Contents - Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur

Transcription

5
Contents
Articles on Museums and Cultural Valuation
Saphinaz-Amal Naguib: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9
Marzia Varutti: Gradients of Alterity. Museums and the Negotiation
of Cultural Difference in Contemporary Norway . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
13
Arne Bugge Amundsen: Men of Vision. Hans Aall, Moltke Moe and
the Representations of the Emerging Nation-State at the Norsk
Folkemuseum in Oslo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
Silje Opdahl Mathisen: Northern Borderlands and the Aesthetics of
Ethnicity. Intervisuality and the Representations of the Sami in Early
Exhibitions at National Cultural Museums in Norway and Sweden . 57
Mariann Mathisen: Patterns of Ethnic Boundaries. Boats and
Museums in Northern Norway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
73
Arne Bugge Amundsen: Folk Museums and Worker’s Memories. The
Norsk Folkemuseum and Working-Class Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
97
Saphinaz-Amal Naguib: Engaging with Gender and Diversity in
Museums of Cultural History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Other Articles
Audun Dybdahl: A Group of Calendar Sticks from Trøndelag,
Northern Norway and Greenland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Book Reviews
Björkholm, Johanna: Immateriellt kulturarv som begrepp och process
(Gunnar Ternhag) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Buggeland, Tord: Figurmaling i Gudbrandsdalen fra Roma til Vågå/
Tord Buggeland: Folkelige tresnitt som kistebrev i Gudbrandsdalen (Nils-Arvid Bringéus) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus: Tolv böcker om lantbruk: En
tvåtusenårig lantbrukslära/ Liv, lantbruk och livsmedel i Columellas värld (Dominic Ingemark) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
6
Edvardsen, Erik Henning: Kvitebjørn kong Valemon 3 (Ronald
Grambo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Fioretos, Ingrid: Möten med motstånd (Pirjo Korkiakangas) . . . . . . 157
Gustavsson, Anders (ed.): Döden speglad i aktuell kulturforskning
(Nils G. Holm) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Hauser, Michael: Traditional Inuit Songs from the Thule Area
(Christer Stoor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Heimo, Anne: Kapina Sammatissa [Rebellion in Sammatti] (Pasi
Saarimäki) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Hellspong, Mats & Fredrik Skott (eds.): Svenska etnologer och
folklorister (Solveig Sjöberg-Pietarinen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Hemmersam, Flemming, Astrid Jespersen, Lene Otto (eds.): Kulturelle processer i Europa. (Anders Gustavsson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Ingemark, Camilla Asplund & Johanna Wassholm: Historiska
sägner om 1808-09 års krig (Ørnulf Hodne) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Jacobson, Maja: Färgen gör människan (Lisa Svensson) . . . . . . . . . . 175
Kanematsu, Makiko: Saga och verklighet (Niels Kayser Nielsen) . . . 178
Klinkmann, Sven-Erik: Från Wantons till Wild Force (Patrik Sandgren) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
Kõresaar, Ene, Epp Lauk & Kristin Kuutma (eds.): The Burden of
Remembering (Kirsi-Maria Hytönen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Kortelainen, Kaisu: Penttilän sahayhteisö ja työläisyys [The Penttilä Sawmill Community and Worker Identity] (Leena Rossi) . . . 185
Koski, Kaarina: Kuoleman voimat [Powers of Death] (Annikki
Kaivola-Bregenhøj) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Kuoljok, Kerstin Eidlitz: Bilden av universum bland folken i norr
(Marjut Anttonen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Lasson, Emilie: Superstitions médiévales (Ronald Grambo) . . . . . . . 191
Löfgren, Orvar & Fredrik Nilsson (eds.): Regionauterna – Öresundsregionen från vision till vardag (Rikard Eriksson) . . . . . . . . 192
Lönnqvist, Bo: Maktspel i kläder (Päivi Aikasalo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Miettunen, Katja-Maria: Menneisyys ja historiakuva/Claire Aho &
Kjell Westö: Helsinki 1968 (Tytti Steel) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Ó Catháin, Séamas: Formation of a Folklorist (Arne Bugge
Amundsen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
7
Olsson, Claes G.: Omsorg och kontroll (Kristofer Hansson) . . . . . . . 200
Piela, Ulla: The Meanings of Folk Healing (Lena MaranderEklund) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Rydving, Håkan: Tracing Sami Traditions (Christer Stoor) . . . . . . . . . 204
Strannegård, Maria: Hotell Speciell (Tove Ingebjørg Fjell) . . . . . . . 205
Suopajärvi, Tiina: Sukupuoli meni metsään [Gendered Forest]
( Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Tolley, Clive: Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic (Alan
Crozier) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Waldén, Susanne: Berättad berusning (Nicklas Hägen) . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Werle, Eva Carlsson: Vålnaden går före (Lena Marander-Eklund) . . 211
Wettstein, Margrit: Livet genom tingen (Susanne ÖsterlundPötzsch) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Ziegler, Susanne (ed.): International Council for Traditional Music
Study Group on Historical Sources (Gunnar Ternhag) . . . . . . . . . . 214
Österlund-Pötzsch, Susanne & Carola Ekrem: Swedish Folklore
Studies in Finland 1828–1918 (Agneta Lilja) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Books received by the editor 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
8
Introduction: Patterns of Cultural Valuation
9
Introduction: Patterns of Cultural Valuation. Priorities and Aesthetics in Exhibitions of Identity in Museums.
Saphinaz-Amal Naguib
This special issue of ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore presents some of the
findings of the research project Patterns of Cultural Valuation. Priorities
and aesthetics in exhibitions of identity in museums (PaCuVal).The project
was funded by the Assigning Cultural Values (KULVER) program of the
Research Council of Norway for a three year period (2008–2011), and was
headed by the present writer. Arne Bugge Amundsen, Olav Christensen,
Line Esborg, Silje Opdahl Mathisen and Saphinaz-Amal Naguib are at the
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo
(IKOS). Mariann Mathisen is a Ph.D. fellow at the University of Tromsø.
Marzia Varutti was anYDDRAGSIL guest researcher at IKOS.
The aim of PaCuVal has been to investigate the role of Norwegian museums of cultural history in presenting and representing the nation during
the span of time stretching from the 19th century to today. The different subprojects examined the manner in which the various cultures that make up the
social fabric of Norway have been integrated in the national Grand Narrative. The situation of Norwegian museums of cultural history reflects that of
other museums around the world and PaCuVal took Norwegian museums as
case studies of wider international trends. During the last three decades or
so most museums of cultural history, also in Norway, have had to face new
challenges. They aspire to establish themselves as “authorities of recognition” (Feuchtwang, 2003: 78) promoting social cohesion and are continuously redefining their roles in society and adapting novel ideas and methods
to their museological endeavours.
The studies presented here explore the polyvalence, flexibility and aesthetics of boundaries. They probe notions of diversity and the dialectics between historical conjunctures and perceptions of culture and belongingness,
and investigate the ways borderlines between different groups in society and
their narratives are conveyed visually and aestheticized in museums. How
10
exhibitions draw upon and often reproduce older models and stereotypes
about the nation and Norwegianess, and which regimes of representation
and frames are applied in exhibitions. Further, they are concerned with the
ways minorities represent themselves in their own museums. As it is used in
the following articles the notion of diversity encompasses a great number of
complex issues pertaining to ethnicity, religion, gender, social class, education and economy. This implies among others analyzing similarities and differences, cross-cultural contacts and hybridity within the framework of the
nation-state.
At the outset the members of PaCuVal have chosen two main analytical
perspectives. The first one Self and the Other expands Fredrik Barth’s
(1969) theories on the flexibility of ethnicity, and introduces the notion of
concerted action to investigate the tension between frontiers and walls.
We analyze how different groups influence each other, cooperate or
choose different paths to represent themselves. Frontiers are spaces where
exchanges may take place. They are pliable – often porous –, do not hinder
circulation and may be changed. Walls tend to last longer and to be more
or less solid constructions. To find a way out one has either to climb over
them, go round them, dig tunnels under them or pull them down. These
perspectives place the project within a wider international context and
bring about a reflexion on the discrepancies between ethnicity, nationality
and citizenship and on the relations between the autochthonous and the allochtonous. Autochthony creates a sense of belongingness that goes beyond the frameworks of ethnicity and points to situations where local
and/or regional identities are emphasized (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh
2000). This is more and more the situation in today’s globalized world and
in plural societies. The concept of allochthony is normally used in geology
and designates something alien to the original structure of a place. By extension it denotes people who come from elsewhere. However, the definitions of foreignness and otherness change and are continuously redefined
in time and space (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009). Social class and gender
denote other kinds of subtle borderlines in a society and are significant
factors in shaping a sense of identity.
The second perspective has been Aesthetics and Visuality. It investigates
the ways the national narrative or a minority’s history is conveyed visually
and aestheticized in exhibitions. We have taken Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of intervisuality as a starting point (Mirzoeff 1999: 30). Accordingly,
we examine how exhibitions build on each other and relate to other exhibitions. Thus, they may be considered as part of a mosaic of “citations” and,
as for intertextuality where texts refer to other texts, exhibitions about a
theme recall other exhibitions about the same or similar theme. This process
prompts transformations in ways of display and also in shaping new meaning. Moreover, in a similar vein to intertextuality there is an ongoing inter-
Introduction: Patterns of Cultural Valuation
11
action between museums, their exhibitions and the public and meaning is
created by the dialogic exchange between all parts concerned.
The articles in the present issue of ARV are arranged into three main
groups. The first group is concerned with the formation of a Norwegian national identity and the creation of given sets of images to visualize the nation.
The first article, Men of Vision. Hans Aall, Moltke Moe and the representations of the emerging nation-state at the Folkemuseum in Kristiania,
by Arne Bugge Amundsen gives us the political and intellectual context in
which ideas about Norway as a young nation-state were elaborated. It examines the political, cultural and social tensions surrounding the creation of
a museum of cultural history in the capital and discusses the role of intellectuals and academics in its conception.
Marzia Varutti’s article Gradients of alterity: museums and the negotiation of cultural difference in contemporary Norway, analyzes the aesthetics of Norwegianess and otherness by looking into display techniques and
narratives in museums according to different regimes of representation. In
the Norwegian context these regimes of representation contribute to implement and visualize the visions of what a museum of cultural history ought
to stand for and represent as they were elaborated by intellectuals and academics during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The
article studies exhibitions in five different museums in Norway and argues
that there are different kinds of perceptions of otherness and not all others
are equal.
The second group of articles addresses questions related to the changing
values and aesthetics of ethnicity. It is clear from the two studies presented
here that although there are several recognized minorities in Norway it is the
indigenous population, the Sami that constitutes the “significant Other” in
the country.
In Northern Borderlands and the Aesthetics of Ethnicity. Intervisuality
and the representations of the Sami in early exhibitions at national cultural museums in Norway and Sweden, Silje Opdahl Mathisen compares the
ways the Sámi are represented in what she calls “majority museums” and
how they represent themselves in their own Sami museums in Sweden and
Norway. To do this she concentrates on recurrent items that are used in the
various exhibitions and shows how they change meaning according to the
type of exhibition they are set in.
Patterns of Ethnic Boundaries. Boats and Museums in Northern Norway, by Mariann Mathisen analyzes the relative imperviousness of boundaries and the entanglement of ethnic relations as they have been materialized
in the nordlandsbåten, that is, the Nordland boat. The author argues that the
ongoing debates and exhibitions in different museums are still influenced by
older views about the Sami and thereby have avoided dealing with the impact the different ethnic groups have had on each other.
12
The third group of articles probes other forms of boundaries and aspects
of cultural and social diversity, namely those related to gender, social class,
economy and migration.
In Processes of Cultural Valuation. Inscribing workers’ culture into the
Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, Arne Bugge Amundsen is concerned with class history and processes of valuation pertaining to the confusing borderlines between social classes and the inclusion of workers’culture in the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum).
These processes show that from its creation the museum was not only conceived as an institution that collected, preserved and exhibited the Norwegian cultural heritage but was also expected to educate, initiate research
and influence political debates.
Engaging with Gender and Diversity in Museums of Cultural History,
by Saphinaz-Amal Naguib discusses framing as a museological perspective
through which various regimes of representation are negotiated and articulated in exhibitions. The author concentrates on aesthetic and hybrid regimes of representation and investigates two forms of framing, namely, gendering and everyday cosmopolitanism. She describes how exhibition spaces
are organized within these frames thanks to artefacts that are used to tell collective and individual stories.
Bibliography
Barth, Fredrik 1969: Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget
Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning.
Geschiere, Peter and Nyamnjoh, Francis 2000: Capitalism and Autochtony: The
Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging. Public Culture 12/2: 423–452.
Feuchtwang, Stefan 2003: Loss, Transmissions, Recognitions, Authorisations, in: S.
Radstone and K. Hodgins (eds.), Regimes of Memory, London: Routledge, pp.
76–89.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas 1999. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge.
Gradients of Alterity
13
Museums and the Negotiation of Cultural Difference in Contemporary Norway
Marzia Varutti
Part of the charm of museums as objects of study resides in their propensity
to reflect and inform social and cultural change. As platforms for intercultural communication, museums are ideal sites for the investigation of how
collective values and attitudes coalesce and evolve over time. The analysis
of these processes is all the more relevant in a country such as Norway,
whose population is becoming increasingly multicultural (Goodnow & Akman 2008). In Oslo alone, a quarter of the population are immigrants, mostly of non-Western origin (Council of Europe 2008:2). How are museums responding to these changes in Norwegian society?
This article endeavours to provide an answer to this question through an
analysis of museum displays of non-ethnic Norwegian cultures in a sample
of museums in Oslo.1 These include the Intercultural Museum (IKM) and
specifically the exhibition Our Sacred Spaces; the Kon-Tiki Museum; the
ethnographic galleries of the Museum of Cultural History of the University
of Oslo; and the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (specifically, the
galleries devoted to the Sami and the display of the Pakistani apartment).
The study also draws on examples from other museums, such as the Glomdal Museum in Elverum (specifically the permanent exhibition Latjo Drom
devoted to the Travellers minority). These museums were selected since
they are the main sites in which the visitor may encounter non-ethnic Norwegian cultures, given their location in the capital and their prominence in
the national museumscape.
The analysis of museums of non-ethnic Norwegian cultures is based on
discourse analysis of displays, analysis of relevant literature and interviews
with museum curators and academics. The investigation yielded two main
interrelated insights. Firstly, the various modalities in which other cultures
are represented in museums point to a range of different articulations of discursive and representational practices which I call “regimes of representation”. Secondly, different “regimes of representation” reveal different kinds
14
Marzia Varutti
of assumptions and perceptions of cultural alterity, suggesting that not all
Others are equal, but there are different categories of Others, as well as gradients of cultural alterity. In the conclusions, I use these findings to question
the role that museums can play, in Norway and beyond, in the making of
more inclusive societies.
Museum Displays as Regimes of Representation
The reader might legitimately question my use of the concepts of “Other”
and “cultural difference” as analytical categories. These concepts are problematic because they imply a self-centred stance in relation to which other
cultures are viewed and commented upon. Indeed, it might be objected that
the use of these concepts actually helps to reinstate and formalize the very
system of assumptions about other cultures that this article is trying to debunk. Aware of this risk, I resolved to retain the term “Other” (hyphenated)
for the sake of brevity and clarity to signify “non-ethnic Norwegian”. The
concept of cultural difference is used in the definition provided by Homi
Bhabha (1988:18):
[cultural difference] is the process of the enunciation of culture as “knowledgeable”,
authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification. […]
[it] is a process of signification through which statements of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate, and authorize the production of fields of force, reference,
applicability, and capacity.
Understood as a construct, cultural difference is a useful concept for the
analysis of cultural phenomena, especially when contrasted with the more
descriptive notion of cultural diversity (e.g. Bhabha 1988; Eriksen 2006).
Explorations of how cultural difference is created, expressed, negotiated or
reinvented in museums gain saliency when framed through the perspective
of material culture, that is, considering how museum objects are used for the
above-mentioned purposes. As Christopher Tilley (2006:61) notes, “material forms do not simply mirror pre-existing social distinctions, sets of ideas
or symbolic systems. They are instead the very medium through which these
values, ideas and social distinctions are constantly reproduced and legitimized, or transformed.” It might be added that in order for material forms
to become such media – in Alfred Gell’s (1998) words, to carry agency –
some kind of human intervention is needed (see also Keane 2001:75; Steiner
2001:210). In museums such agency becomes visible in the work of curators: the writing of texts and labels, the selection and juxtaposition of objects, the choice of images, photos and references that complement the display. Moreover, displays always entail processes of displacement and re-interpretation which I argue, following James Clifford (1997:3), are constitutive of cultural meanings and therefore deserve scholarly attention.
In order to analyse these processes, I draw on Arjun Appadurai’s (1986)
15
theory on the social life of things. Appadurai’s main argument entails that
during their social life, objects move across different regimes of value and
as they do so, they take up different meanings. Building on Appadurai’s
concept of regime of value, I argue that different combinations of display
techniques and narratives constitute different regimes of representation in
museums. It follows that – applying Appadurai’s theory – museum objects
can be made to evoke different meanings according to the museological regime of representation through which they are framed.
The concept of regime of representation can be fruitfully juxtaposed with
the concept of regime of visibility. As in the case of Appadurai’s regimes of
value, the term “regime” indicates that a system of control of what is being
represented and seen is in place. The emphasis on regulation is also central
to the anthropologist Stephan Feuchtwang’s (2011:65) conceptualization of
regimes of visibility as “a disposition of political authority, in a narrow
sense, and more broadly, an habitual ordering of the world into what can and
what cannot be seen, a regime which also entails ways of making the invisible apparent, of imagining it. Behind visualization is an invisible authority
that makes it possible, an authority that reveals hidden principles and forces,
of good or of malice, of truth or of error.” In Feuchtwang’s approach, the
regime of visibility is firmly inscribed in (and indeed made possible by) the
combined deployment of political authority and scientific authentication,
which legitimate and validate what is on view.
In the context of a museum display, such political authority and scientific
authentication are manifested in the work of curators. The regime of representation can then be understood as the result of curatorial choices and professional knowledge; these, to paraphrase Feuchtwang, constitute the invisible authority behind visualization. The regime of representation is then a
concept that facilitates the analysis of processes of exhibition making by
giving a name to the set of interrelated display techniques and narrative lines
that constitute a given museological genre.
The concept of regime of representation enables and invites a closer examination of its constitutive elements and of the dynamics through which a
given regime is manifested. Among these, framing is one of the most analytically relevant. As Saphinaz-Amal Naguib (in this volume) aptly shows,
framing is a useful tool to analyse museum representations.
Framing can be understood as a perspective, a specific angle of interpretation of objects and texts, a given way to organize the elements of an exhibition so that they convey a specific world-view, a mood, or an idea. In
short, framing is a museological device through which a regime of representation is instantiated. A regime of representation can be translated through
different kinds of framing, and conversely, the same kind of framing device
can be deployed in the context of different regimes of representation.
Taken together, these concepts assist scholars in analysing museum dis-
16
Marzia Varutti
plays by providing analytical tools to decode the museological “genre” of a
display (that is, its regime of representation) and to examine how, within a
given museological genre, a specific perspective or world-view is being put
forward (that is, how the exhibition is “framed”). For a discussion of framing as museological device, the reader can refer to Naguib’s article in this
volume. In the following, I will focus on regimes of representation.
The displays in the museums considered in this paper can be “read”
through the lenses of the regime of representation deployed for the depiction
of cultural difference.
The “Other” Within – the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History
The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum) is a
prominent site for the display of Norwegian cultural identity. Albeit historically linked to Norwegian folk, peasant and rural traditions, the Museum
has been sensitive to the changes affecting the population of Norway and
has reformulated its institutional mission to reflect these changes. As a result, today the Museum aims to represent not only Norwegians, but all the
people inhabiting the space of Norway, including the Sami indigenous
group, ethnic minorities and migrant communities.2
At the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, the visitor can walk
among rural and urban buildings including housing units, churches, schools,
banks, pharmacies of diverse historical periods and geographic locations.
One of the most distinctive features of the Norwegian Museum of Cultural
History lies in its propensity to let the visitor experience the built, artistic,
cultural and natural heritage of Norway. The homogeneity of the Norwegian
heritage is challenged and problematized historically and culturally. So for
instance, over the last decade the museum has devoted a number of temporary displays to non-ethnic Norwegian communities. In the permanent
exhibition areas, the most prominent of such displays are those devoted to
the Sami and to the Pakistani communities living in Norway.
The gallery displaying Sami indigenous cultures is composed of two segments: the first opened in 1990, the second in 2007. The first section is mostly informed by an ethnological approach framed by an historical perspective: the display aims to show features of daily life in Sami communities
during the period when the Sami collection was created (roughly mid-1800s
to mid-1900s). The historical perspective is important in the display, since
key historical events contribute to illuminate the cultural, social, economic
and political trajectories of development of Sami communities in Norway.
For instance, visitors learn about the 1826 Border Treaty with Russia, which
illustrates how small-scale Sami communities became victims of political
decisions made far outside their reach, or the burning of Samiland during
17
World War II and the deep impact on Sami social life of the ensuing process
of reconstruction.3
The display makes a conspicuous use of black and white historical photos
portraying Sami people, dwellings and landscapes. Special attention is devoted to Sami historical figures such as the reindeer herder, artist and writer
Johan Turi, referenced here to illustrate the debate on the “origins” of Sami
peoples. Panels provide information on the distribution of Sami communities in the landscape and their seasonal migratory paths, thus helping to historicize (through panel titles such as “The East Sami maintained old ways”)
and territorialize the Sami. A display style inspired by an ethnographic perspective is detectable in the use of mannequins to show Sami “traditional”
costumes, and of dioramas portraying living conditions, hunting practices,
fishing methods, etc. The exhibition approach in this gallery might be described as an ethnographic display style centred not so much on the present
as on the past.
The section of the Sami gallery added in 2007 presents the visitor with a
strong contrast. The display opens with a powerful political statement: “We
are Sami and we want to be Sami.” The tone – assertive and authoritative –
provides a sharp contrast to the distant, analytical and didactic tone of museum texts in the older section of the gallery. Even more visually striking is
the contrast between the collages of black and white historical photos depicting Sami herders in the old gallery segment, and the life-size frontal picture of a young Sami in a punk rock dress style smiling at the camera in the
new gallery addition. This picture is a powerful challenge to received definitions of Sami culture, and resonates strongly with the opening statement
of the gallery section. There are no mannequins or life-size dioramas of rural
dwellings on display in this section. Rather, exhibits include newspaper articles and posters about Sami rights and political independence movements,
the Sami flag, photos of the Sami Parliament, books, design items, and the
reproduction of a contemporary Sami flat – recognizable as Sami only from
details such as Sami “traditional” symbols on clothes or objects. In short,
this new section of the gallery aims to acknowledge and celebrate the
achievements of the Sami political movement and intellectual scene (including literature, theatre and the arts).
The layering of narratives, display techniques, museological and cultural
approaches to the displays of Sami cultures deployed in the two sections of
the permanent gallery at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History encapsulate the complexity of the historical relationships between the Norwegian
majority and Sami indigenous communities. It also casts light on the tensions between curatorial expertise and indigenous knowledge, and between
established museological traditions and new modes of display shaped by the
balancing of different political and cultural agendas, and by an acute concern with contemporary issues.
18
Marzia Varutti
Figure 1. Interior of the reconstructed Pakistani flat, Norwegian Museum of Cultural History.
The other area within the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History devoted to non-ethnic Norwegian cultures is included in the permanent display
Apartment building. Wessels Gate 15. As the name suggests, the display is
a detailed reconstruction of an apartment building originally located in central Oslo. The apartments reconstructed include a flat inhabited by a Pakistani family. The Pakistani flat presents an intriguing combination of Norwegian old-style furniture and exotic spices, Asian food and Norwegian
décor (Figure 1).
The flat is replete with marks of cultural hybridity. This is mostly the result of cultural syncretism whereby Pakistani migrant communities to Oslo
reformulated over time their cultural identities by mixing Pakistani and Norwegian elements. Whilst the smallest items could be carried in the migration
process, the most bulky and thus the most visible items, such as furniture,
are Norwegian. The inclusion of the Pakistani flat in a “traditional” (architecture-wise) Norwegian building, inhabited by “traditional” (ethnicitywise) Norwegian families, together with the emphasis put on the hybridity
of the material culture on display, indicate an effort to re-define the very notion of Norwegian identity.
Globally considered, with its intensive use of photographic documentation, dioramas, mannequins and contextualizing texts, the regime of representation deployed in the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History is a com-
19
pelling combination of historical and ethnographic-folkloric approaches. In
particular, this regime of representation is characterized by an emphasis on
“witness-objects”, that is, objects that can be considered as both historical
and cultural tokens. Only a few categories of “Others” are displayed at the
Norwegian Museum of Cultural History: for the time being, only the Sami
and Pakistani communities have been included in the Museum’s permanent
exhibitions. Yet their presence in this particular museum bears a strong symbolic weight: these “Others” have been formally included in the Norwegian
ethnoscape.
Experiencing Difference – the Intercultural Museum (IKM)
Loosely inspired by the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art
opened in Glasgow in 1993, the Intercultural Museum (IKM) started to take
shape in the late 1980s as an initiative of Bente Guro Møller (Møller & Einarsen 2008:141). The IKM is currently a section of the umbrella institution
Oslo Museum, also including the City Museum and the Theatre Museum.
The Intercultural Museum is not easily placed in established museum categories: it is not a museum of art though it hosts art installations, it is not an
ethnographic nor an historical museum properly speaking, but rather a combination of these museum genres. The words of Bente Møller (2008:143) on
this point are illuminating: “When we work towards changing attitudes, it is
important to talk to the whole person, not just their rationality. […] Art
opens cognitive rooms in us other than those opened by theoretical knowledge. That is why we always have art exhibitions in addition to cultural history exhibitions.”
The temporary4 exhibition Our Sacred Space introduces six religious
communities in Norway: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Sikhism. By showing “religious diversity in Norway today” the exhibition aims to “encourage dialogue between people with different religious practices”. At the IKM performativity is very important. The visitor is
part of the mise en scène, s-he is invited to take up temporarily the role of a
visitor to a religious space, for instance taking off shoes, washing hands,
wearing a headscarf and so on (Figure 2).
The architectural structure of the IKM is intriguing. The building was formerly a prison, thus the exhibition space is composed of a series of small
cells and niches, linked by corridors. In the context of the exhibition Our
Sacred Space, corridors are liminal spaces where the visitor briefly reappropriates his or her identity before entering another religious context and taking up another role. This enactment is made all the more meaningful by the
sequence and juxtaposition of different faiths as visitors literally “divest” a
faith to “wear” another.
The objects on display are not labelled, they can be freely touched,
20
Marzia Varutti
Figure 2. Visitors are invited to take their shoes off and wear slippers at the entrance to the exhibition Our Sacred Space at the Intercultural Museum.
smelled, acted upon – a bell can be rung, a candle can be lit, incense can be
burned. Objects are not presented in a way that draws attention to their materiality and uniqueness, nor to their aesthetic, historical or scientific value.
Rather, they contribute to creating a background, a canvas for the deployment of personal feelings, memories, emotions and personal understandings
of the sacred. There is no judgemental connotation in the panel descriptions
21
of the different religious practices. The equanimity deployed in the display
of the different religious spaces (resulting for instance from the equal exhibition space allotted to each group and the factual, non-discriminating texts)
helps to create an effect of homogeneity. The six religious spaces ultimately
elide each other transforming the display, quite paradoxically, into an eminently secular space. One might wonder whether there is a risk of oversimplifying the complexity of these religious spaces, and of giving the visitors the comfortable feeling to have “understood” the different religious
communities, to have somehow appropriated them, and later simply divested them.
In museological terms, it could be argued that the IKM presents the items
on display as ethnographic specimens, that is, as objects that tell us something about our own, and/or other cultures. But Our Sacred Space does more
than this. The ideas underlying the exhibition and its museological approach
are compelling because they challenge the basic notions of museum and museum object, and subvert established museum practices. Yet, this is a museum. Despite the efforts to accurately reconstitute six sacred spaces, these
are ultimately artificial set-ups. As such, the IKM offers a “safe” environment to explore spaces that many visitors might hardly have the chance or
the interest to visit. In this sense, the IKM offers a non-threatening venture
in spaces often closed to non-adepts, and conversely, it enables the maintenance of a certain distance from the real sacred spaces of these communities, made fictionally available through the museum’s panoptical gaze.
Crystallizing Difference – the Museum of Cultural History, UiO
The Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo was formally established in 1999 through the merging of three formerly independent University museums (Archaeology, Numismatics and Ethnography – which
was founded in 1857).5 After having been repeatedly incorporated and disincorporated from the University, today the Museum is part of a constituency regrouping all the University Museums of Oslo, and enjoys the double
status of museum and university department.6 The Museum includes ethnographic galleries devoted to the Circumpolar regions, Africa, Asia, and the
Americas. The galleries differ not only in geographic focus, but also in conceptual approach, museological formats and display techniques. In short, it
could be said that the Museum of Cultural History conflates several museums in one.
The gallery devoted to the Circumpolar regions for instance, presents a
mostly ethnographic approach, evidenced by the intense use of mannequins
and life-size dioramas. The way in which objects, historical black and white
photos, and text are juxtaposed in the glass cases exudes a concern with
pedagogy (Figure 3).
22
Marzia Varutti
Figure 3. View of the Arctic gallery, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo.
In a similar vein, in the African gallery, objects are also framed through ethnographic lenses. One can find again mannequins and dioramas (though less
prominent than in the Arctic section) as well as a wealth of photos providing
visually evocative backgrounds for objects. Texts are relatively limited and
fall short of providing adequate contextualization for artefacts, whose functions, meanings and values might remain obscure to most visitors. Enlarged
background photos reproduce stereotyped images of the continent: Tuareg
in the desert, women carrying water containers on their heads, straw huts,
Masai warriors dancing, dark and thick forests. Similarly, the coffee-table
books available for browsing – bearing titles such as The Vanishing Traditions of Berber Women, Africa Dances, Africa Adorned, The Masai etc. – do
little in the way of challenging received ideas and providing information
about contemporary African communities. Display techniques emphasize
the exotic and aesthetic character of African cultures.
The Asian Gallery includes items from China, Korea and Japan. This gallery combines a plurality of exhibition approaches. A hint of exoticism characterizes the display of curiosity and iconic artefacts such as the shoes for
women with bound feet, fingernail covers, or the magnificently embroidered capes and garments dating back to the Qing dynasty. In line with the
important tradition of ceramic connoisseurship in China, ceramics and tea
implements are among the most prominent items on display. Ceramics are
23
exhibited in purpose-built cabinets made to resemble those in use in China
in private houses or tea-rooms. This mode of display also recalls the way
ceramics are displayed in private collections, thus suggesting an approach
to these artefacts based on aesthetic appreciation. In other areas, the exhibition style takes a more ethnographic approach, as for instance in the choice
to display a selection of traditional musical instruments, and traditional
Korean and Japanese clothing items complemented by panels explaining the
patterns, and a miniature weaving loom. Aside from these instances, most
of the objects selected for display in the Asian gallery lend themselves to be
appreciated as aesthetic items, and indeed are the object of collecting and
connoisseurship traditions. The display methods used in the gallery present
the material culture of Asian countries as fine art, inviting an aesthetic and
historical, more than an ethnographic gaze. This approach is corroborated
by the choice not to illustrate objects with panels and texts, but rather to
limit captions to the minimum and provide limited information through an
object list hanging from each exhibition shelf.
In the American galleries the exhibition style can be described as ethnographic. In contrast with the other galleries, here a panel provides a title for
the exhibition (“Americas, contemporary and past identity”), the opening
date (November 2008), and the names of the curators and the professionals
involved, thus indicating the “authorship” of the display. The ethnographic
approach is visible in the re-creation of specific settings such as the religious
practice of Santeria in Cuba, or the reproduction of ritual offerings for the
Day of the Dead in Mexico. Artefacts are organized around specific topics
– such as “shamanism” and “global links and urban centres” – and contextualized through rich panel texts and contemporary photos.
In parallel to the four permanent galleries examined, the Museum of Cultural History also hosts temporary exhibitions bringing into focus specific
topics and/or contemporary issues. The engaging museological approaches
deployed in the temporary exhibitions offer a stark contrast to the inertial
character of the permanent galleries.
A good illustration is provided by the exhibition We Paint the Stories of
Our Culture, held at the Museum in spring 2011, and presenting a selection
of contemporary artworks (paintings, sculptures and artefacts) from Australian Aborigine artists.7 Collected during anthropological research in Australia by the curator Maria Øien, the works aim at providing an overview of
the cultural diversity and heterogeneity of styles expressed in the arts of
Australian Aborigines.8 The display unfolds on several levels. On a most
immediate level, it is a sensory and aesthetically powerful experience. Artefacts are displayed in an art-gallery mode, skilfully hung against a white
background, powerfully illuminated by spotlights, surrounded by minimal
design. This approach brings to the fore the materiality of the exhibits: the
large, brightly coloured, pigment-saturated involute patterns exert an almost
24
Marzia Varutti
hypnotic effect on the viewer. It is simply not possible to walk absent-mindedly past these exhibits. But the exhibition strives to reach beyond the aesthetic impact, to offer an intellectually engaging experience. The visitor gets
to learn about the cultural significance of the works, and the specific symbolic meanings embedded in their materiality (referring to Aboriginal
myths, songs, story-telling). Artworks are prefaced by panels providing
contextualizing information. Exhibition texts draw on anthropological insights and critical reflection on such topics as religion and the relationship
between the land, the ancestors and living communities, notions of tradition
and innovation, the cultural significance of designs, the ties between Aborigines and Australian national identity. In addition, each artwork is accompanied by an interpretative text provided by the artist. The cultural meanings
of the objects on display further invite critical reflection to the extent that
they challenge lingering divides between art and ethnography, and tangible
and intangible cultural categories. This exhibition provides an example of
the possibility (and efficacy) of museological approaches combining visual
impact and cultural contextualization, artistic sensitivity and anthropological depth of (cross-)cultural understanding: the display is visually engaging,
appealing, accessible, yet faithful to the inherent epistemological and cultural complexity of the exhibits. Regrettably, however, this kind of critical, research-driven reflection that should be the benchmark of a university museum, has hitherto been only to a limited extent incorporated and reflected
in the Museum’s permanent galleries.
The four permanent galleries considered – Arctic, African, Asian and
American – share one feature: the authenticity of objects is of pivotal importance. Objects are made to be iconic, to represent a culture, but at the same
time, their individual potency and singularity cannot be left in the background: these are unique artefacts bearing considerable historic, artistic,
technical and cultural value. These objects do not need to be interpolated by
a strong narrative. Rather they act as brush strokes that, taken together, collectively contribute to forming the big picture of a distant “Other”.9 Because
they do not have to support other narratives than their own uniqueness and
authenticity, they can afford to be aestheticized. Aesthetics becomes here a
mode of apprehension of distant cultures (see Naguib 2004, 2007); this is
not incompatible with other approaches, such as the ethnographic and historical. Indeed, at the Museum of Cultural History exhibits are presented
both as items to be admired in themselves, and as culturally and historically
salient, to be understood as part of a specific cultural system. Objects are
historicized through the extensive use of black and white historical photos
as contextualization material. With the exception of the Americas gallery,
there are few references in the displays, texts or pictures to contemporary
living societies; when the display does tackle cultural features that might be
considered as “contemporary” or “modern”, as in the case of market ex-
25
changes in the African gallery, these are framed as a Western import, as if
to imply that these societies are “modern” only in those spheres of social life
that are influenced by the West.
All things considered, the displays at the Museum of Cultural History do
not succeed in displacing stereotypical images of Other cultures. In the African gallery for instance, the earthenware, ivory horns, Benin bronzes,
masks and wooden sculptures strongly resonate with collective imagery
about the African Other, as do the Amazonian feather headdresses, Mesoamerican basketry and Plains Indian leather items in the Americas Galleries,
or the igloo in the Circumpolar gallery. The object-stereotype (the mask, the
basket, the feathers) is used as a prop, a tool to invite visitors to learn more
about the cultures on display, yet without really challenging previously held
and received understandings about them. Conversely, displays at the Museum of Cultural History essentially reassure the visitors in their assumptions about Other cultures. To an external viewer, this situation might seem
somewhat paradoxical in a museum employing several professional anthropologists. It is only by exploring the process of exhibition set-up, rather than
just analysing its final result, that other relevant analytical elements emerge,
for instance the fact that anthropologists have no direct responsibility for exhibitions, which are managed by a separate exhibitions department, currently headed by an archaeologist.10 This problematic division of responsibilities within the Museum encroaches upon the disciplinary expertise of social
anthropology (understood as the science devoted to the study of cultural
phenomena and their interpretation in a cross-cultural perspective) and curtails the potentially significant role that social anthropologists might play in
reshaping the ethnographic galleries. Whilst these organizational issues help
to explain the poor conditions of the ethnographic galleries, they do not provide a satisfactory response to visitors’ expectations of more accurate and
updated cultural representations.
The Kon-Tiki Museum: the Aesthetics of the Exotic
The privately owned Kon-Tiki Museum is devoted to the life and achievements of the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl and his lifetime expeditions across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. The fulcrum of displays
at the Kon-Tiki Museum are the vessels used by Heyerdahl and his crew
members, as well as detailed photographic and textual material documenting the expeditions; these are complemented by ethnographic artefacts, archaeological finds and botanical specimen. The local communities encountered during the expeditions appear as secondary characters in narratives focusing on Thor’s persona and endeavours. The ethos of the intrepid, solitary
explorer connecting with the natural environment is here celebrated as a
properly “Norwegian” archetype.
26
Marzia Varutti
The general emphasis on Thor’s persona rather than on artefacts was reversed in the special exhibition Tiki Pop Culture, held at the Museum in
2009. The exhibition was devoted to the spread of images, objects, food and
drinks associated with the Pacific which occurred upon the return of American soldiers after the end of the Second World War, and which was revived
by the interest generated by Thor Heyerdahl’s expeditions. The display cast
a critical eye on the development of Pacific-inspired paraphernalia and pop
culture around the world, and specifically in Norway, where Tiki restaurants
and bars revived the flavours of the “South Seas”. The exhibition included
contemporary art (sculptures and textiles reproducing and re-interpreting
Pacific “traditional” patterns), exotica and a vast array of gadgets (including
small sculptures, mugs, shell bracelets and Hawaiian-style flower necklaces) collected by Norwegian enthusiasts. On display was also a reconstructed corner of a Tiki-inspired bar, complete with Pacific wooden carved
poles, flowered textiles, and a Pacific-themed menu with exotic drinks and
food.
The exhibition Tiki Pop Culture is particularly interesting for the ironic,
self-reflexive view on the appropriation and commodification of the Tiki accoutrements as emblems of the exotic Pacific Other. The exhibition reflected on the aesthetizing gaze directed at Pacific objects. In so doing, it projected the image of a distant, exotic Other reactualized in today’s tourist and
consumerist enactments. The display recalled Susan Stewart’s (1984:146,
148) comment on exoticism: “the exotic object represents distance appropriated […] To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and
a trophy […] [the souvenir’s] otherness speaks to the possessor’s capacity
for otherness: it is the possessor, not the souvenir, which is ultimately the
curiosity.” The Kon-Tiki Museum develops an aesthetics of the exotic that
resonates strongly not only in an historical dimension (the events of World
War II and Thor’s expeditions) but also in its contemporary implications.
The exhibition Tiki Pop Culture in particular played with the ideas of exoticism and consumerism, casting a disenchanted gaze on Western practices of
construction and consumption of cultural difference. By drawing the visitor’s attention to cultural distinctiveness and on cultural difference, displays
accentuate the dichotomy between an implicit Norwegian “us” and the
Other, but interestingly, they do so in a self-reflective way. The “Other” encountered in the Kon-Tiki Museum is not threatening but appealing, not present but distant in place and time, not real but imagined. These features ultimately facilitate and encourage its consumption.
Hybrid Regimes of Representation
The analysis of displays in the museums considered in this study evinces
three main regimes of representation: aesthetic, ethnographic and historical.
27
The Museum of Cultural History (especially the African gallery) and the
Kon-Tiki (especially the Tiki Pop Culture exhibition) offer instances of aesthetic regimes of representation. This kind of regimes of representation emphasize the aesthetics of artefacts through a range of ad hoc display techniques. These tend to singularize the object and to draw attention to its material properties, for instance through precise, powerful lighting and the use
of individual glass cases. The exhibit is presented as a work of art. Consistently, texts and captions are limited, as they are not perceived to be essential
to the full appreciation of the exhibit. Exhibition approaches of this kind
ease cross-cultural comparisons, and often lead to generalizations and the
establishment of a canon, such as “African Style” or “Nordic aesthetics”
(Varutti 2010).
Examples of ethnographic regimes of representation can be found at the
Museum of Cultural History, and in the Norwegian Museum of Cultural
History, especially the section of the Sami gallery dating to 1990. Ethnographic regimes of representation focus on the cultural significance of objects and their contexts of production, use and consumption. In line with this
aim, ethnographic style displays make a significant use of contextualizing
material such as dioramas, mannequins, texts, diagrams and photos. Ethnographic regimes of representation are centred on cultural features; for instance, prominence is given to craft traditions, religious practices, dwelling
customs, strategies of climatic adaptation, lifestyles, and so on. Cultural
context, and its spatio-temporal variations, are the lenses through which the
objects on display are interpreted here.
The Museum of Cultural History (especially the Arctic galleries), the
Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (in the old section of the Sami gallery) and the Kon-Tiki (in the permanent galleries) instantiate the category
of historical regimes of representation. Historical regimes of representation
are primarily concerned with providing historical context for the events,
peoples and cultures on display. This notion might recall the concept of “regimes of historicity” developed by the French historian François Hartog
(2003). In Hartog’s view, a regime of historicity may be understood as the
way a society deals with its past, and in more detail, the ways in which historicity is lived, conceptualized, deployed, and the way the past, the present
and the future are articulated (2003:19, 35, my translation). It follows that
discussions of regimes of historicity imply a self-reflexive concern with the
way temporalities are conceived and perceived within and across societies
– a concern that is more appropriately defined as historiographical, rather
than historical. The concept of historical regimes of representation deployed
here differs from Hartog’s regimes of historicity since it does not aim to explain the different ways in which societies relate to their past (and to time
more broadly). Rather, more coarsely, it aims to define the internal consistency of a set of display techniques, approaches and narratives that create an
28
Marzia Varutti
historical backdrop for the events or cultures displayed. In this sense, in the
notion of historical regimes of representation the emphasis is put on regimes
and the systemic, coherent qualities it suggests, whilst in Hartog’s concept,
the analytical focus is on the notion of historicity. Thus, historical regimes
of representation are characterized by a conspicuous use of historical photographic material (especially black and white photos), and by the deployment of narratives of “progress” and of progressive “civilization”. This implies that historical regimes of representation are not necessarily exclusively
concerned with the past, but also characterize exhibitions engaging with
contemporary issues such as climate change and environmental pollution.
Historical and ethnographic regimes of representation can be intimately entangled in the context of a display, yet it is still useful to distinguish them
for analytical purposes (see below). Whilst an historical perspective may be
present in ethnographic regimes, their main focus is kept on cultural features, and social change is usually explained through reference to cultural
elements. Similarly, in historical regimes of representation we may find that
cultural details and ethnographic analyses greatly enrich an historical analysis, yet the main concern of the historical regime is communicating the
chronological sequence of events, and setting events one in relation to the
other, usually on the basis of a cause-effect logic.
The identification of these three regimes of representation – aesthetic,
ethnographic and historical – serves here analytical, rather than descriptive
purposes. This also implies that these ideal types are not exhaustive, one
might identify many other regimes of representation defined by various
combinations, approaches and emphasis in display techniques and narratives. Defining, however approximatively, these three ideal-types of regimes of representation – aesthetic, ethnographic and historical – allows me
to locate, by way of inference, another open, hybrid category which combines features of the three ideal-types described. In the same way as with
Appadurai’s regimes of value, in fact, regimes of representation are not discrete, closed systems, but open and fluid: their borders are blurred, they can
merge, overlap, dissolve. Indeed, it is hybrids of these regimes of representation that are most interesting to explore.
Among the museums considered, examples of hybrid regimes of representation can be found at the Glomdal Museum (notably the Latjo Drom exhibition on Travellers), the IKM, the new section of the Sami gallery and the
Pakistani flat, both at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, and the
temporary exhibition “We Paint the Stories of Our Culture” at the Museum
of Cultural History of the University of Oslo. Hybrid regimes of representation, however, cannot be reduced to a set of arbitrary choices of museum curators. On closer examination, they reveal an internal logic and consistency.
Interestingly, these are all relatively recent displays, indicating that this regime of representation has crystallized over the last five or six years. More-
29
over, these museums chime with Anthony Alan Shelton’s (2006:492) description of “new” museums as “threshold institutions constructed between
major intellectual, historical and social fault zones, at the intersections and
between the interstices of conflicting, contradictory and paradoxical, pluricultural cross-currents”.
In such hybrid regimes of representation, the centrality of the object-masterpiece constructed as an icon of authenticity is displaced to the benefit of
more evocative approaches using objects as springboards for narratives that
appeal to personal experience, emotions, memories and imagination. This is
also suggested by the generalized emphasis put on the creation of detailed,
thematic contexts that engender a mood and a background enabling an immersive museum experience. Displays are characterized by open, multiple
narrative lines making room for a plurality of points of view. The narrative
mode often adopts a documentary style, using meta-narratives, real-life
stories, individual accounts, personal life-trajectories, belongings and memory boxes. These display techniques tend to conceal curatorial agency in order to convey the sense of a more direct relationship between audiences and
the communities represented. This exhibition approach is less concerned
with providing an accurate, comprehensive representation of a group than
with establishing cross-cultural links that contribute to locating that group
within a broader national or global arena. This effect is also achieved
through a thematic focus on universal topics and issues which are then explored in a cross-cultural perspective.
