceland has little basis in contemporary reality, or at least that if it did
then it is not an image to be heralded. But the apparent lack of forcefulness
in the minister’s concerns for the “image” of modern Iceland comes to the
heart of matter. Despite the potentially deprecating effect on the nation’s image, depicting it rather as eccentric and peripheral, little protest about these
representations has been voiced in Iceland. On the contrary, even high political figures openly embrace these eccentricities as a national asset.11 This
fact also highlights that, though these are to some extent local and artistic
self-representations, they are also potentially lucrative transcultural commodities, reflexively aimed at both foreign and domestic consumers. In
comparison with the explosion of protest a century before the current, and
in part ironic, exposition of Icelanders as primitive and exotic nature-folk,
this seems to have been received with open arms both by Icelanders and the
foreign target audience. Whether this is in fact the case (or inversely that the
voices of dissent do not reach the public ear) will not be answered here. It
nonetheless seems to be the case that in an age of international markets and
mass communication, “foreign” commodities are often received and integrated without much political or social turmoil (Bendix & Klein 1993:5).
When it comes to the integration of “foreign” people and culture into local
society the reverse is often the case (for such comparisons see Spooner
1986; Appadurai 1986). However, what I wish to bring into focus here,
through the ethnography, is that against a backdrop of media exoticisms,
many Icelanders living abroad actually seem to embody projected images of
eccentricity, basing them on differentiating folklore, but performing them to
the point of exaggeration in their everyday lives.
Expressive Culture and Performance in Transnational Contexts
Íslendingar erlendis or Icelanders abroad is a term that perhaps connotes a
strangely static condition of “Icelandicness” and the idea that their presence
outside of Iceland is merely tentative. Somehow a term such as Icelandic
Americans or Icelandic Canadians has never caught on in the Icelandic language: the descendants of Icelanders that emigrated to North-America over
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a century ago are still referred to as West-Icelanders. Icelanders abroad are
also often considered to be excessively Icelandic, a reflexivity Barbro Klein
has frequently come across among Swedes when referring to Swedish
Americans (Klein 2001:78). Nevertheless, Icelandic expatriates in any
given area rarely form a cohesive community and are usually few and far between.12 Reaching its zenith on festive holidays, in-group congregations are
often focused on occasional calendar customs that serve meaningful cohesive purposes. In cities where Icelanders are numerous they may for example meet at the jólaboð or Christmas parties (which often are centred on
children) the þorrablót (pronounced “thorra-blote”) a quasi-traditional midwinter feast involving what used to be the last reserves of cured meat and
fish products in the old winter month called Þorri, or they may congregate
on the 17 June National Holiday celebrating independence from the Denmark since 1944. While performance has proved an integral part of these
in-group congregations of Icelanders abroad, the role of folklore in group
cohesion is not the topic at hand. Instead I will be concentrating on the reflexive liminality of foreigner-native encounters in which exoticizing performances are generated.
Approaches to expressive culture in transnational encounters are plentiful
within the discipline of folkloristics. Since work such as Richard Bauman’s
“Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore” (1971), the role of
folklore as an arena for contesting territories and drawing boundaries has
been firmly established. Twenty years later, scholarly efforts to examine the
process were multiplied, resulting in a number of innovative case studies.
Many of them adapted the performance-centred approach to illustrate the
negotiable processes rendering people and symbols foreign as well as well
as to analyse the latent and overt strategies in the manipulation of identity
symbols (see for example Bendix & Klein 1993; Kirschenblatt-Gimblett
1994; Abrahams 2000). As one of the pioneers of the performance-oriented
approach, Bauman emphasized the significance of the narrator’s performance in the interpretation of narratives, defining performance as a way of
speaking and communicating, “the essence of which resides in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative skill,
highlighting the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content” (Bauman 1984:193). To the participants of the
narration, performance is open to evaluation, not only of the performer’s
skill and effectiveness of display (form) but also of the enhancement of experience (function). In turn, the evaluation of the form, meaning and function of oral narrative is situated in culturally defined scenes or events where
behaviour and experience constitute meaningful contexts.
The reflective nature of performance lies in its ability to create, store, and
transmit identity and cultures. Through it people not only present behaviour,
but also reflexively comment on it and the values and cultural situations
57
(Fine & Speer 1992:8). Bauman has also argued that all natural sociable interactions are fundamentally about the construction and negotiation of identity and in interaction narrative performances are vehicles “for the encoding
and presentation of information about oneself in order to construct a personal and social image” (Bauman 1984:21). Within the dialectic between individual and society, the stories of self and other, which have been repeated
often enough to become artfully shaped performances, are indices of a person’s sense of self. Such performances enable us to understand the Other,
even across cultures, “since we universally express our lives in verbal performances, most often story performances” (Fine & Speer 1992:9). But
cross-cultural communication does not take place in a vacuum and nativeforeign encounters are not always on an equal footing. The crisis of the
foreigner often lies in the ineffectiveness of his corpus of thought processes
and behaviours in the new cultural context (Alfred Schutz 1972). As Bendix
and Klein have pointed out, “members of the host culture only rarely perceive any advantage to themselves in adjusting their own habits to accommodate the foreigner” (Barbro and Klein 1993:6).
To fully comprehend transcultural performances of this kind, the imbalance of power must be confronted in the analysis and research models. A
prolific model of the force relationships in vernacular practices can be found
in Michel de Certeau’s monumental work The Practice of Everyday Life
(1988). Combining the often isolated research of representation on the one
hand and the study of modes of behaviour on the other, de Certeau focuses
on the subtle processes of people conducting their lives in the midst of cultural consumption and innovation; or what de Certeau refers to as the art of
living. This work of scholarship also includes the study of narration that he
describes as being inseparable “from the theory of practices, as its condition
as well as its production” (de Certeau 1988:78). The problem of studying
these processes lay, according to de Certeau, in their “tactical” position: cultural practices he perceives as reactions countering or evading a strategy of
authority. He distinguishes these force relationships into strategy and tactics. The former is defined as the calculus of force relationships possible
when a subject of will and power can be separated in a given environment.
The later, tactics, is the calculus that does not work on a spatial or institutional localization and therefore fragmentarily insinuates itself into “the
other’s” place (for an excellent example of these force relationships see
Timothy Tangherlini’s exploration of the storytelling of paramedics (Tangherlini 2000). Ever reaching towards a theory of the relationship that links
everyday pursuits to particular circumstances, these tactics can only be understood in the local networks of labour and recreation. These pursuits unfailingly establish relational tactics: “a struggle for life, artistic creations and
autonomous initiatives” (de Certeau 1988:9). Applying these models to autonomous initiatives of transcultural narrative performances is helpful in un-
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derstanding the processes and relationships of power embedded in the various contexts of foreign-native encounters.
Peeping Through Windows: Culture Transfer and Yulelad
Blunders
The impact of force relationships in transcultural performances is evident in
the following story of a cultural transfer gone wrong. At Christmas, Icelandic families often arrange to have smoked lamb sent or brought from Iceland
and adhere to other Christmas customs that may not always fit well with local tradition. Such was the predicament of an Icelandic family with two children living in North Carolina. Their live-in aunt and babysitter, Björk Þorleifsdóttir, interjected the following narratives into a conversation over dinner with four other thirty-something Icelandic dinner guests (including Katla and myself), touching on various amusing misunderstandings involving
immigrants. She was encouraged to repeat the tale of “the Yulelads and the
children”. This refers to her previously recounted story of an aborted attempt at introducing, to an American environment, the Icelandic custom of
shoe-gifts in which parents, in lieu of the Yulelads, lay treats in children’s
shoes, placed overnight in windowsills.
Björk: The siblings were very excited about all the Christmas fuss and had never
been exposed to any American Santas. So they were off their heads with excitement
to tell all their American friends on the block there in North Carolina about the Icelandic Santas. After which the kids on the block were much more enthusiastic about
the Icelandic Christmas customs in which you put your shoe in window on the thirteen nights before Christmas and not some sock over the fireplace on Christmas
night. Some nonsense like that.
(group chuckles)
Líney: (mocking disdain) For crying out load.
Katla: All thirteen.
Björk: Right. Thirteen dudes sko13
Líney: Get a lot more stuff sko.
Björk: Yes, indeed. So when the first Yulelad, Stekkjastaur came, all the children in
the street knew just who he was and had all (laughs) stuffed their shoes in the window. And some of the parents got wind of this new interest and began to wonder
what all these shoes were doing in the windows. And the children explained that the
Icelandic Yulelads were coming through and they were giving the children in their
shoe. So some of the parents gave in to the pressure and gave the children in their
shoe. But other parents said “we won’t participate in this nonsense”. So this created
some sort of fiasco in the neighbourhood, some kind of committee of parents contacted my sister and kindly requested a meeting with my sister to discuss this Yulelad
business with the American children and explain to them
Katla: The big case of the Yulelads
Björk: The big case of the Yulelads yes (laughs) and explain to them that there has
been some sort of misunderstanding, these Yulelads being rather senile old wags
they had wandered too far over the ocean by mistake after delivering sweets to the
Icelandic children. So my sister somehow had to explain that if any American chil-
59
dren were given something in their shoe this was in fact a Yulelad blunder and that
uh, it would not happen again because the Icelandic Yulelads were that nationalistic
that they only gave to Icelandic children. And so ended the Yulelad-shoegiving to
the native children of America.
And so endeth that tale.
So we’re very dutiful, the family, in spreading this nonsense (laughter). Expanding our borders (laughter builds up). The ambassadors of the Yulelads and the elves.
(in deep self-mocking tone:) I’m quite a storyteller.
While the story focuses on humorous children’s folklore, it is nonetheless
structured around tensions in adult force relationships and cultural homogeny. Into the tranquil street life of American children a tension is introduced in the form of eccentric male supernatural figures encroaching on the
children’s windows. These over-the-top Yulelads, like hybrids of peepingtoms and pied-pipers, collude with the children and exceed even the American Santa Claus in their exotic extravagancy. This outrage is furthermore
framed in the reflexive storytelling situation by mock-patriotism and cheering expressed by the storyteller through reflexive wordplay and intonation.
But the dramatic imbalance of this tactical resistance must also be set right
by the “host” culture. A force operation is accentuated by the committee’s
swift summoning of the subordinate Icelandic mother. She in turn must rely
on her own storytelling by which she mediates the “foreign” and inappropriate folk custom in an ingeniously absurd marriage of the supernatural and
nationalism – a supernationalism of sorts. Whatever remaining tension
there is left is deflated in the coda, the closing comment that frames the story
(Labov 1972) in Björk’s self-parody of her family as tradition bearers in a
foreign outpost, and of herself as a storyteller, pre-empting any critique of
personal patriotic sentiment or artistic pretensions.
Björk’s reference to the elves alludes to another conversation-embedded
narrative, which exhibits a more successful cultural transmission. It centres
on her own recital and performance of another Christmas custom to a group
of her friends in Alabama:
Björk: Well, we exported the custom out to Alabama and our friends there thought
it was just so cute, and exciting and crazy that they picked it up.
Kristinn: The custom of?
Björk: turning out all the lights in the house on the thirteenth [the thirteenth day of
Christmas counting from 25 December] walking with one lit candle, all in a group,
into each room and reciting the verse: Come those who come will, stay those that stay
will, depart those that depart will, harmlessly to me and mine.14 And so the verse was
written down and given to the gay community in Alabama (laughs) where we heard
it had lived on in its written form and was considered really kooky and fun.
But I don’t know. It’s been years since, they might have stopped but for a certain
time in a certain group it continued.
Kristinn: And how was all this received?
Björk: They thought it was really exciting. They thought it was so crazy that people
believed such nonsense. They were all “oh it’s so cute.” They thought it was lovable.
Kristinn: (laughs) How did you get the idea, how did this come up?
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Kristinn Schram
Björk: Its just a tradition in my family. You can do it on New Year’s Eve but it
works better on the thirteenth. Its an absolute that if you don’t do it on Twelfth Night,
then you had better have invited the whole gang on New Year’s Eve or Day. It’s the
most effective and you get good spirits in my family’s house if it’s the thirteenth. But
you can’t mess it up or you get really bad karma. (laughs). You don’t invite danger
into your home.15
Kristinn: No no. But when you do this, and your family, is there some seriousness
in this.
Björk: Oh yes, no question. It’s all rather creepy. You turn off the lights. It has to be
turned off. Then someone gets the shakes, and we start to tense up. And everyday
walks and mutters this verse. After that there is some giggling. And you’ve walked
everywhere, into the food storage area and each cranny of the house. And everybody
in my family is very conservative about this, even though they pretend to be great
scientists. But this never fails. So.
In this story Björk ironically portrays the transmission of an Icelandic folk
rite to the unusual recipients: a group of friends “gay community” of Americans in Alabama. The verse and custom is a variation of a protection rite in
traditional Icelandic folklore practised on either Christmas night, New
Year’s Eve or Twelfth Night and is meant to appease the elves and hidden
people believed to wander at these times and is common in folktales (see for
example Gunnell 2002). Björk stresses the irony of this and the othering reception of the custom but paradoxically underpins the rite’s importance as
social binder and folk belief among her otherwise scientifically-minded
family members. What is significant, though, is how she constitutes its practice in a contextualized sensory experience, walking as a group in the darkness, bringing a dim light into every nook and cranny of the home. In so doing, she juxtaposes this dislocated performance of culture with her family’s
ritual exploration of the home’s space – claiming and defining the inner
from the outer; the us from the them. While this re-contextualization of the
custom within the host culture is to some extent based on its perceived
“cuteness”, as she herself states, this sensory impact of the narrative context
should not be overlooked. What is also significant from the perspective of
native-foreigner relations is that within the host culture – her native friends
in Alabama – it is the othered – Björk – that is in control of the performance,
setting the stage and directing the action.
Knocking on Doors: Integration Through Exoticism
As an interesting example of successful integration into a host culture, the
following narratives show how the “distressing” and exaggerated performances of formerly banal food customs can serve as stepping stone in the integration process. Áslaug Hersteinsdóttir is in her mid-thirties and has spent
much of her adult life in Finland and Russia. When we interview her, she is
expecting a child with her Finnish partner and has no direct plans to move
to Iceland.16 From her first consecutive years in St. Petersburg and Helsinki,
61
This photo is taken during Björk’s ironic narration of her experiences in the south of the USA.
To her left sits one of the dinner guests, Davíð Ólafsson. Both deserve my warmest thanks for
their participation. Photo by Kristinn Schram. June 2007.
she remembers herself and other Icelanders as being very preoccupied with
national characteristics. Conversation often focused on analysing cultural
differences and similarities in Finns and Russians in comparison with other
Icelanders. After settling down in Finland, she quickly found herself in the
dual role of representing Iceland to Finns and vice versa. She gave presentations and wrote articles on Iceland in local Finnish papers and for a period
of time served as foreign correspondent every other Saturday for the Icelandic Broadcasting Company. In day-to-day conversations, Áslaug would also
self-effacingly answer questions about Icelanders:
Áslaug: Generally when I meet people then I say Iceland is full of know-it-alls, that
Icelanders are eccentric and very entertaining and, of course, always that Icelanders
are unpunctual. I mean (laughs) it’s a national characteristic how late we are all the
time.
In addition to lack of punctuality17 she also attributed the dubious talent of
exaggeration and storytelling to her fellow-countrymen, something she contrasted with the straight-forwardness she had experienced with Finns: “Icelanders are really good at exaggerating. It’s also entertaining to listen to
people who exaggerate (laughs). That’s why they are also good at telling
stories. Its interesting to listen to. But the Finns aren’t much like that.” As a
case in point, Áslaug mentions that unlike the Finns, Icelanders tend to “exaggerate as much as they can” when it comes to Icelandic food but asserts
that the same doesn’t apply to her. Nevertheless, her conversationally embedded personal experience narratives about the food she was brought up on
and how she later presented it shed light on how banal food customs “at
home” become exotic performances abroad. Having initially taken tradition
food with her, she later sent for shark, and also smoked lamb which she pre-
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pared for her flatmates in the traditional sweet white sauce. Her explanation
as to why she did this is quite interesting, as is her regret at losing touch with
the tradition:
Áslaug: I did it most likely…, I just decided to distress people. And since then,
what’s happened to me is that I see this food so rarely now. I have been to þorrablóts,
but I’ve really stopped liking þorri-food like I did before. One has become so unused
to it. I ate svið [singed sheep’s head] as a kid – I’ve often told this story – and the
eyes were my favourite part.
Katla: Did you live in the country?
Áslaug: No, just in Kópavogur [a town next to the capital Reykjavík]. It was dad’s
favourite food. Just svið, it was always every other Saturday, chicken the other
Saturday.
Kristinn: We had svið at my home too. Almost weekly.
Áslaug: Yes. Most liked the tongue best. Of course, people don’t eat svið that much
any more.
Kristinn: Perhaps. I don’t know. But you’ve lost your appetite for it through the
years?
Áslaug: Yes, regretfully. I used to go to the corner stores at home in Iceland and
bought canned shark (Katla grimaces – Áslaug laughs) and ate it while watching
television. I just really enjoyed shark.
Áslaug would later come to participate in organized midwinter feasts or þorrablót, both in Helsinki and St. Petersburg, affairs that were often arranged
by Icelandic associations in collusion with temporarily stationed Icelandic
businessmen.18 Áslaug claims that the businessmen were eager to socialize
with Icelandic students and through them gain access to the local culture
they felt isolated from. Often feasts such as these would take on the form of
national representations aimed at the host culture. The guest lists would include affluent locals who were presented with hired entertainment or presentations dealing with differences and similarities between the respective
nations. The costly importation of cured and pungent meat, fish and dairy
products would, of course, be a central part of this representation, and comparable to the exotic fashion in which Áslaug herself presented the food to
friends in private life. This presentation of the traditional food as curiosa is
nonetheless a far cry from its banal consumption in Iceland (see above). But
what is also interesting is the acute reflexive awareness of how foreigners
receive the food and how Björk herself has begun to marginalize these traditional food practices in her own life:
Áslaug: I think it [traditional Icelandic food] is very uncommon. That it’s not
normal. And moreover from an island like this; way out in the ocean (lift ups her
hand, pointing, looking up) where the natives eat shark and sheep heads (hearty
laugh).
In this clarification of how she effectively and quite deliberately “distressed” her dinner guests, she elaborates on the archaic and primitive image
projected, something further illustrated by her self-effacing laughter and
63
hand gestures as if pointing to the North on a wall-based map. Iceland’s position on the global northern fringe of habitation only further exoticizes her
visualized role and position in these transcultural exchanges. The fact that
Áslaug willingly and ironically took on the role of the exotic native from the
obscure northern island “way out in the ocean” in her encounter must also
be in put into context with her successful integration into Finnish society.
The ironic performance can thus in fact be considered a stepping stone in her
integration process. Through the bewildering sensory experience and symbolic primitivism she presented, Áslaug upset the strategies within her host
locality, creating a new liminal space in which to operate and perform. The
tactic was further mediated by the jocularity of her dinner guests’ strong responses to the exotic narratives of food consumption in her folk culture.
Having used this exotic representation as an entry point, she then slowly,
and with some regret, went on to abandon the food custom on which her performance was based and so widen even further the distance between the performance and banality; eccentricity and authenticity.
Walking Up Hills – Entering Societies
The re-appropriation of exoticism in conjunction with Icelandic food customs was indeed common among my informants. Another case in point can
be found in the narrative accounts of an Icelandic expatriate in Scotland and
his relationship with his flatmates and friends; his American partner and
in-laws; and also with an exclusive society of mountaineers. Haraldur Guðmundsson is a postgraduate in mathematics and has been researching artificial intelligence for a few years.19 Although I quote him at the beginning of
this article on his run-in with “the question”, a common misconception of
Icelandic architecture, Haraldur initially stated that his national origin had
little bearing on his everyday life. He socializes with very few Icelanders in
Scotland and does not seek out Icelandic cultural events unless they are especially to his liking. He claims that whatever need he has of speaking Icelandic he fulfils by occasionally speaking to his family on the phone or during visits. To some extent Haraldur also maintains a link to his native country through the media. He follows Icelandic news and is particularly interested in British press reactions to Icelandic business ventures. He asserts
that he is not filled with any sense of pride by reports of Icelanders taking
over foreign business, which are frequently historicized with references and
allusions to Viking raids (see for example Griffiths 2006). His interest stems
more from when he worked earlier for an Icelandic bank and having since
been asked about the Icelandic economy by the likes of a Lloyds banker.
Other references to media can be seen as equally reflexive and representational. For example, he describes the above-mentioned Icelanders, which he
gave to his partner’s parents, as being representational for an important part
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Kristinn Schram
of Icelanders, albeit not the whole of the nation. Asked if he followed Icelandic films, he replied that he would have liked to see a television broadcast
of Dagur Kári’s Nói Albínói again, having seen it earlier in a local arthouse
cinema: “I would have wanted my girlfriend to see it. To see how difficult
(he chuckles) how difficult life is in the Westfjords.”20
Although Haraldur does not regularly seek out Icelanders, he stated that
he wanted to attend the last þorrablót on account of his American partner but
was away. “It was really unfortunate,” he says and adds with a chuckle “because my girlfriend really wanted to see, to get to know this incredible food,
or rather to see other people eat it.” This sardonic pun becomes even more
significant as we learn more about Haraldur’s own practice of (that is his attitudes to and experiences with) traditional foodways. Indeed a cluster of his
narratives set him as the subject as well the agent of subtle banter and
self-parody revolving around his own food habits.
Haraldur has in fact managed to maintain such fundamentals of the traditional Icelandic diet as fish, adapting them to his life abroad. For example, Haraldur and his otherwise vegetarian fiancé meet halfway over
fish suppers. This enables him to continue on a diet of fish three to four
times a week, similar to that he was raised on. He says that he feels weak
and dull-minded without it. He is satisfied with the Edinburgh fishmongers and even claims to get an outlet for his national sentiment by
shopping in a particular Japanese fish shop where he is still greeted with
respect after a discussion on shark preparation. In addition to this diet, he
supplements his Omega 3 intake with dry fish brought from home and
stocks up on bottles of Lýsi, a popular Icelandic fish liver oil. He halfjokingly complains about running out and going on the Lýsi tablets, expressing severe doubt as to the compatibility of non-Icelandic fish oil and
Omega 3 products. His unwavering faith in the product has become a
standing joke with his flatmates, something he answers by “preaching and
pointing to studies in its support”:
Haraldur: This is made into a joke. My flatmates are quick to point out the reason,
that the contents of the bottles are the cause of the contamination – or that the fridge
smells. Which is, of course, complete nonsense.
Despite the strict adherence to his relatively traditional diet in his daily life,
Haraldur is quite aware of its transcultural significance. He has, in fact, appropriated it into the daily routines within his host culture. Exoticism as a
tactic of gaining access and inclusion is quite apparent in Haraldur’s initiation into an exclusive and traditional British folkgroup. An important part of
his circle of friends consists of a group of British mountaineers or hillwalkers. An avid outdoorsmen himself he got to know the group from a professor
who eventually wrote the letter of recommendation needed to join the club.
Early on in our interview when we asked if in general he thought that being
an Icelander had any bearing on his communication with British people, he
65
answered: “I think it was easier for me to get in. I was really well received
in the mountaineering club because I was an Icelander.”
This positive reception lies to some extent in the reflexive cultural
framework of the folkgroup, and its recurrent appreciation of wilderness
and the exotic. Scottish hill walking was established as an honourable pastime and code of practice among circles of gentlemen in the mid-nineteenth century, alongside an emerging romantic notion of nature “forged
through the contrast with nineteenth century industrial cities and their
sense-scapes” (Macnaghten & Urry 2001:5). From these practices it has
been argued that the culture arose that would instil or enhance tendencies
of exploration and admiration of “untouched” nature in addition to the redemptive values attributed to healthy and picturesque walks in the British
countryside in the eighteenth century (see Solnit 2000 and a modification
of this argument in Lund 2005:27–42). The implications of being an Icelander within this cultural framework, which came later to Iceland and in
different form (see for example Sumarliði Ísleifsson 1996), were certainly
not lost on Haraldur:
Haraldur: I think Iceland is a little exotic in mountaineering. There is so much untouched there, while here every hill has been walked from every side and been
searched for a steeper way up. But at home, some shepherd might have run up and
down but nobody saw the point until the twentieth century in walking on mountains
just walking on them. Usually the sheep are the reason you’re there.
A recent ethnography of hillwalkers in Scotland provides some illuminating
and contextual annotations for Haraldur’s narrative. From her fieldwork in
Scotland in 2001 and 2002, anthropologist Katrín Lund learned that when
mountaineers scale the hills they express what the eye catches through actual descriptions. They look around and name mountains, glens and lochs in a
process of ordering the scenery. Moreover, she learned that walking in the
Scottish mountains is about “getting to know the country”, and this was
what most mountaineers agreed on. Working with the notion of reflexive
awareness, Lund goes on to illustrate that what the mountaineer sees needs
to be examined in relation to the sensual dialogue between the surroundings
and the self She found that in the course of one’s eyes moving over the Scottish Highlands (established as spectacular landscape) modes of movement
change at different inclinations and over the duration of the climb and that
“the eye not only observes, it also reflects” (Lund 2005:28–29). This correlated with the views the mountaineers frequently pointed out to her, that
when walking the Scottish hills you learn as much about yourself as you
learn about Scotland and that “getting to know the country and getting to
know yourself is the same thing’ (Lund 2005:29).
It is into this sensory dialogue, reflexive awareness and exclusive social
context that Haraldur brings his own sense of self and place. On joining the
society he presented a pamphlet he had put together entitled An Introduction
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Kristinn Schram
to Mountaineering in Iceland and provided networks and contacts in Icelandic mountaineering. He has recently gone as far as to bring two of his Scottish friends to Iceland. As he says, “we climbed a new mountain route and
that’s always considered remarkable. It’s something that will live on for the
next decades.” Self-effacingly, he declares having for long been planning to
seek funding from Icelandic airlines for British mountaineers, by so doing
bolstering tourism over the wintertime. Haraldur is frequently asked about
the country, its geology, climate and history. Overall, he explains, the mountaineers seek to gain from each other’s experiences, practical knowledge
and significantly from each stories. These storytelling sessions often begin
by trading practical information, how to get to the wilds and what to do there
and who to ask for logistical information. Often this will entail personal experience narratives that are often characterized by what he calls healthy exaggerations – a common Icelandic term:
Haraldur: Yes, what really matters in this is indeed the natural conditions, how the
snow lies, the ice. It matters greatly in terms of safety. People ask me. There’s news
of someone, somewhere and what the conditions where like. That’s when the stories
follow. Then of course when men have had a few drinks, than it’s like in fishing, the
salmon gets bigger and bigger with every story. It always gets steeper and steeper.
As an example of integrating into the group Haraldur mentions how after he
started to understand the in-crowd, and sometimes jocular, use of Gaelic
place-names he began to relate to his fellow-mountaineers how place-names
in the Iceland often correspond with the Scottish. In the light of his experiences it can also be argued that cultural exchange during, or more frequently, after the act of mountaineering, adds significantly to an already reflexive
construction of place and self. In addition to the reflexive awareness of self
and country already present in the mountaineering experience, Haraldur
brings a sense of place from outside of the immediate locality. Indeed he
also literally brings the “other” to his own locality by facilitating mountaineering trips to Iceland. But he also does this symbolically in the context of
the Scottish hillwalking through the process of both narration and, as illustrated below, symbolic food display as well as ironic narration of his foodways as being incongruous, exotic and northern. This becomes clear when
he explains the reason why he has acquired brennivín (literally “burnt
wine”), the signature Icelandic schnapps, and harðfiskur (dried fish) from
his family:
Haraldur: That’s mainly for, and has become an old tradition of mine, when I go to
the mountains. Its really great once you come back, because harðfiskur is packed
with proteins (gesture: presses hands together tightly) when you’re back in your tent
or your hut and are recharging for the next day. And also exhibits one’s custom (gesture: hands reaching out, palms upward). The Scots, of course, drink whisky like it
was water. It’s a big part, at the end of their day, to have a little whisky and go over
the day’s events. And then I have presented a little brennivín and have tried to…
(starts smiling) to turn them. The reception has been mixed.
67
The hint of irony in the last utterance and the grin that followed suggests that
this attempt at dietary conversion did not receive en entirely positive reaction. Indeed, an initiation into Icelandic tradition was not necessarily intended. In what he refers to as an “old tradition” of his, we may certainly see the
expression of nutritional values deeply rooted in Haraldur’s upbringing and
characteristic of a traditional Icelandic diet. But it is no less his performance
(and the olfactory effects of the food), rather than merely his consumption,
that has most significance in cultural context of those evenings recapping
the day’s events in tents and huts. He further elaborates on this in what he
calls tröllasögur (literally “troll-tales”) or tall tales:
Haraldur: Yes, I of course tell them troll-tales of how one should eat shark with
the brennivín and then completely exaggerate the shark’s production process.
That’s a real fountain and I’ve done that for the men, yes. I would just really like
to be able to bring over some shark (laughs) to show the men that it isn’t just some
fairy tale.
The exotic and masculine symbolism seen, evoking a northern counterpart to the already exotic Scottish Highlands, offers this Icelander abroad
a distinctive voice in the sensory dialogue and reflexive identity negotiation. The construction of the spectacular Highlands is admittedly perhaps akin to the heterotopias of Icelandic nature. But considering Haraldur’s narratives, I would argue that the image of Icelandic nature he performs, and in fact practises, is not a mere internalized component based
on ethereal stereotypes. It is on the contrary a major component of his
identity, daily life and foodways, and provides cultural capital both “at
home” but more significantly abroad, within the exclusive groups he
most effectively interacts with. It is an essential part of his phenomenological reality that is experienced with all his senses, explored with acquired skill and folklore and importantly constructed and narrated with
agency. However it is also a performed, exaggerated re-appropriation of
an emerging exotic image of a wild and “untouched” north. Through this
performance, “staged” within the narrative context of an enclosed tent or
hut, Haraldur deliberately embodies this exotic image and takes full advantage of the visual, olfactory and savoury effects of the traditional food
he offers as well as its symbolic meanings. While distancing himself from
the notion of authenticity (of the folklore or his national identity) Haraldur chooses eccentricity as a tactic to acquire voice and authority within
the strategies of the host culture.
Conclusions
When writing back in the face of othering representations created about
them abroad, Icelanders in early twentieth-century Copenhagen rejected an
exotic image of themselves, stressing their modern Europeanness, political
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Kristinn Schram
sophistication and developed – albeit deep-rooted – culture. In turn, they expressed abhorrence to the allegedly primitive nature-folk they saw on the
other side of the culture-nature dichotomy. In contemporary times marked
by international market forces, tourism and global media, Icelanders are not
simply reluctant receivers of exotic representations but have actually become their active performers. However, unlike the disembodied media images of “the other”, these performances can in fact be seen as a step in the
intricate communal processes of identity negotiation embedded in culturally
specific contexts and sensory experiences. Turning the representations of
northern eccentric nature-folk to their own ends, these individuals have
re-appropriated exoticized vernacular practices abroad as a tactic to gain access and influence within the strategies of new localities. Yet through their
playful exaggerations, they have also distanced themselves from any sense
of authenticity that might be associated with these practices. In effect, they
have negotiated new, ironic post-national identities, applying differentiation
not to build walls, but to open doors.
Postscript
In light of recent economic developments it seems almost impossible to conclude this article without a note on how, for many Icelanders abroad, the
liminal space of foreignness has now been charged with a new dynamic.
With a media backdrop of overgrown Icelandic banks collapsing both at
home and abroad; debilitating state guarantees of foreign deposits; and the
involvement of the International Monetary Fund, everyday transnational encounters and performances may be transformed. While Iceland may still be
relatively obscure in the minds of many Europeans and North Americans,
the coverage of the country’s woes and its effects on foreign depositors has
been considerable. The high profile that Icelandic businessmen have had in
countries of Northern Europe often referred to as Viking raiders, has done
little to quell negativity. Indeed many Icelanders report negative encounters,
and even altercations, abroad while others receive sympathy, condescension
and even offers of financial assistance.
Future research would do well in taking notice of these ever shifting dynamics of identities and the spaces in which they are negotiated. Not only is
the media backdrop altered but the composition of Icelanders abroad (fewer
financial professionals for one thing) and their economic and cultural conditions are likely to change as well. In what ways people may continue to
“perform the North” remains to be seen. While the borealism of exotic and
eccentric images, to appropriate Edward Said’s term orientalism, may persist its active re-appropriation might not continue in the same way. Tactics
may change with the strategies of culturally specific contexts. But what is
clear is that in the study of cultural identity and its performance in everyday
69
life and media, this albeit horrific economic crisis offers unique opportunities.
Kristinn Schram
Icelandic Centre for Ethnology and Folklore/University of Edinburgh
www.icef.is
References
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Politics and Ethnic Diversity. A Festschrift for Barbro Klein. Botkyrka.
Appadurai, Ardjun 1986: The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge.
Appadurai, Ardjun 1996: The Production of Locality. In Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis.
Bauman, Richard 1971: Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore. Journal of American Folklore 84.
Bauman, Richard 1984: Story, Performance and Event. Contextual Studies of Oral
Narrative. Cambridge.
Bendix, Regina & Klein, Barbro 1993: Foreigners and Foreignness in Europe: Expressive Culture in Transcultural Encounters. Journal of Folklore 30.
Billig, Michael 1995: Banal Nationalism. London.
Davidson, Peter 2005: The Idea of North. London.
de Certeau, Michel 1988: The Practice of Everyday Life. London.
Edensor, Tim 2001: Walking in the British Countryside: Reflexivity, Embodied
Practices and Ways of Escape. Bodies of Nature. London.
Einar K. Guðfinnson 9 December 2006. http://www.ekg.is/blogg/nr/669.
Fine, Elizabeth C. and Speer, Jean Haskell 1992: Performance, Culture, and Identity. Westport.
Gísli Sigurðsson 1996: Icelandic National Identity: From Romanticism to Tourism.
Making Europe in Nordic Contexts. (NIF Publications 35.) Turku.
Grace, Sherrill 2002: Canada and the Idea of North. Montreal & Kingston.
Greenblatt, Stephen 1991: Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World.
Chicago.
Griffiths, Ian 2006: Viking raiders return undefeated to Britain’s financial territory.
The Guardian. 13 October. London.
Guðmundur Hálfdánarson 2001: Íslenska þjóðríkið: uppruni og endimörk. Reykjavík.
Gunnar Karlsson 1995: The Emergence of Nationalism in Iceland. Ethnicity and Nation Building in the Nordic World. London.
Gunnell, Terry 2002: Komi þeir sem koma vilja … Úr manna minnum: Greinar um
íslenskar þjóðsögur. Reykjavík.
Jón Yngvi Jóhannesson 2003: Af reiðum Íslendingum. Deilur um Nýlendusýninguna 1905. Þjóðerni í þúsund ár? Reykjavík.
Klein, Barbro 2001: More Swedish than in Sweden, More Iranian than in Iran? Folk
Culture and World Migrations. In Upholders of Culture Past and Present. Stockholm.
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Labov, William 1972: The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia.
Lund, Katrín 2005: Seeing in Motion and the Touching Eye: Walking over Scotland’s Mountains. Etnofoor 17.
Macnaghten, Phil and Urry, John 2001: Bodies of Nature. London.
Oxfeldt, Elisabeth 2005: Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800–1900. Copenhagen.
Ragnar Axelsson 2004: Faces of the North. Reykjavík.
Said, Edward W. 1978: Orientalism. London.
Schutz, Alfred 1972: Der Fremde. Gesammelte Aufsätze Vol. II. The Hague.
Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson & Unnur Þóra Jökulsdóttir 2004: Íslendingar. Reykjavík.
Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson 1994: Fjallmyndin – sjónarhorn íslenskra landsagsljósmynda. Ímynd Ísland: Reykjavík.
Snorri Hjartarson 1952: Á Gnitaheiði. Reykjavík.
Spooner, Brian 1986: Weavers and Dealers: The Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet.
The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge.
Sumarliði Ísleifsson 1996: Ísland framandi land. Reykjavík.
Sumarliði Ísleifsson 2003: Iceland: Descriptions of Iceland and Icelanders Written
by Foreign Writers of Previous Centuries. Reykjavík.
Tangherlini, Timothy R. 2000: Heroes and Lies: Storytelling Tactics among Paramedics. Folklore 111.
Vilhjálmur Finsen 1958: Hvað landinn sagði erlendis. Norðri. Akureyri.
1 As an example I distinctly remember appropriating a Disneyland-bought leather belt in Native American style. Having had my name engraved on the belt, I claimed it was a gift from
the Icelandic Eskimos and that my name in the mother tongue actually translates as “The
Heroic One” (as opposed to the much duller “Christian”).
2 This feature film debut of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson was Oscar-nominated and received much
acclaim both at home and abroad.
3 This work, which will be discussed further in this article, includes Bendix & Klein (1993),
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1994) and Abrahams (2000).
4 The ethnography on which I base this article began in 2005 as part of my ongoing doctoral
research in the University of Edinburgh and the research project “Iceland and Images of the
North” (www.inor.is). Much of the fieldwork was carried out in collaboration with fellow
ethnologist and partner Katla Kjartansdóttir, centring on reflexive participant observation,
qualitative inquiry and audiovisual documentation of how Icelanders abroad conceptualize,
perform and negotiate their identities. Proceeding from this common ground, we attended
gatherings and visited private homes in cities such as London, Glasgow, Berlin, Edinburgh
and Copenhagen as well as interviewing participants who live or have lived in various other
locations in Europe and North America.
5 As another example, the Icelandic Photopress Society has in recent years rewarded the most
“national” photo. This year the motif was Icelanders bathing in the freezing sea and last
year Axelsson won a prize for his depiction of the last farmer of a valley in Westfjords, as
his last sheep are taken to slaughter. The jury’s appraisal was as follows: “The Icelandic
sheep, a farm, steep slopes, rough landscape, dark clouds and farmers who have lived in
close communion with harsh natural forces. Can it be more Icelandic?” (www.vikari.is/index.php?tree=6&page=61&ad=gr&id=925, last viewed in February 2006). Photograph by
Ragnar Axelsson.
6 The 66º North campaign of 2004 and 2005 by Jónsson & Le’macks. Photography by Ari
Magnússon.
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
71
/www.jl.is/verkefni/nr/8 (last viewed in February 2006).
See e.g. Börn náttúrunnar/Children of Nature (1991), Bíodagar/Movie Days (1994) and Á
köldum klaka/Cold Fever (1995).
Conversely, cases can be made that the scene ties in with the film’s gory style, as well as
fitting well into the traditional contemporary dichotomy drawn up between the protagonist,
a middle-aged detective, and his younger counterpart.
Fréttablaðið (a major Icelandic newspaper), 5 November 2006.
In an attempt to illustrate and trumpet Icelandic business successes abroad the president of
Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, stated in a speech that “because of how small the Icelandic nation is, we do not travel the world with an extra baggage of ulterior motives or big
power interests rooted in military, financial or political strength. No one is afraid to work
with us; people even see us as fascinating eccentrics who can do no harm and therefore all
doors are thrown wide open when we arrive” (Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson 2005:5).
One of the few possible exceptions to this is Denmark, where the Icelandic embassy reports
around 8,000 expatriates.
I retain the Icelandic interjection sko because it is idiomatic and intoned with mock forcefulness, its obscure meaning being something to the effect of “see here!”; “let me tell you”!
or “no less” depending on the context.
This is my translation of the variant Björk recited: Komi þeir sem koma vilja, veri þeir sem
vera vilja, fari þeir sem fara vilja, mér og mínum að meinalausu.
Icelandic proverb: Þú býður ekki hættunni heim.
This interview was conducted in June 2006. I wish to thank Áslaug, now living with her
husband and two children in Helsinki, for her contribution to the research.
This was actually among the most common things our participants mentioned when asked
to “describe Icelanders”. General responses to the question were surprisingly consistent
from one participant to another suggesting some uniformity within banal national identities
(on banal nationalism see Michael Billig, 1995). Other common responses described Icelanders as disorganized, discourteous nature-lovers who have an omnipresent can-do attitude which is characterized by the idiom “þetta reddast”; meaning roughly that the things
will work themselves out. Indeed Áslaug referred to this alleged characteristic even before
the interview formally began.
Katla Kjartansdóttir and I have also conducted participant observations of ironic performances given at the Icelandic þorrablót in Scotland and the þorrablót of the London branch
of the Icelandic Glitnir bank.
While still in the UK, Haraldur went south of the border to England not long after this
much-appreciated contribution to the research in the summer of 2006. He has recently communicated that he still misses Scotland.
While I do not pretend to understand my informant’s hilarity at this point, a certain and perhaps apparent irony presents itself in that Nói Albínói does not go far in representing the
Westfjords towns. In fact, in my interview with Dagur Kári (2005), he claims that the
scripted location was modelled on Springfield, the cartoon town from TV series The
Simpsons.
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Kristinn Schram
Transatlantic Place Making
73
Transatlantic Space Making
The Use of Swedish Bridal Crown as Heritage Performance in
the United States
Lizette Gradén
Värmlandsgåvan, The Värmland Gift, which is a donation from people of
the province of Värmland in Sweden to Värmlanders in the United States,
was presented to the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota
in 1952.1 The Värmland Gift is an assemblage of almost 3,000 greetings
gathered in a book, 200 volumes of literature and 300 objects which constitutes the largest donation ever made to the American Swedish Institute’s
collection. Most symbolic value has been ascribed to a replica of a bridal
crown from Karlstad Cathedral.
The questions are: How does a centerpiece of a collection come about?
What is the relationship between such heritage performance and the making
of place? This study forms part of a wider study of layman collections produced in the wake of migration and found in cultural history museums.
Here, my main focus is the performative use of a Swedish bridal crown and
how the use of this piece in the United States contributes to the reshaping of
emigrant and immigrant place into a malleable, coherent transatlantic
space.2
The letter of intent that accompanied the gift explained that the collection
was created by over 1,000 private individuals in collaboration with Värmlands hembygdsförbund, the regional folklife association, and was meant to
provide the 140,000 people who emigrated from Värmland between 1850
and 1930, and their descendants, with “an in-depth material history that they
lack in America.”3
The idea of the Värmland Gift dates from 1948. On the occasion of the
first celebration of the Sweden-America Day in Karlstad, Swedish Consul
General Carl Fredrik Hellström from Minneapolis suggested, as an addition
to rituals such as the Sweden-America Day, a substantial material gift articulating the good relationship between Värmland and the US, created over
the years by emigrants and returnees and their friends and family who had
remained at home.4 The idea of such a gift captivated Värmland’s governor
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Lizette Gradén
Axel Westling. In October 1951 he sent an appeal to every parish in the
province.5 Through the efforts of a committee with representatives from the
parishes, the entire gift was assembled in six months. In addition to the
parish gifts, the committee decided on a bridal crown as the common gift
from the province.
In June 1952, when a delegation from Värmland presented the Värmland
Gift to the American Swedish Institute, it was received with great interest.6
Upon arrival, the collection was inaugurated by Värmlandsförbundet, a social
organization founded in 1927, and made the highlight of Svenskarnas Dag,
one of the major Swedish festivals in the Midwest. Since it was installed, the
American Swedish Institute has displayed the collection in various constellations, or new versions of the collection, over a period of 50 years.
In addition to the centerpiece bridal crown, which was commissioned expressly for the collection, the Värmland Gift includes art, handcrafts, textiles, utensils, inventions, furniture, religious objects, miniature houses,
photographs, publications, and more. The donors described some objects as
functional and everyday, others as extravagant and highly unique.7 In a
Swedish-American setting, these objects are transformed into symbols of
identity. For emigrants from Värmland and their descendants, the collection
makes visible the ties to their old homeland. To visitors from Sweden, the
objects are reminders of the Swedishness of their American cousins. To visitors in general, the Värmland Gift displays analogies of their own migration
story.8
The first time I learned about the Värmland Gift was in 1990 when I
worked at the American Swedish Institute. Because I grew up in Värmland,
the curator was eager to show me the Värmland Gift. I returned to the Värmland Gift in 2006. This article is based on archival material from Sweden
and the USA, and on fieldwork and interviews in the United States. During
fieldwork I have worked with curators, volunteers and staff who care for and
preserve the Värmland Gift Collection at the American Swedish Institute, as
well as with individuals who have used the bridal crown.
The Transfers and Transformations of a Swedish Bridal Crown
According to the curator, volunteers, and individuals who had used the
crown, the bridal crown was the most important object of the Värmland Gift
Collection. When I asked why the bridal crown was particularly important,
they highlighted the crown’s artists, craftsmanship and precious materials.
Most, however, described the crown’s origin in Värmland and its significance as a gift symbolizing an eternal relationship between people from
Värmland on both continents and commented on how important it was to
Swedish-American wedding celebrations.
When handled and represented in various ways, the bridal crown draws
75
The American Swedish Institute, Minneapolis, Minnesota was founded as a museum in 1929.
Photo by Lizette Gradén.
new connections between individuals, family, and institutions. Through
these written, verbal, and visual representations the bridal crown creates
transatlantic bridges between places in the province of Värmland and places
in the United States – places marked by emigration and immigration. In the
official gift letter that accompanied the Värmland Gift collection to the
United States, people in Värmland described the crown as follows:
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Lizette Gradén
When the bridal crown arrived it was entered into the collection, a rite of passage which separates a museum object from objects outside the museum sphere. Unlike many museum objects,
however, the bridal crown is also circulated outside the museum sphere. Photo by Lizette
Gradén.
77
Folk of kinship in the province of Värmland send to the citizens of Värmland heritage in the United States a greeting with a gift from the old ancestral home. The gift
is a reproduction of the bridal crown from Karlstad Cathedral. It is an emblem of a
desire that the ties between American and Swedish citizens of the same tribe shall be
joined generation after generation.”9
The bridal crown illuminates both how people concretize their perceptions
of reality and ideals by making objects material and how these perceptions
are passed on and rematerialized in writing. In the accompanying letter, the
bridal crown is presented as a materialization of relationships between
people in emigrant and immigrant communities, between family and friends
on both sides of the Atlantic.
The use of the bridal crown is a distinctively Scandinavian or Nordic
custom, one that is still practiced in Swedish (Knuts 2006) and also in
Swedish-American weddings. The Scandinavian ritual of using a crown in
the wedding ceremony may have been derived from the practice of adorning
the statue of the Madonna with a crown in churches in the Catholic period
in Scandinavia (Resare 1988:78; Knuts 2006). As an object, writes AnnaMaja Nylén, the silver bridal crown is regarded as the strongest symbol of
virginity. Of all the ornaments for the body the silver bridal crown was worn
only during weddings, as a badge of honor for chaste brides. Nylén points
out that churches in Sweden in the early twentieth century increasingly
loaned out their bridal crowns made of precious materials. Unchaste brides
wore flower-wreaths or crowns made of materials such as steel wire, cloth,
lace, and glazed paper (Nylén 1962) – thus less durable materials than silver.
The bridal crown in the Karlstad Cathedral was inaugurated in 1931.
A silver bridal crown plays a key role when author Vilhelm Moberg in his
novel Sista brevet till Sverige published in 1959, resurrects the honor of the
prostitute Ulrika of Västergöhl, who was regarded a whore in her home
parish in Sweden. First, Moberg transforms Ulrika into a crown bride in
America and thereafter to donor of a “gift from North America to Ljuder
church”, a bridal crown of silver and precious stones to be loaned to “those
brides who are known for their virtue, honor and good manners” (1959:242–
249).
In the same way as previous ethnological studies demonstrate the silver
crown’s transformative force, the stories about the bridal crown can transform women’s view of themselves. Keeping in mind that many emigrants
from Värmland after 1890 were single women (Måwe 1971; cf. Lintelman
2005), it is likely that the women in the province were familiar with the impact of the tradition and possibly considered the social consequences for
women whose families did not have access to their own silver crown.
The custom of reserving the silver crown for a chaste bride seems to have
been common also in Norway (Noss 1991), and some of the women I met
via the American Swedish Institute, whose families had emigrated before
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Lizette Gradén
the Sweden-Norway separation in 1905, made connections between the
Värmland Gift bridal crown and family crowns from Norway. A couple
shared with me how they used their family crown from Norway at their wedding in 1994, although the bride’s roots in Värmland would have entitled her
to wear the Värmland Gift crown. When worn in the American context, the
bridal crown performs the bride’s heritage in Scandinavia.
A Contested Object
The Värmland Gift was not without controversy at the outset. People involved in making and collecting the objects, of course, appreciated the gift.
Museum representatives in Sweden, however, reacted strongly to the initiative of the Värmlanders to provide their relatives and friends in the United
States with the collection of artifacts from the province.
Albin Widén, Swedish author, curator, and scholar of Swedish-America,
wrote:
It has been mentioned that a bridal crown is the main item in the Värmland Gift. In
recent years, several bridal crowns have been donated to Swedish-America and one
of the donors is a female member of the Institute’s Board. Should girls of Swedish
ancestry in Minneapolis wish to borrow a Swedish bridal crown, they already have
access to one. […] Export art and handicrafts, but leave Swedish peasant culture at
home! (DN 6 April 1952; VF 7 April 1952).
Carl A. Boberg, a Värmlander and returnee from Chicago, replied:
According to Dr. Widén there is already a bridal crown in Minneapolis, to be used
by Swedish descendants who want to marry. Who cares? It is not from Värmland!
The crown to be sent is meant for the girls from Värmland. That is the great difference. Värmland is the crown among Svearikes länder! Bryntesson from Svaneholm,
who has donated the crown, is a Swedish-American and he knows what he is doing
(NWT 8 April 1952).
The Governor of Värmland responded:
Our goal with the Värmland Gift to the US has been to provide expression of a personal connection through traditions and community history. […] Doctor Widén is
seething over the fact that they are sending an expensive bridal crown, when
Swedish-America is already in disposition of several such crowns. He seems not to
have understood that what is intended here is to convey an idealistic connection with
Värmland, to provide a breath of their native home. It is none other than the bridal
crown from Karlstad Cathedral that they wish to send over. (NWT 10 April 1952)
The fuss over the Värmland Gift reflects different perceptions of heritage.
Albin Widén considered the Värmland Gift to be unfit for export to America. In the mid-twentieth century, Nordic museums often presented their collections from a nineteenth-century view of “peasant” and upper-class cultures.10 For example, provincial costumes, everyday pottery, and religious
objects were classified by region and unattributed by maker or donor
79
(“man’s folk costume, Norra Ny Parish, Värmland province”), whereas objects from the upper class were classified chronologically and always identified with owner and donor (“Bridal crown, silver with gold filigree, artist
Oscar Jonsson, goldsmith Thure Ahlgren, Karlstad, bequest 1952 of John
Bryntesson, Svaneholms herrgård). The Värmland Gift includes objects
from both spheres, and the controversy arises from the Gift including both
kinds of objects.
Objects as Heritage Performance
People who had stayed in Värmland and who created the Värmland Gift collection presented the American Swedish Institute with a context for understanding how this particular province wanted to be understood in the United
States. By mixing heirlooms, mundane things, and new items such as the
bridal crown into a collection, the people of Värmland imagine, alter, and
rebuild their worlds.
The bridal crown and the ways in which it has been used can be understood as forms of performances through which participants articulate belonging in time and space. Richard Bauman (1992) characterizes performances as displays of expressive competence, in which people take responsibility for their action before an audience. This sense of performance focuses
on form and composition, on how the act is carried out and how it relates to
life outside of the event itself. It shows how meaning is created and expressed by individuals, groups, and communities, but also how collaborative activity, such as the use of the bridal crown, over time creates shared
experience that makes shared understanding possible. My interest here lies
in analyzing how the relationship between heritage and place is created
when people collaboratively and voluntarily produce performances involving the bridal crown.
Performance is thus understood in this context to mean both verbal and
non-verbal stylized communication that takes place front stage, following
Goffman (1959), i.e. in rooms that are accessible to the public to a greater
or lesser extent. Museum exhibitions are obviously part of the front stage.
In this study, however, I attend to performances that take place in storage
rooms and other areas where the objects are handled – rooms considered
backstage for the museum visitor. In addition to human actors, and following Bruno Latour, I also perceive objects as actants – that is, objects with the
capacity to make us humans perform in particular ways. The actants connect
and engage us in the making of sustainable networks (Latour 1998) that span
time and geographical distance. In focus are thus performances emerging in
interactions between the curator, the researcher, the museum object, and its
users outside the museum.
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Lizette Gradén
Performed and Embodied Heritage
In the 1970s, the ASI struck a balance between the museum’s task of caring
for and displaying the crown and the intention of the donors to provide
women from Värmland in the US with their own bridal headpiece. Keeping
the crown in storage became a way to balance between caring for and providing access to the crown, without marketing the object. Storing it in a
locker outside of public view but accessible for those who know about its
existence, the object appears more precious than when put on display for the
public at the museum. In this sense the museum transfers the bridal crown
from an object of display to an object of exclusivity.
Following Goffman, the showcasing of the bridal crown in the storage
area transforms this part of the museum from backstage to front stage (Goffman 1995), from storage to a semi-public space, where museum staff and
researchers can act. Judging from the object’s careful placement in relation
to other objects on adjacent shelves, the bridal crown still played a key role
in the Värmland Gift collection. Although away from public view, the
crown becomes a display for selected view. In this area, the curator carefully
pulled down the container, opened it and lifted out the crown in a manner
that demonstrated familiarity – and great respect. The curator said:
As you know [referring both to his taking me through the archival photos, as well as
to my learning to know the storage areas at the ASI from text describing and photos
depicting the crown to getting to know the actual object] this beautiful headpiece is
very different from other bridal crowns in our collections. It is unique! It is a gift
from the people of Värmland, ordinary people to the people from Värmland living
over here. The crown stands 3½ inches high and measures 3 inches in diameter. It is
made of gold filigree over silver and is inset with rubies and rhinestones. It was designed by artist Oscar Jonsson and made by goldsmith Thure Ahlgren, both from
Värmland.
While setting and performance are crafted to attract an audience, the back
stage belongs to those working to prepare the performance (Goffman 1995:
107–112), hence exhibits. Places such as the storage area that are back stage
in daily life at the museum become transformed into front stage when curator and researcher venture into the Värmland Gift collection. This shift appears only in performance. The curator’s verbal presentation of the bridal
crown reinforces the crown’s preeminent status. As a researcher I listen.
The curator hands the crown over to me. The silver feels cold as the
crown rests heavy in the palm of my hand, and because of its weight I spontaneously exclaimed: “It’s so heavy – how could a bride keep it on her
head?” One of the volunteers who knew the Värmland Gift well replied that,
in the 1950s and 1960s, when the crown was frequently used, the American
Swedish Institute referred brides-to-be to the beauty salon at Dayton’s department store, whose hairdressers had learned how to use “doughnuts”,
rings padded with flax or horse hair to fasten the crown. In this case, the
81
bridal crown becomes an actant (Latour 1998) which influences the hairdresser’s performance, i.e. how bride’s body is dressed. It also connects the
American Swedish Institute with Dayton’s department store.
Like a costume in a play, the bridal crown and the details about it seem to
add authenticity to the story. Along with its careful placing in metal storage,
away from public view, the curator’s biography of the object (Kopytoff
1986) contributes to making it unique. The Värmland bridal crown is presented as “different” from other bridal crowns in ASI’s collections and described as “unique”. By stating the exact measurements of the crown, its
spatial dimensions are meticulously communicated. The crown is also put
forth as a work of art, whose quality, surface and luster, the proportions and
specific workmanship, conjure up its aesthetics as a value that transcends
space, connecting people within the United States and across the Atlantic.
Besides materializing culture through verbal communication, the crown materializes culture in visual representations.
Doubled Object, Increased Value
The ways in which the bridal crown performs heritage is also apparent in
wedding announcements. The following example is found in Minneapolis
paper The Tribune. In this particular announcement, the crown is carefully
combined with another transatlantic object, namely one half of a table
cloth made in Norway and brought to the United States. While the crown
materializes culture it is also an important instance of its embodiment. The
crown as instrument allows heritage to be embodied, the word to become
flesh.
A Swedish crown from the province of Värmland and one half of a table cloth woven
almost 200 years ago, by a former Bishop of Norway, lent a Scandinavian touch to
the wedding Friday evening of Mary Kirsten Towley of Hopkins and David Robert
Swanson of Cokato, Minnesota.
The bride, daughter of Mrs Carl Kahrs Towley, 246 N. 6th Av., Hopkins, and the late
Mr Towley, wore a crown presented to the American Swedish Institute by the Swedish province. (The bride’s maternal grandfather, Dr. P. A. Mattson, came from this
province, entitling her to wear the crown). (Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, 30 July
1961)
Like a press release or written review for a theatre production, the wedding
announcement communicates and legitimizes that the production actually
took place. The wedding announcement articulates exclusivity tied to the
crown, as the museum applies particular rules for its usage. As stated in the
quotation, the bride is “entitled” to wear the crown because of her maternal
grandfather’s coming from Värmland, a concept of heritage that brings to
mind inheritance of reigns among royalty in Sweden.
But mostly the description offers insights into how doubling of objects,
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Lizette Gradén
The joining of Värmland and the USA in matrimony. Photo: The Sweden America Center.
through pairing or replication, increases symbolic value. The meaning invested here in the bridal crown challenges a common perception of museum
objects as unique and intact, while it also challenges the logic of collections,
where each piece ought to be unique (Stewart 1993:161). I would like to
suggest, using the bridal crown, that the doubling of the object through replication is crucial to how people value it. The doubled object, of which one
remains in the homeland, creates a particular pre-eminent connection between the individuals that come into contact with it. The replica increases
rather than decreases the value of the earlier versions, because both are created by the same artists, touched by the same hands. The replica moves
across space more freely than the previous version and thus touches more
people emotionally while literally allowing it to be touched by a larger
number of people. While the bridal crown from Karlstad Cathedral becomes an instrument for embodying gender and kin, the replica becomes
an instrument for embodying lineage overseas, an act that puts heritage
into place.
The ways in which the bridal crown materializes culture also echo in photographs. In the visual documentation of the 1952 Värmland Gift exhibition
at the ASI, the bridal crown appears time and again. In one of the photographs from the event, the bridal crown is literally elevated when handed
over from the county governor to the president of the Värmland association.
Thus the bridal crown was granted a special position, even photographically. Just as a wedding photograph plays a crucial part in the wedding ceremo-
83
ny in the western world (Eicher 2006; cf. Kjerström 1993:145–167), the
photograph with the governor handing over of the bridal crown to the president of the Värmlandsförbundet plays an important role in confirming to future generations that the official marriage ceremony took place; that the
Värmland descendants and receivers of the crown said, “I do!”
Embodying Patriarchal Heritage and Performing Transatlantic
Place
In the early 2000s, several young women showed an interest in wearing the
Värmland bridal crown for their weddings. According to ASI staff, these requests (phone calls) came from women whose mothers or grandmothers had
worn the crown at their weddings. Besides pointing out family relations, the
bridal crown seemed attractive for future brides who wished to have what
they described as “all-Swedish weddings”, or to make their weddings “totally Swedish”. These young women seemed to follow the trend in the Midwest for large, costly weddings and an interest, dating back a couple of decades, in theme weddings (Winge & Eicher 2003:207–218) where clothing,
table settings and choice of party facility all articulate relationships to fairytales, music and specific eras,11 or in the case of the bridal crown, that something Swedish is taking place.
In a similar manner, old-fashioned Finnish-Swedish weddings were
popular among couples of Finnish-Swedish background living in Sweden in
the late 1990s (Larsen 1998). The bridal crown from Värmland becomes attractive to young women because a theme wedding offers a playful, creative
and carnivalesque alternative to a traditional wedding that is often perceived
as serious, conformist, and ritualized. However, just as a traditional wedding communicates who the bride and groom wish to be, the Swedish theme
wedding in the United States communicates the wedding couple’s values
and ideals.
Although the term theme wedding may be new, weddings have long been
a site for women’s heritage performances. Among women living in the
United States, the desire to wear the Värmland bridal crown is not new. It
has been popular in the past, also during times when bridal crowns were
considered out of fashion. In the summer of 2006, I interviewed women who
had worn the crown, whereupon new stories and meanings invested in the
crown emerged. Marie Ylinen (nee Olsson), aged 82, was the first woman
to wear the bridal crown. While the story she shared with me is rich in narratives and dramatic turns and deserves an analysis in itself, what is important for this study is how crucial it was to her and her father that she be the
first. Marie reflected:
In 1952, when the Värmland Gift was on its way to Minnesota, my father was
the director of Värmlandsförbundet and I was about to get married. As it was
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Lizette Gradén
John Bryntesson, who had enabled my father to emigrate from Värmland, who
also had paid for having the crown replicated, the crown meant a lot to my father.
To him, it was a direct connection to the man whom my father throughout his life
credited his courage to leave Sweden and success in America. I met him, a very
nice man, when I spent the summer in Värmland, at 19. My wedding took place
right here (she makes a large, sweeping gesture towards the floor before the fireplace where Marie had chosen we’d sit during the interview), that is in the ASI
Grand Hall.12
Unlike the curator’s performance, where the bridal crown is presented as
unique and a one of a kind, Marie emphasizes that the crown she wore was
indeed the replica of the crown from Karlstad Cathedral. Marie Ylinen’s use
makes the connection between the two crowns. The value she grants the replica is inextricably linked to the fact that its twin is located in Karlstad Cathedral and used by women in Värmland.
Because of Ragnar Olsson being a founding member of Värmlandsförbundet and thus his status in the Swedish-American community, his
daughter was able to be the first bride in America to wear the crown for
the wedding and reception in the museum’s Grand Hall. In her story about
the wedding she emphasized that she had musicians play “Finlandia” by
Sibelius to honor Arthur Ylinen, her husband-to-be, who identified himself as a “Finn from the Iron Range”. Apart from that, she explained, the
entire wedding was “Swedish-to-the-max”, including a color scheme of
blue and yellow. According to Marie, she said yes to her future husband
and to her Swedish background. The spatial framing of Marie’s wedding
was a performance of Swedishness, the crown expressed the secondgeneration immigrant bride’s regional connection and gave her heritage a
definite place of origin.
Heritage Renewed
In 2002, the current governor of Värmland, Ingemar Eliasson, again
crowned Marie Ylinen as “the Värmland Gift Bride” at the Värmlandsjubileet, the American Swedish Institute’s fiftieth anniversary celebration of the
Värmland Gift. When remembering and commenting upon the event in the
interview in 2006, Marie Ylinen said:
I was honored and it was very festive with a nice dinner, toasts and the whole bit.
Being re-crowned was like being confirmed – like I have lived the Swedish-American life I was expected to live…that my father expected me to live (laughs). For this
rich life, my heart is overflowing with thankfulness for God’s protection, His provision and the promise of His love.13
A recrowning, a confirmation, a renewal of heritage – the bridal crown continues to be a force for revitalized connection between Värmland and the
United States. In her recollection of the crowning ceremony in 2002, Marie
Ylinen describes the event as a confirmation. On another level, the recrown-
85
ing demonstrates similar features to the election of the festival queen in
Lindsborg, Kansas, a senior citizen who reconfirms heritage by blood/lineage as well as long-term commitment to and involvement in activities perceived as Swedish (Gradén 2003; cf. Larsen this volume). The celebration
of the Värmland Gift anniversary in 2002 and the subsequent crowning
ceremony of Marie Ylinen may be interpreted as a return gift (Mauss 2002)
and as a continuation of the symbolic matrimony between Värmlanders in
Sweden and US that the bridal crown of the Värmland Gift came to materialize in the 1950s. The re-crowning of Marie may therefore be understood
as a renewal of vows – a revitalized connection between Värmland and the
United States, performing a transatlantic place.
Other women have followed in the footsteps of Marie Ylinen’s heritage
performance. Marcia Linnér Swanson, who wore the crown in the late
1950s, emphasized that the choice to wear the crown at her wedding was important to her father more than anything. Her father, with a prominent position in the Swedish-American business community in the Midwest, insisted
she should wear the Värmland bridal crown. She felt, however, wearing a
crown was out of fashion, and that the crown in particular did not fit with
her wedding dress. She said:
The privilege [of wearing the crown] was extended to me because my father’s grandparents were born in Sweden. When requesting the crown we presented my father’s
family tree. We brought in all the papers we had, and I don’t know for sure that all
my relatives came from Värmland. We were kindly granted the loan of the crown
and I wore the crown to honor my father and his family background – it was much
more important to him than it was to me.14
According to Goffman (1995), we always prepare ourselves for the stages
we are to act on and Marcia’s dress and body ornaments can be seen as
strategies for performance to ensure success. This is not unique. Like
people of all times, places, and social milieus, Marcia Linnér Swanson and
her fellow women of Swedish descent dress for the stage in the United
States on which they are to act, modifying or supplementing the body in
specific ways. The combing of the hair, and the selecting of clothing and
accessories are ways of creating a cultured body. As an ornament supplementing young women’s bodies, the Swedish bridal crown articulates a
wedding celebration and a new stage of life. Marcia makes a particular decision on what to wear – a white long-sleeved dress with a narrow waist
and wide skirt – a dress seemingly inspired by the New Look, launched in
1947 by Dior.
Marcia Linnér Swanson had to dress for two stages. While she describes
the crown as being out of fashion, she also speaks of the wearing of the
crown as a privilege, extended to her by her father’s family, whose family
tree they had brought to the museum to get access to the crown. Although
the Värmland heritage here is embodied by Marcia Linnér Swanson wearing
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Lizette Gradén
the crown, the wearing takes place by the agency of her father and his grandfather’s parents.
A father’s actions and values are prevalent also in a man’s story about the
bridal crown. Nils Hasselmo, who was born in Sweden and emigrated to the
United States in the 1950s, describes to me how he and his wife selected the
crown for their 1950s wedding in the Midwest in the following manner:
As I remember this selection it was the memory of my father’s work to assemble the
Värmland Gift which made us think about using it. A friend of ours who traveled
from Minneapolis brought it along for the wedding. To borrow the crown was an
easy procedure at the time! I also believe the crown had received a lot of publicity.
For me, the crown provided an interesting link to Värmland, now when I was to marry in Diaspora. As you know, my wife was interested in her Swedish background
too.15
The stories illuminate that, although the bridal crown is worn by women,
there is also a strong patriarchal connection, where the words of the fathers
are materialized and embodied in the bride’s wearing of the crown. Like
Marie Ylinen’s, Marcia Linnér Swanson’s recollections of the crown articulate how they as brides in their respective weddings acceded to their fathers’
wishes and to his sense of heritage in Värmland. In Nils Hasselmo’s recollection, however, the father of the groom is at the center of the request for
the crown, and it is because of Nils Hasselmo’s background and not hers that
he and his wife are granted the crown. The regional connection is emphasized when Nils Hasselmo describes his marriage to a spouse of Swedish
background as one in the Diaspora, implicitly suggesting that the bridal
crown has the power to transform her into an honorable woman of Värmland
heritage.
The bridal crown can be seen as materializing or invoking the Swedish
woman as embodied transatlantic life. The women’s similar relationship to
the crown is closely connected to their relationship to their father, as an authority, and in turn to their fathers’ relationship to the native country. Wearing the bridal crown, the woman becomes the bearer of an imagined heritage
that includes heritage by blood. When the ASI require documented blood relations to Värmland as a premise for lending the crown, heritage blood is
made a powerful force in defining and making a transatlantic relationship.
Approved loans from the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate this relationship.
The bridal crown has been lent to daughters of men who have sat on the
Board of ASI, been ASI sponsors, and held prominent positions in Swedish-American cultural and business life. In cases where loans have not been
approved, families have failed to demonstrate their relationship to Värmland. The bridal crown and people’s handling of it thus link older and
younger generations of women of Värmland descent, families with Swedish
backgrounds, with the museum and its interested parties and donors. Evident in the wearing of the bridal crown is a sense of care and pride and a
87
sense of understanding family as unit that bridges the living and the dead
and spans several places.
The ways in which the women and men choose the bridal crown make it
possible for us to observe strands of social and aesthetic forces in Swedish-American society because the crown has the capacity to create groups.
The transformative capacity makes body ornamentation perhaps the richest
category of material culture (Baumgarten 2002; Miller & Küchler 2005).
The Värmland bridal crown not only connects women of Värmland background with women of future generations through a patriarchal relationship;
the crown also has an impact on how these women (and men) view themselves. The crown may thus be perceived as what Bruno Latour refers to as
an actant (Latour 1998), an object that makes us as humans act in a particular way – a way that creates connections. In the case of the crown, as an object that actively contributes to transforming unmarried girls into women, it
connects people not only to a country of heritage but to a very specific place
in that country.
Performing Migration Heritage
Many folklorists have shown how migrants and their descendants select and
combine objects from the homeland into meaningful cultural displays to be
experienced in museums and events (Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998;
Klein 2001:67–80, Gradén 2003) and in individual homes (Gradén 2004:
276–291; Gunnell 2003:89–108).16 These assemblages, often created from
heirlooms with dense biographies (Kopytoff 1986:64–94) from their history
of use and ownership, have the capacity to bridge mental and physical
worlds and give shape to migration experiences and fantasies about the
country once left (Gradén 2003:168ff). These folkloristic studies, having
been developed in close relationship with performance theory, emphasize
not only the work of institutions and groups but also the individual in the social moment of creativity.
Similarly, in this article I have shown how the uses of a Swedish bridal
crown become a force in individuals’ and groups’ performance of heritage,
anchoring their migration story in Sweden and the United States, and linking
them in a coherent transatlantic place. This analysis has been possible by
following the transfer of a bridal crown from Sweden to the United States
and by understanding performance to mean both non-verbal and verbal
communication and to include all participants as well as myself and the object itself as collaborating actors performing on stages.
Dress and ornaments are objects that make the body visible, especially in
the wake of migration (cf. Hol Haugen 2006; Gradén & McIntyre 2009).
The transfer of the bridal crown from Sweden to the United States, from the
exhibit to storage and further to private homes, demonstrates how the bridal
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Lizette Gradén
crown continues to be a force in the performance of gender and ethnicity.
These connections form a transatlantic space in which crucial meanings related to migration are embodied, acted out, integrated with the present, and
made accessible for interpretation by members of the community and others
(cf. Bauman 1992). This heritage performance enables men and women to
put their heritage into place.
By being used at weddings across the United States, the bridal crown ties
together generations of women, ethnic identification, and spaces in the
United States in transatlantic place – all in the body of a woman but through
the agency of a father. The crown, thereby, makes what at first seems to be
a migration heritage carried forth by women. On closer look, however, it
proves to be ensured by a patriarchal relationship, and articulating a relationship between embodiment and space making. Based on this study I
would suggest on one hand that embodiment, here of migration heritage, can
be seen as a form of spatialization. Embodiment creates a trajectory through
space, thus making a coherent transatlantic space. On the other hand, one
may say that the Värmland Gift collection spaces a context for embodiment.
Without the Värmland Gift and without the bridal crown, perhaps there
would be no such performances allowing such embodiment of gendered ethnic migration heritage.
Lizette Gradén, fil. dr
Researcher/Director of Graduate Studies
Konstfack/University College of Arts, Crafts and Design
LM Ericssons väg 14
126 27 Hägersten, Sweden
References
Fieldnotes July–August 2006, the American Swedish Institute, Minneapolis, MN.
Archives
The American Swedish Institute
Emigrantregistret, Karlstad
Interviews
Marie Ylinen, 2–3 August 2006
Marcia Linnér Swanson, 19 August 2006
Nils Hasselmo, 23 August 2006
Newspapers
Dagens Nyheter, 6, 10 April 1952
Nya Wermlands Tidningen, 9 April 1952
Värmlands Folkblad, 7, 9 April 1952
Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, 30 July 1961
89
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Baumgarten, Linda 2002: What clothes reveal. The language of clothing in colonial
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Eicher, Joanne 1995: Dress and Ethnicity. Change across Space and Time. Oxford:
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Eicher, Joanne & Ling, Lisa 2006: Mother Daughter Sister Bride. Rituals of
Womanhood. Washington D.C.: National Geographic Society.
Goffman, Erving 1995 (1959): Jaget och maskerna. En studie i vardagslivets dramatik. 3rd ed. Trans. S. Bergström. Stockholm: Rabén Prisma.
Gradén, Lizette 2003: On Parade. Making Heritage in Lindsborg, Kansas. ACTA
Universitatis Upsaliensis. Centre for Multiethnic Studies. Uppsala.
Gradén, Lizette 2004: Christmas in Lindsborg: About the Miniature Collection,
Place and Time. Creating Diversities: Folklore, Religion and the Politics of
Heritage. Helsinki: Studia Fennica.
Gradén, Lizette and Peterson McIntyre, Magdalena 2009 (ed.): Modets metamorfoser. Stockholm: Carlssons.
Gunnell, Terry 2003: Vatnið og uppsprettan. Þjóðtrú og þjóðsiðir innflytjenda í
Reykjavík. Skírnir 177.
Hol Haugen, Björn Sverre 2006 (ed.): Norsk bunadleksikon: Alle norske bunader og
samiske folkedrakter. Oslo: Damm.
Hyltén-Cavallius, Charlotte 2007: Traditionens estetik. Spelet mellan inhemsk och
utländsk hemslöjd. Stockholm: Carlssons.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1989. Objects of Memory. Material Culture as Life
Review. In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres. A Reader, ed. Elliott Oring, pp.
329–338. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Kjerström, Eva 1993: Minnet av bröllopet. Om bröllopsfotografiet förr och nu. Kulturen Lund: Kulturens årsbok.
Klein, Barbro 2001: More Swedish than Sweden, More Iranian than Iran. Folk Culture and World Migrations. In Upholders of Culture, Past and Present, ed. Bo
Sundin. Göteborg: Chalmers Medialab.
Kopytoff, Igor 1986: The Biography of Things. In The Social Life of Things. Commodities in a Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Knuts, Eva 2006: Något gammalt, något nytt. Skapande av bröllopsföreställningar.
Göteborg: Mara. Diss.
Larsen Pico, Hanne 1999: Midsommarbröllup i Vörå 1998. In Rågens Rike. Folkkulturella yttringar förr och nu, pp. 64–69. Vörå (Finland. Årspublikation).
Latour, Bruno 1998: Artefaktens återkomst. Ett möte mellan organisationsteori och
tingens sociologi. Stockholm: Nerenius och Santérus förlag.
Lintelman, Joy K. 2005: Between the Mundane and the Memorable. The Letters of
Single and Married Swedish Immigrant Women. The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly. 2005 (56):2/3.
Lowenthal, David 1989: Pioneer Museums. In History Museums in the United
States, ed. Warren Leon & Roy Rosenzweig, pp. 115–128. Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
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Mauss, Marcel 2002 (1972): The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge.
Måwe, Carl-Erik 1971: Värmlänningar i Amerika. Sociologiska studier i en anpassningsprocess. Säffle: Säffletidningens tryckeri.
Miller, Daniel and Susan Küchler 2005: Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg.
Noss, Aagot 1991: Lad og Krone, frå jente til brur. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Nylén, Anna-Maja 1962: Varför klär vi oss. Kring dräktens roll förr och nu.
Västerås: ICA.
Resare, Ann 1988: Brudklädsel. Fataburen. Stockholm: Nordiska museet.
Winge, Theresa and Joanne Eicher 2003: The Groom Wore a Kilt. Carnivalesque
and Theme Weddings. In Wedding Dress across Cultures, ed. Helen Bradley
Foster & Donald Clay Johnson. Oxford: Berg.
1
The American Swedish Institute is a private museum founded in 1929 by Swan J. Turnblad,
founder of the newspaper Svensk Amerikanska Posten.
2 Fieldwork in Minneapolis in July–August 2006 was made possible by the Malmberg Fellowship for Studies of Swedish American culture and granted by the American Swedish Institute. Further analysis has been made possible within the project “Nordic Spaces in the
North and North America: Heritage Preservation in Real and Imagined Nordic Places”
funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation 2008–2011. I would like to thank
fellow members of this project for comments on a paper version of this article. I am especially grateful to Chad Eric Bergman, North Park University in Chicago, for constructive
comments on this version.
3 Värmlandsgåvan. Letter of intent. The American Swedish Institute archives. Unless noted,
all translations are made by the author.
4 ASI bulletin 1952. Letters from Swedish Consul General Carl Fredrik Hellström to Värmland Governor Axel Westling, The Kinship Center in Karlstad, dossier Värmlandsgåvan
no. 1.
5 At the time, Värmland was divided into 100 parishes, a number that was reduced in 1971.
6 Without looking at the Nordic countries specifically, David Lowenthal (1989) has portrayed so-called immigrant museums in the United States of which also institutions that
identify themselves as Swedish-American or American Swedish institutions were a part.
7 According to the donor’s description of each object. Dossier Värmlandsgåvan. The American Swedish Institute archives.
8 The participants whose performances I focus on identify as being first, second, and third
generation immigrants to the United States. A group which has migrated, been rooted in a
new locale but identifies their origin elsewhere, is often referred to as a Diaspora (Appadurai 1996). Although the term Diaspora is seldom used when speaking of migrants from
Sweden to the United States, some participants in this study do. They see themselves as part
of the Diasporic space that Minnesota represents. This Diasporic space includes but is not
limited to ongoing negotiations about Somalianness, Hmongness, Norwegianness, Finnishness, and Swedishness; negotiations in which heritage symbols play an important part. In
this space, the participants of this study are viewed as both similar and different, in part due
how they materialize and embody a sense of belonging and how they choose to dress for
example at life-rituals such as weddings..
9 The description appears in both English and Swedish. The Swedish version reads as follows: “Fränder i landskapet Värmland i Sverige sända medborgare av värmländsk ätt i
Nordamerikas Förenta Stater en hälsning med en gåva från den gamla fädernebygden. Gåvan är en replik av den brudkrona, som finnes i Karlstad domkyrka. Den är sinnebild av en
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
91
önskan, att banden mellan amerikanska och svenska medborgare av samma stam måtte förbliva fasta släktled efter släktled.”
Widén, who worked at the Nordic Museum under the leadership of Sigurd Erixson, was
considered specialist in Nordisk allmogekultur, Nordic peasant culture. In the 1930s,
Widén conducted fieldwork in the Midwest (see Gradén 2003) and in 1942–1947 he served
as director of the Swedish information bureau in Minneapolis.
In the 1990s enactments of old-fashioned Finnish-Swedish weddings in Finland were popular among young couples living in Sweden. See Larsen 1999.
Interview with Marie Ylinen, August 2006.
Interview with Marie Ylinen, August 2006.
Interview with Marcia Linnér Swanson in her home in Minneapolis, August 2006.
Conversation with Nils Hasselmo in Sweden, August 23, 2006.
See Gunnell 2003 on Vietnamese immigrants, their objects, home shrines, etc. I am grateful
to Valdimar T. Hafstein for bringing this article to my attention and providing an interpretation into English.
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Lizette Gradén
Danish Maids and Visual Matters
93
Celebrating Heritage in Solvang, California1
Hanne Pico Larsen
In “The Danish Capital of America”, Solvang, California, the heritage festival Danish Days is celebrated every year on the third weekend of September. It is one of many heritage festivals staged in America annually, where
ethnic groups celebrate and express their culture. It is a time for the members of this Danish settlement to reflect on their heritage, individual and
common, and to work together on reinforcing their heritage as well as
strengthening the tourist revenue. The festival is a colorful show of music,
dance, foods, national costumes, handicrafts, flags, torchlight processions,
parades, and Hans Christian Andersen impersonation. Both Danes and
non-Danes come from afar to be Danes for the weekend (Larsen 2004). The
event calls for an icon: The Danish Days Maid.
The selection of a Miss Something-or-other is a typical American tradition. Many towns have one, and almost every small festival does too. The
selection of a symbolic figurehead is about deciding what qualities are most
important and representative for the community. Usually, physical attractiveness is more important than anyone will admit, and in the example of the
Danish Days Maid the ethnic dimension is added as well.
It is a well-known fact that conflict is endemic to heritage and that, in the
words of David Lowenthal: “Victors and victims proclaim disparate and divisive versions of common pasts. Claims of ownership, uniqueness, and priority engender strife over every facet of collective legacies” (Lowenthal
1996:234–235). Even though Lowenthal discusses the grand conflicts in the
context of the notion that all politics are local – and by extension all conflicts
are local – it is productive to consider this approach in the context of this
local, deeply rooted, and surprisingly political conflict. In Solvang, cultural
heritage is generally shared and generously sold to the tourists, but the collective legacy is contested once a year when picking the Danish Days Maid.
By selecting the most Danish (Days) girl in town, others are ostracized and
heritage made the object of heritage envy and competition. What are the
premises for being the most Danish (Days)? What does the maid have to
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represent and how is she chosen? Over the years, various organizational entities have been in charge both of the festival and of finding the right girls.
Hence the rules have changed over the years. Today the Danish Days Foundation is in charge of planning the festival and picking the girl. In Solvang,
the change of committees in charge and the lack of official criteria and rules
in the selection process underline the puzzle: Who decides, and who decides
who decides?
In this empirical study I will look at some of the processes involved in selecting a young girl to serve as the Solvang Danish Days Maid. Kinship and
cultural heritage make up a system of belonging, and the issues cannot be
described succinctly. Often obvious traits, such as looks, are put to use, or
just silently assumed, in order to visualize the culture in question. If Solvang
refers back to Denmark, should the Danish Days Maid be/look Danish as
well? And what makes up this particular Danish (Days) look?
The event is a low-budget hybrid of Danish Solvang and the all-American
community beauty pageant. Whereas it is neither my intent to contribute to
the study of heritage festivals, nor to the study of pageants in general, I use
the festival and the Danish Days Maid as a vehicle to comment on heritage
envy and the inherent importance of visuality in culture heritage – “The
Danish Looks”. In Solvang, the lack of a formal selection process is problematic for some. The uncertainty about what criteria are applied leaves
people wondering; therefore they easily come to feel that the outcome is unfair. The selection of the Danish Days Maid brings into question who is the
most Danish and who has the (ethnic) authority to decide. The process then
triggers the imagination of an invisible heritage hegemony applied and contested and often fuels Heritage Envy. Danish heritage as well as Solvang
history become important for the selection of the right girl.
In this article a main informant and key figure, Kristine, a young Solvang
adult, was asked to comment on the importance of looks in the case of the
Danish Days Maid. Probing the Solvang society about the selection of the
Danish Days Maid, I sensed the tension surrounding the issue. I could grasp
some of the semantics, but most informants were carefully parsing their
words. Kristine’s case often came up. In spite of her popularity and Danish
heritage, Kristine was never chosen as the Danish Days Maid. Many people
mentioned Kristine’s not being chosen as their favorite example of how unfair the whole selection is. Kristine is adopted from the Philippines, and she
does not conform physically to the stereotypical looks of a Dane: blonde
hair and blue eyes.
Heritage Envy and Visual Culture
When I refer to the term Heritage Envy, I allude to the ethnic hierarchies that
often exist within immigrant groups or between individual immigrants.
95
Heritage Envy is an irrational and emotional construct, which often leads to
emotive, quasi-rational questions: Who is more Danish/Swedish/Finnish
than others?
It has often been described how heritage is both nature and nurture (Lowenthal 1996; Bendix 2000). Whereas it is important to practice heritage, it
is also important that heritage be innate and that one be able to trace back
history and genes to “the first” (Lowenthal 1996). In the case of Solvang,
that means the families must be able to trace their ancestry to Denmark or
maybe to the early settlers of Solvang. Heritage can provoke rivalry on all
levels, and in Solvang such a rivalry can be seen on a local scale. This rivalry
is often caused by Heritage Envy and such “Clashes ensue when rivals press
entitlement to being first, being distinctive, or being sublimely endowed”
(Lowenthal 1996:235). Heritage Envy thus refers to this conflict or rivalry
characteristic of the question of heritage. However, the aspect of Heritage
Envy that I wish to foreground is rooted in the aspect of visuality: Must heritage “show” in order to be “real”? The answer is yes. Much attention has
been directed towards the externalization of heritage in landscape, especially as it is pursued in cultural geography and folklore. In Solvang visual
markers of Denmark are everywhere. Danish flags fluttering in the wind,
cute girls in costumes behind every counter, and fake Danish architecture.
It is of course a display constructed for the tourist gaze, but it is my opinion
that the visualization of everything Danish also reinforces the Danish feel
for the Danish immigrants who live there (Larsen 2006). Geographer
Michael P. Conzen called this phenomenon Ersatz Ethnicity (Conzen 1990),
and describes it as ethnicity paraded, exaggerated and made synthetic for
tourist consumption. Based on my work in Solvang, I will stress that even if
the overtly visualized heritage aims to cash in on tourists, the visually expressed ethnic background also becomes another component of the different
forms of Symbolic Ethnicity as described by Gans (1979). In his seminal article Gans shows how third, fourth and even later generations of immigrants
resort to the use of ethnic symbols when celebrating their cultural heritage.
Symbolic Ethnicity is often visible, easily felt and expressed and it never
conflicts with other aspects of life. Two obvious examples are food and festivals (Gans 1979). It is my conviction that whereas it becomes less and less
important and also more and more difficult for American immigrants to
maintain a 100% ethnic background, it is more frequently observed that
American immigrants display an American Plus attitude (Österlund-Pötzsch
2003; see also Österlund-Pötzsch in this volume). American Plus, as described by Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch, refers to the additional benefit to the
American heritage: one can be American plus Danish (Österlund-Pötzsch
2003). The importance of making cultural heritage visible is becoming more
and more important in the whole issue of superlative national origin. It is important for the American Plus immigrants to show off their heritage for
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themselves and others, and it often results in heritage theming for the entire
community. Such theming has occurred in the tourist towns of Swiss New
Glarus (Wisconsin), Danish Solvang (California), and Bavarian Leavenworth (Washington) (Hoelscher 1998; Larsen 2006; Price & Miller 1997).
When it comes to people, however, visualization of culture becomes
more problematic, and often overdetermined. In Solvang the assumed
“whiteness” of Nordic descendants is never mentioned, but it does lurk beneath the surface; it can be decoded by looking at the group of tourists visiting, and it comes up on different occasions, for example when choosing the
Danish Days Maid.
American Pageants
The literature concerning young girls recruited to represent communities in
festivals, fairs, and similar public celebrations is extensive. The common assumption is that whereas these young, fair women put gender norms on
stage in presenting an idealized version of femininity, the competition itself
showcases values, behavior, and concepts within a group (Cohen, Wilk &
Stoeltje 1996). Beauty contests, queen pageants, cotillions, and debutante
balls are all similar events formally presenting young ladies to society. By
choosing a young girl and honoring her with a fictive royal status for a short
period of time, the society projects its shared values and goals (Cohen, Wilk
& Stoeltje 1996). Queens and maids bring together local populations and
sometimes strengthen the ties to other communities and hierarchies (Stoeltje
& Bauman 1989; Stoeltje 1996). It is both fascinating entertainment as well
as serious play, and pageants are often a subject of local dispute (Cohen,
Wilk & Stoeltje 1996). In the introduction to the seminal work on beauty
queens, these pageants are defined as “places where cultural meanings are
produced, consumed, and rejected, where local and global, ethnic and national, national and international cultures and structures of power are engaged in their most trivial but vital aspects” (Cohen, Wilk & Stoeltje 1996:8).
Most approaches to pageants focus on feminine allegory and symbolism,
on performance and semiotics, and on nationalism and sexuality. R. H. Lavenda underlines the fact that in small communities, like Solvang, the term
beauty in beauty pageants is considered inappropriate for the local people
involved. To them it is rather a matter of selecting a queen who can serve as
a representative of the community and who embodies: “What local people
believe to be the best of themselves: talent, friendliness, commitment to the
community and its values, upward mobility” (Lavenda 1996:31). The queen
was molded by the community, and by extension, her deeds are those of the
community (Gradén 2003b; see also Yano 2006).
Beauty and looks are supposedly not part of the selection criteria in
Solvang either. However, looks, or the visualization of heritage – in this
97
case the face of the Danish Days Maid – is rather problematic. The celebration of Danish Days and the selection and adoration of the Danish Days
Maid are obviously emotional articulations rather than intellectual ones.