In a report for the Norwegian government, the museum professional Per
Bjorn Rekdal (2001:15) wrote: “one expected result of increased museum
activity connected to our cultural diversity is that this can contribute to the
integration of new groups in Norwegian society.” Whilst it is beyond the
purpose of this paper to discuss the degree to which this objective is being
successfully pursued, this statement confirms the concern among museum
academics and professionals for the potential role that museums can play in
the development of a more inclusive and cohesive society. Less debated are
the implications of a range of concrete modes of cultural representation
adopted by museums in the pursuit of this goal. The analysis of museums
developed in this paper helps to shed light on this issue.
When juxtaposed, the analyses of the different regimes of representation
in the museums examined project different kinds of assumptions and perceptions about the various “Others”. This suggests that not all non-ethnic
Norwegian enjoy the same museological status, but there are in museums
different categories of Others, as well as gradients of cultural alterity.
This might be a surprising finding in a country that identifies egalitarian
30
Marzia Varutti
individualism as one of its main values (Gullestad 1992), but Norwegian society might not be as egalitarian as imagined. The historian Einar Niemi
(2008:5) explains that since the 1990s, a minority policy hierarchy has gradually taken shape, whereby the Sami are the most prominent group, followed by national minorities, and lastly immigrant communities (see footnote 1). In the same vein, the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen talks
of a “hierarchy of Norwegian Others” (2002:232), and Elisabeth Eide (n.d.)
of “scales of Norwegian-ness”.
That there are different kinds of non-ethnic Norwegian communities
might not be a novelty per se. What deserves attention, however, is the role
of museums in reproducing such hierarchies and subtly communicating
them to audiences. I would argue that through the deployment of different
regimes of representation, the museums analysed in this study implicitly
communicate such hierarchies. In more detail, in the museums considered
there are to my mind at least four different categories of Others: the Sami;
the mostly integrated national minorities (such as the Travellers); the partially integrated immigrant communities (such as the Pakistanis); and more
distant “Others”, culturally and geographically far from Norway. Whilst this
is an oversimplified interpretation of cultural complexity in contemporary
Norway, museums do not appear to engage in a critical rethinking of such
gross categorization.
In general, one can notice that the less the ethnic group is statistically, socially, economically or culturally relevant in Norway (thus unlikely to play
any role in the (re)definition of Norwegian national identity), the more its
museum representation is characterized by essentialism, objectification,
generalizations and exoticism. For instance, a group that has been inhabiting
what is today the Norwegian territory for a very long time – this is obviously
the case for the Sami indigenous group, but also for the Travellers, officially
recognized as an ethnic minority since inhabiting Norway for more than 100
years – enjoys dedicated museums and/or display space, and the possibility
to play an active role in the set-up of their museum representation. This is
the case for the Sami at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, and the
Travellers at the Glomdal Museum.
Gradually, this kind of opportunities are being extended to groups of
more recent settlement in Norway, such as immigrants, refugees, asylum
seekers, and so on. Migrant cultures are often presented in the context of
collective displays conflating the diverse groups in an allegedly unifiable
“immigrant culture” (as for instance at the IKM). However, museums are
slowly developing a sharper focus on migrant communities. This is attained
either through exhibitions devoted to a specific group – for instance the
Pakistani flat at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, or Fotspor
Somalia–Norge/Footprints Somalia–Norway, which was an exhibition devoted to Somali culture held at the Glomdal Museum from June 2006 to
31
June 2008 – or through a thematic approach – for instance the temporary exhibition innSYN=INNsikt held at the IKM in Autumn 2010 focused on migration and the role of language as bridge or barrier among cultures; in a
similar vein the exhibition Hijab og hodeplagg – med rett til å velge/Hijab
and head wear – with a right to choose held at the Museum of the City of
Oslo in Spring 2009, explored the use of the hijab as a fashion item.
The preference accorded to hybrid regimes of representation in these exhibitions can be interpreted as a heightened recognition of the visibility of
non-ethnic Norwegian communities in Norwegian society, and of the need
to represent cultural difference in “politically correct” manners as a way to
foster intercultural dialogue and social cohesion. Increasingly, such politically correct representations serve to negotiate the gradual introduction of
“foreign” cultures in the domestic ethnoscape. In fact, in most instances,
“politically correct” representations of other cultures focus not so much on
the “Other” and its cultural difference, as on its relation with the Norwegian
majority. This results in an implicit, gradual redefinition of Norwegian national identity and citizenship.
To illustrate this point, I will use the example of the Sami. The display of
Sami culture in the new gallery section at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History emphasizes the similarities between Sami and ethnic Norwegians. The punk girl in the opening photo is not recognisable as a Sami,
her cultural belonging is overridden by her statement as an individual – in
contrast to the anonymity of the featureless Sami mannequins used in the old
section of the same gallery. The photo of the young Sami punk signifies rebellion, including rebellion against previously fixed definitions of “Saminess”. It is also an image of modernity as it redefines the image of the Sami
by locating Sami culture in the hybrid space of a subculture – punk rock –
that transcends cultural borders. Precisely because Sami culture is defined
here in non-culturally specific terms, it is easier to link it to Norwegian culture. This point chimes with Eriksen’s (2002:223) analysis of the understanding of cultural difference in Norway as a lack of Norwegian features:
the Other is such precisely because it is not culturally similar. The invisibility of Sami as a visually distinctive group in today’s Norwegian society is
perhaps the most patent indication of their degree of integration. The “naturalization” of Sami also appears in museum texts such as “Sami are now to
be found in all walks of life…”, or “daily life becomes more and more
similar to that of other people in the country” (Norwegian Museum of Cultural History). The core message of the displays of Sami culture at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History appears to be: “we are all ultimately
similar”.
Another instance showing the centrality of the equation “similarityequality” for the integration of non-ethnic Norwegian cultures is provided
by the permanent exhibition Latjo Drom, at the Glomdal Museum, illustrat-
32
Marzia Varutti
ing the culture of Travellers’ communities. The display is interspersed with
references to Norwegian history, cultural elements and collective imagery.
For instance, a Traveller witness points out that hygiene has always been
very important for her and that she used Lano soap for her children. The
Travellers’ own reference to an item so firmly inscribed in Norwegian collective imagination such as Lano soap (the most widespread brand of soap
in Norway since the 1930s) might not, at first glance, seem noteworthy. Yet,
the fact that this information was retained by the curator and by the Traveller
communities as relevant suggests the existence of a shared set of references
and values associated with “Norwegianness” in relation to which other cultures are located, and locate themselves. Conversely, the curator of the permanent exhibition reported11 that on some occasions visitors claimed that
the display is not objective since it does not account for Travellers’ involvement in knife fights, misappropriations and so on. In response to such
claims, the curator usually points out that museum displays of Norwegian
peasant culture do not either display fights, drinking habits and so on, and
questions possible double standards for Travellers. What the curator is aiming at with this answer – and what some visitors are resistant to accept – is
the extension of the regime of representation of the Norwegian majority to
non-Norwegian cultural components. In other words, the permanent exhibition Latjo Drom is negotiating the transition and the acceptance of Travellers into the Norwegian nation. It is doing so by striving to present Travellers’ culture as both unique and distinctive, and situated within the framework of Norwegian history and culture. The core message of the display,
mediated by the Museum authority, could be crudely synthesized as “they
[the Travellers] are like us”. Yet the very creation in 2004 of this dedicated
permanent exhibition is evidence that this statement is not obvious, but
needs to be enforced – and museums are precisely contributing to this end.
Conclusions
In this paper, I proposed to extend Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “regime of
value” to museum displays by means of its reformulation as “regime of representation”. I used this as an analytical concept in a study of the way Norwegian museums tackle cultural difference.
In general terms, the construction or depiction of cultural difference in
museums (as in other media) has mostly followed two main lines: the temporal or the spatial. Art and history museums have traditionally centred on
the chronological development of cultures, essentially locating the roots of
cultural difference in a different historical trajectory, whilst anthropology
museums have worked with notions of cultural difference as linked to a different spatial or geographical location. Based on this study of museums in
Norway, the last generation of museums displaying other cultures seems to
33
aim to transcend this dichotomy, striving to open up an in-between space
where cultural identities are neither past nor faraway, but rather multiple,
fluid, ever-changing identities that are here and in the present. Perceptions
of cultural and territorial belonging overlap and intersect, creating new coordinates of identity where ethnic communities can both maintain strong
links with their cultures of origin, and be fully part of the multicultural society in which they live. Crucially, there is a growing awareness of these
processes among museum professionals, the political body and Norwegian
society at large (Ministry of Labour and Social Inclusion 2010; Rekdal
2001).
If Victorian museums, according to Tony Bennett (2006) educated
masses to “civic seeing”, that is, to becoming the “modern” citizens of
“civilized nations”, the last generation of museums and displays of cultural
difference in Norway appear to operate as sites for a “multicultural seeing”,
educating audiences to become citizens of a multicultural, open-minded,
cosmopolitan and globalized world. In this sense, the hierarchization of cultural difference that surfaces in museum displays is not necessarily negative: it can be understood as part of a long-term process of acceptance and
integration of different cultural communities, and ultimately as a way to
gradually negotiate the multi-ethnic profile of the Norwegian nation.
Although museum representations do not really challenge received understandings about different categories of Others, but rather work within
such schemata, their efforts to break through established regimes of representation and to explore new visual and narrative ways to present other cultures are important and deserve to be encouraged. Museums will have to
cope with the challenge, but also the extraordinary opportunities, to work
with ethnic communities to better translate the complex, imaginative processes through which Norwegian and non-Norwegian cultural elements are
being constantly re-articulated and reinterpreted in the formulation of collective (ethnic) identities. This direction bears the potential to transform museums from sites of superficial showcasing of cultural diversity, into laboratories for the development and expression of the inspirational cultural
vibrancy of a truly multicultural country.
Acknowledgements
I wish to gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the Research
Council of Norway to this research project (YGGDRASIL mobility grant
n.195787/V11). I also wish to thank colleagues at the IKOS – Department
of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages of the University of Oslo, where
I was a visiting researcher from September to January 2010. In particular, I
am grateful to Professor Saphinaz Amal Naguib and the members of the research programme Patterns of Cultural Valuation for providing valuable
34
Marzia Varutti
comments and an inspirational framework for my research. I furthermore
wish to thank the participants in a seminar held at the Museum of Cultural
History, University of Oslo, in March 2010, where I presented a draft of this
paper, for their insightful comments. My thanks also to Arlyne Moi for commenting on previous versions of the article. Any mistakes remain my sole
responsibility.
Marzia Varutti, Visiting Researcher
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS)
University of Oslo
Duehaugveien 8C
0851 Oslo
Norway
e-mail: [email protected]
References
Bennett, T. 2006: Civic Seeing. Museums and the organization of vision. A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. S. Macdonald. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bhabha, H. 1988: The Commitment to Theory. New Formations 5, pp. 5–24.
Bouquet, M. 1996: Sans og samling – hos Universitete[t]s etnografiske museum. Oslo: Universitetets etnografiske museum.
Clifford, J. 1997: Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Council of Europe 2008: City of Oslo. Intercultural Profile. Online:
http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/culture/cities/osloprofile.pdf (accessed
September 2010)
Eide, E. (undated): The Long Distance Runner and Discourses on “Europe’s
Others”. Ethnic Minority Representation in Norwegian Feature Stories. Online:
http://home.hio.no/~elisabe/Tufte.htm (accessed 30 December 2009).
Eriksen, T. H. 2002: The Colonial and the Postcolonial. A View from Scandinavia
on Italian Minority Issues. The Politics of Recognizing Difference, ed. R. Grillo
& J. Pratt. London: Ashgate.
Eriksen, T. H. 2006: Diversity versus Difference. Neo-liberalism in the Minority Debate. The Making and Unmaking of Difference, ed. Richard Rottenburg et al.
Bielefeld: Transaction. Online http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/Diversity.html (accessed 1 December 2009).
Goodnow, K. J. & Akman, H. (eds.) 2008: Scandinavian Museums and Cultural Diversity. New York: Berghahn Books.
Gullestad M. 1992: The Art of Social Relations. Essays on Culture, Social Action and Everyday Life in Modern Norway, Oslo: Scandinavian University
Press.
Gullestad M. 2001: Imagined Sameness. Shifting Notions of “Us” and “Them” in
Norway. Forestillinger om “den Andre” / Images of Otherness, ed. Line Alice
Ytrehus Kristiansand: Hoyskoleforlaget.
Hartog, F. 2003: Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris:
Seuil.
Keane, W. 2001: Money Is No Object. Materiality, Desire and Modernity in an In-
35
donesian Society. The Empire of Things. Regimes of Value and Material Culture,
ed. F. Myers. Oxford: James Currey.
Norwegian Ministry of Labour and Social Inclusion 2010: [Documentation on] Integration and social inclusion policy. Online:
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/aid/Topics/Integration-and-diversity/midtspalte/integrerings--og-inkluderingspolitikk.html?id=86693 (accessed October
2010).
Møller, B. G. & Einarsen, H. P. 2008: As in a Mirror. Scandinavian Museums and
Cultural Diversity, ed. K. J. Goodnow & H. Akman. New York: Berghahn
Books.
Naguib, S. A. 2004: The Aesthetics of Otherness in Museums of Cultural History.
Tidskrift for kulturforskning 3/4, pp. 5–21.
Naguib, S. A. 2007: Autres temps, autres regards. Représentations de l’altérité au
musée d’Histoire culturelle de l’Université d’Oslo. Histoire de l’Art 60, pp. 149–
160.
Niemi, E. 2008: Indigenous Peoples and National Minorities in Norway. Categorisation and Minority Politics. Scandinavian Museums and Cultural Diversity, ed.
K. J. Goodnow & H. Akman. New York: Berghahn Books.
Rekdal, P. 1999: Norwegian Museums and the Multicultural Challenge. Principles
and Practices in Exhibition and Education, Oslo: Norwegian Museum Authority.
Online: http://www.abm-utvikling.no/publisert/tidligere-utgivelser/nmu (accessed September 2010).
Shelton, A. 2006: Museums and Museum Displays. Handbook of Material Culture,
ed. C. Tilley et al. London: Sage.
Steiner, C. 2001: Rights of Passage. On the Liminal Identity of Art in the Border
Zone. The Empire of Things. Regimes of Value and Material Culture, ed. F.
Myers. Oxford: James Currey.
Stewart, S. 1984: On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tilley, C. 2006: Objectification. Handbook of Material Culture, ed. C. Tilley et al.
London: Sage.
Varutti, M. 2010: The Aesthetics and Narratives of National Museums in China. National Museums. New Studies from Around the World, ed. S. J. Knell et al. London: Routledge.
1
Since this article is mostly concerned with the ethnic dimensions of cultural difference,
the analysis focuses on indigenous groups, ethnic minorities and migrant communities,
rather than on religious or linguistic minorities. It should also be noted that, in addition
to the Sami indigenous people, Norway officially recognizes five national minority groups:
Kven, Forest Finns, Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and Romany (Travellers).
2
Thomas Walle, curator, Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. Personal communication, 25 November 2009.
3
I am grateful to Dr Leif Pareli, curator at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History,
for these insights. Personal communication, 6 May 2011.
4
The exhibition Our Sacred Space opened at the IKM in Spring 2007 and was extended
until the end of 2010.
5
Dr Leif Pareli, curator at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. Personal communication, 6 May 2011.
36
6
Marzia Varutti
The complex institutional history of the Museum of Cultural History and its collections
have been extensively discussed by other authors (see Bouquet 1996; Naguib 2007).
7
The exhibition is correlated to web pages (in Norwegian and English) reproducing all
the exhibition texts organized in thematic sections, high-quality photographs of the artworks on display, profiles of the exhibiting artists, a video interview with Aborigine
women demonstrating the making of a traditional handbag, and photo galleries offering
a glimpse of the exhibition making process.
8
Maria Øien, exhibition curator. Personal communication, 14 April 2011.
9
For a discussion of the concept of “culturally distant” (fjernkulturell) see Gullestad 2001:
52.
10
Professor Øivind Fuglerud, Department of Ethnography, Museum of Cultural History,
University of Oslo. Personal communication, 4 February 2011.
11
Mary Møystad, curator of the Latjo Drom exhibition, Glomdal Museum, Elverum. Personal communication, 3 November 2009.
Men of Vision
37
Men of Vision
Hans Aall, Moltke Moe, and the Representations of the Emerging Nation State at the Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo
Arne Bugge Amundsen
During the nineteenth century the young state of Norway established a number of cultural institutions which were intended to display, argue for, and develop a Norwegian national identity. An important group among these institutions were the museums, which became important media, both nationally
and regionally, for articulating cultural identity. The focus in this article is
on the national development of museums, and specifically the Norwegian
Folk Museum – Norsk Folkemuseum, established in 1894 – will be examined in order to find central variables in the kind of identity project this
museum was supposed to represent, and especially how different parts of the
historically given culture in Norway were inscribed in this museum project.
Central actors in this process were Hans Aall, founder and director of the
Norsk Folkemuseum until his death in 1946, and Moltke Moe, Norway’s
first professor of folklore and folk traditions and a central national culture
builder in the period around 1900.
National Museums in Norway1
The most important national museums in Norway were established in
periods when Norway was eager to demonstrate national identity and independence. The Norwegian state institutions were few and weak in 1814,
the first year of the new state of Norway. Norway’s political and cultural
elite strongly defended independence from Sweden and distance to Denmark. After 1814, this elite was seeking for distinct expressions of national identity following the traditional nineteenth-century standards: language, material culture, historical remains, narratives, and ethnic origin.
The members of the Norwegian cultural and political elite in the nineteenth century were of Danish ancestry, wrote Danish, and continued their
close contacts with Denmark, but scholars, littérateurs and politicians took
active part in different cultural and institutional projects aiming at devel-
38
Arne Bugge Amundsen
oping Norwegian language, literacy, and symbols.2 As early as 1767 a
group of Enlightenment scholars had established a Museum of Natural
Science and Archaeology in Trondhjem, and in the 1820s Bergen became
the location of a similar museum, and in the Norwegian capital Kristiania
(Oslo) collectors and scholars established various public collections
(Shetelig 1944:23ff.; Andersen 2009).
The University of Oslo was established in 1811, and at a very early stage
collections and museums were established within its institutional framework: collections of natural history, cultural history (“antiquities”), and
coins were parts of the University of Oslo from its very beginning. The initial phase of these collections actually was the result of a private initiative.
In 1811, the Royal Norwegian Society for Development3 established a Commission of Antiquities (Antiqvitetscommissionen). This Commission started
the collection of “antiquities” related to Norwegian history. The objects
were on public display in the Norwegian capital. This collection was handed
over to the University in 1823 as the basis for the University’s Collection of
National Antiquities (Universitetets Oldsaksamling). From 1829, a new exhibition designed by the later Professor Rudolf Keyser (1803–1864) and after a few years based on the new periodic system advocated by the Danish
archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) was opened to the
public – “The collection of Nordic antiquities” (Shetelig 1944:35ff.).
These early collections were not formally labelled museums, even if they
acted as such in that they were open to the general public. They were, on the
other hand, closely connected to academic activities – both research and
teaching – of university professors. The collections were formally owned by
the university, which in turn was owned by the Norwegian state. In 1852,
the collections were moved to the newly built university buildings close to
the Royal Palace. The Norwegian Parliament engaged directly in the establishment of a National Gallery of Art in 1836, while the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, established in 1877, was a private initiative aiming at
encouraging the understanding of aesthetic values in public and private
spheres by comparing decorative styles from Norway and other parts of Europe.
National museums in Norway, and the Antiquity Collection in particular, played a major role in developing and sustaining important national
symbols like the Viking ships, the Viking and medieval heritage of a nation proud of its ancient past and material representations of urban and especially of rural origin from the more recent cultural history of the nation.
Especially with regard to Denmark, Norwegian scholars and writers redefined and restructured dominant historical narratives. The “grand narrative” was one about the independent, expanding and powerful Viking Age
and medieval kingdom of Norway (Haavardsholm 2004). The Scandinavian Kalmar Union from 1397, the Lutheran Reformation in 1537 and the
Men of Vision
39
introduction of Absolutism in 1660 were regarded as continuous steps towards Denmark’s colonizing and weakening of Norway (Amundsen in
print).
Norwegian History was continuously written by new generations of national scholars as something distinctively separate from the history of Denmark, and Norwegian museums were established in order to show publicly
the material remains of such a separate Norwegian past.4 Norwegian Art
was likewise described as something specific and national, and art museums
were established to display this national art – a development further
strengthened by the establishment of art history as a separate academic discipline at the University of Oslo.
The main perspective in these nineteenth-century museum initiatives was
to combine the need to establish academic competence, the necessary safeguarding of national antiquities and culture, and the search for comparative
research material. However, Norway in fact never established a formal national museum during the nineteenth century. What happened was that different central museum initiatives in the Norwegian capital developed and
interacted. Some of these museums were ideologically national in perspective and practice, but they were never officially recognized by the Norwegian State as such. In 1863 the archaeologist Nicolay Nicolaysen (1817–
1911) suggested the establishment of a Norwegian Riksmuseum, and the
question was discussed by university professors for several years, but with
no final result. Another archaeologist, Ingvald Undset (1853–1893), tried to
revitalize these plans in 1885, but again without success (Hegard 1994:11;
Amundsen 2011).
The ideological and political background to all these museum initiatives
obviously was the renewed Norwegian national self-esteem. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the definite heyday of Norwegian nationalistic sentiment. Central persons like the author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
(1832–1910) and the arctic explorer and scientist Frithjof Nansen (1861–
1930) were important exponents of Norwegian pride in the nation, the language and the potential of the young state. On a political level, this nationalistic sentiment resulted in a peaceful dissolution of the personal union with
Sweden in 1905.
A Norwegian Folk Museum
A new line of museum development with national ambitions around 1900
was the Norsk Folkemuseum, which was founded in 1894 by the curator,
cand.philos. Hans Aall (1867–1946). It was a private foundation, and after
1907 also included the former Union King Oscar II’s collections of old Norwegian buildings and furniture (founded 1881). These collections had been
situated in rural environments at Bygdøy close to the capital. According to
40
Arne Bugge Amundsen
its first programme, the Norsk Folkemuseum wanted to “collect and exhibit
everything that elucidates the cultural life of the Norwegian people”. This
included both urban and rural culture, from the sixteenth century onwards,
a period not covered systematically by the university museums. This programme managed to unite a substantial number of supporters across quite
severe political conflicts and social differences in Norway at the time. Conservative and liberal university professors, artists and politicians supported
Hans Aall’s plans for a museum of Norwegian culture, among them artists
like Erik Werenskiold (1855–1938) and Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929), professors like Moltke Moe (1859–1913), Yngvar Nielsen (1843–1916) and
Bredo Morgenstierne (1851–1930), and Eva Nansen (1858–1907), Fridtjof
Nansen’s wife.
In fact, there had been several earlier plans to establish a museum of Norwegian cultural history (Shetelig 1944:191ff; Hegard 1984). Around 1880,
Professor Yngvar Nielsen had started to collect private funding for a museum of this kind, but the Norwegian Parliament refused to contribute, and
Nielsen had to abandon his ambitious plans. In 1892, an association was established in Bergen with the aim of creating a “national ethnographic collection”. Funds were raised and a collection created, but in 1897 the collection was handed over to Bergen Museum (established in 1825). In 1894, the
dentist Anders Sandvig (1862–1950) also started collecting old houses and
other material objects from the inner parts of Southern Norway in order to
establish a regional folk museum in Lillehammer. From that time on, Sandvig’s museum was developed parallel to the Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo,
but it remained a regional collection (Sandvig 2001).
The Norsk Folkemuseum opened in 1896 in an apartment in Oslo, and
during the growing organizing of the collections, the exhibitions were distributed regionally – the museum’s objects were displayed according to
where in Norway they came from. Accordingly, the visitors were offered a
journey through the most important Norwegian valleys. Closely connected
with the Norsk Folkemuseum was the ambitious Cultural History Exhibition
at Bygdøy in Oslo in 1901, covering all the regions in south-eastern Norway
and divided between urban and rural cultural history, with separate exhibitions on Norwegian church art, military history, and the Norwegian coronation regalia. The exhibition was a major national event and a cultural demonstration in Norway just a few years before the personal union with Sweden was broken.
In 1902 the Norsk Folkemuseum was permanently moved to Bygdøy,
where the first old house in the open-air museum was rebuilt a few years earlier. The Norsk Folkemuseum has never had the formal status of a national
museum, but intentionally its collections cover the whole country, with special emphasis on popular and peasant culture, urban culture and Post-Reformation church art. Since 1897 the Norwegian Parliament had contributed to
Men of Vision
41
the funding of the museum. Since 1902 the Norwegian Ministry of Church
and Education had appointed one of six members of the museum board. In
1906 the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Oslo handed over its
collection of approximately 1,600 objects representing popular Norwegian
culture, and the Collection of National Antiquities (Oldsaksamlingen) transferred its post-Reformation collection of roughly 3,000 objects to the Norsk
Folkemuseum. The Folk Museum also included national historical relics
like the Gol stave church (originally a part of King Oscar II’s collection)
from around 1200 and several other buildings from the Middle Ages, and
even the first assembly hall of the Norwegian Parliament, moved to the museum in 1913 (Norsk Folkemuseum 1978; Rentzhog 2007; Tschudi-Madsen
1993).
The traditional understanding of the early Norwegian museums is that
they were strictly national in character, and the museum history outlined
here indicates that this is a correct assessment. A common critique in recent
times, however, has been that the museums were not only national but also
had a heavy bias towards rural Norway, peasant culture, and the pre-modern
era. There is no doubt that these were the most important building blocks
when the Norwegian cultural identity was to be shaped in the nineteenth
century (Hodne 1994; Sørensen 1998). Yet there is good reason to suspect
that this is too one-sided a view of the way the central Norwegian museums
regarded their assignments and built up their collections. A closer look at the
Norsk Folkemuseum and the central actors in the establishment of this museum may possibly give answers to this question.
Hans Aall – The Founder
Right from the start in 1894, the Norsk Folkemuseum bore the stamp of its
founder, Hans Aall. What did he think about the relationship between the
classes and between town and country in the nation he wanted to portray and
stage through his museum? What kind of museum practice did the Norsk
Folkemuseum represent in relation to these questions?
The 98 people who in December 1894 signed an appeal for support for
the establishment of a Norwegian folk museum in Kristiania comprised
leading Norwegian artists, musicians, authors, archivists, and academics, as
well as prominent representatives of the upper bourgeoisie and the class of
state officials. In the invitation, the purpose of the museum was stated as
“preserving for the Norwegian people the image of the life that has been led
Norway in recent centuries […], the setting in which people moved, about
which memories are gradually vanishing.” The collection of artefacts and
buildings was to comprise both the different districts and regions in Norway
and “images of the life of the upper classes”. The intention of the whole project was to strengthen research on the history of Norway and to spread
42
Arne Bugge Amundsen
knowledge of “our people’s living conditions and development” and thus to
arouse and reinforce national sentiment (Aall 1920:75f.).
The invitation was accompanied by a lengthy printed text written by Professor Moltke Moe. At the 25th anniversary in 1919 Hans Aall himself declared that it was still “the best that has been said about the significance of
the folk museum”. In other contexts too, Aall referred to or cited Moltke
Moe when he had to justify and explain the tasks and methods of the Folkemuseum and all other museums of cultural history: the crucial thing was to
create an all-round picture of the past, of nature in Norway, and of what was
Norwegian.
It was also Hans Aall who managed and described the history of the
Norsk Folkemuseum as long as he lived. An important element in Aall’s account of the history was to inscribe the establishment of the Norsk Folkemuseum as part of the protracted effort to found a national museum of cultural history in Norway. Aall referred here in particular to the first initiatives
taken by the university professors Ludvig Kristensen Daa and Yngvar
Nielsen in the 1870s and 1880s, even though their work achieved no result
(Hegard 1994:10). Aall also emphasized how, in central Norwegian towns
like Bergen, Trondhjem, and Lillehammer from the 1890s, there were initiatives to establish regional museums of cultural history. Hans Aall inscribed himself in this part of museum history too. He constantly returned
to how he was engaged by the Nordenfjeldske Museum of Decorative Arts
in Trondhjem in the years 1893–1894 to collect and exhibit folk art. The
idea behind this collection was based on the programme established in 1877
through the foundation of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Kristiania,
namely, to collect aesthetically valuable objects that could inspire artists and
craftsmen and give the public a better understanding of aesthetic values (Hegard 1994:33ff.).
Hans Aall portrayed his involvement in Trondhjem as an important
breakthrough in his development as a museum man: during his collecting
tour in 1894 he became convinced that it was not right just to collect “what
was considered nice and to ignore all the other things that belonged to the
old life, on weekdays and Sundays, outdoors and indoors”. At the same
time, he became properly acquainted with the scope and magnificence of
Artur Hazelius’s open-air museum Skansen in Stockholm. Aall himself said
that this was where he got the idea of building up a national museum of cultural history in the Norwegian capital (Aall 1920:1f.).
In his accounts of the development of the Norsk Folkemuseum and comparable museums in Norway, Aall emphasized that it was a success story.
This was true in particular of his own museum, where it was noted that, in
the time around the First World War, the number of artefacts had increased
to 27,000, which represented a doubling in ten years. In the same period the
number of buildings had risen from 10 to 37. Parallel to this, the museum
Men of Vision
43
had built up its own library and a picture collection, had drawn up collection
plans and acquired a growing number of employees (Aall 1915). Moreover,
Hans Aall was a system builder in the museum field. A central expression
of this was one of his foundational works, a general handbook of collecting
and ordering for museums of cultural history. The book was based on his
own experiences at the Norsk Folkemuseum (Aall 1925).
In this book Aall places not only the Norsk Folkemuseum but all the museums of cultural history in Norway as an organized institutional landscape
which together would create an understanding of national life and lay the
foundation for the continued development of national culture. He pointed out
that these local museums did not need to be scholarly as regards the staff or
the structure, as long as they presented “an honest old home”. Then it would
be possible to build up an understanding of the value of local cultural development and thus also of the national: “And now, when distances no longer
matter, and new cultural currents pour in like a flood over the countryside […]
the local museums will help the rural people to dam this flood, to tame it and
reshape it into forces in the service of Norwegian life” (Aall 1925:9).
What Aall called “the central museums”, meaning museums located in
the bigger towns of Norway, would have a more comprehensive part to play
than this. By definition these museums were situated in the national “cultural centres”, where many people lived and there were many visitors, and “a
relatively large proportion of people engaged in the work of the mind, precisely those who have great influence on development throughout the country and who must feel secure on home ground, so that they can benefit from
foreign cultural currents without being knocked over by tidal waves”. The
scholarly side of these museums meant that it would be possible to share the
task of research on the different regional cultures. However, all the central
museums would display the entire national culture to their audiences (Aall
1925:11).
What was Norwegian according to Hans Aall? For him the relevant artefacts exhibited in a Norwegian museum of cultural history would be anything that had been used in Norway, even if it was directly or indirectly of
foreign origin. And “by culture we understand here everything, from primitive tool culture to the highest art culture” (Aall 1925:13). The Norwegian,
in other words, was an extensive and inclusive entity, but it also had different levels and forms of expression. This assessment was clearly linked to
Aall’s view of the tasks of museums of cultural history and of what was national cultural history.
What Kind of Cultural History?
What kind of cultural history did the Norsk Folkemuseum and Hans Aall
wish to exhibit? If we follow Aall’s line of thought from the museum’s first
44
Arne Bugge Amundsen
decade, the public exhibitions would be in keeping with a modern scholarly
understanding, but they would not be a part of any actual scholarly discussion. The museum’s exhibitions were meant to inform rather than problematize.
This view has distinct parallels in the scholarly and museological discussion that was carried on both in Sweden and in Norway in the 1880s–1890s
about cultural history as a field and as a science. The question that was particularly burning concerned the relationship between cultural history and
political history. There was broad agreement, however, that cultural history
was a field of knowledge dealing with people and their lives, preferably with
a comparative perspective (cf. Hillström 2006:49ff., 233f.). It is probably
correct to see Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) philosophy of history
and culture an important premise for ideas about cultural history: it is a history that displays variation along the axes of time and place, and the forms
of culture must be studied on the basis of their individual and specific conditions (Pedersen 2010:53). For several years the Danish historian Troels
Lund (1840–1922) had been publishing his volumes about everyday life in
the Nordic countries in the early modern period, and in 1894 he presented a
programmatic account of what distinguished cultural history as a discipline
and a field of knowledge. In the same period, similar ideas gained support
from authors and scholars in Norway (Kjellberg 1945:5; Christiansen 2000:
49ff, 64ff). What these representatives had in common was a conception of
the relationship between nationality, ethnicity, and history, often with the
emphasis on the interaction between the external circumstances of culture,
in the form of nature and landscape with all their forms and fluctuations.
For Aall cultural history was about finding the parameters by which the
exhibited material could be classified. The given point of departure was that
the Norsk Folkemuseum should present Norwegian cultural history in the
period from the Reformation in the sixteenth century to the recent past. Aall
then goes on to distinguish two “Norwegian cultural histories”, that of the
towns and that of the countryside. They were to be exhibited separately,
each with its own representation and its own place in the museum. In addition there was what can best be called a functional or thematic parameter,
namely, “the systematic department” of the museum. Here the public would
find objects classified according to their use or function. The main categories were landscape and history, house and home, trade and craft, community life, social customs, religious memories, and transport. This list of
topics was not far from the arrangement applied by Troels-Lund in his work
on Nordic cultural history.
In the category “memories of urban culture” Aall believed that it was the
chronological dimension that was the most important parameter. From a
closer look at his classification,5 we see that in practice it is based on variations of the art-historical understanding of periods that prevailed at the time.
Men of Vision
45
In this way urban culture was primarily evaluated in terms of its stylistic
connotations as a specific academic discipline dated and defined them. This
of course made it possible to present contrasts and innovations in the exhibitions, but in practice this was a parameter that depicted the aesthetic development of urban culture until around 1850 (Aall 1925:30).
“Cultural monuments from the rural district associations and the more urban-influenced rural districts” are given a somewhat different treatment in
Aall’s presentation. Here too the chronological dimension is an important
premise, but only up to the eighteenth century. Aall goes on to point out that
“the local character” increasingly made itself felt, and the museum exhibition should switch to a topographical parameter: each cultural area was to
be treated separately.
What Hans Aall calls “the systematic collections”, on the other hand,
were supposed to have a different character. Here it was the function or
meaning of the objects that would determine how they were displayed in the
museum’s exhibitions. What is called “landscape and history” in Aall’s system is in practice just a category for paintings and illustrations of landscape
and particularly important historical personages. “Trade”, “community
life”, and “transport” are categories for techniques, crafts, and aesthetics or
for artefacts associated with various occupations and functions in the towns
and in the countryside. “Religious memories” are also an interesting category in Hans Aall’s system. Here it is a kind of “primordial folk culture” that
dictates the premises: everyday life was to be represented in the collections
by various examples of “superstition” and magical acts, then by “annual
feasts” and “special occasions in the life cycle”, while the church and its associated customs would be displayed with the aid of church fixtures and objects from cemeteries and graves. With the exception of the church fixtures
and grave memorials, the exhibition category of “religious memories” cannot be placed in relation to historical time and place – it exists solely in the
mythical antiquity of the national folk culture.
In other words, a museum of cultural history should not give a total presentation of the national history, its different periods or processes of change,
but should instead consist of a series of “pictures of culture” divided by
place, time, material variation, and different classes or social groups. Urban
culture was portrayed as “one”, whereas rural culture represented the principles of synchronic variation. In the so-called systematic collections there
is a hint of what people at the time would presumably have perceived as
“real history”, that is, presentations of important historical events and persons. But this is given a subordinate place. Instead it is the “pictures of culture” that set the standard and give meaning to the exhibitions: they are supposed to convey genuine impressions of homes and aesthetics in urban and
rural culture. The dynamic parameters are not, for example, modernization,
national independence, economic crises, or political changes, but locally
46
Arne Bugge Amundsen
rooted variation, town and country, the peasantry, the bourgeoisie, and officialdom, or aesthetics and technology.
Hans Aall devotes considerable attention to the techniques and philosophy of the exhibition. The main principle was that the exhibitions should not
be overloaded with objects, so that the visitors would not be fatigued. On the
other hand, it was Aall’s experience that there was considerable potential in
letting the public acquire knowledge and experience by meeting the individual objects.
It was a central idea for Hans Aall at an early stage to separate the collections of artefacts and buildings from the different districts topographically
and spread them around the constructed museum landscape. In 1919 the
Norwegian districts of Hallingdal, Numedal, Gudbrandsdalen, Telemarken,
Østerdalen, and Setesdal were represented. For this purpose Aall launched
what he called “the 15-farmstead plan”. The plan was that all the buildings
the museum had collected from different districts in Norway – they numbered between 80 and 90 – should not just be perceived as individual old
buildings, but should be linked to each other in form of yards or farmsteads
(tun), so that the functional link between the buildings and the distinctive regional character of the farmsteads would be clear to visitors. Only when this
totality was clearly presented would “the old life” be displayed to the full,
according to Aall (Aall n.d.).
In contrast, exhibitions of the culture of the towns and of public officials
were first assembled in separate exhibition buildings. This was not changed
until the time around the First World War. In a new appeal from the museum
in November 1915, donors were asked to support the establishment of a new
fund to finance the construction of a collection of urban houses and settings.
The appeal declared that the Norsk Folkemuseum had hitherto concentrated
on collecting and exhibiting buildings from rural settings because they were
often most seriously threatened by destruction or demolition and because
they represented relatively simple challenges as regards re-erection and restoration. But it was now the turn of the buildings representing urban culture.
Before the appeal was issued, the Norwegian Central Bank had donated an
old craftsman’s house with the address Toldbodgaten 14 in Kristiania, together with financial support to re-erect the building in the museum grounds
on Bygdøy. This generated plans for a more systematic collection of urban
buildings in an area that would be called “The Old Town”, a name that of
course reflected that old town houses would stand there, but it also alluded
to a specific neighbourhood in Kristiania that was particularly threatened by
modernization and the demolition of old buildings (Aall 1920:80f). The plan
was to construct an entire little town with old urban buildings assembled
from different parts of the country.
In this way Hans Aall realized his plan and his understanding of Norwegian cultural history as an inclusive project. Officialdom, townspeople, and
Men of Vision
47
peasants all had their defined part of this cultural history. The “pictures of
cultural history” were to be presented to the public as part of a greater national whole.
The “Second Founder” – Moltke Moe
Hans Aall’s presentations were nevertheless fairly pragmatic, closely tied to
museum practice. He wanted to find good answers to the question of what a
Norwegian folk museum should collect, how the exhibitions should be built
up, and how to interest the public. As for the museum’s historical and culture-historical position, there was another man with a more central position
in the early history of the Norsk Folkemuseum: Moltke Moe. He was among
those who signed the appeal for the establishment of the museum in 1894,
and since 1886 he had been Norway’s first professor of folklore and dialects.
He was the son of one of the central actors in the collection and literary presentation of Norwegian folk traditions in the nineteenth century, the theologian, clergyman, and bishop Jørgen Moe (1813–1882). In politics he was
radical, and he was a central figure in the so-called Lysaker circle of authors,
artists, and academics who wanted to build a Norwegian identity based on
folk culture, folk speech, and democratic principles (Stenseth 2000; Eriksen
2009:79f.). Through his origin, his academic position, and his network he
administered “Norwegian folk culture” as it was understood and interpreted
in the latter part of the nineteenth century (Fløtra 1995; Amundsen 1999).
Using him as his central ideologist was evidently a deliberate choice on
Hans Aall’s part.
It was Moltke Moe who in 1894 wrote the Norsk Folkemuseum’s ideological programme, a text that followed the appeal for the foundation of the
museum. Moe’s arguments were intended to justify and promote the establishment of a Norwegian folk museum. The text has an orientation that includes philosophy of history, aesthetics, and epistemology, even though it is
written in a relatively simple form to appeal to everyone (reprinted in Aall
1920:3–5; cf. Eriksen 2009:76ff.). Moe’s major statement is that “the Norwegian people” have always had an interest in history and that “bygone life
and history have always had an intrinsic ability to grasp the senses”. Here
we can already see that the link between past and present has “the fatherland” as its given context: the past grasps the senses and creates understanding.
What is supposed to be understood is amplified by Moltke Moe as “the
inner history”, how people in Norway have lived. And this inner history has
a morality and it has a topology: “our fathers” have struggled against a harsh
nature, they have tilled the soil, used the resources of the sea, pursued trade
and craft, and they have had a “spiritual life” (åndsliv), they have thought
and believed, in everyday life and on special occasions.
48
Arne Bugge Amundsen
The whole of this variety of human experience, struggle, and interpretation in the past is what creates identification in the present, according to
Moltke Moe: “For in every single such feature of our fathers’ life and cultural history we see parallels or counterparts to our own life and our own living conditions.” This parallelism and this differentness creates understanding – of how the distinctiveness of the Norwegian people came about, for
better or worse. “And the more we understand, the more our national sentiment grows and strengthens.”
In Moltke Moe’s interpretation a Norwegian folk museum would help to
sharpen and profile this historically based national culture formation. For
Moe the idea is that a Norwegian folk museum not only tells people things
but also allows them more concretely to see and touch objects from the
shared national past, with the result that the details and the whole in both the
past and the present will stand out more clearly. This holistic experience is
mediated through a combination of authenticity and systematics. The scientifically based recreation of the past has a value in itself – a university professor could not say anything else, of course – but the main thing for a Norwegian folk museum was that it should serve to educate “all strata of our
people”. In other words, there is a democratic element in the educational
programme of the folk museum.
Moltke Moe constantly alternates between the interpreting expert (the
professor) and an acting and experiencing “we”. His academic knowledge
lends legitimacy to the project and to the way a Norwegian folk museum is
supposed to function, but at the same time it is an essential condition that
there is a something called “our people”, who despite their cultural and social differences can be educated and shaped towards “national sentiment and
a shared spiritual life”.
The dynamic link between present-day experience and the material survivals that a Norwegian folk museum was supposed to collect was everything that was in danger of disappearing or falling into oblivion. On the one
hand “the Norwegian people”, according to Moe, had always been concerned with their history, but now they were living in a time when memories
of the past were disappearing, and at a steadily increasing tempo. A Norwegian folk museum would therefore be an arena and a medium to compensate
for the accelerating oblivion or the logic of change: “The old legends and
ballads are increasingly disappearing, with every old woman that is buried.
And the visible memories of an old culture are no less at risk: every railway
and every new highway that paves the way into our closed valleys, and indeed almost every tourist who visits our country takes with him one piece
after the other of this vanishing culture.” Here the focus is on the people, the
rural districts, what is changing most quickly. The towns and the class of
state officials are marginal in the dynamic of the account.
The same idea can be found in Moltke Moe in an article he published in
Men of Vision
49
1909. Here it is the issue of the national language that is at the centre, but
throughout the article we see the tension in Norway between the ordinary
people and the elites in the country: “It has been our misfortune, both in the
union policy and in the whole of our inner life, that there has not been a lively, sensitive contact between the people and those who were born as spokesmen for the nation, far too little shared vision and emotion; it was often as
if there was no umbilical cord connecting them. […] The reason, the main
reason by far, is that the two parts of the nation have derived their nourishment from very different sources – the intelligentsia predominantly from
foreign founts of culture.” And what did Moltke Moe see as the solution?
His answer was “full knowledge of the other side […] As European culture
must be an essential constituent of the national, the national must likewise
be an equally essential part of the highest education.” At the same time, Moe
displayed a clear bias towards rural Norwegian culture, where he felt that
one could find “an assured, harmonious beauty that one rarely encounters in
urban culture” (Moe 1926:255f).
This logic, in turn, has several elements, again according to Moltke Moe.
The oblivion was due in some measure to the fact that objects of the national
memory had long since been sent abroad – to Denmark before 1814, to Sweden, especially inspired by Artur Hazelius and his idea of a Nordic folk museum. Oblivion could also be due to (foreign) collectors. Both Moe and
other contemporaries described the antique dealers of the time in rather
negative terms: they accumulated objects of national historical value, but
they were simultaneously instruments for a process that, because of the
economic logic of the collectors’ market, sent more and more objects of
Norwegian culture out of the country.
For Moltke Moe a Norwegian folk museum is therefore an institution
with a series of more or less parallel dynamic movements. The museum
would not have been necessary if the increasing changes and modernization
had not threatened the collective national formation and memory. But because the Norwegian people’s formation project was not yet completed, a
Norwegian folk museum could be a good instrument to achieve the goals of
a project like this. The relationship with the union nation of Sweden was
also a motive here. For Moltke Moe the Swedish-initiated Nordiska Museet
in Stockholm was both a positive and a negative reference for the establishment of a Norwegian folk museum. The Nordiska Museet was a fine model,
but its practice represented an opposing power in relation to the establishment of the Norwegian one, because it tried to create an image of a cultural
unity between the two nations that was problematic and prevented the development of a museum presenting what was distinctively Norwegian.