The Danish Days Maid is a girl known to the entire community, a human
icon associated with everybody in the Solvang hierarchy – a maid, not a
queen. The maid embodies the heritage of the community, and with her
family traits she can take everybody back to a nostalgic past and provide
people with a sense of belonging to both Solvang and Denmark (Fig. 1). The
family of the girl chosen is recognized as an old Solvang family as well as
a family with Danish heritage, but an embedded message is implicit in the
recognition: The family has succeeded in American society at large (Klein
1988), insofar as ethnic pageants “seek to capture and celebrate an everevolving combination of old-world continuity and American progress” (Rodrigez 2006:M5).
As an illustration one need just take a look at the short presentation of the
Danish Days Maid, written by the maid herself and published in the festival
magazine (see appendix 1). It is a rather formulaic narrative. It confirms
what insiders already know about her, and it justifies the Danish heritage –
her own and that of Solvang – to the festival visitor from afar. Most often
pictures accompanying the essay show a nice-looking girl, blonde, dressed
in her new costume, while another picture might show the same girl as little,
but still dressed up for Danish Days (Fig. 2). Childhood pictures like these
serve as proof of her life-long dedication and reveal the message that being
a Danish Days Maid is a childhood dream come true (see also Gradén
2003a:189). As the Solvang informant Kristine suggests: “If you read the introductions written by the maids every year they too are the same. They go
something like: my grandfather came to Solvang… I have made æbleskiver
since I was a little girl… I always dreamed about being the Danish Days
Maid… I’m proud of my heritage.”2 (See appendix 1.) Future queens are
usually active participants in sports, school activities, church and/or youth
groups, they play music and are capable of doing some kind of craft – all
achievements valued by the small, middle-class community (Lavenda
1996). It is therefore not outstanding-ness but rather well-roundedness and
appropriate achievements that demonstrate the competence of the candidates.
It is my assertion that in small communities with an ethnic reference, the
common rules and regulations for most pageants – such as poise, sincerity,
intelligence, and commitment – are the most important assets for the candidate to have, while beauty seemingly is rejected as a criterion. However, the
ethnic reference is as strong, if not stronger, than any other requirement. But
how is ethnicity measured? In the looks, in the family ties back to the old
country, ability to speak the language, or just loyalty to the ethnic background clung to by the community – or loyalty to the commercialization of
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Solvang and the tourist economy? Or is it all of the above requirements
combined?
The aspect of ethnicity within the context of the pageant is only sporadically touched upon in the literature. In Lavenda’s writing, however, we find
a case study from a small Czech community in Minnesota. During their annual community festival a girl is selected. In 1983, the girls wore ethnic costumes, no evening dresses, or other paraphernalia indicative of royalty. The
winner was a “heavy-set” girl, talented, blonde, and 100% Czech (Lavenda
1996). Even if she stood out in the crowd of slender candidates, her physical
appearance was never mentioned. A losing candidate, on the other hand, lamented the fact that it was always the daughters of the business community
and the families with important names who won the honors (Lavenda 1996).
In this example, as in the example of the Danish Days Maid, the ethnic
fronting is clear even if it is hardly verbalized. It is okay to be chubby as long
as the candidate comes from an important family with roots back to the
country from where they immigrated, who show a local as well as an ethnic
sense of belonging.
Another salient example can be found in old ethnic Los Angeles pageants
such as Miss Chinatown and Miss Nisei Week in Little Tokyo. Here it is no
longer required that the contestants be 100% Chinese or Japanese – a recognition of the impact of interethnic and interracial marriage (Rodrigez 2006:
M5). The debate about mixed-race queens has in fact been going on there
since the 1970s because of a growing number of white-Japanese contestants.
Some Japanese-Americans thought that the mixed-race queens were not
representative of Japanese-American culture. Furthermore, the candidates
had moved closer to a more mainstream ideal of Caucasian beauty, subsequently giving the mixed race queens an advantage over participants of
100% ethnic background (Tanner 1998). In 1982 the crowning of a mixedrace queen heated up the debate and a very angry letter was printed in a community paper. The writer contested the “disproportional selection and seeming infatuation with the Eurasian looks” of the queen and asked that the
beauty representatives should at least be representative (Linden Nishinaga
quoted in Tanner 1998). Responses were many, some agreeing and others
qualifying the statement as racist. A former Nisei Queen offered her contribution and a different perspective. She wrote: “Who’s to say that I’m not as
‘Japanese’ as any other Nisei, Sansei, or Yonsei?” (second, third, and
fourth-generation Japanese Americans). “What is the definition of Japanese
American anyway?” She went on:
I grew up in a Japanese neighborhood of Los Angeles, with Japanese food, culture,
and language in my home and attended Japanese school for 11 years … It breaks my
heart to think that the very people that I have been so proud to represent aren’t proud
that I’m representing them. (Hedy Posey quoted in Tanner 1998).3
99
The former Nisei queen elucidates the rather complex cultural dynamics
around the selection process and question the resistance towards cultural
changes happening in the Japanese-American community. Who decides
what comprises ethnicity and who is most ethnic? And again, who decides
who decides?
Competition regarding ethnicity was also discussed by Lizette Gradén,
who worked with Swedish Americans (Gradén 2003a, 2003b). Analyzing
ethnic hierarchies in the selection of the Hyllningsfest royalty among the
Swedish-Americans in Lindsborg, one of her conclusions is that whereas
Swedish lineage is very important in the selection process, loyalty to Swedish heritage and activities at large are important as well (Gradén 2003a,
2003b). In this example physical appearance is also passed over in silence.
The Danish Days Foundation in Solvang seems to rank belonging to the
community and loyalty to the festival higher than Danish heritage per se.
However, it is hard to disentangle these factors, and the confusion in
Solvang about which outweighs the other – heritage or the practice and
loyalty to heritage – was obvious in many interviews. Kristine notes with
irony:
Since there is such consistency from year to year [in Danish Days], it seems obvious
who the candidates for Danish Days Maids will be for the next 5–10 years. It is almost always a high school senior whose family has been involved with Danish Days
ever since forever. It makes sense because the “most” Danish people do Danish
Days right?
The most Danish, the most loyal Solvang citizens, are in this case the ones
who are most active in Danish Days. They are considered the ones who most
belong, and they are the ones who have daughters who can become Danish
Days Maids.
The Selection of the Danish Days Maid
The process of naming the Danish Days Maid every year for Danish Days
festival can be described as a simplified version of a community pageant
prototype as extrapolated from the vast body of literature on pageants. The
Danish Days Maid differs, however, in that she does not need a sponsor, she
is not one of many contestants, and she does not go through formal training
in public appearance. She does not have to sing or dance in order to persuade
any audience that she is the one to be chosen. She is not required to wear
either swimsuit or evening gown. Once selected, there are no material winnings, trips to Denmark, or scholarships, nor is she busy undertaking
time-consuming tasks, as are other community queens. In fact, she is not
even a queen, she is a maid. Beauty is not part of the criteria for picking her,
as long as her physical standards conform to that of a healthy, happy,
open-minded high school girl, the all-Danish-American “girl next door”.
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In spite of these differences from other community pageants, the annual
selection of the Danish Days Maid shows the contours of a similar structure
to other community pageants, and indeed the potential social impact is clear.
In spite of the seemingly more relaxed form of the pageant there is no reason
to believe that the outcome is less important for the families involved. Many
informants found it easier to describe what the process is not like, for there
are no sets of written rules to which to refer. The murkiness of the affair is,
in part, due to the fact that the selection has been done differently and by different entities and committees over the years. The selection is commonly
perceived to be highly subjective and by definition unfair. However, even if
the selection seems to lack rules, there may exist an informal selection process that is obvious to members of the Danish Days Foundation, the body
that picks the girl.
The first Danish Days Maid was selected in 1967. There are no records
or living memories about how the tradition was initiated. Presumably, she
was just another festive element added to the festival. When the second
Danish Days Maid, Marianne, was asked how she was selected she laughed:
Yes, but I was selected back then, it was very easy because they wanted a girl from
Denmark, and there were not a lot of us. So I was chosen in 1968. 4
Literally, a Danish Maid was desired, and Marianne was one of the few in
town. But the rules changed quickly:
There was one more Danish girl chosen after me, but then it was changed so that it
had to be someone from the valley. At first they were just picked from the different
Danish families and later it changed to become a girl from either the second to last
or last year in high school, and then she writes an essay where she describes herself
and her experiences during Danish Days. 5
The Danish Days Maid thus was a Danish girl from Denmark for the first
three years during which the tradition was established, and then rules were
adjusted and the maid had to be a girl from the valley with some connection
to the Danish community. Marianne also describes what she thinks the process is like today. She recalls the maid responsibilities as a wonderful experience and relates how she even traveled to Los Angeles to be on a TV show.
However, there were no formal tasks:
Back then it was not as much an official task, one mainly had to walk around and
talk to people [during Danish Days]. Of course, when I was interviewed on TV I had
to talk … nowadays the Danish Days Maids have different tasks where they sell
tickets … those tickets6… and they go around to the different societies and stuff like
that.7
When Marianne was asked if there is great competition to become the
Danish Days Maid she laughed again and shook her head:
No there is not, there are not too many options. They take someone who comes from
families active in Danish Days – it is a bit unfair sometimes.8
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Marianne was not able to elaborate on the unfairness, but the same concerns
about unfairness in the selection process were voiced in other conversations.
Esther is another well-known citizen of Solvang, who proudly describes her
long-standing Solvang background and direct Danish heritage on both
parents’ sides, as well as her husband’s Solvang and Denmark lineage.
Esther finds the Danish Days Foundation committee rather exclusive. Although her criticism is barely expressed, she does not give the committee
members much credit for the way in which they handle the selection of the
Danish Days Maid. When asked if she was ever the Danish Days Maid she
replied: “NO, I was not a Danish Days Maid.”9 Inquiring further if she
knows why she was not selected: “I have NO idea… I would probably not
have appreciated the honor at the time. My daughter was interested in being
a Danish Days Maid but she was not selected, so it is… it is interesting.”10
The tone in her voice and her careful choice of the word “interesting” belies
her critique of the way in which the selection is done. It is clear that she finds
her family entitled to the honor. They are Danish, they are from Solvang,
and they have always worked hard on Danish Days. Evidently they do belong. The first Danish Days Maid in this family was Lauren Jacobsen,
Danish Days Maid 2006 (see appendix 1). Lauren Jacobsen presented herself as the all-round active American high school girl: She was seventeen, a
junior in high school, on the varsity tennis team, an award winner, and, in
her spare time, she enjoyed tutoring as well as different church activities.
She showed involvement and engagement in her surroundings. Her Danish
heritage goes back and entails a war story and happy love between grandparents. Lauren had participated in Danish Days with her family since she
was little (see appendix 1). What was left out, and covered up in 2006, was
the fact that Lauren does not live in Solvang. Her dad does, and so does his
family. Lauren lives with her mother. The environment in which she is active and the high school for which she plays tennis are somewhere in Orange
County. However, she has participated in Danish Days every year, and as
she ends the essay: “The festival is still largely about family as my dad, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents still participate yearly” (Jacobsen 2006:3 or see appendix 1). In this example we see how family values are
highlighted.
Max, another committee member, a bold, outspoken person, suddenly became rather quiet when the recording device was turned on and he was
asked about the Danish Days Maid. There was a smile in his voice, but it is
clearly a serious matter:
The Danish Maid … is … picked on how she is going to represent the committee and
herself, there is a lot of PR involved, she has to go around in parades and events and
present herself well, and Danish Days in a nice manner. Generally, there is an essay
she has to write … if there is a group of applicants… It has changed significantly
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Hanne Pico Larsen
over the years (laughs), I have never been a real significant part in picking the
Danish Maid. And she has been picked in a number of different ways. There is not
really a straightforward answer to that question. 11
When asked who is currently in charge of the selection: “I don’t know, the
committee is in charge of getting names… (laughs) there is no straightforward answer, I don’t know what to tell you on that one. There is always controversy.”12
I try to tease out some criteria such as speaking Danish, being Danish or
even looking Danish. As for the looks, the informant cautiously changes his
rhetorical strategy, twists my question, and sends it back to me:
No, you don’t have to speak Danish, but yes, they have to have some Danish blood
in them, heritage, some part, some minute quantity of Danish blood in them somewhere. And what does a Dane look like? They all look like Danes don’t they, so we
can’t, they do not have to look like a Dane, Danes look like everybody else…13
I ask if a Danish Days Maid could look Hispanic and the informant clears
his throat: “…absolutely, why not? They could be colored, they could look
anyway … if you go to Denmark you see a ‘hodgepodge’ of people…”14 I
point out that many Danish Days Maids have had long blonde hair, but he
reminds me that some have also had dark hair and slightly darker skin. Then
he starts to talk about his Danish cousin in Denmark with Indian roots. Max
points to blood and heritage as criteria but it is interesting to note that he
shies away from the debate about looks. In the past there have been Danish
Days Maids coming from mixed marriages, dark-haired and with darker
complexion then the usual fair Scandinavian skin. Looking at the photo gallery of former Danish Days Maids, however, we see that they are usually
blonde. Max’s daughter, Kristine, became the Danish Days Maid in 2007.
Kristine has Danish blood, a family actively participating in the festival and
she has long blonde hair.
I ask Max about the controversy that he had pointed to earlier:
There is always a bit of uh … controversy in it, there is always going to be a loser
that did not get it, who thought they should have been, or someone upset because
their daughter did not get it. There is always a winner and a loser in everything when
there is more than one person involved, it is hard to please everyone … it is a tough
deal.15
Finally, getting nowhere, I ask if I could apply to become the Danish Days
Maid and we both get an outlet for our laughter and a conclusion for our talk:
Hmm … there is an age thing, you know what, why don’t you? I am sure we would
love to have you as the Danish Maid … I don’t think there is anything set in stone in
the age, I think it is … although, they generally are a bit younger than yourself. I have
not been involved in this, I do not know.16
This conversation illustrates that not even one of the committee members
from the Danish Days Foundation is sure about the process for choosing a
103
Danish Days Maid. He knows that it has changed over the years, and he
knows that this is a controversial matter, but “nothing is set in stone”.
My spontaneous query about applying to become the Danish Days Maid
myself was revealing, but an actual application would have made it easier
for me to detect a set of rules. Max is saying that I might be Danish, but I
am not from the valley. I have no Solvang history, and I am too old. Reversing these three statements reveals, yet again, that the maid needs to have
Danish blood, she needs a Solvang history, and she must be a young high
school girl, a maid. A similar example can be found in the work of Barbro
Klein. In the 1970s Barbro Klein participated in “Swedish Days” on Long
Island. She reported on the “Miss Sweden Day Beauty Contest” (note that
here the word beauty is used), one of the highlights of the festival. Again,
Swedish blood was required for the contestants. Ten women were presented, eight of whom came from Swedish American families around New
York. When the girls were introduced, their family history and deeds were
mentioned and applauded as part of the contestant’s virtues. The remaining
two women had just come from Sweden, and regardless of how beautiful
and Swedish they were, they lost (Klein 1988). Unlike the rest of the participant, the two Swedish girls wore contemporary Swedish fashion. They were
perhaps too Swedish, as I might have been too Danish for Solvang. Neither
the two Swedish ladies nor I had any history or sense of belonging in the
American plus community. We had no successful families in America to fall
back on, and besides being Danish/Swedish, we had nothing to do in the
context of American ethnic pageants. Some of the qualities sought for in
such ethnic pageants seem very much to be American values rather than
modern Danish values. Not surprisingly, Danish-ness in Solvang is very different from Danish Danish-ness and can be characterized as a static phenomenon, which refuses the infusion of contemporary Danish culture (Larsen
2006).
Rick, yet another member of the Danish Days Foundation and unofficial
Danish Days historian, has studied the history of the pageant. He has made
paper cuttings of the first 30 of the Danish Days Maids and he is not afraid
of talking about how the looks of the girls loom large in the consciousness
of the people involved: “There was a time during the 70s where girls were
being chosen just because they had blonde hair and a Scandinavian last
name and had no connection to the town.”17 He also gives an example of a
girl who was not chosen because her father was Hispanic and she did not
“look Danish.” That of course, had stirred things up. “There are people here
now, who might have different last name now, but their family has been here
for three generations now, they have been a part of this party, they have the
same right.”18
Rick underscores the importance of being from the valley, having a
Danish immigrant history and not really wanting to be the maid but doing it
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Hanne Pico Larsen
for the sake of putting it on one’s resume, and/or because her parents want
her to. He stressed that some girls are simply raised to be the Danish Days
Maids. Again it confirmed how girls might be selected because of the status
of parents and grandparents. In small communities the girls probably also
participate because it is expected of them, by their parents as well as the
wider community. Their reward is the pride of their immediate families
(Lavenda 1996).
When I ask Rick to list the criteria he is quick to list some obvious rules:
being Danish, family and child participation in Danish Days (throughout 60
years), school, school clubs, community spirit. He underlines: ‘There are no
rules, and when [there are] no rules it leaves it open.”19
Asking two other members of the Danish Days Foundation, Bernice and
Hans Birkholm, about the selection process and the bickering, I finally get
a straight answer:
We just sit around and talk. Actually, up until last year since the foundation … the
ladies, Rose and I and Brenda would kind of just pick. And then last year [2004],
there was a hue and a cry from the year before, that it was not democratic enough.
So we invited people to apply. Well, only one applied (laughs). So, this year two
were represented and they both would be real good, so we’ll do one this year
[2005] and one the next year, and then I think we already have one for the next
year.20
Bernice is not afraid to explain the former informal character of the selection
process. She even laughs a bit when explaining how little interest there had
been when the process had been formalized – two girls applied and they
were both accepted. I ask the reason why the girl, the center of the hubbub,
was not chosen. Both committee members admit that she could have been
perfect, she and her family work hard for Danish Days but … “The girl
which was complained about … her cousins has been already … we try to
spread it out.”21 It is not only about the individual girl and her immediate
family, but about the larger family as well.
The last inquiry concerns Kristine, the popular Solvang girl who never became the Danish Days Maid. When I talked to people of Solvang about the
Danish Days Maid, people speculated a lot about this girl and why she had
never been chosen. They often used her as the perfect example of how unfair
the selection was. This was a salient example because the girl in question is
deeply rooted in Solvang. But her skin is not fair and her facial features not
Caucasian. Everybody seemed to assume that the reason why she was never
picked was connected to the fact that she was adopted and did not look
Danish. Kristine herself, contrary to everybody else, gave another explanation. For Kristine her inadmissibility as a Danish Days Maid was more
about her not fulfilling another criterion, namely that of former engagement
in Danish Days.
105
Kristine as the Danish Days Maid was not something that ever came up. I never participated in Danish Days like the maids did. I never hung out in the æbleskiver tent
(though I go there frequently for drinks now) and would have rather run around in
my soccer uniform than in my custom-made costume. Growing up, I think I just
looked at Danish Days as a carnival thing with booths, food, and parades, not a
Danish thing. Maybe that has to do with my family and our own traditions.22
Kristine is not nostalgic about her Danish roots and family background. She
is fluent in Danish, visits Denmark frequently, and has two Danish parents.
To her being Danish is natural, not a heritage to cling to in fear of losing it.
Maybe that is one of the reasons why she never dreamed of becoming the
Danish Days Maid. However, Kristine is not naïve, and when I asked her
about the importance of the “Danish look”, she has an answer as well, and
treats the issue with sensitivity. This Danish, non-Danish looking girl is the
one to put words to an issue about which other people feel so uncomfortable
speaking:
Danish Days is a celebration of culture and old-time traditions, but over the years it
has also been a major part of tourism in Solvang. To that extent, Danish Days is a
production that needs to look the part. The Danish Days Maid doesn’t necessarily
get to talk to everyone that see her and talk about her heritage so it would make sense
to make sure she looks “Danish”. Looking Danish, to clarify, is … you know … Caucasian-ish. To relate it more to my personal experiences I will use the chocolate
shop. Whenever it comes up that my parents own Ingeborg’s [a Solvang store selling
Danish homemade chocolate], I slip it in that they are Danish or that I was adopted
into a Danish family. I want people to know that Ingeborg’s is still really “Danish”.
I think it gives the business its credibility and/or authenticity. I think the face of
Danish Days does the same thing for Solvang. Whether people want to admit it or
not, physical appearance does make a difference for Danish Days and the physical
attribute I am referring to is more color than anything else.23
Although on the surface, this selection may seem motivated largely by nepotism, this analysis makes little sense. Kristine’s family is among the central
families in the business community. Both in social and commercial life,
Kristine and her family stand for a profound identification with Solvang
Danishness. Kristine is, by any measure, one of the most “Danish” kids in
the community. Her only “failing” in the Danish Days Maid competition is
her dark brown eyes, long black hair, and pronounced Asian features.
Conclusion
Danish Days is a festival celebration of the hometown of Solvang rather
than Denmark or Danish heritage. The selection of the maid is controversial and can fuel heritage envy, and it puts into question the community’s
boundaries and criteria for belonging. Danish Days and the selection of
the Danish Days Maid are manifestations and reaffirmations of the constructed Danish heritage. It functions as the annual maintenance of Danish
heritage as it is interpreted and perceived in Solvang. It is Solvang keeping
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Hanne Pico Larsen
up with its own history and even getting a chance to continue and strengthen it.
The content of the annual Solvang festival, Danish Days, is rather repetitive. The same procedure is followed, and the same costumes are worn year
after year. At the core of the event is the Danish Days Maid. She is a young
girl who is given the honor of representing Solvang and the festival, not a
major task, but the significance of the task looms large in the Solvang consciousness. The event is controversial within the small community. Changes
in the selection process have taken place during the last years. However, the
character of these changes seems more dialogic and the lack of rules for selecting the Danish Days Maid, the lack of competition, and the elusiveness
of the process allow people in town to contest the choice of the maid almost
every year. According to the Danish Days Foundation, whose members
choose the maid, she has to fulfill certain basic criteria. She has to have been
active in the festival as long as she can remember, to be of Danish background, well known to Solvang citizens, and to be an active and involved
young girl. However, people in Solvang often project other criteria into the
process, and it becomes a sensitive affair. Does she have to look Danish?
Does she have to live in town? Why are some families favored over others
in the selection? These are some of the main issues in the annual discussion
of the Danish Days Maid. But in part it is a question of semantics. The
Danish Days Maid is to represent the festival, not the Danish as such. These
two levels of the discussion are often hard for Solvang people to connect;
and the maid is often taken to be a Danish Maid and the confusion gives rise
to heritage-based envy. Who is more Danish than others? The Danish Days
Maid was actually only Danish for the first three years after the inauguration
of the tradition in Solvang in 1967. Thereafter the girl needed to be from the
valley and in that way most Danish girls from Denmark were excluded. But
if Solvang refers back to Denmark, should the Danish Days Maid be/look
Danish as well? And what constitutes this particular Danish (Days) look?
The Danish looks have only been defined by one stereotypical feature, long
blonde hair and blue eyes. Some Danish Days Maids have lacked those features, but many of them certainly have it.
The elusiveness of the process together with the Heritage Envy manifest
themselves in the importance of the appearance of the maid, at least in the
minds of the townspeople in Solvang. The Danish Days Maid is not considered a beauty queen and hence appearance is not something to be discussed. Still, questions about ethnicity and visuality lurk below the surface
though they are not easily addressed. Ethnicity is an important element in
the pageant, but ethnicity becomes even more important in the minds of the
people of Solvang who project ethnicity, Danish looks, family history, and
certain nostalgia for the past into the process.
107
Hanne Pico Larsen, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor
Department of Germanic Languages and Literature
Faculty of Arts and Science
Columbia University
319 Hamilton Hall (MC 2812)
1130 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027
E-mail: [email protected]
References
Bendix, R. 2000: Heredity, Hybridity and Heritage from One Fin de Siècle to the
Next. In Folklore, Heritage Politics and Ethnic Diversity. Sweden: Botkyrka.
Cohen, C. B., Richard Wilk & Beverly Stoeltje (eds.) 1996: Beauty Queens on the
Global Stage. Gender, Contests, and Power. London & New York.
Conzen, M. P. 1990: Ethnicity on the Land. In The Making of the American Landscape. London & New York.
Gans, J. 1979: Symbolic Ethnicity. The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in
America. Ethnic and Racial Studies (2).
Gradén, L. 2003a: On Parade. Making Heritage in Lindsborg, Kansas. Uppsala.
Gradén, L. 2003b: Royal Symbolism and Swedish-American Heritage Making. The
Swedish-American Historical Quarterly LIV.
Hoelscher, S. D. 1998a: Heritage on Stage. The Invention of Ethnic Place in America’s Little Switzerland. Madison.
Jacobsen, L 2006: Hello and Welcome to Solvang Danish Days 2006! Velkommen.
Danish Days in Solvang. Solvang.
Klein, B. 1988: Den gamla hembygden eller vad har hänt med de svenska folktraditionerna i USA? Blandsverige. Om kulturskillnader och kulturmöten. Stockholm.
Kurashige, L. 2002. Japanese American Celebration and Conflict. A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934–1990. Berkeley.
Larsen, H. P. 2004: “We Are All Danes for the Weekend”. Danish Days in Solvang,
California. Center for Tourism and Cultural Change. Sheffield.
Larsen, H. P. 2006: Solvang, the “Danish Capital of America”. A Little Bit of Denmark, Disney, or Something Else? (Ph.D. Dissertation, UC Berkeley).
Lavenda R. H. 1996: “It’s Not a Beauty Pageant!” Hybrid Ideology in Minnesota
Community Queen Pageants. In Beauty Queens on the Global Stage. Gender,
Contests, and Power. London & New York.
Lowenthal, D. 1996: Possessed by the Past. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of
History. New York.
Österlund-Pötzsch, Susanne 2003: American Plus. Etnisk identitet hos finlandssvenska ättlingar i Nordamerika. Helsingfors.
Price, T. & J. Miller. 1997: Miracle Town. Creating America’s Bavarian Village in
Leavenworth, Washington. Vancouver.
Rodrigez, G. (Jan. 29th) 2006: There She Is, Miss Chinatown. Celebrating Heritage
and Assimilation, Pageant-Style. Los Angeles Times. M5
Stoeltje, B. & R. Bauman. 1989: Community Festival and the Enactment of Modernity. The Old Traditional Way of Life. Bloomington.
Stoeltje, B. 1996: The Snake Charmer Queen. Ritual, Competition, and Signification
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in American Festival. In Beauty Queens on the Global Stage. Gender, Contests,
and Power. London & New York.
Tanner, M. 1998. Pageants: Pride or Puffery? AsianWeek.
Yano, Christine R. 2006. Crowning the Nice Girl. Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in
Hawai’i’s Cherry Blossom Festival. Honolulu.
Appendix 1
Hello and Welcome to Solvang Danish Days 2006!
My name is Lauren Jacobsen and I am proud to serve as this year’s Danish Days
Maid. I am thrilled to represent my family, our Danish heritage, and the city of
Solvang in its yearly celebration. I am a 17 years old junior in high school and a
member of the varsity tennis team as well as a United States National award winner.
In my spare time I enjoy tutoring as well as various church activities. For me, being
the Danish Maid is like fulfilling a childhood fantasy. Ever since I was young I have
dreamt of one day being that girl, and I remember my dad telling me that one day I
just could be. I have always cherished the Danish community of Solvang, and have
enjoyed every minute of my childhood spent here. I love the heritage and people of
this community and am so excited to represent them in the 2006 Danish Days celebration.
My Danish heritage stems from my father, Glen Jacobsen’s, side of the family.
My Grandfather, Knud Jacobsen, was born in Denmark on the island of Årø in
Sønder Jutland. He grew up during World War II and even faced the Nazi occupation. At the age of 18 he enlisted in the Danish army and soon after moved to the
United States, where he joined his Uncle’s farm on the Bull Flats outside of Solvang.
It did not take long for him to enlist in the U.S. army, and was promptly sent back to
Europe, Germany to be exact, for his tour of duty. Upon returning home he met my
Grandmother, Elisabeth Simonsen, and was soon married. My Grandmother’s
parents, Jens and Marie Simonsen, were both Danish immigrants. Jens was a Danish
merchant marine and came to the United States in the early 1900s working on a boat
owned by him and his brothers. After meeting Marie the two moved to Iowa where
my Grandmother was born. She later moved to Solvang in 1940s.
My Grandparents have long associated our family with the Danish Days Celebration, and my dad as well as his sisters were always involved in the festival. As for
me, participating in the festival started at a very young age. As a little girl my sisters,
Lexi and Laini, and I especially enjoyed walking around town in our costumes taking
pictures with visitors, not forgetting to put on that big smile. Over the years, I have
taken on bigger tasks. Helping out in the breakfast area, serving coffee, and cooking
æbleskiver, as well as delivering breakfast at the Lutheran Home, working the
linguisa booth, and participating in the parades are many of the tasks that I enjoy doing each and every year. The festival is still largely about family as my dad, sisters,
cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents still participate yearly.
For me, the city of Solvang is filled with loving family and friends and is an amazing community. I am proud to represent them as the 2006 Solvang Danish Maid. I
hope that you are able to experience the communities amazing culture and traditions,
HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND AND ENJOY THIS YEAR’S CELEBRATION
(Jacobsen 2006:3).
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
109
This article is an abbreviated and revised version of a chapter from my Ph.D. dissertation:
Solvang, the “Danish Capital of America”: A Little Bit of Denmark, Disney, or Something
Else? (Larsen 2006).
Kristine Pedersen 3 September 2006.
On Japanese-American ethnic identity as played out during the Nisei Week, see Kurashige
2002.
Marianne Larsen, 2 March 2005. Author’s translation from Danish.
Ibid.
Danish Days raffle tickets sold before and during Danish Days. The prize is a trip to Denmark and the money raised is used to sponsor the following Danish Days.
Marianne Larsen, 2 March 2005. Author’s translation from Danish.
Ibid.
Esther Jacobsen Bates, 9 January 2005.
Ibid.
Max Hanberg, 19 February 2005.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Rick Marzullo, 26 February 2005.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Bernice Birkholm, 6 March 2005.
Ibid.
Kristine Pedersen, 22 September 2006.
Ibid.
110
Hanne Pico Larsen
New Legends in Nordic America
111
The Case of Big Erick Erickson
James P. Leary
Nordic immigrants to North America and their descendants, like other immigrants and their offspring, have remembered, transplanted, altered, and
created numerous legends. Yet we have examined such legends less fully
than we might. Extant studies have been concerned overwhelmingly with
the survival and revival of mostly supernatural old country legends as
counters to the assimilating forces of America’s mainstream.1 Hence scholars have keyed on numerous instances wherein Nordic Americans have nostalgically invoked hidden people, trolls, sorcerers, and household spirits
from across the Atlantic so as to: 1) maintain imaginative connections to distant old world homelands; 2) establish familiar old world legendary figures
within somewhat similar new world settings; and 3) transform new world
sites into romantic and highly selective representations of the old world.
This article, in contrast, asserts through a case study of Big Erick Erickson
that new legends–neither exclusively Nordic nor American but thoroughly
Nordic American–have also been fashioned; legends that draw in subtle
ways upon old world experiences yet are chiefly concerned with constituting and commenting on emerging, culturally plural new world milieus. Before discussing Big Erick’s legendry and its significance, however, permit
me to sketch the historical context of sketch Nordic American legend scholarship.
Survival and Revival
In the early twentieth century Thor Helgeson, a Norwegian-born sexton and
schoolteacher in Waupaca County, Wisconsin, vividly chronicled a legend-telling session amongst fellow immigrants that mixed accounts of supernatural occurrences in the old country with those about ghosts, the devil,
and even trolls in rural Wisconsin (Helgeson 1917). When Helgeson published Folksagn og folketro (1923), concerning the old world legendry of
immigrants from various parts of Norway, he was hailed by the Norwegian
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James P. Leary
American journalist Waldemar Ager as “the P.C. Asbjörnsen of the Norwegians in America” (Haugen 1970). Ella Valborg Rølvaag’s subsequent overview essay, “Norwegian Folk Narrative in America” (1941), revealed that
many other Norwegian Americans contributed similar accounts to magazines published by immigrants from such districts as Telemark and Valders.
Louise P. Olson (1950, 1954) and Einar Haugen (1953:487,541,550) offered further testimony to Norwegian supernatural legendry set mostly in
the old country but sometimes in America’s Upper Midwest and Pacific
Northwest, prompting an extended commentary in Reidar Christiansen’s
European Folklore in America (1962:43–46,52–53). Meanwhile Richard
Dorson (1952:131–134) and Aili Kolehmainen Johnson (1955) reported on
stories of Finnish wizards or noitas circulating in the Upper Peninsula of
Michigan.
The eventual presence of Dorson and folk narrative scholar Linda Dégh
at Indiana University in the 1960s helped foster a trio of dissertations by Elli
Kaija Köngäs-Maranda (1963), Frank Paulsen (1967), and Barbro Sklute
Klein (1970) that examined, respectively, Finnish, Danish, and Swedish
American folklore, with a considerable emphasis on legends. In keeping
with the paradigm prevailing throughout much of the twentieth century,
they concentrated on the extent to which old world forms of folklore survived in the new world. With particular regard to legends, each demonstrated that, although many stories set across the Atlantic were remembered
by the first generation, only a few took root in America. And most of these
faded from the active repertoires of the second and subsequent generations,
especially as language competence diminished and the legends of long ago
and far away were no longer relevant to the increasingly modernized,
Americanized lives of younger folks (see also Stern 1977:10–12,15–16).
By the early 1970s, however, a new way of looking at immigrant and ethnic folklore was emerging, especially at Indiana University. Robert Klymasz, a Canadian graduate student of Ukrainian descent, argued forcefully
that the “Old Immigrant Folklore Complex” was succeeded by a “New Ethnic Folklore Complex.” This latter phenomenon, aligned with the third legendary pattern introduced above, has subsequently thrived as a major component of the multi-cultural movement now well-established throughout
North America. It is distinguished by the highly conscious, simplified,
modified, occasional, organizationally based, entertainment-oriented, thoroughly romantic, and publicly accessible revitalization of a few selectively
chosen and symbolically charged folklore forms, including legends that are
transmitted more through visual representations and print than oral tradition
(Klymasz 1973). Hence in Mount Horeb, the Wisconsin village where I
have lived since 1988, members of the Sons of Norway Lodge, many of
whom were also merchants involved with the local Chamber of Commerce,
decided in the early 1980s to make their community “The Troll Capital of
113
the World.” Murals, carved statues, signs, books and pamphlets, dolls, and
troll impersonators in parades now provide villagers and tourists with a contemporary, safe and cuddly rendering of an ancient, fierce and prickly Nordic being.
In 1995 Barbro Sklute Klein, whose observations of Nordic legendry in
the new world have been the most continuous and astute, returned to
Maine’s New Sweden where she had done field research thirty years before.
In addition to encountering and reassessing the legendary patterns sketched
above, she discerned a fourth phenomenon wherein the new world behavioral modes and folklore forms she had originally regarded as shaped solely
by Swedish acculturation to an Anglo-American mainstream had also been
affected significantly from the outset by interactions with Micmac Indians
and French Canadian immigrants: “I came to recognize that understanding
the history of relationships with Yankees, Native Americans, and French
speakers is of critical importance to understanding New Sweden” (Klein
2004:254). In other words, Klein realized that some of the most vital, everyday aspects of new world Nordic American folklore were the creolized expressions of participants in a diverse, polyglot, relatively egalitarian, and
emergent regional culture.
Just such a creolized cultural milieu developed and persists in the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan where, in the late 19th century, Cornish, French Canadian, Italian, Slavic, Finnish, and Swedish immigrants came to farm mine,
fish, and work in the woods alongside indigenous Ojibwe and Potawatomi
peoples. Legends aplenty sprung from their collective and divergent experiences, exhibiting patterns that, while still connected to older motifs and
structures, are nonetheless new. This article offers and ponders one such
cycle of new legends in Nordic America, concerning a Swedish immigrant
logger who came be known as Big Erick Erickson.
Erick Julius Bryngelson Becomes “Big Erick”
In 1871 Walfred Been, an ocean-going and Great Lakes captain, guided an
immigrant party of fellow Swedes to the shores of Lake Superior’s Huron
Bay. Perhaps inspired by the coastal setting and dreams of agrarian prosperity, they named their community after Skåne, Sweden’s southernmost
province and breadbasket, an old world place favored with a moderate climate and situated just a few sea miles from the major market and shipping
port of Copenhagen, Denmark (Monette 1975:45). Old and new worlds,
dreams and reality, however, seldom align entirely. This Swedish American
maritime settlement was in a remote northern region with long snowy winters and frozen lakes. Its nearby metropolis was the rough sawmill town of
L’Anse. Its neighbors were Ojibwes, French Canadians, and especially
Finns. Its chief crop was timber. And it was soon called Skanee. In keeping
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James P. Leary
with the topsy-turvy nature of Skåne’s transformation into Skanee, the prosperous Captain Walfred Been is nowadays nearly forgotten, while Erick
Erickson, once a lowly hired man on Been’s farm, lives on in a cycle of legends sustained through print, oral tradition, commemorative products, and
local landmarks.
Erick Julius Bryngelson was born in Fröskog, Dalsland, Sweden, in 1882,
the son of Bryngel Magnus Eriksson and Stina Lisa Petersdotter. On June
17, 1901, thirteen days before his nineteenth birthday, young Erick departed
from Stockholm, bound for Baraga, Michigan, where his saloon-keeping
uncle, Axel Johnson, had offered a place to stay. Soon after arrival, in conformity with American style surnames, he exchanged Bryngelson for his father’s patronymic, Eriksson, but altered the spelling to Erickson.2 Like many
male Swedish immigrants, he roamed for a few years, harvesting grain in the
Dakotas, then homesteading briefly in Oregon before returning to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where he worked in the woods, bought a small farm
near Skanee from “Whisky Pete” Olson, and married a fellow Swede, Elin
Sophia Newman (whose surname was originally Nyland). The couple raised
nine children and, to support his growing family, Erickson began working
as a jobber or logging contractor for local mills, while continuing to farm.
From 1934 until shortly before his death in 1954, Erickson ran several large
camps, employing as many as 250 lumberjacks at a time, that supplied the
Ford Motor Company Mill in L’Anse with timber for wooden automobile
parts. In his heyday, Erickson also hired farm laborers for such seasonal
practices as haymaking (Anonymous 1948, 1954; Klenner 2005; Ravits
2005).
Erick Erickson’s contemporary status as a legendary local character
emerged during these two decades. Through research undertaken sporadically between 1993 and the present, I have encountered nearly 50 Big Erick
stories, along with an additional 17 variants, from four published sources, a
broadcast on Hancock’s WMPL radio, and contact through interviews and
letters with ten people who knew and/or told stories about him. I have
learned about but have not yet eaten a Big Erick Burger. And I have traveled
Big Erick Road to Big Erick’s Bridge State Forest Campground, crossed the
eponymous bridge, and gazed at Big Erick’s Falls.
From a strict textual and generic perspective, the oral narratives that constitute what I am calling the cycle of Big Erick legends range from true stories based on occurrences experienced and witnessed by several parties, to
legendary accounts that are supposed to be true but are second hand and not
fully verifiable, to widespread jokes or humorous fictitious narratives that
are “told on” an actual person with whose real life escapades they somehow
fit. In addition, the many Big Erick stories emphasizing his sing-song
Swenglish speech and mock inadvertent malapropisms–whether regarded as
true, possibly true, or outright fictions–share structural and stylistic features
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with the dialect joke, a form of folk narrative that flourishes in the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan (Dorson 1948). Meanwhile at least one widely circulating story, involving the loan and repayment of an uncounted roll of
money, has achieved the status of an exemplum or parable, a moral tale illustrative of an ideal response to a recurring human situation.
With regard to content, the most widespread folk legendry surrounding
Big Erick focuses on his physical appearance and on his distinctive verbal
style, witticisms, and related actions in two separate but interrelated spheres.
The first is the lumber camp, populated by his workers: cooks, sawyers, and
truckers, including a plethora of Finns from the nearby settlement of Aura.
The second is the town, usually L’Anse but sometimes more cosmopolitan
Hancock, wherein Erick meets beggars, bartenders, bankers, merchants, and
agents of the state and federal governments. Sometimes the latter also venture into the woods; whereas fellow timber jobbers and working lumberjacks are regular accomplices or witnesses to Erick’s in-town interactions.
In addition to Big Erick stories and memories that persist in the public
sphere, there are more private family stories, the content, style, and intent of
which, as we shall see, both coincide and contrast with narratives in wider
circulation.
A strapping albeit occasionally shambling, hunched over 6'4", the Erick
Erickson of legend was mostly dubbed “Big Erick,” although some called
him “Long Erick” and others favored the Finnglish “Lonkka Eerikki”
(Collins 1975:86). In 1946, amidst a storytelling session at the Liberty
boardinghouse in L’Anse, a fellow named Norm Thompson told folklorist
Richard Dorson that, despite his height, Erickson was “all humped over.”
Thompson continued:
If you meet him in the woods where he’s boss, he’s dressed up in oxfords, dress pants
and a silk shirt. In town he dresses like a lumberjack, very ragged. He cut off the
pants legs of a new eighty dollar suit in a saloon, to show he was one of the boys.
“Sesus Rist, none of my friends know me,’ he said (Dorson 1952:201–202).
Local historian Elsie Collins offered similar comments amidst a string of
stories learned from former Erickson employees Andrew Keranen and Hugo
Lehto: “‘Long Eric’ fancied himself as a neat dresser on the work scene.
When he went to town, however, his garb was like that of most lumberjacks” (Collins 1975:86). [See Figure 1]
A tall man who sometimes affected shorter stature, a logger who occasionally wore town clothes in the woods and woods clothes in town, the
Erick Erickson of stories periodically used facial and vocal expressions inversely. As Norm Thompson told Richard Dorson: “He’s happy when losing money and grumbling when making it” (Dorson 1952:201). Swanny
Goodell recalled Erickson’s frequent lament, “I’m going to the poor farm.”
Consequently, Charlie Laurich, a fellow logging contractor, and others
knew Erickson by yet another name.
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Figure 1: Big Erick, in lumberjack garb, assumes a characteristic
stance at his camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, late 1940s.
Courtesy: Trish Klenner Ravits.
He was also called “Crying’ Eric, because he had a high, whining voice when upset.
“Vell, if ve don’t get more logs out, dere vill be no money for Christmas!” . . . It was
when things were going well that he whined the most (Waring 1986:59).
Like the foregoing example, Big Erick stories sometimes demanded a distinctive performance style. Besides assuming a distraught tone, Laurich’s
rendering of Erick’s speech assumes the broken-English of a Swedish immigrant. Dorson likewise reported “queer whines and sobbing noises” when
Erick was evoked, adding that the “imitation of Big Eric’s own Swedish
singsong has become a standard second voice around L’Anse for describing
the eccentric acts and sayings of the celebrated boss” (1952:201). Even so,
Dorson’s use of “Sesus Rist,” a dialect rendering of “Jesus Christ,” in two
of the five stories he published suggests that some of his informants were
likely first-generation Finnish Americans whose emulations of a Swede’s
botched English were colored by their own Finnglish peculiarities.3 Indeed
the Big Erick stories I have found were told mostly by Finns. Among them:
Norm Hiltunen, Hugo Lehto, Andrew Keranen, Roy Koski, Siiri Toyras Ollila, Wesley Ollila, Ken Salo, Oren Tikkanen, Helmer Toyras, and Fred
Waisanen.
The crying tone frequently adopted yet variously employed in Big Erick
stories prompts several interpretive possibilities. A marked departure from
the deep, gruff, stoic voicing commonly used in oral tradition to signify participants in such proverbially “rough and tough” occupations as logging,
Big Erick’s higher, heartfelt register–coming, in contrast, from an experienced, extremely competent woods boss—bespoke a greater-than-usual degree of self-reflection, vulnerability and humanity: the genuine anxiety of an
immigrant with very little education, of a self-made man who was supporting a large family, and of a boss who was responsible for the well-being of
several hundred workers in a region mightily affected by the economic de-
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pression of the 1930s. Similarly, Norm Thompson’s aforementioned notion
that Erickson was “grumbling” in good times and “happy” when times were
hard, despite the apparent contradiction, aligns with age-old peasant fatalism: calamity and prosperity come in cycles; one endures the former and
recognizes that the latter cannot last.
At the same time, however, there is little doubt that the crying tone of
some Big Erick stories connotes a canny entrepreneur. Indeed Helmer
Toyras, whose brother-in-law Wesley Ollila worked for Erickson “from the
1930s to the 1950s off and on,” referred to Big Erick stories as centered
around “his sly remarks” (Toyras 2002). Swanny Goodell, a mill operator,
fondly recalled the legendary Swede as a “hard bargainer” who was nevertheless fair and scrupulously honest. To some, he may have been “Crying
Erick,” but as Goodell put it, “he was no crybaby as far as I’m concerned.”
Once a price was agreed on, a handshake sealed the deal and there was no
more quibbling (Olson 1970). The fact that Erickson was indisputably admired rather than ridiculed suggests that legend-tellers like Goodell regarded him as shrewdly putting on the poor mouth to gain an edge, a rather common, artful, and even expected traditional negotiating strategy within old
time economic networks eschewing the small print and unfathomable language of lawyers. In the mid-1970s, for example, I recorded several bargaining sessions between cattle brokers in the Omaha stockyards that, in keeping
with longstanding conventions, were fraught with the hard-luck stories and
pleading tones of both parties (e.g. Leary 1978). Accordingly in one Big
Erick story, tears rolled down his cheeks as he bargained for a new truck
(Waring 1986:60). In another, he lamented to a sluggish Monday morning
crew that, at the rate they were going, it would soon be Friday, “and ve ain’t
got no vork done yet” (Koski 2005).
As in these two instances, anecdotes regarding Big Erick in town frequently addressed themes associated with money, property, and legal matters, while those set in the woods involved his efforts to maintain authority
over and get work out of a large crew of independently inclined employees
that included adversaries, agitators, shirkers, and petty thieves. When a
businessman from Houghton-Hancock, twin cities divided by a canal, commented enviously on all the property Erick owned, he whimpered that his
holdings extended “only as far as the bridge” (Erickson 2005). When a
salesman for City Service pressed Erick to purchase his brand of gasoline,
the big camp boss wondered what good city service would be in the woods
(Dorson 1952:202). After auditing Big Erick’s books, a man from the Internal Revenue Service asked if he had any other resources. Apparently mishearing, Erick deflected the query immediately to a sporting fellow timber
contractor: “Sirard has the race horses, not me” (Toyras 2002). Several of
the five versions I’ve encountered add, “But I got eight damn good teams”
(Dorson 1952:202; Anonymous, 1971; Collins 1975:87; Waring 1986:60).
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On another occasion a government official cautioned Erick not to exceed his
assigned logging quota. Playing slyly on the homophony between his
Swenglish rendering of “the quota” (“da quota”) and the mostly tree-less
states of North and South Dakota, Erickson supposedly responded, “I never
logged in Dakota” (Collins 1975:87; Waisanen 1993).
A master of affected ignorance and effective indirection, the Erick of legend controlled and cajoled his workers similarly. When a new cook obsessed with efficiency proposed completely rearranging the camp kitchen,
Erick reckoned it would be more efficient to get a new cook (Collins 1975:
85; Waisanen 1993). When a log truck driver, disgusted with the old rig he
had to use, told Erick, “You can stick this truck up your ass,” the big Swede
meekly protested, “I got a team of horses and a bulldozer up there already”
(Toyras 2002; see also Collins 1975:86; Waisanen 1993; Koski 2005). Another time:
In the spring when the jacks were ready to leave camp because of spring break-up,
he knew that a certain employee had already filled his gas tank from the available
gas pumps . . . He told the man, “You have been such a good worker, go and fill up
your gas tank at the pump over there, on your way out.” The pump was visible to all
the others who were present, so it was an embarrassment to the fellow because he
had already stolen gas and Big Erick knew this, so the fellow’s face got pretty red
(Toyras 1992; see also Waisanen 1993).
Erick subtly shamed one of his truckers as well. The fellow had taken off
with a company vehicle for a two day spree. Arriving late for work on the
third day, he saw his boss coming and slouched guiltily in the cab. Instead
of ranting, Big Erick simply said, “You can get out of this whorehouse now.
In the daytime it is my truck” (Collins 1975:86).
Several Big Erick stories key on his compassionate treatment of workers
and the respect they offered in return. Although he sometimes fired employees, or was forced by economic circumstances to dismiss them temporarily,
he invariably hired them back, even raising their pay. He often gave men
time off for emergencies and lent them money. In an oft-told story, one lumberjack asked for a loan to tide his family through hard times. Without a
word, without asking how much, and without counting his money, Erick
simply reached in his pocket, withdrew a large roll of bills, and handed them
to the fellow. Months later, the man gave Erick a wad of cash and, again,
with only a nod and without counting, he put the money in his pocket (Olson
1970, Waisanen 1993). Besides paying his men fairly, Erickson was known
for feeding them well, and for offering a meal to any who might turn up at
the camp. When asked how many worked for him, he responded mournfully: “I don’t know . . . but eighty-five eat here” (Collins 1975:85).
Big Erick stories, circulating in oral tradition and through local publications, have been of special interest to his children and grandchildren. As
might be expected, the content, style, and meaning of the family’s repertoire
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largely echo but occasionally are at odds with the larger complex of legends.
Erick’s daughter and grandson, Helen Erickson Klenner and her son, Mike
Klenner, told me several favorite family stories (Klenner 2005). From
1983–1989, Mike Klenner, served as pastor of the Lutheran church in Pelkie, a hamlet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula not far from several of his
grandfather’s camps.
Some of the men in the church had worked for him. I remember Elmo Heikkanen, a
real humble man. He worked for grandpa in the logging camps. Way back in the thirties. He told me in his home once, we were visiting, “You had a very nice grandpa.”
And he talked about him. Then there was another man named Wilho Wanatalo. He
worked for grandpa. And he was probably 17, 18. He went to the camp, and grandpa
gave him a job. He told him, “You’re kind of skinny.” You go to the cook and ask
for two lunch buckets.” So this is one of my parishoners who told me this. Neither
men are living anymore. “You go to the cook, get two lunch buckets. You’re kind of
skinny.”
Helen Klenner’s accounts came from her own experiences. She was a young
girl in this instance from the 1930s.
We lived about fifteen miles from the hospital. And it was in the winter. And this
young woman, she was ready to have her baby delivered. So he had one of his men
that worked for him–he took a tractor and took her in to L’Anse, Michigan, to the
hospital so she could have her baby delivered. He did things like that whenever
somebody needed something, or even needed money–he was always loaning them
money.
Helen also recalled her father’s justifiable dismay, and eventual vindication,
when audited by the Internal Revenue Service.
When they went through his books–they took his books and went over them. Then
they sent him a check from the government. They said he had overpaid. And that’s
a true story. ‘Cause I remember him coming home. He was all upset, why they were
after him, ‘cause he was honest.
Still another story, from late in Big Erick’s life, emphasizes honesty. Helen
Erickson Klenner was newly married when her father came to visit with a
dual purpose in mind. Nearly four decades earlier, while on his way to Skanee from a stint in Oregon, Erick Erickson fell ill and was treated in a hospital in Crookston, Minnesota, despite the fact that he lacked money to pay
his bill.
I don’t know what year that was. It was evidently before he was even married. Oh
goodness, about a year before he passed away, in 1953 it must’ve been, the spring of
the year, he came to visit us in Brainerd, Minnesota. And he wanted my husband,
who worked for Amoco Oil Company at the time–he traveled a lot, that was in his
territory–[to take him to Crookston]. He wanted to pay the bill, after all those years
. . . They went and checked for the hospital. The hospital had been torn down. It was
a hospital run by the Catholics. And he went and talked to the administrator. He said,
“I owe a bill.” He said, “Well we don’t have anything on it, because we destroyed
everything.” So he gave ‘em some money. How much I do not know.
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After a moment’s reflection, she added: “He was very honest. He taught us
to be as well.”
Emphasizing a concern for his workers’ well-being, kindness to neighbors, and honesty, the Klenners’ stories resonate thematically with many of
the more widely circulating Big Erick stories. Yet they also depart in significant ways from narratives swapped outside the family circle. None is a
comic story turning on some clever or inadvertent word play, and none feature Swenglish dialect and a crying tone. The Erickson extended family has
heard or read and appreciates many of the comic stories attributed to their
ancestor, and they have vivid, fond recollections of his Swedish-inflected
English, but they dispute representations of him as “Crying Erick.” Regarding her father’s supposed high-pitched voice, Helen Erickson Klenner told
me unequivocally, “That isn’t true” (Klenner 2005). Trish Klenner Ravits
elaborated on her mother’s point of view: “Granted, he got excited, but in
his struggle to speak the English language, perhaps his frustration was
colored by raising his voice” (Ravits 2007).
What are we to make of such opposing characterizations within the larger
complex of Big Erick legendry, both of which are offered by those who
knew the man more than fifty years ago and continue to revere him? We
cannot hear Big Erick banter with workers and townsfolk, nor do we have
recordings of his speech in even one situation, let alone many. Thanks to the
pioneering work of several folklorists, however, we do know that people living in what, on one level, is unarguably the same community are nonetheless
quite often participants in several different, even mutually exclusive, social
networks (Bauman 1972). Moreover those networks, typically formed
around such commonalities as kinship, ethnicity, gender and occupation,
may on certain occasions favor one set of behavioral modes (e.g. serious or
playful) and narrative genres (e.g. comic dialect anecdotes or sentimental
true stories) over another. Thus two people who know each other well in one
setting may not be fully aware of the actions and storytelling of their close
acquaintance in another context (Degh and Vázsonyi 1975). And to the extent that people excluded from one network are aware of its existence, they
often form speculative notions about how participants in that network might
regard them (Jansen 1959).
Since Big Erick stories infused with a crying tone abound within the
male, occupational, and commercial networks of lumberjacks and townsfolk, might Erick Erickson have indeed made clever and comic use of his
broken-English and economic burdens to address managerial and entrepreneurial challenges? Likewise, although “Crying Erick” stories were regarded within such networks as celebrations of an unusual yet thoroughly admirable fellow, might Erickson’s family members, as outsiders, quite understandably misinterpret and resent the very same stories as attacks on their
beloved Erick’s foreign birth, compassionate personality, and lack of edu-
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cation? Alternatively, might some non-family members who told the stories
also have been non-members of Big Erick’s occupational community who
indulged in the stories to assert their supposed ethnic and class superiority?
Commenting on her own experiences in relation to her father, Helen Erickson Klenner told me, “I think some were jealous of him, because he did so
well. Some even made fun of us kids. Some thought they were better than
other people.”
We do not know the answers to all of these questions, but we do know
Helen Klenner recollected that her father “got along very well with Finns.”
And they got along very well with him. As mentioned above, Elmo
Heikkanen, who had worked in the woods for Erickson, assured Mike
Klenner, “you had a very nice grandpa.” Besides Heikkanen, Big Erick
employed large numbers of Finnish Americans, both as farm hands and in
the lumber camps. In prefacing roughly a score of stories, all of them
gleaned from Finns who had worked for Big Erick, Elsie Collins reckoned
“Mr. Erickson became known to many men of Aura as an essentially kindly man and a shrewd judge of men” (Collins 1975:85). Apart from the legendary Swede’s extended family, Finnish Americans have been the chief
purveyors of Big Erick stories over the past 70 years. Indeed it is through
them that many stories remain current in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan’s oral tradition.
Betwixt and Between
So what can the Big Erick cycle tell us about new legends in Nordic America? To begin with, although classifying legends is a perilous enterprise, Big
Erick stories function most fundamentally as legends of local characters.
Characters like Erick Erickson are sustained in folk tradition by the sometimes contending generic shape-shifting of a local community. Through the
speech and action of a familiar character in familiar settings, the stories
make it possible to ponder collectively, to agree upon or debate, just what
constitutes and confounds a given community’s social categories and aspirations.
Compassionate, honest, hard-working, self-reliant, responsible, and successful, Big Erick might, upon first consideration, be pronounced a quintessentially “American” local character. Frederick Jackson Turner’s provocative “frontier thesis,” after all, argued that the American character, distinctive from the character of Europeans, was forged when immigrants from
many nations developed individualistic self-reliance and democratic values
by acquiring free land and commingling with fellow independent newcomers at society’s edge (Turner 1929). An intellectual heir of Turner, folklorist Richard Dorson did not look beyond an American context when including Big Erick in his discussion of legendary lumber camp bosses (1952:
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196–204). Dorson subsequently drew on Turner in America in Legend:
Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present, a book contending that
particular cycles of legends circulating during particular historical periods
expressed the nation’s zeitgeist (1973: 58–59,66–67). Notably, in that publication Dorson regarded legends concerning two other Nordic immigrant
loggers, Otto Walta and Ola Värmlänning, as exemplifying the “Economic
Impulse” characterizing nation-building in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (1973:170–174).
Following Dorson, we might be content simply to regard new world Nordic legends as dramatizations of assimilation, as narrative expressions of
patterns through which people of Nordic heritage melted into the great pot
of America’s cultural mainstream: Big Erick Erickson, a newcomer arriving
with nothing in a relative wilderness, casts off the class-bound constraints
of Europe and, by dint of hard and honest toil, rises “from rags-to-riches” to
achieve the proverbial “American dream.” We might also mention, in keeping with Dorson’s homogenizing Americanist assertions, that Big Erick’s
occupation and association with a road, a bridge, and a park render him another larger-than-life cousin of Paul Bunyan, especially since that legendary
logger relied on guile, humor, a dedicated crew and technology to alter and
exploit the natural world (Hoffman 1952). The Erickson-Bunyan connection might be strengthened by suggesting that the commercial promotion of
super-sized Big Erick Burgers are a hamburger joint equivalent of the
all-you-can-eat Paul Bunyan restaurants that attract tourists throughout the
timbered Upper Midwest.
And yet, as Simon Bronner has shown in his recent critical overview, proponents of putatively American traditions have almost invariably made use
of folklore selectively (2002). If we wish to consider Big Erick fully, we
cannot disregard contradictions that seethe through his life and legend, paradoxes that defy elegant claims of conventional Americanism. A tall man
who hunched over, a well-to-do person who appeared poor, a shrewd fellow
affecting foolishness, an indisputable manly man with an occasional
womanish voice, the Erick Erickson of folk narrative was also a a family
man who was one of the boys, a boss who was nonetheless a worker, a respectable citizen who sometimes played the rascal, and both a settled farmer
and an itinerant logger. As a trickster-like coincidence of opposites, Big
Erick embraced and thereby called into question notions of both the mainstream and the margins of American society.
Perhaps most tellingly with regard to our concern with the nature of new
Nordic American legends, the paradoxical components of Big Erick’s legendry also reveal him as both a less-than-completely-assimilated immigrant
who was nonetheless a thoroughgoing American, and as a Swede who was
and continues to be beloved by Finns. Such linked yet opposing aspects of
Big Erick stories accordingly sharpen our understanding of the similarly
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overlapping yet contrasting relationship between legends in Nordic realms
and North America. Although Big Erick’s life and legend span and conjoin
old and new worlds, the old world is turned upside down in the new. Just as
Skanee invokes yet inverts Skåne, so also does Big Erick resemble yet dramatically reverse the nature of folk figures revered by Nordic workers, especially Finnish workers.
The Finns who worked for Big Erick were not, quite obviously, bosses,
nor had they, with possibly a few exceptions, come from well-to-do families
back in Finland. As new world woods workers employed by an immigrant
Swede, they were also well aware that ethnic Finns had, for centuries, been
second-class citizens to Finland’s predominantly Swedish ruling class, and
that the Finnish forests had been industrialized and controlled for centuries
by the Swedish ship-building and tar trade (Mattila 1973:19–47). Not surprisingly, neither they nor their Finnish ancestors were accustomed to telling laudatory legends about Swedish bosses. Rather when it came to stories
associated with work, Finns in old and new worlds alike sustained an oral
tradition peopled with egalitarian trickster figures. A schwank cycle entrenched in Nordic realms and also widespread in peasant Europe featured
the clever hireling who used his wits to win rest, good food, and decent pay
from a stingy, hard-driving farmer (Ranke 1972:115–119; Uther 2004:297–
315). Shifting from agrarian to industrial contexts, such kindred working
class tricksters as Jussi the Workman and Lapatossu or “Shoe Pack”
emerged in late nineteenth century Finland.
The subject of stories told in America but set in Finland, the fictive hired
farm worker, Jussi, and Laptossu each crossed over imaginatively with fellow immigrants and were well known. Elli Köngäs-Maranda (1962) recorded old world farmer-servant stories in Illinois, while in the Upper Peninsula
of Michigan Richard Dorson set down numerous oral narratives about Jussi
and Lapatossu at the same time he was gathering Big Erick stories (Dorson
1952:129–131, 148–149, 291; see also Hoglund 1985:164–166). The historian A. William Hoglund also referred briefly to tales set in America concerning how Jussi “outwitted the pesky lice or the arrogant boss in the lumber camp” (1960:25–26). Celebrated through joke books, films, and a radio
program in Finland, Lapatossu was likewise the name of a left-wing Finnish
workers’ magazine published in Hancock, Michigan (Ross 1994:79). Images of Lapatossu–with hunched shoulders and a shambling gait—appeared
on the masthead and throughout each issue of Lapatossu during a bi-weekly
tenure that extended from 1911–1921. [See Figure 2] The magazine’s successor, Punikki (The Red), also included frequent images and stories of Lapatossu during its existence from 1921–1936 (Ross 1994:80). Both raggedly
dressed itinerant laborers, Lapatossu and Jussi the Workman were similarly
wise fools who used their wiles to puncture the pretensions of those who
acted “high-toned,” as well as to con better conditions, fair pay, and plenti-
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Figure 2: In this typical caricature,
Lapatossu wanders along a railroad
track. From the masthead of the
Finnish American newspaper, Lapatossu, June 15, 1916. Courtesy: Immigration History Research Center,
University of Minnesota.
ful food from grudging but gullible land owners, capitalists, and government officials.
The Finns who worked for Big Erick, and who socialized in places like
Aura’s worker’s hall, clearly realized that their boss was nothing like the
bosses rightly scorned and bedeviled by Jussi and Lapatossu. In marked
contrast, he actually shared the tricksters’ humble origins, slumped and tattered appearances, clever tactics, and deep sympathy with the common
worker. Although Big Erick used guile to keep his employees in line, he also
tolerated their trickiness with good nature, while sharpening his wits–in the
manner of Jussi and Lapatossu—to fend off government officials and to best
competing bosses and businessmen. What’s more Big Erick freely gave men
what Jussi and Lapatossu sought to gain through trickery: steady work, good
and plentiful food, fair pay, and decent treatment. And unlike some patronizing blue blood, he did it all without putting on airs. Summarizing the attitudes of her Finnish neighbors, Elsie Collins put it best: “Big Eric was a
sympathetic character to his subordinates because he was never too big for
his britches. He practiced humility without losing the respect of his associates” (Collins 1975:85).
This was not an easy task during the turbulent 1930s when Big Erick
established his camps and his reputation. Tensions between workers and
bosses were rife in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the spring of 1937, for
example, woods workers throughout the region organized an industry-wide
strike. Although the main targets were a handful of large corporate logging
operations that demanded long hours and dangerous work in return for poor
pay and miserable camp conditions, small independent loggers like Big
Erick were, as historian Theodore Karamanski put it, “trapped in this crossfire” (1980:240). There was violence on both sides, although the workers
and small loggers suffered the most.
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On June 4, in Newberry to the east of Big Erick’s operation, a pro-company mob enraged in part by the presence of avowed Communist Finns in
the ranks of striking lumberjacks attacked them with baseball bats and iron
bars, killing one striker and destroying the Worker’s Hall (Karamanski
1989: 237–241). A year later, when folklorist Alan Lomax visited Newberry
in search of songs for the Archive of American Folk Song, he met a gang of
Swedes at Larsen’s Luce Hotel who held Finnish loggers in contempt. He
described them in his field journal as:
young loafers, football players, fighters around the dreary bar, potential fascists,
boasting about how the strikers had been beaten up and the Finn Workers Hall
smashed.–We showed them reds–radio stations all over the country congratulated
the little town of Newberry–whistles blowing at 6AM–chased strikers for five miles
out of town—beating them. “Hey boys here’s a Roosevelt man.” – Dude Larsen, the
youngest, talks stupid, a boaster, soft, golden hair falling in forelock over high sloping Swede forehead–brother John the brightest complexion I’ve ever seen–reputed a
terrible fighter–always drunk–dangerous–very handsome (Lomax 1938).
The response of Big Erick, a Swede, to his mostly Finnish crew was quite
different. Although distressed when they agreed to strike in solidarity with
fellow workers, he took them back “when the strike fizzled out” and, a few
months later “granted the eight-hour day and . . . . increased contract pay for
sawyers” (Collins 1975:86). He was especially magnanimous in his dealings with Hugo Lehto, the strike leader and a source for many of the Big
Erick stories gathered by Elsie Collins. She recounts Lehto’s experience:
“With his first check he was given a bonus, but better still was this compliment, ‘You done a real good job. If all the other fellas was like you, Lehto,
we’d get a lot of logs out of here’” (Collins 1975:86).
As an immigrant laborer of humble origins who became a boss, Big
Erick clearly shrugged off old world economic and class constraints in
ways that folklorists like Richard Dorson might conclude were unarguably
American. Yet he just as clearly spurned the high-toned new world role of
a rags-to-riches plutocrat to keep faith with the noble ideals and mischievous sensibilities of Nordic working class heroes. What’s more, although a boss of Swedish origins, Erick was hailed by Finnish-born
workers who recognized his kinship with Jussi the Workman and Lapatossu. Randall, an otherwise anonymous caller to WMPL radio, and a man
who once worked for Big Erick, said about his former boss, in a FinnishAmerican dialect suffused with affection, “He was the only man I ever met
in my life like him” (Olson 1970). Fred Waisanen, raised in the Aura
settlement, was more succinct but equally affectionate: “He was a legend”
(Waisanen 1993). For our purposes, Big Erick’s life and associated stories
cannot be understood with exclusive recourse to either Nordic or American legendry; nor can they be used to illustrate a discrete Swedish or Finnish American pattern. Betwixt and between, arising in an egalitarian and
126
James P. Leary
creolized community, understandable only through the consideration of
several traditions transformed, Big Erick’s stories offer a striking instance
of new legends in Nordic America.
James P. Leary
Professor of Folklore and Scandinavian Studies
306 Ingraham Hall
University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin 53706
USA
[email protected]
This article could not have been written without the kind assistance of many people,
most of whom are cited below: Ansel Erickson, Helen Erickson Klenner, Mike Klenner, Kjerstin Moody, Marty Nelson, Marilyn and Ray Prill, Oren Tikkanen, Helmer
Toyras, Fred Waisanen, and especially Trish Klenner Ravits. My thanks goes as well
to the staff of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota for access to the Finnish American worker’s periodicals Lapatossu and Punikki.
Portions of the research undertaken for this article were funded by the Michigan Traditional Arts Program at Michigan State University, by Vilas and Kellett research
awards from the University of Wisconsin, and by the Finlandia Foundation. Finally,
I am grateful to Hanne Pico Larson, Lizette Graden, Valdimar Hafstein, and Susanne
Österlund-Pötzsch for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
References
Unpublished
Erickson, Ansel May 21, 2005: Tape recorded interview conducted by James P.
Leary via a telephone call to the Erickson home, Skanee, Michigan
Klenner, Helen Erickson and Mike Klenner June 9, 2005: Tape recorded interview
conducted by James P. Leary via a telephone call to the Helen Erickson Klenner
home, Rochester, Minnesota.
Koski, Ray May 23, 2005: Tape recorded interview conducted by James P. Leary via
a telephone call to the Koski home, Aura, Michigan.
Lomax, Alan 1938: Michigan Field Notebooks. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, Archive of Folk Culture.
Nelson, Marty May 21, 2005: Notes from telephone call by James P. Leary to the
Copper Country State Forest office.
Olson, Bob ca. 1970: Tape recording of a call-in show devoted to Big Erick. WMPL
radio station, Hancock/Houghton, Michigan, with callers Norm Hiltunen, Swanny Goodell, and someone identified only as Randall.
Prill, Marilyn Peterson May 21, 2005: Tape recorded interview conducted by James
P. Leary via a telephone call to the Prill home, rural L’Anse, Michigan.
Ravits, Trish Klenner 2005: Email correspondence.
Ravits, Trish Klenner 2007: Email correspondence.
127
Waisanen, Fred and Oren Tikkanen 1993: U.P. Storytelling. Tape recording of a narrative session at the Michigan Folklife Festival, Michigan State University.
Published
Anonymous 1948: The Lumberjack of 1948. The Hiawathan: Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula Magazine, vol. 1.
Anonymous 1954: Retires from Logging. L’Anse Sentinel.
Anonymous 1971: Skanee Centennial Booklet 1871–1971.
Bauman, Richard 1972: Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore. Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, ed. Americo Paredes and Richard Bauman.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bronner, Simon J. 2002: Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources.
Christiansen, Reidar 1962: European Folklore in America. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Collins, Elsie M. 1975: From Keeweenaw to Abbaye: Biographical Sketches of a
Community. Ishpeming, Michigan: Globe Printing Company.
Cumming, John 1971: The Timber Era. 100 Years of History: L’Anse/Skanee Centennial. Baraga, Michigan: Baraga County Historical Society.
Dégh, Linda and Andrew Vázsonyi 1975: The Hypothesis of Multi-Conduit Transmission in Folklore. Folklore, Performance and Communication, ed. Dan
Ben-Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein. The Hague: Mouton.
Dégh, Linda 2001: Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Dorson, Richard M. 1948: Dialect Stories of the Upper Peninsula: A New Form of
American Folklore. Journal of American Folklore 61:240.
Dorson, Richard M. 1952: Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of the
Upper Peninsula. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Dorson, Richard M. 1973: America in Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to
the Present. New York City: Pantheon Books.
Hanson, Marvin C. 1971: Skanee: Its Early Days. 100 Years of History: L’Anse/
Skanee Centennial. Baraga, Michigan: Baraga County Historical Society.
Haugen, Einar 1953: The Norwegian Language in America. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Haugen, Einar 1970: Thor Helgeson: Schoolmaster and Raconteur. Norwegian–
American Studies and Records 24.
Helgeson, Thor 1917: Fra Indianernes Lande. Minneapolis.
Helgeson, Thor 1923: Folksagn og folketro. Eau Claire, Wisconsin: Fremad Publishing Co.
Hoffman, Daniel G. 1952: Paul Bunyan: Last of the Frontier Demigods. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hoglund, A. William 1960: Finnish Immigrants to America, 1880–1920. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Hoglund, A. William 1985: Finnish–American Humor and Satire: A Cultural Self
Portrait, 1890–1930's. Scandinavians in America: Literary Life, ed. J.R. Christianson. Decorah, Iowa: Symra Literary Society.
Jansen, William Hugh 1959: The Esoteric-Exoteric Factor in Folklore. Fabula 2.
Johnson, Aili Kolehmainen 1955: The Eyeturner: A Cycle of Finnish Wizard Tales
from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Midwestern Folklore 5.
Karamanski, Theodore J. 1989: Deep Woods Frontier: A History of Logging In
Northern Michigan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
128
James P. Leary
Karni, Michael G. 1967: Otto Walta: Finnish Folk Hero of the Iron Range. Minnesota History 40.
Klein, Barbro Sklute 1970: Legends and Folk Beliefs in a Swedish American Coummunity: A Study in Folklore and Acculturation. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University. Reprinted as Legends and Folk Beliefs in a Swedish American Community. New York City: Arno Press, 1980.
Klein, Barbro Sklute 2004: Old Maps and New Worlds: 125 Years of Place-Names,
Stories, and Material Culture in New Sweden, Maine. Scandinavians in Old and
New Lands: Essays in Honor of H. Arnold Barton, ed. Philip J. Anderson, Dag
Blanck, and Byron J. Nordstrom. Chicago: The Swedish–American Historical
Society.
Köngäs-Maranda, Elli 1962: A Finnish Schwank Pattern: The Farmer–Servant
Cycle of the Kuusisto Family. Midwest Folklore 11.
Köngäs-Maranda, Elli 1963: Finnish–American Folklore: Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University. Reprinted as Finnish–
American Folklore. New York City: Arno Press, 1980.
Klymasz, Robert B. 1973: From Immigrant to Ethnic Folklore: A Canadian View of
Process and Transition. Journal of the Folklore Institute 10:3.
Leary, James P. 1978: Stories and Strategies of the Omaha Stockyards. Workers’
Folklore and the Folklore of Workers, ed. Philip Nusbaum and Catherine Swanson. Bloomington, Indiana: Folklore Forum.
Mataczynski, David May 4, 1988: Big Erick Was Too Busy to Go Fishing. L’Anse
Sentinel.
Mattilla, Walter 1973: The Finnish Paul Bunyans. Portland, Oregon: Finnish American Historical Society of the West.
Monette, Clarence J. 1975: Some Copper Country Names and Places. Lake Linden,
Michigan: Welden H. Curtin.
Munch, Peter 1960: Ten Thousand Swedes: Reflections on a Folklore Motif. Midwest Folklore 10.
Olson, Louise P. 1950: Four Scandinavian Ghost Stories. Hoosier Folklore 9.
Olson, Louise P. 1954: Norwegian Tales from Minnesota. Midwest Folklore 4.
Paulsen, Frank M. 1967: Danish–American Folk Traditions: A Study in Fading Survivals. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University.
Ranke, Kurt 1972: European Anecdotes and Jests. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and
Bagger.
Rølvaag, Ella Valborg 1941: Norwegian Folk Narrative in America. Norwegian–
American Studies and Records 1.
Ross, Carl 1994: Radicalism in Minnesota, 1900–1960: A Survey of Selected
Sources. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Swanson, Roy 1948: A Swedish Immigrant Folk Figure: Ola Värmlänning. Minnesota History 29.
Turner, Frederick Jackson 1920: The Frontier in American History. NYC: H. Holt
and Company.
Uther, Hans-Jörg 2004: The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and
Bibliography. Helsinki: Folklore Fellows Communications.
Waring, Betty A. 1986: Yellow Dog Tales and Logging Trails to Big Bay, Michigan.
Marquette, Michigan: Lake Superior Press.
129
1 In pointing out that the old world legends told by Nordic peoples in North America have been
“mostly supernatural,” I do not wish to discount the less frequent yet evident persistence of
historical legends. For an excellent discussion of one such legend complex–involving oral
narratives, a ballad, and a rhyme–see Munch (1960).
2 Big Erick and his family used “Erick Erickson.” Hence I have used this spelling, except
when quoting several sources that render the name as “Eric Ericson” or “Eric Erickson.”
3 Dorson mentions “Sesus ‘Rist” as one of several “conventional expletives and expressions”
used in Finnish dialect stories in his genre-defining article, Dialect Stories of the Upper
Peninsula: A New Form of American Folklore (1948:116). The use of ‘Rist for Christ is
standard Finnglish, as immigrant Finns typically dropped the first consonant (in this case the
hard “c” sound of “ch”) whenever two consonant sounds began a word, e.g. drink becomes
‘rink, sleep becomes ‘leep, chrome becomes ‘rome. Dorson’s use of Sesus, not Yesus, for
Jesus is puzzling, however, since first and second generation Finnish Americans typically
rendered the English “j” sound as “y.” My suspicion is that Dorson did not hear this expression correctly and, because he wrote down stories instead of making sound recordings amidst
his 1940s fieldwork, he was unable to discover errors by playing back performances.
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James P. Leary
Witchcraft Trials in the Norwegian Folklore Archives
131
The Collection of Norwegian Witchcraft
Trials in the Norwegian Folklore Archives
(Norsk Folkeminnesamling) at the
University of Oslo
Henning Laugerud
A part of the collections of the Norwegian Folklore Archives at the University of Oslo is the collection of Norwegian witchcraft or sorcery trials from
the end of the sixteenth century to the first decades of the eighteenth century,
known as “Trolldomsarkivet”.1 The collection consists of transcriptions of
a broad spectrum of legal documents, police department accounting records,
bailiff, diocese and county governor accounting records, records of legal
proceedings and other documents. The collection of transcriptions consists
of some 780 of the roughly 930 witchcraft cases from this period that is
known today. This collection has recently been rearranged, supplemented
and digitized and is made publicly accessible on the Internet.
In this article I will take a brief look at the background and history of this
collection, and present the newly executed digitization project on the Norwegian sorcery and witchcraft trials with related material.
The Transcription Project, 1927–1949
The collection and transcription of documents relating to Norwegian sorcery and witchcraft trials was carried out under the auspices of the Institute
for Comparative Research in Human Culture (Institutt for sammenlignende
kulturforskning), in the period 1927–1949. This institute was founded in
1922, as an independent research institution sponsoring research in the areas
of comparative linguistics, folklore, religion, ethnology, archaeology and
ethnography. In the period between the two world wars the institute was a
central and renowned research institution, both internationally and nationally, and financed several large research projects and international symposia,
as well as publishing the results of these activities.2 The Institute was fi-
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Henning Laugerud
nanced by the Norwegian authorities through the establishment of a fund
and grants from the City of Oslo. It was also sponsored by the Rockefeller
Foundation in the years 1929 to 1934.3
In a letter dated 10 November 1927 to the steering committee of the Institute, the head of “The Folklore Committee” (Folkeminneutvalget), Knut
Liestøl (1881–1952), together with the other signatories Reidar Th. Christiansen (1886–1971) and Nils Lid (1890–1958),4 applied for a sum of 1200
Norwegian kroner to start up a project for transcribing and collecting documents relating to the sorcery and witchcraft trials of Norway.5 The main argument for the necessity of such an undertaking was that in this material
there was hidden rich information of great folkloristic and more general cultural historical interest.6 This was source material of the greatest importance
and it was seen as necessary to collect this material in connection with the
systematic research on Norwegian popular belief and traditions that had
started at this time in the same scholarly milieu.
The project activities started the following year, under the leadership of
Nils Lid. The work on the transcription and collection of judicial documents
continued until 1949, as one of the major activities of the Folklore Committee. The work continued during the first years of the Second World War,
with a pause in the years 1943 to 1945 when the holdings of the National
Archives were evacuated to more secure keeping in the old silver mines of
Kongsberg. But the work started again in 1946. Svale Solheim (1903–
1971), Lid’s assistant from 1935, later took over the responsibility for the
project in 1940 and up until its finalization in 1949.7 During the more than
twenty years from 1927/1928 up until 1949 this was one of the top-priority
scholarly projects financed by the Folklore Committee. Both Nils Lid and
Svale Solheim did research and published on topics related to witchcraft,
sorcery and magic.8
During the course of the project a systematic review of judicial protocols
and other source materials was completed, primarily from the seventeenth
century, but also documents and material from the end of the sixteenth to the
beginning of the seventeenth centuries. All documents that had to do with
criminal cases regarding accusations of witchcraft and sorcery were transcribed with excruciating precision, with references to original sources. The
review of archival materials, and the transcription itself, were completed by
Thora Laache, the archives in Oslo, the National Archivist Leif Midthaug at
the National Archive at Hamar, and Ebba Jansen in Bergen. The transcriptions of a selection of cases from Finnmark were completed by a fourth person whom it has not yet been possible to identify.
In 1949 the transcription and collection of documents was concluded. But
in addition to this project, the Folklore Committee of the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture financed another related research
project during the same period. This was the huge undertaking of Dr. med.
133
Ingjald Reichborn-Kjennerud of research into popular medicine, subsequently published in five volumes in the period 1927–1947 titled: Vår gamle
trolldomsmedisin (“Our Old Sorcery Medicine).9 In the documents related
to the dealings of the Folklore Committee, Reichborn-Kjennerud’s project
is always mentioned in relation to the “Sorcery Project”, as it was commonly called in the documents. In a new application in 1949 from Svale Solheim
to the Norwegian Research Council, this was clearly stated as being a part
of a larger undertaking in the years preceding his new application.10 And as
this application states, this has been a large and important undertaking and
the time has now come to do the final part, the completion of the collection
and research into the material and a subsequent publication of a large history
of witchcraft and sorcery in Norway.
Svale Solheim received his money from the national research council and
started in 1950 with the final collecting of material, which meant the popular
tradition and folklore material related to beliefs in sorcery and popular
magic. During a period of four years, from 1950 to 1954, Sigrid Liestøl
worked as Solheim’s assistant on the project. She collected and typed the
material, in addition to collecting and systematizing published material. Solheim himself travelled round the country to register and photograph all
kinds of objects related to popular belief on sorcery. The final outcome was
1,581 neatly typed manuscript pages and 450 photographs according to the
final report dated 8 December 1954, addressed to the research council.11 The
letter concludes that the only thing that is left now is the final research and
the writing of the book about the Norwegian witchcraft and sorcery trials. It
subsequently came to nothing, and this is the last time this “all-important”
collection and research project is mentioned. The transcribed and collected
material seems not to have been used until the 1970s, by Bente Alver and by
Hans Eyvind Næss in his seminal and important historical study of the Norwegian witchcraft and sorcery trials from 1981/1982.12
The Present Collection in the Norwegian Folklore Archives
The result of the transcription process was a comprehensive archive that
was integrated into the Norwegian Folklore Archives, which was a part of
the Department of Folklore. After various institute mergers and reorganizations, it has since become a part of the research archive at today’s Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of
Oslo.
The archive, and its transcriptions, maintains an unusually high level of
accuracy, as later research has documented. This is in other words a source
archive of uncommonly high quality and research value, which is also evident in that everyone who has worked with witchcraft and sorcery trials in
Norway during that last fifty years has based their work on material in this
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Henning Laugerud
This is an example of the transcriptions in The Norwegian Folklore Archives, showing the front
page and the transcribed documents. The front page states the archival provenience, the name
of the accused, the year and the outcome of the case. This particular case concerns “Soede
Marj” (“Sweet Mary”), her real name being Gunhild, who was triad and executed in Mandal,
in the southern part of Norway, in 1650. The sources transcribed are the county accounts from
135
the County of Nedenes, in to days Vest-Agder, and gives the figures for the cost of her uphold
in prison for 4 months and the payment for the executioner. She was beheaded by sword. Her
number in the process-register is no. 189. Her confession is recorded in the documents of another case, no. 203, against Gunhild Nedrebø from Kristiansand.
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Henning Laugerud
archive. The collection has been a vital resource for research and has also
been used by foreign scholars.
The collected transcriptions cover approximately 780 of the known sorcery or witchcraft trials – of a total of about 930 cases. This means that
roughly two-thirds of the total cases are contained in this collection. The
transcription project did not include material that was already published in
historical document publications from the nineteenth and early twentieth
century. With these published sources we can include material for about 150
other cases, which means that the historical documentation of this complex
phenomenon, or phenomena, in Norway has been in a unique situation for a
very long time. Despite this, the research interest has not been as great as
should be expected. It is the aim of the newly finished supplementation and
digitization project to remedy this.
The archive is not complete, however, and later researchers – such as
Hans Eyvind Næss, Rune Blix Hagen and Gunnar Knutsen – have found additional legal proceedings and other material that were not included in the
transcription project. But even these new findings must be defined as supplements, and have now been included into the new digitized archive together with material from source publications. As far as I am aware there is
no similar project of such a scope regarding witchcraft and sorcery trials in
Europe of the early modern period. This archive is in this sense completely
unique in an international context.
The Digitization Project and the Present Register and Database
of Norwegian Witchcraft Trials from the Sixteenth to the Early
Eighteenth Centuries
During the spring of 2006 a major digitization and organization project began in order to make this collection and supplemental material regarding
Norwegian sorcery and witchcraft trials from early modern times available
on the Internet.13
The digitization project is a cooperative effort between the Department of
Culture Studies and Oriental Languages and the Unit for Digital Documentation at the University of Oslo. All documents and transcriptions from the
witchcraft archive have been scanned, and in addition to this all other documents from already published sources have also been scanned. This extension is intended to create a database that is as complete as possible of all
known Norwegian witchcraft cases/allegations and their most central source
documentation.
The database consists of a register with an overview over all known
witchcraft cases in Norway as of today. In addition it contains a few other
cases related to witchcraft, in all 924 cases. These cases are registered under
individual personal names with a case number, and organized by province
137
and county. The register contains complete source references, of all known
documents today, for all registered cases. In addition it includes some supplementary information. The register is sequential and based on the serial
number principle, in other words; the numbering starts with 1 and continues
sequentially case by case.14
The basis for the register is Hans Eyvind Næss’s register from Trolldomsprosessene i Norge på 1500- 1600-tallet. En retts- og sosialhistorisk
undersøkelse (Witchcraft Trials in Norway during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. A Judicial and Sociohistorical Study, Oslo 1982), which is
a revised edition of his doctoral thesis from 1980. This thereby represents a
national standard register, and all “new” cases have been and will be numbered sequentially in relation to Næss’s register. The database is also built
up according to Næss’s principles of order in this register. In addition to the
cases from Næss, the register is supplied with a number of newly discovered
cases from studies done after Næss. The numbering of these cases is done
sequentially after the last number in Næss’s register.
An important question in relation to such a register is how to define a
sorcery or witchcraft case. The principle followed by Næss, and adapted
in this register, is perhaps a very simple one: a witchcraft case is simply a
case where people stand trial for sorcery or witchcraft, i.e. that someone
is charged with breaking laws against sorcery or witchcraft. In Næss’s
overview from 1982 also libel cases (slander cases) are included where
someone is charged with defamation for having accused someone of being
a sorcerer, witch or the like. Some other cases that are not strictly cases
where someone has been accused of breaking sorcery or witchcraft laws
are also included.15 The reason for this is that they are a part of the collection of transcribed material that has been the basis for the database. We
have therefore been of the opinion that it is correct to include them, since
the material is in the Norwegian Folklore Archives. The cases are related
to the broader “sorcery or witchcraft complex” and are therefore interesting and relevant. What a witchcraft case was or is will always be a question of definition, and every user of the database must make his or her own
evaluation of the material.
The main part of the database, and obviously the most important content,
is the facsimiles of source texts. These are the transcribed documents from
the Norwegian Folklore Archives. They make up the bulk of the material, in
all 785 cases. This is supplemented with printed source editions for the majority of cases for which there are no transcriptions in the Archive, or where
the transcriptions are lacking and/or unclear (this applies particularly to
cases from Finnmark), in all 182 cases. There are, however, some cases in
the register that do not have any material in the database. The reason for this
is that these documents have not been transcribed, nor published, and are
still in various archives in Norway. It has been outside the scope of the
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Henning Laugerud
present project to collect this material. The register, however, contains
source references for these few cases as well.
The Black Books of Norway
The new database also includes additional material related to sorcery and
“magical” beliefs and traditions. Based on documents in the Folklore Archive, a digital archive of the so-called “black books” from Norway has
been built. This digital archive contains facsimiles of a selection of originals, transcriptions and copies in the Folklore Archive. Also included is
Svarteboken fra Borge (The Black-book of Borge) transcribed and commented by Professor Arne Bugge Amundsen.16 In addition to the facsimiles
it contains a preliminary register of the known black books in public collections. This register is to be expanded and contains today the collections in
the following institutions: Norsk folkeminnesamling – Universitetet i Oslo,
Nasjonalbiblioteket – Håndskriftsamlingen, De Heibergske Samlinger –
Sogn folkemuseum, Norsk Folkemuseum og Gunnerusbiblioteket – Universitetsbiblioteket i Trondhjem.
Why This Project?
When this database is finished we in Norway will be in a unique situation
internationally, in that practically all known witchcraft cases of Norwegian
courts will be available not just in a register, but also with most legal documents digitally accessible. In order for it to be complete a few supplements
are necessary, but this does not actually constitute very many. The database
will also be easy to maintain, in other words, update and correct. Therefore
we will be able to present an important and much sought-after research material in an international context, in a simple and easily accessible way.
The collection also makes it possible to conduct investigations that have
previously been impossible, or at least very difficult to complete. The collection enables a body of material to be systematized in an entirely different
way. The database has a dynamic structure that makes it easy to maintain
and update, with new source material, cases and additional information. The
register can be regarded as a kind of “national standard” for witchcraft
cases. The same principle has been adopted for the register of the “black
books”.
The database is intended for use in teaching situations, but will probably
have its most important function as a research database. Through this collection we have now access to affairs connected to witchcraft trials and their
justification on a unique scale. The database is also unique on a European
level, being the most complete register and collection of this kind. This is
also an important collection of sources for mentalities and world views in
139
Norway in the early modern period in more general terms, giving information about a variety of cultural phenomena, ideologies and mentalities.