Moltke Moe’s role as the chief ideologist of the Norsk Folkemuseum did
not end in 1894. When the museum moved to Bygdøy in 1902, several
speeches were held during the opening ceremony. The man who had the
50
Arne Bugge Amundsen
honour to describe the idea and history of the museum was Moltke Moe. In
his speech he repeated, in briefer form, much of what had been said in the
appeal that he had composed eight years earlier. But he was more forceful
than he had been then when he also countered any critics who claimed that
a Norwegian folk museum could be chauvinistic and isolationist. Moe declared that when the Norwegian people gained a “feeling of belonging together with each other and with the past”, they would “also gain the confidence to continue on their own paths, as their forefathers did on theirs. The
folk museum is a museum of the people. But our Norwegian culture is also
a part of world culture, constantly influenced by it.” This perspective also
had to be included in an exhibition of cultural history. “The trick is to blend
the foreign with one’s own, assimilating it, reshaping it to suit one’s own
personality. Assimilate, not borrow. We ourselves shall be judged by what
we have created,” Moltke Moe ended his speech (Aall 1920:8).
Aall and Moe
Where was Hans Aall in all this? He was no doubt mostly the organizer and
inspirer, and in every way a figure who stood out in public as the founder of
the Norsk Folkemuseum. At the same time, however, he knew how to use
the national actors of the time – central professors such as Gustav Storm and
Moltke Moe, who both positioned themselves towards the national left, and
more conservative figures such as Professor Yngvar Nielsen, who was inscribed in the important prior history of the foundation of a Norwegian folk
museum. Aall thus embraced both political wings in an increasingly polarized Norwegian landscape. But every time Hans Aall tried to explain the
ideas on which the Norsk Folkemuseum was founded, it was Moltke Moe’s
text from 1894 that he referred to or cited.
The reasons for this close relationship between Moltke Moe and Hans
Aall were numerous and complicated, and they went back much further in
time than 1894. Moe had a close friendship with the Aall family, and already
in 1887 the 18-year-old Hans Aall had gone on a “collecting trip” with Moe.
Another such journey came about in 1891, when Moe formally engaged
Aall to collect folk traditions in Telemarken. This effort yielded a massive
collection comprising most of the important genres of folklore. Another
such trip was carried out in 1892 with the aid of a government grant (Hegard
1994:24f, 31f). Through his collaboration with Moltke Moe, Hans Aall must
have acquired an understanding of the non-material side of Norwegian folk
culture, and he must obviously also have come close to the charismatic Moe
in the positive assessment of this folk culture. There is a great deal to suggest that Hans Aall viewed himself as the museum counterpart to Moltke
Moe’s many years of work as the scholarly collector of folk tradition and
folk culture.
Men of Vision
51
At the same time, Hans Aall preached his own museological revivalism,
whose form and connotations closely resemble what was formulated by
Artur Hazelius in 1900: It was the encounter with a folk culture that was
rapidly disappearing, especially the vernacular architecture and the material
culture, which had ignited a fire in him – the work for a museum of cultural
history is a national rescue operation that requires individual sacrifice and a
conviction; it is a calling.6
Yet on this point too he was also under Moltke Moe’s wings from an early
age, learning much of his collecting philosophy from him. They shared the
same rhetoric that was connected to the old calling of cultural history: it was
essential to rescue and protect what was old and authentic and in danger of
disappearing from the collective memory because of accelerating modernization. The calling was a project to create monuments to the Norway that
was vanishing and that ought to be a lasting memento for the present and the
future.
It is clear how important this was for Hans Aall when we see how Moltke
Moe’s appeal from 1894 is repeated verbatim as the introduction to the first
printed guide for visitors to the Norsk Folkemuseum, published in 1902. In
this text, however, there is also an important addition, evidently written by
Hans Aall himself: “It is a matter of raising a monument to our people’s
growth in culture and the development of our nationality, a monument to the
culture of the towns and the upper circles as well as to our peasant culture.”
This is amplified when the text goes on to play on the theme of Moltke
Moe’s ideal “all-round picture” that the Norsk Folkemuseum wished to present to the public. Much of this was still only at the planning stage: the buildings of the peasant aristocracy and those of the small, forgotten conservative
valleys alike had to be included, and the same applied to areas characterized
by the culture of officialdom and “the more cosmopolitan character of the
coastal population”, the urban life of the rich and the artisans, and the aesthetic of the churches (Norsk Folkemuseum 1902:1ff). This does not gel
with the traditional picture that tends to be painted of the open-air museums
of cultural history, which are claimed to have had a one-sided emphasis on
the material culture of inland Norway exhibited as the symbol of national
identity (e.g. Pedersen 2010:54).
Inscribing the Urban at a Norwegian Folk Museum
Through the analysis of Hans Aall and Moltke Moe and their positions in
the establishment of the Norsk Folkemuseum from 1894 onwards, it is quite
easy to answer the question posed at the start of this article: the Norsk Folkemuseum was never intended as, nor was it designed as, a monument or a representation of the national understood as Norwegian peasant culture, rural
culture, or inland culture.
52
Arne Bugge Amundsen
On the other hand, the analysis has shown that the positions were complex and negotiable in quite a different way. As such, the Norsk Folkemuseum illustrates through the positions of Aall and Moe that the national museums functioned as central arenas for negotiating the representations of national history. This arena has an obvious (culture-)political dimension, and
it led to a close link between (scientific) knowledge and politics in the time
around 1900 (cf. Aronsson 2010:344f).
When it comes to the scholarly justification for the Norsk Folkemuseum,
it must be said that Hans Aall himself was not active as a scholarly writer,
and he constantly referred to his own inadequacy in this respect. Yet he was
concerned that the museum work should have a scholarly basis. For Aall this
scholarly character was connected to “the development of material culture”,
which also included “customs, traditions, and superstitions in bygone
times”. In practice a museum could only present a section of the development of culture, for instance by concentrating on a particular period, a geographically defined area – from the local via the regional to the national
(Aall 1925:7f). In this perspective it was important for Aall to leave the
scholarly legitimation of the museum work to others, on both the programmatic and the practical level. Here, for example, Moltke Moe had a crucial
function for the good strategist Hans Aall.
At the same time, cultural politics was crucial for the museum strategy.
In the 1890s the question of Norwegian national identity was linked to major
political controversies. Being able to agree on the opinion that agrarian culture and folk culture were an important premise for creating national symbols and representations did not prevent these symbols and representations
from being politicized. After the introduction of the parliamentary system
through a constitutional revolution in the Norwegian Stortinget in 1884, the
social classes positioned themselves differently. The peasants and the parliamentary majority outlined a radical, anti-Danish, and anti-Swedish cultural policy. One major focus of this was “folk culture”, and Moltke Moe became an important spokesman for this policy as regards both the meaning of
“Norwegian folk culture” and the development of a distinct national language. Control of the ideology of what was “genuinely Norwegian” thus became highly politicized, and definitely not a force to unify the national
across political divisions.
This represented a dual problem: most actors, irrespective of their political position, believed that the development of something specifically Norwegian required detaching oneself from everything Danish and – to some
extent – Swedish, and coming closer to a distinctive Norway, envisaged as
something other than Denmark (and Sweden). Before 1884 the people mediating this dual movement had been the educated elite of state officials and
the urban bourgeoisie. These were social groups that were marginalized and
problematized in 1884.
Men of Vision
53
In social and cultural terms Hans Aall belonged to this group. He nevertheless wanted to be a player in the field of cultural politics. His strategic
choice to forge alliances with both radical and conservative actors shows
that he was trying to find a via media into the politicized field. His museum
project embraced all the social classes in Norwegian history, and at the same
time he developed different systems for presenting these classes in the form
of museum exhibitions. The material objects associated with the towns and
with officialdom became bearers of a historical chronology, while peasant
culture was presented as a cultural variation of the national.
Two positions appear to have determined the success of Hans Aall’s museum project. One involved presenting the idea for a Norwegian folk museum as a scholarly one; this was where Moltke Moe played a crucial part,
admittedly together with other representatives of Norway academia. Extensive discussions of the relationship between collecting, scientificness, and
exhibition systematics was nothing new, and the questions about what this
relationship actually entailed had followed the development of the open-air
museum and the “folk museum” throughout the latter part of the nineteenth
century.7 Hans Aall’s solution was to let a political radical like Professor
Moltke Moe present the museum ideology through the pen, while he himself
simultaneously engaged academics of differing political colour in the project.
For cultural politics, however, “the national” was a conflict-ridden field
in Norway in the 1890s. Here too Hans Aall chose a via media. He was able
to use Moltke Moe’s scholarly authority to justify the importance of a Norwegian folk museum as an important project. He simultaneously allowed
both elite cultures and folk culture to stand as national representations.
When read critically, Aall’s plans for the Norsk Folkemuseum present the
elite cultures as the most important for creating a national history, while folk
culture or peasant culture stand for “the primitive” and for variation in culture. But what brought all this together into a greater national whole was the
aesthetic dimension. The “pictures of culture” would give the public an idea
of how nature, living conditions, and historical events had shaped the nation’s representatives and their aesthetic expression in different ways.
This aestheticization – which in political terms must be defined as bourgeois and elitist – made it possible for the Norsk Folkemuseum to function
as a unifying national force. In Hans Aall’s project, the Norwegian national
culture was depoliticized and made into something natural through the museum practice and the way it was organized by region, as also happened at
other open-air museums in this period (cf. Amundsen 2010). The aestheticization was intended to interpret and present an assumed national totality,
which it would communicate against all the conflicts, tensions, and the political dimensions of social differences that were the most important theme
of Norwegian cultural politics around 1900. The Norsk Folkemuseum thus
54
Arne Bugge Amundsen
became a project for cultural unity, which would convey “the Norwegian”
to everyone in an aesthetic whole. The aestheticization allowed for dissimilarity and differentness, for inclusion and comparison, but it closed the
door to political conflict and social struggle.
(Translated by Alan Crozier)
Arne Bugge Amundsen, dr.philos.
Professor of Cultural History
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages
University of Oslo
P.O. Box 1010, Blindern
NO-0315 Oslo
Norway
References
Aall, Hans 1915: Norsk Folkemuseum og dets arbeide i de nærmeste aar. Kristiania:
Norsk Folkemuseum.
Aall, Hans 1920: Norsk Folkemuseum 1894–1919. Trekk av dets historie. Kristiania:
Kirstes boktrykkeri.
Aall, Hans 1925: Arbeide og ordning i kulturhistoriske museer. Kort veiledning. Oslo: Norske museers landsforbund.
Aall, Hans n.d. [1945?]: Norsk Folkemuseum. To viktige ting som stiller alt annet i
skyggen. Oslo: Norsk Folkemuseum.
Amundsen, Arne Bugge 1999: Drømmesyner, eventyr og nasjonalkultur. Norge
anno 1900, ed. Bjarne Rogan. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Amundsen, Arne Bugge 2010: Museet i fortellingsperspektiv. Sted, rom og fortellingsunivers. Samling og museum. Kapitler av museenes historie, praksis og
ideologi, ed. Bjarne Rogan & Arne Bugge Amundsen. Oslo: Novus forlag.
Amundsen, Arne Bugge 2011: National Museums in Norway. Building National
Museums in Europe 1750-2010, ed. Peter Aronsson & Gabriella Elgenius.
Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press.
Amundsen, Arne Bugge in print: Kulturhistorie og kulturforståelse hos P. A. Munch
(article).
Andersen, Haakon With et al. 2009: Aemula Lauri. The Royal Norwegian Society of
Sciences and Letters, 1760–2010. Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications.
Aronsson, Peter 2010: Europeiska nationalmuseer som förhandlingsarenor. Samling
og museum. Kapitler av museenes historie, praksis og ideologi, ed. Bjarne Rogan
& Arne Bugge Amundsen. Oslo: Novus forlag.
Bergstøl, Jostein et al. (eds.) 2004: Kulturhistorier i sentrum: Historisk museum 100
år. Oslo: Kulturhistorisk Museum.
Christiansen, Palle Ove 2000: Kulturhistorie som opposition. Træk af forskellige
fagtraditioner. København: Samlerens forlag.
Eriksen, Anne 2009: Museum. En kulturhistorie. Oslo: Pax forlag.
Men of Vision
55
Fløtra, Jorunn 1995: Moltke Moe som folklorist. (Norsk Folkeminnelags skrifter
140.) Oslo: Norsk Folkeminnelag.
Glambek, Ingeborg 2010: Kunstindustrimuseer og den kunstindustrielle bevegelse.
Samling og museum. Kapitler av museenes historie, praksis og ideologi, ed.
Bjarne Rogan & Arne Bugge Amundsen. Oslo: Novus forlag.
Haavardsholm, Jørgen 2004: Vikingtiden som 1800-tallskonstruksjon. Avhandling
for graden dr. art. Oslo: Unipub forlag.
Hegard, Tonte 1984: Romantikk og fortidsvern. Historien om de første friluftsmuseene i Norge. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Hegard, Tonte 1994: Hans Aall – mannen, visjonen og verket. Oslo (Norsk Folkemuseum).
Hillström, Magdalena 2006: Ansvaret för kulturarvet. Studier i det kulturhistoriska
museiväsendets formering med särskild inriktning på Nordiska museets etablering 1872–1919. (Linköping Studies in Arts and Science No. 363). Linköping:
Linköping University.
Hodne, Bjarne 2002: Norsk nasjonalkultur. En kulturpolitisk oversikt. Second edition. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Hodne, Ørnulf 1994: Det nasjonale hos norske folklorister på 1800-tallet. (KULTs
skriftserie 24). Oslo: Norges Forskningsråd.
Kjellberg, Reidar 1945: Et halvt århundre. Norsk Folkemuseum 1894–1944. Oslo:
Johan Grundt Tanum.
Kjus, Audun 2003: Sitt fedrelands Herodot. P.A. Munch og det norske folks historie.
(Norsk Folkeminnelags skrifter 154.) Oslo: Norsk Folkeminnelag.
Moe, Moltke 1926: Nationalitet og kultur. Moltke Moes samlede skrifter II, ed. Knut
Liestøl. (Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning. Serie B: Skrifter VI.)
Oslo: Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning.
Norsk Folkemuseum 1902: Norsk Folkemuseum. Illustreret fører og beskrivelse.
Kristiania: S.M. Brydes bogtrykkeri.
Norsk folkemuseum 1978: By og bygd. Norsk Folkemuseums årbok 1977, vol. 26,
Oslo, Norsk Folkemuseum.
Pedersen, Ragnar 2010: De norske museene får sin form. Utviklingen 1830–1950.
Samling og museum. Kapitler av museenes historie, praksis og ideologi, ed.
Bjarne Rogan & Arne Bugge Amundsen. Oslo: Novus forlag.
Rentzhog, Sten 2007: Friluftsmuseerna. En skandinavisk idé erövrar världen.
Stockholm: Carlssons.
Sandvig, Anders 2001 (1943): I praksis og på samlerferd. Lillehammer: Maihaugen.
Shetelig, Haakon 1944: Norske museers historie. Oslo: J.W. Cappelens forlag.
Sørensen, Øystein (ed.) 1998: Jakten på det norske. Perspektiver på utviklingen av
en norsk nasjonal identitet på 1800-tallet. (KULT-serien 13.) Oslo: Ad Notam
Gyldendal.
Stenseth, Bodil 2000: En norsk elite. Nasjonsbyggerne på Lysaker 1890–1940. Oslo: Aschehoug.
Tschudi-Madsen, Stephan (ed.) 1993: På nordmanns vis. Norsk folkemuseum gjennom 100 år. Oslo: Aschehoug.
This part of the article is also closely related to my participation in the EU project EuNaMus,
European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen,
see http://www.eunamus.eu/.
1
56
Arne Bugge Amundsen
For a general introduction, see Hodne 2002.
This is the official English name of the society, Det Kongelige Selskab for Norges Vel, established in 1809; a more historically correct translation might be the Royal Society for the Benefit
of Norway.
4
E.g. Kjus 2003 on the central Norwegian historian Peter Andreas Munch.
5
In reality this system was designed by the art historian Henrik Grevenor (1896–1937), who in
the period 1918–1928 was linked to the Norsk Folkemuseum as a research assistant and conservator. At the museum he mounted a series of separate exhibitions of Norwegian decorative
arts and painting; see Aall 1925:29.
6
Hazelius retold the story of his “revival” in his history of the first 25 years of the Nordiska
Museet (published in 1900), Hillström 2006:211ff. He had already told it orally for many years.
The parallel to Aall is obvious: he too told of the “revival” in the history of the first 25 years of
the Norsk Folkemuseum, Aall 1920:1f. It is also reprinted in the history of the museum written
by his successor, Reidar Kjellberg, in 1945 (Kjellberg 1945:1f.).
7
There is a good account of this as regards the growth of the Nordiska Museet in Hillström
2006:196ff.
2
3
Northern Borderlands and the Aesthetics of Ethnicity
57
Northern Borderlands and the Aesthetics
of Ethnicity
Intervisuality and the Representations of the Sami in Early Exhibitions at National Cultural Museums in Norway and Sweden
Silje Opdahl Mathisen
This article1 examines how Sami culture and history have been represented
in the earliest exhibitions at majority museums2 in Norway and Sweden. I
focus on three museums in particular, namely the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm,3 the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Oslo,4 and the Norsk
Folkemuseum (The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History) located at
Bygdøy, Oslo.5 I look at similarities and differences in the early museological representations of the Sami in Norway and Sweden.
I draw upon the concept of intervisuality, coined by Nicholas Mirzoeff
(2000), in order to discuss how some material objects have become an almost iconic representation of Sami culture. These icons show a remarkable
persistence of ideological perceptions over time and space, and can be found
in exhibitions in both majority museums and Sami museums. Whilst some
of the material representation of Sami culture remains much the same at
both majority and Sami museums, the significance of these representations
changes as the context and narrative change.
Intervisuality, in my opinion, provides novel approaches to analyse how
such icons or material representations are borrowed, cited from and rearranged in different exhibitions. Intervisuality can be seen as the visual
counterpart to intertextuality. It refers to the ways in which visual images
build upon and develop from previous images, in much the same way as
texts build upon, refer to and play upon other texts. Icons such as the Lappish equipage may, therefore, be seen as material signs that have been used
in different exhibitions in the majority museums and in the Sami museums.
A Brief Presentation of the Sami
The Sami are an indigenous people and an ethnic minority living in northern
Scandinavia, Finland and Russia. They have their own territory, languages,
58
culture and history, characteristics which set them apart from the majority
populations. The area that has traditionally been populated by the Sami is
called Sápmi. This area does not have a clearly defined territory with precise
borders and its size has varied throughout history. In the course of history,
Sápmi has been subsumed by four states: Norway, Sweden, Finland and
Russia. The total number of Sami today is estimated to be at least 80,000
(http://www.sami-statistics.info/default.asp?nc=2807&id=110, accessed 10
May 2011). The majority of the Sami population live in Norway. The Sami
traditionally made their livelihood from hunting, trapping, fishing and reindeer herding. Today the Sami can be found in most walks of life, occupying
a range of professions. It must be noted then that even though the Sami
people share many common traits they are not a homogeneous group. Differences in livelihood, language and their differing relationships to the
various national states and the majority population of those national states
have shaped them in different ways. Until recently the history of the Sami
has been told by people from outside the Sami culture. It is a history of “the
other”. The last 50 years or so have seen a change in perspective. The history
of the Sami is now often told as a story of oppression and exploitation, leading to an ethno-political awakening in the twentieth century (see for example Ojala 2009:82–102).
The Sami as “the Internal Other”
The current exhibition “Sami Culture” at the Norsk Folkemuseum opens
with the words of the famous Sami author Johan Turi (1854–1936), who
claims that “he has never heard that the Sami came from somewhere else”,
meaning that the Sami are not an occupying people from elsewhere but instead belong to the land where they live. Perceptions of the origins of the
Sami have changed over time, and these changes reflect shifting political
and scientific views of so-called “primitive” peoples. The archaeologist
Cathrine Baglo has described how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century the view of the origin of the Sami changed. The Sami were first perceived as “the indigenous other”, the remains of the first people to inhabit
the land after the ice retracted. Later they were seen as “the Arctic other”, as
part of a cultural dualism in the Stone Age where the other part consisted of
southern Scandinavian people. Then came the theory of “the eastern other”,
a theory that claimed that the Sami must have migrated to northern Scandinavia from northern parts of Asia. Baglo claims that these changing theories
of the Sami’s origin led to an increasingly marginalized place for the Sami
in the various national histories. As a result of the theory that the Sami had
immigrated from the east and as such were of a different nationality, the
Sami were excluded as a historical object. Instead Sami culture was studied
as an ethnographic category, as something static and unchangeable (Baglo
59
2001:55–56). These changing views on the Sami’s origins also affected the
ways in which the Sami were represented in museums.
The national museums of cultural history were founded at a time of strong
nationalistic sentiment (see for example Shetelig 1944; Lidén 1991). These
museums have therefore functioned as a source of national identity creation
and promotion. The very concept of nationalism is connected to the idea of
a nation originating from one single ethnic group. The Sami were a disruptive element to the national ideal of coinciding political, cultural and ethnic
boundaries (Hansen & Olsen 2004:19; Bergstøl 2008:7). The Sami, who traditionally lived within a region that spans over four national states, were
therefore not a part of, or at best marginalized in, the national narratives at
the historical museums. According to the historian Lars Ivar Hansen and the
archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen, Sami history and archaeology first emerged as
visible academic fields in the 1980s. Previously, the research and representation of Sami culture and history was part of ethnography (Hansen & Olsen
2004:13). Before the 1980s the Sami were only given the part of extras in
the national stories of the countries in which they lived. Swedes and Norwegians were portrayed as bearers of culture, while the Sami were portrayed
as a people closely connected to nature. A distinction was created between
Norwegian and Swedish history on the one hand and Sami ethnography on
the other, both in scientific texts and in museum representations (Hansen &
Olsen 2004:10–13). The museums visualized and naturalized this as a distinction between historical Nations with the ability to develop and change,
and indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities who were unable to change
and develop. Because the latter were perceived as static they could be analysed and exhibited without the time dimension that was deemed fundamental for historical people. If change occurred it was often linked to cultural
decay and loss of identity in the face of modernity (see Olsen 2000; Mathisen 2004).
If we compare the first exhibitions of Sami culture at the majority museums in Norway and Sweden we discover that the picture is a bit more
nuanced.6 In Norway, Sami culture was first exhibited at the Ethnographic
Museum, founded in 1853. The open-air museum Norsk Folkemuseum,
which opened in 1894, displayed only the history and culture of the Norwegian people (singular), and made no room for ethnic minorities (Pareli
2004:35).
In Sweden the picture is somewhat different. Both at the Nordiska Museet
and at the open-air museum Skansen, Sami culture was part of the exhibitions from the very beginning.7 At the Nordiska Museet, Sami culture was
exhibited with the tableaux “Autumn Migration in Lule Lappmark” as one
of six tableaux showing traditional ways of life in different parts of Sweden
(Silvén 2008:313). The historian Lars Jönses claims that the representation
of the Sami in museums played a vital part in the construction of the Swe-
60
dish territory. At the Nordiska Museet and Skansen the different scenes and
houses represented different parts of Sweden. By walking from scene to
scene at the Nordiska Museet, or from house to house at Skansen, the visitor
could experience a symbolic walk through the Swedish territory (Jönses
2008). The idea of these exhibitions was to show Sweden as a mosaic of different cultures representing different regions. In this mosaic of regions the
nomadic reindeer-herding Sami were excellent “territory markers” in the
sparsely populated north. Eva Silvén, a curator working with minority and
multicultural issues at the Nordiska Museet, draws on Lars Jönses and views
the interest in Sami culture shown by the founder of the Nordiska Museet,
Artur Hazelius, not only from a colonial perspective, as part of the hierarchical organization of modern society, but also from a geopolitical slant.
The inclusion of the Sami in Swedish cultural history could therefore be
seen as a way of asserting Sweden’s claims to the territory in the northern
regions of Sweden (Silvén 2008:313).
As mentioned earlier, the Sami were not included in the exhibitions at the
Norsk Folkemuseum. Lars Jönses interprets this as reflecting a different position for the Sami in the construction of a Norwegian nationality (Jönses
2008:57). The Norsk Folkemuseum was founded in 1894, with the intention
of collecting and exhibiting everything that shows the cultural life of the
Norwegian people. According to Leif Pareli, the curator at Norsk Folkemuseum who is responsible for the Sami collection, the Sami were probably not
even thought of as belonging to the Norwegian people at that time and, thus,
were not included in the museum’s exhibition (Pareli 2004:33). There was
a strict division between the collection and display of Sami and Norwegian
culture. Norwegian culture was displayed and collected at the Norsk Folkemuseum, and Sami culture was collected and displayed at the Ethnographic
Museum, where it was presented together with non-European peoples
(Pareli 2004:34). This division can be seen as an expression of the nation
building in the newly created nation state of Norway. Although Norway was
still in union with Sweden, there was a strong movement for independence:
to incorporate the Sami at such a time would have been disruptive. Another
reason for such a distinct division between Sami and “Norwegian” culture
was the changing views on the origins of the Sami people. The common
view of the Sami was changing from that of indigenous people to a perception of the Sami as immigrants. As Norwegian nationalism was further reinforced by the dissolution of the union with Sweden in 1905, the Sami became increasingly marginalized in Norwegian society and indeed in Norwegian national history (Pareli 2004:36).8
The first steps towards an ethnographic museum in Oslo9 were taken in
1853, following an initiative from the English ethnologist Robert Latham,
who wanted to obtain so-called “Lappish” objects for the new ethnographic
museum in London. In exchange for a Sami collection, Latham offered a
61
collection of ethnographic objects from various parts of the world. The Norwegian government paid for the purchase of Sami objects on the condition
that the University of Oslo would be given an example of each item sent to
Latham. In view of this exchange one can say that the Ethnographic Museum was actually founded upon a base of Sami objects (Bouquet 1996:
110–112). The first exhibitions opened in 1857, in the old university buildings. In 1904 the museum moved to its present location, together with several other collections belonging to the University of Oslo. The Ethnographic
Museum and the Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo must be seen as connected,
since the Sami collections were transferred from the Ethnographic Museum
to the Norsk Folkemuseum in 1951. At the time, the inclusion of Sami objects at the Norsk Folkemuseum was considered radical, and represented a
marked shift in the view of the Sami and their role in Norwegian society.
From now on the Sami were part of Norwegian culture and, hence, belonged
at the Norsk Folkemuseum, and not among the exotic collections and exhibitions at the Ethnographic Museum (Bouquet 1996:42–44).
Even though the background to the first exhibitions of Sami culture at majority museums is different in Norway and Sweden, and even though these
exhibitions took place in different types of museums, an ethnographic university museum and a privately founded museum of cultural history, the exhibitions show a remarkable similarity. Centrally staged in both exhibitions
we find what I here choose to call the Lappish equipage.10 The Lappish
equipage consisted of a stuffed reindeer pulling a sledge, together with a
life-size mannequin wearing a traditional Sami costume. At the Nordiska
Museet this equipage was part of a larger tableau called “autumn migration
in Lule Lappmark” (Figure 1). This representation, in its various forms, remained a constant in the changing exhibitions about Sami culture at the Nordiska Museet right up until the latest exhibition, Sápmi, was set up in 2007.
When the Ethnographic Museum in Oslo opened to the public in 1857 it
was housed in Domus Media at the university. The Lappish equipage was
also on display here, as it was again at the new museum that opened in 1904
(Figure 2) (Bouquet 1996:98–99; Nielsen 1911:13). After the Sami collection was transferred to the Norsk Folkemuseum, the Ethnographic Museum
exhibited Sami culture among the circumpolar peoples, as it still does today.
The Lappish equipage was also on display at the Norsk Folkemuseum, in the
exhibitions that opened in 1958, and it can still be found here, in the exhibition entitled “Sami Culture”, which opened in 1990. Thus, the Lappish
equipage has become an almost iconic representation of Sami culture. It can
be found in illustrations in early ethnographic literature about the Sami such
as Olaus Magnus’ Historia om de nordiska folken,11 first published in 1555,
and Johannes Schefferus’ Lapponia, first published 1673. As discussed
above, the Lappish equipage was present in the earliest exhibitions of Sami
culture, and can still be found in museums today.
62
Figure 1. “Autumn Migration in Lule Lappmark”. A tableau from the Nordiska museet’s
permanent exhibition at Drottninggatan, 1874. Copyright: Nordiska museet.
Figure 2. “Lap in winter costume”. From the permanent exhibition at the Ethnographic museum
in Oslo, 1911. Reproduced with the kind permission from the Museum of Cultural History,
University of Oslo.
The Emergence of Sami Museums
Museums often take a vital position in the development of indigenous
peoples’ expression of culture and history. The older exhibitions of Sami
culture at the majority museums have been criticized for giving a stereotypic
representation of the Sami. A stereotype reduces a multitude of characteristics to a few that become natural and made to look as though they are inherent properties. Europe’s representation of other cultures has been the subject
of critical debate since the end of the 1970s. It is claimed that when Western
63
stereotypes are reproduced, conceptions of race, mentality and culture are
essentialized, and that this ultimately serves to legitimize Western hegemony over others. Museums were an important contributing factor in this process. They appropriated other cultures by collecting, storing, researching
and exhibiting their perceptions of these cultures.
Over approximately the last thirty years there has been an increase in the
cultural, social and economic rights of indigenous people. The development
of the Alta-Kautokeino hydroelectric power plant and the protests against
this development in the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s was a turning
point in the Sami ethno-political movement. The emergence of a number of
Sami museums12 since the 1970s can be seen in relation to such an ethno-political process, together with an emergence of new theoretical frameworks
for understanding ethnicity and cultural variation within the disciplines of
social anthropology and sociology. This must also be seen in connection
with the emergence of post-colonialist theory, and its emphasis on the cultural and political rights of minorities. The Sami museums were created out
of a need to preserve the Sami heritage, to make Sami culture more visible,
and to strengthen Sami identity. Since the 1970s, the Sami museums have
played an important role in creating and strengthening Sami identity. These
museums are not merely a passive reflection of developments in society;
they actively take part in the creation of knowledge (Webb 2006:169).
Sami Museums as a Museological Object of Study
Sami museums are an arena where several potential problematic aspects of
the museum institution are highlighted. Questions like “Whose past? Whose
land? Whose rights to represent and be represented by?” are raised all the
time. Historically, the Sami people have been presented as the exotic
“other” in the majority museums, but what happens when the Sami make
their own exhibitions and represent themselves? Can something new
emerge from this, or is the museum institution such a hegemonic structure
that it is impossible to change its content? And how have the majority museums adapted to this new museum reality?
Sami museums are relatively new phenomena. Sweden, Finland and Russia all have one official Sami museum each. In Norway today there are
eleven Sami museums under the governance of the Norwegian Sami parliament (Andreassen 2011).
There has been little museological research carried out on Sami museums
so far, but some analyses of exhibitions at Sami museums have criticized
their exhibitions for showing a timeless and static picture of Sami culture,
and in so doing the Sami museums are in danger of reproducing old ethnographic stereotypes.
The archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen visited three Sami museums in Norway,
64
Sweden and Finland in 1998, with the purpose of finding out whether the exhibitions differed when a people who had previously been represented by
others now represented themselves. According to Olsen the exhibitions at
these museums told a story about how the real Sami culture is something that
only existed in the past, and by doing this the Sami museums are in danger of
reproducing an ethnographic stereotypical narrative (Olsen 2000:26–28).
The anthropologist Janet E. Levy has studied how seven different museums in Norway, Sweden and Finland exhibit Sami prehistory. She visited
both majority museums and Sami museums in the periods 1998–1999 and
2002. According to Levy there is a marked difference in how the majority
museums and the Sami museums represent Sami prehistory. This can have
various ideological and more pragmatic causes. Ultimately, however, it
leads to the fact that the majority museums and the Sami museums convey
different messages about Sami history and identity. Levy claims that these
differences reflect ideologies imbued in the construction of indigenous, national and pan-national identities. Some of the differences also reflect an effort to legitimize Sami claims to land and heritage (Levy 2006:135)
The archaeologist Sharon Webb has examined the ways in which the archaeological past is represented in museums. Her work included an analysis
of five Sami museums in Norway, Finland and Sweden (Webb 2006). Understandably, the Sami museums had some similarities, and Webb highlights three such common traits. First: a focus on reindeer herding and a nomadic lifestyle. Secondly: the exhibitions stress that the traditional Sami
way of life is closely connected to and in balance with nature. Third: the exhibitions are lacking in information regarding development and change over
time. The Sami are presented as a traditional people living in harmony with
nature and their culture as timeless and static. Like Olsen, Webb also claims
that because the exhibitions were lacking in information regarding change
over time, they are in danger of reproducing ethnographic stereotypes. According to her, this stereotyping was necessary at a certain period of time, in
order to rebuild and reinforce Sami identity. In this way the Sami museums
not only reflected but also negotiated and created Sami identity. The Sami
museums did this by focusing on objects that would strengthen the Sami cultural identity, and set it apart from the majority culture. Seen in this historical perspective it is understandable that the exhibitions were fairly simple
and stereotypic. Webb emphasizes the dynamic role of the museums in this
process. The museums were actively negotiating and creating what it means
to be “Sami”. She concludes by arguing that the timeless image of Sami culture that was presented at the earliest exhibitions at Sami museums does not
mean that the past is not important, but that the political climate at the time
was not right to claim that past (Webb 2006:174–175).
To sum up this part of the article, we may say that museums do not just
pass on knowledge but are actively involved in creating knowledge, and
65
Sami museums are an arena where the objects and the museums’ active
and creative role are highlighted. Levy notes that all the Sami museums
she visited have given the map of Sápmi a dominant place in the exhibition. When the museums additionally simplify and stereotype what it is to
be Sami, and under-communicate internal differences among the Sami
people, it is tempting to draw parallels to the role of the national museums
of cultural history in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. These museums were actively involved in the building of the
nation states of Norway and Sweden. The Sami museums can be seen as
actively involved in building the nation Sápmi. It is interesting to note here
that both the archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen and the cultural historian Stein
R. Mathisen point out that Sami museums are introducing a new meta-narrative. The old ethnographic exhibitions presented a narrative of the Sami
as a people that once lived in a harmonic balance with nature, and that today’s Sami are threatened by disintegration, the dissolution of old ideals
and ultimately cultural death. The new meta-narrative that is being told at
the Sami museums presents the past as a period of exploitation by Scandinavian society and the modern world. The present is marked by ethnopolitical struggle, and the future holds an ethnic revival (Mathisen 2004:
7; Olsen 2000:18).
The Lappish Equipage and the Past in the Present
An exhibition is never totally independent and autonomous. It builds on and
borrows from other, previous and existing exhibitions and representations.
Even though the ideological message given in the earliest exhibitions at the
majority museums is very different from the one conveyed at the Sami museums, they use some of the same material representations or “icons” to convey these different ideologies. According to Janet E. Levy (2006), the snowmobile, the shamanic drum and the lavvo13 are recurring objects in both majority museums and Sami museums. However, they bear different meanings. In the majority museums the lavvo was part of a picture of Sami culture
presented as traditional in the sense that it is frozen in time, with no past and
no future. At the Sami museums she discovered that the lavvo represented
something different. Here it was used as a symbol of Sami independence
and cultural uniqueness (Levy 2006:142–143).
The snowmobile may be perceived as the modern heir to the Lappish
equipage. As with the lavvo, both the snowmobile and the Lappish equipage
are connected to reindeer herding, and have been used in a similar way in
the majority museums and the Sami museums. In the older exhibitions at the
majority museums the Lappish equipage has been given a central place
when representing the Sami culture as “traditional” and unmovable. At the
Sami museums the Lappish equipage has been used as a symbol of the quin-
66
tessential “Sami”, and also as an instrument to claim landscapes and territories connected to reindeer herding.
In the earliest exhibitions at the majority museums the Lappish equipage
was part of a broader discourse about human cultural evolution. During the
nineteenth century, travelling exhibitions of live Sami people were popular.
These exhibitions were fairly standardized, and the Lappish equipage was a
predominant element. The archaeologist Cathrine Baglo sees these exhibitions as a visual technology which was given meaning by and at the same
time gave meaning to a particular view of human cultures and races. Abstract categories such as evolution, prehistory, biology and race were visualized and materialized through these exhibitions. The theory of a hierarchy of human races achieved great significance partly because it was an
element in a huge network of representations (Baglo 2006). Exhibiting the
Lappish equipage in the early exhibitions at majority museums was a part of
this network of representations.
At the Sami museums the Lappish equipage has been a component of a
discourse concerning Sami identity and ethno-politics. As I have mentioned
earlier in this article, the exhibitions at the first Sami museums have been
criticized for reproducing old ethnographic stereotypes of the Sami. This is
in part because these museums rely on the same material expressions as the
majority museums. However, as mentioned earlier, this can be seen as an attempt to rebuild and reinforce Sami identity. By exhibiting objects that
strengthen Sami cultural identity, Sami museums also set it apart from the
majority culture. This approach may be seen as a kind of strategic essentialism by which a people deliberately manipulates, projects and stereotypes its
public image, in order to gain the recognition of its demands and rights
(Hodgson 2002:1040). The Sami museums have thus played an active role
in negotiating and creating what is “Sami”. If we look at the representation
of the Lappish equipage at the Sami museums from a post-colonial perspective the image or material manifestation can be seen as a moment of confrontation, whereby the Scandinavian discourse is being challenged because
“the other” that previously has been represented as an object now acts as the
subject and is answering back (Simonsen 2003:169–182).
Such stereotyping or strategic essentialism is a two-edged sword. In both
discourses (the “Scandinavian” and the “Sami”) the conventional meaning
has been fixed so that Sami culture is perceived as synonymous with reindeer
herding, even though Sami culture has been and still is much more
heterogeneous.14 The focus on reindeer herding can overshadow other parts of
Sami culture in the past and in the present, and one runs the risk of excluding
other Sami groups who are not connected to reindeer herding (Nilsen 2007).
67
Reinventing Exhibitions of the Sami at Majority Museums
So far I have given a brief overview of the ways in which the Sami have
been represented in the earliest exhibitions at the majority museums, and I
have discussed the background to the emergence of Sami museums. I have
used the material manifestation that I have here called the Lappish equipage
to illustrate how the Sami have been represented in various museum exhibitions. As mentioned before, this is a material manifestation that also appears
in Sami museums. In my ongoing research I focus mainly on the exhibitions
at the Sami museums, and study which narratives are being told and how
they are visualized in material representations.
In the last few decades, in the same period as the Sami museums emerged,
museums all around the world have been reinventing themselves. National
museums of cultural history are trying to reflect and represent the many different pasts and histories that can exist within a national territory. The national museums of Scandinavia are compelled to rectify the marginalization
of minority communities and their own indigenous populations, and find a
place within the museums and their exhibitions for new ethnic and cultural
minorities. By focusing on the fate of the Lappish equipage I will now take
a brief look at how the majority museums have adapted to these changed circumstances in their exhibitions of the Sami.
As mentioned above, although the Sami collection was transferred to the
Norsk Folkemuseum in 1951, the Ethnographic Museum still displays Sami
culture in the exhibition entitled “Circumpolar People”. A section of this exhibition is dedicated to Sami culture. Here the Lappish equipage has been
divided up so that the mannequin bearing a traditional (male) costume is exhibited in a display case together with black and white photographs showing
scenes of reindeer herding. A stuffed reindeer is placed on the other side of
the room and given a new symbolic meaning under a poster showing the
Sami national flag.
At the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm a new exhibition called Sápmi
opened in 2007. This is perhaps the most radical break with earlier modes
of exhibiting Sami culture. The exhibition design is contemporary. There
are no stuffed reindeers or mannequins dressed in traditional costumes, in
fact the costumes are “hidden” in a chest of drawers (this is probably a better
way of exhibiting old costumes from a conservational point of view). There
are many display cases but only one of them focuses on reindeer herding.
The exhibition lifts the focus from a national to a more global perspective,
as it simultaneously tells a narrative of what it is like to be a Sami in Sweden,
and it relates it to a much broader narrative of the many minorities and indigenous people around the world.
The Sami exhibition at the Norsk Folkemuseum consists of two parts.
The older part, which opened in 1990, is based on the museums’ collection
of Sami artefacts and focuses on Sami history and traditional way of life.
68
This is where we find the Lappish equipage amongst many other objects and
displays. The new section, which opened in 2007, tries to give the visitor a
sense of what it means to be a Sami today, in a modern Norwegian society.
The focus is on ethno-political struggle, on hybrid identity and urbanism,
and the message is that most Sami are “just like us”. There are no stuffed
reindeers or traditional costumes on display in this section.15
Peter Aronsson claims that even though museums are faced with new
challenges, the main vision and programme for cultural institutions is still
integration into a national political system (Aronsson 2008). Specialized
museums like Sami museums are one solution to the many new challenges
the museums are faced with. Still, the majority museums need to expand and
add new dimensions to the national narrative. The exhibition Sveriges Historia (“The History of Sweden”), which opened in 2010 at the National Historical Museum in Stockholm, can be seen as an attempt to face such challenges. The objective of the exhibition is to provide a unified, modern representation of Sweden’s history, where recent research is presented. Accordingly, the exhibition is primarily a tale of “other people’s stories” and
not just those of white Scandinavian men. There are many stories about
women. The Sami and the Swedish Travellers are also part of the presentation. In the introduction to the exhibition the museum director Lars Amréus
explains that storytelling is all about making choices, and that what is presented here is only one of many stories. The exhibition consists of ten different scenes, one for each century. Each century is seen in relation to a central theme. The theme of the seventeenth century is expansion, integration
and colonization. This is Sweden’s political golden age, a time where the
Swedish Empire reaches its greatest extent. The location is symbolic: Sami
history takes a prominent place in the story of Sweden’s golden age. Objects
of silver are used as symbols of the seventeenth century: a silver beaker and
silver jewellery. This is linked to the history of the Nasa Mountain’s silver
mines. The story of the Sami people is told through artefacts found at Silbojokk, where the ore from Nasa was converted into silver. The explanatory
text tells us how the Sami were forced to work for the silver mine transporting ore and firewood, and that the colonization of Lapland meant the suppression of the Sami.
In the exhibition the history of the Sami has been given a symbolic position in both time and space. As mentioned, the time is the seventeenth century, when Sweden was a great power. Spatially it is the story about the
Sami that dominates the scene from the seventeenth century. The display
case is small and contains few objects. It is placed on top of a long slope, a
kind of mountain that is covered with a copy of an ancient map. The display
case and the “mountain slope” are set against a wall covered by a photograph of a snow-clad pine forest in bluish winter light. The use of the map
gives the impression that you are looking from the north towards the south.
69
In the south, at the end of the map, two display cases containing silver objects are placed. The silver beaker and women’s jewellery may be perceived
as the end product of the silver mines. The history of the Sami as it is told
here is a story of colonization. This is underlined by the fact that from the
seventeenth-century scene one gets a clear view of the eighteenth-century
scene. The scene is dominated by a piece of furniture that looks like a cabinet. Here different products from the colonies are displayed under the title
“The Products of Slavery”.
As I understand it, the exhibition “The History of Sweden” is trying to represent many different pasts and histories within a national narrative. One must
take into consideration that the scope of this exhibition is ambitious and that
naturally there is not much room for each of the many topics that are being addressed. Even though the (hi)story of the Sami is given a prominent position
in this section of the exhibition, it is placed in a fairly traditional narrative.
Change comes in the form of suppression and threats by the Swedish national
state. Further, the story is told against the backdrop of a winter forest, which
places the Sami culture as something that is firmly rooted in nature.
I have looked at how the Lappish equipage has been staged in different museum settings, to illustrate how the term “intervisuality” can be used to examine how exhibitions build upon each other and relate to other exhibitions,
and thus may be considered as part of a mosaic of “visual citations” that recalls other exhibitions about the same theme or a related one. As Saphinaz-Amal Naguib writes in the introduction to this issue, this process prompts
transformations, both in ways of display and also in shaping new meaning.
The Lappish equipage is given new meaning from new contexts, but at the
same time it also carries with it meaning from older contexts. This process is
one of the main reasons why museums collect and display objects in the first
place: because an object has the ability to relate to a past, or to past events. The
dialectic between the indisputable physical presence of an object and its
ever-changing meaning can be explained through a semiotic approach, where
the object is seen as a sign. The terms denotation and connotation describe the
objects first and second order of meaning. The first order of meaning, the denotation, is a descriptive relationship between the signifier and the signified.
For example, the Lappish equipage denotes a mode of transportation used by
the Sami. The second order of meaning, the connotation, is how the image is
understood at a broader, more associative level of meaning, and it is this level
of meaning that can undergo great variations (Lidchi 2010 [1997]:162–164).
Henrietta Lidchi uses the palimpsest as a metaphor for how new layers of
meaning are superimposed over older ones, or re-articulated. This change in
meaning is most frequently the result of cultural, spatial and temporal displacements (Lidchi 2010 [1997]:167). The lavvo can be used to illustrate how
an object or a representation is imbued with new meaning in a new context. In
the old exhibitions at the majority museums the lavvo was often placed next
70
to the Lappish equipage (as indeed it is still today at the Norsk Folkemuseum),
and was part of a representation where Sami culture was conveyed as traditional, unchangeable and closely connected to nature. The lavvo was given a
new symbolic meaning when a lavvo was erected in front of the Norwegian
parliament in 1979, as part of the protest against the Alta-Kautokeino hydroelectric plant. This new symbolic meaning has followed the lavvo as it entered
new exhibitions of Sami culture.
The Lappish equipage has also partly been given a new meaning. For example, it can be seen as a symbol of something “quintessentially” Sami and as
symbol of Sami claims to the land connected with the extensive nomadic reindeer herding. But still it is my contention that the connotations attached to this
image have not changed as much as is the case with the lavvo. The Lappish
equipage seems so closely tied to a Sami traditional way of life that it still
bears with it connotations from the time when it had pride of place in the old
Sami exhibitions at the majority museums. The Lappish equipage is uniquely
Sami, and easily recognized. It is a strong symbol; one might even call it a key
symbol. It is culturally important, and comes up in many different contexts
(Ortner 1973). If we use the palimpsest metaphor, the Lappish equipage relates to a traditional Sami way of life, but it also refers to descriptions of the
Sami by early ethnographers like Johannes Schefferus, and to exhibitions at
early ethnographic museums. Because of this it is not unproblematic to use the
Lappish equipage in modern museum exhibitions of Sami culture. Indeed, as
I have shown, the strategy of some museums is to avoid the Lappish equipage
altogether, as in the exhibition Sápmi at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm,
or to transform or remodel it, as is the case at the Ethnographic Museum,
where the Lappish equipage has been split up and the mannequin and the reindeer are placed on different sides of the room.