Henning Laugerud
Førsteamanuensis/Associate professor, dr. art.
University of Bergen
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4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
These archival collections are today part of the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental
Languages at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo. The Norwegian Folklore
Archives was established in 1914. For a short historical survey of the history of the archives, see Christiansen 1995, pp. 59–69.
Among the institute’s members we count scholars like Marc Bloch, Gordon Childe, Alfons
Dopsch, Kaarle Krohn, H. P. L’Orange, Antoine Meillet to mention some of the most renowned ones. The reports on the activities of the first twelve years are reported in three subsequent published reports by the Institute’s leader, Fredrik Stang, in English. See the bibliography of this article. See also Stang 1931 and Amundsen 1972. For a more general history of the institute and its establishment, see the newly published doctoral dissertation
Kyllingstad 2008.
After the Second World War the Norwegian government reorganized all state funding of
research into public national research funds etc., and the financial situation of the institute
– which was a private foundation – somewhat crumbled away. However, the Institute is still
in existence, financing research into a broad spectrum of cultural research and publishing,
though on a smaller scale than in the years before 1950.
All three of them were leading academics in the field of folklore studies in Norway in the
first half of the twentieth century. For detailed biographies see for instance articles in Norsk
Biografisk Leksikon I and II. See also the short biographies in Eriksen & Amundsen 1999:
173–230, and the references there.
The letter is in the National Archives (Riksarkivet) in Oslo, Norway. See: RA: Institutt for
sammenlignende kulturforskning. PA 424. Hovedserie 1. D 0030.
“I dei gamle forhøyrs- og domsaktene som vedkjem trolldomssaker, er det gjømt eit rikt tilfang, som både hev folkloristisk og ålmenn kulturhistorisk interesse,” p. 1 of the letter. See
also Stang 1931:110; Amundsen 1972:96.
On Solheim see Norsk Biografisk Leksikon I and II, and Bø 1973:1–10.
See for instance the collection of Nils Lid’s articles on these topics Lid 1950, edited as a
festschrift for his 60th birthday and Svale Solheim’s chapter on sorcery in his seminal work
on Norwegian summer dairying in the mountains, Solheim 1952, chapter VI. This book was
published in the series of the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, series
B.
Reichborn-Kjennerud, in Vår gamle trolldomsmedisin (Oslo 1927–1947). On Reichborn-Kjennerud see Norsk Biografisk Leksikon I and II, and Eriksen & Amundsen 1999:
157–172 and the references in this article.
The letter is dated 1 November 1949.
The letter has the journal number 101/54.
See Alver 1971 and Næss 1982. The typed manuscript collection of popular belief about
sorcery is still in the archives but needs to be sorted and organized; this is a work that has
13
14
15
16
141
yet to be done. The photographs that were collected by Solheim, on the other hand, unfortunately seem to have been lost.
The work has been done by the author of the present article, with assistance from AnnaMarie Wiersholm.
When particular cases are given a number and an alphabetical classification, it is because
of people who were accused during the same trial.
See moreover Sølvi Sogner’s criticism and discussion of Næss’s definitions in Sogner
1982. On this see also Knutsen 1998:16ff.
This book contains a transcription of the so called “Black Book of Borge” with an introduction and comments; see Amundsen 1987.
142
Henning Laugerud
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143
Book Reviews
Living with Burnout
Mia-Marie Hammarlin: Att leva som utbränd: En etnologisk studie av långtidssjukskrivna. Brutus Östlings Bokförlag
Symposion, Stockholm/Stehag 2008.
255 pp. Ill. English summary. Diss.
No one in Sweden could have missed
the crucial public debate about longterm sick-listing and the many attempts
that have been made to explain once and
for all the reasons for this major social
problem. This study is part of an interdisciplinary research programme with
the task of examining the administration
and implementation of social insurance
in Sweden. The dissertation is therefore
a form of commissioned research, but it
does not seek to be just another project
explaining the reasons for the largescale sick-listing. In the dissertation the
focus is instead on what people do with
their experiences of being afflicted with
ill health and being sick-listed. The dissertation shows that the forms of mental
suffering that have been given the name
“burnout”, and are often associated with
very long periods of sick-listing, can
also trigger people’s creativity. The individuals who are the subject of this
study have started to engage in interests
which they never got round to pursuing
earlier in life. One result is that these
people, at least during the hours they
spend on their more or less newly acquired interests, feel more authentic,
more “real” and satisfied with themselves than before, when they were
healthy and able to work.
Hammarlin’s subjects are not people
who have only recently had their diag-
nosis confirmed, but those who have become established in their role as sick and
who have formed partly new relations
with themselves and the people close to
them. It is in this later phase of being
sick-listed that it becomes clear that
burnout and sick-listing do not just close
doors but can also open doors to new opportunities for action. But even if these
opportunities often concern nature’s
healing power and the pleasure of being
able to enjoy the scent of one’s own
flowerbed, the diagnosis and the sicklisting are not a bed of roses. Hammarlin, however, opposes the view that
people with long-term sick-listing for
burnout are embodied examples of processes by which society breaks people;
she suggests instead that these people’s
insights and competences should be noticed and utilized.
One of the conditions for this is the
dissertation’s phenomenological premises, with its focus on people’s lifeworlds as an analytical object and a central concept. This is not to say that a
theoretical framework generates specific stances, but rather a type of knowledge that in this case reflects a specific
outlook on humanity. For the discussion
of burnout this means that people’s perceived and described experiences of
their illness are the centre of interest, not
biomedical and scientific explanations
of these states. The knowledge yielded
is not measurable and scarcely generalizable. But there is a clear will not to reduce these people, who are referred to in
the dissertation as “collaborators” (medverkande), not “informants”.
The analytical approach of the disser-
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tation follows the perspectives of phenomenology and cultural analysis presented in the book Being There: New
Perspectives on Phenomenology and the
Analysis of Culture (Frykman & Gilje
eds., 2003). But Hammarlin also goes to
the original sources and grapples with
texts by Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and a number of other great
thinkers. In her reading of Simone de
Beauvoir there is some friction. The
long-term sick-listed women in the
study who find new opportunities in life
through baking and gardening receive
no support from de Beauvoir; in her eyes
their actions lack a proper direction and
purpose. On this point I find Hammarlin
a little ambivalent. Whether burnout is,
as Beauvoir says, “a negative liberation
project, a way to renounce the world, instead of vociferously opposing it and
then conquering”, cannot be clearly
stated, according to Hammarlin. But in
the next breath she agrees with a rather
ironic statement by the sociologist Johan
Asplund, in which he says that many
former rebels have been passivized by
learning how to breathe with their
stomach (pp. 228).
An explicit ambition of the reading of
theoretical texts has been to find forms
for translating ideas into methods and a
way to pursue fieldwork. Hammarlin’s
method has been to follow a small
number (nine) of long-term sick-listed
people in their everyday doings for two
or three days each. Media reports about
burnout are another important empirical
basis for the study. It is through the media that she found the nine people for the
study. All nine had the same experience
of appearing in the media and then reading about themselves. This circumstance
interests Hammarlin, who also works
professionally as a journalist. Her method has been to try to think along with the
collaborators rather than about them; to
be a participant herself rather than an
observer. Words like empathy are
stressed in the description of the method. One may ask whether the method
could be described more clearly, or if we
are obliged to “learn by doing”, with the
implication that methodical awareness
is a kind of tacit knowledge that verges
on artistic ability.
A method that Hammarlin uses and
that verges on literary writing is to construct one’s own narratives based on
both fact and fiction. This way of creating ethnography may be appealing, but
it can also provoke objections. One argument for the method can be that it is a
way to transform observations from the
field into a more insightful and meaningful text than would be the case if one
tried too strictly to render the sometimes
fragmentary and incoherent empirical
material in one’s own text. As Hammarlin says with reference to Clifford
Geertz, it could be claimed that all scientific text has fictitious elements, and that
this neither can nor should be avoided
(p. 46). One justification for this genre,
which Geertz calls faction, is that it can
clearly convey the researcher’s analytical premises. But one can also argue
against Hammarlin’s way of writing, as
I am partly inclined to do. When she
constructs narratives and mixes fact and
fiction, I have no way of knowing how
her insights have come about, however
insightful she might be. Nor can I see
that these passages clarify her analytical
premises more than others. The intention has obviously been to capture how
events, objects, and other things emerge
in the eyes of both the researcher and the
collaborators in the study. But the long,
elaborate quotations from the field diaries nevertheless have the tendency to
refer ultimately back to the author herself. Hammarlin’s express ambition to
heed George Marcus’s exhortation to
observe mobility and openness about the
field being studied, and to follow where
the topic leads, is much more convincing and seems to have had an effect on
the structure of the dissertation.
The book is arranged in five chapters
following the introduction. All the chapters have titles with spatial metaphors:
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the press room, the group room, the hobby room, the outdoor room, and the
waiting room. These are settings, places,
contexts, and encounters which, according to Hammarlin, become accessible
for people who suffer from mental ill
health and long-term sick-listing. In the
concluding chapter, however, she points
out that the home could also have served
as the scene for yet another chapter in
view of the fact that many sick-listed
people live at home more than in the
past, and the fact that so much of the creativity she has tried to capture also takes
place in the home.
The press room differs from the other
“rooms” in the dissertation in that it is
not the actions of the people with burnout who are studied there but what is
written in the newspapers about burnout.
The chapter is divided into three parts.
The first part discusses what the rhetoric
does with the readers, not on the basis of
a study of the actual reading, but of the
newspaper language. Here Hammarlin
uses the method of constructing her
own, partly fictitious narrative based on
conversations with her collaborators.
She asked them how they first acquired
knowledge about burnout via media narratives and how they then actively
searched for information about the illness. From their answers she creates a
narrative that is similar in form to an ordinary type of newspaper report. It is
built up of detailed descriptions of certain individuals and incorporates quotations from interviewees, not always accompanied by the interviewer’s questions. The second part of the chapter discusses the newspaper texts. The press,
according to Hammarlin, gives plenty of
space to narratives of personal experience, or more exactly the arranged retelling by the journalists of the interviewees’ accounts of their personal experiences. Yet it is not the genre and narrative form she analyses, but chiefly the
use of metaphors in newspaper language. The metaphors show that the
press narratives about burnout are dis-
145
tinctly gendered. In the third part of the
chapter Hammarlin turns to long-term
sick-listed people who have been interviewed by journalists. Their experiences
of speaking out about their own situation
and then reading about themselves are
described as part of a healing process, a
way to make oneself public which can
strengthen self-esteem.
But it is not until the next chapter,
“The group room”, that the dissertation
clarifies what the long-term sick-listed
people do with their experiences of illness. First there is the question of what
they do with all the spare time they have
after being sick-listed. A common activity among the category to which the
collaborators belong is to network with
other people in the same situation; this
turns out to be a women’s world. Hammarlin describes some club meetings in
different parts of Sweden by quoting
evocative descriptions from her field
diary. With the aid of scholars such as
Gaston Bachelard and Erving Goffman,
she reflects on the dialectic between exclusion and inclusion in the sick-listed
clubs. Hammarlin observes that the different local networks are geared to different topics and points out three overall
themes: equality, politics, and therapy.
She is not primarily interested in these
themes per se, but in the actual thematization as an expression of the symbolic
capacity of burnout. This becomes a
multipurpose tool which can be used
symbolically for virtually anything.
Here Hammarlin refers to Bruno Latour
and action network theory to show how
burnout has been ascribed meanings by
long chains of actants. At certain times
she thinks that the symbol has been so
dominant that it can be ascribed the
power of Sherry Ortner’s key symbols
and become active in “key scenarios”.
But the point Hammarlin wants to make
with this analysis is that the changing
symbolic meanings of burnout also have
the result that the diagnosis opens and
closes people’s scope for action. With
the symbolic polyvalence of burnout,
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Hammarlin wants to give an explanation
of how people can find a refuge in the
illness and simultaneously be excluded
from other contexts.
The next chapter, “The hobby room”,
deals with more concrete creativity. Yet
this is only half the truth. The concrete
aspect is that many of the sick-listed
people engage in various forms of creative activity: they paint, write poetry, or
portray life in other forms. In this chapter a number of graphic artworks and
photographs are reproduced, adding to
the sense of presence in the reading. But
the artworks are not analysed as such.
Somewhat less concrete is the discussion here of what makes so many sick
people feel a need to express themselves
artistically. The reason is of course that
the question is difficult to answer. Hammarlin brings in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre to arrive at the conclusion that all three have pointed out that it
is the road away from the self that leads
to the self, an idea that is not easy to explain (p. 160). Hammarlin seizes on
what philosophers have written about
weariness of life as a form of “nothingness” which, if I have understood her
correctly, is the painful feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness that can be
felt by a person afflicted by illness. But
she believes that this feeling is also the
seed of the ability to regain one’s selfesteem. With reference to Sartre, Hammarlin notes that several of her collaborators have testified to how they let
themselves be swallowed up by their artistic creativity and temporarily forgot
themselves, how they “stopped relating
to the world and instead started to think
and feel with it” (p. 150).
Heidegger is also the guide in the next
chapter, “The outdoor room”. The empirical object is “the space that nature
offers”, which many sick people, according to Hammarlin, seek as a matter
of course. A great deal of this chapter is
devoted to a discussion of why nature
seems to be a resource for people’s recovery. The chapter is, in her own
words, an attempt to use Heidegger’s
terms habitat and mood to “liberate nature from its cultural and historical
heritage and open for the possibility of
seeing its elements as they are, through
lived experience” (pp. 167 f). On first
thought it seems hardly necessary to me
to waste too much energy on this attempt, since the cultural and historical
heritage of nature’s healing power turns
out to be apparent throughout the work.
But then I realize that she is referring to
something different, rather how Heidegger’s existential concepts of habitat
and mood seem to say something more
fundamental about the inclination of the
sick-listed people to turn to nature. Here
she tells, for instance, of a man who has
spent hours by himself, day after day, in
the forest during a long period of sicklisting. He himself confesses that the
forest meant everything to him, how he
figuratively felt the roots of life while
standing on a stone, doing nothing more
than just being. Hammarlin draws the
conclusion that what is so rewarding
about being in the forest or the garden
seems to be the profound experience that
everything is connected. Through time
the man who spent his days in the forest
has become increasingly at home there
and has left behind the “homeless existence” of the illness, to use Heidegger’s
words. His concept of habitat, according
to Hammarlin, is also close to this being
in nature that she has documented. But
she also points out that her attempt to
combine Heidegger’s “sometimes grandiose thought experiments” with the
more down-to-earth ethnology has occasionally met resistance (p. 197).
In the concluding chapter, “The waiting room”, which is both a free-standing
chapter and a concluding discussion,
burnout is considered from a gender perspective. The title is a little more enigmatic than the title of the previous chapters. Perhaps it is a general metaphor for
what Hammarlin also calls “cultural free
space”, that is, all the places and contexts that people with a long period of
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sick-listing behind them can choose in
order to forget their worries temporarily.
Hammarlin observes that these waiting
rooms differ as regards gender. For
women, she writes, there seem to be
much bigger, better, and nicer waiting
rooms during a long sick-listing. She
points out that women bring along the
skills they have acquired from looking
after a home, and that they create cosy,
homelike network meetings and other
forms of community. The men, in contrast, turn into themselves, with old mottoes such as “a good man sorts things out
by himself” and “every man for himself”.
But there can hardly be any doubt that
there has been a gender shift through
time in relation to the illness. Whereas it
used to be mostly career men who suffered, it is now women in low-status
jobs that predominate. Hammarlin
claims that this change has affected the
image of the syndrome, and that the
stress that is assumed to provoke the illness no longer seems as honourable as
the male stress appeared to be. Now
stress is associated with something emotional, mystical, difficult to interpret, or
it is even dismissed as imagined stress.
But the most crucial finding of the dissertation is that burnout is not just a
mental state and a body that does not
work as it is supposed to. Burnout, as
Hammarlin puts it, can also function as
a kind of door opener to new rooms
waiting to be explored, where the sick
person makes a form of journey to a
more authentic way of being in the
world.
It is entertaining to read about how
the author has thought and connected
ideas from her reading with her own observations and experiences in the field.
She reasons in a way that makes her own
reflections bear up a great deal of the
text. Hammarlin is grappling with really
difficult texts and seems to want to find
something larger and more general in
each individual’s actions. In the final
chapter she also reveals that the emo-
147
tional fieldwork was sometimes far from
the exalted goal of possessing “the
necessary capacity for empathy” that
helps the researcher to understand the
world as it seems in someone else’s
eyes. I feel every respect for Hammarlin’s work, but cannot rid myself of the
impression that it could have been done
in a more manageable way. One impression is that Hammarlin handles the phenomenological approach as if it were a
new paradigm that she must convince
the scholarly community about, that her
main aim has been to show the world
through Heidegger’s eyes and her secondary aim to understand sick people’s
experiences and creation of meaning.
But to place so much emphasis on discussing the theoretical approach can
also be said to be part of the task of writing a doctoral dissertation.
I nevertheless think that an unnecessary limitation of the empirical analysis
has arisen as a consequence of an artificial opposition between people’s narratives and their other actions. Hammarlin
gives the impression of regarding her
own method with its phenomenological
approach as a critical alternative to “the
obsession in the human and social sciences with the narrative and discursive
from the late 1980s until today”. She
says she wants to get at what people do
but rarely talk about. She simultaneously emphasizes that narratives are not always the same as what people do (p. 28).
But we tell stories, particularly when we
incur a serious illness that forces us to
navigate towards new goals in life.
There are many ways to get close to
what people do with their experiences of
illness, and studying their narratives is
not a universal medicine. But it would
be misguided to ignore narrative, as a
consequence of a phenomenological approach geared to what people do. In the
dissertation the author comments on
narratives, but neither the narratives as
such, nor the paintings, photographs,
and other products that have come about
as a result of the creating activities of the
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collaborators, are central objects of analysis. Here I think there is a partly unused source of insight into what the
people in the study do with their experiences of mental ill health and long-term
sick-listing.
As my comments show, the dissertation is a highly ambitious attempt to
tackle an urgent topic which has long
been at the centre of the public debate in
Sweden. In a time when evidence-based
medicine dominates the idea of what is
legitimate research in the field, Hammarlin’s dissertation stands out as an unconventional alternative that contributes
important knowledge. Although the
study covers a very limited number of
people, it is not closed in a way that reduces the image of what it can mean to
suffer mental ill health and long-term
sick-listing. The dissertation is generously open in its reasoning tone and
raises important issues. I am convinced
that many people who are involved in
various ways with the work of rehabilitation after this illness will, like me, derive important ideas and thoughts from
reading this dissertation.
Georg Drakos
Stockholm, Sweden
New Ballad Studies
Gunilla Byrman (ed.): En värld för sig
själv. Nya studier i medeltida ballader.
Växjö University Press, Växjö 2008. 445
pp. Ill.
This collection of new studies in medieval ballads, entitled “A world of its
own”, is the result of an interdisciplinary
project at Växjö University. The project
was started after the discovery in 2004
of a manuscript collection in Växjö,
comprising over 900 pages of songs,
tales, and other folk tradition. The material was collected by the Englishman
George Stephens, who moved to Stockholm in 1834. Stephens was an academ-
ic “multihumanist” in the nineteenthcentury spirit. He was a poet, an author,
a scholar of literature, language, and history, with a keen interest in social development and politics. Stephens’s interest
in history also entailed an interest in folk
tradition, which he cultivated by collaborating for decades with Gunnar Olof
Hyltén-Cavallius.
Stephens himself became an active
collector of folkloristic material, mainly
songs. He acquired transcripts of original records by other scholars, he copied
songs from archive collections, and he
may have recorded folk songs himself.
The boxes of manuscripts ended up in
Växjö City Library, where they were
packed away and forgotten in the early
twentieth century, until their recent rediscovery.
The greater part of Stephens’s collection consists of folksongs, among them
about 400 ballads. It is the ballads in the
collection that this book is about. The
more modern songs, stories, and other
folk tradition have not been analysed.
It is not every day one finds such a
quantity of ballads previously unknown
to scholars. This book is full of enthusiasm, and delight over the find. A considerable amount of work has been expended by the researchers at Växjö University to explore the papers discovered in
the cardboard boxes. George Stephens’s
life, his work, and his collecting activities are expertly described in Karin
Eriksson’s detailed study of how the collection came about, and also Stephens’s
academic and political ideas.
Sigurd Kværndrup had drawn up a list
of all the ballads in the collection. His
extremely knowledgeable commentary
is an excellent introduction to the ballads. Kværndrup’s article about HylténCavallius at the end of the book is also
highly interesting reading. Here we
learn about how Hyltén-Cavallius
viewed the relationship between history,
belief, and poetry. Kværndrup conducts
a thorough examination of Hyltén-Cavallius’s almost mythical perception of
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history, and his interpretation of the past
lays the foundation for his outlook on
the present. This interpretation of
Hyltén-Cavallius’s universe of nature
myths is well supplemented by Magnus
Gustafsson in his analysis of the tunes.
This topic is examined in greater depth
in another article by Magnus Gustafsson, where he discusses our present-day
view of folk tradition, which does not
proceed from the tradition itself but is
shaped by the way scholars and authorities have viewed the country, the provinces, geography, and people.
I am a little more sceptical about
some other articles. Stephens’s manuscript collection includes the ballad Osteknoppen, which was previously unknown. The linguist Gunilla Byrman interprets the ballad from the perspective
of discourse analysis. She concludes, no
doubt quite correctly, that the ballad
moves in the border zone between the
absurd and the familiar, between dream
and realism. The ballad describes a
paradise where everything one wishes
for appears by magic and is distributed,
in this case by the king himself. Byrman
seems to overinterpret the ballad somewhat, examining virtually every word
and assigning it a meaning. She ignores
the character of the ballad; it is not
unique, but a cumulative song that is
typical of the folk tradition, with witty
turns of phrase and amusing rhymes.
The ballad consists of common themes
and stereotyped formulas that are found
in folktales and in verse. Osteknoppen,
the meaning of which Byrman examines
at length, is one such word, which to me
seems to involve no real problem. The
word knopp means something that is
round like a “knob”, a cheese (ost) can
be round, and an amusing word has been
created to fit the rhythm of the ballad. I
can pick a similar example from Sveriges medeltida ballader: in the ballad
Och bonden han körde till furuskog we
find the line “av huvudet gjordes en
kyrkoknopp och satte den högt uppå
taket opp” (from the head they made a
149
church knob and put it high up on the
church roof). The word kyrkoknopp also
occurs in variants such as kyrkeknapp,
kyrketornstopp, kyrkotupp, or käppeknapp. The word huvudknopp as an
everyday term for “head, noddle” is
even listed in Svenska Akademiens ordlista.
A typical feature of folktales and ballads is that they do not describe time,
place, setting, and they do not provide
any psychological explanations. It is
probably not a Christmas feast that is described in the ballad, as Byrman speculates. For those who once composed the
ballad, the act of dipping bread was not
a Christmas custom but an everyday
way to soften hard bread and enjoy the
tasty broth left after meat had been
boiled.
The starting point for Eva Kjellander’s article about the Näck or waterhorse in ballads and legends of folk belief seems odd to me. Ballads and belief
legends are totally different folkloristic
genres which lived quite different lives.
Ballads are better compared with folktales and the entertainment tradition
than with legends, beliefs, and religion.
The Näck in the ballads is not the same
figure as in the legends, that is to say, in
folk belief. The supernatural helpers in
folktales, or the trolls and giants, likewise have little more than the name in
common with the beings in folk belief.
The article by the literary scholar
Tommy Olofsson shows that folk tradition cannot be fitted into any absolute
categorization. He seeks to show deficiencies in the ballad definitions of previous scholars. In defining folkloristic
tradition, just one criterion cannot be applied. The result can always be questioned and compromises can be debated,
but scholars must nevertheless make decisions in order to proceed with their
work.
The book ends with a detailed list of
the ballads in George Stephens’s newfound collection.
To my knowledge, no such large col-
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lection has ever been analysed so thoroughly in such a short time as this. The
scholars at Växjö University have done
an enormous job with both registration
and research. Let us hope that the interest in songs and folk music will continue
to thrive at Växjö University.
Anne Bergman
Helsingfors (Helsinki), Finland
Cross-Border Contacts
Kjell Å. Modéer (ed.): Grændse som
skiller ej! Kontakter över Öresund under 1900-talet. Museum Tusculanums
Forlag, Copenhagen 2007. 137 pp.
On 13 November 2002 a symposium
was held at the Royal Danish Academy
of Sciences and Letters in Copenhagen.
The symposium was to mark the centenary of the birth (the following day) of Einar Hansen, a Danish-Swedish entrepreneur and patron of the arts. Six scholars
in the humanities from Denmark and
Sweden took part, lecturing on the
theme of the Öresund as a unifying and
dividing strait during the lifetime of Einar Hansen, 1902–1994. The papers
have been edited by the professor of legal history, Kjell Å. Modéer, who was
then chairman of the Einar Hansen Research Fund, and they are now published
in this volume.
The collection brings together an impressive group of researchers with long
experience. Only one of them was born
after 1950, the historian Ulf Zander,
who seems like a mere youth in this context. What is slightly more remarkable is
that only one of the authors is a woman,
the linguist Else Bojsen. The general impression of edited volumes like this
tends to be mixed. An overall theme is
rarely enough to keep a group of academic soloists together. This is also the
case here. Despite that, several more important factors make this a fascinating
book. First of all, the quality of the pa-
pers is even, which gives a good rhythm.
Secondly, the essays deal with relevant
issues in a way that arouses interest. The
book is, quite simply, informative. The
modest format is mostly an advantage:
several of the chapters serve to whet the
appetite.
The introductory chapter by Kjell Å.
Modéer consists of a summary of his
biography of Einar Hansen, entitled
“Patriot in a Borderland”. Hansen, who
is no doubt well known to many people
in southern Sweden, was one of the most
important businessmen in the Öresund
region in the twentieth century. His significance for humanistic research can
scarcely be overestimated. Einar Hansen’s Research Fund, with its seat in
Lund, and Director Einar Hansen and
Mrs Vera Hansen’s Fund in Copenhagen are two important examples of his
contributions.
Hansen was born in Horsens, Denmark, in 1902, and died in Malmö, Sweden, in 1994. He spent most of his life in
Malmö, where he became a prominent
publisher of magazines and books and
ran a shipping line. The Allhem publishing house and the Clipper line were well
known to the people of Malmö at the
time. A total of 750 unique books were
published, about 150 of them by donation, chiefly in order to contribute to
projects concerned with research and
defence The Second World War was a
major theme of Hansen’s donation
projects (Hyllning till Einar Hansen,
Allhemiana, 2002). Modéer describes
Hansen as an entrepreneur, patron, and
patriot – three titles with varying undertones in our time. Entrepreneurship
could be characterized as the most politically correct in today’s discourse, while
the other two titles are probably often
reckoned as belonging to the past. In its
historical context, however, with an occupied Denmark on the other side of the
Sound, the patriotism has other connotations. It is the same thing with patronage. In our days there is talk of sponsoring as a form of crass marketing, and
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culture is far down on the list of donations from the big anonymous companies. Public actors such as municipal
councils and regions, I imagine, have
taken over the role played by patrons in
the past. Einar Hansen’s efforts became
anachronistic during his life. “Alms and
grandiose donations did not belong to
the spirit of the time and the Social
Democratic redistribution policy in a
modern Sweden” (p. 18). Modéer starts
his chapter by discussing what makes a
creative meeting place, with examples
such as Manhattan, Silicon Valley, or
Weimar, and finds that three factors are
required: capital, heterogeneous cultures – and idealists. “In the growth of
creative centres, mercantile actors are
allied to culture workers” (p. 9). Cultural
life in the Öresund region has been highly dependent on patriarchal entrepreneurs. In Malmö there was R.-F. Bergh,
founder of a cement factory. In Helsingborg there was the director Henry Dunker, whose rubber company Tretorn established the foundation for the vigorous
cultural life of the city today. In Denmark there was the brewing family of
Jacobsen and ship owners such as A. P.
Møller and his son Mærsk. In the same
group, with a clear Danish-Swedish
orientation, was Einar Hansen. With his
Danish-Swedish identity he was a pioneer of the vision of a new Öresund identity that emerged with the construction
of the bridge linking the two countries.
The German occupation of Denmark
was totally unacceptable to Hansen, of
course, as a boundary-crossing entrepreneur. His contributions to air defence,
coastal defence, and the Danish Jews
during the occupation were significant.
Apart from the interesting introductory chapter, the other papers have no direct link to Einar Hansen.
The literary scholar Per-Erik Ljung
presents a great many literary contacts
across the Sound in a rather compressed
chapter that requires a considerable
pre-understanding. Most attention is devoted to the Swedish authors, such as
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Fritiof Nilsson Piraten and Lars Forssell, who have crossed the Sound. Like
other Swedes, most Swedish authors
seem to have had happy experiences in
Denmark. Copenhagen symbolizes the
continent and freedom. A radical exception can be found in a poem by Stig
Carlsson (1962), who thinks that it
should all be demolished: “Tear it all
down – make a supermarket of this ridiculous town.” The Danish authors, as
expected, have often made ironic remarks about how stiff and boring everything is in Sweden with all its supposed
prohibitions. All in all, literature reflects
only too well the national stereotypes
that still dominate the symbolic universe
of the Öresund region.
The historian Ulf Zander discusses regional and national identities in the Öresund around 1900. The migration of
Swedish labour which has increased in
the last decade, filling Danish shops,
restaurants, and nursing homes with
Swedish commuters, is far from being a
recent phenomenon. From the second
half of the nineteenth century many
Swedes emigrated to Denmark. These
were men from the agrarian proletariat
and young women in domestic service.
The latter group, who often came from a
rural background, were especially controversial. It was feared that these young
women would go astray in sinful Copenhagen. There was evidence that some of
the Swedish emigrants would end up in
prostitution and crime. Zander also discusses conflicts about national monuments and shows how the contemporary
identity process across the Öresund has
old roots.
The ethnologist Orvar Löfgren’s essay is the best-written chapter, full of
poetic similes and metaphors. Löfgren
starts with the sense of discomfort that
he and many others felt about crossing
the Öresund border not so long ago. This
was a time when drug-sniffer dogs, methodical customs officers, and suspicious passport police filled the transit
halls in Malmö and other places. He then
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considers historical border crossings
over the Öresund and observes that employment cycles have influenced the
travel statistics, but that during the second half of the twentieth century Copenhagen and Helsingør increased in popularity for excursions. That is how I remember my own first crossings of the
Sound: the “tours” on the ferry between
Helsingborg and Helsingør. For
Swedes, Denmark became synonymous
with freedom from responsibility, a
nearby Majorca, full of opportunity.
“Since 1838, when the steam ferry started, we have eaten our way over to Denmark. Millions of spongy shrimp sandwiches, lemonade, gold lager, gold toffee” (p. 83). Löfgren describes it as an
“oral border crossing”. The Swedish fascination clashes with the Danes’ image
of Sweden as a Scandinavian East Germany: grey, cold, and forbidding. The
stereotypes of damned Danes (danskdjävlar) and sodding Swedes (satans
svenskere) persist. Löfgren believes, no
doubt correctly, that the building of the
bridge, paradoxically, has increased the
need for national stereotyping of people
on the other side of the water. National
identities are not easy to shake.
The historian Hans Kirchhoff and the
former Keeper of National Antiquities,
the archaeology professor Olaf Olsen,
tell in the next two chapters about how
the Danish Jews were saved in October
1943. Kirchhoff declares that the most
important factor in the rescue of 7,000
Jews across the Öresund, “even though
it is seldom heard” (p. 95), was the passivity of the Germans. He gives a realistic and interesting description of the diplomatic manoeuvres, public opinion,
and refugee aid. Olsen provides a brief
autobiography of his time as a Danish
refugee in Lund. His account is fascinating, painting a picture of a town and a
time full of life and movement. Olsen
notes that life as a Dane was good in
Lund. In the final chapter the reader is
given a quick lesson in the differences
between Danish and Swedish. Else Boj-
sen sums up linguistic research concisely. There is no doubt that language actually is an obstacle even for today’s integration. Danes find it easier to understand the people of Stockholm than the
inhabitants of nearby Skåne, while
Swedes find it hard to understand Danish, despite the fact that 90 per cent of
the thousand most frequent Danish
words are common Scandinavian. The
other ten per cent is sufficient to cause
problems in conversations between us.
It is not clear to me why it took almost
five years to publish this small collection (137 pages), but this is not so important when the texts, with few exceptions, apply a historical perspective to
the Öresund region. At the same time,
there is no doubt that some of the chapters would have been even more interesting if the authors had made links to
the Öresund region that we are now living in. In any case, this edited volume is
well suited to the increased interest recently shown in perspectives and narratives about the history of the Öresund.
Grændse som skiller ej! (“Boundaries
that do not separate!”) is a small and easily-read collection of pearls from the
Öresund.
Jesper Falkheimer
Lund, Sweden
Papers on the Ritual Year
Lina Midholm et al. (eds.): The Ritual
Year and Ritual Diversity. Proceedings
of the Second International Conference
of the SIEF Working Group on The
Ritual Year. Gothenburg 7–11.6.2006.
Institutet för språk och folkminnesarkiven, Dialekt, ortnamns och folkminnesarkivet i Göteborg, Göteborg 2007. 377
pp. Ill.
The publication The Ritual Year and Ritual Diversity is a collection of lectures
from a conference with the same title
that SIEF’s working group The Ritual
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Year held in the summer of 2006 in
Gothenburg. Comparable conferences
were held in Malta in 2005 and in the
Czech Republic in 2007. The editors of
the book are Lina Midholm and Annika
Nordström. The book consists of 41 lectures from this conference. As documentation of a conference it fills its function
in many ways. Those who attended the
conference have the opportunity to explore a given topic in depth by reacquainting themselves with the paper
and following up the references. They
also have the chance to see what the papers they missed were about. Future
scholars who are interested in ritual
studies will also benefit from the book,
which examines rites from numerous
angles that show great variation as regards geography, chronology, and subject matter. It is obvious that rites are a
central research theme for ethnologists
and folklorists all over Europe, and this
in itself is gratifying.
As conference documentation, then,
this volume works very well, but as a
publication aimed at a wider audience it
is not as successful. This has to do with
the disconnected impression that the
near-400-page book gives. The articles,
understandably, are short and highly
varied in character and content. As a
publication about rites and ritual, it
could have done with more filtering; a
selection of the papers might have been
presented in longer versions. The editors
could thus have been more critical as regards the conference material. Some of
the contributions, regrettably, manage to
say very little because they are so short.
Many articles fail to problematize the
phenomenon under study and remain at
a descriptive level. In most cases the
reader is told nothing about the material
on which the study is based. Nor is there
any problematization of the researcher’s
relationship to what is being studied.
This becomes especially clear in an article about cultural perspectives on alcohol – about how alcohol is used in connection with annual festivals. Here the
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author presents the use of alcohol in
Swedish festive customs – in principle
an interesting theme – in a highly superficial way with no connection to
any source material. The aim of the article is not to provide knowledge about
the significance of alcohol in ritual
contexts, but rather to point out the dubious morality of serving alcohol at
parties. A more exhaustive presentation would have given a greater understanding of the topic, but that is not
possible here.
On the other hand, I find it more difficult to accept certain things about the
texts. Firstly, the researcher makes no
distinction between beliefs about a phenomenon and the phenomenon itself.
For example, there are articles which
state that Midsummer is a time when
witches and other creatures are abroad.
This could give the reader the impression, perhaps wrongly, that the researcher believes in witches. This is of
course perfectly possible, but in that
case the authors ought to have reflected
on their own position about what is being studied. During the SIEF conference in Derry in summer 2008 I witnessed the same tendency, that researchers did not always see the difference between the beliefs they were
studying and their own involvement in
the movement. This can be seen as a
way for the researcher to try to convince readers about the positive character of the studied phenomenon rather
than trying to problematize his or her
own position in relation to it.
The other phenomenon that I find difficult to accept is when the researcher
expresses emotionally coloured opinions about the decay of folklore. This is
evident in studies about ritual contexts
which have commercial expressions,
about rites which have a market value
and can be sold. Another example is a
study of a Midsummer festival which
the author views as an expression of
amateurishness and thinks that the ritual
has been misinterpreted and distorted by
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what she calls “pseudo-folklorists”.
Other example are when rituals that
have changed are regarded as an expression of folklorism. Change is thus a bad
thing, and it is the folklorist’s task to ensure that rituals are kept intact and authentic. Words like untrue and inauthentic occur in many articles, which implies
– in the spirit of devolutionistism – that
there is a true and authentic tradition
which has decayed. One theme of the
conference was in fact rituals in a changing world, but many researchers seem to
think that rites and rituals should not
change. In connection with this critique,
I would like to reflect on the folklorist’s
relation to what is being studied. When I
myself studied for my first degree in
folkloristics at the start of the 1980s, we
spoke a great deal about folklorism and
we were horrified at traditions that were
being reused in new contexts. Today we
teach our students very early on that
folklorists should not act as tradition police, but should study the traditions as
they are, precisely because they are
changing, and the focus can be on the
change itself. In the world as it is today,
this research tradition can be regarded as
a viable approach.
The third thing that disturbs me is an
ironic attitude to the people who perform the rites being studied. Here researchers set themselves above people
who seemingly know no better than to
perform or participate in rites which are
not correct in the researcher’s opinion.
These critical comments can of course
be discussed in terms of ideas about
what should be published, how much the
editors ought to interfere with the authors’ intentions, different research traditions in different countries and different times, and what characterizes good
research. There is no absolute answer to
this question. For one researcher it may
be interesting to find out something
about a specific rite, while for another it
is the theoretical reasoning that is most
rewarding.
Not all the articles in the volume are
weak by any means. There are in fact
many interesting gems to be found. The
reader learns how and why roundnumber birthdays are advertised in
newspapers, either inviting people to a
party or stating that the person does not
wish to celebrate the occasion; about
how christening presents materialize
emotions; about how neopaganism affects rites today; and how wedding traditions are changing. Ane Ohrvik shows in
her article how new traditions are created, doing so with the focus on the process. Britt-Marie Näsström writes about
the syncretism surrounding Lucia and
how she was made saint for a day, a
feminist icon. These articles, which are
almost all Nordic, are easier for me to
assimilate since they are written in a
scholarly tradition that I am accustomed
to. But I have also learned a great deal
about rites that I had never heard of, and
I have seen many similarities, for example, concerning Midsummer celebrations in different parts of Europe. In this
way the volume gives new knowledge
about rites and ritual processes.
The publication is built up around
central themes. These were rituals concerning Midsummer, theories about rituals, ritual life, who owns the rituals, rituals in a religious context, rituals in a
changing world, and hosts and sites for
the theme of the conference. On the last
theme, Malta, Sweden, and the Czech
Republic, i.e., the places that have arranged the conference hitherto, presented their views on the topic. The book
ends with closing comments by Terry
Gunnell, Emily Lyle, George MifsudChircop, and Irina Sedakova. From
these we learn that the conference in
Gothenburg was well arranged and that
SIEF’s working group has succeeded in
knitting together a group of researchers
from all over Europe on this theme in a
short time. Rites and ritual studies are a
central part of folkloristics, ethnology,
and comparative religion, and will hopefully remain so. The diversity in the way
of viewing rites and rituals is something
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I hope will persist. The editors have
done a good job in putting this thick
book together.
Lena Marander-Eklund
Åbo, Finland
In Defence of a Generation of Folklorists
Fredrik Skott: Folkets minnen. Traditionsinsamling i idé och praktik 1919–
1964. Institutet för språk och folkminnen,
Göteborgs universitet, Göteborg 2008.
386 pp. Ill. English summary. Diss.
It was at the beginning of the 1990s. I
was attending an international folklore
conference in Stockholm. On the way to
a restaurant I walked through the Humlegården park accompanying one of the
persons in charge of the meeting. This
was an elderly person, and we spoke
about shared memories of folklorists
and folklore studies. My colleague was
obviously annoyed. Some younger colleague had maintained that the older
generation was completely unaware of
anything to do with theory. Now this
declaration became the crucial point of
debate in our conversation. My colleague was deeply offended.
This conversation puzzled me until
recently. Could it really be possible that
the previous generation of Swedish
scholars was theoretically inexperienced? When I read Fredrik Skott’s dissertation Folkets minnen, my curiosity
about the context behind my colleague’s
perturbation was partly satisfied. The
book is about the history of folklore archives in Sweden, particularly Västsvenska Folkminnesarkivet in Göteborg. Certainly, this topic also touches
upon the history of folklore scholarship
in Sweden. The time span is from the
1910s to the mid 1960s, a decade that
ended with the Student Revolt in 1968
and visions of a more democratic university than before.
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Skott starts his study by mentioning
the seriously unfavourable comments on
tradition archives uttered by quite a few
folklore and ethnology scholars, all of
the same age, and all placed in more or
less influential positions within
academia. The archives were said to be
bourgeois, nostalgic, falsely embellished and concealing important parts of
life in Swedish society. So it was maintained that they did not democratically
represent the Swedish population, they
omitted the culture connected with the
dark side of human life, and such like.
The archivists were simply accused of
being naïve and starry-eyed. Regarding
the fact that archive material once was
central in folklore and ethnology research, the scholars came in for their
share, too. That seemed to have happened to my colleague in the Humlegården park. In the 1970s, according to
Skott, this attitude had a fateful effect on
the tradition archives, and consequently
also on research: folklore studies at the
universities changed completely from a
historical discipline to a study of contemporary culture, and the archives were
abandoned.
In his dissertation Skott starts with
this perspective, and returns step by step
to the sources. Who were the people
making decisions on the tradition archives in Sweden during the period of
interest? What was their political
affiliation? By studying these matters in
minutes and official documents of different kinds, he tries to find out whether
the argument about the lack of democracy in archive matters is plausible. He
succeeds well in demonstrating that tradition archives were a political issue
among liberals/radicals and conservatives alike. Their common perspective
was that of rescuing folk culture in the
growing process of modernization and
industrialization in Sweden. The politicians’ affiliation was not important
when they decided how to work for the
tradition archives.
Skott also shows that the people inter-
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viewed belonged to almost any kind of
social grouping. This also tells us that
the archives contain a broad spectrum of
material that, at least in some sense, is
representative of the Swedish population of that time.
In another chapter Skott scrutinizes
the argument that the tradition archives
mirror the collectors’ ideal of folk culture and that the collectors only wanted
to present idealized records. The 1970s
generation of scholars made the accusation that the collectors were recommended to omit certain indecent and inappropriate material. However, Skott
finds counter-evidence for this. It turns
out that the collectors were asked repeatedly to record everything; they were
urged time and again to record things
exactly as the informant formulated
them. The guides for fieldwork were
meticulous and exact, and moreover, the
collections were controlled and very
little was refused by the archive authorities. In this way Skott draws the conclusion that the archived material is much
more plentiful and varied than its critics
maintained.
Many of the collectors also had their
own agendas in their work. Certainly,
in a way they belonged to the elite
among the local people, although they
were, and were strictly recommended
to be, part of the community in which
they acted. They did not only collect for
research, but also in order to create
identity, either in their own region or
for a greater part of their country. It
turns out that they also used their own
material for papers presented at regional history meetings, in books they
wrote, or for other purposes where they
needed to profile their place of birth
and belonging. The collectors were definitely not naïve or yielding to the demands of the archive. They were independent, reflecting individuals, proud
of their region and their work but also
aware of problems and deficiencies.
They did not hide the shortcomings in
human life, and they did not underline
the positive traits. The extant correspondence between the collectors and
the staff of the archives turns out to be
an excellent source for analysing these
matters.
In the last chapter of his analysis
Skott turns to the informants. Were they
backward, romanticizing people? No, he
states. They were just as critical,
open-minded and honest as the collectors were.
The critical perspective of the 1970s
scholars made them point out the lack of
workers’ tradition in the archives. Skott
concentrates on this argument and analyses it against the background of
Swedish cultural and political history.
He partly contradicts it, yet he explains
why it may be true to some extent.
At the end of the book is a summary
in which he strictly demonstrates that
the 1970s scholars were wrong.
The book is well structured in three
obvious analytical sections. Some annoying repetitions could have been deleted, but on the other hand they help
the reader to remember the starting
points and follow the thread. I found it
interesting to see parallels between the
methods of gathering folklore in Swedish and in Finland-Swedish folklore
archives. I very much enjoyed reading
Skott’s well-mannered formulations,
although he must be aware of the risk
he takes with this book. Hopefully he
will start a polemic about trendsetting
within academia. For he also demonstrates that the scholars and archivists
of the 1920s had rejected their forerunners’ work in a corresponding way. Is it
really necessary in scholarship to commit an Oedipean murder of the father(s)
every now and then? Now Skott in his
turn has certainly reinstated the folklorists from the 1920s to the 1960s, but
in a way he has also “murdered” his
forerunners. Maybe it was quite smart
of him to write this highly interesting,
well-formulated dissertation, filled
with skilfully used evidence and conclusive argumentation, not within eth-
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nology or folklore studies but within
the discipline of history.
Ulrika Wolf-Knuts
Åbo, Finland
Radio Listeners’ Folklore
Bengt af Klintberg: Folkminnen. Atlantis, Stockholm 2007. 368 pp.
For fifteen years the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation had a radio programme
Folkminnen, to which listeners could
send in questions and examples about
folklore, in the hope of getting an
answer or a comment from the expert
Bengt af Klintberg and his assistant
Christina Mattsson. Now Bengt af
Klintberg has put together a book containing some of the material received
from listeners, 350 letters, a mere fraction of the roughly 20,000 letters sent in
over the years.
In short texts the author comments on
questions posed by listeners, and examples of various folk beliefs and narratives are put into a historical and geographical context. The book contains
everything from children’s games to
words for different kinds of ice, legend
motifs and festive traditions, and much
besides. Above all one is struck by the
fantastic material to which the radio programme gave rise. All the letters are preserved in the archives of the Nordiska
Museet, a collection that seems to be a
veritable gold mine.
We have here a very interesting collection of traditional material which differs in part from other types of collections. Instead of being wholly steered by
the researcher’s interests, as in the older
use of regular local informants and modern questionnaires, informants are given
greater power to choose what they want
to say. It is the tradition bearers who
write about their own folklore, what
they think is special or important, what
they want to find out more about, or
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what they think deserves to be known to
other people.
The approach has evidently been rewarding, and the radio programme managed to achieve interactivity between
listeners and radio hosts. It happened often that a listener’s question led to a response from other listeners who had
their own examples and explanations.
Folklore seems to be something that
arouses a response from the man in the
street. The interest exists, and it was put
to good use here in people’s questions
about everyday or special phenomena:
why do we say this, why do people do
that, does anyone recognize this?
Folkminnen is not a book you read
from cover to cover, but one to come
back and dip into. It can be used for reference, or to read alongside other books.
It is a fine example of how everyday life
is filled with meaning. People try all the
time to create order and meaning in their
lives. Bengt af Klintberg is a seasoned
writer and a popular educator, and it is a
pleasure to read his well-founded
thoughts. He has read widely and is thoroughly familiar with folklore, with the
result that the book is well substantiated
and even seemingly trivial things are
taken seriously. The author also shows
humility vis-à-vis the experts, that is to
say, the people, without compromising
his own expertise. He lets the folklore
user be a specialist in his or her own use
of folklore, and he does not hesitate to
admit error when his own statements
have been corrected by listeners.
Perhaps af Klintberg’s answers are
not always wholly convincing, and of
course it is often the case that there is no
definitive answer. But the reader’s imagination has been stimulated and
thoughts start to flow. When I read about
how children in the 1950s counted
wine-red Volvos in order to influence
their fate, I immediately began to think
of “platespotting”, when adults in the
twenty-first century read car number
plates and try to get from 001 to 999.
The numbers must be seen in order, and
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when you reach the target you start from
the beginning again. On the Internet you
can share your results with others who
have the same hobby.
The book definitely fills a gap, one
that we may not always be aware of, and
perhaps for many people it is not the
most essential gap to fill. But who is the
scholar to judge what needs to be investigated? Radio listeners have clearly felt
a great need to get answers to their questions, and now the reader too has a
chance to learn more about everyday
thoughts and stories that have occupied
people through the ages. Here we get the
answer, or perhaps rather the questions.
For often the queries or the original observations are at least as interesting as
Bengt af Klintberg’s explications.
Blanka Henriksson
Åbo, Finland
Contemporary Folklore
Bengt af Klintberg & Ulf Palmenfelt:
Vår tids folkkultur. Carlsson Bokförlag,
Stockholm 2008. 254 pp. Ill.
In the 1960s the folkloristic field of research suddenly grew. New publications
such as The Lore and Language of
Schoolchildren by the British folklorist
couple Iona and Peter Opie introduced a
thriving contemporary tradition: children’s folklore. Nordic researchers were
not slow to follow. With the article
“Why does the elephant have red eyes?”
Bengt af Klintberg started his career as
an introducer of contemporary traditions.
Bengt af Klintberg and his colleague
Ulf Palmenfelt, another innovative collector, have now published the best bits
of their by now imposing range of contemporary tradition studies in the volume Vår tids folkkultur (Folk culture of
today). Here we meet some texts which
have achieved cult status in Nordic tradition research, many of which were
originally published in specialist journals that are not easy to come by today.
In his foreword Palmenfelt notes that
the interest in children’s lore became a
gateway to studies in other modern genres. Within the frames of children’s lore
we find a wide spectrum of tradition
products characterized by an indefinite
boundary with adult folk traditions.
Bellman jokes, sly riddles, stories of
sexual deviants and erotic jokes are examples of some of the themes presented
in the articles in this book.
The articles range over four decades
and Bengt af Klintberg’s study “Folksägner i dag” (Folktales of today) published in Fataburen 1976 is the oldest
text. The article introduces a genre of
classic calibre featuring an innovative
content, the contemporary legends, a
genre af Klintberg has since continued
to follow and has introduced in rich,
commented publications of material.
Likewise, Ulf Palmenfelt’s studies of
chain letters and traditional photocopies,
originally published in the innovative
journal Tradisjon, still provide insightful reading experiences.
The last, newly written chapter introduces the new arena for this rich “folk
culture of today”, the Internet. In his article about the forms of net lore Ulf Palmenfelt outlines the folkloristic elements on the Internet and states that they
are characterized by the old criteria for
folklore: they are anonymous, they are
varied and they are actively transmitted.
The forms of tradition products are increasing, and on the net we find recycled
material, previously spread in the form
of chain letters and traditional copies.
However, there is also a lot of net lore
that uses the special requirements of
computer technology and works only in
Internet form.
A special feature of net lore is that the
process of transmission can be studied
by the researcher online. It is possible in
a unique way for the folklorist to observe an arena for collective tradition
where not only changes in tradition can
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be studied, but also the acting and creativity of the bearers of tradition. The Internet offers folklorists boundless possibilities, but also enormous challenges.
Folklore is a social barometer and a
commentator on mental changes and
discussion climates. Folklore means engagement and is a tool for communicating values. Bengt af Klintberg’s and Ulf
Palmenfelt’s collected articles present
us with a fascinating retrospective view
of an epoch when the identification of
folklore changed for ever. The authors
also urge folklorists of today to show
awareness when it comes to identifying
new folklore – and not to lose heart
when confronting the wide selection of
tradition products in the virtual world of
today.
Carola Ekrem
Helsingfors, Finland
Forming a Folk Music Canon
Niklas Nyqvist: Från bondson till folkmusikikon. Otto Andersson och formandet av “finlandssvensk folkmusik”. Åbo
Akademis förlag, Åbo 2007. 310 pp. Ill.
English summary. Diss.
This dissertation by musicologist Niklas
Nyqvist is about Otto Andersson (1879–
1969), professor of musicology and folk
poetry in Åbo, Finland. Andersson was
not only a scholar but also a composer
and a violin player. He was born in the
village of Lövö, parish of Vårdö, in the
Åland Islands. He grew up in a musical
environment in a Swedish-speaking
farmer’s family.
Nyqvist’s thesis is based on the idea
that Otto Andersson had a prominent
role in the process that developed what
can be regarded as canonical Swedish
folk music in Finland. Andersson was
collecting folklore, such as folk tunes, in
the Swedish-speaking province of Ostrobothnia between 1902 and 1907.
These collections became the founda-
159
tion for both his scholarly work and his
view of Finland’s Swedish folk music
and its characteristics. Thus, one of
Nyqvist’s main purposes is to explain
what this folk music stands for today.
The book also has a biographical approach and illustrates Andersson’s personal conditions, cultural engagement,
and political views besides his more
concrete professional work. The author’s thesis has a hermeneutical perspective, in this case an interpretation of
history based on analyses of the social
and cultural context of the current period. In the early nineteenth century Finland was detached from its union with
Sweden and instead became a part of the
Russian empire. As a result of this the
Finnish people had to search for their
own culture. This was manifested, for
example, in the Kalevala epic, which
was compiled by Emil Lönnrot in 1835.
Because Finland was bilingual, folklife
research turned in two different directions; a more eastern-oriented Finnish
one, and a more western-oriented Swedish-speaking one, where Andersson
mainly represented the latter.
The book is divided into three main
chapters with sub-chapters, in addition
to the preface and the initial and final
discussion. There is also a list of sources, an index of persons, English summary and appendices with an extract, a
list of Andersson’s compositions and a
distribution map of the Swedish settlements in Finland during Andersson’s active collection period.
The first chapter depicts the history of
Swedish folk poetry in Finland, the early
work on folklore, the collection of folklore and its importance. It describes Andersson’s early collection efforts and the
role this had for establishing the canon
of Swedish folk music in Finland. It also
describes his path from music studies to
work in the field. The author also considers Andersson’s early publications
and looks at his collected material as it
has been published by the Society of
Swedish Literature in Finland. Nyqvist
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also makes comparisons with both recent and contemporary collectors’ material. The chapter also discusses the partly controversial entry of the phonograph, different methods to collect and
record and the importance of approaches, and something about social developments of folk music.
The second chapter focuses on the revitalization of Finland’s Swedish folk
music. Nyqvist describes the impulses
for this process and compares similar revivals of folk traditions in other Nordic
countries and Germany. In this connection, it came to light that Otto Andersson
was impressed by the German folk song
society and their habit of singing “genuine German folk songs.” Andersson was
the initiator of the association Brage,
which was formed in 1906. Its main task
was to collect and popularize musical
and literary folk poetry, folk games and
folk dance. In this work the phonograph
was an important tool. The second chapter also describes the way new popular
texts were added to old folk songs. This
was one of the moments of nostalgia,
and the Brage association encouraged
poets to write new lyrics to the recorded
tunes. Andersson himself took an active
part in arranging old melodies for choirs
in an accessible and romantically coloured style. In this context, Nyqvist has
a discussion about the Rosan dance
which he would see as a symbol of the
canonization of Finland’s Swedish folk
music. This dance was basically a polonaise and existed around 1900 as a feature of wedding celebrations at places in
the Swedish-speaking part of Ostrobothnia. The melody that was used was either a polska or a march. Rosan was
published with a dance description in a
recorded and fixed form and developed
into an entity with lyrics by Alexander
Slotte and arrangement by Otto Andersson. The melody was a polska which
Andersson recorded in 1905 from the
fiddler Erik Wilhelm Eriksson, Eckerö,
Åland. Nyqvist therefore argues that Rosan went through a process and design
that suited a purpose that was in line
with the work of Andersson and others
at this time.
In the third, and in my opinion the
most interesting chapter, the author digs
deeper into Andersson’s scholarly work.
Otto Andersson had not passed the upper-secondary final examination but had
to apply for exemption in 1913 when he
was to begin his higher studies. In this
process, he obtained the help of Kaarle
and Ilmari Krohn. Kaarle was a professor of Finnish folk poetry at the University of Helsinki and Ilmari associate professor of music research at the same university. Kaarle had been impressed by
the manuscript of Andersson’s article
Ur den svenska folkdiktningens historia,
published in 1909. Nyqvist suggests that
Kaarle’s and Ilmari’s continued encouragement of Andersson’s career is somewhat vague, and refers to John Rosas
(1983). At the beginning of his academic career Andersson was critical of
the fact that there were too few seats of
learning in Swedish folklife research in
Finland. He mentioned this problem in
an article, “Brage och vårt kulturarbete”,
he wrote in 1924. This was after he had
received his doctoral degree. At this
time there was only one Swedish-speaking professorship in folklife research,
the Kiseleff chair at Åbo Academy. In
the article Andersson went so far as to
propose that the Brage association could
found an institute for Swedish folklife
research including the study of folk
poetry and folk music. Nyqvist argues
that Andersson here predicted his own
future career and later chair, and that linguistic, ideological and personal motives were behind his move. Even before
his academic career Andersson had lectured and had written articles with scholarly ambitions. Several of these were
about folk music and resulted from his
previous collection work. Nyqvist argues that many of Andersson’s recommendations had a critical view of the
early folklife research. Andersson is said
to have stated that the first folklife re-
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search was too dominated by mythology, but it had become a more independent academic discipline in the late
1800s.
Andersson tried early on to define the
task of folklife research, and Nyqvist
mentions in this context the article,
“Brage, en vetenskaplig och kulturell
uppgift”, written in 1906. In the article
the meaning of the term “the people”
was discussed by Andersson. He broke
down the concept into two categories,
“political-national” and “social-civilizational”, with reference to Eduard Hoffman-Krayer’s definition in the journal
Die Volkskunde als Wissenschaft
(1902). The first is known as “populus”
and the latter as “vulgus.” Andersson
thought that it essentially is the latter
that is the starting point for scholarly
folklife studies. Andersson links “vulgus” with “primitive thinking”, from
which he said that popular traditions are
created. Such a derogatory expression
could hardly be used in today’s scholarship, but Nyqvist forgives Andersson to
a certain extent and argues that we must
put this opinion in a cultural context in
which certain words, at least in part,
could have different meanings than they
have today. Nyqvist suggests, however,
that Andersson was relatively modern in
his scholarly approach, as shown in his
studies describing the music in a specific
socio-cultural context. On the other
hand, it is known that Andersson had a
nationalist approach at that time, which
he certainly not was alone in having. He
had notably been inspired by the Austrian folk music researcher Josef Pommer, who saw the possibilities of exploiting and popularizing the collected
material. Nyqvist also discusses the volumes of Finlands svenska folkdiktning
which were published by Andersson
1934–1964. These volumes include
most of the material collected in Swedish-speaking Finland until 1940 in
edited form. These also summarize Andersson’s research findings and Nyqvist
sees them as a manifestation of the
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canon of Finland’s Swedish folk music.
The volumes which contain dance tunes
are known in Swedish-speaking fiddler
circles in Finland as “the fiddler’s bible”
just to underline their importance. Nyqvist argues that the canonization was
possible because Anderson anchored
folk music material in a scholarly context, and thus credibility was achieved.
At the end of the book Nyqvist discusses
objectivity versus subjectivity, that is,
what his position has meant for the
thesis. He is certainly a music researcher
at Åbo Academy, where the scholarly
legacy of Otto Andersson is most evident.
Niklas Nyqvist dissertation breathes
accuracy and detail. Its strength lies in
the author’s observations of the social
and political circumstances surrounding
the canonization of Swedish folk music
in Finland. I am somewhat critical of the
outline of the thesis and the flow of the
text. The book is somewhat fragmented
and deviates somewhat from a chronological structure. History should not be
presented in a way in which events succeeded each other linearly, as the author
certainly is aware. However, an overly
strict approach to this problem entails
the risk that the presentation will be too
mosaic-like, especially in combination
with a hermeneutic method. The book
would also have benefited from a general index.
Theses which describe standardized
processes of folk music in terms of musical canon are not very common. This
is because the term is usually employed
in discussions of classical music. It is
even rarer that the term “musical canon”
is used in a folk music context in combination with the highlighting of a single
person’s role in this process. Nykvist’s
thesis is special in this respect.
Patrik Sandgren
Lund, Sweden
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The Sought-after People
Palle Ove Christiansen & Jens Henrik
Koudal (eds.): Det ombejlede folk. Nation, følelse og social bevægelse. C.A.
Reitzels forlag & Dansk Folkemindesamling, København 2007. Folkemindesamlingens kulturstudier 12. 163 pp., Ill.
The people as a concept is the theme of
this collection of articles, Det ombejlede
folk (The sought-after people). Most of
the six articles consist of well-edited
presentations held at a theme day in
2006 at Dansk Folkemindesamling (The
Danish Folklore Archives). The articles
span different areas and together give a
good overall picture, although of course
not complete, of how the concept of “the
people” was understood and used, from
the French Revolution until the second
half of the twentieth century. Palle Ove
Christiansen and Jens Henrik Koudal,
both researchers at the above-mentioned
archives, are the editors.
With his article Palle Ove Christiansen provides a good input to the
study of nationalism as well as different
views and uses of “the people” in the
Western world, from the eighteenth century on. His empirical examples mainly
come from Denmark. Christiansen focuses on the perceptions of the concept
of the people as invented or discovered.
He starts from those who historically
created the national motivations through
struggles about attitudes, politics and
cultural symbols. The focus is on how
the people was created by intellectuals
and politicians but also, in a way,
formed itself using linguistic and historical elements. Particularly interesting is
Christiansen’s account of the German
philosopher Johann G. Herder’s thinking, the basis for a new descriptive and
broad concept of culture, and its consequences. Christiansen points out how intellectuals began to show an interest in
oral peasant culture, which was seen as
older and more connected to the tradition than their own culture. Extensive
collecting and publication activity re-
garding folk culture was started and became of great importance for the legitimacy of nations. Christiansen also gives
a concise overview of various Danish
collecting projects, from N. F. S. Grundtvig to Dansk Folkemindesamling.
After being a part of the Danish kingdom for four hundred years, Norway became independent in 1814. Although
Norway was soon forced into a union
with Sweden, a national romantic mood
swept over the country. Who were the
sovereign Norwegian people, whose
symbols were included in their self-understanding, and how did they define
themselves in relation to others? Rasmus Glenthøj asks these questions in his
very interesting article about the nation-building blocks of the new Norwegian self-understanding in 1814. Above
all, conceptions of a specific Norwegian
people existed among the elite – officials and citizens. The landscape, the
peasants and not least the history were
highlighted. On the basis of Norwegian
as a language and national symbols such
as the flag and the national anthem,
Glenthøj shows how the young Norwegian nation was legitimated, both inwards and outwards. In his article
Glenthøj further clarifies how a struggle
about defining the Norwegian took
place within the elite, regarding how the
time together with Denmark should be
interpreted and not least who was the
enemy – Denmark or Sweden. According to Glenthøj, the creation and maintenance of these enemy images was central in the Norwegian nation-building
process.
Søren Frost discusses conscripts’
patriotism during the Schleswig-Holstein war in 1848–1851. It is often
claimed that the war led to a patriotic revival among the peasants, who are said
to have fought for Denmark as a nation.
By proceeding from and frequently
quoting rarely used material, 800 uncensored letters written by peasant conscripts, Frost gives us another picture.
He compares letters written by these
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conscripts with letters written by volunteer soldiers, often students, artists and
others from the upper bourgeoisie.
There were striking differences between
the groups. The peasants did not write
about the nation in the same way as the
volunteers did, Frost shows, but instead
about God’s providence, the trust in the
King, and matters at home. The romantic view of war that the volunteers often
expressed is, on the other hand, rare in
the conscripts’ letters. Nor do they seem
to have the same ideas about the nation,
for example they usually do not appear
to have shared the common idea within
the bourgeoisie about the nation as a language-based community. Further, Frost
points out that the peasant soldiers only
to a limited extent identified themselves
with national community; rather they
emphasized regional areas. For them the
war was about defending the borders,
showing loyalty to the King and defending his rights. It is doubtful, Frost emphasizes, whether there was a sense of
national solidarity between the different
regions of Denmark.
In his article Jens Henrik Koudal focuses on national anthems. Like other
symbols, the songs are ascribed special
attributes and thereby the national anthems can be used to illuminate the relationship between nation, state and
people. Koudal describes three different
types of national themes and their different characters: the royal anthem (for example “God Save the Queen”), the revolutionary march (for example “La Marseillaise”) and the folk song (for example “Du gamla, du fria”). With
Denmark as the main example, Koudal
gives a detailed explanation of how national anthems could be created, while
Germany and Russia provide examples
of how the anthems can be quickly replaced after changes of system, wars or
revolutions. In order to function as national symbols the anthems, Koudal emphasizes, must not only be written but
also reach out and be accepted by the
population.
163
Two of the articles in the volume directly concern the twentieth century and
the political left. Nils Finn Christiansen
creditably deals with social democracy,
its relationship to and use of the concept
of the people up to the 1930s. He notes
that the early labour movement had an
ambivalent attitude to the concept.
Leading social democrats proceeded
from classes – the working class and its
relation to other classes – although there
were exceptions, such as the editor and
parliamentarian Fredrik Borgbjerg.
Borgbjerg argued instead that the labour
movement was the genuine heir of
Grundtvig’s project of popular freedom.
The people, according to Borgbjerg’s
definition, also covered both the working class and other “small people”, but
excluded the upper classes. Around the
First World War the party accepted the
nation state as the primary framework
for its political strategy. Based on the
Social Democrat Thorvald Stauning’s
program Danmark for folket (“Denmark
for the People”) Christiansen elegantly
shows how the workers over time also
were made a part of the people. In
Stauning’s programme the working
class, the people, the nation and the state
were depicted as one whole, which was
to work in harmony for the common
good under the management of the Social Democrats.
While Christiansen focuses on social
democracy, Morten Thing concentrates
on more radical parties and movements,
primarily on Danmarks Kommunistiske
Parti (Danish Communist Party, 1917–),
Socialistiskt Folkeparti (The Socialist
People’s Party, 1959–) and Venstresocialisterne (The Left-wing Socialists,
1967–). He gives a good overview of
their approach to and use of the concept
of “people”. With great clarity, he shows
how national symbols and the “people”,
albeit with varying degrees of success,
were also used by parties on the extreme
left wing from the 1930s onwards. Both
Christiansen’s and Thing’s conclusions
agree with similar investigations regard-
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ing conditions in Sweden, where social
democracy’s equally ambivalent and
changing relation to the “people” and
nationalism have been discussed, among
others by Christer Strahl (Nationalism
och socialism, 1983), Lars Christian
Trägårdh (The Concept of the People
and the Construction of Popular Culture
in Germany and Sweden 1848–1944,
1993), Åsa Linderborg (Socialdemokraterna skriver historia, 2001) and also by
myself (Folkets minnen, 2008).
Det ombejlede folk is an exceptionally
interesting volume. Its articles are wellwritten and without exception give good
insight into the concept of the people, its
different meanings and in particular the
constant struggle about its definitions.
“As a concept ‘the people’ is elastic to
such degree that almost any political significance can be attached to it”, Morten
Thing concludes his article. His words
are well chosen and summarize in many
respects the whole anthology. Det ombejlede folk adds new knowledge to the
general understanding of the concept
people and thus is an excellent complement to an already extensive area of research. The book can be warmly recommended for specially interested researchers but also, I believe, to a broader
audience with an interest in history.
Fredrik Skott
Gothenburg, Sweden
Nursing care in the presence of death
Eva M. Karlsson: Livet nära döden. Situationer, status och social solidaritet
vid vård i livets slutskede. Mångkulturellt centrum, Tumba 2008. 268 pp.
Diss.
Eva M. Karlsson has presented a doctoral dissertation in ethnology at the University of Stockholm. Her subject lies
within the framework of the extensive
amount of research on death that has
been carried out in Scandinavia in recent
years. A symposium on “Death as a top-
ic in Scandinavian cultural research during the 2000s”, where she presented a
paper, was held in Oslo in 2008.
In her dissertation, Karlsson focuses
on a description and analysis of the public nursing care provided to patients in
their own homes who have been diagnosed as suffering from terminal cancer.
Such activity is termed palliative home
nursing in the final stages of life, and
“Life near death” has therefore been
chosen as an appropriate main title of
the dissertation. The book has been published by the Mångkulturellt centrum in
Botkyrka, Sweden, the author’s place of
employment.
This palliative form of nursing first
began being applied in Sweden in the
1980s and in England as early as the
1960s. It consists of a close cooperation
between nursing personnel and patients
with their closest relatives. The aim of
such nursing is to alleviate the symptoms of the illness, thus increasing the
quality of life for extremely ill patients
so that they are able to experience as lenient a death as is possible. The nursing
personnel are to concern themselves
with the needs of the total person and not
merely monitor and deal with his or her
medical needs. The patient’s social, psychological and existential condition
must also be taken into consideration.
This is what constitutes the greatest difference from the acute healthcare given
in hospitals. Despite these clearly expressed ideological intentions, nursing
personnel often feel that they give most
attention to the patients’ physical condition. It is that which is most obviously
apparent when observed in the context
of their specialized skills and is thus
easiest to deal with. Information as to
the disease’s degree of difficulty and the
fact that no hope of recovery remains
must always be readily available to both
patients and their relatives. Their participation in this form of nursing care
constitutes a mainstay in its philosophy.
Such participation is to be expressed in
the care recipients’ experience of the
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care providers’ attention to them and
their comments, and by the providers’
consideration of their expressed wishes.
Interviews that the author has conducted
with patients show that their experience
of such consideration has been positive.
The dissertation is based on Karlsson’s own fieldwork at selected palliative units in or near large Swedish cities.
This fieldwork has been conducted in
the form of observations both during
meetings of nursing personnel, who
were primarily trained nurses, and during their visits in the homes. In addition,
the author has conducted interviews
with persons from all the categories involved, namely 22 interviews with
nurses, 12 with patients and three with
relatives. Except for three instances,
these interviews have all been conducted with the help of a tape-recorder. Surprisingly few people declined to be interviewed despite the fact that the topic
concerned is exceedingly sensitive. The
author discloses that she met outspokenness in conversations about death. This
is in contrast to results shown in previous research during the 1900s which indicated a tabooing against speaking
about death. The pendulum has obviously swung towards greater openness in recent years, something that I have also
been able to observe in my own research.
A scrupulous anonymization has been
carried out concerning the assembled
material. This has also been done with
the names of the palliative units in
which the study has been conducted.
The dissertation has a clearly empirical
foundation on the whole, while the presentation is characterized by what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz expressed
as being “thick description”. The reader
feels a positive nearness to both nursing
personnel and patients who receive
nursing services. It is easy to imagine
being involved in and affected by this
tragic situation.
Palliative home-nursing involves
both younger and older people. It does
165
not last for a very lengthy period of time
in the individual cases since the illness
has reached an extremely advanced
stage when the patient is provided with
this form of nursing. After death has occurred, nursing personnel meet together
in order to speak about what has happened and are thus aided in the closure
of the process of mourning. This actually becomes a personal matter for the personnel because contacts with the patient
have been so frequent and so deeply personal both in the duration of treatment
and during conversations.
The daily performance of nursing
care is the centre of attention in this dissertation. The author analyses the interaction of the nursing personnel, the patients and the closest relatives with one
another both in those cases in which
good contact is maintained and those in
which difficulties occur and communication lessens. These encounters between individuals and actors are given
the term situations by the author, thus
referring to the terminology used by the
sociologists Erving Goffman and
Randar Collins. Nursing personnel
speak of both “good” and “difficult” patients with regard to cooperative willingness during treatment visits and trustworthiness in the intervals between
visits. Those who are categorized as being “difficult” were those with whom
the nursing personnel experienced as
having had poor contact, leading to a
feeling of having lost some of the control over the situations. This seems especially to have been the case with male
patients and to have been reinforced by
the fact that the nursing personnel consisted for the most part of women. Female patients were often experienced as
being more compliant. Male patients
could thus be seen as a somewhat bothersome element in the cultural contacts
in early phases of the nursing care. Gender divergence disappears in a later
phase when the patients have become increasingly enfeebled. Then a dehumanization process occurs instead, and the
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patient goes from functioning as something like an active subject to becoming
a passive object, not only for nursing
personnel but also in relation to the relatives.
The concept of the good home occupies a prominent position in the ideology
of palliative nursing. This is the motivation for having nursing care take place in
the patient’s home with its expectations
of providing security and warmth in the
final stages of life. The public and the
private sphere then meet on the latter’s
home ground. This can be an obvious
advantage for the patients as the course
of their serious illness leads to their becoming more weakened. The meetings
in the home counteract the possibility of
the patient becoming a mere object for
the nursing personnel, but instead allow
him or her some semblance of functioning as a subject. The choice of nursing in
the home is, however, coupled to a nursing-care ideology rather than to the patients and their relatives. A doctor writes
a letter of referral concerning palliative
nursing care without the patient’s own
preferences necessarily having been
considered.
In a social context, Karlsson has taken
both ethnicity and social hierarchy into
account in her analysis. She has chosen
immigrants as one category and the socio-economic elite as another. The relevant palliative unit’s catchment area has
had importance in this respect. Certain
districts contained many immigrants
while persons having an obviously high
socio-economic background lived in
other areas. The location of the residential area could be of importance for the
nursing personnel’s understanding of
the patients’ social situation. At the
same time, according to nursing-care
ideology, neither the relationship to
nursing care nor its form was to differentiate according to ethnicity or socioeconomic position. The nursing personnel were expected to live up to this ideal.
This could, however, lead to certain difficulties when patients and their rela-
tives with the highest socio-economic
background proved to be more articulate
and more demanding than others. On the
other hand, such patients could also
come into conflict with the nursing personnel if they acted too haughty or too
snobbish.
One problem that could arise with immigrant patients from non-Western
countries was that their relatives did not
want the patient to receive detailed information about the situation of his or
her illness and its fatal significance.
Then the nursing personnel were caught
in a dilemma between the family’s
wishes and the intentions of Swedish
laws on health and nursing stating that
all patients have the right to be informed
of their diagnoses and prognoses. However, constructive meetings also occurred between the nursing personnel
and this category of immigrant patients.
The personnel especially noticed immigrant families’ solidarity which was expressed in a special way in crisis situations, compared to what was observed in
ethnic Swedish families.
In closing, I wish to emphasize that
this contemporarily concentrated dissertation provides very factual glimpses of
the life behind the scenes in connection
with a form of nursing care that is not as
well known for the public as that which
is carried out in hospitals or in other
types of public care institutions in Sweden. The study is an excellent example
of a meeting between separate individuals and the collective in the form of society’s outstretched hand. This meeting
can be expressed as mutual cooperation,
but can also easily lead to some cultural
collisions. These must, however, be resolved so that nursing-care activities can
function in a satisfactory manner. Eva
M. Karlsson gives an impression of being a good fieldworker who has gained
admission in the sensitive settings arising from the care of a terminally ill person in his or her home during the last period of that person’s life. She has succeeded in combining proximity to the
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field of study with a necessary analytical
distance. This is shown in the critical
comments which in certain instances
have emerged concerning the practical
application of this form of nursing care.
The accumulated evidence is linked in
the analysis to the theoretical discussions which have been conducted not
only in international sociology, but also
in contemporary Swedish ethnology in
recent years.
Anders Gustavsson
Oslo, Norway
Magic as Empowerment
Laura Stark: The Magical Self. Body,
Society and the Supernatural in Early
Modern Rural Finland. FF Communications 290. Academia Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki 2006. 521 pp. Ill.
What can narratives about magic in 19th
and early 20th century Finland tell us
about older Finnish notions of the self
and individual agency? A great deal, to
judge by this book. Its basic premise is
that the early modern sense of self was
not the same as the modern one, and that
stories about magic afford a glimpse of
this conception of the self because
magic was employed as a strategy to
bolster the individual’s self-esteem; the
use of magic presupposed, on the one
hand, a notion of the individual as an active agent (magic is a form of agency),
and on the other, it was utilised as a tool
to defend or enhance this sense of agency. Protecting one’s ability to act as an
autonomous agent was of prime importance in early modern Finnish culture for
a number of reasons: firstly, it was the
primary cultural expression of a sense of
individuality, since a person was otherwise chiefly identified with the larger
social unit of the farm household. Secondly, agency was paramount to retaining one’s position in the social hierarchy: lack or loss of agency undermined
this position.
167
The threats to agency and autonomy
in early modern Finnish culture were,
according to Stark, manifold, and she
distinguishes between three major types
of arenas in which people were said to
use magic to defend their individuality
and status as agents, and these provide
the structure of the book, which is divided into four parts, with the introductory chapters forming the first. The first
type of situation in which magic was
seen as a viable means of defending
one’s agency, discussed in Part Two,
was conflicts with neighbours and other
members of the community. This included sorcery performed by the landless poor – or the threat of such sorcery
– to maintain existing relations of exchange which were vital to their survival, dependent as they were on the
charity of social superiors, as well as
sorcery performed by neighbours to
‘break’ the members of other households or the luck of the household as a
whole. The former kind of magic was
considered more legitimate, something
we can divine from the fact that the objects of this type of sorcery were never
said to resort to counter sorcery, which
was the normal response to the latter
kind. Stark contends that magic might
have been the only way for beggars and
itinerant labourers to assert their autonomy and dignity as individuals, while social peers presumably had other methods for self-promotion at their disposal,
and were not supposed to resort to
magic. When they were nevertheless reported to do so, it was often to rectify
what was perceived as a skewed balance
of fortune – invoking notions of the
limited good – or to handle a dispute for
which no proper form of arbitration was
available. Conflicts could seldom be
settled in court as sessions were sparse,
and the difficulty to avoid personal enemies in social life discouraged direct
confrontation and encouraged attack or
revenge by clandestine means, i.e.
through magic.
The corollary of this state of affairs
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was the conception of the ideal personality as an aggressive defender of his individual agency, and this ideal personality was pre-eminently, though not exclusively, male, and belonged to the landowning class. Achieving the ideal of the
autonomous individual was obviously
easier for those who were independent
to begin with, such as farm masters, and
correspondingly more difficult for dependents. The epitome of this active individual, however, was the sage, the
tietäjä, who invariably was the master of
his own household, and possessed secret
knowledge as well. Narratives about
sages are highly interesting as they exemplify an important strategy for aggressive self-defence, namely anger,
which Stark describes as more of a cultural performance than an emotional response in the modern sense. Anger mobilised the psychological, cultural and
social resources of the individual and
heightened his sense of agency, which
was crucial in the banishment of supernatural illness agents, for instance. In
these cases anger was a requisite part of
the healing ritual, and empowered the
sage in his battle against the illness
agents.
A second context in which magic was
used to defend the individual’s agency,
treated in Part Three, was illness; illness
restricts the individual’s autonomy as
s/he is no longer capable of performing
daily tasks, and thus loses one avenue to
building a social reputation, namely
through hard work. Illness was thought
to result from the intrusion of supernatural forces into the human body, either through wounds on the skin or
through penetration of the human
body’s own supernatural boundary and
force, the luonto. The luonto could be
hard or soft, and a soft luonto meant a
greater vulnerability to illness as it was
easier for supernatural illness agents to
infect a person with this characteristic.
Part and parcel of this greater susceptibility was the tendency of persons with a
soft luonto to take fright easily, and
thereby open themselves to infection
by these supernatural illness agents.
Fright and fear, in addition to falling
down on the ground and even thinking
of the possibility of infection, were
viewed as a loss of agency, and eventually as a collapse, or rupture, in the important distinction between self and
other, or the proper relationship between them. Anger, on the other hand,
was believed to make people’s luonto
harder, and the sage consequently
worked himself into a rage in order to
release his clients from curses and illnesses, both to protect himself and to
make the healing more effective. But
“anger” was also ascribed to the supernatural illness agent, and Stark suggests that “anger” in this context should
be understood as a form of agency rather than as an emotion, an agency that
caused harm or injury to others.
In concert with her earlier work, Stark
attributes the early modern Finnish conceptions of illness to what she calls “the
open body schema”, the unconscious experience of the body as opening up to the
external environment in dangerous
ways. Illness as a result of shock
(säikähdys) is an instructive example
here. Shock allowed alien forces to enter
the body, and it could be cured by
“re-shocking” the patient, which was
thought to release the foreign element
from the body. But the body could also
be vulnerable to the intrusive energies of
other people: since anger made a person’s luonto hard or sharp, the projection of this energy onto another individual as the object of anger was believed to
have potentially serious consequences.
This was especially the case if the angry
person was of higher social rank than the
individual with whom he was angry, and
hence was considered to possess a higher degree of social agency as it was.
Farm masters rebuking servants, or
adults cursing at children could, according to this mode of thought, inflict harm
and illness on them, or cause them to be
“taken by the forest”, a state in which
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they were detached from human society
and suffered the dissolution of their very
identities. Stark argues that these experiences of the invasion of the body by
alien forces resulted in trauma, and that
the task of the folk healer was to produce
a narrative explaining the origin of the
trauma (through fright, falling down,
etc.) – thereby verbalising the existence
of the trauma and the patient’s concomitant sense of psychological injury – and
to perform a ritual in which the patient’s
bodily boundaries were sealed and restored. Thus, the diagnoses and aetiologies offered by the healer should be interpreted as healing fictions that had a
real effect on the patient’s body, according to the author, for the narratives state
that people were actually cured from
their complaints. Stark attributes this effect to the fact that the healer and the patient shared the same body schema, and
understood illness and healing in the
same ways.
The third type of context for magic,
dealt with in Part Four, was what Stark
labels testing situations: court proceedings, catechism exams, and dances. The
common denominator of all of these is
that they affected the social standing of
the individual in the eyes of the community, and therefore the leverage for autonomous agency. In order to protect
their autonomy, individuals could perform magic to try to ensure success in
these contexts, and as the author points
out, the narratives preserved in folk tradition are only concerned with those
who enjoyed success in these arenas.
There are no stories narrated from the
point of view of a parishioner condemned to the stocks, or of girls failing
to attract suitors at a village dance; they
remain voiceless, and may even have
lacked narrative models for verbalising
their experiences. Physical insubordination or verbal assaults on spectators appear to have been the major forms of resistance to public shaming, and represented an assertion of agency in situations designed to constrain it.
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This book lucidly illustrates the import of magic as a resource in highly
competitive contexts – what scholars of
Ancient magic have so elegantly called
its “agonistic” context – in which the
social status, and perhaps even the very
life of the individual, was at stake. All
contexts for magic covered here share a
sense of intense vulnerability, and
magic functioned as a form of empowerment.
The Magical Self furnishes an intriguing peek at the early modern Finnish
self, and addresses a wide array of folkloristic issues, of which I have mentioned just a few. The book has bearing
on the study of magic, the history of early modern society, the history of emotions, the study of folk medicine, ethnopsychology and narrative analysis. Interpreting the experiences of early modern individuals on their own terms is
never allowed to slip out of focus, and
the differences between early modern
and modern culture are regularly highlighted by explicit comparisons between
them. These comparisons make early
modern conceptions more intelligible to
the contemporary reader, and serve as a
stepping stone for the analysis. Personally, I particularly appreciated the extensive discussion of anger in early modern
Finnish culture, as it clearly demonstrates that emotions are not mere emotions, but also cultural performances and
concepts that are “good to think with”.
The Magical Self is, in short, an impressive achievement by a dedicated scholar.
Camilla Asplund Ingemark
Lund, Sweden
Norwegian School Tours to Nazi Concentration Camps
Kyrre Kverndokk: Pilgrim, turist og
elev. Norske skoleturer til døds- og konsentrasjonsleirer. Linköping. University
of Linköping 2007. Linköping Studies in
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Arts and Science no. 403. 294 pp. Ill.
English summary. Diss.
The Norwegian cultural historian Kyrre
Kverndokk has presented his doctoral
dissertation at the University of Linköping in Sweden. Its theme concerns
contemporary Norwegian school tours
to former Nazi concentration camps in
Poland and Germany. The author’s intention is to study how the past can be
made meaningful for the school pupils
involved. The tours are organized by the
trust “Hvite busser til Auschwitz”
(“White busses to Auschwitz”) which
began such activities in 1992. The intention was to combat neo-Nazism which
had then begun to make itself felt both in
Norway and elsewhere in Europe. The
pupils who have participated in the tours
have been fifteen years of age. Prior to
their departure, they have met with a
so-called time-witness. This witness is
Norwegian, a former prisoner of war
who was interned in a concentration
camp and who can talk about his or her
experiences and impressions. In 2003
approximately 16 000 Norwegian pupils, or about one-fourth of the form,
participated in such tours.
These tours can primarily be considered as having the character of pilgrimages to the death camps. In addition, they are a form of tourist excursion,
in that the pupils visit a number of attractive tourist sites in addition to the
death camps. That is why the author has
used the two terms “pilgrim” and “tourist” in the title of his publication.
Theoretically speaking, the author
utilizes ritual theories to a great extent.
This relates both to Paul Connerton’s
theory of memorial rites and Victor
Turner’s model for rites of passage.
Kverndokk considers the school tours to
be memorial rites. In their aspect of rites
of passage, they can be divided into
three parts. The first is the preparation or
separation phase, followed by an intensive journey which makes up a liminal
or border phase, and finally, a phase of
supplementary work. This latter task includes a presentation of the pupils’ impressions from their tour for their teachers, parents and siblings. An analysis of
the content of the time-witness’s narratives is also marked by a division into
three. Its structure consists first of a description of the invasion, then the occupation and, finally, the liberation.
The fieldwork on which the dissertation is based was carried out by the author in 2004 in the form of observations
and interviews. 45 interviews have been
conducted with 40 people. Ten interviews have been conducted with former
concentration camp prisoners. The author also participated in and documented
all phases of one school tour, from the
preparations for the tour itself, to the
supplementary work. Each of the three
phases has been given a separate chapter
in the publication. The study concentrates on a school in Oslo where such
tours have been organized since 1997.
Ten pupils chosen as key informants
were studied in detail. Five sets of parents were interviewed. The names of
both the school and the informants have
been anonymized. This means that the
author has not been able to make actual
use of the plentiful photographic material assembled during the tour. During
interviews with the pupils after they had
arrived back home, however, these photographs had an important function in
assisting the pupils to verbalize their experiences of the tour.
The chapter on the preparation or
separation phase informs the reader that
the pupils themselves had earned the
money for their tour. This was done, for
example, by selling cookies and waffles
while the pupils told purchasers about
their proposed tour as well. They also
met a time-witness ahead of time, a man
who had been imprisoned in various
concentration camps between 1942 and
1945. They also listened to the experiences of other pupils, among them elder
siblings, who had previously participated on a tour of this kind. Moreover, they
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watched a documentary film made by a
former pupil during his tour. Just before
departure, the teacher distributed notebooks that the pupils were to use as their
private travel diaries in which experiences and impressions were to be continually recorded.
A subsequent chapter examines the
tour itself as ritual praxis in the field of
tension between pilgrimage and tourist
excursion. The tour by bus is interpreted
by the author as the first portion of a
liminal space extraneous to ordinary
daily life. Sprits and other stimulants
were strictly forbidden in this phase;
sprits constituted an absolute ritual
boundary. The next portion of the liminal space begins with the arrival at the
concentration camp chosen as the goal
of the pilgrimage. This develops into a
horror-filled journey through history in
which the pupils’ expectations are confronted with a tangible reality on a foreign site. Many pupils began to cry although they still used their cameras to
take many photographs. This would lead
to reality being even more evident after
they arrived home. The pupils were involved in a memorial ceremony in the
camp by laying down flowers, lighting a
torch and reading a text. Photographs
were forbidden during this ceremony.
After the visit to the death camps, a
more exhilarated feeling arose during
which the pupils were to experience
Kraków as tourists. As is clearly shown
in the diary notations, the most important element here was shopping.
A third main chapter presents and discusses the tour’s third phase which consisted of developing and presenting the
impressions of the tour after having arrived back home in Oslo. The pupils
wrote long reports on their experiences
and recollections. The author has been
allowed to read and analyse these written contributions which include the assembled photographic material. In this
context, Paul Connerton’s theory of memorial rites proves especially valuable.
The last step in the ritual process con-
171
sisted of the presentation at the parents’
meeting. Then the pupils assumed the
ritual role of new witnesses with personal testimony about the concentration
camps. The obligation for a continual
creation of new witnesses is really the
ultimate goal of these tours.
My main impression is that this dissertation adds important aspects to current research in several fields. These include issues about enlivening history,
not least the more horrible portions of it.