Silje Opdahl Mathisen, PhD fellow
University of Oslo
N-0315 Oslo
Norway
References
Andreassen, Lars Magne 2011: Gyda og Snøfrid. To paradigmer i norsk kulturhistorie. Museumsnytt 1/2011.
Aronsson, Peter 2008: Representing Community. National Museums Negotiating
Differences and Community in the Nordic Countries. Scandinavian Museums
and Cultural Diversity, ed. Katherine Goodnow and Haci Akman. Paris, Oxford,
New York: UNESCO, Berghahn Books.
Baglo, Cathrine 2001: Vitenskapelige stereotypier. Om konstruksjonen av samene
71
som kulturhistorisk enhet i tida fram mot 1910. Hovedfagsoppgave i arkeologi,
Universitetet i Tromsø.
Baglo, Cathrine 2006: Samer på ville veger? Om “levende utstillinger”, antropologi
og vitenskapelige praksiser. Nordisk Museologi 2006:1, pp. 3–20.
Bergstøl, Jostein 2008: Samer i Østerdalen? En studie av etnisitet i jernalderen og
middelalderen i det nordøstre Telemark. Acta Humaniora 325. Universitetet i Oslo.
Bouquet, Mary 1996: Sans og Samling … hos Universitetets Etnografiske Museum.
Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Hansen, Lars Ivar & Olsen, Bjørnar 2004: Samenes historie fram til 1750. Oslo:
Cappelen.
Hodgson, Dorothy L. 2002: Introduction. Comparative Perspectives on the Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa and the Americas. American Anthropologist 104
(4), pp. 1037–1049.
Jönses, Lars 2008: Samerna i den kulturelle konstruktionen av territoriet. För Sápmi
i tiden, ed. C. Westergren & E. Silvén. Nordiska museet og Skansens årbok 2008,
pp. 43–57.
Levy, Janet E. 2006: Prehistory, Identity and Archaeological Representation in Nordic Museums. American Anthropologist, 108:1, pp. 135–47.
Lidchi, Henrietta 2010 [1997]: The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures. Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed.
Stuart Hall, pp. 151–222. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, in association with The Open University.
Lidén, Hans Emil 1991: Fra antikvitet til kulturminne. Trekk av kulturminnevernets
historie i Norge. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Mathisen, Stein R. 2004: Representasjoner av kulturell forskjell. Tidsskrift for kulturforskning 3:3, pp. 5–25.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas 2000: Intervisuality. Exploding Aesthetics. L&B 16, ed. A. W.
Balkema and H. Slager, pp.124–33.
Nielsen, Yngvar 1911: Universitetets lappiske samlinger. Meddelelser fra Det ethnografiske museum.
Nilsen, André 2007: Typisk samisk? Museumsgjenstander som identitetsbærere.
Riss 2, pp. 16–24.
Ojala, Carl-Gösta 2009: Sámi Prehistories. The Politics of Archaeology and Identity
in Northernmost Europe. Department of Archaeology and Ancient History. Occasional Papers in Archaeology 47. Uppsala.
Olsen, Bjørnar 2000: Bilder fra fortida? Representasjoner av samisk kultur i samiske
museer. Nordisk museologi 2000:2, pp. 13–30.
Ortner, Sherry B. 1973: On Key Symbols. American Anthropologist, New series, 75:
5, pp. 1338–1346.
Pareli, Leif 2004: En gamme blant nasjonalskattene. Om samenes plass ved Norsk
Folkemuseum. Museum i friluft. By og bygd XXXVII, ed. T. Bjorli, I. Jensen, E.
Johnsen, pp. 32–45.
Shetelig, Haakon 1944: Norske museers historie. Festskrift til Thor B. Kielland på
50-års dagen 9.12.1944. Oslo: J. W. Cappelens forlag.
Silvén, Eva 2007: Sápmi – om att vara sami i Sverige. Katalog til Nordiska museets
utställning Sápmi. Stockholm: Nordiska museet.
Silvén, Eva 2008: Staging the Sami – Narrative and Display at the Nordiska Museet
in Stockholm.
http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp_article/index.en.aspx?issue=030;article=023 (accessed
5 October 2011).
Simonsen, Dorthe Gert 2003: Tegnets tid. Fortid, historie og historicitet efter den
sproglige vending. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag.
72
Svensson, Tom G. 1997. Folk i Arktis og Sub-Arktis. Guide til Arktis og Sub-Arktis-salen. Ethnographic Museum. Universitetet i Oslo.
Webb, Sharon 2006: Making Museums, Making People. The Representation of the
Sami through Material Culture. Public Archaeology 5, pp. 167–83.
1
I am currently working on my PhD thesis which is connected to the project Patterns of Cultural
Valuation (PaCuVal). The working title of the thesis is Northern Borderlands and the Aesthetics
of Ethnicity. In it I analyse exhibitions at Sami museums in Norway, Sweden and Finland, with
special emphasis on how Sami prehistory is presented in these exhibitions. The PhD project is due
to end in 2013, so I cannot claim to give a total overview of the subject, or to present final results.
What I present here are some preliminary findings and reflections on the topic.
2
I use the term “majority museum” to mean national museums of cultural history
3
The Nordiska Museet is Sweden’s National Museums of Cultural History. It was created in
1873 by Artur Hazelius (1833 – 1901) and moved to its present location in 1907.
4
This museum no longer exists as an independent museum but has since 1999 been part of the
University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History. For the sake of clarity I will, however, refer
to it by its older name, the Ethnographic Museum.
5
The Norsk Folkemuseum is Norway’s largest museum of cultural history. It features both an
open-air museum and an indoor exhibition.
6
In this article I focus on the exhibitions of Sami culture. It seems that the situation regarding
research on Sami culture was quite similar in Norway and Sweden. According to Leif Pareli
(2004), research on Sami culture in Norway was carried out at the Ethnographic Museum, and
in Sweden research on Sami culture was carried out at the State Ethnographic Museum.
7
Both the Nordiska Museet and the open-air museum Skansen were founded by Artur Hazelius. Skansen opened in 1891, and can be seen as a sister museum of the Nordiska Museet.
8
Yngvar Nielsen, director of the Ethnographic Museum from 1877 to 1916, was both an ardent
“unionist”, that is to say, he was in favour of the union, and one of the main protagonists of the
theory that claimed that the Sami had immigrated to Norway and only in fairly recent times had
moved to the central and southern parts of Norway (Pareli 2004: 36).
9
The City of Oslo has changed its name several times. In the seventeenth century the city
changed its name to Christiania, after King Christian IV. In 1877 the spelling was changed to
Kristiania. In 1925 the city reclaimed its original name Oslo. To avoid confusion I here use the
name Oslo for all periods.
10
“Laplands eqvipage” or in my translation: the “Lappish Equipage”, is the title of a picture of
a Sami in a sledge being pulled by a reindeer. I first came across this title on a copy of a drawing
by Johan F. L. Dreier (1775–1833 ) from his series of Norwegian folk costumes (Primus Identifikasjonsnr: NF.04647-001)
11
Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (“The History of the Nordic Peoples”).
12
I define Sami museums as either what is appointed as the national Sami museum (as in Sweden)
or as museums placed under the governance of the Sami parliament (as in Norway). In both cases
the museums are placed in an area populated by Sami (but not exclusively) and the focus of the
collecting, exhibiting and research in the museum is related to Sami culture and history.
13
A lavvo is a traditional Sami tent connected to a nomadic lifestyle. It is a light structure that
can be easily moved.
14
On the subject see the article of Mariann Mathisen in this issue.
15
For a more extensive description of this exhibition, see Marzia Varutti’s article in this issue.
Patterns of Ethnic Boundaries
73
Boats and Museums in Northern Norway
Mariann Mathisen
Boats have always been important tools wherever people have exploited
coastal resources. In northern Norway, coastal fishing has been a primary
source of subsistence for a very long time. In this article, I will examine the
particular northern Norwegian boat called nordlandsbåten, the Nordland
boat, as an example with which to explore ethnic boundaries and identity
building in northern Norway. The combination of the complex ethnic background of the region and the coast as a meeting point between the different
groups makes it a relevant case to study. Coastal fishing has been an important industry for the Sami, the Kven people1 and Norwegians, and the Nordland boat has been the traditional fishing vessel built and used by all three
groups (Andersen 2008:181; Mathisen 2003:10–11, 2010:139ff).2 Little is
known about when or how this type of boat was developed, or by whom, but
it is assumed that it has existed since at least the fifteenth or sixteenth century (Nedkvitne 1988; Eldjarn 2000; Mathisen 2003:10–11). This boat has
undergone many changes,3 just as fishing has varied geographically and
over time.4
Bearing the common technological practice in mind, I will examine what
patterns of ethnic boundaries the Nordland boat has been given. Does the
valuation of the boat differ between the Sami and Norwegians, and is the
valuation based on the boat’s multiethnic background or has one of the
groups adopted it?
Inspired by Frederik Barth, I investigate whether the boat has been an
arena for drawing boundaries and boundary negotiations. Barth sees ethnicity as an awareness of one’s own identity in relation to other groups. Ethnicity is not regarded as fixed position dependent upon specific material
traits, but rather as a dynamic and relational aspect between social groups
(Barth 1969:9–10). Historically Sami culture has been suppressed and obscured by the Norwegian majority culture. The Norwegianization and nation-building processes that took place during the first half of the twentieth
century were particularly important. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the Sami people’s struggle for equality and equal rights placed them in
74
Mariann Mathisen
a completely different position today. Did the nation-building processes by
both the Norwegians and the Sami have an impact on the valuation of the
Nordland boat? Were there established borders; if so are the borders sharp
and exclusive or negotiable and permeable?
Using examples from historical material, various museums, the coastal
culture movement and the public debate, I will show how different boundaries drawn in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century gained
importance for the way we currently deal with the boat’s ethnic belonging.
The article is in three sections. In the first I will show how hierarchies and
values among people and boats in northern Norway were established. Establishing borders between people in the multicultural north coincided with the
discovery of the two Viking ships Oseberg and Gokstad. This contributed
to elaborate frontiers against the coastal Sami and affected the perception of
the Nordland boat’s ethnic belonging. What impact does this have on museum exhibitions today? In the second section, I will examine the valuation
of coastal Sami culture in Sami nation-building. How did this influence the
Sami connection to the Nordland boat? By analysing two coastal Sami exhibitions at Várjjatt Sámi Musea/Varanger Sami Museum and Árran – Julevsáme Guovdásj/Lulesami Centre we will see how the Sami museums
deal with this theme. In the last section, I discuss how ethnic boundaries related to the Nordland boat are still under negotiation.
Establishing Borders in the Multicultural North
Several peoples who have been in long-term trading contact have populated
the north-east region of Norway and the Barents region. The products traded
ranged from wares such as walrus skin and walrus teeth, fish products and
fur products to grain (see e.g. Niemi 1983, 1993, Hansen 1990, Schanche
and Schanche 2007). Traces of this long-term east-west relationship go back
to the Late Iron Age when there was extensive trade with the Russian city
state of Novgorod (Schanche and Schanche 2007:23–27). Over time,
so-called Sami markets developed, and these became meeting-places for
people from the entire Northern Cape region (Nielssen 2007:39; Niemi
2007a:14). In the period from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries,
these markets were arranged at Fiskerhalvøya, at Kildin and in the Varanger
fjord. Merchants from seafaring nations in Western Europe and Russia also
participated here, and the Sami markets were thus part of the major European trade systems (Nielssen 2007:39; Niemi 2007a:14).
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the northern region of Norway
had no clearly defined national borders. The population as far south as Tysfjord in Nordland was taxed by Denmark-Norway, Russia and Sweden
alike. Russian merchants, called Pomors, began to visit Varanger at the end
of the seventeenth century. Regular trading contacts developed and con-
75
tinued until World War I. This included regions as far south as Andøya in
Nordland. During the same period, “fisher Russians” became more or less a
permanent seasonal feature in the Varanger fjord (Niemi 2007a:15). In
1774, 245 Russian fishing boats were registered in Finnmark (Niemi 2007b:
121). Diversity and cultural encounters characterized the region, with an extensive level of interaction across what would become to be the national
boundaries. The border between Denmark-Norway and Sweden was established in 1751, while the border between Russia and Norway was fixed in
1826.
After the Norwegian declaration of independence in 1814, it was critical
for the young nation to establish an idea of what was typically Norwegian.
National romanticism and the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von
Herder, who described nations as organic entities, inspired many. This also
implied that multinational state formations were contrary to the laws of nature and culture (Myklebost 2010:61). This was part of the underpinning for
how the north-east region of northern Norway was perceived (Myklebost
2010, 2010b). Henrik Wergeland (1808–1845) became a key public figure
in the national romantic movement. In 1834 he introduced a metaphor where
he spoke of “the two half rings in Norwegian history, the medieval state and
the independent Norwegian state after 1814” (Myklebost 2010:64). This, in
many ways, marks what Kari Myklebost calls the start of “the exploration
of what was characteristically Norwegian and its roots in the Norwegian
‘Golden Age’, the Viking period” (Myklebost 2010:64).
The multiethnic existence settlements in the north were a threat to the idea
of a uniform Norwegian culture. It was therefore important to establish mental barriers against the east. According to the historian Jens Petter Nielsen,
two very different countries met at this border: “It was a place of confluence
of two different modes of history and two different concepts of borders, that
of a small budding nation-state and that of a vast multiethnic dynastically
legitimated state with believably, a greater tolerance of permeable borders”
(Nielsen 2005:10). The Sami were seen, with the Kvens, as “non-national
elements” by the Norwegian cultural elite (Myklebost 2010b:2). The aim
was a uniform national cultural community. Language and culture, education and the church became important tools for assimilating mixed ethnic
groups into the majority population (Niemi 2005:70–71; Myklebost 2010,
2010b). Nationalization of the selected cultural elements which were to represent “Norway”, the central Norwegian and eventually the west Norwegian
farming culture, contributed to marginalization of the north Norwegian culture, including the Sami and the Kven populations (Myklebost 2010b:3).
Finnmark in general and the Varanger region in particular thus became an
important border area, also mentally. Two persons who became key contributors to Norwegian boat research helped to fortify this delimitation:
Eilert Sundt (1817–1875) and Bernhard Færøyvik (1866–1950).
76
Mariann Mathisen
Eilert Sundt – Valuation of Geography and People
In his work on population demography in the middle of the nineteenth century, Eilert Sundt became particularly interested in the social conditions in
northern Norway.5 Sundt was interested in analysing the status of the Norwegian population, and population statistics were considered a suitable tool
for this purpose. The average life expectancy was considered to be representative of the development of national civilization (Stenseth 2000:135).
Here Norway scored satisfyingly high, with a longer life expectancy than
Sweden, Denmark and England in all age groups (Stenseth 2000:137). The
only problematic area was northern Norway. In the Diocese of Tromsø, the
mortality rate was higher than in other comparable countries, and this undermined the average figures (Sundt 1855:83–84).
Sundt focused on the region and the boats used to try to find a possible
cause for the high death rate. After extensive work, he postulated a connection between the people and their artefacts and the stage of development,
their civilization had reached (Mathisen 2003b). He believed that people in
the south were more enlightened and willing to develop than people in the
north, and divided the ethnic groups into a cultural hierarchy. He ranked
Norwegians highest, the Kvens second and lastly the Sami (Sundt 1975b:
148–157), and the Sami were characterized as a “childish people” who were
at a “low stage of development” (Stenseth 2000:209). Based on this valuation, one would be able to find good and poor representatives of what was
Norwegian (Mathisen 2003b).
When Sundt visited northern Norway in 1863, he claimed that Finnmark
was situated north of what he called “the old Norway and the old national
customs” (Sundt 1975a:50). The population of Finnmark could not be good
representatives of Norwegian qualities, since the Sami and the Norwegians
lived side by side (Sundt 1975a:50; Mathisen 2003b). Sundt actually doubted whether Norwegians could thrive in Finnmark, and even questioned
whether the region could be a part of the real Norway (Sundt 1975a:52).
Northern Norway, according to Sundt, was populated from the south because of the quality of the boats. In his opinion people in the area of
North-east Russia lacked the knowledge of boats and seafaring (Stenseth
2000:257).
Sundt was part of a movement that developed towards the end of the nineteenth century. During the last decades of the century, the Sami were understood “as uncivilized individuals of an alien race, ‘radically different’, in
contrast to the Norwegian cultural community” (Myklebost 2010b:11). The
origins of the Sami were discussed, and archaeologists were particularly important contributors to the debate because they were interested in finding the
urhjem – the original home – of various peoples (Myklevold 1999:36).
Many researchers drew attention to the close connections the Sami had to
the east, which were particularly apparent in the language. For this reason it
77
was believed that the Sami must have migrated from Russian lands and,
thus, that their original home must be somewhere there (Myklevold 1999:
36; Hansen and Olsen 2004:25–27, Myklebost 2010b).
Finnmark and large parts of northern Norway were ranked as Norway’s
backyard: disorderly, dirty, lacking in progress, with unclear boundaries
and incompatible with the idea of what was Norwegian. Consequently, the
Sami position at the bottom of the ladder ensured that they could not be
worthy of mention in the knowledge connected to the heirs of the Viking
Age. However, Sundt somewhat surprisingly described some specific
Sami individuals who enjoyed a reputation as good boatbuilders (Klepp
1983:49).
Bernhard Færøyvik – Valuation of Boats and People
In 1880, a Viking ship was found at Gokstad, and in 1904–5 another was excavated at Oseberg, both locations being in southern Norway.6 These two
ships became important elements in Norwegian nation-building (Mathisen
2007b, 2009, 2010:133). It was, at last, possible to claim that Norway had
been a nation since the Viking Age, only interrupted by 400 years of Danish
rule. In 1926, construction of the Viking Ship museum at Bygdøy in Oslo
started, and when Bernhard Færøyvik went to Finnmark in 1934–35, almost
a century after Eilert Sundt, it had become a key reference. Færøyvik has
been regarded as the “foremost pioneer of documentation and studies of traditional boats in Norway” (Nielssen 2010:82). He worked with such documentation from the beginning of the 1920s until his death in 1950, and
travelled to Finnmark to document Sami boats. Færøyvik established a classification of boats belonging to different areas of Norway, arranging them
in geographical types and different qualities.7 He also compared the various
types of boats along the coast with the Viking ships and evaluated them
more or less similar in accordance with their origin. In this ranking, the
Nordland boat fared well with its tall prow and stern. In the words of the ethnologist Asbjørn Klepp, no Norwegian boat has been described in more detail. “This special position is not least due to the boat’s picturesque appearance and the national symbolic values connected to a design that reminds
one of the Viking ships. This is a point that no author fails to mention”
(Klepp 1983:15). The connection confirmed the Norwegian boatbuilding
continuity as an unbroken tradition since the Viking period.
In Varangerfjord, Færøyvik found different boats called skoltebask, tanabask and elvebask. These were small boats used for fishing in rivers and
fjords (Nilsen 2010:96). The Skolt Sami and the Karelians also built boats
for seafaring (Færøyvik 1935:84), the schnjaka that was used for cod-fishing by Russian fishermen. The Russian fishermen bought several boats from
the Skolt Sami in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Færøyvik 1935:
78
Mariann Mathisen
88). Only the skoltebask and the schnjaka were sewn, and both were built
by Skolt Sami (Christensen 1979:114, Nielssen 2010:87).
Færøyvik and other researchers placed the sewing technique and the
clinker technique in an evolutionary relation to each other. The sewn boats
were defined as an older and less developed type of boat than the Vikings’
clinker boats (Færøyvik 1935, Gjessing 1941). Færøyvik found it hard to believe that the Skolt Sami lived in a very ancient coastal culture along the
Arctic coast. He regarded Sami boats and the coastal Sami culture as more
primitive than the Norwegian one (Færøyvik 1935:81). In his opinion, shipbuilding technology had developed fast in the southern part of Norway and
the primitive Skolt Sami had not been able to keep up after they had learnt
boatbuilding skills from the Norwegians (Færøyvik 1935:80,90). The
schnjaka, with its good seafaring qualities, could not be originally Sami in
Færøyvik’s opinion; it must have been a Norwegian boat. He even claimed
that this was the old Nordland boat (Færøyvik 1935:90).
In 1909, the well-known Norwegian archaeologist A. W. Brøgger portrayed the Sami as a people without any ability to bring about cultural and
technological change (Hansen and Olsen 2004:27). Other researchers
claimed that only reindeer herding was originally Sami and that the coastal
Sami lived on loan from the Norwegians (Qvigstad 1925:74, quoted by
Storm 2010:345).
It is known that Sami built and used Nordland boats in the eighteenth
and the nineteenth centuries, and they probably did so before that time
(Nielssen 1994; Myklevold 2005; Hansen 2010; Mathisen 2010b). The
contemporary perception of the Sami and the close ties to the Viking ships
hindered Færøyvik from considering the Sami boat tradition as common
to the Norwegian tradition. Færøyvik also shared the opinion with several
researchers at that time that the Sami had immigrated from the east. This
was an effective mental barrier between the alien Sami and the national
Norwegians.
The Nordland boat belonged to the Norwegians, while the Sami had
only borrowed it. The Sami could keep the various basks, which were
classed as a poorly developed type of boat. The schnjaka, on the other
hand, with its good seafaring qualities, could not be originally Sami.8
Færøyvik’s theories, combined with the eastern immigrant theory, are the
basis on which we today often speak of Sami boats as being sewn. Færøyvik has had a strong position in Norwegian research on traditional boats,
and the geographical division has served as the foundation of this knowledge right up to the present. What roles have Sundt and Færøyvik played
for the way the multiethnic relations in coastal culture in northern Norway
are presented today?
79
Ethnicity and Boats at Norwegian Museums
We shall look more closely at some major national museums in Oslo as well
as Tromsø University Museum (Tromsø Museum Universitetsmuseet) in
Northern Norway. My presentation of the exhibitions in the different museums concentrates on the role and position of the boats in the exhibitions,
and therefore I will not describe the other part of the exhibitions.
At the Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo (Kulturhistorisk Museum Universitetet i Oslo), the exhibition Fra istid til kvitekrist
(From Ice Age to White Christ) is presented on the ground floor.9 Many artefacts from the Viking Age are on display. But there is little information
about Sami culture and Sami artefacts. A small trace is a Sami magic drum
hammer from Rendalen in the glass case about the religious theme. An artist
has created textile pictures in several of the glass cases, and in this particular
one we find a Sami shaman (noaidi) and a Catholic priest. In one corner, the
big bow of a Viking ship represents boats and boatbuilding, and in a glass
case beside it there are some objects related to boatbuilding. The diversity
of ethnic relations in northern Norway is not a theme in the exhibition.
The Sami are found on the first floor in company with other Arctic
peoples as part of the exhibition about the indigenous populations in the
Arctic areas (www.khm.uio.no).10 Samene i Finnmark (The Sami in Finnmark) is the heading of the Sami part, which places the Sami inside the borders of Finnmark. The text there tells of several Sami forms of livelihood in
Finnmark. A picture of Sami people on the shore with cod-drying racks and
a Nordland boat presents the relation to the sea. The organization of the
rooms and exhibitions makes it easy to be left with the idea that the Sami
have little to do with narratives about the Viking period and Norwegian prehistory.
The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum) presents the exhibition Samisk kultur (Sami Culture).11 One of the headings is
Fishing and farming were the way of life for most people. Activities such as
fishing in the fjords, and hunting of seal, whale and seabirds are mentioned,
and the harvesting of eggs, down and seaweed were also important for their
livelihood. Two Nordland boat models are presented along with the text and
a picture. The exhibition featuring the Sami is a separate section, and is not
part of the exhibition displaying what is Norwegian.
The fact that boats are big and difficult to handle has often contributed to
their placing in special museums. The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History sold its original collection of boats to the Norwegian Maritime Museum
(Norsk Maritimt Museum) in 1943 (Molaug 1964:58). In 1958, the Norwegian Maritime Museum12 opened an exhibition in the Boat Hall. The exhibition tells the story of the large family of boats, the geographical variations in (boat) dialects and that they are “carriers of 1,000 years of unbroken
boatbuilding tradition” (Molaug 1964:58). One of the largest boats was the
80
Mariann Mathisen
Oppreisningen, a nordlandsfembøring, an open wooden sailboat of nearly
50 feet, seen in silhouette at the innermost end of the room by the window.
When passing through the room, visitors would look straight at the tall prow
of the boat, and with its large square sail, it was not difficult to connect the
boat with the Viking longships of the past. No connection was made between the Nordland boat and the coastal Sami. Some of the boats collected
by Færøyvik in Finnmark in 1934–35 were on display in another part of the
room. These were a tanabask, a Sami river boat and a Russian schnjaka
(Nielssen 2010:82–96). Even if it is assumed that the eastern boats represent
the limit of what is Norwegian in the north-east, they were nevertheless part
of the same exhibition. They were in a way included in the “family”.
Tromsø Museum opened an exhibition called Samekulturen (Sami culture) in 1973. The purpose of the exhibition “was to document Sami culture
and thus show that the Sami were a separate people in the Northern Cape
with roots going far back in time” (exhibition text, Tromsø Museum). The
Sami as a people are presented with “common characteristics, not only from
Arctic cultures but also strongly dominated by the culture forms of neighbouring peoples” (exhibition text, Tromsø Museum). According to the exhibition text, the Sami pursued various livelihoods up to the sixteenth century, some Sami living permanently on the coast, some living as reindeer-herding nomads and some living permanently along the rivers. The
coastal Sami had permanent housing all year, kept cattle, fished in the sea
and hunted.
When visitors enter the exhibition, one of the first objects to come into
view is a boat. There is no specific information about the boat, who built it
or what it represents. Posters close by offer information about inland fishing
and hunting and fishing in the sea. The boat is quite small, and one becomes
uncertain about what it represents. At the end of the explanatory text we
read: “Boats were important in the hunting and fishing culture. The Norse
sagas mention the Sami as skilled boatbuilders. The boat planks were sewn
together with thread made from tendons, wood roots and hemp” (exhibition
text, Tromsø Museum). In another section of the exhibition it says under the
title Kystsamer (Coastal Sami) that “the boats were originally built by the
Sami, but over time they came to be replaced by boats from builders in the
valleys of Nordland” (exhibition text, Tromsø Museum).
A common feature of these four exhibitions is that they are old, and have
not been updated with information from recent research. They may also
have undergone many changes. The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History and Tromsø University Museum have separate exhibitions about the Sami, while at the Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo the
Sami are included in the group presenting indigenous Arctic populations. At
the Norwegian Maritime Museum, the boats are in focus, not the various
population groups. Here what are perceived as Russian and Sami boats are
81
included in the exhibition. This gives an impression of relations between the
boats and not between people.
The museums’ areas of responsibility and theme orientation contribute to
what they narrate in the exhibitions. We could say that the Norwegian
Maritime Museum and the Viking Ship Museum deal with boats, while the
other museums deal with cultural history. Boats are often visual and material elements or part of integrated decoration in the exhibitions without further explanation. Do boats not need to be explained? The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History’s exhibition would have given a better picture of
the coastal Sami culture if it had included information about the boat culture. The exhibition of boats in the Norwegian Maritime Museum would
have benefited from more cultural information. The placement of the Sami
among indigenous arctic peoples on the first floor of the Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo shows a clear division between them
and the Norse population on the ground floor.
If the Nordland boat represents an important element of the coastal Sami
cultural history, there are only a few traces of it in the Norwegian museums.
The Nordland Boat and Ethnicity in the Coastal Association
In the 1970s, there was growing dissatisfaction in Norway over the use of
national symbols connected to the Norwegian inland farmer. An increasing
number of people wanted to see a greater degree of coast-related symbols as
identity markers.
From 1974, several coastal museums were established in northern Norway.13 In 1979, Forbundet Kysten (the Coastal Association) was established
in response to the long-heard wish for a greater commitment to the coast in
the cultural sector (Berge 2004:7–28). An important element of the movement was the use of traditional boats, including the Nordland boat. An increasing number newly built and restored Nordland boats resulted, after a
while, in a relatively large fleet.14
Every year, the Coastal Association arranged national meetings in different locations across the country. This became an important arena for highlighting boat culture. In Lofoten in 1998, the meeting culminated with a
modern re-enactment of the “Battle of Trollfjord”, with a large number of
Nordland boats as stage props in the encounter with the SS Børøysund. The
original Trollfjordslag (The Trollfjord Battle), a battle between capital interests and regular fishermen in 1890, occupies a central place in Norwegian
fishing history.15
The Lofoten fishery has a central place in Norwegian coastal culture, and
the town of Bodø has been a natural stop for boats heading for the fishing
grounds. Most boating people are familiar with the many historic descriptions of how the fleet of Nordland boats sailed in, particularly during the
82
Mariann Mathisen
The fleet of traditional Nordland boats on their way into Bodø in 2006. Photo: Arne-Terje
Sæther.
nineteenth century. The national meeting in 2006 staged one such entrance
into Bodø by inviting participants to meet in given ports north and south of
the town. The given time of arrival was combined with suitable weather and
winds, resulting in a successful re-enactment of history.
The National Association meeting and the regional Coastal Associations
became important arenas for displaying the Nordland boat as an identity
symbol. For many, this boat is northern Norway’s answer to the Viking
ships. People in northern Norway also wanted to be Vikings, and their aspiration was visualized through the Nordland boat. Local historical works and
coastal museums of local history often shared the statement “1,000 years of
unbroken boatbuilding tradition”, where the aim was to imbue coastal history with greater value by connecting to the Viking Age.16 In several locations, the interest in coastal museums and the Coastal Association were two
sides of the same coin. Gratangen Kystlag founded in 1988,17 arranged the
Coastal Association’s first national meeting in northern Norway the following year. A newly built museum called Gratangen Båtsamling (Gratangen
Boat Collection) opened with an exhibition of Nordland boats.18
However, in all this highlighting of the symbols of the coast in this period,
the Sami background of the Nordland boat was not a topic. Nor did the Sami
communities display any particular interest in the organization. Even
though Gratangen has a history of three cultures – Sami, Kvens and Norwegians – this was not a theme taken up in the museum. The museum insti-
83
gated the foundation of Nordnorsk fartøyvernsenter og båtmuseum (Northern Norwegian Ship Preservation Centre and Boat Museum), in 1996. But
again the Coastal Sami culture was not dealt with by the Centre before
2005.19
It seems that the boundaries drawn by Færøyvik between Norwegian and
Sami boat culture permeated the voluntary coastal culture movement for a
long time. Accordingly Coastal Sami were considered incapable of competing at sea. How was then the Sami connection to the Nordland boat dealt
with in the Sami communities?
Sami Nation-building: Sami Museums – Sami Boats?
The Sami population became involved politically as the second part of the
1900s progressed. The political struggle of the Sami led to the establishment
of Samedíggí (the Sami Parliament) in 1989 and ratification of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention no. 16. Through the process, the Sami
movement was interested in marking cultural boundaries, to stand out clearly as being different from Norwegians (Stordahl 1998:86). The manner in
which this was to be done was to mark the ethnic boundary by using some
cultural characteristics or symbols, what Eidheim (1971:41) calls idioms,
which were selected and assigned special symbolic value (Stordahl 1998:
82). These idioms needed to be capable of creating a sense of community
internally in Sami relationships. They were also to underline the essence of
being Sami as something special and different from being Norwegian. The
idioms would furthermore need to be accepted in Sami-Norwegian relations, and they also needed to be complementary to and of equal value to
cultural expressions that signified being Norwegian (my italics, Stordahl
1998:82).
Large internal cultural differences did not facilitate the choice of idioms.
There were major language differences between south Sami and north Sami,
and the background of very different livelihoods created challenges. Among
most Sami, a distinction would be made between nomadic Sami, permanently settled Sami and coastal Sami (Stordahl 1998:83). The biggest problem was, however, what idioms the Norwegian had taken and what was left
for the Sami.
At the end of the nineteenth century, reindeer herding was presented as
the innate symbol of what was Sami (Myklebost 2010b:10). Since the idiom
identifying Sami culture was already well established, it was easier to adopt
than boats and other elements from the coastal Sami culture. The Sami economic adaptation along the coast did not differ essentially from the Norwegian one, and it was important to use idioms that created clear distinguishing lines. Symbols related to the coastal practice were already “taken”.
The competitor was the Norse Viking and a thousand years of Norwegian
84
Mariann Mathisen
boatbuilding competence. The coastal Sami status at the bottom of the Norwegian hierarchy seems to have excluded them from the Norwegian and
northern Norwegian coastal culture. In Sami nation-building, the outcome
was the same, but in a slightly different way. Here the coastal Sami were at
the bottom due to their common practice with Norwegian coast culture. In
the symbol hierarchy, reindeer herding ranked at the top, river Sami culture
came in second and coastal Sami culture ended at the bottom. Overall, this
made it difficult for the coastal Sami group to use elements from their livelihood as symbols to strengthen their own identity.
How has Norwegian and Sami nation-building influenced Sami museums
and the manner in which they present boats? Is the Nordland boat presented
as part of the coastal Sami culture? I have examined two exhibitions: Árran
– Julevsáme Guovdásj/Lulesami centre and Várjjatt Sámi Musea/Varanger
Sami Museum. These are both coastal Sami museums, and were among the
first to produce exhibitions of coastal Sami culture. In addition, I have used
information from the websites and the periodicals produced by the museums
as supplementary information.
The Sjøsamene (Coastal Sami) Exhibition at Várjjatt Sámi
Musea – Varanger Sami Museum (VSM)
In its permanent exhibition Sjøsamene (Coastal Sami), which opened in
2000, the museum highlights coastal Sami history and prehistory with the
sub-themes settlement history, hunting and fishing, pre-Christian religion,
joik (a traditional Sami musical expression), arts and crafts. The first object
in the exhibition is a boat with two mannequins dressed in coastal Sami
clothes, a man and a woman. The boat is raised on a platform that creates
the illusion of water, and the scene is clearly defined by its lighting. There
are several elements of nature with stuffed seabirds next to the boat and the
sound of seabirds in the background. There is little information about the
boat, which is a Sami bask, or about the boatbuilding tradition and the use
of boats in general.20
On the museum’s website we learn that fish was an important trading item
during the trade with the Pomors (from the end of the seventeenth century
to 1917). In the early spring, from February to April, the Sami would move
to their fishing grounds. The coastal Sami also seem to have joined in commercial fishing from the second half of the twelfth century (Hansen 2010:
46). There is not much information about boatbuilding, the use of boats or
fishing on the website; the focus is rather on types of settlement and housing.
An article written by the local historian Øystein Nilsen, “Baska – Bask –
Paaski, Fjordbåten, innsjøbåten, lettbåten, elvebåten” (Baska – Bask –
Paaski, the fjord boat, the lake boat, the light boat, the river boat; Nilsen
85
2010), provides more extensive information. He shows that the designation
has been connected to several variants, in both Tana and Varanger, and that
they were adapted for use in the sea and the river. The bask, according to
Nilsen, was the most common rowing boat in the inner part of Varangerfjord
in Nesseby up to World War II (Nilsen 2010:96). The boat in the exhibition
is a result of cooperation between the riverboat builder Jouni Laiti, VSM
and elderly people in Varanger who have helped (Nilsen 2010:99–100). The
result was two reconstructions based on old pictures, measurements of a
bask from the mouth of the Tana River and a lake bask from Tanadalen
(Nilsen 2010:99–100). In the exhibition, the boat is not placed in a particular
time frame. For example, it has thole pins, a technology which was adopted
for Nordland boats in the second half of the nineteenth century. The boat is
not sewn; the planks are attached by spikes. The second boat lies at Mortensnes alongside a reconstructed Sami goahti, and can be used for presentation
purposes.
In the exhibition, VSM does not challenge Færøyvik’s boat historiography. The ethnic boundaries drawn between Sami boats and Norwegian boats
are maintained. The question is whether the Sami bask, adapted for use in
fjord mouths and a river estuary, was suitable for all types of fishing that the
coastal Sami did in Varanger. The county governor’s report for Finnmark
and Troms 1840–45 says: “in Senjen and Tromsø Fogderi [districts], in Alten, Porsanger and Varanger-Fjorden a quite substantial number of [Nordland] boats have been built” (Klepp 1983:43). It is unclear how far back
Sami building and use of Nordland boats can be traced in this area. Possibly
the Sami fjord adaptation in Varanger differed from the one used further
south. Fragmented documentation that is difficult to access also makes it
harder to deal with these unclear border-transcending cultural practices. The
main impression the visitor is left with is that the exhibition talks about a
“authentic” Sami world. This boat is not borrowed, it is genuine Sami.
The Samisk kystkultur (Sami Coastal Culture) Exhibition at
Árran – Julevsáme Guovdásj/Lulesami Centre
The permanent exhibition Samisk kystkultur (Sami Coastal Culture) opened
in 2005. The exhibition is housed in the basement with the sub-exhibition
Den samiske gården (The Sami Farm) which opened in 2007. These two
sections relate to each other and are framed by the same wall structures. The
exhibitions have many openings and common passageways, and the coastal
section has a boat, a small færing, that is the smallest Nordland boat of approximately 17–18 feet. On board are two mannequins, a man and a woman
in Lulesami dresses. There is not an overwhelming amount of information,
and the exhibitions are relatively simple.
The front wall framing the coastal exhibition is divided into three infor-
86
Mariann Mathisen
mation sections with the headings: Bergenshandelen (the Bergen trade),
Båtbygging (Boatbuilding) and Kommersielt fiske (Commercial fishing).
All three topics have usually been connected to the Norwegian fishermen in
the north and have been main pillars in northern Norwegian history and
identity building. The texts inform visitors that the Sami have taken part in
the Lofoten fishing, that they have built many boats and sailed in their own
vessels to Bergen where they actively took part in the dried fish trade. The
exhibition presents the coastal Sami in Tysfjord as independent participants
taking part in events in a Sami coastal culture framework. They write the
Sami into northern Norwegian coastal culture, which challenges the Norwegian dominance both textually and visually. A painting by Alvin Jensvold depicts Sami people building Viking ships. This imagined scene is
based on the often heard quotation from the old Sagas: “This winter, they
say, Sigurd had the Finns [Sami] build two ships for himself in the fjords,
and they were tied together with tendons in addition to spikes and wicker instead of ribs.”21
Árran also founded the periodical Bårjås22 in 1999, and in 2005 published
a special issue to mark the opening of the exhibition. It was entitled Båter,
fiske og folketro – Samisk kystkultur (Boats, fishing and popular beliefs –
Sami coastal culture) and had a painting of Sami boatbuilders building
Viking longships on the front cover. Many of the articles focus on coastal
Sami history seen from a Lulesami perspective.23 Alf Ragnar Nielssen
writes about “Samene og lofotfisket i eldre tid” (The Sami and the Lofoten
fisheries in past times), where the Norwegian bastion of Lofoten is challenged. The world’s largest seasonal fisheries, where the ultimate heroes,
the northern Norwegian skippers, have fished and sailed for almost a thousand years, were no longer allowed to dominate the scene alone. Nielssen
discusses Sami practice, settlement and names in an area which has been understood as being predominantly Norwegian.
Two Museums – Two Strategies
Varanger Sami Museum was the first museum to open an exhibition of
coastal Sami culture as its main theme. VSM creates and presents a special
coastal Sami universe without Norwegians, strongly confirming Varangerbotn and Nesseby as core Sami – and coastal Sami – areas. Here there is the
opportunity to gain a visual, material and textual understanding/perception
of coastal Sami culture. The boat is a central item of the exhibition. A special Sami type of boat has been recreated, and this shows that the Sami and
boats belong together. The bask represents the Sami’s own boat culture and
represents an extension of what is accepted as Sami identity markers. Sami
culture thus becomes more diverse in both Sami and Norwegian contexts. If
we see museum exhibitions as a form of dialogue, we may consider this ex-
87
The Sami bask in Varanger Sami Museum. Photo: Arne-Terje Sæther.
hibition as an answer to the non-existent story of the coastal Sami (Bugge
Amundsen 2003:70).
Árran has chosen another solution. Árran has challenged the established
idea of Sami as inland people and has presented new research results on special coastal Sami traditions (Andersen 2005a and 2005b). They cross all the
established symbolic borders. Coastal Sami culture is written into and in opposition to the Norwegian narrative of continuity by bringing to the fore the
participation of Sami in Lofoten fishing, Sami settlement in Lofoten, Sami
building Viking longships, Sami participation in sailing freight ships and the
Bergen trade. Even the use of the name Bårjås (sail) contends the northern
Norwegian dominance. Moreover, the local coastal Sami culture is also presented with folkloristic material, which confirms a strong connection to the
sea. Textually and thematically, the Sami replaces the Norwegian. For some
this may be perceived as an attempt to exclude what is Norwegian, claiming
that this is coastal Sami culture, not Norwegian. We can also regard it as a
contribution to an ongoing process, an attempt to adjust ethnic and cultural
boundaries.
Both museums display the simple fjord fishing with hand lines in small
boats, giving a simple and uncomplicated technique status. The gender aspect also represents the drawing of an ethnic boundary since it has been a
general notion that Norwegian women did not fish,24 while it was more common for the Sami man and wife to fish together.
To the extent that Sami clothing can be perceived as nation-building, this
88
Mariann Mathisen
is primarily achieved through their ethnic provenance. There is no technical
focus on boats, nor are there any technological explanations. It is rather the
highlighting of this ethnic group’s practice, a staging of the practice with a
view to making it visible, taking a place in this part of the presentation of
history, that is being communicated. VSM maintained the ethnic border related to technology, or perhaps it is trying to tell us that the Sami boat is also
an important boat. Árran, however, is saying that the Nordland boat also belongs to the Sami. Both museums aim at making the coastal Sami visible.
From Ethnic Boundaries to Cultural Interaction?
What is displayed in museums is assigned value in one way or another. Norwegian nation-building and the Norwegian coastal culture movement chose
the Viking ships as important identity markers, while Sami nation-building
chose reindeer herding. Coastal Sami culture was assigned no status either
in Sami or in Norwegian culture. The Norwegian nation-building concerned
highlighting a young and small nation in relation to its much larger neighbours Sweden, Denmark and Russia. The Viking period was an important
resource and the Viking ships became key symbols of Norwegian culture.
This in particular had consequences for the way the Nordland boat was
given ethnic idioms and woven into patterns of ethnic relations. It was related to the Viking ships and given a role as evidence of a thousand-year Norwegian boatbuilding tradition. With Bernhard Færøyvik’s work it was used
as a boundary marker for being Norwegian. These patterns formed the basis
for the Coastal Associations activity after the 1970s. Although the museum
exhibitions also been influenced by these views, it is possible to notice a
kind of relationship between the coastal Sami and the Nordland boat in several exhibitions. However, the former view maintaining that the Sami had
just borrowed it undermines the relation. The boat is not really theirs anyway. Is it then possible to think that the coastal Sami society has influenced
the development of the Nordland boat? It has been difficult to see the Nordland boat as a Sami boat as well, because this would distort the picture of
what was Norwegian.
Moreover, the way the boat is or is not exhibited seems to have great significance for how the boat is understood. Boats often seem to be tacit elements that are included in tangible and visual decorations in exhibitions
about culture but without explanations. On the other hand, exhibitions that
focus on boats often say little about complicated ethnic relationships. What
is strange is that, visually as well as materially, boats in museums rarely tell
any other story than that they are static. They are immovable, ossified pillars
of salt, as if they were monuments from a past time. One might wonder
whether this “frozen” expression may have been mutually infectious. The
narrative about the Norwegian boatbuilder from the Viking period is until
89
today set in a frozen and rigid phase like this. Boats, boatbuilders and fishermen represented the opposite. Boats were movable, and they were moved
across large distances from one season of fishing to the next. For periods of
time, boatbuilders were itinerant, gathering impressions and inspirations.
The older notion of the thousand years of Norwegian boatbuilding traditions needs to be challenged. The continuity is there in the light of practice,
but it is very unclear whether we today should understand this as a uniform
Norwegian tradition. The point of departure for both Eilert Sundt and Bernhard Færøyvik was that the Vikings’ culture ranked higher than that of the
Sami. It is related to the fact that the two cultures should be held apart in order to be assessed at the right value. Even if museum exhibitions today are
not based on this view, it could be an underlying part of the narrative.
It is no better to construct a similar thousand years of Sami boatbuilding
tradition based on sewn boats (Paulsen 2010) in an attempt to balance this
condescending assessment. There are more than 800 years between the Viking period and the 1800s, and Bernhard Færøyvik’s boundary between
what were Norwegian boats and what were Sami boats generally rests on
merging the two historic semicircles postulated by Henrik Wergeland, the
Viking period and the new nation in 1905. There was thus less interest in exploring what occurred in the intervening years. Even if there is continuity in
a technical sense from the boats of the Viking period, this is a long span of
time with little or no research (Mathisen 2010:132ff.). Varanger became the
arena for Norwegian boundary marking against what was perceived as an
alien culture. Even though the coastal Sami culture had been part of the
Nordland boat tradition and commercial fishing for centuries, it was now
understood as foreign.