For people of our day and age, this can
be experienced as diffuse, even if many
now find this to be of increasing interest.
Research on pilgrims, which is very
prominent in Catholic countries, can
also have secular alternatives, as has
been shown in this dissertation. Tourism
does not have to be a mere entertainment
and consumption industry, but can also
be combined with experiences of the
more serious and traumatic events experienced by other persons in the past. The
author has, in addition, made a contribution to the cultural research on death
which in international terms has shown
immense growth in later years and
which was the subject of a Scandinavian
symposium in Oslo in October of 2008.
Anders Gustavsson
Oslo, Norway
Charms, Charmers, Charming
Jonathan Roper (ed.): Charms, Charmers and Charming. International Research on Verbal Magic. (Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and
Magic). Palgrave Macmillan. Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York, 2009.
xxvii + 294 pp.
Jonathan Roper, who is at present
Teaching Fellow in English Language at
the University of Leeds, has distinguished himself in recent years as one of
the most active international network
builders among specialists on charms.
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Within the framework of the International Society for Narrative Research
(ISFNR) he has helped to build up a special committee on charms, charmers,
and charming. He has also played a central part in arranging international conferences on this theme in London in
2003 and 2005 and in Pécs in Hungary
in 2007. In 2004 he published a collection of articles based on the first conference, while the present book is in some
measure the publication of lectures from
the last two conferences. Besides Roper’s introduction the book consists of
nineteen papers by researchers from
eleven countries. The book is part of the
publisher’s established and respected
series about Witchcraft and Magic. The
series is being expanded into a broader
spectrum of themes of significance for
the understanding of witchcraft and
magic in Europe.
The articles are named here in the order in which they come in the book. The
first is by Laura Stark (Finland), who
analyses parts of the Finnish tietäjä tradition from the old peasant society, with
special emphasis on the nineteenth century. A tietäjä was a person who was a
specialist in magic, including healing,
sorcery, and divination. Stark focuses on
charms and charming with the intention
of making such a person “hard”. With
this hardness the expert in magic enjoyed special protection. Stark associates this special form of charming
with the understanding of the individual in pre-modern society, when people
had to draw their own boundaries and
establish respect for themselves and
their resources.
Paul Cowdell (England) writes about
charms performed in order to get rid of
rats. He follows these charms over a
long period, and observes that they display some formal similarities – even in
our own days. Éva Pócs (Hungary)
writes about a classical rhetorical device
in charms, namely, the reference to the
impossible. She uses a number of examples to demonstrate something more
general, namely, that charms, besides
being text-oriented and faithful to a text,
are also functional and elastic. In addition, they show traces of cultural encounters and of “grand narratives” of a
mythological kind.
Ritwa Herjulfsdotter (Sweden) analyses a specific type of charms from
Swedish-speaking areas, namely, those
which tell of the Virgin Mary’s encounter with snakes. In her analysis she follows up a study published by the historian Linda Oja in 1994 about gender perspectives on folk magic, and claims that
these snake charms represent a special
female experience and practice in
pre-modern peasant society. This perspective was the foundation for Herjulfsdotter’s recently published doctoral
dissertation in ethnology (see the review
on pp. 174–176).
Ulrika Wolf-Knuts (Finland) considers quite a different perspective in her
article, namely, that of psychology.
Based on a concrete charm recorded in
Sweden in 1674, she performs a detailed
and insightful analysis of what can be
called the “the actualization situation”
for a text of this kind. She shows how
the use of the charm actually helps the
individual to handle a dangerous situation where he or she feels threatened by
evil forces.
Vladimir Klyaus (Russia) has worked
for many years indexing the themes in
Slavic verbal charms, and in his article
he analyses some examples from the
material with which he has worked.
Through the examples he seeks to show
how a structuralist approach – particularly inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss
and Vladimir Propp – can illuminate
shared features in all verbal charms, features that have a great deal in common
with the folktale.
T. M. Smallwood (Ulster) proceeds
from late medieval European manuscripts and demonstrates how charms
were handed down and distributed
through channels that were legitimate in
the eyes of the church. Jacqueline Simp-
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son (England) discusses a passage in
William Shakespeare’s King Lear,
showing how it simulates a charm text.
She also reveals how this special literary
charm text has models both in earlier literature and in folk tradition.
Natalia Glukhova and Vladimir
Glukhov (Russia) presents charms from
the Mari people, a Volga-Finnic group
living in the centre of Russia. The article
gives a brief survey of various types of
Mari charms and then undertakes a
deeper analysis of two central motifs –
impossibility and inevitability – in some
of the charms.
The work of developing an international typology for verbal charms has
occupied many scholars. One of those
who has been most active in this endeavour in recent years has been Andrei
Toporkov (Russia). His article seeks to
show how an international typology
could help to illuminate connections and
lines of tradition across cultures and historical periods. Monika Kropej (Slovenia) analyses how Slovenian charms
have parallels and similarities in both
South Slavic and Central European popular traditions. She proceeds from material that she herself has collected in a
border zone between Slovenia and Austria.
Henni Ilomäki (Finland) interprets
Finnish snake charms from the nineteenth century, using them as material
for understanding the relationship between Christian and pre-Christian traditions in pre-modern Finnish peasant culture, a relationship that she explains as a
bricolage of world-view. Jonathan Roper (England) presents charms from Estonia, showing the many parallels to the
German charm tradition. Daiva
Vaitkeviciene (Lithuania) discusses
charms from both Latvia and Lithuania,
revealing that the two countries have
rather different traditions in this field.
She points out in particular that there are
many similarities between the Lithuanian traditions and those from Russia
and Belarus.
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Lea Olsan (USA) performs a concrete
study of charms in some medieval
manuscripts. The texts are in both English and Latin. Olsan makes a detailed
analysis of the form and function of
these texts. Not least interesting is her
attempt to determine when and in what
circumstances the texts were perceived
as either meditative or healing. Based on
her fieldwork in Serbia, Maria Vivod
(France) analyses a concrete female
magical healer, her activity and her
repertoire of charms. Vivod also draws
attention to the external circumstances
that seem to have led to a certain renaissance for this practice in modern society.
Lee Haring (USA) presents charm
traditions in Madagascar. He takes his
material from collections of folk tales.
Meri Tsiklauri (Georgia) and David
Hunt (England) have together written an
article discussing a special type of
charm from Georgia, and the parallel
English translations of the texts make
this material more accessible to international researchers. The final essay in the
book is by Low Kok On (Malaysia),
analysing magical practice in today’s
Malaysia.
Jonathan Roper, in his relatively
short introduction to the book, has explained the idea behind it. He first gives
an account of the earlier research traditions on charms, with special emphasis
on the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, which he views as the golden age
of charm studies in Europe. This account is very brief and does not entirely
manage to convey that there was in this
period a well-functioning international
network of scholars in this field. His
great hero is obviously the Danish folklorist Ferdinand Ohrt. After Ohrt,
charms were for a long time a neglected
field among scholars, according to Roper. His intention with this book is to
show that new life has been blown into
this research field in recent decades, a
silver age of research on charms. When
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Roper tries to sum up what this revitalized research is actually about, it is not
entirely easy to follow him. He is of
course right that this is an important research field, but why is it? To put it
simply, one can perhaps distinguish between two answers to that question: For
some people it is a goal in itself to have
scholarly competence on charms as
texts, especially because they can shed
light on cultural contacts, cultural relations, and the handing down of cultural
elements. For others – and this is perhaps what Roper is aiming at when he
includes charmers and charming in the
title of the book – this is just part of a
larger field where scholars study, for example, magic and medicinal tradition,
the relationship between learned and
folk tradition, gender issues, cultural
change and regression, mentalities, verbal and oral cultures, textuality – to
name just some of the themes that may
arise. Behind the two answers there are
a series of different and perhaps incommensurate research traditions, but Roper
seems to place too little emphasis on this
particular problem.
Several of the essays in the book
clearly point beyond themselves or communicate indirectly with each other, and
this can hopefully inspire further international research collaboration in this
field. As a whole, the book seems to lack
focus. It gives some impression of the
research traditions in individual countries, but it does not wholly succeed in
tying this together into something more
general, suitable for further discussion.
One question that can be asked is how
much more insight it gives than the previous collection of articles edited by
Roper (see the review in Arv 2008, pp.
226–228).
One is also tempted to ask whether it
really is a shared research field that this
book documents. If it is difficult to give
an unambiguously positive answer to
this, one explanation is that the authors
come from very different academic
backgrounds – from anthropology and
folkloristics to comparative literature
and philology. Another explanation is
that the research traditions in countries
as different as Finland, Russia, and
Malaysia seem so divergent that they
can hardly be assembled into a uniform
platform for further collaboration. Perhaps it would have been better to concentrate a book like this on a few concrete themes and invite a smaller
number of researchers to write longer
articles that communicate more explicitly with each other.
Arne Bugge Amundsen
Oslo, Norway
Marian Charms against Snake Bites
Ritwa Herjulfsdotter: Jungfru Maria
möter ormen – om formlers tolkningar.
Ask & Embla hb, Göteborg 2008. 292
pp. English summary. Diss.
This dissertation in ethnology from
Gothenburg University is a contribution
to a classical field of ethnology and folklore, namely, the study of folk medicine
in pre-modern society. The author’s
main thesis is that old folk verbal
charms are ambiguous and can be used
in many different contexts. The author
seeks to investigate this by examining
how charms used against snakes and
snake bites can also have been part of a
larger repertoire, where the female cultural sphere and fertility may have been
important.
Charms as source material represent a
critical challenge because there is little
contextual information. This applies to
the uses, the users, and the passing on of
the tradition. The focus of the study,
however, is on records of charms from
the period 1880–1930 in Sweden and in
Swedish-speaking Finland. Separate
chapters are devoted to snakes and snake
bites in early folk tradition and the Virgin Mary in popular and ecclesiastical
tradition. Great emphasis is placed on
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the way in which the folk image of Mary
could be used in different cultural contexts. The main chapter consists of the
analysis of the Marian charms. Symbolic language is central to these, especially
what is associated with Mary’s role
when she meets the snake in the charms:
she binds it. The author argues that
many of the designations used in the
charms may also have had connotations
of a female world of experience and use.
It is not entirely clear which research
tradition the dissertation is inscribed in.
It is clear that it is folkloristic, and also
that it draws on research in the history of
religion. It is also surprising that the dissertation does not apply a gender-theoretical or feminist perspective. If there is
anything the author really discusses and
brings into her own discussions, it is precisely authors who have worked more or
less explicitly with that research approach.
When it comes to issues of theory and
method, the dissertation is likewise not
always explicit about its positions. It
completely lacks an overall theoretical
discussion, for example, but it seems as
if a great deal of inspiration derives from
Claude Lévi-Strauss and his structuralist
approach to “the savage mind”, since
what is called “associative thinking” is
important for understanding how the
content and effect of the charms were
defined and understood in pre-modern
society. However, these theoretical references are very sparse and not taken all
the way, yet they seem to determine the
entire horizon of interpretation. If one
were to suggest an equally fruitful theoretical approach to material of this type it
could be in the direction of, say, one or
other form of text theory, that is, a theory that says something about how texts –
and hence also “oral texts” – have a cultural and social effect by being used,
performed, and applied in concrete situations. What bears up the project in
terms of method and has extensive – albeit problematic – implications is what
175
the author describes as source pluralism,
the method of indications or circumstantial evidence, and “the demands of “rare
attestations”. Source pluralism is not
problematic, but the other methods are
tricky. Building an academic argument
on indications and scattered attestations
is risky. It is hard to decide when a
number of separate references develops
into a convincing series of indications.
The author emphasizes that she is chiefly concerned with her primary source
material, and that she subjects it to a
“close reading”. A “close reading” of
the Marian charms has the result that
none of them is said to have been used
for anything but curing snake bites. In
practice, little importance is attached to
what the charms say about themselves,
the internal statements of the texts,
whereas the context – which turns out to
be more or less cohesive series of indications – virtually invades the texts of
the charms and gives them a different
meaning from what can be read from
them expressis verbis.
An important aim of the dissertation
is to look closely at the relationship between folk culture and ecclesiastical culture. The Virgin Mary is a figure that occupied priests and church doctrine, but
she was also very important in folk religious culture. It seems as if the dissertation in practice makes the differences
between the people and the church
greater than necessary. In her description of the figure of Mary, for instance,
she makes a point of the fact that several
of the ideas about the mother of Jesus
have no biblical basis. As the same time,
she makes a clear distinction between
what “the official church” or “theology”
believed about Mary and what is found
in folk beliefs.
What characterizes the folk ideas, of
course, is the rich ecclesiastical tradition
of the Virgin Mary which developed
during the first fifteen hundred years in
the history of the Christian church. Although this perspective is included in the
description of the heterogeneous figure
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of Mary, it does not stand alone. It was
Protestantism that introduced the sharp
distinction between “The Bible” and the
ecclesiastical tradition, and it was probably not until after the Protestant culture
had been firmly established in Scandinavia, especially from the eighteenth century on, that popular religiosity was
judged as something qualitatively different from what theology and church
doctrine could accept – it became “superstition”.
The focus of the analysis is, as we
have seen, the content and meaning of
the snake charms in the period when
they were collected, that is, in Swedishspeaking areas in the period 1880–1930.
An important principle in all historical
research is thus maintained, that of the
unity of time and space. In practice,
however, the principle is not consistently upheld. This could perhaps be an objection at the level of detail, but if one
looks more closely, it seems as if it is the
records and indications from other
places that make it possible for the author to arrive at new and alternative interpretations of her source material. Especially important are the many references to the situation in the Finnishspeaking part of Finland. This provides
substantial arguments for alternative interpretations of the Swedish material.
When this is based on other scholars’ interpretations of material that is after all
rather alien in relation to Swedish cultural reality, it becomes problematic.
The dissertation perhaps reveals the
strength and weakness of the “close
reading”: the details may become too
big and the big things too small. This
should not however be allowed to obscure all the positive and especially inspiring aspects of this dissertation. It
contributes to a much-needed renewal of
a classical field in folkloristics and ethnology, namely, the study of charms and
folk medicine in pre-modern society.
The dissertation simultaneously opens
the field to much broader perspectives
than it had in the past. The study of the
Marian charms contributes to (ethno)medicine, anthropology, cultural history, text studies, church history, and –
not least of all – to women’s history.
Arne Bugge Amundsen
Oslo, Norway
A Hidden Public Sphere
Marie Steinrud: Den dolda offentligheten. Kvinnlighetens sfärer i 1800-talets
svenska högreståndskultur. Carlsson
Bokförlag, Stockholm 2008. 309 pp. Ill.
Diss.
This is the author’s doctoral dissertation
in ethnology at Uppsala University. Research on the culture of the nobility and
the upper classes has perhaps not been
the most dominant theme in Swedish
ethnology in the last few decades. But
there are important exceptions, not least
Angela Rundquist’s dissertation from
1989, which was a study of Swedish
aristocratic female culture in the latter
part of the nineteenth century (Blått blod
och liljevita händer: En etnologisk studie av aristokratiska kvinnor 1850–
1900). Steinrud’s dissertation can perhaps be viewed against the background
of the research interest developed over
several years by Rundquist in collaboration with scholars like Mats Hellspong.
Likewise, historical studies have not
been the main focus of Swedish ethnology, but here too there are a few important exceptions. Steinrud’s dissertation
also belongs to this series of interesting
exceptions.
Steinrud’s main interest is in highlighting a historical female culture that
she says has attracted little attention. To
do so, she has chosen a good point of departure, namely, a family-conscious, archivally documented noble family with
many women who wrote letters. They
are from the relatively recently ennobled
Tersmeden family with its many links to
the nineteenth-century Swedish elite. A
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total of 1,500 letters are the main source
material for the study, and the manor of
Hessle outside Uppsala is its most important locus geographicus. Four sisters
from the Tersmeden family, who were
born and died between 1791 and 1881,
are the central actors.
A major perspective in the dissertation is the difference between the public
and the private sphere, a distinction that
has been central in several general studies of bourgeois culture and of
women’s culture in the nineteenth century. Here Steinrud brings into her discussion scholars such as Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, and Karen V.
Hansen. She follows Leonore Davidoff
and Catherine Hall and their understanding of the public/private distinct as socially and ideologically constructed
“spaces”.
To test this model, Steinrud follows
her female actors and their letter writing
through four selected themes: social life
and social network, friendship, work
and charity, home, manor, and church.
These seem to be well-chosen variables,
not least because, in the noble and aristocratic culture they were by definition
broad fields where both men and
women, younger and older people, family and fellow aristocrats interacted all
the time. Steinrud performs a close reading, in the best sense, of her material.
She picks good quotations and brings
out fascinating nuances in the material.
She looks in detail at topics such as the
intricate rules of etiquette, letter writing
as a form of communication, child rearing, the handling of money, interior, and
intimacy. An underlying theme is how
cultural and social rules, freedom of action and scope for negotiation are communicated in and through the letter writing and through concrete actions reflected in the letters.
It is clear from Steinrud’s analysis
that the aristocratic culture – including
the female culture – was a very complex
entity. To study it only as the framework
for individual or gendered staging is of-
177
ten a far too limited perspective. Of
course there were different conditions
for men and women and boundaries between the sexes in this culture. Yet at the
same time the potential for negotiation
was perhaps greater than in many other
social groups. The private/public distinction becomes pressing because the
actors in a manor-house family lived
highly visible lives – for each other and
for people in close or distant social surroundings. Yet this distinction is less
clear because the manor-house family as
a cultural entity, precisely through its individual members, acted as mediators or
messengers between a number of other
groups and individuals who related either to the manor house as a farming unit
or to the aristocratic family as a local or
regional elite. This was an inheritance
from the older aristocratic culture: in a
manor house the owners could not
isolate themselves or withdraw, they had
to be visible and serve as exemplary
models. This was the duty that nobility
and aristocratic elite status brought with
it. The alterity that this old elite ideal entailed is perhaps given too little attention
in Steinrud’s account.
An important explanation for this is
possibly the weakness of close reading
as a method: that one focuses so much
on one’s primary material that part of
the historical context and the longer
lines of cultural history receive less emphasis. Using a contemporary letter collection as the main source means that
this particular genre, with its limitations,
dictates the perspective to a large extent.
At the same time, there is an important
strength in this limitation, and Steinrud
uses it to the full: the letters show how
noble women in the nineteenth century
could negotiate about their positions,
participate in and influence fields and
spaces that were gendered in the contemporary bourgeois ideology. Nobility
and aristocratic status made the main female actors more visible, but also more
flexible.
It must be said that Marie Steinrud
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has written an exciting, consistent, and
competent scholarly study. There is just
as much reason to state that her historical-ethnological contribution will be of
great significance for other research on
aristocratic culture and the North European manor-house culture. In recent
years we have seen a renaissance in all
the Scandinavian countries for interdisciplinary studies of this culture, not least
its metamorphoses in the nineteenth
century, when the pressure of bourgeois
culture and the politicization of society
and culture made themselves increasingly felt. Steinrud’s study shows both
how resistant and how adaptable the
aristocratic culture was. New ideals
were seized on, modern perspectives
were brought in – but at the same time
the manor houses and the aristocratic
elite retained the self-assurance that
only a belief in their historical obligations could give them.
Arne Bugge Amundsen
Oslo, Norway
Heritage and Canon
Lars-Eric Jönsson, Anna Wallette & Jes
Wienberg (eds.): Kanon och kulturarv.
Historia och samtid i Danmark och Sverige. Centrum för Danmarksstudier 19.
Makadam, Göteborg/Stockholm 2008.
327 pp. Ill.
Conferences were arranged by the
Centre for the Study of Denmark in
2006 and 2007 to discuss the question
“Cultural heritage today – why and for
whom?” The general intention of the
Centre is to encourage comparisons between Sweden and Denmark, and the
two conferences brought together scholars from different academic disciplines
and cultural institutions. Archaeologists,
historians, ethnologists, and others debated research in the two countries in
terms of historic monuments, culture
and nature, cultural heritage and canon.
This volume, entitled “Canon and Heritage: Past and Present in Denmark and
Sweden”, presents the results in eighteen articles, divided into three themes.
Several of the authors act not solely as
researchers but also put forward their
own arguments about cultural policy.
Some draw interesting political conclusions about the concepts of canon and
heritage and how they are used in ideas
about the past.
In the introduction the editors,
Lars-Eric Jönsson, Anna Wallette, and
Jes Wienberg, describe and compare the
two concepts, their history and ambiguity. Since the reader has to relate to both
Swedish and Danish contexts, this account is welcome for an understanding
of the debates on cultural policy in
which the concepts of canon and heritage have been used. Differences emerge
in that the term heritage has not provoked such heated discussions in Sweden as the term canon has done in Denmark. It caused a huge controversy
when the Danish government took the
initiative a few years ago to compile a
literary canon, a cultural canon, and a
historical canon, with a selection of
works and events to be used in school
tuition. Although the cultural heritage
has an important position in the Swedish
school curriculum, the debate in Sweden
has not been as politically combustible.
Here the heritage sector – archives, museums, and antiquarian authorities – was
strengthened by a concerted government
action in the 1990s. What the Swedish
and Danish debates have in common,
however, is the problematization of how
and for what purpose the past is used
when aspects of democracy and quality
are considered.
Under the theme of “Memory” the curator Inge Adriansen write about three of
the almost twenty memorial parks in
Denmark. The canonization of these
places reflects how patriotism, nationalism, and heroism have been shaped and
used materially in different times. Adriansen applies an interesting processual
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perspective, showing how a place of
memory can become a place of oblivion.
An example of this is the memorial
grove at Jægerspris, where the royal
family in the 1780s established a memorial to honour prominent Nordic
burghers and nobles from the sixteenth
century to 1750. The site testifies to a
time when Denmark was part of the Oldenburg monarchy, which ruled from
the North Cape to Hamburg, a multicultural and multilingual conglomerate
state, with the Swedes as the main enemy. This canon does not fit today’s Danish self-understanding, and the site is
not used for any memorial ceremonies
or events. According to Adriansen, it is
now a forgotten Danish historical canon.
The archaeologist Håkan Karlsson
also writes about the process parallel to
remembering: oblivion, here in terms of
the neglect of the people’s heritage.
Karlsson sees a problem in the fact that
sites connected with sport are given low
priority in official heritage management.
The issue of whose heritage should be
preserved, and where decisions about
this should be made, is highlighted
through the example of Carlsrofältet, a
hundred-year-old football pitch which
has been used as a car park since 2002.
In the article Karlsson stresses the importance of dialogue with the citizens in
the assessment of what should be given
the status of heritage. But despite the author’s ambition to adopt a popular perspective on heritage, surprisingly few
citizens are allowed to speak in the article. Who are the people who agree with
Karlsson that the site should be preserved? The article does apply an important class perspective to heritage policy,
but it would have gained from admitting
the users’ experiences and opinions as
well.
The great significance of music as
heritage and canon is the theme of the
article by the ethnologist Stefan Bohman. For him, research on music as
heritage is a keyhole for understanding
society as a whole. The changed status
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of jazz in the elite, for example, can describe the important role that music
plays for the shift in attitudes to non-national cultures in the second half of the
twentieth century. In different times and
situations people ascribe different symbolic values to music, and analysing this
as heritage can illuminate how ideologies in society (re)charge works of music with new values and symbolism.
Bohman discusses perhaps one of the
most famous examples of this,
Beethoven’s ninth symphony. For the
labour movement at the last turn of the
century, Beethoven was a revolutionary,
but for right-wing forces in Germany the
work came to symbolize the genuineness and superiority of German culture.
After the Second World War the work
was classified in East Germany as proletarian and revolutionary, reinterpreted
by Walter Ulbricht as fraternity and
freedom from “the chains of imperialistic profiteers” (p. 124). In the last decade
of the twentieth century the work acquired the symbolic value that makes
present-day listeners think of the EU and
a united Europe. With this thought-provoking example Bohman shows how a
heritage perspective on a work of music
can sum up twentieth-century European
history.
What do cows do in and with nature?
This question is posed by the ethnologist
Katarina Saltzman in a discussion of
how boundaries are drawn between nature and culture and how values are expressed in the landscape. Starting with
the imported breed of Highland Cattle,
Saltzman shows how questions about
origin and authenticity come to a head in
texts by the Swedish Environmental
Protection Agency about “Protection
and Management of Valuable Nature”.
Analysing landscape as heritage reveals
how taken-for-granted assumptions
about the division between nature and
culture govern preservation efforts.
Compared with Australian landscape
management, it is clear how the concept
of origin is charged with a great many
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different values, depending on national
context. Saltzman’s analyses of the dialectic between nature and culture are an
important foundation for my own research, so it is very interesting for me to
follow her discussion of post-colonial
nature. When she shows how the work
of nature conservation in Australia in
practice involves combating species
brought by Western colonization, and
she also draws parallels to the Aboriginal population and the integration of
people in a multicultural society, the discussion gets hot. But here, unfortunately, Saltzman does not really follow
through her comparison of origins in
Sweden and Australia, other than to observe that even Sweden has landscapes
that show the effects of unequal power
relations. Issues concerning the indigenous population in a Swedish context
are of course fraught. It would therefore
be valuable to read more about Saltzman’s research on the dialectic between
nature and culture from a post-colonial
perspective. I can only hope that, with
her knowledge of the usefulness of the
landscape in critical analyses of society,
she will continue this important discussion in future publications.
“School” as an arena for the use of
heritage and canon is the second theme
in the volume. Educational policy as regards the concepts is considered in different times. The historian Carsten Tage
Nielsen focuses on the subject of history
and the limited amount of time it has always had in school. He is critical of the
Danish selection of canonical works as a
motivation for learning. He argues that
the canon cannot be viewed in isolation
from the context of cultural and educational policy to which it belongs. The
canon represents no one’s history, it is a
collection of abstract items compiled by
politically nominated experts who state
no reasons for their choices. In his critique Nielsen stresses that the canon
mentality implicitly means an understanding of the pupils as lacking history
and culture, and in need of a selected
canon. The subject of history is thus removed even further from the basic
democratic idea, to become an expression of an authoritarian mode of
thought. The dialogue-based tuition that
Nielsen advocates, which takes the pupils’ own history and historical awareness seriously, thus finds it difficult to fit
into a subject based on a canon selected
by experts.
The third theme of the volume is
“Politics”. Like some of the other authors here, the historian Niels Kayser
Nielsen stresses that heritage concerns
both remembering and forgetting. In his
article he highlights the spatial perspective by studying how different scales of
boundaries relate to heritage. When a
monument that united the German population of Aabenraa in Denmark was
blown up in August 1945, it can be explained as a protest against Nazi Germany, against Germany as a whole, or
against Germans living in Denmark. But
when the German heritage in Denmark
is neglected in the twenty-first century,
it is a different situation from the summer of liberation in 1945. One of the minority groups in Denmark is the German-speaking population in the border
zone, a minority with its own history in
the multinationality of the conglomerate
state. This German dimension of the
Danish heritage needs to be illuminated
from both present-day and historical
perspectives in the shaping of a Danish
cultural and historical canon. Nielsen argues that, for a nation like Denmark,
which has a heavy centralistic heritage
generated by despotism, it can be difficult to relate to “deviations from the
main line” (p. 243) and tends to ignore
the parts of history that do not belong to
the language and culture of the capital.
The ethnologist Lars-Eric Jönsson
discusses whether the expression “Heritage for everyone” should be viewed as
political risk or loss. What is the relationship between “everyone” and “heritage”, and how, does heritage acquire
meaning at a collective and individual
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level? Jönsson brings out the conflicting
meanings of the concept in terms of both
distinctiveness and community, and the
simultaneous rhetoric of diversity and
unity. He proceeds from two Swedish
heritage bills put forward in the second
half of the 1990s. One of these sought to
highlight environmental policy and metropolitan policy as two possible fields
outside the heritage sector where the
concept of heritage was useful. The second concerned instrumentalizing heritage in terms of democracy, tolerance,
and equality. Jönsson then moves this
analysis from a Swedish to an EU context, and it is here, through comparisons
with debates in the Council of Europe,
that I think his arguments gain weight.
The convention on “The Value of Heritage for Society” stresses the usefulness
of heritage in the endeavour for unity
and solidarity between the member
states. In the convention, respect for human rights, democracy, and legal security leads to a central position for human
value in the concept of heritage. All citizens are to be involved in defining and
caring for the cultural heritage; the concept is viewed as a resource giving quality of life and a sustainable society. In
this discourse about a heritage community Jönsson finds an implicit risk assessment. He stresses that the talk about
everyone’s right to heritage and the demand for mutual respect for each other’s
heritage basically concerns experiences
of the opposite. If it is through respect
for difference that community is to be
built, how then should difference be defined to be able to be incorporated in a
heterogeneous homogenization? What
is the interaction between collective and
individual productions of heritage, and
what do people do in practice when they
exercise their own and everyone’s right
to a public heritage? These are difficult
questions without easy answers, and I
agree with Jönsson’s call for more research.
The editors of the volume have thus
elected to arrange the articles in three
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themes. Yet this division is not without
problems. A theme like “Memory” permeates all the texts, and given the ambition of the volume to contribute to cultural policy, the selection of articles on
the theme of “Politics” is not self-evident. At the same time, the division is
necessary since the overall content of
the many articles reflects the diversity of
aspects in the concepts of heritage and
canon. But do we really need another
book about the politics of memory? Yes,
this volume is a useful summary of how
the terms canon and heritage are defined
regionally within the EU and nationally
in Denmark and Sweden, and the function these concepts have had and can
have for political decisions in society.
Selected parts of the volume could thus
serve well as material for training in
heritage management, community planning, and education. For everyone else
with an interest in the politics of memory I recommend the pleasure principle.
Many of the articles present important
arguments and results that contribute to
the continued debate about how the past
is highlighted or repressed in our collective and individual memory.
Beate Feldmann
Stockholm, Sweden
Voices of Immigrants
Liv Bjørnhaug Johansen & Ida Tolgensbakk Vedeld (eds.): Mangfoldige minner. Veier til Norge. Norsk folkeminnelags skrifter 159. Aschehoug, Oslo
2008. 144 pp.
This book aims to present some anonymous immigrants telling about their often long, difficult and desperate journey
to Norway to seek a new future, a new
hope. Many have encountered great
tribulations and obstacles. Sometimes
they had to rely on unscrupulous, brutal
people to help them. Often the price they
paid for this service was exorbitant. The
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journey could sometimes take several
months in atrocious circumstances.
It is indeed very seldom that we obtain any relevant and reliable information about these people’s life stories,
their social, economic, cultural and religious background. This book therefore
represents a real boon.
Certain immigrants do not want to reveal anything at all about how they were
able to leave their country and seek a
permanent residence permit and citizenship in Norway. People from Pakistan,
India, Iraq and Iran are often reluctant to
disclose anything about themselves.
There is one aspect to be remembered,
however: There are also people that
have settled down in Norway from European countries, such as Denmark,
Britain, Italy, France and Hungary.
These immigrants have likewise had
their experiences with the Norwegian
authorities, for instance. They too have
had their encounters with Norwegian
norms, values, attitudes and conceptions. Sometimes they have difficulties
in grasping the essentials of the Norwegians’ way of life and their world view.
Mutual misunderstandings often arise.
Without a knowledge of Norwegian,
many doors are closed to them.
It is evident that many foreigners have
brought with them bitter, indelible
memories of humiliation, torture and
persecution by political and religious
authorities in their homelands. This is
specifically the case with people from
the third world.
Many immigrants have been astonished by the stillness brooding depressingly over the Norwegian countryside
and small towns.
A lady from Hungary has made her
own phonetic observations. She had listened attentively to the intonation and
the rhythm of the Norwegian language.
It sounded to her like small children
talking to each other! The funniest word
in Norwegian, in her opinion, is hurtigruta (the passenger ship sailing from
Bergen to Kirkenes). Every time she
says this particular word with the correct
intonation, her Hungarian friends and
acquaintances are apt to burst out laughing.
Norms, values, attitudes and conceptions inoculated and internalized from
childhood in the homelands of the immigrants often differ greatly from those
met with amongst the Norwegians. It
has been a long process for many to become initiated into the Norwegian way
of life and to get to know the esoteric intricacies of the Norwegian red tape. It is
very instructive, and sometimes as well
depressing, to read about the various difficulties and troubles experienced by the
immigrants both in their homelands and
in Norway.
One must remember that behind the
impersonal, demographic data of statistics established by the authorities there
are human beings with their own hopes,
yearnings and wishes. The editors have
tried to preserve the narrative style of
each informant, even if this decision has
sometimes resulted in somewhat clumsy
sentences. In this way, the informants
emerge as distinct individuals with their
own modes of expression and with their
own personality. The biographies contained in the book are indeed human
documents, to use the expression coined
by Émile Zola.
Ronald Grambo
Oslo, Norway
Magic in Witchcraft Trials
Bente Gullveig Alver: Mellom mennesker og magter. Magi i hekseforfølgelsernes tid. Oslo. Scandinavian Academic Press, Oslo 2008. 305 pp.
This is a truly wonderful work. Every
now and then we get to read a study that
stands out from the rest, and Bente Gullveig Alver has produced just such a
book. Returning to the subject that
launched her career, she has written
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what will surely be a classic study of
popular magic in early modern Norway.
Separating Alver’s first book on Norwegian witchcraft trials and this one are
nearly forty years. This allows her to
draw on a lifetime’s experience as a
folklorist and on three decades of historical research by a dozen Norwegian
scholars when she revisits the subject.
These two factors give her writing an
extraordinary depth, and this reviewer
felt he learnt a great deal from this book.
Folklorists initially dominated the
study of witchcraft trials in Norway, and
during the 1920s and 1930s Svale Solheim organized the collection and transcription of the sources for Norwegian
trials in court books and fiscal records
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This source collection, which is
kept in Norsk folkeminnesamling and
now has been digitized, has been the basis of later research, which has been
dominated by historians since the early
1980s. But a decade before Hans Eyvind
Næss launched the current wave of historical research on Norwegian witch
trials in 1982 (Trolldomsprosessene i
Norge på 1500–1600-tallet, 1982),
Bente Alver published her folkloristic
study which has been the core text on the
subject for folklorists up to this day. As
Alver re-enters the field today, she
draws heavily on work done by historians, which in turn was based on sources
gathered by folklorists. The research on
Norwegian witchcraft trials is thus
marked by a long and profitable interplay between the disciplines of history
and folklore.
One important difference between her
first effort and this one is that the emphasis has shifted from the trials themselves to the perceptions and beliefs
about magic that informed the trials. In
shifting thus from the historical facts of
the trials to the cultural interpretation of
magical actions and words and the study
of the magical universe that enveloped
the participants in witchcraft trials, she
has also given us a study which is clearly
183
and fruitfully different from the historical studies of the last three decades.
The book opens with two well-written
background chapters, the first of which
sets the background in terms of subject
matter, previous research and her own
interest in this study. This is followed by
a more theoretical chapter asking (and
answering) the question of “what magic
is – or can be”. These are followed by
excellent chapters on diseases and popular healing, and on evil reputations.
Then comes a series of chapters dealing
in different ways with the influence of
the church, before three case studies and
a conclusion round the book off.
Occasionally Alver reflects on what
has changed since she published Heksetro og trolldom in 1971, as when she reappraises the influence of the church (p.
145) in what is perhaps the book’s best
chapter. She was expecting to find a
clear influence in the form of trials for
demonological witchcraft, and the relative absence in Norwegian trials of accusations of devil worship and participation at the witches’ sabbath made her
overlook the role that the priests had
taken in the trials and the run-up to
them. This is an oversight that she certainly is not the only one guilty of, and
which she now corrects with the best
treatment anyone has given to the role of
both the priest and his wife in Norwegian witchcraft trials. Here we meet the
clergy as parish priests, neighbours,
local nobility and tied up in power
struggles and local webs of influence
and meaning. Having learnt her lesson,
Alver now teaches us all one, and we
shall never again be able to consider the
priests solely in their capacity as shepherds of their flocks or carriers of church
doctrine.
It is difficult to give this book adequate praise, since it is hard to do justice
to how effectively she manages to convey her message. The clarity of her analyses, the various sources she uses to illuminate much more than trials, and the
wealth of reading and personal field-
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work experience that informs her work
are presented in such well-crafted prose
that it is a pleasure to read. This will be
one of those books that all students actually read when it is on their syllabus.
But even so there are some minor
points and quibbles. Throughout we are
presented with text boxes, which are separate from the main text. This is a
well-known practice from textbooks,
where the aim is partly to present more
in-depth information without breaking up
the main narrative, and partly to adapt to
the expected five-minute attention span
of American college students. Here it
does not work very well, in part because
the narrative flows so nicely and the text
boxes only serve to break the reader’s attention, and in part because much of the
information presented in the boxes could
well have been integrated into the main
text. Furthermore, the layout is unfortunate, as several of the boxes span pages
even though they would fit in a single
page. Having said that, some of them do
contain fascinating information and insights that would not fit easily within the
general narrative. A case in point is the
story she tells of how a Danish couple in
1972 found a dead rat dressed as a human
and put in a coffin with folded hands. The
rat in its coffin was passed on to Alver,
who thus gained a personal experience of
maleficent magic (p. 52).
Another minor quibble is that we are
not told until page 32 of the geographical limitations to the sources used: Trials
from Hordaland and Rogaland form the
basis of this study, while she stresses her
familiarity with trials from the rest of the
country from earlier studies. This choice
itself is unproblematic, but it should be
stated earlier, and it could fruitfully have
been discussed instead of simply presented, since the trials from these areas
are implicitly taken as representative of
all of Norway, while Alver herself argues in favour of more regional studies
because the differences between trials in
various regions within Norway are so
great (p. 31).
It is rare for a book to make this reviewer as enthusiastic as this one did.
Alver’s command of her subject is absolute, and her narrative flows with the
precision and grace of an experienced
writer. She draws on a lifetime of reading and reflecting on culture. This book
is as wise as it is learned. Throughout we
sense the presence of an author who
genuinely feels for the people she writes
about, both the alleged witches and their
claimed victims. She successfully
weaves together insights from historians, folklorists, anthropologists and ethnologists, and couples these with her
own fieldwork to interpret the historical
sources. In doing so she makes an implicit but convincing defence of folklore
as an academic discipline, retaking a
field dominated by historians for three
decades and showcasing folklore’s
unique strengths in analysing popular
culture from written sources. This is important at a time when folklore is under
threat as a discipline, both by being marginalized as too small to exist on its
own, and by losing its own identity in
mergers with other disciplines.
In short, this is an important book because of the significant contributions it
makes to our understanding of early
modern Norwegian popular culture and
witchcraft trials, because of its contribution to folklore as an academic discipline, and because of its usefulness in
teaching witchcraft and magic in folklore courses which now are completely
dominated by history books. But above
all, it is a pure pleasure to read. An English translation of this book would be
highly welcome.
Gunnar W. Knutsen
Oslo, Norway
The Voice as an Instrument
Ingrid Åkesson: Med rösten som instrument. Perspektiv på nutida svensk vokal
folkmusik. Institutionen för musikveten-
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skap, Uppsala universitet. Svenskt
Visarkiv, Stockholm 2007. 354 pp. Ill.
CD. English summary. Diss.
This book deals with an important era in
vocal folk music, the years from around
1970 up to the start of the twenty-first
century, from the “folk music wave” and
what happened afterwards. Interest in
vocal music experienced a vigorous upswing, new groups of users and places
arose, and so on. Concepts such as “the
vocal vogue,” whether singular or plural, are known not only from Sweden,
but also from Norway and several other
countries at the same time. It is of great
value that the author has tackled this era
up to the present day and studied it so
thoroughly, and the study is relevant
outside Sweden too.
The author investigates fourteen still
living singers in interviews and performances, mostly on record. The practitioners have different roles and positions in Swedish musical environments. Ingrid Åkesson gives a good account of her selection criteria. She has
sought to achieve a wide spread as regards the type of musical activity, arena, the singers’ relationship to the folk
music tradition, and geographical distribution. The selection comprises two
generations, both the “pioneers”, before what she calls the revitalization of
vocal folk music in the 1970s, and the
generation after it. All the sings are
well known from recordings and concerts, and all of them influence or have
influenced vocal folk music in different
ways. They make a living in whole or
part as musicians, and several of them
have a musical education. The performers also represent a broad range of musical expression, from traditional and
unarranged folk music to arranged and
composed music. A CD with the musical examples that she specifically studies comes with the book.
By “present-day folk singers” she
means those who are active in the vocal
wave and in folk music settings in gen-
185
eral, and who often call themselves folk
singers. Vernacular singing by nonprofessionals is not included in this category. Nor does the author consider traditional singing as everyday musicmaking. Yet this does not mean that she
thinks this is absent from the period she
studies. Everyday singing is brought in
where it is relevant for the problem, and
it is there as important background
knowledge in the analysis, in that the
singers in this study are also dependent
on everyday practice as source material. As the author also points out, it is
this practice that best represents continuity.
The book discusses how present-day
singers relate to what is called folk music tradition. The main emphasis in the
actual study is on the music and the music-making, although she also brings in
historical background material, the social framework, and other matters of
relevance for the main topic of the
book.
The first part of the book contains
several important chapters preparing
the way for the actual analyses. For instance, there is a presentation and discussion of concepts and definitions.
She makes no attempt to define “folk
music” or “folk song”, stating that an
unambiguous definition is problematic,
that there is more than one definition
but none that covers everything. Instead she singles out distinctive stylistic features that she finds central, such
as “oral/aural transmission” and the
“folk music idiom.” She supports the
view of “folk music” as an open and
controversial term that has to be defined in its practical context. This also
applies to the concept of vocal folk music, where she lets the practice of the
singers determine.
An important observation in connection with the term folk music is the concept of genre; she states that the term has
several meanings today, not just referring to different types of songs and the
like in folk music. Folk music as such is
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one musical genre among others, and the
term “the folk music genre” is common
among today’s practitioners. The author
is aware of both meanings, but today’s
use of the term is important to include
for a better understanding of musical
practice in our time. She also discusses
the concepts of tradition and folk vocal
tradition. In this book tradition stands
for both object and process. The complexity of the term tradition is considered. She shows that it is problematic
and can result in confusion. She therefore chooses to avoid terms like “traditional music” and “traditional song”,
preferring to talk of “folk song” and
“folk ballad”.
She then goes on to look at the concept of authenticity, which is also
changing, and terms such as revitalization, time, cultural heritage, and canon.
She examines these in detail, with reference to crucial literature, both Swedish
and international, with authors such as
Owe Ronström, Dan Lundberg, Tamara
Livingstone, Henry Glassie, Anthony
Giddens, and David Atkinson, to name
just a few. The positive thing is that she
arrives at her own standpoints from this
and finds definitions that serve her material and the context she is studying. A
good example is the concept of time,
where she sees overlapping layers of
time. She focuses on continuity rather
than change, on the dialogic character of
history rather than division into eras,
and she avoids theories associated with
“post-modern”,
“post-traditional”,
“de-traditionalization”, and “de-construction”. She uses the term “late modern” instead of “post-modern”.
The focus in her study is on the singers’ own music-making and creativity,
the way they think, and their educational
work, not on discourse and external images of folk music. I see this as a great
advantage, bringing the analysis close to
what the singers do; she has also discussed the results with them. The insider
perspective does not view tradition as a
product or as concluded fragments. It is
the same with the concept of revitalization, which in this book is more processoriented that product-oriented. As a participant one can ask different questions
and obtain different answers than if everything is viewed from the outside. This is a
strength of Åkesson’s dissertation.
Ingrid Åkesson approaches the material as both a practitioner and a scholar.
This is a distinct strength in her investigation and presentation. There is no
overemphasis on theories at the expense
of empirical material, which has been a
weakness of some dissertations in the
last 10–15 years. This book is not a result of desk research alone. We see a
clear desire to combine the perspectives
of practitioner and researcher. There is a
participant perspective, but it is both
close up and from a distance. She has
also done fieldwork as both participant
and observer in the context, a setting to
which she herself belongs.