Revitalization of the coastal Sami during the last fifteen or twenty years
has taken place apart from the Norwegian coastal culture movement. The
coastal Sami established their own forums through local Sami associations
and local history associations. Perhaps the coastal Sami were more interested in internal acceptance from other Sami groups than in competing with the
Norwegian Viking symbol. North Troms is one of the areas where the coastal Sami origin of the Nordland boat has been put on the agenda. In 2001, the
music and culture festival Riddu Riđđu in Kåfjord placed the use of boats
on its programme. This resulted in a photograph of a Nordland fembøring
under sail with a Sami flag printed in the Nordlys newspaper. The Beavžá
4H club and Nord-Troms Museum built Nordland boats and gave them
Sami names (Nilsen 2008:144–145). This sparked debates in several newspapers, and it was clear that any link between coastal Sami and Nordland
boats challenged the Norwegian sense of identity (Nordlys, February
2006).25 The statements show that attempts were made by Norwegian, Sami
and Kven groups to mark or move boundaries. Each one argued the right to
the boat, and they all claimed that their ethnic group had invented the boat.
90
Mariann Mathisen
The positions and relations between the Sami and the Norwegians have
changed, from one young nation and a coastal Sami minority to that of two
different populations with their own nations. The strength of the Sami nation-building can be seen in the Sami movement’s need to define its own territory, as an alternative region called Sápmi, that is, the Sami nation (Niemi
2004:182).26 It has become customary among some Sami politicians to “put
the word ‘nation’ or ‘national’ in front of all their institutions. The website
of Samedíggí/the Sami Parliament has promoted the terms Sami national
day, Sami national symbols and Sami national anthem” (Berg 2004:107).
The coastal Sami have also been elevated to a more visible and powerful position.
For Sami living along the coast, the need to make their culture visible has
been just as important as it was for Norwegians. Earlier political views have
been an important basis for drawing ethnic boundaries between Norwegian
and Sami Coastal culture. A greater amount of documentation might today
provide evidence of how the different population groups interacted and
learnt from each other. There is still much to be learned about coastal Sami
culture and Sami historical monuments connected to water, rivers and the
coast (Wickler 2010:122).
The coastal Sami revitalization has challenged the existing knowledge
and valuation regime and there is a need for new perspectives. Lars Børge
Myklevold voices the idea of using the term “boatbuilding history in northern Norway” instead of northern Norwegian boatbuilding history (Myklevold 2010:18–22). Various ethnic groups that represent settlements in
northern Norway could be included. Vladimir Lomakin, a tradition researcher in the Maye Korely Museum in Archangel, states that the schnjaka
type of boat is a mixture or symbiosis of boatbuilding traditions from Scandinavia, Novgorod and the Pomor/White Sea area (Lomakin 2009). In this
view, culture seems to be permeable and people can use different inspirations to develop boats. The captivating aspect is precisely the study of such
development features in a multicultural arena. The boat culture in northern
Norway has also been in a state of continuous change. Access to timber, demand, trade relations and adaptation to commercial fishing have all had an
impact. During some periods there have been great changes, during other
periods there have been smaller changes, and it appears that the Sami and
Norwegians have adopted differing positions at different times (Mathisen
2010:150–151). Mutual relations were built and knowledge was exchanged.
The open north promoted common cultural experiences and learning, and
perhaps a certain degree of permeability. Through this article we can see
how ethnic borders have been established but also negotiated.
How can exhibitions in museums tell complex stories about complex ethnic relations? None of the exhibitions in this article has provided enough
knowledge about the complex ethnic relations in northern Norway. It is
91
necessary to go to other media or channels to learn more. The question is
what the biggest challenge is to our understanding of museum exhibitions
and how they should be displayed or our understanding of culture. The need
for clear categories and boundaries between “us and them”, Sami and Norwegians, has led both groups to narrate stories without considering the
other. Can museums allow cultural practices or objects to pass through ethnically established borders? How can stories about relations be told without
taking in account the majority–minority hierarchy? Are there any stories of
this kind to be told? Absence of valuation of the multiethnic diversity rests
of course upon old values, but perhaps we also need new ways of presenting
museums exhibitions? New ways of telling stories about technology transcending ethnic boundaries can perhaps contribute to new experiences.
Mariann Mathisen, PhD Research Fellow
Tromsø University Museum
N-9037 Tromsø
E-mail: [email protected]
References
Andersen, Svanhild 2008: Sjøsamene i Finnmark – bosetting og kultur. NOU 5
Retten til fiske i havet utenfor Finnmark. Oslo.
Andersen, Oddmund 2005: Rágga og gubbon – mytiske vesener i det maritime
miljøet. Diedalasj ájggetjála Árran – juvesáme guovdásj/ Populærvitenskapelig
tidsskrift fra Árran – lulesamisk senter, ed. Lars Børge Myklevold. Bodø.
Andersen, Oddmund 2005: Fiskemáddo – fiskenes stammor. Diedalasj ájggetjála
Árran – juvesáme guovdásj/ Populærvitenskapelig tidsskrift fra Árran – lulesamisk senter, ed. Lars Børge Myklevold. Bodø.
Barth, Fredrik (ed.) 1969: Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization
of Culture Difference. Bergen.
Barrett, Rob 1992: Fembøringen Salarøy. Arctandrias Skrifter. Tromsø, http:
//www.arctandria.no/baat/artsalaroy.htm.
Berg, Bård A. 2002: Forestillingen om en samisk nasjon. Fortidsforestillinger, bruk
og misbruk av nordnorsk historie, ed. Bård A. Berg & Einar Niemi. Skriftserie
for Institutt for historie, Universitetet i Tromsø 4. Tromsø.
Berge, Geir 2004: Uryddige individualister i flokk. Forbundet Kysten gjennom 25 år.
Oslo: Forbundet Kysten.
Berkaak, Odd Are 1992: Ressursbruk, bevaringsideologier og antikvarisk praksis i
fartøyvernet. Norsk Forening For Fartøyvern.
Bojer, Johan 1972: Den siste Viking. Oslo: Gyldendal.
Bugge Amundsen, Arne 2003: Museet som fortelling. Sted, rom og fortellingsunivers. Museer i fortid og nåtid. Essays i museumskunnskap, ed. Arne Bugge
Amundsen, Bjarne Rogan & Margrethe Stang. Oslo: Novus forlag.
Christensen, Arne-Emil 1979: Inshore Craft of Norway. Oslo: Grøndahl & Søn.
Eidheim, Harald 1971: Aspects of the Lappish Minority Situation. Oslo-Bergen-Tromsø: Universitetsforlaget.
Eldjarn, Gunnar & Godal, Jon 1990: Nordlandsbåten. Rissa: Båtstikka D/A.
92
Mariann Mathisen
Eldjarn, Gunnar 2000: De nordlandske båtreformene. Om kulturvern ved kyst og
strand, Norsk Museumsutvikling 4.
Eldjarn, Gunnar 2010: Kæm e du uijnna? Várjjat Sámi Musea Čállosat/Varanger
Samiske Museums Skrifter 6, ed. Mia Krogh, Mariann Mathisen & Kjersti
Schanche. Varangerbotn.
Evjen, Bjørg & Hansen, Lars Ivar (eds.) 2008: Nordlands kulturelle mangfold. Oslo:
Pax forlag.
Gjessing, Guttorm 1941: Båtfunnene fra Bårset og Øksnes. To nordnorske jernaldersfunn. Tromsø Museums årshefter 8.
Færøyvik, Bernhard 1935: Baatbyggjekunsti ved Ishavs-strenderne. Schnjaka,
havbaaten fraa Murmankysten er norsk. Norrøna 6. Bjørgvin.
Gjessing, Gutorm 1941: Båtfunnene fra Bårset og Øksnes, to nordnorske jernalderfunn. Tromsø Museums årshefter 8.
Hansen, Lars Ivar 1990: Handel i nord – samiske samfunnsendringer ca. 1550–ca.
1750. Unpublished Thesis. University of Tromsø.
Hansen, Lars Ivar 2010: Sami Fisheries in the Pre-Modern Era. Household Sustenance and Market Relations. Várjjat Sámi Musea Čállosat/Varanger Samiske
Museums Skrifter 6, ed. Mia Krogh, Mariann Mathisen & Kjersti Schanche.
Varangerbotn.
Hansen, Lars Ivar & Olsen, Bjørnar 2004: Samenes historie fram til 1750. Oslo:
Cappelen Akademiske forlag.
Hole, Arne R. 2007: Båter og kystfolk. Oslo: Aschehoug & Co.
Klepp, Asbjørn 1983: Nordlandsbåter og båter fra Trøndelag. Norske båter IV., Oslo: Grøndahl & Søn.
Kolsrud, Knut 1991: Sjøfinnane i Rognsund. Serien artikler i etnologi grunnfag 1.
Avdeling for etnologi, IKS Universitetet i Oslo.
Larsen, Anders 1950: Om sjøsamene, oversatt fra samisk av J. Qvigstad. Tromsø:
Tromsø Museum
Lomakin, Vladimir 2010: En beskrivelse av de viktigste typene pomorbåter,
abridged version translated by Marianne Lund for the exhibition project Cold
Coasts – Close Relationship, opening in Tromsø on 14 December 2011.
Mathisen, Mariann 2003: Med nordlandsbåten mellom praksis og symbol. Nordnorske fiskeres strategier mot fare og grenseforståelse 1830–1900. Hovedfagsoppgave i historie. Universitetet i Tromsø.
Mathisen Mariann: 2003b: Eilert Sundt og Nord-Norge, folk og kunnskap. Unpublished trial lecture. Universitetet i Tromsø.
Mathisen, Mariann & Nilsen, Gørill 2006: Nordlandsbåten og det samiske. Avisa
Nordlys 28 February.
Mathisen; Mariann 2007: Samisk båtbygging. Kysten 3.
Mathisen, Mariann 2009: Region og kulturarv, etnisitet og båt – gamle og nye utfordringer. Unpublished lecture at the Kaff Seminar 5 March.
Mathisen, Mariann 2010a: Innledning. Várjjat Sámi Musea Čállosat/Varanger Samiske Museums Skrifter 6, ed Mia Krogh, Mariann Mathisen & Kjersti Schanche.
Varangerbotn.
Mathisen, Mariann 2010b: Båt og etnisitet i Nord-Norge. Veien videre? Várjjat Sámi
Musea Čállosat/Varanger Samiske Museums Skrifter 6, ed Mia Krogh, Mariann
Mathisen & Kjersti Schanche. Varangerbotn.
Molaug, Svein 1964: Norsk sjøfartsmuseum 1914–1964. Norsk Sjøfartsmuseum
Årsberetning. Oslo.
Myklebost, Kari Aga 2010: Borealisme og kulturnasjonalisme. Bilder av nord i
norsk og russisk folkeminnegransking 1830–1920. Ph.D diss. Universitetet i
Tromsø.
93
Myklebost, Kari Aga 2010b: Bilder av samene og kvenene i den norske kulturnasjonalismen. En komparasjon. Trial Ph.D. lecture, 26 November 2010. Universitetet i Tromsø.
Myklevold, Lars Børge 2005: Samisk båtbyggingshistorie i Nord- Salten. Bårjås,
Diedalasj ájggetjála Árran – juvesáme guovdásj/ Populærvitenskapelig tidsskrift
fra Árran – lulesamisk senter, ed. Lars Børge Myklevold. Bodø.
Myklevold, Lars Børge 2010: Båter og båttradisjoner nordpå – hva er norrønt/norsk
og hva er samisk? Várjjat Sámi Musea Čállosat/Varanger Samiske Museums
Skrifter 6, ed Mia Krogh, Mariann Mathisen & Kjersti Schanche. Varangerbotn.
Nielsen, Jens Petter 2005: Some Reflections on the Norwegian–Russian Border and
the Evolution of State Borders in General. Russia-Norway, Physical and Symbolic Borders, ed. Tatjana N. Jackson & Jens Petter Nielsen. Moscow.
Nielssen, Alf Ragnar 1990: Fra steinalderen til 1700-tallet. Lødingen, Tjeldsund og
Tysfjords historie V. Published by those municipalities.
Nielssen, Alf Ragnar 1994: Fra vidstrakt prestegjeld til storkommune. Lødingen,
Tjeldsund og Tysfjords historie IV. Published by those municipalities.
Nielssen, Alf Ragnar 1996: Møtet mellom lulesamer og sjøsamer i Tysfjord på 17og 1800-tallet, Stat, religion, etnisitet, ed. Bjørn-Petter Finstad, Lars Ivar Hansen, Henry Minde, Einar Niemi, Hallvard Tjelmeland. Skriftserie 4, Sámi dutkamiid guovddáš/Senter for samiske studier, Tromsø.
Nielssen, Alf Ragnar: 2005: Samene og lofotfiske i eldre tid. Diedalasj ájggetjála
Árran – juvesáme guovdásj/ Populærvitenskapelig tidsskrift fra Árran – lulesamisk senter, ed. Lars Børge Myklevold. Bodø.
Nielssen, Alf Ragnar 2007: Den første storhetstid. Kiberg som fiskevær ca 1400–
1700. Partisanbygda Kiberg, fiskeværet mellom øst og vest. Vadsø.
Niemi, Einar 2004: Region, fortidsforestillinger, etnisitet. Fortidsforestillinger, bruk
og misbruk av nordnorsk historie, ed. Bård A. Berg & Einar Niemi. Skriftserie
for Institutt for historie, Universitetet i Tromsø 4. Tromsø.
Niemi, Einar 2005: Border Minorities between State and Culture. Russia-Norway,
Physical and Symbolic Borders, ed. Tatjana N. Jackson & Jens Petter Nielsen.
Moscow.
Niemi, Einar 2007a: Kibergs historie – utsyn og innsikt. Partisanbygda Kiberg,
Fiskeværet mellom øst og vest, ed. Einar Niemi. Vadsø.
Niemi, Einar 2007b: Fra krise til ny storhetstid. Kiberg på 1700- og 1800-tallet. Partisanbygda Kiberg, Fiskeværet mellom øst og vest, ed. Einar Niemi. Vadsø.
Nilsen, Gørill 2004: Nord-Troms museum 25 år. Kulturmøter i Nord-Troms.
Tromsø: Nord-Troms Museum, Lundblad Media.
Nilsen, Gørill: 2008: Det problematiske mangfold. Nordisk museologi 1–2. Århus.
Nilsen, Øystein 2010: Baska – Bask – Paaski. Fjordbåten, innsjøbåten, lettbåten.
Várjjat Sámi Musea Čállosat/Varanger Samiske Museums Skrifter 6, ed. Mia
Krogh, Mariann Mathisen & Kjersti Schanche. Varangerbotn.
Olsen, Bjørnar 2004: Hva er samisk forhistorie? Várjjat Sámi Musea Čállosat/
Varanger Samiske Museums Skrifter 1, ed. Mia Krogh & Kjersti Schanche.
Varangerbotn.
Paulsen, Yngve 2010: Samisk skryt til kystkulturbevaring. Harstad Tidende 16 July,
www.ht.no/incoming/article375042.ece, accessed 30 November.
Posti, Per 2001: Trollfjordslaget. Myter og virkelighet. Svolvær: Montanus forlag.
Sametingsrådets melding om samisk institusjonsutvikling 2004:7, from http:
//www.sametinget.no/artikkel.aspx?MId1=3299&AId=2683, accessed 17 November 2010.
Schanche, Audhild & Schanche, Kjersti 2007: Forhistorien. Kiberg før 1400. Parti-
94
Mariann Mathisen
sanbygda Kiberg, fiskeværet mellom øst og vest, ed. Einar Niemi. Kiberg Bygdelag. Vadsø.
Solhaug, Trygve 1976: De norske fiskeriers historie 1815–1880. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget.
Stenseth, Bodil 2000: Eilert Sundt og det Norge han fant. Gjøvik: Gyldendal Norsk
Forlag.
Stordahl. Vigdis 1998: Same i den moderne verden. Karasjok: Davvi Girji OS.
Storm, Dikka 2010: Rollen til Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning innen
samisk forskning – fra tysk forskningstradisjon til fremveksten av samfunnsvitenskapene. Heimen 47.
Sundt. Eilert 1855: Om dødeligheden i Norge. Bidrag til kundskab om folkets kaar.
Udgivet af “Selskabet for Folkeoplysningens Fremme” som Tillægshæfte til
“Folkevennens” 4de Aargang. Christiania.
Sundt, Eilert 1975a: Om husfliden i Norge. Verker i utvalg 8. Oslo/Gjøvik: As Norbok.
Sundt, Eilert 1975b: Om renligheds-stellet i Norge. Verker i utvalg 9. Oslo/Gjøvik:
As Norbok.
Sundt, Eilert 1976: På havet. Verker i utvalg 7. Oslo/Gjøvik: As Norbok.
Wickler, Stephen 2010: Submerged Cultural Heritage and Ethnicity in Northern
Norway. Visualizing Sami Waterscapes from an Archaeological Perspective.
Várjjat Sámi Musea Čállosat/Varanger Samiske Museums Skrifter 6, ed. Mia
Krogh, Mariann Mathisen & Kjersti Schanche. Varangerbotn.
Finnish-speaking immigrants from northern parts of Finland and Sweden.
For further reading about coastal Sami practice and fishing culture see, for example, Andersen
2008:164–186. The jekt, a sail freight boat, has also been constructed by Norwegians and Sami,
but will not be dealt with in this article.
3
Eldjarn and Godal 1990; Eldjarn 2000; Eldjarn 2010:101–106; Mathisen 2003:52–68; Mathisen 2010:142–144.
4
For Sami participation see for example Solhaug 1976; Nielssen 1990, 1994, 1996, 2005; Hansen 2010:37–57.
5
This section builds on Mathisen 2003b.
6
http://www.khm.uio.no/utstilling/faste/vikingskipene/index.html, accessed 30 November
2010.
7
He separated inland boats from coastal boats since “coastal boats are generally more highly
developed and of better quality than those used on fresh water” (Christensen 1979:13). A
south-eastern Norwegian type of boats was contrasted to the west coast and the northern types.
The south-eastern type was more heavily built and specialized for sailing while the west and
northern types were more adapted to rowing (Christensen 1979:14). Finally “there are the types
proper to the Arctic coast; these were mainly built by the coastal Sami people and their Russian
neighbours, who fished extensively on the coast of East Finnmark (Christensen 1979:14–15).
8
In 1941, the archaeologist Guttorm Gjessing wrote about the two boats, the Øksnes boat and
the Bårset boat. They were excavated in Øksnes in Vesterålen and at Nord-Kvaløya off the
Troms coast. In the Øksnes boat all the planks are sewn together, while in the Bårset boat only
the uppermost plank is sewn. Gjessing proposes a theory that the sewing technique could be
ascribed to a special Sami boat tradition. The Sami boat tradition harked back to the northern
skin boat culture from the Stone Age, while the rivet or spike building technique was a tradition
from the south (Gjessing 1935:74–85).
9
Accessed 15 June 2010.
1
2
95
Accessed 30 November 2010.
Accessed 16 June 2010.
12
Previously called Norsk Sjøfartsmuseum, visited several times in 2007, 2008, 2009 and last
on 16 June 2010.
13
For example Norsk Fiskeværsmuseum in Lofoten, Lofotmuseet, Nord-Troms Museum, Øksnes Museum, Bø Museum, see also: http://www.fiskerimuseene.no/index.html.
14
See for example Berge 2004. Arctandria coastal association had the fembøring named
Salarøy built in collaboration with Tromsø Museum, Barrett 1992. Today many people are
building Nordland boats, one of these being Gunnar Eldjarn who lives in Tromsø. He was also
active in the establishment of the Arctandria coastal association, www.arctandria.no.
15
The original Battle of Trollfjord, in 1890, was a conflict over access to fish. A steamship
barred the entrance to the Trollfjord and denied fishermen access, while the steamship hauled
aboard large loads of fish. The fishermen attacked and managed to open the barriers. See for
example Bojer 1972 or Posti 2001.
16
See examples: www.vagan-kystlag.no; www.hildringstimen.no; Hole 2007:20.
17
http://www.gratangen-kystlag.no/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=
3&Itemid=10, accessed 28 September 2010.
18
Collected by Arctic Ocean skipper Bertheus Eilivsen. The exhibition was designed by Alvin
Jensvold and Agnar Kalseth in cooperation with Sverre Nordmo, later the general manager of
the museum.
19
The author worked at the boat museum from 1 February 2006 to 31 October 2008. She developed the project Havets helter, på samisk, kvensk og norsk (“Heroes of the Sea in Sami,
Kven and Norwegian”), a cooperation project with Trondarnes Distriktsmuseum, Øksnes Museum/Museum Nord, Nord-Troms Museum, Vadsø Museum, Porsanger Museum, Nordnorsk
fartøyvernsenter og båtmuseum.
20
For pictures see: http://www.varjjat.org/web/?galleri_govat=30.
21
Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla: A History of the Norse Kings. The Sami were at the time
spoken of as Finns.
22
The Lulesami word for sail.
23
Norway has several Sami groups: Lulesami, Pitesami, North Sami and South Sami.
24
This nevertheless varies greatly in relation to the type of fishing, and there are many examples where girls would join their father in the boat. In general, Norwegian women did not
join in the major seasonal fishing off the coasts of Finnmark and Lofoten.
25
Nordlys, February 2006: 8/2, p. 64; 11/2, p. 41; 15/2, p. 64; 17/2, p. 60; 21/2; 28/2.
26
“The name Sápmi designates a nation without state boundaries, but with a common language,
common history and common culture. Sápmi comprises Sami in Norway, Sweden, Finland and
Russia” (exhibition text Tromsø Museum, Bjørklund, Brantenberg, Eidheim, Kalstad, Storm,
opened in 2000).
10
11
96
Mariann Mathisen
Folk Museums and Worker’s Memories
97
The Norsk Folkemuseum and Working-Class Culture
Arne Bugge Amundsen
The Norwegian national project was shaped in the nineteenth century.
When the distinctive collective character was to be filled with content and
meaning, Norwegians chose to place the emphasis on what was called
folk culture and folk tradition. This was also the case in a number of other
nations, particularly evident in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway.
As a consequence of this, priority was given to the collecting and interpretation of sources of the national folk culture. The importance of this
activity is clear from the fact that it also acquired academic legitimacy
through the establishment of university posts in the subject of folklore
studies, known as folkeminnevitenskap and later folkloristikk (Boberg
1953).
The Institutionalization of Folklore
Norway gained its first professorial chair in this field in 1886, when Moltke
Moe (1859–1913) – son of the great folklore collector and later bishop of
Christianssand, Jørgen Moe – became professor of folklore and dialects
(folkemaal og folketraditioner). What Moltke Moe and his academic successors were interested in was documenting parts of Norwegian peasant culture. This mainly concerned the part of the peasant culture that had undergone little Danish or urban influence. It was therefore particularly important
for them to collect traditions from the interior of Southern Norway, especially Upper Telemark (Liestøl 1949; Fløtra 1995; Amundsen 1999).
This tendency is not difficult to explain. As an independent state from
1814, Norway’s politicians and intellectuals grappled with two problems of
boundary drawing. One was to find genuine Norwegian historical and cultural survivals that could lead the nation back to an older period of independence; this meant that everything that was described as “Danish” was
problematic. And Danish included the little urban and bourgeois culture that
existed in Norway. The other problem was in maintaining a cultural distance
98
Arne Bugge Amundsen
from the other state in the personal union, Sweden, with its great class differences and its aristocratic elite. The solution to both problems was to emphasize the independent, proud, and historically rooted peasant culture as
something genuinely Norwegian, as something national above all else
(Hodne 1994:41ff; Storsveen 1997; Kjus 2003).
There was also a third front, however, which was clearly expressed
through the collection and study of the material and non-material vestiges
of peasant culture, and this concerns the fear of modern society. Both implicitly and explicitly, it is clear that many of those who were concerned
with “folk tradition” took a negative view of cities with their industry and
their class differences, and with their working people and working-class culture. These parts of the cultural and social reality were either tacitly ignored
or described as destroying the “folk tradition” (Amundsen 1999:36ff.). This
in turn shows that the concept that was constantly modulated by the Norwegian nation-forming process, that of the “folk”, was an ideological construction, an ideal designation, and not a numerically or socially defined entity (cf. Hylland 2002).
The Disappearance of the “Folk”
The problem was that the “folk” was tricky to grasp, and was gradually disappearing. Even rural Norway was slowly being mechanized and industrialized, and the pre-modern peasant culture – often described as “the old peasant society” – became a distant dream. In Norway between the two world
wars it was evident to most people that “the folk tradition” was in the process of vanishing, and the same applied to “the free Norwegian peasant”.
The concrete form this took was a profound economic and demographic crisis for Norwegian agriculture, a crisis that also had major political consequences (Furre 1991:92ff). The 1930s simultaneously saw a great upswing
for peasant romanticism and nationalistic nostalgia, which had obvious political and cultural overtones; there was no mistaking the protest against the
consequences of the crisis, and the idyllic view of the pure national past.
Workers, socialism, and social democracy could not possibly find any place
in this nostalgia (Furre 1991:139f; Rovde 1998).
This nostalgia also had its academic bastions. Folklore in the nineteenth
century was a part of the national enthusiasm, and it even had a radical background as part of the left-wing interest in “the people”. Moltke Moe’s professorship thus became a political cause for the radical groups that came to
power after the parliamentary rebellion in the Norwegian Storting in 1884
(Amundsen 1999:88). Interest in folklore and folklife, on the other hand, acquired an increasingly conservative political character in the twentieth century. Now it was a matter of defending what was old and established, embracing the agrarian heritage against new popular movements and the social
99
and cultural changes that threatened the national identity. Everything that
did not support traditional and conservative Norwegianness was problematic for the academic discipline of “folklore studies”.1
A Modern, Methodological, and Scholarly Rescue Operation
This could have remained mere cultural and academic rhetoric, but it did
not. The anti-urban and national academic movement also found its modern
methods – systematic, scholarly, scientific, historical. The way to achieve
this was by the national, nationwide approach. The method was the questionnaire.
In the 1920s and 1930s, grand plans were put forward for the collection
and analysis of surviving folklore from the pre-modern peasant society in
Norway. Many local collections with records of folk tradition were sent in
to the national folklore archive, Norsk Folkeminnesamling.2 A large number
of these collections were edited and published in the series Norsk Folkeminnelags Skrifter.3 In addition, the systematic collection of folklore began with
the aid of questionnaires.
This method was not completely new in Norwegian contexts; in the 1860s
cultural researchers like Eilert Sundt had used questionnaires as a collecting
method (Amundsen 1983: introduction; Bø 1996:97f). But the one who
definitively launched questionnaire projects about folk culture was Nils Lid.
From the 1920s and 1930s he distributed a series of questionnaires to local
informants, on topics to do with old folk beliefs and peasant culture. This
collecting was originally done from the Institute for Comparative Research
in Human Culture, established in 1922. Nils Lid was working at this institute
from 1924, and he composed and distributed a whole series with questionnaires under the common title Ord og Sed, “Words and Customs” (Bø 1990:
10f).
Nils Lid (1890–1958) was appointed Norway’s first professor of “folklife
studies” (folkelivsgransking, later etnologi) in 1940. During the Second
World War he was not able to do much, but after 1945 he resumed his interest in collecting by questionnaire. Through various initiatives a new institution was set up in 1946, which was to send questionnaires annually to local
informants all over Norway. This institution – which soon took over the responsibility for national questionnaire surveys of Norwegian folk culture
from the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture – was named
Norsk Etnologisk Gransking, (Norwegian Ethnological Research), and for
many years it was housed at the Norsk Folkemuseum, the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History in Oslo.4 One model for this way of organizing the
collection of folklore was the national museums in Sweden and Denmark.
With this the old local peasant culture had acquired its own permanent,
modern, and scientific collection apparatus.5
100
Arne Bugge Amundsen
What Fell Outside the National Folklore Project
What continued to fall outside projects like this – ideologically, politically,
and culturally – was the working-class culture; it goes without saying that
bourgeois and upper-class culture were totally out of the question. It was not
by chance, however, that the Norsk Folkemuseum was selected as the location for Norsk Etnologisk Gransking. Around 1950 a series of officers and
project planners at this museum were busy doing systematic documentation
of cultural forms and phenomena. Among other things, there was a largescale documentation of Norwegian storgårder – big farms and manor-like
estates – under the leadership of the archaeologist and art historian Eivind
Stenersen Engelstad (1900–1969) (cf. Engelstad 1959, 1962–1963). In addition, the museum waged a struggle at the end of the 1940s to become accepted as a research museum, and everything that could further this goal was
regarded as important by the director of the museum at the time, Reidar
Kjellberg (1904–1978) (Bjørkvik 1984:16).
What is to be highlighted here, however, is another initiative from the
Norsk Folkemuseum, namely, Norway’s first national survey of workers’
memoirs. The person behind this collection – a man who also used the questionnaire method – was the historian and conservator Edvard Bull the
Younger (1914–1986). Bull belonged to a bourgeois family with a central
ideological position in the Norwegian Labour Party. His father, who was
likewise an important Norwegian historian,6 had as one of his fields of study
the early Norwegian peasant society. Edvard Bull the Younger evidently
brought along a radical political zeal combined with an interest in pre-modern society. An important question was how much he articulated this as a researcher and museum man. Bull was a conservator in the Norsk Folkemuseum’s department of workers’ memoirs in the period 1950–1962.7
Collecting Workers’ Memoirs
The actual collection of workers’ memoirs spanned many years. The basic
method was the use of questionnaires drawn up by Edvard Bull himself, although they were modelled on those used by Nordiska Museet in Stockholm.8 The questionnaires were distributed to a large number of informants
or local collectors, often via trade unions. Back came answers of varying
length written on the questionnaire itself, but these could be accompanied
by drawings, newspaper cuttings, or old photographs.9 Bull himself was
rarely out in the field.10 His most important task was to receive and order the
material that arrived, and in many cases he maintained contact with the informants or collections by letter, to obtain more detailed responses or explanations. The questionnaires were fairly exhaustive, with many detailed
questions. Moreover, they were organized thematically in a way that invited
the respondents to apply an autobiographical perspective to the material.11
101
A New Ideology of Folklore
It is clear that Edvard Bull originally had an ideological intention for the
workers’ memoirs project. It was a contrast and a response to the one-sided
focus on “the old peasant society” that had characterized the Norwegian
museum system and the portrayal of Norwegian national culture. In some
articles he wrote in the 1950s the ideological and critical perspective was
fairly explicit.12 Bull’s project was thus a parallel to the reformulation of
what was considered worth collecting for museums and folklore archives in
Sweden – where the ethnologist Mats Rehnberg (1915–1984) and Nordiska
Museet had played a prominent part – and in other Nordic countries.13
Bull’s employment at the Norsk Folkemuseum had a prior history that is
interesting in this connection. In 1949 he and a fellow historian, Alf Langeland, had sent a letter to the secretariat of the Norwegian Federation of Trade
Unions and to the head office of the Norwegian Labour Party. In the letter
they argued that the labour movement should not lose its cultural and social
strength now that it had political power and had “assumed the responsibility
for the welfare of the whole of society”. Something that could help to
generate the strength the two historians called for was a study of “the history
of the movement and the working people”. Bull thus viewed a workers’
memoir project as part of a strategy to revitalize the labour movement. He
did not get a positive response, however, so he turned to the Norsk Folkemuseum. The director, Kjellberg, welcomed the initiative, and from the autumn of 1950 a Norwegian Institute for Workers’ Memoirs was set up at the
museum. This institute marked the museum as a research institution, but after a time the name was changed to the Department for Workers’ Memoirs
(Bjørkvik 1984:15f).
At the same time, it is interesting that the historian Bull used methods borrowed from folklife studies or ethnology, namely, questionnaires and fieldwork. In this respect his project and the resulting material were also a contrast to the activity in the Archive and Library of the Labour Movement,
which had mainly, since its foundation in 1909, collected material about the
history of labour by following the traditional principles of historians: archiving published and unpublished written material.14 In institutional terms
Bull thus did not end up where he had hoped, in the labour movement’s own
archive of historical memoirs.
But were there perhaps better opportunities at the Norsk Folkemuseum
after all? As regards resources this was probably the case. On the other hand,
it does not seem as if Bull’s collection of workers’ memoirs was of any great
significance for the exhibition or research activity at the museum, apart from
what he did himself. This was no doubt one reason why Bull was able, after
his appointment as professor of history at the Teacher Training College in
Trondhjem in 1963,15 to move the entire collection of memoirs there. It is
only recently that the material has been returned to the Norsk Folkemuseum.
102
Arne Bugge Amundsen
The material, however, was to be of great significance for Edvard Bull’s
own research. In his now classic doctoral dissertation in history from 1958,
Arbeidermiljø under det industrielle gjennombrudd (Bull 1958),16 he used
parts of the material, specifically the memoirs from Østfold County, which
made up a particularly rich collection. Besides the dissertation, Edvard Bull
edited three books of selections from the workers’ memoirs. The series was
entitled Arbeidsfolk forteller, and was obviously inspired by a corresponding book series with “memoirs” that had been started a year or two previously at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm.17
Workers’ Memoirs and Research on Workers
How did Edvard Bull view his project on workers’ memoirs? Originally he
tried explicitly to make it an ideologically charged, strategic, and edifying
work within the framework of the labour movement itself. It appears that he
toned down this aspect during his time at the Norsk Folkemuseum.18 In this
period he presented his outlook on the workers’ memoirs in several contexts, and as we have seen, he could do so as part of an outright critique of
the traditional national representations in Norway and at the Norsk Folkemuseum. In the central results of his work at the museum, however, this is
not very prominent.
The edited collections of workers’ memoirs for which Bull was responsible through the 1950s had a more indirect approach. In the foreword to the
book of workers’ memoirs from the sawmill and planing industry he wrote
a few reflections on the kind of material this was. He described it as “the autobiography of the working class”. Through autobiographies it was possible
to write about “ordinary people” by letting them write for themselves. History was full of autobiographies of leaders and grand personalities, but ordinary people, as a rule, ended up as the historian’s statistics. That was not
how it should be (Bull 1955:9). This reflection can obviously be traced back
to the letter Bull and Langeland sent to the leadership of the Norwegian labour movement in 1949. Through contact with labour history, both the
movement and the motivation could be renewed. And with this we are probably also quite close to a basic outlook of the historian and socialist Edvard
Bull, who was concerned with “history from below” all his life (Maurseth
1984:140f).
In the introduction to his doctoral dissertation from 1958 he tackled the
matter from a slightly different angle. Here he described his study as being
primarily based on the collected memoirs; it was supplemented with other
sources – folk narratives, contemporary newspapers, statistical data (Bull
1958:6ff). Particularly consequential was Bull’s argument that both the collection of workers’ memoirs and the dissertation were important. Norwegian research in cultural and social history had hitherto been preoccupied
103
with pre-industrial matters, he wrote. The idea had been to rescue traditions
and recollections of the pre-industrial era from total oblivion, which is of
course legitimate. In the meantime, memories of Norwegian industry and
working-class culture had “become so old that the foundation years are slipping into oblivion”. But unlike the folklore of the old peasant society, the
workers’ memoirs were distinctive for referring to a rapidly changing form
of culture, where individuals did not have long family memories or deep
roots in a specific place to refer to; “it is therefore urgent to collect the old
workers’ memoirs” (Bull 1958:1).
In other words, Bull used much of the same rhetoric that had been used
about pre-industrial folklore when he sought to justify the value of the collection project: it was urgent because the memories were at risk of disappearing soon! On the other hand, he was not very explicit in contrasting with
or criticizing the one-sided emphasis that the Norwegian national memoir
project had hitherto placed on the collection of pre-industrial agrarian folklore. In this connection Bull described his own project of collecting memoirs
as being similar to, but also a supplement to, what had previously dominated.
Edvard Bull was a historian, and the use of folklore and workers’
memoirs as sources was not uncontroversial in the 1950s. Bull therefore expended a considerable amount of energy in his dissertation to outline and
justify his choice of source material. The explanation that workers’ memoirs
had to be collected because they were disappearing was one thing; arguing
that they could be used as historical sources was quite another. This dual
perspective was never wholly synchronized in Bull’s reflections in the
1950s.
Workers’ Memoirs and the Labour Ideology
It may be necessary to examine this point a little more closely. In his argumentation for his interest in workers’ memoirs and for using them in a historical study, he used several strategies. First of all, he argued that even historical research on the labour movement had hitherto had a “top-down”
perspective; the problem, then, was the ideological dominance. Workers’
memoirs, in other words, could help to bring out the workers’ own experiences and interpretation of their reality: it was a matter of letting “the ordinary workers themselves”19 speak. This argument was weighty in terms of
cultural history because it emphasized that cultural matters are not about
ideology and norms, but about practice and interpretation (Bull 1958:2).
Secondly, Bull argues that worker’s memoirs, when viewed as a whole, are
not just a collection of random memories, but something typical, something
essential, capable of saying something about an entire group of people: the
workers (Bull 1958:3). Here he is obviously arguing against his fellow his-
104
Arne Bugge Amundsen
torians who would object that this source material was not representative.
And these objections were indeed a central feature at Bull’s public defence
of the dissertation in 1958.20 It is also possible to identify a third strategy,
namely, the one aimed at the organized labour movement’s own ideology.
Here it was probably not uncommon to portray the working class as a strong,
united, and unambiguous class community. Bull believed that the workers’
memoirs could challenge that position, and at least make it possible to investigate whether and perhaps when “the workers” developed from being a
more or less random collection of individuals to become a collective, conscious, and acting group. In practice the workers were not a uniform group,
neither socially, politically, nor ideologically; it could be assumed that
“class solidarity” was more an ideal than a reality (Bull 1958:4f.).
It is surely possible to discuss how successful Edvard Bull’s dissertation
actually was. The core of the study is in many ways a relatively traditional
historical analysis, where the different types of source are mixed, and where
the workers’ memoirs in many cases have the same function as quotations
from contemporary newspapers or commentators. It can be tricky to see that
the dissertation is actually what Bull describes it as, namely, as being based
on workers’ memoirs supplemented with other source material. In the concluding chapter Bull in fact ends by declaring that the most important function of the workers’ memoirs from the 1950s could perhaps be to supplement or elaborate the historian’s interpretation of the written source material
from the end of the nineteenth century (Bull 1958:371ff). His presentation
in the introduction to the dissertation is thus reversed.
This is not so important here. Far more important is to observe that Edvard Bull, his collection of worker’ memoirs under the auspices of the Norsk
Folkemuseum, and his doctoral dissertation from 1958 clearly marked that
the idea of what constituted Norwegian folklore had alternatives. It was no
less significant that Bull opened the door for historians to use new sources,
sources not primarily based on written formulation but on oral narrative and
ethnological observation and documentation. The term “interdisciplinary”
did not exist in the academic language of the 1950s, but this was in practice
what Bull was attempting by collecting memoirs and writing his dissertation. He retained an interest in this cross-disciplinary work throughout his
life (Maurseth 1984:145).
Local Workers’ Memoirs
Bull’s collection of workers’ memoirs became important in local terms as
well. One of his permanent informants for many years, Alf Fredriksen of
Sarpsborg, was a boilerman at Borregaard Fabrikker, the paper mill in
Sarpsborg.21 Fredriksen did a great deal of work for Bull in and around
Sarpsborg, which was one of the classic working-class areas in the early-
105
industrialized Østfold County. Alf Fredriksen published some of his material itself, and through cooperation with the county museum of Østfold –
Borgarsyssel Museum in Sarpsborg – where he was a member of the board
for many years, he contributed to the establishment of a separate worker’s
museum for Østfold. In concrete terms this was a worker’s flat in one of the
old buildings constructed to house employees in the grounds of Borregaard
(Amundsen 2003:82.86f).
Alf Fredriksen’s use of workers’ memoirs is interesting. There is no doubt
that he himself understood that he was breaking new ground by writing
about the Østfold working class, but he did not do so in a declamatory way
or as propaganda. In his long article “Av arbeiderklassens kulturhistorie i
Østfold”, published early in the 1950s, it was probably mostly the title he
used to mark what was new: that even the working class had its cultural history (Fredriksen 1954; cf. Fredriksen 1974). The article otherwise stuck
close to the sources in retelling many of the workers’ memoirs that Fredriksen himself had recorded for Edvard Bull, supplemented with historical
photographs. The best way to describe Alf Fredriksen’s article is as a report
on ethnological fieldwork; it is the informants who are allowed to speak, regardless of what the collector might think about what they say. Some of this
is made explicit at the end of the article, where Fredriksen states that this
was about what “the old people themselves” had told him. And “the old
people” had told him about “the good old days” – they had not criticized the
conditions of the working class or their way of life in the latter part of the
nineteenth century. But then Fredriksen went on: “Today’s old people are
also the first to admit the tremendous progress that has taken place in the social and cultural field since – the good old days” (Fredriksen 1954:125). The
world had thus moved forwards!
In many ways it may seem as if Alf Fredriksen’s publication was a
simpler version of Bull’s – the workers’ memoirs were important because
they documented a culture that was disappearing faster than peasant culture,
but their importance did not lie in the fact that they told of something other
than the national narrative about the agrarian era in Norway with its wealth
of memories. In Fredriksen’s presentation, too, the collection of workers’
memoirs was mostly a continuation of the traditional work with folklore.
The ideological critique was largely implicit.
The Dilemma of the Project
This, of course, is not the whole story. Both Alf Fredriksen and Edvard Bull
were concerned with “the right to history” – that the working class belonged
in the historical canon both locally and nationally; that this canon would
thus change character and be modernized; that even the repressed people
could demand a voice when history was to be written; and not least of all,
106
Arne Bugge Amundsen
that workers’ memoirs could be significant for the internal life and political
strategies of the labour movement. The relative modesty with which they
publicly presented their projects in the 1950s nevertheless has its explanations, which are perhaps mostly of an institutional nature. Both Bull and
Fredriksen used traditional museums of cultural history as the institutional
framework for their study of workers’ memoirs, and so it may have felt most
rational to generalize the project, to present it as additional material to what
had already been collected. Memoirs and folklore were at this time still a
field with a heavy ideological load, and it might not have been the right approach to argue that workers’ memoirs were justified too, by explicitly and
repeatedly criticizing the national, pre-modern and agrarian folklore projects. The solution instead was to use the folklore rhetoric and the strategy
of presenting workers’ memoirs as a supplement: they too were important
because they were disappearing, just as agrarian memories had vanished a
few generations previously.
The Folk Museum and Workers’ Memoirs
This is not intended as an exhaustive or adequate presentation and analysis
of the collecting of Norwegian workers’ memoirs in the 1950s, for there is
much more to be derived both from the material itself and from the documentation of the collecting.22 It can be observed in retrospect, however, that
Edvard Bull did pioneering work, but it is debatable whether it was regarded
as an unqualified success at the time. He incurred a great deal of critique
from his academic colleagues, and the actual collecting of the memoirs
would hardly have been possible if he had not been employed at the Norsk
Folkemuseum.
There is nevertheless good reason to pause to consider Bull’s collection
of workers’ memoirs in a 1950s perspective. At that time it represented a deliberate challenge. It must have been the first time the focus on folklore from
pre-modern agrarian Norway was challenged on such a broad front in terms
of research, ideology, and academic discipline. No one “owned” folklore,
the concept of “folk” was not unambiguous, and the interest in folklore was
not limited to folklorists and folklife scholars employees at small institutions where the official language was a more or less conservative Nynorsk,
a language with pre-modern and anti-urban ideological features. Edvard
Bull showed that it was also possible to clothe the interest in folklore in a
bourgeois and urban historian’s language – admittedly with the odd element
of cultural “self-proletarianization” – and to bring this interest into other
ideological and disciplinary debates. So new and simultaneously so marginal was the collection of Norwegian workers’ memoirs in the 1950s at bottom. The pressure from the old national folklore project remained strong.
From the perspective of the institutional and ideological history of the
107
Norsk Folkemuseum, however, Edvard Bull’s efforts with workers’
memoirs were of great significance. The project was possible as a consequence of Hans Aall having been succeeded by Reidar Kjellberg as director
and operational manager. Kjellberg was evidently trying to manoeuvre in a
new political and ideological situation. The time after the Second World
War in Norway was dominated by projects that were intended to gather the
nation once again in a cultural community. The guiding political ideology
was marked by the goals of uniting the classes in the work for a new Norway, and culture was an important means to succeed in this work (Hodne
1994:156ff).
In Hans Aall’s time the Norsk Folkemuseum had not had “working-class
culture” as a central field for collection and mediation. The new museum director, Reidar Kjellberg, was born in Fredrikstad, a central area for the
working-class culture that Edvard Bull turned into an object for collection
and research.23 Kjellberg was thus well informed about the political and cultural conflicts that post-war Norwegian cultural policy was trying to resolve.
While the Norwegian labour movement did not appear to be engaged in Edvard Bull’s history-and-memoir project, the new leader of the Norsk Folkemuseum was an important ally for Bull’s political concern and his philosophy of history. The way to accomplish it was partly to follow the old line
from Hans Aall and Moltke Moe: what was in danger of vanishing had to be
rescued for posterity, to secure the national memory and the national identity. And one can also detect Hans Aall’s old idea about the relationship between the local, the regional, and the national in the Norsk Folkemuseum’s
project about workers’ memoirs. It was a national rescue project that was
implemented, but it also had regional and local effects in the form of committed staff members who pursued their interest in working-class culture in
other museum contexts (Amundsen 2003).
In any case, Edvard Bull realized his plans, while the Norsk Folkemuseum could once again realize the old strategy of Hans Aall: national identity building takes place through the de-ideologized inclusion of all social
groups.
(Translated by Alan Crozier)
Arne Bugge Amundsen, dr.philos.
University of Oslo
NO-0315 Oslo
Norway
108
Arne Bugge Amundsen
References
Internet (all accessed September 2011)
http://snl.no/.nbl_biografi/Reidar_Kjellberg/utdypning.
http://www.arbark.no/Om_Arbark.htmhttp://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/forskning/samlinger/nfs/index.html.
http://www.kulturvern.no/NorskFolkeminnelag.html.
http://www.norskfolkemuseum.no/no/Forskning/Konservatorer-1894-2008/.
http://www.norskfolkemuseum.no/no/Forskning/Norsk-etnologisk-gransking/.
http://www.norskfolkemuseum.no/no/Samlingene/Fotosamlingen/.
http://www.ntnu.no/ub/spesialsamlingene/privark/P180/bull_e_p180.pdf.
Published works
Amundsen, Arne Bugge 1983: Folketradisjon i Østfold 1867. Sarpsborg: Sverre Johansens boktrykkeri.
Amundsen, Arne Bugge 1999: Drømmesyner, eventyr og nasjonalkultur. Norge
anno 1900, ed. Bjarne Rogan. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Amundsen, Arne Bugge 1999: Med overtroen gjennom historien. Noen linjer i folkloristisk faghistorie 1730–1930. Hinsides. Folkloristiske perspektiver på det
overnaturlige, ed. Siv Bente Grongstad et al. Oslo: Spartacus forlag.
Amundsen, Arne Bugge 2003: Museet som fortelling. Sted, rom og fortellingsunivers. Museer i fortid og nåtid. Essays i museumskunnskap, ed. Arne Bugge
Amundsen et al. Oslo: Novus forlag.
Bjørkvik, Randi & Halvard 1984: Dei kulturhistoriske musea og arbeidarkulturen.
Historie nedenfra. Festskrift til Edvard Bull på 70-årsdagen, ed. Per Fuglum &
Jarle Simensen. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Bø, Olav 1990: Nils Lid. Norveg 33.
Bø, Olav 1996: Norsk etnologisk gransking – 50 år. “Minnet”. Foredrag ved Norsk
etnologisk gransking’s 50-års jubileumssymposium 18.–19.4 1996. Oslo: Norsk
Etnologisk Gransking.
Boberg, Inger M 1953: Folkemindeforskningens historie i Mellem- og Nordeuropa.
(Danmarks Folkeminder 60.) København: Munksgaard.
Bull, Edvard (ed.) 1953: Arbeidsfolk forteller. Fra papirindustrien. Oslo: Tiden.
Bull, Edvard (ed.) 1955: Arbeidsfolk forteller. Fra sagbruk og høvleri. Oslo: Tiden.
Bull, Edvard 1958: Arbeidermiljø under det industrielle gjennombrudd. Tre norske
industristrøk. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Bull, Edvard (ed.) 1961: Arbeidsfolk forteller. Renhårig slusk. Oslo: Tiden.
Bull, Edvard 1981: Retten til en fortid. Sosialhistoriske artikler. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Engelstad, Eivind S. 1959: Storgårder i Østfold. Oslo: Aschehoug.
Engelstad, Eivind S. et al. 1962–1963: Storgårder i Norge I–II. Oslo: Hjemmenes
forlag.
Fløtra, Jorunn 1995: Moltke Moe som folklorist. (Norsk Folkeminnelags skrifter
140). Oslo: Norsk Folkeminnelag.
Fredriksen, Alf 1954: Av arbeiderklassens kulturhistorie i Østfold. Østfoldarv II.
Fredriksen, Alf 1974: Arbeidermiljøet langs fossestupet under den siste sagbrukstid.
Østfoldarv VIII.
Fuglum, Per & Jarle Simensen (ed.) 1984: Historie nedenfra. Festskrift til Edvard
Bull på 70-årsdagen. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Furre, Berge 1991: Vårt hundreår. Norsk historie 1905–1990. Oslo: Samlaget.
Hemmersam, Flemming 1987: Arbejderfolkloristik og arbejderkultur. Norveg 30.
109
Historisk tidsskrift 39 1959–1960.
Hodne, Bjarne 1994: Norsk nasjonalkultur. En kulturpolitisk oversikt. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Hodne, Bjarne 2002: Sagnforskning – historien om de tre fortellinger. Sagnomsust.
Fortelling og virkelighet, ed. Arne Bugge Amundsen et al. Oslo: Novus forlag.
Hylland, Ole Marius 2002: Folket og eliten. En studie av folkeopplysning som tekst
i tidsskriftet Folkevennen. (Acta Humaniora 153.) Oslo: Historisk-Filosofiske
Fakultet.
Kaldal, Ingar 2003: Historisk forsking, forståing og forteljing. Oslo: Samlaget.
Kjus, Audun 2003: Sitt fedrelands Herodot. P.A. Munch og det norske folks historie.
(Norsk Folkeminnelags Skrifter 154.) Oslo: Norsk Folkeminnelag.
Liestøl, Knut 1949: Moltke Moe. Oslo: Aschehoug.
Lunde, Aage (ed.): Arbeidsfolk forteller. Jernbaneminner. Oslo: Tiden.
Maurseth, Per 1984: Mellom Seip og Bull. Tilbakeblikk på en jubileumsdebatt. Historie nedenfra. Festskrift til Edvard Bull på 70-årsdagen, ed. Per Fuglum & Jarle
Simensen. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Nilsson, Bo G. 1996: Folkhemmets arbetarminnen. En undersökning av de historiska och diskursiva villkoren för svenska arbetares levnadsskildringar. (Nordiska
museets handlingar 121.) Stockholm: Nordiska museet.
Norsk biografisk leksikon II 1925. Oslo: Aschehoug.
Rovde, Olav 1998: Ætt og bonde – ættedyrkinga i bonderørsla. Slekt og lokalsamfunn, ed. Harald Winge. (Skrifter fra Norsk lokalhistorisk institutt 34.) Oslo:
Norsk lokalhistorisk institutt.
Semmingsen, Ingrid 1960 (ed.): Husmannsminner. Oslo: Tiden.
Simensen, Jarle 1987: Edvard Bull. Minnetale. Det Kongelige Norske Videnskabers
Selskab, Forhandlinger 1987. Trondheim: Det Kongelige Norske Videnskabers
Selskab.
Slettan, Dagfinn 1994: Minner og kulturhistorie. Teoretiske perspektiver. (Skriftserie fra Historisk institutt 4.) Trondheim: Historisk Institutt.
Storsveen, Odd Arvid 1997: Henrik Wergelands norske historie. Et bidrag til nasjonalhistoriens mythos. (KULTs skriftserie 80.) Oslo: Norges Forskningsråd.
There is an interesting discussion of this by Bjarne Hodne (2002) in his study of the relationship between two contemporary Norwegian folklorists, Knut Liestøl and Reidar Th. Christiansen. Whereas Liestøl represented Nynorsk, the agrarian and traditionalist perspective, Christiansen stood for a more urban, international, and comparative outlook. Liestøl remained dominant from the 1910s until the 1950s!
2
Norsk Folkeminnesamling was established in 1914 as a result of a legacy from Professor
Moltke Moe, http://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/research/collections/nfs/index.html.
3
Norsk Folkeminnelag was established in 1920 with the aim of publishing source material
based on Norwegian tradition; see http://www.kulturvern.no/NorskFolkeminnelag.html.
4
In 1974 Norsk Etnologisk Gransking was rehoused together with the Department of Ethnology at the University of Oslo, and in 1986 it was given the status of a private foundation. In 2005,
however, the foundation was dissolved, and Norsk Etnologisk Gransking was turned into a separate department at Norsk Folkemuseum; see http://www.norskfolkemuseum.no/no/Forskning/Norsk-etnologisk-gransking/ and Bø 1996:106.
5
This changed, however, in the 1970s, when collecting activities, under the influence of new
tendencies in Norwegian and international ethnology, led to a concentration on the documentation of contemporary culture.
1
110
Arne Bugge Amundsen
Edvard Bull d e (1881–1932), Norsk biografisk leksikon 1925:378f.
http://www.norskfolkemuseum.no/no/Forskning/Konservatorer-1894-2008/.
8
Bull 1953:127. A survey of the questionnaires that Bull compiled and had printed can be
found in Fuglum & Simensen 1984:239ff.
9
The historical photographic documentation is now a part of a searchable database at Norsk
Folkemuseum, http://www.norskfolkemuseum.no/no/Samlingene/Fotosamlingen/.
10
He stated in the first book of edited workers’ memoirs that he himself had written one third
of the entries, the informants one third, and local collectors one third (Bull 1953:8).
11
See, for example, the questionnaire on the wood processing industry, Bull 1953:127–129.
12
An example is an article of his from 1953, reprinted in Bull 1981:72ff.
13
Hemmersam 1987:81f. An interesting analysis of the situation in Sweden can be found in
Nilsson 1996.
14
On the history of this institution see http://www.arbark.no/Om_Arbark.htm.
15
In 1968 the Teacher Training College became a part of the new University of Trondhjem,
and Bull was professor there until 1981.
16
The dissertation appeared in three editions between 1958 and 1975.
17
Bull 1953, 1955, 1961. In addition a couple of volumes in the series were edited by other
people: Semmingsen 1960 and Lunde 1962.
18
A subsequent director of the museum said 25 years later: “It could have become agitation,
and it could have become weeping wives’ interviews. What it did become was real documentation”, Bjørkvik 1984:24.
19
The word that Bull uses for “themselves” is the Nynorsk sjøl, rather than the Bokmål selv,
thus showing by linguistic means where he belonged politically and ideologically. In the steady
flow of fairly conservative language the form sjøl is a sudden clash of style and an ideological
marker, because this form was perceived as radical and “popular” (folkelig) in Norway in the
1950s.
20
The statements by the opponents at the disputation, with Bull’s responses, were published in
Historisk tidsskrift 1959–1960. The historian Dagfinn Slettan (1994:123ff) has left a detailed
account of how sensational Bull’s breach with the historians’ traditions actually was in the
1950s. At the same time, several Trondhjem historians in the generations after Edvard Bull
have shown a new interest in the problem of memories; see Slettan 1994; Kaldal 2003.
21
Bull (1953:7) mentions Fredriksen as a particularly important collaborator.
22
Edvard Bull’s private archive was deposited in the University Library in Trondhjem in 2000;
see http://www.ntnu.no/ub/spesialsamlingene/privark/P180/bull_e_p180.pdf
23
Reidar Kjellberg in Store norske leksikon. Accessed 30 September 2011 at http:
//snl.no/.nbl_biografi/Reidar_Kjellberg/utdypning.
6
7
Engaging with Gender and Diversity in Museums
111
Engaging with Gender and Diversity in
Museums of Cultural History
Introduction
Discourses on multiculturalism based on essentialist and territorial understandings of culture are gradually being replaced by the hazier and less controversial expressions (cultural) diversity and plural societies (Naguib forthcoming). So much so that 2008 was declared to be the Year of Diversity. As
an analytic tool diversity opens up avenues for exploring similarities and
differences within the framework of the nation state and examines varieties
of cross-cultural contacts and hybridity. Diversity is presented through a
number of lenses and perspectives that explore the boundaries and contact
zones between different groups in society. Following this line of thought, diversity is then understood as an all-embracing concept that not only encompasses nationality, citizenship, ethnicity and religion. It also covers class,
gender, age and lifestyle (Pieterse 2005:165–167). In the world of museums
diversity may be seen as the new governing order, or to paraphrase Tony
Bennett (1988, 1995), the standard exhibition regime of the last thirty years
or so.
This article is about framing as a museological tool through which various regimes of representation are negotiated and articulated in exhibitions.
I concentrate on aesthetic and hybrid regimes of representation and begin by
discussing the relationship between them and framing. I then go on to examine two forms of framing, namely, gendering and everyday cosmopolitanism, and describe how space is organized within these frames thanks to
artefacts that are used to tell collective and individual stories. I illustrate my
arguments with examples from three Norwegian museums. These are the
Kvinnemuseet in Kongsvinger, the Oslo Bymuseum (Oslo City Museum)
section of Oslo Museum (OM) and the Norsk Folkemuseum (The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History).
112
Forms of Framing
In her article Marzia Varutti proposes to analyse display techniques and
narratives in museums according to four different overarching “regimes of
representation” in terms of museological strategies and practices.1 The
term regime refers to political governance and choices that comprise sets
of rules, appropriate conditions and suitable patterns for their deployment
and visibility (Feuchtwang 2011). As a favoured regime of representation
applied in museums of cultural history, aesthetics is of a practical and
phenomenological kind. It relies on experience, emotions, senses and the
individual’s relation to the world. It goes beyond a meditation on the transcendental universality of beauty and the non-utilitarian pleasure that
artefacts and works of art may give by the mere contemplation of their
physical properties such as material, design and execution. Further, as
Mieke Bal (2008:16) rightly points out, in museums aesthetics and politics
operate together. Aesthetics reflects the opinions, policies and priorities of
institutions and funding organizations. One of the main aspects of the aesthetic approach is, in my opinion, the blurring of boundaries between art,
cultural history, anthropology, and media technology. Accordingly, we
observe what Ruth Phillips calls the ‘entanglement of unrelated phenomena’, which in museums is visualized by an overlapping of artefacts and
art installations that not so long ago were seen as quite separate categories
(Phillips 2007:10). Phillips draws on Bruno Latour’s notion of imbroglio
in her discussion of museums’ dilemma to make classificatory distinctions
between art and non-art. Personally, I do not find the term appropriate to
the new trend in exhibitions. In Italian the term imbroglio conveys the idea
of confusion, disorder and delusion. Exhibitions are usually carefully
planned and staged, and the puzzlement a visitor might feel is usually deliberately intended by the organizers.
In exhibitions, regimes of representations are expressed and visualized
through framing. Framing denotes the act, process or manner of shaping
meaning and imparting knowledge. As a theoretical perspective framing is
used in media and communication studies, journalism, sociology and psychology to explicate how reality or events are constructed by mass media,
certain political and social interest groups or by institutions. Framing has to
do with choosing a point of view, method and tool to outline a theme or define a debate and, more important, with fitting particular matters into the
contexts of broader events and narratives. It involves selecting the appropriate items and rejecting others less suitable for the purpose in hand. Framing
must, however, be relevant to all participants both senders and receivers.
Thus, history, collective memory and reflexivity are core elements of framing. In the context of museums, framing gives coherence to exhibitions. It
involves presentation and representation processes where every choice has
consequences both for what kind of meanings are produced, for how they
113
are produced, and also for how they are understood by individuals and communities (Greenhill 2000; Hall 1997:8; Watson 2007:3f.). From the institutional side, curators and designers decide on the content, form and objectives of an exhibition. The displays are organized according to certain contemporary principles and conventions of representation that prevail among
museum practitioners internationally at a given time. In doing so, they follow criteria of intervisuality by referring to one another. The way in which
any selection of objects is put on display reflects the historical and cultural
contexts, the thinking and visions of those in charge. But the message sent
is received in the manner of the receiver, and visitors also bring along their
own experiences, perceptions and individual background, baggage of memories and preconceived ideas to any exhibition. Their interpretations and
reactions may therefore be quite different from the intentions of the organizers.
Framing may take many, often overlapping, forms. Gendering is one of
them. Objects do not have a gender as such but are inscribed with gender to
convey social relations. According to Anne-Jorun Berg and Merete Lie it is
their function and use already at their production that endows them with a
gender. For instance, toys like dolls, kitchen utensils, sowing and knitting
kits, washing boards, cosmetics, fashion magazines and dresses are perceived to indicate the realm of women, while cars, swords, guns, hammers,
saws, technologically sophisticated objects and gadgets and erotic magazines point to a masculine world. In between, there are of course all the
things that are gender-neutral before being used. Berg and Lie propose two
different approaches to analyse these objects (Berg & Lie 1995:345f.; also
Lie 2010). The first one is the gender script approach, where objects such as
contraceptive pills are seen to incorporate a script that influences human
agency. The second, domestication, considers the individual users’ choices
and practices. I would add social and cultural contexts to both approaches
as fundamental elements to understanding how processes of gendering
things are set about.
Laurajane Smith posits that when gender issues are taken up in heritage
projects and museum exhibitions they tend to “convey and legitimize gender stereotypes of men and women” (Smith 2008:162). Museums of cultural
history have had a tendency to present and represent women fixed in the unvarying roles of nurturers, home-makers and companions stepping in to replace men in periods of crisis. Their time is seen as cyclical and repetitive.
It is tied to the details of everyday life, with marriage, births and death as
major events. Men, on the other hand, are shown as innovative, the decision
makers and providers. If given the opportunity they may change the course
of history. Their time is perceived as linear and dynamic. In recent years issues related to gender have been treated in more critical and discursive manners and some museums have engaged with women’s role and contributions
114
Photo 1: The Womens’ Museum (Kvinnemuseet) in Kongsvinger. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal
Naguib
to politics, culture, economy and social life in general. One of these museums is the Kvinnemuseet (Women’s Museum) in the town of Kongsvinger south-east of Oslo ( photo 1).2
A House Filled with Women
There are today forty-seven women’s museums around the world.3 Their
main purpose is to present and represent women’s perspectives on history,
cultural history and the arts. The first women’s museum was established in
1982 in the town of Århus in Denmark.4 In Norway, the Kvinnemuseet is
housed in the childhood home, Rolighed (Tranquillity), of the Norwegian
writer and musician Dagny Juell (1867–1901).5 To save it from demolition
the city museum of Kongsvinger bought the house in 1989 with the explicit
purpose “to fill it with women” and to focus on Norwegian women’s views
of their contributions to building up the nation from the nineteenth century
to today (Jacobsen 2003:323). The museum was officially inaugurated in
1995. Two years later it obtained the status of national museum and is today
part of the Hedmark County Museum. The Kvinnemuseet is a type of museum that combines biography with a special theme. Another example of
such museums is the Musée Champollion: Les écritures du monde, in Figeac
115
in south-west France. It was originally the house of the man who deciphered
the hieroglyphs, Jean-François Champollion (1790–1830), and now specializes in the history, development and diversity of scripts, writing and their
manifold supports and impacts.6 This kind of museum does not merely convey materiality to biographies and keep the memory of a personality alive.
By broadening their fields they also give their stamp to the cultural landscape of their towns. As such they are important tourist attractions and influential actors in the local heritage industry, where they actively contribute
to the production and consumption of culture, either in the form of special
events or by providing fruitful outlets for cultural local goods and crafts.
The Kvinnemuseet in Kongsvinger has four permanent exhibitions in addition to the temporary exhibitions that are set up each summer. The various
exhibitions are planned by the museum’s curators who often rely on artists
to create the setting. Two of the permanent exhibitions rely on a biographical frame that plays on the interaction between people and things as both
subjects and objects (Albano 2008; Hoskins 1998). The artefacts on display
may be considered in terms of “biographical things” or authentic “biographical relics”, to use the expressions of Violette Morin (1969) and Jean
Baudrillard (1968), respectively. As such they are imbued with the aura of
the bond that existed between them and their owners as they bear the traces
of use and belonging. They represent their owners and give them an individuality that is situated in time and space. The exhibition about Rolighed
tells the story of the house from the time it was built in 1857 and the physical
changes it underwent under its successive owners. It largely makes use of
photographs and texts. The house belonged first to the mayor of the city, an
industrialist in the timber business, Sigward Irgens Rynningthen. In 1875 it
became the home of the district physician Hans Lemmich Juell and his
family. One of the four daughters was Dagny Juell. From 1908 the house
served as a rectory and in 1940 it was occupied by the Germans. After the
World War II it was transformed into a social housing project until 1954
when it became a timber factory. The factory closed down in the 1960s.
The second biographical exhibition is called Damen i Berlin (The Lady
in Berlin). It is a personal narrative that relates the life of Dagny Juell and
her days as a pianist and writer amongst the international bohème of Berlin.
The room is fitted with furniture that belonged to her and her family. Here
the artefacts have a strong evocative power as they (re)create an image of
their owner through the presentation of selected personal belongings such as
the piano, her writings and publications and photographs.
The other two permanent exhibitions at the Kvinnemuseet treat social and
political matters. The main one addresses the emancipation of women and
their struggle for equal rights. The first such exhibition to be arranged was
entitled Camillas latter – kvinnesaken gjennom 150 år (“Camilla’s laughter
– the women’s cause during 150 years”) and was opened in May 2000 to cel-
116
Photo 2: Exhibition: The laughter of Camilla; Kvinnemuseet, Kongsvinger Photo: SaphinazAmal Naguib
ebrate the new millennium.7 Two artists, Tone Hellerud and Rigmor Porsvik, were engaged to visualize the theme. The central installation consisted
of pegs in black wrought iron shaped as the signs of paragraphs (§) and fixed
on a white wall (photo 2). A label hanging from each § was inscribed with
a date and the text of a law stating a new achievement in the history of Norway’s feminist movement. The exhibition played on perceptions of inequality and unfairness by contrasting the lot of women from different social
classes while at the same time pointing out some of their shared conditions.
It underscored their state of dependence, the tediousness of the life of
women from the upper classes, the hardships of the poor, and it went on to
show how their situation gradually improved after Norwegian women obtained the right to vote in 1913.
Camillas latter was taken down in 2009 and replaced by the current exhibition, Kvinnesak – er det noen sak? (“The women’s cause – Is it an issue?”), which was produced by the artist Britt Holm to mark the 125th anniversary of the Feminist Association in Norway.8 In contrast to the previous exhibition where the light was dim and the exhibition space divided into
sections, for Kvinnesak the room is brightly lit and there are no partition
walls. The exhibition space is dominated by a long table covered with a
white damascene tablecloth with the word Kvinneliv (“Woman’s life”)
117
Photo 3: Exhibition: Kvinnesak – er det noen sak?, Kvinnemuseet, Kongsvinger. Photo:
embroidered in red thread on the end facing the entrance (photo 3). The
table is overloaded with artefacts of all sorts. Toys, kitchen utensils and appliances, foodstuffs, books and magazines, sewing kits, cosmetics and
medicines are tossed in a seeming jumble. Three items tower over the display: a pile of dishes, a wedding cake and a cumbersome old-fashioned
green ballot box of iron imprinted with the heraldic Norwegian lion. The
table is surrounded by different kinds of chairs, from the high stool for babies to the more comfortable easy chair. Various clothing items have been
placed on each chair. The space under the table is also filled with diverse objects such as different kinds of bowls and basins, socks, shoes, a typewriter,
bottles in a tray, bags and purses. Here the borderline between art and
non-art is blurred. The installation stages objects of daily life and as
ready-made each item is transformed into an object of art. Put together they
represent gendered social relations and the manifold “frozen actions” in a
woman’s life (Oudshoorn et al. 2002; Norris 2004:13–14). Gender is imprinted on the objects of this exhibition, and even the most gender-neutral
of them – such as the eyeglasses, calculator, chairs or typewriter – take on a
different meaning by which women are primarily presented as homemakers
caring for the needs of their families. The ballot box stands out from the rest
as it signifies a much wider political and social matter, namely, the moment
118
women obtained the right to vote. It symbolizes the turning point in their status as citizens.
The walls of the room are covered with long panels bearing texts and photographs. Following a chronological sequence, each panel takes up a theme,
a cause or an event that has affected the situation of women in Norway. The
texts and photographs explicate the role of pioneers in the feminist cause,
major issues that were treated with known model figures standing prominently at the forefront and the circumstances that brought about changes in
women’s place in society. At the entrance the visitor is met by the first Norwegian feminists, their work and the issues they fought for. It continues with
life during World War II, followed by a new wave of feminism, its accomplishments in bringing about additional understandings and practices of
gender roles, such as the stronger presence of men at home and in childcare
and of women engaged in all aspects and echelons of the public domain. The
last panel reminds the visitor that the struggle is not over and there are still
a number of issues to be resolved. Among the most pressing are better salaries for typical “women’s” jobs such as nursing. Matters tied to cultural diversity are visualized by the pictures of the veiled heads and bodies of two
obviously foreign women seen from behind, and of white and brown hands
holding each other in sign of solidarity. The panel bears the title Skaut. En
kvinne sak? (“Head covering. A women’s issue?”). The text informs the
reader about attitudes to the Islamic headdress or hijab in Norway and the
debates it has triggered off in recent years. I’ll come back to this point later.
The fourth permanent exhibition which is also an online exhibition is
called Fortiet. Aborthistorien (“Concealed. The history of abortion”) and is
the work of another artist, Bodil Lundsten Buchacz. It was set up in 2004
and treats the suppressed history of abortion in Norway, from the Middle
Ages up to present times. It focuses on the different laws concerning abortion and women’s own experiences. The exhibition is arranged in the building’s cellar, and to get to this part of the house one has to go down a steep
wooden staircase (photo 4). In her analysis of “the work of exhibition”
Mieke Bal suggests that the deployment of what she describes as “affective
syntax” results from the sequencing of and transitions between different
elements in exhibitions as they are highlighted, framed and animated by the
dynamics of the visit. Meaning is not only produced by the choice of artefacts, their relation to each other in an exhibition and the explanatory texts.
It is also created during a visitor’s stroll or flânerie through an exhibition
(Bal 2006:525–542). Here, the movement of descent emphasizes the sense
of secretiveness and furtiveness surrounding abortion. The space is set up as
a waiting room in a clinic. The objects on display follow a plain gender
script. There is a table with some brochures, surgical instruments and under
it a bowl full of long needles. On the floor there is a large metal washbasin
filled with torn strips of cloth. An old iron and a washing board are placed
119
Photo 4: Exhibition:
Concealed. The History of abortion; Kvinnemuseet, Kongsvinger.
Photo: Saphinaz-Amal
Naguib
beside it. Four small rectangular showcases containing a Barbie doll dressed
in white gauze bandages are fixed on the walls. The text of a law concerning
abortion is pinned above each showcase. The first case visualizes the law of
1687 by showing a decapitated Barbie whose body is wrapped up tightly, lying on her back while her head is pitched on a stake. In the second case the
Barbie is sitting behind bars. Her bandages are a bit looser. The text of the
law from 1902 tells us that a woman committing abortion risked three years
imprisonment. The third Barbie is sitting with a bowed head and strapped
mouth in front of a standing Ken doll representing a medical doctor. The text
of the law of 1960 above the case states that abortion has been allowed for
health reasons. The fourth Barbie is walking towards the beholder. Her left
arm is raised in sign of victory while the gauze rolls down from the right
arm. The text of the law of 1975 confirms women’s right to abortion. Facing
the entrance there are two cubicles. One has its door ajar while the other is
left open, showing that the inner part is hidden by a long curtain. Whispering
feminine voices telling their experiences of abortion come from behind
these secluded rooms. The flow of the narratives is muffled and halting. The
120
exhibition does not merely stress the look at me and read my story aspect of
the display, but also the listen to me and empathize with me dimensions.
Thus, it plays on the combination of emotions and intimacy prompted by
singular voices, things, texts and pictures.
In addition to the permanent exhibitions, the Kvinnemuseet arranges special exhibitions during the summers. The topics treated vary from women’s
traditional crafts and skills to questions related to ongoing social and political debates. For instance, in 2008, which was the year of diversity, it set up
an exhibition entitled En annen dans. En kjærlighetshistorie om homofili
(“Another dance. A love story about homosexuality”) that probed stereotypes and prejudices related to homosexuality.
The exhibitions at the Kvinnemuseet in Kongsvinger use a hybrid regime
of representation by combining aesthetics and history. So far they have relied on a gendered frame and focused on the cultural history of Norwegian
women without, until now, addressing specific issues concerning the different ethnic and/or religious groups. By ignoring cultural and religious differences and disregarding alternative stories, the exhibitions at the Kvinnemuseet have elided the Many by placing them within the boundaries of a
greater hegemonic national narrative (Naguib 2008b). Other museums,
however, have been engaged with questions related to ethnic, cultural and
religious diversity in addition to the gender aspect. The Oslo City Museum
is one of them.
Veiled Diversity
The Oslo Museum (OM) is a city museum and consists of three sections
situated in different parts of the capital. The oldest is the Oslo City Museum.
It is established in an old manor house in the district of Frogner in the west
side of Oslo, and is a museum of urban history. The second is the Intercultural Museum which is located in a converted prison in the “East End” of
Oslo, and the third section is the Theatre Museum which is set in the old
Town Hall in the city centre.9 As is the case with the majority of museums
of urban cultural history or city museums, the OM is housed in converted
private or public historical buildings that are well integrated emblematic
“sites of memory” in the local topography.
The collection and the permanent exhibitions of Oslo City Museum are
closely tied to the history of Oslo and its inhabitants from prehistory to the
present time. The collection consists mostly of various types of artefacts and
clothes, pieces of furniture and house appliances as well as an art collection,
consisting of paintings, graphics, photographs and films depicting surrounding landscapes, streets, buildings, people and life in the city. In its permanent exhibition the Oslo City Museum displays models reproducing the topography of Oslo and the different stages of its development in reduced
121
Photo 5: Poster of Exhibition: Hijab – the right to choose, Oslo City Museum. Photo: SaphinazAmal Naguib
scale. In addition, it makes use of diorama with reconstructed environments
to represent different settings of everyday life in the capital. Following the
general trend among city museums, the Oslo City Museum has in recent
years been more attuned to the interplay between place and people and how
the public space influences the inhabitants’ social and cultural life. A wide
range of topics are treated in short-term, experimental and travelling exhibitions. The themes covered run from issues related to questions of urbanity
and life in the city and its suburbs, matters concerning lifestyles and sexuality to debates on migration, minorities and gender.
In the spring of 2009 the Oslo City Museum arranged an exhibition entitled Hijab – med rett til å velge (“Hijab – the right to choose”; photo 5).10
At the time there was a heated debate going on in Norway about the Islamic veil and whether Muslim women entering the police force should be
allowed to wear it as part of their uniform. By organizing this exhibition
the museum asserted its involvement in current controversial social and
political debates and showed that it can play an active role in promoting
tolerance and social harmony in a plural society. The curator, designers
and artists focused on the Norwegian context and on young Norwegian
Muslim women, mostly of foreign origin. The exhibition presented eleven
models of sophisticated hijabs designed by the founders of the Fashion
House of Badr, the sisters Nafeesah and Suzan Badrakhan.11 Two pieces
122
by the artist Louise Nippierd were part of the exhibition. The most striking
was a model entitled Stigmatisert (“Stigmatized”; photo 6) showing a female figure fully clad in a black metal burqah. The sculpture represented
the Western perception of Muslim women as oppressed and invisible. The
explanatory texts of the exhibition were kept to a minimum. Verse 30 of
the surah of Light (24) in the Qur’an instructing women to cover themselves in public was juxtaposed with St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians. The other reminded the visitor that not so long ago Norwegian (and
by extension European and Western) women used to go about with their
heads covered. The historical and comparative dimensions as well as a
more inquisitive and nuanced treatment of the hijab were completely absent from the exhibition. The hijab was presented as a religious marker of
identity without relating it to disputes within Muslim communities. Thus,
historical and contemporary Muslim feminist movements against the hijab, the hijab as a tool of repression or as a means to accommodate protest
and allow women to participate in public life were not considered. A video
film by one of the initiators of the exhibition, the artist Anita Hillebrand,
told the story of the Fashion House of Badr and showed a catwalk with
models parading new creations of Islamic attires while chanting religious
hymns. The film went on to present interviews with a Sikh man and a
Photo 6: Stigmatized by Louise Nippierd. Exhibition: Hijab – the right to choose;
Oslo City Museum. Photo:
Saphinaz-Amal Naguib.
123
Greek orthodox priest on their use of head covers. In my view, the exhibition was an essentializing, glossy display of “Islamic” fashion within an
aesthetic regime of representation. Gendering was resorted to as a framing
device to emphasize one narrow aspect of a much wider and complex debate on Islam and the integration of Muslim communities in Norwegian
society. Further, the gender framework highlighted difference by setting
up frontiers and making a clear distinction between Us and Them. At the
same time, the exhibition revealed inconsistencies in interpretations and
behaviour tied to veils and their use. The way the veiled young Muslim
women were presented wearing tight-fitting clothes, revealing the curves
of their bodies and heavy make-up did not, in my opinion, correspond to
the teachings of the Qur’an admonishing women (and men) to be modest
and chaste. Nonetheless, in spite of its shortcomings the exhibition reminded the visitor that neither cultural and religious traditions nor identities stand still. Rather, they are set within what Fernand Braudel (1958)
described as the “almost motionless time” of the long duration in which
changes occur without being felt. Traditions and identities are continuously in the making and in a process of transformation, of being re-interpreted
and adapted to novel situations. In a certain way the exhibition pointed out
modes of practising transculturality and everyday cosmopolitanism.
Experimenting with Prismatic Identities
Fernando Ortiz coined the term transculturality to express various stages of
the process of transition from one culture to another (Ortiz 1995 [1947]:
102f.). For him transculturality involves the loss or uprooting of elements of
one culture, the incorporation of new ones and the convergence of these
fragments of old and new and their transformation into a more or less coherent new body. The stages of transculturation do not happen one after the
other in an orderly fashion. Rather, because there are many decisions and
choices to be made along the road they are often concomitant and criss-cross
each other. Hence, transculturation denotes phases of adaptation and integration but also of rejection. Transculturality conveys the idea of going beyond cultural boundaries and engaging with hybridity and plural identities.
In my understanding, hybridity is a process of transformation which entails
the convergence and mixing of various cultural influences and the practice
of an everyday cosmopolitanism.
Everyday cosmopolitanism implies a concern and respect for others, for
differences and diversity. Moreover, it is not restricted to urban elites, frequent travellers and academics. It combines roots with routes, and “the
global does not exclude the local” (Chan 2008 [2002]:207). As an analytical
approach everyday cosmopolitanism offers alternative perspectives to explore the ways people from various backgrounds share a common space, in-
124
teract on a daily basis and practise glocalization by mixing the local with the
global. It means to acknowledge “cultural hyphenations” and the articulation of individual double-focused – even multiple-focused – identities such
as Native-American and Afro-American in the USA, of French-Algerian-Muslim-Sunni-Parisian-woman in France, of Muslim-Norwegian-Pakistani-gay, Muslim-Shia’-Norwegian-Iranian-woman or Sami-Norwegiangirl-punk in Norway (Ashworth et al. 2007:124f.; Naguib forthcoming). Expressing a sense of belongingness to a plurality of cultures and underlining
one’s multiple roots is not perceived as a denial of one’s allegiance to a nation state, a region, a locality or an ethnic/religious group.
In recent years several European and North American museums of cultural history have endeavoured to visualize everyday cosmopolitanism by
showing how it is practised in daily life, in what Michel de Certeau (1990:
173) described as lieux pratiqués, or practiced spaces, that is, spaces of
creative accommodation that are defined by the experiences and multiple
identities of those who use them. In treating topics related to diversity museums are experimenting by combining two central elements of everyday
cosmopolitanism. They make use of what Olivier Remaud (forthcoming
2012) describes as translation and familiarization approaches. Translation
presupposes a shift and, as I see it, implies an etic description by an observer from the outside. In the case of museums, it means explaining the
“Other” from the standpoint of the national or the majority. Familiarization comes from within. It is an emic description and considers women,
ethnic groups, cultures or religions in terms of their own understandings
and concepts. Nowadays, the translation and the familiarization approaches are increasingly used together in a dialogic relationship in exhibitions
and collaborative projects. Accordingly, museums of cultural history
treating questions related to diversity in plural societies are looking at
them through the lenses of hybrid regimes of representation where gendering and everyday cosmopolitanism are among the favoured framing strategies. Thus, instead of focusing on borderlines, walls, differences and
clashes they probe the manifold contact zones and experiment with interaction and shared values, even if these may be the basis for conflicts (Naguib 2008b, 2010). The term contact zone was coined by Marie Louise
Pratt (1992:6) to describe in-between or intersticious spaces of encounters
between people of different backgrounds. Contact zones are by no means
peaceful spaces but rather ramified fields of tension where homogeneity
and heterogeneity, tradition and innovation, the local and the global converge (Naguib 2008a:472f.). They are transient spaces with flexible
boundaries which provide fertile grounds for various degrees of cultural
translations, transfers and borrowings. They are intermediary spaces of accumulated transcultural knowledge that foster hybridity. Visualizing
everyday cosmopolitanism and multiple identities in museums of cultural
125
history involves a close examination of the intersticious spaces and how
they are converted into new beginnings. This approach leads the way to
uncovering and mapping out the new frontiers that are being shaped in different societies. The Pakistani apartment at the Norsk Folkemuseum is an
example of this trend.12
In 1998 the Oslo Cooperative Housing Cooperation (OBOS) donated an
old three-storey brick apartment building known by its former address,
Wesselsgate 15, to the Norsk Folkemuseum. The edifice dates from 1865
and is typical of the residential districts of Oslo at the time. The street is
situated at the junction between the west and east sides of Oslo, and its inhabitants used to belong to the middle and lower middle classes, mostly
shopkeepers, craftsmen, white-collar workers and employees in the public
and private sectors. The reconstruction of the building on the grounds of the
Norsk Folkemuseum began in 2000 and was finalized in 2009. As it stands
on its new site, the building contains eight apartments in addition to a liquor
store. The size of the flats varies between 50 and 125 square metres. Each
flat is used to tell a different story of daily life, living conditions and interior
styles in Oslo from the late nineteenth century up to the present. Thus, the
interiors are not simply reconstructed homes, but what I would describe as
tangible narratives that rely on a hybrid regime of representation by mixing
aesthetic, historical and ethnographic perspectives. These are articulated
through many-layered frames combining biography, gender and in our case
study, everyday cosmopolitanism.
The so-called Pakistani apartment was set up in collaboration with a
family that came originally from Pakistan and was living at Tøyen on the
east side of Oslo. The layout is common for many three-room flats in Oslo.
The first room that meets the visitor is the kitchen and already here the
blend of cultures is clearly expressed. It has the usual worktop, fridge,
oven, pots and pans, table, chairs and curtains as most such kitchens have
in Norway, but the food and spices on display are clearly exotic. The same
is true of the configurations of the other rooms. The furniture is ordinary
to many homes in Norway and can be purchased anywhere, but the details
of the interior decoration communicate a sense of “foreignness” and also,
implicitly, of gender. The choice of materials and colours, the pictures on
the walls (many are calligraphic verses from the Qur’an), the artificial
flowers, the teddy bears and other ornaments, the embroidered pillows, the
silverware and the dainty glasses in the living room as well as the
heart-shaped clock in the youngster’s bedroom, the flowered bedcover
with a stuffed red heart on top suggest that here the person in charge of
housekeeping is a woman – a woman who might be working outside her
home but whose presence, taste and style are conveyed by the way the private space of the family is ordered.
126
De-framing and Re-framing
Frames are not permanent. Exhibitions are regularly de-framed and reframed. New knowledge, ideas and standpoints are presented and the same
objects may be used to illustrate a number of themes and debates. Hence, the
artefacts convey different meanings according to the museological regimes
of visibility and representation through which they are framed. Even in the
case of collaborative projects and exhibitions it is ultimately the museum
embodying political authority and scientific knowledge in the persons of
curators, architects and exhibition designers that decides which regime(s) of
representation and which frames will be applied for the purpose in hand.
Hilde Hein (2000:65f.) explains that during the last three decades or so museums have shifted their priorities from the presentation of authentic artefacts to the production of experiences, that is, to transience and elusiveness.
Exhibitions are more idea-oriented and geared to the public. Design and
spectacle are central to the display. The provenance of the objects, their materiality, craftsmanship, form and style are secondary to the effect they have
in exhibitions. It is my contention, however, that objects do have their own
aura and what Robert Armstrong (1971) has called their affecting presence.
They do touch us and have an emotional influence on our senses, and this
acts upon our perception and valuation. Common to the three cases presented in this article is their use of a gendered frame to articulate an aesthetic
regime of representation visualized by mixing art and non-art. The objects
are not only chosen and staged for their materiality and meaning but also for
their power of moving us, and through that they may perhaps prompt novel
understandings on a given matter.
University of Oslo
P.O. Box 1010 Blindern
NO-0315 Oslo
Norway
References
Albano, Caterina 2007: Displaying Lives. The Narrative of Objects in Biographical
Exhibitions. Museum and Society 5/1, pp. 15–28.
Armstrong, Robert P. 1972: The Affecting Presence. An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Bal, Mieke 2008: Exhibition as Film. (Re)Visualizing National History. Museums
and National Identities in Europe in the New Millennium, ed. Robin Ostow, pp.
15–43. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
127
Baudrillard, Jean 1968: Le système des objets. La consommation des signes. Paris:
Gallimard.
Bennett, Tony 1988: The Exhibitionary Complex. New Formations 4, pp. 73–102.
Bennett, Tony 1995: The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics. London:
Routledge.
Berg, Anne-Jorunn & Lie, Merete 1995: Feminism and Constructivism. Do Artifacts
Have a Gender? Science, Technology & Human Values 20/3, pp. 332–351.
Braudel, Fernand 1958: Histoire et sciences sociales. La longue durée. Annales.
Économie, Sociétés, Civilisations, 13/ 4, pp. 725–753.
Certeau, Michel de 1990: L’invention du quotidien. Vol. I, Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard.
Chan, Kwok-Bun 2008 [2002]: Both Sides, Now. Culture Contact, Hybridization,
and Cosmopolitanism. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Theory, Context and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, pp. 191–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hall, Stuart 1997: Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London: Sage.
Feuchtwang, Stephan 2011: Exhibition and Awe. Regimes of Visibility in the
Presentation of an Emperor. Journal of Material Culture 16/1, pp. 64–79.
Hein, Hilde 2000: Museum in Transition. A Philosophical Perspective. Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean 2007: Interpretive Communities, Strategies and Repertoires. Museums and their Communities, ed. Watson, Sheila, pp. 76–94. Leicester
Readers in Museum Studies. London: Routledge.
Hoskins, Janet 1998: Biographical Objects. How Things Tell the Stories of People’s
Lives. London: Routledge.
Houdshoorn, Nelly, Saetnan, Ann Rudinow & Lie, Merete 2004: On Gender and
Things. Reflections on an Exhibition on Gendered Artefacts. Women’s Studies
International Forum 25/4, pp. 471–483.
Jacobsen, Kari Sommerseth 2003: Hennes historie – museet. Museer i fortid og
nåtid. Essays i museumskunnskap, ed. Arne Bugge Amundsen, Bjarne Rogan &
Margrethe C. Stang, pp. 317–327. Oslo: Novus forlag.
Lie, Merete 2010: Tingenes kjønn. En utstilling av gjenstander og teknologi. Samling og museum. Kapitler av museenes historie, praksis og ideology, ed. Bjarne
Rogan & Arne Bugge Amundsen, pp. 151–165. Oslo: Novus Forlag.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas 1999: An Introduction to Visual Culture. London and New York:
Routledge.
Morin, Violette 1969: L’objet biographique. Communications vol. 13, pp. 131–139.
Naguib, Saphinaz-Amal 2008a: Heritage in Movement. Rethinking Cultural Borrowings in the Mediterranean. International Journal of Heritage Studies 14/5,
pp. 467–480.
Naguib, Saphinaz-Amal 2008b: The One, the Many and the Other. Revisiting Cultural Diversity in Museums of Cultural History. National Museums in a Global
World. NaMu III, vol. 31, pp. 5–13. Linköping University Electronic Press, http:
//www.ep.liu.se/ecp/031/index.html.
Naguib, Saphinaz-Amal 2010: Reconciling History and Memory at the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris. Museums, New Media and Refugees.
Forms and Issues of Participation, ed. Katherine Goodnow & Hanne-Lovise
Skartveit, pp. 47–58. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Naguib, Saphinaz-Amal forthcoming: The Articulation of Cultural Memory and
Heritage in Plural Societies. The Formative Past and the Formation of the Future, ed. Terje Stordalen & Saphinaz-Amal Naguib.
128
Norris, Sigrid 2004: Analyzing Multimodal Interaction. A Methodological Framework. New York: Routledge.
Ortiz, Fernando 1995 [1947]: Cuban Counterpoint. Tobacco and Sugar. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Oudshoorn, Nelly, Ann Rudinow Saetnan and Merete Lie, 2002: On Gender and
Things: Reflections on an Exhibition on Gendered Artifacts. Women’s Studies
International Forum 25/4, pp. 471–483.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 2005: Multiculturalism and Museums. Discourses about
Others in the Age of Globalization. Heritage, Museums and Galleries, ed. Gerard
Corsane, pp. 163–183. London: Routledge.
Pratt, Marie Louise 1992: Imperial Eyes. Travel and Translation. London: Routledge.
Remaud, Olivier forthcoming 2012: On Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms, Multiple
Modernities and The Task of Comparative Thought. The Comparative Political
Thought, ed. M. Freeden. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Laurajane 2008: Heritage, Gender and Identity. The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Brian Graham & Peter Howard, pp. 159 –
178. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Watson, Sheila (ed.) 2007: Museums and their Communities. Leicester Readers in
Museum Studies. London: Routledge.
See Varutti’s article in this issue.
I am thankful to the Kvinnemuseet’s curator of education, Mona Holm, for receiving me and
taking the time to answer all my queries.
3
http://www.womeninmuseum.net/.
4
http://www.kvindemuseet.dk.
5
http://www.kvinnemuseet.no/.
6
http://www.ville-figeac.fr/Culture/Musee/.
7
In reference to one of Norway’s first feminists, the writer Camilla Collett (1813–1895).
8
There is a wordplay on the polysemy of the term sak which in Norwegian means a gadget or
contraption, and also an issue or a cause.
9
http://www.oslomuseum.no. Oslo is divided into east and west by River Aker. During the
nineteenth century factories were built along the east bank and the area was mainly inhabited
by factory workers and families with low incomes, many of whom were originally migrants
who had come to the capital in search of employment. This pattern seems to have persisted and
many immigrants have settled there, so much so that the east side of Oslo is considered as the
“multicultural” part of town.
10
The exhibition Hijab – med rett til å velge lasted from 15 February to 15 April 2009. See also
the article by Varutti in this issue of Arv.
11
The name of the fashion house refers to the Battle of Badr in 624 CE which marked the turning point in Islamic history and established the prophet Muhammed as a recognized political
and religious leader.
12
See also Varutti’s article.