In the book she examines how
present-day folk singers, in practice and
in ideas, relate to their “predecessors” (I
understand this as the role models, the
pioneers from the time before the
1970s), stylistic features, repertoire, etc.
in Swedish folk music tradition. In this
connection she also describes some important phenomena in folk music settings after the folk wave of the 1960s
and 1970s. The main question of her inquiry is: how do the singers choose,
shape, and perform their musical material, and what significance do their own
generation and musical background
have for the way they relate to the phenomenon of “folk music tradition” in its
different senses and for the way they
shape the music? In addition, to a more
limited extent she wants to answer general questions about the relationship between stability and change today compared with the past, and how to describe
the link between present-day versions of
vocal folk music on the one hand and the
establishment of folk music as a genre/type of music, its increasing formalization, institutionalization, profession-
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alization, and medialization on the other
hand. These questions are closely connected to the empirical study, but will
also be relevant for the performance of
folk music in general and for other
oral/aural music.
The main conceptual model that she
uses in the analysis is interesting. She
has devised a model based both on that
of Margareta Jersild and Märta Ramsten
and on her own ideas in previous works.
The model seizes on the idea of shifts in
the centre of gravity, and how different
periods and perceptions overlap. By empirically investigating how the singers
go about the “recreation”, “reshaping/
transformation”, and “renewal/innovation” (återskapande, omskapande,
nyskapande) of traditional musical material and stylistic features, she seeks to
illuminate the relationship between tradition and revitalization, between stability and change. I view this model as a direct consequence of the discussion she
has previously conducted, and it seems
very suitable for application to her material. She observes that both the musical
performance and the thoughts about it
can be described as an overlapping layer
of recreation, transformation, and innovation, from simple, pure solo performances to genre-crossing arrangements
and compositions.
The title meaning “With the Voice as
an Instrument” is more apt than might
appear at first sight. The study shows
how the voice has acquired a more central place in the last few decades. The
singing voice is perfected to an increasing mastery of distinctive stylistic features, often those which are reckoned as
archaic, and particularly challenging,
such as melismatic ornamentation and
the blue notes of non-major/minor tonality, and the use of a voice that functions
well in more official contexts such as
concerts and CD recordings. Herding
calls and mouth music and other wordless songs where the voice is used more
as an instrument have attracted renewed
interest.
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In addition to past models, the study
also shows how today’s practitioners select what to sing, and what influences
their choice. We also see the performers’ present-day models, and how
the emphasis on individuality, on personal expression, is important for today’s singers. In this connection the
concept of authenticity is interesting,
and the fact that being authentic does not
mean, as it used to, being faithful to a
model or to the person you learned from,
but that the practitioner is as true as
possible to his or her own person and individual style of performing.
The book discusses many topics, and
the analysis presents many interesting
results. It would take too long to review
everything in this perhaps too comprehensive and detailed study, where little
is omitted. In general I would say that
this is highly relevant and interesting
reading, and I would describe the book
as pioneering and indispensable for all
those working with vocal folk music today. The author avoids being categorical
and opinionated, balances pros and
cons, and prefers to ask new questions
rather than draw hasty conclusions. This
can also be the reason why some sentences are slightly too long and packed
with content, which can make the reading more difficult.
The author shows great scholarly maturity and uncommonly keen insight into
the setting and the material she studies.
In keeping with what Ingrid Åkesson
herself writes about her target group, I
would say that both researchers and
practitioners, both readers with extensive knowledge of folk music and readers with a more general interest in traditional music, anyone concerned with
creativity on different levels, or conceptual models of tradition and renewal,
will derive pleasure and benefit from
this book.
Ingrid Gjertsen
Bergen, Norway
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Expanding Leisure Activities
Anna-Maria Ånäs, Janina Lassila &
Ann-Helen Sund (eds.): Extremt? Etnologiska analyser av kvinnorock, extremsport och Ultimate Fighting. Etnologi
vid Åbo Akademi, Rapport 12, Åbo
2007. 208 pp. Ill.
Seeking the extreme has become an ordinary phenomenon in our modern society. People climb mountains, dive and
paraglide in their spare time – activities
that are risky in one way or another. Together with like-minded individuals,
people seek out risk and test identities
and their bodies’ boundaries. In what
ways can we understand and study this
cultural phenomenon?
In this volume, “Extreme? Ethnological analyses of women’s rock, extreme
sport and Ultimate Fighting”, three ethnologists from Åbo University examine
the present-day phenomenon of extreme
spare-time occupations. In the short
foreword Anna-Maria Ånäs and AnnaMaria Åström point out that in our late
modern time people seek contexts where
a test of body and identity can take
place. In extreme settings people try to
achieve strong bodily experiences and
unique identity feelings. Ånäs and
Åström use what the sociologists Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman say
about the characteristics of contemporary society. This introductory discussion returns in the three articles in the
book.
The first article, “Women’s bands in
rock music in Åbo: A study in gender,
identity and cultural conditions”, is by
Anna-Maria Ånäs. The purpose is to
study how young women who play rock
music in Åbo establish themselves on
the rock scene and how femininity is
created in a rock band. Ånäs writes:
“The aim of the study is to investigate
how active women in women’s rock
bands orient themselves in a traditionally male sector” (p. 7). The study proceeds from an assumption that rock music and rock culture are built on male
conventions. In the text the focus is on
which strategies the women can use to
legitimate themselves on the rock scene.
The material for the study is interviews
with eight women who play in four different rock bands in Åbo.
After the presentation of the aim of
the study and material there are three
chapters that present the background to
the study. Ånäs describes the history of
rock culture and its influence on our
times. She uses other scholarly studies
and describes the beginning of rock music in the USA and how it has acquired a
male image. Then she describes what
characterizes contemporary society. She
argues that it is crucial to analyse the
concepts of identity and lifestyle in order to understand why women get involved in rock bands. Chapter 5 presents
previous studies on women and men in
rock culture. Ånäs points out: “It is the
culture around the rock music that
makes it difficult for women to attain an
acceptable position in the music industry” (p. 27).
The following three chapters present
the research. In the chapter “Music
above everything” Ånäs describes how
the women see the rock music as something central in their lives. None of the
women has music as a profession, but
still music is something that is constantly with them in their everyday life. It is
essential for the women to gain a rock
image. In this way they are trying to
withstand the discourse which says that
women only create music that is nice
and tame. In the chapter “Female solidarity and sex neutrality” the discussion
focuses on the strategies the women use
in order to integrate with the rock music
discourse. Ånäs says that the male discourse in rock culture constrains
women. At the same time rock culture is
central for women’s possibilities to
stand out as serious musicians. Ånäs’s
conclusion in this chapter is that the
women wish to stand beside the male
discourse in the rock culture but that is
not possible. In the next chapter Ånäs
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studies the women’s choice of clothes
and their performance on stage. The
women in the study try to dress in a neutral and fashion-free way, instead they
try to have a rock image. This image
strategy is central when they perform on
stage. They try to gain credibility as rock
musicians and they don’t want to be described as playing in girl bands.
In the concluding chapter, “Self-reflection and representation”, Ånäs discusses how lifestyle has become an important project for the individual in order to create an identity. Rock culture is
important for the young women in this
study, but at the same time problematic
because of its male discourse. Creating
authentic rock music with female symbols is problematic for the women. The
women struggle with a dilemma when in
one way they use the rock culture to create identity, in another way are placed
on the margin of the rock culture.
The next article, “The boundary
stretching of our time and our culture: A
study of the self-formation of practitioners of extreme sport”, is by Janina Lassila. She is interested in extreme sports,
which she defines as risk sports that require special gear. Extreme sports can
be, for example, diving, paragliding,
free climbing and so forth. These are
sports that focus more on experience and
playfulness and less on rules. Her approach involves studying how the practitioners create and express themselves
through extreme sport. Lassila is interested in how they acquire skilfulness,
create identity through the sport and so
forth. The material for the study consists
of interviews with eight men and one
woman. They all practise different extreme sports, represented by power kiting, kayak paddling, road racing, climbing, flying, parachuting and diving. The
informants are divided into three different groups, which also structure the text:
“Conscious and reflecting extreme
sport”, “Aesthetic extreme sport” and
“Extreme extreme sport”.
The study begins with two theoretical
189
chapters. In the first of these Lassila discusses why extreme sports have become
so popular in today’s society. She brings
in Zygmunt Bauman’s discussion about
the dream of eternity as a part of our
search for fame. She asks whether the
practitioners of extreme sports have this
wish to be seen. In the next chapter Lassila presents the theories and conceptions used in the study. The concepts
are: lifestyle, group, identity, body,
flow, edgework and script. The four first
theories are well represented in ethnology and need not be presented here. Instead I want to question the use of the
concept of flow in ethnology. Flow has
its background in a psychological theory
and is used to study how individuals
gain an optimal experience. How this
experience is a part of a social and cultural pattern is of less interest. It would
have been good if Lassila had discussed
the possibilities and limitations there are
in using the term flow in ethnology.
Edgework is a more useful concept in
this perspective because it considers the
social and cultural patterns that explain
why people voluntarily take risks. Script
is used to analyse the rituals the practitioners have when they perform their
sport.
After the presentation of theory and
method we meet the informants in the
part “Extreme sport in practice”. In
chapter 5 the informants give their story
of how they began with extreme sport.
What Lassila finds out from the interviews is that the informants were active
in different sports before they started
with extreme sport. They also know the
components of the extreme sport before
they start. In the beginning the sport
takes more and more time and becomes
an essential part of their everyday life.
An important discussion in this chapter
is the relationship between extreme
sport and economic interests in selling
new products.
In the chapter “Conscious and reflecting extreme sport” the discussion of how
the individual uses the extreme sport to
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create a lifestyle continues. In this chapter we meet informants who dive, climb
and compete in road racing. Lassila discusses how these persons use their sport
to intensify their identities. Much time is
spent on having relations with likeminded people. In this way the extreme
sport affects how their everyday life is
organized. In the chapter Lassila also
discusses the order of the extreme sport
practise, how the persons have different
phases of preparation, realization and
satisfactory. In the realization phase the
person can stretch the borders of what he
or she can do and in this way reach a
state of flow. One of the informants says
that if you don’t stretch the borders you
can “miss this experience” (p. 121).
In the chapter “Aesthetic extreme
sport” Lassila presents extreme sports
where practitioners have an experience of
nature. Nature is discussed as something
important for the person’s identity and
lifestyle. One of the informants says: “It
is freedom and then there is this powerful
beauty and experiencing nature’s rage
and feeling one’s own smallness” (p.
135). In this chapter Lassila discusses
how the Internet is used as a meeting
place and a space where the persons can
create group identification. It would be
interesting to read more about how the informants use the Internet when they are at
home and not outdoors.
The chapter “Extreme extreme sport”
focuses on an explorer, a flier and a
parachutist. They all do extreme sports
that are very risky. The chapter has an
interesting discussion about competence
and skill and what it means when the informants stretch borders. Physical skill
is central for those informants who use
the body to overcome borders and in this
way experience certain bodily feelings.
These feelings become central for the informants’ identity. In the chapter Lassila
discusses how the extreme sport can be
a way to escape a tedious everyday life.
In the concluding chapter Lassila
summarizes the central themes. Here she
discusses the dilemma of extreme sports
and she asks whether these sports are a
way to gain meaning for individuals in a
fragmented postmodern life. In this way
she tries to say something about what it
means to create strong body experiences
and unique identity feelings in our late
modern times. She also returns to the
discussion about the relationship between extreme sport and economic interests. This is a very important discussion and it is interesting to relate to the
discussion about fragmented postmodern life. In what way are the economic
interests a part of people’s efforts to gain
unique identity feelings? And how
unique are these feelings if they are a
part of a globalized economic discourse?
The book ends with a shorter article,
“Sport, club, body: A study of Ultimate
Fighting”, written by Ann-Helen Sund.
Ultimate Fighting is a new fighting sport
that started in the USA in 1993 and it is
counted as one of the toughest fighting
sports. The competitors are free to use
different techniques such as boxing,
wrestling and kicking. In the Nordic
countries it is only permitted in Finland.
Very little research has been done on Ultimate Fighting.
The fieldwork was done in a gym in
Finland. Six persons training Ultimate
Fighting were interviewed. Women are
not allowed in the club so there are only
men in the study. Sund has also done observations in the gym. The aim of the
study has similarities to the other two
studies in the book, focusing on how Ultimate Fighting can be used to create
identity. Sund is interested in how the
informants create masculine identities.
In chapter 3 Sund describes the gym
as a masculine place. It is a place where
men can expose themselves to risks and
in this way create identities. The atmosphere in the gym is “macho”. At the
same time there is a closeness between
the men in, for example, wrestling. Sund
analyses how the men can be intimate
and at the same time not be homoerotic.
Violence plays a central part in separat-
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ing the intimate from the homoerotic,
and it is important for how masculine
identities are created. Sund points out
that violence is normalized in Finnish
culture, something that men can strive to
attain. In chapter 4 she discusses this
discourse of normalized violence in Finland.
In the concluding chapter, “A simulated fight”, Sund presents her informants. She is interested in the informants’
separation of what is fighting from what
is violence. The informants think that
Ultimate Fighting is fighting and not
violence. They also say that they try to
create a real fight in the ring. Sund
points out that we can see it as a simulated fight.
Extreme? is, I think, a misleading title
for this interesting book. My suggestion
for a title is instead: “The expansion of
leisure activities”. What happens when
the possibilities of our spare time expand and make it possible for men and
women to engage in sports and leisure
activities that they couldn’t do before?
Today we can use our spare time to experiment with identities and different
lifestyles, for example, in many new
sports. We can experiment with the
boundaries of our bodies or expose ourselves to risky activities. Is this extreme? Sometimes it is and sometimes it
is not. The book is important because the
three studies continue an ethnological
tradition of investigating the cultural
phenomenon of spare time. The book
also expands the possibilities for ethnology to study new leisure activities such
as women’s rock, extreme sport and Ultimate Fighting.
Kristofer Hansson
Stockholm, Sweden
Folk Conceptions and Folk
Religiosity
Lena Marander-Eklund, Sofie Strandén,
Nils G. Holm (eds.): Folkliga föreställ-
191
ningar och folklig religiositet. Festskrift
till Professor Ulrika Wolf-Knuts. Åbo
Akademi förlag, Åbo 2007. 235 pp.
On 6 December 2007 Ulrika WolfKnuts turned sixty. To mark the occasion a festschrift was published to honour her important contribution to Finnish and Nordic folkloristics over several
decades. The title of the book sums up
Wolf-Knuts’s main interests throughout
her folkloristic career, but her published
works also comprise a great many other
themes, including research history, nostalgia, and Finland-Swedish identity.
The book is structured around the two
main ideas of “Folk Conceptions” and
“Folk Religiosity”, both of which have
two subheadings. “Folk Conceptions”
starts with the subheading “Creatures in
Folk Belief and Popular Conceptions”,
where Sven-Erik Klinkmann begins
with an article on beliefs about the devil.
In “The Devil in Some Country Songs”
he looks at commercial American country music, more specifically the words
of some songs from the period 1950–
1980 where the devil is the theme in one
way or another. Klinkmann identifies
four different types of devil in these
lyrics: the metaphysical devil, the psychologizing devil, the devil associated
with violence, and the devil as a trickster
figure. The main point of the article is to
show how country music, which is
mostly a secular form of cultural expression, can reflect the world-view of folk
religiosity.
“Elf Mill, Elf Dance, and Elf Blast” is
the topic of the second article, by
Per-Anders Östling, who considers beliefs about elves in Swedish folk tradition. He has studied how elves are described in both printed works and archival material, and shows the names given
to elves, where they live, what they get
up to, and how humans can protect
themselves from elves.
The next article takes the reader on a
ghost tour of Löfstad Castle in Östergötland. In “An Invisible Presence – Stories
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of the Supernatural in a Castle Setting”
Birgitta Meurling retells some narratives about the supernatural associated
with this castle, showing how these stories are used today. Several motifs in the
tales are well known in folk tradition,
and according to Meurling they show
how the “Löfstad lore” assimilates and
adapts shared narrative matter of contemporary relevance.
In her article “Premonitory Dreams
and the Diversity of Interpretations” Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj shows how
two well-known dream symbols are expressed in Finnish material. These examples – “losing teeth” and “horses” –
which are among the oldest dream symbols known in Finland, are respectively
a good and a bad omen of future events.
The last article in this section is by
Arne Bugge Amundsen, entitled “Black
Books and the Awfulness of Folk Culture – Anton Christian Bang and His
Traces in the History of Norwegian
Folkloristics”. Here he discusses how
scholars of folk culture used this material politically in the nineteenth century.
At that time people were mainly interested in historical and aesthetic traces of
the distinctive national character. One
consequence of this for Bang’s research
was that some aspects of the folk tradition of magic and medicine acquired a
low status, partly for reasons of morality. Bang’s theological background made
him blind to the value of this material in
constructing a picture of the development of folk culture.
The subheading “Remarkable People
in Folklore” opens with Anne Bergman’s article “The Remarkable in Belief
and Custom”. Using material from a
questionnaire asking informants to tell
of remarkable people and places, Bergman shows that people primarily tell stories of marginalized individuals with
tragic lives, and to a lesser extent about
the classical “local characters”. She also
points out that, whereas in the past
people told such stories for entertainment, the themes of equal value and dig-
nity are now central for today’s storytellers.
Bengt af Klintberg continues the
same thread as Bergman, describing the
tradition of rumours about a tramp. In
the article “The Bearer of the Burden of
Sin – Traditions of a Tramp in Västerbotten” he shows how this particular
man has been depicted in newspapers,
works of local history, and fiction, and –
like other tramps – made his own significant contribution to the rumours that
were spread about him.
The last article under this heading is
by Camilla Asplund Ingemark, entitled
“‘Worse than a Murderer’ – Folk Belief
as an Interpretative Pattern in Fritiof
Nilsson Piraten’s Historier från Färs”.
Based on two different characters in a
short story, she shows how the ambiguous role of folk belief has an important
place in the construction of the characters and the interpretation of reality.
Through the characters one can read
how folk belief, through its social norms
and moral rules, is pivotal for their understanding of reality.
The second main section of the book,
“Folk Religiosity”, has the subsections
“Folk Piety” and “Expressions of Folk
Religion”. The theme of folk piety begins with an article by Anne Eriksen,
who considers “Images of Mary and
Folk Religiosity”. She points out that the
Protestant-based conceptual hegemony
attached to folk religiosity has led to a
deficit of knowledge and a distorted image of Roman folk culture. The reason
for this is the emphasis on relations at
the expense of content. Eriksen proceeds
from narratives of miraculous images of
the Virgin Mary in Rome, showing that
the legendary tradition attached to these
images cannot be understood in terms of
the “traditional” dividing lines between
folk and elite, and between official and
popular religiosity.
“Human Senses and Their Forms of
Expression in Folk Belief and Religiosity” is the topic of Anders Gustavsson’s
article. He examines how sight, hearing,
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touch, taste, and smell have been used in
religious contexts from the nineteenth
century until the present day. He concludes that sight and hearing have been
the most important senses in Protestant
circles in Scandinavia.
The last article in this part is in Finnish. Pekka Hakamies writes about folk
religiosity and folk belief in the parts of
Karelia that were ceded to the USSR after the Second World War. Hakamies
looks at religious customs such as baptism and shows that the degree of religiosity is determined by the generation to
which a person belongs.
“‘To God’: Prayer Cards in Norwegian Churches”, by Ann Helen Bolstad
Skjelbred, begins the last part in this section. The article examines the twelveyear-old practice of prayer cards, which
is heavily inspired by this tradition in the
Catholic church. Through the prayer
cards, which she has studied through
samples from three specific years, she
observes that the prayers primarily express what people in different age
groups emphasize here and now.
Carola Ekrem writes about the history
of wall embroidery in Sweden and what
it is intended to teach us. The title of the
article is “‘God in High Protect Us,
Keep Our Peaceful Home Safe’ – Folk
Piety in the Texts of Wall Hangings”,
which is a good indication of the function these textiles had. In visual terms
they had a decorative function, while the
embroidered inscriptions of biblical
quotations, verses from hymns, and
prayers conveyed moral and religious
attitudes.
In the article “How the Christmas
Crib Came to Sweden” Nils-Arvid
Bringéus describes the introduction of
this custom from Germany. As a result
of contacts between representatives of
the nobility in the two countries, the
manor of Tagel in Mistelås Parish was
the first place where a crib was set up as
part of the Christmas decorations. From
here the custom spread as a fixed element in the celebration of Christmas,
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and it has more recently become an important feature in Swedish churches during the festive season.
How we should understand the interest in collective singing is the question
asked in the last article in the book. Here
Nils G. Holm proceeds from the growing popularity of community singing in
Sweden in recent years, and goes on to
examine the popularity of hymn singing,
which he discusses from the perspective
of the psychology of music. The positive
emotional experiences that the participants derive from singing together is
linked by Holm to what he calls “peak
experience” or mysticism, and he thus
identifies community singing as an expression of folk religion.
Writing a review of a festschrift can
sometimes be a thankless task. Festschrifts are often structured according to
other principles than ordinary collections of articles. Instead of tackling a
specific topic, dealing with empirical
material from a particular region, or
conducting discussions of a theory or
method that is the shared focus of the
book, the aim of a festschrift is to reflect
the research of the recipient. This often
results in a great diversity of themes and
discussions because it comments on the
many works written by a person during
a long career. This problem is not as visible in this book. Although the main
themes are very broad and could potentially invite the contributors to write
highly divergent papers, the articles here
work well in their context. The editors of
this book have obviously striven to publish an empirically based book. Here it is
the examples and the narratives that are
central, not so much the concepts, theories, and methods. The result is readable
and entertaining articles about a wide
range of topics, but all connected by implicit or explicit references to the main
theme of the book. In that way the majority of the articles also serve as comments on or further examples of topics
that have been central for Ulrika
Wolf-Knuts.
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Each section and subsection has its
own introduction in which the articles
are summed up for the reader. These
summaries seem somewhat superfluous,
especially since some of the articles are
rather short and the book has fifteen of
them. It might have been more interesting for the reader if these introductions
had discussed and problematized the research field to which the articles belong,
thus enhancing the theoretical and methodological profile of the book.
Ane Ohrvik
Oslo, Norway
Consequential Inconsequentialities
Billy Ehn & Orvar Löfgren: När ingenting särskilt händer. Nya kulturanalyser. Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, Stockholm/Stehag 2007. 265 pp.
The affinity of the media for everything
that is sensational, radical, and out of the
ordinary has reshaped our experience of
the world we live in. Some people would
even claim that the media have totally
changed our way of life. At any rate, development in recent decades has had the
consequence that spectacular things set
their stamp on much of everyday life:
clothes and looks during the 1980s,
sport and leisure during the 1990s, while
the first decade of the twenty-first century has given us a children’s culture in
which extreme forms of expression and
themes target younger and younger age
groups. Sensations and upheavals have
naturally attracted the interest of researchers, resulting in many studies
about the new cultural forms of everyday life, while more trivial and less conspicuous aspects have not received
much attention.
There is therefore good reason for
high expectations when two of the leading Nordic scholars of culture assume
the task of highlighting and analysing
sides of everyday culture that mostly fall
outside our field of vision. With this
book entitled “When Nothing Special
Happens: New Cultural Analyses”, the
ethnologists Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren tackle some of the “spaces” of life
that lack flashy signs. But what Ehn and
Löfgren invite us to examine with them
is far from colourless or trivial, for on
the way through the four main chapters
of the book – about waiting, routine,
daydreams and disappearance – we are
constantly reminded of people’s ability
to create life and meaning – even when
it comes to these seemingly insignificant
and perhaps drab components of everyday existence.
Waiting is an aspect of life that we
rarely reflect on, but a category of time
that we try to shrink or fill, sometimes
by subtle methods. But Ehn and Löfgren
emphasize this part of our existence,
showing how our understanding of the
meaning of waiting changes in different
cultural and social conditions. As they
write, waiting consists of hope and longing, power and powerlessness. Waiting
charges a landscape with meaning, it redefines places, it colours moods. At the
same time, people do something with
waiting, for instance by transforming it
into a moral arena, a tool for power
struggle, and a means to explore boredom and to allow daydreams.
Like waiting, routine is about what
happens when nothing special is expected to happen. As part of our actions, routine seems obvious and instinctive, but it
simultaneously has a paradoxical weight
by virtue of its relative invisibility. Ehn
and Löfgren point out that, even if routines can be regarded as highly personal,
they organize significant parts of our
everyday life and make it manageable,
and are consequently also cultural phenomena. That is how routines are analysed in the book, with a rich array of examples from the daily rhythm, the home,
and working life. It is particularly interesting to view these routine parts of life
in the light of radical changes in circumstances, for example as a consequence
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of war or siege. Routines also serve as
the foundation for our ability to do more
than one thing at the same time, our simultaneous capacity, and the authors illustrate, with reference to different
states of debilitation and illness, what
happens when this competence breaks
down.
That daydreams are also a cultural
practice is emphasized by Ehn and Löfgren, who point out that secret wishes,
obsessions, intellectual experiments,
and escape routes are affected by social
and material circumstances. The authors
show what the conditions for daydreams
are like in different historical settings.
Daydreams and fantasies are charged
with values, but they are not regarded as
unproductive in the way they were a few
decades ago. Daydreams can be of great
significance for how we view ourselves,
they can clarify wishes and help us to
approach what can be realized. Since
daydreams open for different scenarios,
they can assist in coping with problems.
To analyse the significance of daydreams and fantasy, Ehn and Löfgren
use a lot of literature with examples of
the place of daydreams in human life. It
is especially fascinating to read their
demonstration of how different material
conditions provide contexts for fantasy
and daydreams, such as the sofa, the
railway station, the hotel room, and the
car.
The last category of what Ehn and
Löfgren call “everyday microdramas” is
disappearance. Here they examine the
conflicts between purposeful action and
seeming lack of initiative. Different
types of disappearance are analysed
here, such as things we lose, a love affair
that ends when one of the parties breaks
it off, tension that vanishes, or simply
time that disappears. The paradox that
Henrik Ibsen formulated so elegantly,
“Eternally owned is but what’s lost”, is
placed in different cultural contexts.
Perhaps this chapter is particularly interesting for its different perspectives on
the consumer society, which tried as ear-
195
ly as the 1920s to create products built to
age faster than they were physically
worn out, “with a dream of being able to
control the cultural wear-and-tear of objects” (p. 204).
Ehn and Löfgren do not disappoint in
their highly demanding task of analysing things that are otherwise ignored.
The book is abundant in perspectives
and insights. It is based on a wealth of
sources, with a breadth that calls to mind
the epithet kaleidoscopic. Yet the book
is kept coherent through the authors’
strict arrangement of the material and
their firm literary grasp. As a text the
book reaches its zenith in the chapter
“Daydreams”, where the prose at times
reaches a high level. Also, the book
never weakens in its basically positive
attitude to humanity, even when people
lack all originality or heroism. This is of
great significance for the future life of
the book, for I have rarely read an academic book that can widen the reader’s
horizons as this one can. Let us hope that
the book will reach the many people
who can benefit from it.
Olav Christensen
Oslo, Norway
Photographs as Visits to Reality
Anja Petersen: På visit i verkligheten.
Fotografi och kön i slutet av 1800-talet.
Symposion förlag, Stockholm/Stehag,
2007. 184 pp. Ill. English summary.
Diss.
This is the ethnologist Anja Petersen’s
doctoral dissertation, the title of which
means “Visiting Reality: Photography
and Gender at the End of the Nineteenth
Century”. The book is about how
women in different contexts and for different purposes were represented in photographic images in Sweden and Norway between 1850 and 1910. The dissertation is divided into four main chapters, dealing with different types of
196
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portrait photography, with the overall
aim of showing “how photographic portraits in different social and cultural relations helped in formulating different
images of what a woman was.”
The first chapter is about studio portraits. As examples the author has selected visiting-card portraits of bourgeois
women and men taken in Oscar Olsson’s
studio in Östersund from the 1890s until
1905. The photographs were commissioned by the women themselves. The
visiting-card portraits from the studio
are therefore based on an agreement in
which both parties were keen that the
subject should look her best. The
women wore their very best clothes, and
the photographer carefully selected the
pose and the angle in order to highlight
the most favourable aspects and conceal
any flaws. The portraits typically have a
horizontal angle which symbolically
places the viewer and the woman at the
same height, and thus as equals.
The second chapter is based on photographs of female patients at Gothenburg
Mental Hospital from 1891 until the early years of the twentieth century. Photographs of the patients were entered in
the records together with descriptions of
their illness. The material includes pictures of the same patient taken on admission and discharge, which could serve as
visual evidence of the efficacy of the
treatment and the recovery of the patient. The photographs were not primarily pictures of individuals but rather displayed different stages in the course of
the illness. At this time it was generally
believed that mental symptoms revealed
themselves in physical expressions, and
photography was one of several tools
used to record people’s external appearance for this purpose.
The pictures from Gothenburg Mental Hospital reveal several interesting aspects. The biggest difference is between
different groups of patients. The pictures
of the first-class patients, who were photographed in their private clothes, hardly
differ at all from the private portraits
taken in the studios. We see similar
clothes and poses. By contrast, the pictures of the less well-off mental patients
differ dramatically from the visiting
cards. Many of them were taken against
the background of the hospital’s brick
wall, which would have been inconceivable on a visiting card. Here we also find
examples of pictures with strong expressions, both distinct emotional expressions and grimaces (instead of controlled, restrained gravity), short or dishevelled hair (instead of being wellcombed, long, put up), wrinkled and disorderly clothes (instead of the finest
dress, well-ironed and arranged). The
patients are often portrayed from the
front, another rare feature in visitingcard portraits.
The third chapter is about prison and
police photographs of criminal women
from the period 1859–1910. The prisons
had to submit photographs of specially
selected and particularly dangerous prisoners to the National Prisons Board,
which in turn distributed these pictures
to police authorities all over Sweden.
Besides these examples there are some
from the Malmö prison’s own documentation of its inmates and the from the police archives. Pictures of female criminals were very uncommon. In the material presented here there are example
that resemble those from the mental hospitals, with a close-up frontal view
against a brick wall, and also photographs which can be difficult to distinguish from visiting cards. In some cases,
however, the civilian clothes and settings are combined with specially made
mirrors whose function was to show the
person from the front and in profile on
the same picture. In other words, clear
signs of the instrumental police function
of the photograph were mixed with the
characteristics of the civilian portrait.
The fourth and last chapter deals with
portraits of women in men’s clothes.
Here the author analyses a picture from
a hen party in Sala in 1903, where four
women pose in men’s clothes and false
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moustaches, and pictures taken by the
photographer Marie Høeg of herself and
her colleague Bolette Berg in their studio in Horten, Norway, 1895–1903.
Alongside their ordinary portrait commissions, Høeg and Berg produced a series of pictures in which they staged
themselves as men, as mixtures of men
and women, or as androgynous beings.
The reason this theme is exemplified to
such an extent by the pictures of the
Norwegian photographer Høeg is that
there are no comparable examples in
Sweden, according to Petersen. Yet this
selection can be questioned. In portraits
of actors, of which there are many in
Swedish collections of visiting cards, we
see women dressed up as men, albeit in
acting roles. At the same time, a crucial
category of portraits is missing from the
dissertation: pictures of the others, or
people who deviate in terms of race or
ethnicity. Portraits taken by anthropologists in the second half of the nineteenth
century show many similarities to the
portraits from hospitals and prisons presented in the dissertation. There are also
Swedish examples of these. The amateur
photographer Lotta von Düben’s portraits of Sami women from her travels in
Lapland in 1868–1971 are an early example. In view of the fact that Sweden,
a few decades later, opened the world’s
first Institute of Racial Biology in Uppsala, this category of portrait is even
more relevant in a Swedish context.
In the pictures of both patients and
criminals, class is a decisive factor. The
image of women in the nineteenth century is so closely associated with bourgeois portraits that the feminine ideal is
equated with the bourgeois feminine
ideal. The pictures of working-class
women therefore stand out because of
their plain, worn-out clothes, their unkempt hair, haggard hands, and hollow
faces. It is in the light of the bourgeois
feminine ideal that the picture of the
prostitute can be perceived as vain, with
her excessively showy clothes or too
lavish accessories. The most radical
197
thing about the pictures in this book is
that they expose a different class, a class
that was not visualized in any other way
than as deviating from the (bourgeois)
norm. These pictures, although they depict human physiognomies, are rather
images of symptoms and types, as Petersen also states. Pictures were taken
with a heavy imbalance of power between the photographer and the subject,
whether this was done with a supposed
social commitment or formulated as
scientific recording.
It is clear that it is not just what these
pictures show but also how they present
the motifs that is important, and this
could have been emphasized more in the
dissertation. The practice and aesthetics
of photography are significant. By this I
mean that the actual physical and practical circumstances of photography are interesting, along with the aesthetic expressions this takes. It is striking, for example, that many of the pictures of female mental patients were taken from
close range. The actual framing of the
scene therefore reveals the imbalance of
power between photographer and subject. The short distance shows that the
institutionalized women did not have a
right to the same physical integrity as
bourgeois women. Another example is
the presence and absence of retouch.
The bourgeois portraits were retouched
afterwards, as is evident, for example, in
the women’s light, smooth skin, while
the pictures of the institutionalized
women are not. The same applies to the
occurrence of sharp focus (in the visiting
cards) and blur (in the pictures from the
mental hospital). The former were taken
by a professional photographer and the
latter presumably by an amateur, the
hospital’s supervisor. Sharp focus also
required the subject to accept the procedure and sit as still as possible during the
exposure. Perhaps the hospital inmates
were unwilling or did not understood
that they were supposed to sit still.
A sympathetic feature of the dissertation is that there are many pictures with
198
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long captions containing information
and analyses not found in the body text.
In many other respects, however, the
pictures are poorly treated considering
the fact that they are the main material of
the study. It is not clear, for example,
how many pictures the study is based on
or where they originated. This applies in
particular to the portraits from the hospitals, prisons, and the police. In a note we
are told that the analysis is based on
“over 10,000 portraits from prisons and
the police” and “over 4,000 photographs
from the hospitals”; in addition to this
there are almost 20,000 visiting cards
and “a great many glass plates” – a total
of over 30,000 pictures. The question is
whether all this constitutes the author’s
research material. In other words, are all
these portraits of women? In the chapter
about the hospital portraits, thirty photographs from the Gothenburg hospital are
reproduced. It is unclear whether these
make up the whole corpus of pictures or
are a small selection of 4,000 possible
photographs of women. It is the same
with the prison portraits, but here the
reader gets a hint of the size of the corpus. Between 1877 and 1929 a total of
10,000 photographs were submitted to
the National Prisons Board. During part
of that time, 1878–1905, a total of 16
pictures of women were sent, which is a
tiny proportion and also a very small
number. I am not saying that this makes
the pictures uninteresting to study – on
the contrary – but the author would have
gained by stating more clearly the scope
and origin of the pictorial material and
discussing the problem that there are – I
guess – relatively few photographs of female criminals.
In many cases there is no information
about the institution or person that took
the photograph, or the year. Clearer dating would have given the reader an idea
of what comes before and after and what
happened in parallel. That some pictures
perhaps are not dated or attributed to any
photographer is in itself also interesting
information that could be stated, in rela-
tion to the fact that there are different
genres of portraits and different archive
practices.
It is actually paradoxical that it became the height of fashion in the second
half of the nineteenth century for the
bourgeoisie to have their photographs
taken, when social deviants were being
controlled using exactly the same technique. The fact that “the others” were
being photographically registered as
early as 1860, that is, before the great
breakthrough for visiting-card photography, makes it even more paradoxical.
There were thus two different conventions for portraits, with certain parallels
but with clearly marked differences. In
this book, however, the pictures of female mental patients are described in
terms of defects, and Petersen makes
comparisons throughout with the visiting-card portraits, which are allowed to
represent the norm. The female subjects
are said to “lack” posture and their facial
expressions are “without direction”. It
might not have been envisaged this way,
but this suggests an idea of, on the one
hand, carefully staged, formalized photography and on the other hand straightforward, undirected photography – in
other words regarding the camera as a
tool for objective, mechanical recording. I think it is more fruitful to regard
all photographic images as being staged.
The pictures from Gothenburg Mental
Hospital are directed too, following certain conventions. These are contrary to
the conventions of bourgeois portraiture, and therefore they functioned as a
powerful visual testimony to the differences between people.
This dissertation considers an interesting spectrum of female portrait practices in the late nineteenth century. The
pictures are the great strength of the
study and thus answer the author’s questions of how photographic portraits were
used to represent women in the period.
However, the author does not describe
the context in the history of ideas where
these different portrait conventions
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arose and interacted, which would have
been interesting. One can read about this
in the book The Beautiful and the
Damned: Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography, which was
published in connection with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in
London in 2001. That book deals with
the relations between different portrait
practices, from royals and celebrities to
criminals and sick people, putting them
in relation to the contemporary passion
for taxonomy and typology against the
larger background of societal and economic processes.
Anna Dahlgren
Stockholm, Sweden
A Phenomenological Approach to Encounters between Individuals and
Things
Erik Ottoson: Söka sitt. Om möten mellan människor och föremål. Etnolore 32.
Skrifter från Etnologiska avdelningen,
Uppsala universitet 2008. 194 pp. English summary. Diss.
When reading the summary and the
blurb on the book cover, I learnt that the
subject matter of the book was the relationship between people and objects, the
looking for, the searching, the corresponding movements in space and the
creation of place, the anticipating and
the finding of miscellaneous objects –
and not least the serendipitous finding,
that is, the anticipated finding of unexpected, pleasure-giving objects.
What immediately came to my mind
was a glimpse from some early fieldwork of mine: my walks and talks with
an informant from a coastal community,
a lighthouse keeper. We had several
long walks in his childhood surroundings, the islands of an archipelago on the
southern coast of Norway, calmly chatting and reflecting upon his childhood
and youth experiences and the daily way
199
of life on these islands. But the atmosphere invariably changed when we approached a bay or a beach. He became
less attentive to my presence, his
answers became shorter, his bodily
movements more tense, and he always
speeded up and – without exception –
arrived at the waterfront 20 metres or so
ahead of me. I soon learnt to give him
the time to comb the waterfront, to
search and to let him confront his expectations with what the beach might reveal
of objects that had drifted ashore –
wood, litter, and sometimes some kind
of serendipitous objects.
My informant had been brought up
and had lived most of his adult life in a
setting where the sea took and the sea
gave. He had always risen early in the
morning after storms, to be the first one
to search for expected and unexpected
gifts from the sea. For his grandfather,
and even for his father, beachcombing
had been part of their economic base.
For him, there was no longer any economic gain in it (except securing his winter supply of wood). But these strolls in
a terrain without roads, often combined
with raids from a boat, were filled with
an undefined anticipation of what
strange objects might have drifted
ashore. And he excelled in telling stories
– of what his father and grandfather had
found during the war, and he himself after the war, and not least in the oil platform construction period in the North
Sea.
All this is to say that I has a sense of
déjà-vu – and a deep sympathy – with
this research topic: searching and finding (un)expected material objects. After
having read the book, however, I feel
left with more questions than answers,
and with more critical remarks than with
unreserved hoorays. The reason is perhaps the combination of the very disparate and heterogeneous source material
that Ottoson has used, and an interpretative (and I might add quite subjective)
approach, based on phenomenological
theory.
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As for the source material, it consists
of a couple of photographs (the main
one from an advertising campaign), observations in Swedish shopping centres
and flea markets, a few interviews (11 in
total, over the years 2003–2007), an
SMS campaign and some Internet
searching, and finally observations of a
young girl’s shopping tour to London, of
a “skip diver” (rummaging refuse skips)
and of a person searching for and fishing
bikes thrown into the river. In total perhaps not “thin” material in itself, but so
disparate and so heterogeneous that a
convincing analysis depends very much
upon questions of methodology. One
may ask what an interpretation of an advertising photograph from a shopping
mall (which already represents an act of
interpretation by the photographer as
well as by the advertising company
which has selected it) has in common
with a lost-bike-rescuer’s concern for
the environment … or window-shopping with garbage rummaging. I do not
deny that there may be links – in the
serendipitous finding, in the eurekamoments, in the dialectics of anticipation and pleasure, and above all this – in
the way individuals establish meaning in
relation to their material surroundings.
But do Ottoson’s rather free interpretative discussions provide a convincing
analysis? The text (which does not lack
stylistic qualities) consists to a large part
of his own observations, blended with
explanations, interpretations and references to other authors and theorists.
These discussions, with flea markets etc.
as the backdrop, contain many interesting comments and observations. As a
reader, however, I often find them too
unfocused, gliding from one subtopic to
another, like a flow that ends up in a
patchwork. Or perhaps a more respectful
expression in a modernist setting is a
bricolage.
The theoretical platform is that of
phenomenology. To this reviewer, Ottoson seems to be well versed and well
read in the theoretical literature of this
philosophical tradition. He leans upon
philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as well as upon later researchers who have been heavily influenced by these, like Michel de Certeau
with his “life world” and “space” versus
“place”, and Tim Ingold with his landscape and “taskscape” analyses, to mention only two among several sources of
inspiration. Central aspects and concepts in the discussions are movement,
intention, body and embodiment, experience and horizon, the hap-tic and the
tactile, to point and to grasp, etc. – all of
which may be linked to a phenomenological tradition.
Phenomenology should probably be a
highly relevant point of departure for investigations of material culture issues.
As has often been pointed out, phenomenology is predominantly concerned
with the human encounter, experience
and interpretation of things, in a broad
acceptation of “things”. Its main impact
has been within architecture and archaeology, i.e. in studies of material structures of “everyday life”, such as the built
environment and landscapes, rather than
of single objects. For this reason, Erik
Ottoson’s attempt to cultivate another
sector of the field should be welcomed.
However, it has also been noted that
phenomenology, conceived as a method
– and not only as a philosophical backdrop and source of inspiration – is seldom called upon in analyses of material
culture. Furthermore, some of its critics
have claimed that as a methodology,
phenomenology should imply more than
simply interpretation of things based on
subjective experience, which it not infrequently has been reduced to. An important question then is whether Ottoson
transcends this limitation. Ottoson is obviously aware of this potential criticism
(as well as of the potential criticism of
his very heterogeneous research material) and tries to counter it in his discussion of methodology, where he defends
hermeneutic interpretation and the use
of “himself as a tool”, as well as what he
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calls “the deep shopping method”, i.e.
simulating being a customer, or simulating looking for special items at flea markets etc. – items that do not really, or not
initially, interest him – in order to share
the horizon of his studied agents, or to
“attune” to their mental universe.
I am not certain that I am willing to
follow Ottoson here, and I feel that he is
dangerously near the trap of subjectivism, which has been a tripwire for phenomenological methodology. This of
course does not mean that I adhere to old
illusions of objectivity in humanistic research. But as a researcher fearing the
pitfalls of both positivism and hermeneutics, I am at a loss to say what should
have been the best course to choose for
an investigation like this. I started out
above with some reflections on a fieldwork episode I once experienced – my
informant’s search for a serendipitous
find – but I am not convinced that Ottoson’s investigation has taught me more
about the phenomenon than a thorough
talk with my informant might have done
(and preferably supplemented with a
handful of other informants too, from
the same milieu). And I am fairly certain
that if I had not myself had a weakness
for, and found a thrill in, an activity like
beachcombing, a simulation effort – after Ottoson’s recipe – would not have
brought me any closer to an understanding.
Be that as it may. In spite of my critical remarks about his methodology and
research material, I find Ottoson’s in-
201
vestigation not only a little provocative
(which is not necessarily a negative attribute), but also challenging and innovative to consumption and material culture studies. Material culture studies
have developed into a field of research
transcending established disciplines,
and to some extent also their methodological constraints and disciplinary restrictions. It has become an unbounded
field, characterized as an academic
manifestation of postmodernity, where
heterodoxy and pluralism, ambiguity
and indeterminacy are constituent ingredients. In this respect, Ottoson’s essay is
unquestionably modern in its postmodern approaches. As such, it deserves
attention as well as respect, but also opposition – from those who want to combine the best of two worlds.
The main topic of Ottoson’s investigation is neither consumption nor material culture in itself; it is about objects, it
is about consumption habits, but the focus is (most of the time) on the act of
searching, and the goal a better understanding of man’s relationship to his material surroundings, to the surrounding
world. As the author himself states:
“When you are looking for something,
the world takes on a special appearance”. He is undeniably right in this assertion. But perhaps the optimal tools to
reach this understanding have not yet
been developed.
Bjarne Rogan
Oslo, Norway
202
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203
Books Received by the Editor 2009
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