1
2
A Group of Calendar Sticks from Trøndelag
129
A Group of Calendar Sticks from Trøndelag, Northern Norway and Greenland
Audun Dybdahl
We do not know for certain when the people in Norway first employed material aids to keep account of the time, but the introduction of Christianity
was presumably very important. The church introduced the Julian calendar,
repeatedly presented in various liturgical manuscripts (missals, breviaries).
Here, the old Roman system was most often used, with the important days
of the Church added as a parallel layout (Beckman 1934:10–11). As the centuries passed, it became more usual to state the time with reference to the
feast days of the Church, rather than to the Roman marking days of the
months (the 1st (Kalendae), the 5th (Nonae), and the 13th (Idus).
By the time Christianity was introduced in our country, a large number of
ecclesiastical feast days had already been established; these were of course
also accepted here. It is quite obvious that the Anglo-Saxon church exerted
a great influence on the Norwegian one, as regards which saints, and how
many, received red days in the calendar (Taranger 1890:353–372). A certain
development took however place, when the Norwegian Church also gradually accepted national saints, who became objects for liturgical celebration.
Not all feast days were of equal importance; the liturgical practices were
classified by the Church (Schumacher 2002:99). The most important days
were celebrated from the previous eve, with fast and ban of all labour, and
were called festum fori; those were feast days which concerned everybody.
Less important feast days were celebrated with simple liturgical ceremonies
in the churches (festum chori); these were not aimed at the people in general.
The normal feast days are also listed in the parts of the provincial laws
which concern the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The most important saints reoccur in all of these; however, they are not the same everywhere (Taranger
1890:354–58).
It was the duty of the priest to make certain that the parishioners were informed of the approaching feast days. Warning was spread by the passing
of a cross from farm to farm, according to a pre-set sequence. If the clerics
neglected this duty, or mistook the day, they were prone to punishment.
130
Audun Dybdahl
Some of their parishioners might work on feast days, or neglect the fast
regulations; the laws have an established system of fines here, graded according to the seriousness of the violations (Frostathing Law: 25–29).
How Old Are the Wooden Calendars?
It is obvious that lay people, too, might find it useful to have their own calendars to show which days were due for observance. Independently of ecclesiastical feasts, it would of course also be important to ascertain the progress of the year, with reference to such work as should be observed. Not
least important would be to determine the most favourable moment for the
various agricultural undertakings: sowing, harvesting, and so on. In popular
speech, saints were therefore often allied with such work, in more or less
established expressions such as “Kolbjørn with the salmon” (Columba),
“Knut with the scythe” (Canute), Kari with the spinning wheel” (Catherine)
etc. (Alver [1970] 1981:142, 148, 99).
At what time wooden material began to be used in order to keep account
of dates, no one can say with certainty. Lithberg (1921:10–17) has pointed
out similarities between calendar sticks and rune-sticks on one side, and the
tally-stick on the other; the latter was much used for figures and account-keeping in the Middle Ages. The carving of a notch for each day on a
stick, starting from a distinct point, would of course give some idea of how
far the year had passed. But it would be a cumbersome method of keeping
track of the time.
An obvious step forward would be to make a calendar of wood which
could be reused every year, like the ecclesiastic calendar. It would not be
very complicated, provided there was agreement on when the year was supposed to start, how many days it had, how it should be split up and which
days were the more important and should be plotted in to simplify the computing of time. Most people were illiterate, and parchment expensive. Wood
was a cheap material, and everyone knew how to handle a knife.
The oldest wooden calendars in the North have been found during archaeological excavations in Swedish towns. Oldest is a small stick of only 20.5
cm found in Lödöse, presumably produced in Denmark in the second half
of the twelfth century (Svärdström 1963). Here, working days are marked
by a long notch, while feast days are symbolized by a full cross, a half-cross,
or just a short notch. This stick also has a system with lines which make it
possible to determine the day of the week of any date in any particular year.
The Swedish rune-sticks were already in the High Middle Ages equipped
with certain symbols (runes, and rune-like signs) specifying Sundays and
movable feasts. Like the calendaria of the Church, which throughout the
year employed the seven first letters of the alphabet to signify the days of
the week, the Swedish runic sticks continually repeated the row of seven
131
runes fuþarkh, starting on 1 January. If the rune F fell on a Sunday, then all
days in that year marked by this letter would be Sundays. Leap years had
two letters for Sunday: one before, the other after the leap year day, 24 February. These runes correspond to the day notches on the Norwegian sticks.
Unlike the Norwegian sticks however, the Swedish also have Golden Numbers. The reason here was as follows: The Church had decided that Easter
Day should be celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after
the vernal equinox (21 March). But while the Julian calendar related to the
Earth’s circling around the Sun, the time of Easter was dependent on the
Moon’s circling around the Earth. During 19 years, the Moon would travel
235 times round the Earth – thus, the lunar phases would occur on the same
dates every 19 years. The whole of time after the year 1 before Christ was
therefore divided into 19-year cycles, and each year within any such cycle
received a number 1–19, the so-called Golden Number. The number of any
year could then be found by adding 1 to the actual year and dividing by 19.
With the aid of the rune-stick’s Sunday letters and the Golden Numbers, and
a table, it was then possible to work out the time of Easter and other movable
holidays in the foreseeable future. The calendarium perpetuum (eternal calendar) had been constructed.
In Nyköping in Sweden, an eight-sided rune-stick from the second half of
the thirteenth century has been found (Svärdström 1966). Here, the consecutive Sunday runes are combined with the 19 Golden Numbers in the form
of runes along the upper side. Below the Sunday runes is a row of crosses
and runic signs which symbolize the actual feast days. The runes for Sundays and Golden Numbers are of an archaic type which dates back to the period c.1050–1100. This stick bears certain similarities to a calendarium in
Hortus deliciarum, written in Alsace c.1170 (Lithberg 1953:28–29). That
calendarium employs vertical lines for days; the first day of the month is
marked by an arch. A crossing line accentuates the day as a feast day; if
three dots have been added above, this is one of the feasts of Christ. A feast
of Mary has two points; one point indicates an apostle feast. It has been assumed that this calendarium refers to an original wooden calendar. There is
anyhow no doubt that wooden calendars were in use during the Middle
Ages. So far, however, none have been found in excavations in any Norwegian town.
The Norwegian Calendar Stick and the Swedish Rune-stick
Before continuing, a few terminological clarifications are necessary. Primstav is the usual Norwegian name for all perpetual calendars not on parchment or paper (i.e., wood, horn, bone or metal). The first part probably relates to primatio (lunae), the first appearance of the new moon (Alver 1981:
61). This may indicate that the original edition of the Norwegian calendar
132
Audun Dybdahl
stick might, like the Swedish rune-stick, have had some kind of Golden
Numbers which made it possible to pinpoint the movable Easter.
The oldest dated Norwegian calendar stick from 1457 does indeed have
pentadic Golden Numbers (Liebgott 1971:170), but I still doubt that this
particular stick is really representative of most Norwegian sticks of the time.
As on the Swedish runic sticks, the year here starts on 1 January, while other
Norwegian sticks divide the year into two, with Winter starting on 14 October, and Summer on 14 April. In the eastern part of the country (Østlandet)
there are a few sticks which have runes instead of day notches, but on these
there are no Golden Numbers.
The main difference between the Norwegian calendar stick and the Swedish rune-stick is that the Norwegian stick marks the days with notches,
while the Swedish type uses the first seven letters of the runic alphabet
(fuþarkh), and in addition has 19 runic signs which mark the Golden Numbers. In this, the Swedish stick has much in common with the Church’s
calendaria which make it possible to determine the movable feasts. As the
letters in the calendaria were replaced by straight-lined runes, one reason
may well have been that they were much easier than letters to carve in the
wood.
It may also be discussed whether the second part of the word, -stav (stave
or staff), is really proper for all Norwegian calendars of the materials mentioned above. Even if most of these artefacts are long and narrow, there are
many exceptions. Some wooden calendars are completely circular, others
are oval, or flat and square, while some consist of joined-up thin plates of
wood or horn (Alver 1971:61–62; Dybdahl 2011:14–19). I will not go further into this, however, as all the sticks I treat here are shaped like a long
stick with rectangular cross-section, with or without handles.
There is agreement that the Norwegian sticks fall into two main groups.
The most common, a flat board, has day notches at the lower rim. For feast
days, symbols have been carved: crosses, saints’ attributes, working tools,
etc. The other type is the one treated here: the long narrow stick, where the
day notches are placed crosswise, and interrupted occasionally by minor
fields, normally difficult to interpret, but being symbols of feast days. Apparently, it was the eminent Swedish scholar Nils Lithberg who first pointed
out what he called “a small group of calendar sticks from northern Norway”
(Lithberg 1921:12) in his basic paper on “Runstavens uppkomst” (the origin
of the rune-stick). Here, he recognizes one of the primitive types “adopting
the characteristically archaic form”. Alver (1971:61) states that it is normally considered that the oldest type of calendar stick in the North belongs in
Trøndelag and the north of Norway.
133
The Object of the Present Investigation
Based on mostly superficial observations, most scholars apparently agree
that the type above represents a very old variant, which has survived as a
relic phenomenon in Trøndelag and the north of Norway. But so far, nobody
has tried to study closely all known objects in the group. Only by looking at
each single day-mark is it possible to really form an opinion on which important questions which may be asked – and answered – about this particular
type of calendar stick:
1. Which feast days are marked on these sticks?
2. Can the feast days tell us about the age of the sticks?
3. What can be deduced from the symbols?
4. Can the sticks be dated?
5. Can any conclusions be drawn from the geographical distribution?
6. How closely could these sticks relate to pre-Christian culture?
A comparative method is the best help for answering these questions. The
sticks in the group must be compared to one another, but a brief look at the
whole corpus of Norwegian sticks will also be necessary. In connection with
the project Den norske primstaven i lys av helgenkulten (“The Norwegian
calendar stick and its relations to the cult of saints”), I have digitized the
feast symbols of approximately 500 sticks from the whole country, and thus
have a large comparative material at disposal (the results published in Dybdahl 2011).
The Material
My database is basically dependent on the drawings of symbols on all those
500 Norwegian sticks, made by Kaare Hovind. Through his registrations,
and during my own investigations, I have found that various museum collections contain altogether eighteen examples of this long narrow type with
the day notches placed crosswise on the flat sides. As so many are preserved, this is due mainly to the collecting activity of the Nordiska Museet,
Stockholm, in the 1880s. Agents from this museum travelled round the
country and bought objects of interest which could be related to local culture
and history. Altogether eight of these eighteen sticks thus ended in the Nordiska Museet. After nearly a hundred years in the storage there, seven examples were handed over as long-term deposits to the Norsk Folkemuseum
in Oslo, which at the time owned no copies of this particular type. The last
example was transferred in 2010. Vitenskapsmuseet in Trondheim has three
examples; Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen, Maihaugen in Lillehammer,
Bergen Museum, Trøndelag Folkemuseum in Trondheim, Meldal and
Sunndal local museums, and the Skårvoll collection (in Midtre Gauldal) all
have one example each.
Figure 1. Three calendar sticks in Vitenskapsmuseet, NTNU, Trondheim. From the top both sides of a
calendar stick from unknown place (T.125). In the middle a stick from Støren (T.1795). At the bottom
both sides of a stick from Hemne (T.4383).
134
Audun Dybdahl
Figure 2. Three calendar sticks from Orkdal county. From the top both sides of two sticks from Meldal
(DSS 6922 and NF.1987-0532). At the bottom a stick from Rennebu (NF.1987-0540). The winter sides
at the top.
135
136
Audun Dybdahl
Figure 3. Map showing the geographical distribution of the narrow sticks in Norway. From
Dybdahl 2011 p. 67.
As a certain number of these objects were acquired by Nordiska Museet, information about provenance here is fairly reliable. Four other sticks have no
information of this kind (Nationalmuseet, Vitenskapsmuseet, Maihaugen
and Meldal local museum). Through my comparisons, however, these can
to some extent be placed geographically. The stick in Nationalmuseet has so
many similarities to one from Hølonda in South Trøndelag that it might have
been carved by the same man. The one in Maihaugen, acquired from an
English collector, is close to one from Meldal and very likely from the same
rural district. The stick in Vitenskapsmuseet is more difficult, but the symbols show certain similarities to those from Hemne and Sunndal. The one in
Meldal local museum was acquired by the founder of the museum, Dr
Støren, and is thus presumably local.
This means that one stick may originate from the area Nordmøre-Fosen,
while the rest may come from the following local areas: Sunndal, Hemne,
Orkdal and Meldal (four examples), Rennebu, Støren (two), Hølonda
(three), Vefsn, Rana and Beiarn (two). This presents an interesting geo-
Figure 4. Four sticks from Gauldal county. From the top both sides of a stick from Støren (the Skårvoll
collection). The next two objects a representative for Nordiska Museet bought in Hølonda
(NF.1987-0533, -0534). The last, now in Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen, is also probably from Hølonda.
The winter sides at the top.
137
138
Audun Dybdahl
graphical distribution, with two separate areas, one in the south-western part
of Sør-Trøndelag fronting Nordmøre, and another in the north, reaching
from Vefsn in Helgeland to Beiarn in Salten. It can however be assumed that
this type of calendar stick has been used in larger areas than these, as sheer
accidents often decide the survivals. There is however no doubt that all these
eighteen sticks were used in the Diocese of Nidaros.
The Feast Days Marked on the Calendars Examined in Relation
to the Frostathing Law and the Liturgical Sources
In the table below, all normal feast days mentioned in the Frostathing Law (F)
and the Gulathing Law (G) are listed. Most of these occur in both law collections but do not completely coincide. The Gulathing Law is alone in mentioning Brettiva Mass, and St Canute’s, while the Frostathing Law has the Mass
of St Gregory, St Magnus and St Margaret. In the Frostathing law the “lille
Gangdag” (Letania) was also regarded as a holy day (Frostathing Law: 30).
Within the Frostathing province, the 16 most important saints’ feasts
should be celebrated as Sundays. This meant that the observation started on
Saturday noon, lasting until daybreak on Monday. There were also seventeen saints’ feasts without the Saturday observation. Work was forbidden;
there were also rules for the fast, but of varied strength. On Letania the observation also lasted from noon. In addition there were all the holidays related to Christmas, Easter and Whitsun.
In Missale Nidrosiense (1519) the Church’s liturgical feasts are ranged in
the following way: 1. Summum (highest degree), 2. Maius Duplex, 3.
Duplex, 4. Semiduplex, and 5. Simplex. This tells us how the Church ranged
these feast days by the end of the Catholic period.
The two last columns in the table show how many per cent of the sticks
in the group I treat here (17), and the reference group (319), have these particular dates marked. The stick in Meldal Bygdemuseum is not on the list,
as it has a number of faults and mistakes.
I cannot here go into detail about the origins of the feast days in the Frostathing Law’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction chapters, but to a great extent they belong to persons mentioned in the New Testament and the Holy Cross. Many
are related to Christ, Mary, and the Apostles; these were obviously important
feasts. In the Late Middle Ages the number of feast days in honour of St. Mary
was increased. In liturgical connections her Visitation superseded St
Swithun’s feast; her Conception feast was also added (Dybdahl 1999:18).
As for foreign saints, most of these were ranked highly in the universal
Church. St Stephen was a protomartyr, a deacon serving the apostles, Gregory the Great one of the most important popes, St. Botholf was an English
abbot, St Margaret a well-known martyr from Antioch, and St. Lawrence a
famous Roman deacon who was burnt to death on a gridiron. Well known
were also Martin of Tours, Clement, and St Nicholas (Santa Claus).
139
Catholic feast days (Dybdahl 1999:15–20) and calendar stick markings
The medieval calendar
Date
Feast
Law
F G
25 Dec. 1st Christmas – Birth of Christ
26 Dec. 2nd Christmas – Stephen
27 Dec. 3rd Christmas – John the
Evangelist
28 Dec. 4th Christmas – Holy Innocents
1 Jan. 8th Christmas – Circumcision
6 Jan. 13th Christmas – Epiphany
11 Jan. Brettiva
25 Jan. Paul
2 Feb. Candlemas (Mary)
24 Feb. Matthew
12 Mar. Gregory
25 Mar. Annunciation
16 Apr. Magnus
25 Apr. Mark/Letania
1 May Philip and James
3 May Inventio crucis
15 May Hallvard
17 Jun. Bothulf
24 Jun. John
29 Jun. Peter
2 Jul. Swithun (also Mary)
8 Jul. Seljumannamesse (Sunniva)
10 Jul. Canute
20 Jul. Margaret
25 Jul. James
29 Jul. Olav
3 Aug. Olav, Translatio
10 Aug. Lawrence
15 Aug. Assumption
24 Aug. Bartholomew
8 Sep. Nativ. Mariae
14 Sep. Exaltatio crucis
21 Sep. Matthew
29 Sep. Michael
28 Oct. Simon and Judas Thaddeus
1 Nov. All Saints’
11 Nov. Martin
23 Nov. Clement
30 Nov. Andrew
6 Dec. Nicholas
21 Dec. Thomas
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
Missal 1519
Stick markings
Liturgical grade % on the % on all
17
319
x Summum
100
99
x Maius duplex
6
5
x Maius duplex
6
–
x Duplex
x Summum
x Summum
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
Duplex
Summum
Duplex
Duplex
Summum
Duplex
Semiduplex
Duplex
Summum
Duplex
Simplex
Summum
Maius duplex
Summum
Maius duplex
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
Simplex
Duplex
Summum
Summum
Duplex
Summum
Duplex
Summum
Maius duplex
Duplex
Maius duplex
Duplex
Summum
Duplex
Simplex
Maius duplex
Duplex
Duplex
x
x
x
x
x
x
Summum
Semiduplex
Maius duplex
Summum
Semiduplex
Duplex
0
100
100
76
100
100
100
100
100
82
88
100
94
94
100
100
100
100
94
24
100
94
100
94
100
94
100
100
100
100
94
100
100
94
88
100
88
100
9
98
97
80
97
97
97
96
93
82
96
97
98
100
99
99
98
98
96
63
96
96
100
95
99
97
98
96
98
95
95
97
98
99
97
99
95
96
Feast days according to the Missal:
2 Jul.
4 Oct.
21 Nov.
8 Dec.
9 Dec.
29 Dec.
Mary (Visitatio)
Francis of Assisi
Mary (Presentatio)
Mary (Conceptio)
Anne
Thomas of Canterbury
See above
47
0
82
35
12
32
14
81
33
–
The more local saints, Olav, Hallvard, the Men of Selja (in the Later
Middle Ages often personified by St Sunniva), and Magnus, Earl of Orkney,
occupied five holidays.
As the table shows, practically all these holidays mentioned in the Frosta-
140
Audun Dybdahl
thing Law were also marked on the calendar sticks, but with a few exceptions. Christmas Day was followed by another three holy days, but it is usual
on these Norwegian sticks that it was regarded as sufficient to mark only the
first day of Christmas, and then the eighth, Circumcision. Presumably the
idea was that the days in between were easy to remember anyway.
Further, it should be mentioned that there are a few feast days which must
have been very popular but which are not mentioned in the Frostathing Law.
Above all, there is a “Brettiva Mass”, referring to the slightly bewildering
Brictiva. Several theories have been launched; personally, I would suggest
that this is the Irish abbess St Brigid, celebrated in Norway but on an unusual day (Dybdahl 1999:28–31). Even though the Church tried to exclude
her feast, it did not succeed, as is shown both by the calendar sticks and in
a number of Norwegian diplomas. Her day is also mentioned in the Gulathing Law.
Nearly all sticks had a symbol on St. Mark’s day 25 April. Here, however,
the main reason for marking a feast here may have been another, as the
“Lille gangdag” (Letania Major), was also on this day.
The table shows that holy days mentioned in the Frostathing Law are
marked on practically all calendar sticks of this type. In this respect, they do
not differ from other Norwegian sticks. As these are saints celebrated in
Norway already in the early Middle Ages, the marking of them does however not present especially interesting information about the genesis of our
particular type. In many ways, it is more interesting to study the sticks’
marking of such saints’ feasts as are not mentioned in the high medieval
laws, or in the Ordo (liturgical rules) of Nidaros Province. A close study
here presents an interesting picture. As the table below demonstrates, those
saints are mostly female.
Saints marked on at least four of the seventeen calendar sticks are discussed in the analysis.
Feast
dates
Celebrated
The 1519 missal
Liturgical rank
22 Jul.
25 Nov.
4 Dec.
13 Dec.
22 Feb.
23 Dec.
13 Jan.
3 Feb.
5 Feb.
9 Jun.
7 Oct.
14 Oct.
21 Oct.
17 Mar.
25 May.
Mary Magdalene
Catherine
Barbara
Lucy
Cathedra Petri
Sjur/Thorlac
Octave of Epiphany
Blaise
Agatha
Columba
Bridget of Sweden
Calixtus
11,000 Virgins
Gertrude
Urban
Semiduplex
Semiduplex
Simplex
Simplex
Semiduplex
Simplex
Semiduplex
3 lec. Noctur.
Simplex
3 lec. co.sol
Semiduplex
3 lec. co. sol.
3 lec. co. sol
Simplex
3 lec. co. sol
Stick symbols
% on
% on
the 17
all 319
82
95
65
94
65
94
53
90
47
68
41
11
41
88
35
75
35
67
35
14
35
81
35
92
24
91
24
49
24
19
Saints’ feasts with 3 lec. (=lectiones, i.e. readings) have a lower liturgical grade than simplex.
141
As to the markings of the feast days, I have included a few symbols which are
placed on the narrow side below the day markers. These are mainly crosses;
Mary Magdalene, Catherine, Barbara and Lucy are the most frequent. This
may be an indication that these saints did arrive rather late in the day.
What can be deduced from the comparison between the group treated
here and the whole corpus of calendar sticks? As regards most of the feast
days, there are proportionately fewer markings on the selected sticks than in
the other groups. This may be interpreted in at least three ways: (1) the narrow sticks belong by and large to an older tradition; (2) this group of sticks
concentrate on festa fori; (3) There is simply too little space for many symbols on these narrow sticks.
There are a few exceptions to the main rule. First of all, it is noticeable
that the day before Christmas Eve is more frequently marked on our type
than on the others. This may relate to the fact that a popular tradition in
Trøndelag, Nordland and Jämtland spoke of this day as “Sjurs-mass day” ;
a tradition alive into our days. Who this Sigurd was is not clear (Dybdahl
2008), but most likely it is he who is marked here, rather than the Icelandic
St Thorlac, who was celebrated on that same day.
Another saint with a relatively high number of markers is the Irish-Scottish St. Columba, or “Kolbjørn with the salmon” as he was often called. He
was, among other things, abbot of the famous monastery at Iona (Farmer
[1978] 1997:110–111). There is a rich legend literature attached to him.
Among other things he helped some fishermen to catch a large salmon, and
a fish is a normal symbol on St Columba’s feast day on 7 June. It was
popularly said that at this time the salmon went upriver to spawn. It may not
be accidental that this feast day is marked on more sticks from Nidaros and
Bjørgvin than on sticks from the other dioceses in Norway.
As can be seen, there is a general tendency for saints whose feasts are of
higher liturgical grade to be more frequently marked than others. This, however, does not apply to St. Anne or St. Bridget of Sweden. Bridget is indeed
the only one who lived and died in the Late Middle Ages (Fröjmark 1992:
31–43). She instituted her own religious order, died in Rome in 1373, and
her relics arrived in Vadstena a year later. She was canonized in 1391.
As to St Anne, she also received increasing popularity in the Late Middle
Ages. Traditionally her feast was 26 July, but as there was some congestion
of holy days around this time, her day was moved in a statute from Aslak Bolt
to 9 December, with exceptions for Oslo and Stavanger (Alver 1981:101).
Other saints listed in the tables also enjoyed great confidence. First of all
comes St Catherine, definitely one of the most popular saints in Norway in
the Late Middle Ages (Solbakken 2009). Like St Barbara and St Blaise, she
was counted among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, a group of saints appropriate for people in acute illness or danger of death (Dybdahl 1999:44). St Lucy
did not belong in this group, but judging from the calendar sticks, she was
also popular. Before the calendar reform of 1700, her feast day coincided
142
Audun Dybdahl
with the winter solstice (“Lussi Long-night”). In the years after the last war,
the quite recent Swedish Lucia celebration has also found its way into Norway (Espeland 2005:191).
It can also be seen that several other female saints, such as Agatha, Ursula
(with her 10,000 Virgins), and Gertrude of Nivelles are marked on many
calendar sticks. This may well have been because the dreadful fate of these,
dramatically described in their legends, made its impressions. Probably it
might also have been a point that only two women originally had their feast
day prescribed in the Frostathing Law, Mary and Margaret, as there were of
course no women among the disciples or apostles; this may have been the
reason behind those later additions.
And how about those days marked which originally did not have an ecclesiastical basis? Important here are the first day of summer (14 April), the
first day of winter (14 October), and Midsummer (14 July). The analysis
shows that these days are more rarely marked on our particular group than
on other sticks. Only three of the seventeen sticks have the usual tree for 14
April, and only two sticks show the traditional mitten which marks the oncoming winter. Nearly all other calendar sticks show symbols to mark these
days. About one-third of all sticks also have symbols for Midsummer; this
is not found on any of the sticks in our group. This supports the idea that this
type has in the main an ecclesiastical origin.
The Symbols
Of course these narrow sticks allow only limited space for symbols. Studying the symbols of the marked days, it quickly becomes obvious that there
are far fewer complicated figurative symbols on this type of sticks than on
sticks with other shapes. We find, for example, no animal figures, no human beings, no ships or buildings. Most of the symbols are crosses, or
straight lines which form geometrical figures, or patterns which can hardly
have any meaningful function in relation to the saint’s feast that they represent. Many of them are relatively intricate, filling their little fields harmoniously.
Some of the most classical feast days can nevertheless easily be traced
from their symbols (Dybdahl 2011:221–258); certainly St Olav’s two axes,
found on most of the sticks. The same applies to St Lawrence’s gridiron,
even if the interpretation requires a bit of good will. Slightly unexpectedly,
St Halvard’s mill stone is only found on five of the seventeen sticks (not on
those from Nordland). St Bartholomew’s knife fares no better. St Peter’s
Keys (23 June) are rather more frequent, appearing on more than half the
sticks. It is also worth noting that the sticks do not have any symbols directly
associated with daily work, such as scythes or rakes.
The feasts of St Mary are of special interest, as she is celebrated on altogether six days. In an earlier paper I showed that the most common symbols
143
for these days are a tree or a crown (Dybdahl 2007:99–139), but this is not
the case in our particular group. Only the two sticks from Beiarn have systematically tree-like symbols for all Mary’s days. Also, Mary Magdalene
and Sunniva are marked by a tree on these sticks. An interesting Marian
symbol is found on the three sticks from the frontier of Nordmøre/Fosen; it
looks like an upraised ladder. As this symbol is not used for Visitatio
Mariae, it suggests that St Swithun’s mark was still current for this day. One
stick from Meldal, however, has this ladder symbol on all the six Mary days.
The ladder appears only on these four sticks. The idea behind this may be
that the way to Heaven leads via St Mary. Elsewhere, Mary has her own special symbols on wooden calendars, for example, in Switzerland, where a
simple square is used (illustration in Lithberg 1953:27).
Other symbols can also be decoded. A crossbow is found for the day of
SS. Simon and Judas Thaddeus, while a stick from Meldal has an arrow
here. The crossbow is also used on some other sticks from Trøndelag, including one from Oppdal. St Andrew is in most cases marked with a more
or less decorative X. Other sticks from Trøndelag have rich, to some extent
similar, carvings marking the Birth and the Circumcision of Jesus, but none
of these are immediately self-explanatory.
The sword is a common symbol of St Paul, and is found on a couple of
the sticks in the group. Popularly, however, the day was also referred to as
“Pål the shot” (Alver 1981:116); this may explain why four sticks have an
arrow. An arrow is also used to symbolize St Margaret on a couple of sticks
from South Trøndelag. The connection here may be that stylized swords and
spears both have developed into arrows with triangular points. On a couple
of sticks the knife of St Bartholomew also has this form.
The two feasts of the Holy Cross are, naturally enough, marked with crosses
of varied types. In some cases, a few important saints are surprisingly not given
their normal symbols. The scales of St Michael are not found in this group,
nor the usual symbols for St Matthew (axe) or St Clement (anchor).
Dividing the material into three groups according to geographical provenance, it is the three from the south-western area (Nordmøre/Fosen), which
appear most advanced, marking the most non-statutory feasts, such as for
example St Columba, St Canute, St Bridget, St Barbara, St Blaise, St Agatha
or St Gertrude.
The sticks from North Norway have in general fewer day markers. Looking for non-statutory feasts which have been added to the Frostathing’s obligatory ones, they are (provenance in brackets): Catherine, (Rana, Beiarn),
Barbara (Rana), Conception (all three), Lucy (Rana, Beiarn), Sjurd/Thorlac
(Rana, Beiarn), Brictiva (Beiarn), Revelation of St John (Vefsn, Rana), Cathedra Petri (Beiarn), 22 May (Beiarn), Columba (Vefsn og Rana), St Mary
22 July, (Rana, Beiarn), Giles (Vefsn, Rana), Francis of Assisi (Rana),
Bridget (Vefsn, Rana). This means five extra days on the stick from Vefsn,
eleven for the Rana stick, and eight for Beiarn.
Figure 5. Three calendar sticks from Nordland. At the top both sides of a stick from Rana
(NF.1987-0547). The other two were used in Beiarn (NF.1987-0548, Bd.6010). The winter sides at the
top.
144
Audun Dybdahl
145
Some sticks from South Trøndelag agree even more closely with the
Frostathing Law’s festa fori. The two from Støren follow the Frostathing’s
jurisdiction on all points, with a few exceptions, carved on the narrow sides
only. The persevering St Brictiva is still included, however. A few sticks
from Meldal follow this pattern as regards the day marks on the flat sides,
but have a few crosses on the narrow sides. The stick from Rennebu has a
lot in common with those Meldal sticks; one stick from Hølonda (NF.1987:
534) has a few more day marks on the flat side.
Four of the sticks are distinguished by employing one or more Latin letters to mark the feasts. One of these is the stick in Meldal Bygdemuseum;
as stated earlier, this has been kept out of the analysis because of mistakes
and flaws. Another is from Orkdal in Trøndelag Folk Museum, carrying the
date 1686. There are two more sticks which may originate from Hølonda;
these are very similar, and we know the provenance of the one which came
to the Nordiska Museet. The other ended up in Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen, where it has been left uncatalogued in storage to this day. As far as the
feast days are concerned, these are not very different from the others, but it
should perhaps not be expected that sticks with letters belong to a variant
with roots far back in the Middle Ages.
A Relative from Greenland?
It is a well-known fact that calendar sticks with day marks placed crosswise
have been used by many peoples and in many parts of the world. But there
is no reason to believe that the Norwegian ones are closely related to these;
the geographical distances are too large. It is more to the point to look at the
islands in the West, those that ecclesiastically speaking belonged in the
province of Nidaros.
Calendar sticks are not known from Iceland, a society more at home with
pen and ink, as the rich written material suggests. In Greenland, however,
Figure 6. An artifact, found in Vesterbygden, Greenland, that might well be a calendar stick.
The photos show two of the four sides. As we can see, the stick is nicely incised. The inv. number is D12489.595. It was found in ruin V52a Umiviiarsuk - Nuuk.
146
Audun Dybdahl
archaeological excavations have revealed some broken sticks, which undeniably resemble calendar sticks. These are now in Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen (Roussell 1936:154, 207). Here there are crosswise lines, with Xfigures unevenly distributed in between. The most interesting stick is preserved to a length of just 19 cm, and is very carefully made. As far as I know,
the code of these symbols has not yet been cracked. But as Greenland was
part of the Province of Nidaros, there were presumably no important differences in the feast days between Greenland and the Frostathing area.
Summary and Conclusion
In museums and collections there are eighteen Norwegian calendar sticks
which have certain characteristic features in common. They are long and
narrow; the cross-section is rectangular. On the broader side, cross lines
have been incised; these mark the weekdays. Between the lines are minor
fields, marking the feast days. A few well-known saints’ attributes, such as
St Olav’s axes and St Lawrence’s gridiron occur on them all, but most of the
symbols are crosses or geometrical figures, which do not immediately identify the feast. All sticks originate from the earlier Nidaros bishopric, but the
geographical distribution is distinct, divided into two separate areas: in the
south the administrative areas of Gauldal, Orkdal, Fosen and Nordmøre, in
the north Helgeland and Salten.
It has been claimed that this type of stick is among the oldest in the North,
but the group has never been thoroughly analysed stick by stick, or the day
marks in their sequence. In the present analysis, the symbols have been compared with the holy days in the Frostathing Law, the liturgical feast days of
the Church, and the contemporary popular (secular) marking days of the
year.
The conclusion is that nothing indicates a pre-Christian origin for this
group. Admittedly, the year has been divided into a summer and a winter
side, beginning respectively on 14 April and 14 October, but this was, after
all, the established way of dividing the year. It is, by the way, worth noting
that Midsummer is not marked on any of the sticks. Everything suggests that
this type of stick was basically constructed for the ordinary people, to help
them keep the holy days ordered in the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Some of
the sticks have a few feasts added to the obligatory holidays. However, a
certain number have marks for several saints whose popularity increased
during the Late Middle Ages (particularly female saints such as Mary Magdalene, Catherine, Barbara and Lucy). A few of these additions take the
form of a cross placed on the narrow side of the stick. The ones that have
been most completely “updated” are those from Nordmøre and Fosen.
The geographical distribution of the sticks preserved indicates that this
type was mainly developed and used in the Diocese of Nidaros. As no ex-
147
ample has been found from the other bishoprics, it is unlikely that the type
was in use all over the country. These areas in Nidaros may possibly be
categorized as relict areas, where this type of stick was used longer than
elsewhere in the country. Where the actual age of these eighteen sticks is
concerned, the one from Støren in Vitenskapsmuseet (Trondheim) carries
the date 1607, and the one from Orkdal 1686. Presumably most of them are
from the seventeenth century. At that time, these would already have been
competing with the more common type of calendar stick, which had larger
flat areas, providing space for more numerous, and more self-explanatory,
symbols. This other type may presumably owe something to the pictorial paper calendars, which, since they were illustrated, made it relatively simple
to locate the right date (Dybdahl 2011:268–275). This other type of calendar
stick had in fact already found its way into the areas here discussed. The
agents from the Nordiska Museet bought such sticks as well, in Meldal,
from Støren, and from Leirfjord in Nordland.
Audun Dybdahl, dr.philos.
Professor of Medieval History
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Department of History and Classical studies
N-7491 Trondheim
Norway
A survey of the calendar sticks discussed here
Museum/
Collection
Vitenskapsmuseet
Sunndal
Museum
Vitenskapsmuseet
Trøndelag
Folkemuseum
Maihaugen
Norsk
Folkemuseum
Norsk
Folkemuseum
Meldal
Bygdetun
Norsk
Folkemuseum
Vitenskapsmuseet
Skårvoll
collection
Norsk
Folkemuseum
Norsk
Folkemuseum
Reference
Last owner
T.125
SU.720
Unknown
Gjøra farm
Rural
Borough
Unknown
Sunndal
County
T.4383
FFT 19997
Unknown
Peder Skjenold
Hemne
Orkdal
Unknown
Møre og
Romsdal
Sør-Trøndelag
Sør-Trøndelag
DSS 6922
NF.1987-0531
N. Gurney
John Drulien
Meldal?
Meldal
Sør-Trøndelag
Sør-Trøndelag
NF.1987-0532
Anders Blokkom
Meldal
Sør-Trøndelag
M.B. 666
Unknown
Meldal?
Sør-Trøndelag
NF.1987-0540
Ole Bak
Rennebu
Sør-Trøndelag
T.1795
Unknown
Margit Skaarvold
Støren
Støren
Sør-Trøndelag
Sør-Trøndelag
NF.1987-0533
Reidar Krokstad
Hølonda
Sør-Trøndelag
NF.1987-0534
Ingebrigt Stensæth
Hølonda
Sør-Trøndelag
148
Audun Dybdahl
Nationalmuseet
Copenhagen
Nordiska Museet
Norsk
Folkemuseum
Norsk
Folkemuseum
Hist. Mus.
Bergen
Nationalmuseet,
Copenhagen
Unnumbered
Unknown
Hølonda?
Sør-Trøndelag
Nor.M. 43408
NF.1987-0547
Olava Aanæs
Ole Brygfjeld
Vefsn
Rana
Nordland
Nordland
NF.1987-0548
Johan Graataadal
Beiarn
Nordland
Bd 6010
Unknown
Beiarn
Nordland
D12489.595
Arch. find, ruins,
V52a
Vesterbygden
Greenland
References
Alver, Brynjulf 1981: Dag og merke. Folkeleg tidsrekning og merkedagstradisjon.
Oslo.
Beckman, N. 1934: Isländsk och medeltida skand. Tideräkning, Nordisk kultur XXI.
Stockholm.
Breviarium Nidrosiense. Breuiaria ad vsum ritumque sacrosante Nidrosiensis ecclesie. Paris, 1519.
Dybdahl, Audun 1999: Helgener i tiden. Trondheim.
Dybdahl, Audun 2007: St. Mary Symbols on Norwegian Calendar Boards (primstaver). Arv.
Dybdahl, Audun 2008: Sjurdsmessedagen. Adresseavisen 23 December.
Dybdahl, Audun 2011: Primstaven i lys av helgenkulten. Trondheim.
Espeland, Velle 2005: Helgener. Mirakelmakere og idoler. Oslo.
Farmer, D. Hugh 1997: The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. Oxford.
Frostatingslova, published by Jan Ragnar Hagland & Jørn Sandnes. Oslo.
Fröjmark, Anders 1992: Mirakler och helgonkult. Uppsala.
Gad, Tue 1971: Helgener. Legender fortalt i Norden. Copenhagen: Rhodos.
Gjerløw, Lilli, Kalendarium II, KLNM 8, cols. 93 ff.
Hagland, Jan Ragnar & Sandnes, Jørn (eds.) 1994: Frostatingslova. Trondheim.
Hallonquist, Sven-Göran 1994: Primstaven. En runalmanacka. Runmärkt. Från brev
til klotter, ed. Solbritt Benneth et al., pp. 177–193. Stockholm.
Jansson, Sam Owen, Kalendarium I, KLNM 8, cols. 89 ff.
Kolsrud, Oluf 1926: Nordiske kalenderdagnavn i middelalderen. Håndbog i kronologi II, by J. F. Schroeter. Oslo.
Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder (KLNM). 2nd ed. Copenhagen,
1981.
Lebech, Mogens 1969: Fra Runestav til Almanak. Copenhagen.
Liebgott, Niels-Knud 1971: En norsk kalenderstav fra 1457. Nationalmuseets Arbejdsmark. Copenhagen.
Liebgott, Niels-Knud 1973: Kalendere. Folkelig tidsregning i Norden. Copenhagen.
Lithberg, Nils 1921: Runstavens uppkomst. Fataburen 1921, pp. 1–27.
Lithberg, Nils 1934: Kalendariska hjälpmedel. Nordisk kultur XXI. Tideräkning, pp.
77–94.
Lithberg, Nils, 1953: Computus med särskild hänsyn till runstaven och den borgerliga kalenderen. Stockholm.
Nilsson, Martin P:n (ed.) 1934: Tideräkning. Nordisk kultur XXI. Stockholm.
Raasted, Jørgen: Helgener. KLNM 5, cols. 321 ff.
Robberstad, Knut (ed.) 1969: Gulatingslovi. Oslo.
Rousell, Aage 1936: Sandnes and the Neighbouring Farms. Copenhagen.
149
Schumacher, Jan Henrik 2002: Kirkehistorisk latinleksikon. Begreper fra middelalderens kirke- og klosterliv. Oslo.
Solbakken, Jon 2009: St. Katarina av Alexandria. En undersøkelse av en helgens
popularitet i middelalderens Norge. Masteroppgave i historie, NTNU.
Svärdström, Elisabeth 1963: Kalenderstickan från Lödöse. Uppsala.
Svärdström, Elisabeth 1966: Nyköpingsstaven och de medeltida kalenderrunorna.
Uppsala.
Taranger, Absalon 1890: Den angelsaksiske kirkes indflydelse paa den norske. Kristiania.
Note: The photos were mostly delivered by the museums where the artefacts are stored. In most
cases the photographer is unknown, but the sticks in Norsk Folkemuseum, Oslo, were photographed by Anne-Lise Reinsfelt. Jette Arneborg at Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen, has taken the
photos of the Greenland stick. The Skårvoll calendar stick was photographed by the author.
150
Audun Dybdahl
Reviews
151
Book Reviews
The Intangible Cultural Heritage
Johanna Björkholm: Immateriellt kulturarv som begrepp och process. Folkloristiska perspektiv på kulturarv i Finlands svenskbygder med folkmusik som
exempel. Åbo Akademis förlag, Åbo
2011. XII + 355 pp. Ill. English summary. Diss.
The Finland-Swedish folklorist Johanna
Björkholm has chosen to devote her
doctoral dissertation to the intangible (or
non-physical) cultural heritage, a subject of great relevance and topicality.
The intangible cultural heritage as a category has emerged as a consequence of
UNESCO’s work with the World Heritage, built environments which are inscribed, via a decision-making process
in several stages, on the growing list of
hallmarked sites to visit. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the selected World
Heritage sites have their greatest density
in Europe, especially in the Mediterranean countries. But criticism has also
been heard from other continents against
the very idea of standing buildings as
being worth conserving. In Japan, for
example, the knowledge of certain arts
of building is regarded as more worth remembering than the buildings themselves.
The material cultural heritage as an
idea therefore has to be supplemented
with an idea of the non-material cultural
heritage – this is the brief narrative of
the background to Johanna Björkholm’s
study object. It is worth knowing that
Finland has not ratified the Convention
for the Safeguarding of the Intangible
Cultural Heritage, which puts this study
in special relief. Norway has ratified it,
however, joined very recently by Sweden, where the Institute for Language
and Folklore has been commissioned by
the government to work with the application of the convention.
Johanna Björkholm studies both the
concept of intangible cultural heritage
and the process that creates such a heritage. Her text is clearly arranged. In the
introduction she presents the conditions
for the study. In part two she investigates the intangible cultural heritage as a
concept. She studies the definitions and
uses of the concept by the affected cultural institutions, in texts on cultural
studies, and in the Finland-Swedish
press – three textual arenas where the
newly coined term is employed. The
third section of the dissertation is devoted to a study of how folk music in the
Swedish-speaking parts of Finland has
been described in terms of heritage or
intangible cultural heritage. The two
studies have different chronological
limits: the part about the concept runs to
2009, while the part about the processes
stops in 1968. This tells us that the two
parts of the study are relatively independent. A fourth section concludes the
study with conclusions and – an original
feature – a postlude intended for “people
with an interest in maintaining traditions” (p. 318).
A central element in Björkholm’s text
is the concept of “cultural component”
(kulturkomponent), a not entirely ideal
word that she uses for want of a better alternative (p. 6). This concept is crucial
since she studies how such cultural units
are selected and launched as cultural
152
Reviews
heritage. According to her own definition, cultural heritage is “specially selected, value-laden and/or symbolic culture-components” (p. 6). She observes
that although the intangible cultural
heritage is a separate category, the previously existing parallels – the natural
heritage and the material cultural heritage – also have strong elements of intangibility. It is through the way of
thinking and talking about these “hard”
heritages that their status is actually
maintained.
Björkholm’s study cites a wide and
varied range of literature, showing that
the research field is occupied by colleagues from several disciplines. Research on the cultural heritage is thus a
meeting place. As a folklorist she is specially equipped to add to our knowledge
– and she regularly reminds readers
about her folkloristic perspective. Folkloristics as a science emphasizes the intangible sides of culture, and the discipline has actually participated in the cultural heritage process by pointing out
certain cultural components as more
valuable than others.
Unfortunately, the aim of the study is
not easy to identify. The overall objective is vague, albeit truthful: “by studying perceptions of cultural heritage […]
to gain an understanding of the mechanisms whereby culture-components
such as folk music acquire a special position in society through their clear symbolic values” (p. 2). There are also some
subsidiary aims, as I read them. Among
other things, Johanna Björkholm wants
to contribute knowledge about “how
cultural-heritage
processes
affect
non-material culture” and to add to “the
discussion of how theories of cultural
heritage can be formed and applied to
comprise the non-material category as
well” (p. 4). From the latter we see that
the dominance of the material heritage
in the discussion has had a significant
effect on the study. There are no distinctly formulated research questions.
This lack of clear premises probably ex-
plains why the study has resulted in such
a large amount of text.
The investigation of the intangible
cultural heritage as a concept is a form
of discourse analysis. Björkholm employs the dichotomy emic-etic, arguing
that the discourses in the newspapers are
emic, while those used by cultural institutions and researchers are etic; this can
be discussed. In any case, she finds that
the term, although frequently used, is
very rarely defined. Moreover, she notes
that in the Nordic countries the term is
associated with peasant culture, whereas
in other parts of the world it is instead
associated with aboriginal peoples.
To be honest, the discourse analysis
is not very profound, even though she
achieves her aims. With sharper tools
she could have made the power aspects
stand out more, which would have been
appropriate given the topic. Cultural institutions, researchers, and local actors,
who are able to speak through the press,
struggle for influence when it comes to
using the concept for their own purposes
and for elevating particular phenomena
to the level of cultural heritage.
The second part of the study, about
the intangible cultural heritage as a process, takes folk music in Swedish-speaking Finland as its example. It should be
said at once that this part is sounder
scholarship than the part about the concept, chiefly because it has a more solid
theoretical foundation. Johanna Björkholm has a firmer grip of the reins here,
which results in a more interesting text.
The source material is diverse. It consists of folklore records, collectors’ letters, and texts from newspapers and periodicals.
The study is arranged according to a
model that describes the cultural-heritage process, especially the one concerning the intangible cultural heritage. The
model builds on a model launched by
the museologist Stefan Bohman. Bohman’s model, however, is primarily intended to describe the path of museum
objects from the outhouse to the exhibi-
Reviews
tion showcase, whereas Johanna Björkholm’s ambition is to create a model of
broader usefulness. Strictly speaking,
her contribution is a theory that describes – and thus predicts – how particular cultural elements are selected, recharged, and recontextualized to become (intangible) cultural heritage. She
also argues that the process does not
take place once and for all; the selected
cultural heritage can be redefined:
“power relations and dissonance are an
ineluctable part of the processes that surround cultural heritage” (p. 144).
According to Björkholm’s theory, the
cultural-heritage process consists of
four phases (ibid.):
• Selection (defining, identifying, taking over, focusing)
• Value ascription (coding, thematizing, symbolizing, stereotyping)
• Demarcation (changing context, isolating)
• Objectification (institutionalizing, preserving, academizing)
There is a great deal to suggest that her
model will appear in the cultural-heritage literature in the future, especially if
she presents it in article form in English.
It is clear and comprehensible, besides
which it can be applied to all kinds of
cultural heritage. She herself tests its applicability, arranging her study according to the four phases.
She arrives at the conclusion that Finland-Swedish folk music has become intangible cultural heritage without the
musicians actually being a part of the
process. The arguments and interventions have instead been the work of the
“assumer” (Swe. övertagare), Björkholm’s term for the actors in the process
who take over the cultural heritage (p.
129). They have had other motives than
the musicians. Moreover, their motives
have changed during the long study period. Initially it concerned “the noble,
idyllic nature and the people associated
with it, whom the takers-over wished to
associate with folk music” (p. 301). But
153
the appreciation of music that was close
to nature later became problematic when
new popular music was described as
primitive and in some cases animal-like.
The dignity of folk music was instead
emphasized as a major quality. “The
norms of bourgeois culture in the form
of their preferences in high culture and
art music are palpable in the process by
which folk music became cultural heritage, which is no doubt connected to the
education, ideals, and position in society
of the takers-over” (p. 303).
Even those who have read a lot of research on folk music will find that Johanna Björkholm draws many interesting conclusions. Above all, she convincingly describes and explains the path of
folk music from “functional utility music to aestheticized stage music” (ibid.).
This change is by no means unknown in
the literature, but here she puts it in a
framework that opens new angles on the
modern life of folk music. One thoughtprovoking example is her argument that
the cultural-heritage process also contains performative elements, which thus
are not only a part of the traditional performance of music.
Johanna Björkholm’s choice of topic
for her doctoral dissertation in folkloristics is valuable in several respects. I began by hinting at its relevance to contemporary society. Its scholarly relevance extends beyond the discipline to
which she herself belongs. Issues of cultural heritage, especially of an intangible
kind, are treated in several subjects
which can now benefit from the insights
gained in the dissertation.
The study would have benefited from
stricter limitation, which would have resulted in a shorter book. The large
amount of text now risks concealing the
theoretical strength of the book in particular, which is a shame. In this flow of
text I detect the author’s problems in
knowing where to draw the line – not an
unusual feature in dissertation writers.
Yet the overall impression is that Johanna Björkholm’s study makes a valuable
154
Reviews
theoretical contribution to the study of
cultural heritage and gives new perspectives on the shaping of folk music.
Gunnar Ternhag
Falun, Sweden
Folk Art in Gudbrandsdalen
Tord Buggeland: Figurmaling i Gudbrandsdalen fra Roma til Vågå. Andrésen og Butenschøn, Oslo 2009. 194 pp.
Ill. English summary. Tord Buggeland:
Folkelige tresnitt som kistebrev i Gudbrandsdalen. Årbok for Gudbrandsdalen 78, 2010.
Research on folk art has had a stronger
position in Norway than in the other
Nordic countries. For a couple of generations there has even been a chair of this
subject in Bergen. Norwegian folk art is
primarily association with wood carving, but also with painting. The term
rosemaling, literally “rose painting”,
has been a counterpart to the genre of
kurbitsmålning or “gourd painting” in
Sweden, referring to the free representation of vegetative elements. What is less
known is that Gudbrandsdalen also had
a rich tradition of figure painting, copied
from copperplate engravings and lithographs. This form of decorative painting
sought to keep as closely as possible to
the originals. In the Academy of Art in
Christiania (and its predecessor), copying was an important part of the education, and the same was true of the laugskonst or “guild art”, the painting done by
craftsmen. From there it spread to decorative painters in the countryside, especially in Gudbrandsdalen.
Although conservative by nature,
Gudbrandsdalen had a geographical location that made it easier here than in
other parts of Norway to adopt features
from urban art. Another powerful contributory factor was the prosperity of the
peasant culture here, which in turn left
its traces in a highly developed architec-
tural culture which also gave work to interior painters. People in Gudbrandsdalen also traded in cattle and other
commodities, resulting in further contacts with Christiania.
The largest group of figural motifs
are pictures from the New Testament,
along with portraits of royals. Figure
painting depended on the availability of
models in the form of woodcuts and
copperplates, that is to say, imported
originals. Individual painters kept every
picture they came across, and through
inheritance and purchase they could accumulate large collections. One example is the Visdal collection in Vågå,
from which several generations of painters copied. From this collection the former conservator at Lillehammer Museum, Tord Buggeland, has sifted out
various layers of pictorial originals,
either in the form of free-standing motifs, or as assembled picture sources.
The latter include G. Hertel’s edition of
Cecare Ripa’s famous work Iconologia
(originally published in Rome in 1592),
later published in Augsburg around
1760. Of the 200 copperplates, 34 belong to the Visdal collection. A later
stratum of originals is the lithographs
produced in three large picture factories
in Neuruppin north-west of Berlin. No
less than 22,000 motifs, most of them
biblical, were spread from there. This
was greatly assisted by the fact that the
texts were printed in Danish and Swedish. The foreign lithographs in the Visdal collection constituted the foundation
for figure painting in Gudbrandsdalen,
according to Buggeland.
To the extent that it has been possible,
the author has demonstrated how these
continental originals were copied in
Norwegian paintings. He also goes into
greater depth by examining some of the
most prominent painters in Gudbrandsdalen: Peder Olsen Veggum (1768–
1813), Rasmus Garmo (born 1800),
Syver Valde (1821–1898), Hans Sokstad (1829–1894), and Ola Jakobsen
Kvam (born 1810). Of greater general
Reviews
interest, however, is the closing chapter
of the book, with a large number of
paintings and their originals. The book
is printed in a beautiful, picture-friendly
format with a large number of colour illustrations.
A special category of picture is the
“chest prints”, hand-coloured singlesheet prints intended for pasting on the
inside of chest lids. A double sheet combining Jesus and the ten lepers with the
ten virgins belonged to the Visdal collection. Perhaps this was why Buggeland, alongside the study of the figure
paintings, started an inventory of these
woodcuts in Gudbrandsdalen. A total of
63 have been registered to date. In Årbog for Gudbrandsdalen for 2010 there
are reproductions of 29 of these, and the
rest will be published in subsequent issues of the yearbook. Of these woodcuts, 24 were printed by Johan Jørgen
Høpffner in Copenhagen, who worked
in the period 1720–1759. The other five
were published by Thomas Larsen
Borup, who was active 1756–1771. Several of Høpffner’s prints were not registered by V. E. Clausen, so Buggeland’s
catalogue is a valuable complement. Unlike the case in Sweden, however, these
chest prints were not copied by folk
painters in Norway, which is why
Buggeland has not included them in his
book, instead publishing them separately. Through his catalogue, Tord Buggeland shows that the Danish chest prints
also had a significant market in Norway.
Nils-Arvid Bringéus
Lund, Sweden
Columella’s De re rustica Put in Perspective
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella:
Tolv böcker om lantbruk: En tvåtusenårig lantbrukslära, översättning från latinet av Sten Hedberg; samt Liv, lantbruk och livsmedel i Columellas värld.
Kungl. Skogs- och Lantbruksakade-
155
mien: Skogs- och lantbrukshistoriska
meddelanden 43, Stockholm 2009. 374
pp. Ill.
The volume Columella: tolv böcker om
lantbruk consists of a translation from
the Latin original into Swedish of Columella’s De re rustica – a work in twelve
books – followed by twelve scholarly
papers taking their point of departure in
Columella’s work and discussion of
various aspects of it. This review will
put its primary focus on the latter papers.
The major part of the contributing authors have a scholarly background
which lies outside of Classical Studies,
which can be said to be both a disadvantage and an advantage. The disadvantages are obvious: some of the texts suffer from the fact that there are a number
of simple misunderstandings concerning
Roman culture and society (and other
contemporary cultures) – misunderstandings that could easily have been removed in the editing process – which affects the overall impression of this work.
The advantages are the new insights and
the fresh perspectives offered by some
of the authors, paired with an in-depth
knowledge of their different areas of expertise, creating some highly interesting
and very readable papers.
An example of the latter is found in
Janken Myrdal’s paper on the tools and
technology employed in agricultural
contexts in the Roman world. Myrdal’s
hypothesis is that the Roman Empire –
and Roman culture – is to be seen as the
result of a long historical development
that had global effects, namely the introduction of iron some 1,500 years earlier.
In doing so he places Rome in a much
wider geographical context, and more
importantly in a considerably deeper
timeframe, than is usually done. Iron led
to significant improvements – not only
within agriculture – but also in different
crafts, military equipment, mining, and
so on. Iron could be produced in greater
quantities than bronze, a much wider variety of tools were manufactured, and
156
Reviews
tools such as knives with sharper edges
could be manufactured. This development led to a significant increase in production, not least within the agricultural
sector, and although Myrdal does not
specifically mention it, this fact made an
increase in population possible.
At the beginning of his paper Myrdal
makes his views on the century-long
scholarly debate on the nature of the ancient economy clear: he argues that there
was a continuing technological development with a corresponding economic
growth, i.e. he supports the “Modernist”
standpoint. His argument that there are
but few who do not share this view may
be questioned, however. I would argue
that the opposite notion, namely that
there was little interest in innovations
and technological improvements in the
ancient world and hence that the economic growth was very modest, i.e., the
“Primitivist” standpoint, is still argued
in recent publications by a number of influential scholars.
Interestingly enough we find one of
the internationally most important
critics of the latter view – Örjan
Wikander – in this volume. Wikander
discusses the economic and social conditions prevalent in the rural areas of the
Empire. In a discussion of the importance of slave workforces, he gives a
picture of diversity and differences in
the Roman Empire. In Columella’s work
it is taken for granted that the farm was
run by slaves, while Wikander points
out that the opposite was the case in
Gaul, where free farmers were of fundamental importance.
Paulina Rytkönen has contributed a
paper on wine and its production in the
Roman world. She is clearly very
knowledgeable when it comes to viticulture and wine in the present, which provides her with valuable insights in her
discussions of the past. What Columella
says about viticulture is put into a context of modern scientific knowledge and
wine production in the present, providing a deeper understanding and new in-
sights to readers without prior knowledge. An example is her discussion of
the training of the vines – a way of optimizing the photosynthesis, hindering
harmful dampness and facilitating harvesting from an ergonomic point of view
– thereby maximizing productivity.
As pointed out above, some texts
contain unfortunate misunderstandings;
for example in a discussion of Roman–
Celtic exchange in Rytkönen’s paper.
Potlatch was not, as claimed (p. 544), a
form of gift exchange in Celtic society.
Rather this ritual form of consumption is
found among the Kwakwaka’waka (formerly known as Kwakiutl), a Native
American tribe. This form of consumption has often been employed as an anthropological analogy in the attempts to
understand exchange and trade in prehistoric and early historic Europe. Notwithstanding this is a well-written and
highly interesting paper.
Erik Husberg’s paper – brief but informative – gives a good overview of
beekeeping and the uses of honey in Roman culture. Beekeeping was an important enterprise in the Roman world, for
the bees provided not only honey, but
also wax. Although honey was arguably
the most important sweetener in the Roman world, Husberg’s argument that it
“in practice was the sole sweetener” (my
translation), cannot be supported by the
literary evidence. On the contrary, a
number of alternatives were widely
used: various kinds of concentrated
grape must, for example defrutum and
sapa, and dried fruits such as figs and
raisins. In Dioscorides’ De materia medica sugar is mentioned as an ingredient
in medicine, but its importance as a
sweetener is a later phenomenon.
As I have argued above, this volume
consists of a number of interesting papers which I would recommend as reading for those interested in agricultural
production in the Roman period.
Dominic Ingemark
Lund, Sweden
Reviews
Folklore Recorded in Setesdal
Erik Henning Edvardsen: Kvitebjørn
kong Valemon 3. Gerhard August
Schneider – Setesdals folkloristiske oppdager. Norsk folkeminnelags skrifter
163. Norsk Folkeminnelag Aschehoug,
Oslo 2010. 314 pp. Ill.
The present volume is a well-documented presentation of the multi-talented
Gerhard August Schneider’s folkloristic
and ethnological notes from his fieldwork in Setesdal, written by the head of
the Ibsen Museum in Oslo. Edvardsen’s
folkloristic background comes well to
the fore in this volume. Without any
doubt, this trilogy is a well-deserved
tribute to Schneider. Edvardsen underscores the incontestable fact that Schneider must be regarded as a pioneer and a
precursor. He collected folkloristic and
ethnological materials in Setesdalen before Johannes Skar’s fieldwork there.
Schneider’s output in the areas of
folklore and ethnology seems to have
fallen into oblivion. Edvardsen has thus
rendered an invaluable service by underlining his importance as a field collector
and an artist. He explains Schneider’s
editing principles in an opening chapter,
and describes how his notes were written down. Schneider depicted everyday
clothes, folk costumes, utensils and
other useful specimens. He seems to
have been specifically fascinated by
folktales and legends. Many wellknown folktales are to be found among
his notes. The version of Kvitebjørn
kong Valemon (The Polar Bear and King
Valemon) used by P. Chr. Asbjørnsen
was written down by Schneider.
Schneider’s notes cover a broad spectrum of customs, beliefs and folk poetry.
His collections represent a significant
and eloquent testimony to his diligence,
his curiosity and willingness to study the
everyday life of the inhabitants of Setesdal.
Edvardsen has annotated the folktales
and popular legends with reference to
Antti Aarne & Stith Thompson, The
157
Types of the Folktale: A Classification
and Bibliography (FF Communications
No. 184, Helsinki 1961) and Ørnulf
Hodne, The Types of the Norwegian
Folktale (Oslo 1984). He has also used
Reidar Th. Christiansen, The Migratory
Legends : A Proposed List of Types with
a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants (FF Communications
No.175, Helsinki 1985). Edvardsen has
added a list of abbreviations, a glossary,
and an index of persons with relevant
data on their background.
The book contains several drawings
and sketches by Schneider which bear
witness to his extraordinary ability to reproduce the specific and characteristic
aspects of his chosen motifs. This also
goes for his drawings illustrating certain
legends.
It is obvious that this volume reflects
all aspects of Schneider’s collections,
namely ballads, folktales, hymns, broadsides, drinking songs, anecdotes, proverbs, legends, magical formulas, black
books, magic and magicians, and folk
medicine, folk art, night courting by the
young, dance gatherings, etc.
This trilogy will certainly be an indispensable tool for everyone working
within the folkloristic and ethnological
disciplines. The layout of the volume is
excellent and a pleasure to behold!
Ronald Grambo
Oslo, Norway
Encounters in a Health Centre
Ingrid Fioretos: Möten med motstånd.
Kultur, klass, kropp på vårdcentralen.
[Encounters of exclusion. Culture,
class, body at the health care centre.]
Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper,
Lunds universitet 2009. 200 pp. English
summary. Diss.
Ingrid Fioretos’s doctoral dissertation
studies the encounters of the staff and
certain patients of a health care centre,
158
Reviews
which she calls Lyra, in Malmö, Sweden. She focuses on patients who visit
the health care centre frequently, with
nonspecific or vague ailments. Fioretos
carried out field work at the health care
centre in 2001 and 2006. The research
was conducted as a study of change. The
reader is left wondering why Fioretos
does not provide reasons for conducting
the study at two different points in time:
Is it intended to be a longitudinal study,
or was the researcher just attracted by
the same subject twice? The most important research method consisted in observing the health care centre in different situations. The researcher observed
the nursing staff performing their daily
tasks and sat with patients waiting for
their turn in the waiting room. A large
part of the research material consists of
notes made in field diaries. Conversations and interviews with the staff and
the patients constitute a logical part of
the observation.
As a researcher, Fioretos spent on
average one day a week, together nine
months (during 2001 and 2006) at the
health care centre and observed in total
twenty members of staff, ten of whom
she met several times and studied in
greater depth. Of these ten, two were
male and eight female, and they represented the different occupations at the
health care centre: doctors, nurses, midwives and physiotherapists. All the persons in the study have been given pseudonyms. In addition Fioretos observed
two other health care centres in Malmö,
endeavouring in this way to blur the
connection between the observed persons and a particular health care centre
in order to make recognition of the subjects more difficult. The study itself only
refers to “Lyra Health Care Centre”.
The main theme of the study is the encounters between the health care centre
staff and complicated patients. These
patients all tend to come to the centre repeatedly with complaints that are hard to
diagnose accurately and concisely
(aches and pains, headaches, dizziness,
fatigue, respiratory problems). The
complicated patients are of varied ages,
and while some of them are native
Swedes most of them are unemployed
immigrants. This creates problems with
language and cultural comprehension
between them and the staff. However,
the study does not define the complicated patients directly through their ethnicity or native culture. The nursing
staff defines complicated patients as
persons who have trouble living according to Swedish standards of how to live
properly. The doctors’ activities, on the
other hand, are based on an organ-specific “partition” of the body, with a specialist for each part of the body. Patients
looking for help are sent to a certain specialist on the basis of their assumed
symptom, but often without any evident
benefit. Moreover, the specialist doctors
do not communicate with each other or
look beyond their own speciality for
diagnoses and treatment of the patients’
complaints.
According to Fioretos, the actions of
the health care centre staff exemplify
Michel Foucault’s ideas about authority
and the exercise of power: on the basis
of their own expertise, nurses and doctors have the power to define not only
what sickness and health are but also the
normal and proper way to live. Their
task is to direct and control their patients
in such a way that the patients will live
according to the defined ideal norms.
The most important strategy the Lyra
Health Care Centre nurses employed for
improving the lives of complicated patients was to direct and encourage them
repeatedly to eat well, exercise and sleep
sufficiently. It was assumed that through
these actions the patients would improve
their own living conditions and come to
lead a life that was considered to conform to Swedish and, more widely,
Western cultural standards. On the other
hand, it is understandable that nurses often feel inadequate and see their methods as insufficient. For example, unemployment is a societal problem they can-
Reviews
not directly influence in their work with
patients. These difficulties are exemplified by one nurse’s efforts to get a patient to organise his/her life (waking up
early enough, exercise, a good diet) so
as to become enterprising, active and
versatile and thus a potentially good
job-seeker. Fioretos sees this strategy as
typical of neo-liberal societies, where
the individual is expected to take responsibility for his/her own life and living conditions while also benefiting the
nation.
The Lyra Health Care Centre appears
to have changed between the two years
in which it was studied, 2001 and 2006.
Fioretos characterises Lyra in 2001 as a
“time bomb”, where nothing works
smoothly. Even before the centre opens,
there is a group of people behind the
door, waiting to get in. Soon the waiting
room fills up with patients and a cacophony of noises. In their offices, the
nurses try to calm people who are seeking help by phone. The employees seem
to have an inhuman workload, the centre
is under-staffed, and everybody is busy
all the time. One doctor even remarks
“Soon it will explode here” (p. 54). According to the employees, the main
blame lies with the politicians, who are
not interested in improving the conditions at Lyra. Consequently, the employees themselves try to come up with
new measures and organisational improvements to make the workday flow
smoothly and to ensure more efficient
help for the patients.
Five years later, Lyra seems to be the
complete opposite of what it was earlier.
Many improvements have been carried
out. These are already apparent in the
waiting room, which looks peaceful and
has obtained an entertaining aquarium.
The previously green walls have been
painted white and, unlike before, the
doors to the consulting rooms are open.
The staff feels that the workload has become more manageable and the tempo
of work slower. The work no longer
feels strenuous, but interesting, fun and
159
satisfying. The changes have been made
possible by the appointment of a new
manager since the previous field work
period. The organisational changes have
increased the doctors’ and nurses’ accessibility to patients. Only the social
welfare officer of the health care centre
highlights problems related to working
with patients. According to the rest of
the staff, the number of complicated patients has diminished, and they are now
easier to work with. However, according
to Fioretos’ observations, there are still
just as many, if not more, complicated
patients as in 2001. All in all, descriptions of the changes carried out at the
health care centre come across as a kind
of a “utopia” come true.
The study presents many interesting
questions pertaining to encounters between employees and patients who are
seen as difficult. It is surprising that
even though multiculturalism is a fairly
general and everyday phenomenon in
Sweden, numerous conflicts still arise in
encounters with patients from different
native cultures. These problems are
most clearly caused by the fact that the
underlying reasons for the patients’
diagnostically difficult symptoms cannot be eradicated by the employees. According to the study, these symptoms often arise from the patients’ difficult life
circumstances, problems created by unemployment, insufficient financial
means, child-care problems and also different cultural values.
Ingrid Fioretos’ dissertation surprises
the reader. The initial impression that
the text is easy to read and simple continues throughout the study. This simplicity and readability prove to be distinct advantages as one reads further.
The study has been written in a way that
is both comprehensible and understanding, and it captures the reader’s attention. It is made even more interesting by
the visibility of the research material in
it and the way in which the material is
related both to writer’s own reflections
and to the theoretical research literature.
160
Reviews
On the other hand, the study is in its own
way “hands-on”, which should make it
an interesting read for people who are
active in the field, and indeed helpful to
them in their own encounters with complicated patients.
Pirjo Korkiakangas
Jyväskylä, Finland
Death As Reflected in Culture Studies
Anders Gustavsson (ed.): Döden speglad i aktuell kulturforskning. Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi CVII.
Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för
svensk folkkultur, Uppsala 2009. 214
pp. Ill.
Death is everywhere. The topic can be
approached from any number of angles.
This volume contains twelve articles
about how people have dealt with the
processes of death and funeral rituals,
especially in bygone Nordic culture. The
articles go back to a symposium held at
the University of Oslo on 22–24 October
2008, with lectures by representatives of
different subjects, such as ethnologists,
historians, cultural historians, scholars
of religion, sociologists, and theologians. Although a great deal of culturehistorical material is presented here, the
articles do not cover all sides of the topic
of death. We learn almost nothing, for
example, about the history of cremation,
or of how dissidents and members of
free churches have been buried over the
years. Yet there is a great deal of interesting knowledge to be found here. Unfortunately, I cannot summarize all the
articles in detail, so I shall highlight
some themes that I consider important.
In his introductory article, Michael
Hviid Jacobsen gives us a brief history
of death. He shows how death was a
very common theme in pre-modern society, and how it then declined somewhat in the twentieth century, but has
begun to attract attention once again in
recent years. When modernity gained
momentum in earnest in the middle of
the last century, the handling of the dead
was crucially rationalized, as were
burial rituals. Most of this was closed
away in the private sphere and professionalized by undertakers. The recent
new focus on death is presumably connected to the fact that terminal care has
become a subject of attention. A proper
survey of research history is provided by
the grand old man of ethnology, NilsArvid Bringéus, in his article about his
sixty-year study of the topic. We learn a
great deal here about the cultural history
of funeral rituals over the centuries,
right up to modern times.
In the next section we can read two
articles about death in the Middle Ages.
Stina Fallberg Sundmark writes about
the host, holy water, oil, and candles in
theology and popular piety in the Middle
Ages. Although the Reformation
changed a great deal, it is interesting to
see how certain actions and ideas survived for a very long time. Audun Kjus
writes about death and punishment in
the oldest Norwegian laws.
The third section in the book is about
death in early modern society. Anders
Gustavsson paints a vivid picture of how
a farmer on the west coast of Sweden experienced death and burial around the
middle of the nineteenth century. He
does so by analysing this farmer’s
diaries, a unique source material.
Birgitta Skarin Frykman writes about
working-class funerals in Gothenburg.
Here we get an interesting survey of
what burials as social markers have
looked like for more than a hundred
years. In the past it was important to
have a decent public funeral with a lot of
guests. When the economic status of the
Swedish working class rose in the early
twentieth century, they copied the funerals of the better-off people. Workers
now had to have a hearse, a procession,
a large gathering of friends and acquaintances, and a lavish feast. The
more prosperous people subsequently
Reviews
reacted by adopting something that had
been considered shameful before: strictly private funerals. Today it is quite
common to have quiet funerals with
only the next of kin present. Few people
retain negative perceptions of private funerals. Generally speaking, funerals
have become more private and individualized.
In her article Ilona Kemppainen analyses death notices in Finland from the
nineteenth century to the present day.
Death notices became common at the
start of the twentieth century, and the
cross was a frequently used symbol in
them. In Finland the cross still seems to
be more common than in, say, Sweden.
The rule that the family does not write
the obituaries printed in the newspapers
seems to have been relaxed in recent
years. Today we find that sons and other
close relatives can describe the deceased
person. The rule that only prominent figures in society get obituaries also seems
to be changing. Now virtually anyone
can have an obituary, at least in the local
press.
The fourth section in the book is entitled “Death in a multicultural and
changeable society”. Eva M. Karlsson
writes here about the dying body in terminal care. Mirjaliisa Lukkarinen Kvist
discusses who is supposed to tend the
grave after a death. Migrants to Sweden
from Finland often seem to prefer to be
buried near their new home in Sweden,
despite otherwise strong ties to their
childhood home and its local culture. An
important question in this connection is
who looks after the grave. Proper care is
best ensured if one is buried in the place
where one’s children and grandchildren
live and work.
With the increased immigration of
Muslims, the question of burial places
for them has also become topical, not to
say acute, in our Nordic societies. Cora
Alexa Døving writes in her article about
the establishment of a Muslim cemetery
in Norway. We find more about cemeteries in Anne-Louise Sommer’s article
161
about graveyard culture in Denmark. Ingeborg Svensson concludes the book
with her article about national mourning. She states that collective grief after
major disasters – the tsunami in Thailand and the sinking of the Estonia – creates a collective community that unites
different groups in society, at least for a
time.
I find the book important in many
ways. People need to have some perspective on death and burial if they are
to have a correct perception of today’s
trends. The entire theme is a good reflection of tendencies and changes in society
at large. It is slightly surprising that
there is no example of research on this
theme by any sociologist of religion,
given the existence of that subject in
Sweden. As it is now, the articles provide “tasters” of different themes associated with death, but one is left with the
feeling that the treatment is sometimes a
little too short and summary. In dealing
with these themes, a firmer grasp of sociological theories would be desirable,
but perhaps that will come in a subsequent, more concerted study.
Nils G. Holm
Åbo, Finland
Traditional Inuit Songs from the
Thule Area
Michael Hauser: Traditional Inuit
Songs from the Thule Area. Transcriptions and Investigations of Traditional
Songs from the Thule Area recorded by
Erik Holtved in 1937 and Michael Hauser and Bent Jensen in 1962. Further investigations with music examples of traditional songs from the Uummannaq-Upernavik Areas, the Baffin Island
Areas and the Copper Inuit Areas. Volume 1 + 2. 827 + 729 pp. Ill. Museum
Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen 2010.
ISBN 978-87-635-2589-3. Supplementary CD with music examples, 59 tracks.
162
Reviews
Michael Hauser is an icon in research on
Inuit culture and music. Hauser was
nominated for the 2010 William Mills
Prize for Non-Fiction Polar Books. Michael Hauser has published several
books in the field of ethnomusicology
and he is a big name in that research environment. This book is based on transcriptions and fieldwork from 1937 by
the late Erik Holtved and from 1962 by
Michael Hauser himself together with
Bent Jensen. Two volumes packed with
information, in total more than 1500
pages of text, notes and photographs. In
Volume II the content is all Erik Holtved’s material. I do not think that anybody will read these books continuously
from beginning to end. It is more of an
encyclopaedia of Inuit music and culture. Most of the fieldwork was done in
the northernmost part of Greenland, the
Thule area, one of the most northerly
settlements in the world, on the 77th
parallel. Even though the people of
Thule were the primary target for the
scholars, they also did comparative studies on the Inuit of Baffin Island, Uummannaq-Upernavik (West Greenland)
and the Copper Inuit areas.
Erik Holtved recorded 134 traditional songs in his fieldwork in 1937, of
which 110 were drum songs and 24
were other varieties. All of the songs
are transcribed and analysed in full.
Hauser himself recorded 590 songs together with Bent Jensen and the artist
Pauline Motzfeldt Lumholt, one of the
most popular singers during the 1990s
and 2000s. The pictures in the book are
mostly portrait photographs of the singers and dancers, and there are also a lot
of pictures of the environment. Archival photographs, together with their
own pictures, give the text new life, and
for me as a reader the story behind the
text, fieldwork and pictures gives a better understanding of the entire process
of getting closer to the Inuit culture.
Even the moment when they do their
recording is very interesting to see,
how they controlled their equipment to
get the best sound from the performer
and the role the performer played. This
makes it possible to undertake performance interpretations of the actual
song. We have the context of the situation, the fieldworkers, their informants
and the early explorers and fieldworkers who roamed the country, like Knud
Rasmussen and Thalbitzer, are also described.
Hauser spends a lot of his time transcribing the songs, and describing his
tools for analysing his material. He discusses the problem of how to note the
drum beat, which does not exactly correspond to the singing. The verbal singing
and the drum beat do not always have
the same pulse, which I find particularly
interesting. The performers are presented with their genealogy, which explains
their belonging, who they are. A lot of
the Thule people have their roots in Baffin Island, from where their ancestors
emigrated during the 1860s. In one song
the singer, Taitsiáguax, who is well
known and highly esteemed, says that
each song contains three different parts:
siulleq – the first part with no lyrics;
aappaat – the second part with lyrics;
and pingajuat – the third part, which
could be a different melody. The intellectual property or the personal connections of a song are very complicated and
hard to track down. Usually the singers
start every song with the phrase “this is
X’s drum song”. So far so easy, but it
can be complicated if the person who
owns the song has passed away. It is
generally taboo to use the name of the
dead, especially if the name is not
passed on to a newborn child in the community. When the name is forgotten and
one does not know the age of the song,
the identity is also lost to the song. This
tells us of one very important tradition
of Inuit culture; a name is not just a
name, it is identity, not only to the songs
but also its originator’s kin and territory.
In Holtved’s material from 1937 do we
not find so many originator of songs, no
more than seventeen. In Hauser’s mate-
Reviews
rial we find a lot more. Why is that? It is
all because Hauser asked the performers
to present their song and where it came
from. In Holtved’s case he did not ask
them at all.
Michael Hauser sees himself as a
door opener to the global community,
and I believe that Pauline Motzfeldt
Lumholt was a door opener for Hauser
to the Inuit community. Hauser has
made his interpretations with historical
descriptions he found in the songs,
lyrics that describe the first immigrants
who came to the Thule area. We can
read about Inuit history and their way
of life in the songs, and thanks to Hauser this is also an option for others to
understand and learn more about Inuit
culture and Greenlandic history as well.
Michael Hauser commends Erik Holtved for his work of documentation over
the years, and Hauser uses Holtved’s
methods and also develops them. We
cannot underestimate Hauser himself –
he dedicates this book to Holtved – but
although Hauser in his modesty does
not say it, he has been more skilful than
Holtved; the apprentice has surpassed
his master. Hauser praises Holtved, and
I would praise Hauser for this work.
This is an encyclopaedia, his masterpiece, and it should be on every scholars bookshelf for future studies of Inuit
culture.
Krister Stoor
Umeå, Sweden
The Construction of the Past in Sammatti – Memories and Interpretations
of the Finnish Civil War
Anne Heimo: Kapina Sammatissa. Vuoden 1918 paikalliset tulkinnat osana historian yhteiskunnallisen rakentamisen
prosessia. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden
Seuran Toimituksia 1275, Tiede. (English summary: Rebellion in Sammatti:
local interpretations of the 1918 Finnish
Civil war as a part of the social process
163
of history making.) Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Helsinki 2010. 295 pp.
Ill.
The events of the 1918 Finnish Civil
War are an object of regular interest in
Finland even today. The earlier academic studies of history have been especially
interested in the political and military
aspects of the Civil War, because they
are often related to the winning of political independence in Finland. On the
other hand, such issues as tragic events
and executions have aroused a lot of interest among the general public as well.
Immediately after the war, academic
studies examined the war from the viewpoint of the winners, the “Whites”. On
the opposing side, escaped “Reds” conducted their own research, which they
published, for example, in the United
States or the Soviet Union. The left wing
also published several books in Finland
in the 1920s, eliciting memories of that
bloody era.
Väinö Linna’s Täällä Pohjantähden
alla 1–2 (1959–1960; Under the North
Star, 1960) provoked a new and wide
debate concerning the events of the Civil
War in Finland. Historians began to
study the war from more varying perspectives and finally, during the late
1960s, they began also to focus on the
Reds as a topic of research.
The study of history has usually concentrated on the real events of the past,
that is to say, on historical truths. There
are, however, other possibilities as well.
In her doctoral dissertation (Kapina
Sammatissa, Rebellion in Sammatti),
Anne Heimo studies how the people of
Sammatti have interpreted and explained the historical events of the Civil
War. The focus of the study is on the
folklore concerning the Civil War,
which means that Heimo is interested in
narrative truth: what has been told and
understood as the truth, and how this
truth has been conveyed. Heimo’s dissertation is a part of the field of folklore
studies at the University of Turku, but it
164
Reviews
also operates in the domain of oral history and memory studies.
Social and economic differences
were considerable in the late 1910s in
western Uusimaa. In Sammatti, however, there were no big manors and the
number of crofters was smaller than in
other parts of Finland. The population
was, nevertheless, politically divided.
The Civil War began in Finland in
late January 1918. The Red Guards in
Sammatti had been formed from the
members of the local worker’s associations. During the war, the Red Guards
patrolled the area, interrogated known
supporters of the white faction and confiscated food and weapons from the local landowners. The opposing side, the
White Civil Guard, had scattered and its
members were either in hiding or had
fled. There were no actual battles in
Sammatti during the Civil War.
The war ended in May 1918 and the
Reds were defeated. The Red Guards
had retreated from Sammatti in the latter
half of April. Germans and FinnishSwedish soldiers occupied Sammatti,
purged the area of the communist Reds,
and the local White Civil Guard took
command.
Throughout history, civil wars have
always been especially bloody. During
the last fifteen years, Finnish historians
have been especially interested in the
numerous deaths and executions that occurred in the year 1918. Anne Heimo
plays her own part in this debate, because her starting point for the study is
the exceptional violence that took place
in the Sammatti.
While the Reds executed only one
person during the war, the Whites executed no fewer than 34 Reds in the war’s
aftermath. The number of persons executed was high in relation to the population of Sammatti and also in comparison
to other parishes in Finland. People later
described the Sammatti of those days as
“bad” and “dismal”.
These violent events are a fruitful
starting point for studies concerning
memory. The people on the side of the
Reds have, for example, remembered
the executions as harsh and arbitrary. On
the opposing side, supporters of the
Whites have tried to provide explanations for how those violent events were
possible.
Depending on people’s political
views, different terms were used to describe the events. Within families the
Civil War has often been a forbidden
subject and sometimes interviewers
have had difficulties in acquiring information. The historian Tauno Tukkinen
was the first writer who published actual
research dealing with the events of the
Civil War in Sammatti. This did not happen until 1992.
Heimo emphasizes that people reconstruct the past at many different levels.
In such instances, history becomes a
combination of social knowledge,
people’s action and interpretations. Heimo has benefited from the ideas introduced by the British social historian
Raphael Samuel and Professor Jorma
Kalela from Finland.
People described not only their own
experience and memories but also narratives common in Sammatti. Usually
they remembered only single glimpses
of the events. Heimo states that these
events have to represent something significant or extraordinary to the community or to individuals in order to form
such lasting memories.
For instance, people remembered
how armed men moved around and how
supplies were confiscated. The executions in particular had created strong
memories and narratives, because killings denoted “bad” or “wrongful”
deaths. Humorous events had also crystallized in people’s memories and famous local individuals were often key
characters in the narratives.
Sometimes separate memories can
form repetitive narratives. Three women
who had worked for the local Red
Guards were often remembered. They
were all executed after the war. A sec-
Reviews
ond example is the execution of Judge
Unto Nevalainen by the Reds in April
1918, which was a basic explanation for
a violent aftermath. People also remembered the bomb attempt which happened
after the war and which had led to the
death of Hulda Vannas. She was the
wife of the commander of the local
White Civil Guard. Political perspectives were strongly emphasized in these
narratives.
Experiences and shared memories are
not, however, the only way to reconstruct the past. The past also exists in a
physical sense. Cemeteries, execution
sites, hiding places and monuments act
as reminders of the Civil War. The
memories are also combined with the
predominant way of dealing with history
in that community (historiakulttuuri). In
other words, the people of Sammatti
have also gained knowledge from
school, academic history and literature.
For example, Eeva Joenpelto, who has
written about the events of Sammatti in
her Lohja series, is a well-known novelist in Sammatti.
Heimo emphasizes the role of the local history experts. They do not have the
same academic education as an historian, but they are interested in history and
have gained knowledge by reading,
listening and visiting historical sites.
Heimo wants to raise their status as experts, placing them on a par with academic historians. Tauno Tukkinen is the
well-known local expert, who, at his
own cost, has written and published several studies concerning executions.
Finally, memories and tales are combined with written material and with the
knowledge that local history experts distribute. These different forms are interrelated and they interact with one another. Heimo calls this action a “social
process of history-making”. Memories
affect interpretations and vice versa.
Even though the inhabitants of Sammatti were politically divided on these
issues, they did not necessarily consider
relatives, workers on the same farm or
165
people they had known for decades as
real enemies. The Reds often downplayed the misconduct of the Whites,
and vice versa.
People transferred their memories of
the actual evil executioners to those outside the community. White executioners
were thought to have been Germans,
Finnish-Swedish whites or well-known
Finnish executioners. Only the head of
the local White Civil Guard, Juho Vannas, was mentioned in the context of
executions, but he was not a native of
Sammatti. People also claimed that the
executioners of Judge Nevalainen were
from other parishes.
Heimo’s research material consists
mostly of interviews and written memoirs collected from various archives.
Other materials used include newspapers, the archive of the local Lietzén
family, official documents and the database of the Suomen sotasurmat 1914–
1922 project. With the help of such extensive sources, Anne Heimo provides a
plausible study concerning local interpretations of the Finnish Civil War in
Sammatti.
After the introduction, Heimo also introduces in detail the theoretical background to her study, displaying areas of
oral history, memory studies and theory
of narration. She discusses the use of her
methods (especially interviews) and her
research material rather extensively.
This is, however, not to be criticized
here. An accurate and lengthy reflection
on one’s own research and situating oneself in the field of academic study are an
essential part of dissertations, especially
in the field of folkloristics. These chapters are not just a compulsory part of the
doctoral thesis. While reflecting on her
theoretical, methodological and empirical basis, Anne Heimo already succeeds
in eliciting her findings on the formation
of historical knowledge: during the interviews people build up their common
past by introducing their memories.
In the field of the Finnish Folklore
studies the first dissertations and re-
166
Reviews
search dealing with the year 1918 were
not published until the 1990s (Ulla
Maija Peltonen’s dissertation Punakapinan muistot (1996), for instance). Anne
Heimo’s dissertation, Kapina Sammatissa, is an admirable contribution to this
field of study. It is a well written and
convincing study. A separate index for
important concepts and key words
would have been useful, but readers can
still find important persons in the index
at the end of the book.
There is not much to criticize. There
are, however, some unnecessary repetitions throughout the study. Heimo
writes several times that she does not examine historical facts but, rather, historical interpretations. The definition of
folklore and the different methods used
for the interviews are already sufficiently introduced in the first three chapters.
Therefore, they do not need to be repeated later. Also, Elias Lönnrot, who lived
in Sammatti in the latter half of the nineteenth century, is mentioned now and
then. Even though Lönnrot is certainly
an important historical figure for the inhabitants of Sammatti and the interviewees, I am not sure how often it is necessary to connect Lönnrot to the events of
the Civil War.
Hopefully, not only ethnologists and
folklorists but also academic historians
and other people who are interested in
the events of the Civil War will take
time to read this book. Anne Heimo’s
study reminds us that historians do not
have a monopoly on our shared past or
on how people choose to evaluate those
events that they consider worth remembering.
Pasi Saarimäki
The Swedish Ethnological Family
Book
Mats Hellspong & Fredrik Skott (eds.):
Svenska etnologer och folklorister. Acta
Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi
CIX, Uppsala 2010. 296 pp. Ill.
Last autumn I found a pleasing and
cheap popular description of “bygone
life” in a bookshop in Stockholm. In it I
noticed an unusually clear picture from a
sauna. The caption said when and where
the picture was taken, but nothing about
who took it or who owned it. A few
weeks later the book Svenska etnologer
och folklorister arrived by post, and
there I found the same picture in the section about Nils Keyland. The name Keyland has popped up now and then in my
own work, and I have wondered about
the linguistic origin and background of
the name. In the brief but fact-packed article I got the answer to my question,
and I simultaneously understood how a
person like him had personal contacts
and opportunities to obtain such pictures
in his documentation of folklife.
The individual articles, like this book
as a whole, greatly help in giving a better understanding of how ethnology in
Sweden has developed and in many
cases also reflects the Swedish influence
on European ethnology. Another important aspect is that we need facts about
who did what when it comes to the
documentation of folklife and cultural
history. In many of the biographical articles one can read about how the scholars used their whole life experience,
their childhood environment, and the assistance of their relatives while doing
documentation and research. The article
about Keyland is a good example. While
describing his life and the way he
worked, it also includes a discussion of
source criticism and examples of how he
adjusted various situations to bring out
exactly what he wanted.
After having read some articles, I increasingly began to feel like an Åbo
cousin of the Swedish family of ethnologists. I found that 22 of the 35 articles
were written by someone I have met or
at least listened to in some context. Of
the people portrayed in the book, I have
Reviews
personally met four in reality, and Sigurd Erixon was of some significance
for my way of working, partly through
what Béla Gunda told me from his time
in Sweden before the Second World
War, partly through Karl-Olov Arnstberg’s book Utforskaren. The cousin
perspective therefore feels good. I know
and recognize some individuals, but not
as well as a family member would do.
The book begins with a presentation
of the forefathers, Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius and Nils Gabriel Djurklou. They were mentioned in works I
read during my student days. For those
of us who began our studies about a
hundred years after their time, it was
sufficient to know that Wärend och
wirdarne existed. Northern Sweden
was not so visible, with the exception
of the Sami. Reading Lars-Erik Edlund’s presentation gave me a new acquaintance in Johan Nordlander. He
was one of those who saw the link between language and culture. The series
he founded in 1892, Norrländska Samlingar, eventually published 18 volumes, the last in 1947.
From an Åbo perspective, Stockholm
with Nordiska Museet and the Hallwyl
professorship are familiar and close.
N. E. Hammarstedt and Nils Lithberg
were friends of Gabriel Nikander, the
first professor of ethnology at Åbo
Academy. The designation “folklife
studies” proposed by Hammarstedt
came into use in Stockholm in 1919,
when Lithberg was appointed to the
chair of Nordic and comparative folklife
studies. In the following year Gabriel
Nikander was appointed professor of
Nordic cultural history and folklife studies at Åbo Academy. Before these
chairs were established, the terms were
discussed in depth. A few years later, the
question of whether the Swedish-speaking population of Finland ought to have
a national museum of their own was discussed, and the colleagues in Sweden
had advised against it. Later too, Åbo
followed other Nordic examples, for ex-
167
ample, when the name of the subject was
changed to “ethnology”.
Besides Keyland, there is a presentation of Louise Hagberg, known from
earlier texts in connection with Artur
Hazelius and Nordiska Museet. Ernst
Klein is known as the first museum
pedagogue, not just at Nordiska Museet
but in the whole of Europe. Klein succeeded Keyland as “head of folklife
presentations and living folk art” at
Skansen and later became museum
pedagogue. Klein’s collection of material among the Swedes of Estonia has always interested me, and in the book one
can read about his international background and his broad interest in the various expressions of folk culture, whether
in buildings or in dances, games, and
rites. He made major contributions to
dance studies, and his knowledge about
the many expressions of folk culture
were translated into practice as programmes at Skansen and Nordiska Museet. He worked to have cultural history
included in school teaching, and through
his efforts Nordiska Museet reached out
to large numbers of pupils.
An interesting new acquaintance is
Ella Odstedt, an autodidact from Ångermanland who managed to make a career
out of her talent and her familiarity with
folk culture. As a young girl she began
to send her notes to Nordiska Museet.
Initially she received guidance in recording techniques from N. E. Hammarstedt, and with his help she came
into contact with the Dialect Archive in
Uppsala. In 1927 she was employed as
secretary at the archive, where she
stayed for the rest of her working life.
Since she had no formal academic education she was paid a secretarial wage,
even though she performed scholarly
tasks. She is described as a “Mädchen
für alles”. Her work included corresponding with local informants and assessing their answers, and she also compiled questionnaires. Her strongest side
was collecting in the field. Her most important scholarly works are two mono-
168
Reviews
graphs: Varulven i svensk folktradition
(“The werewolf in Swedish folk tradition, 1943) and Folkdräkter i övre Dalarna (“Folk dress in Upper Dalarna”,
1953). In 1955 she received an honorary
doctorate in Uppsala. Despite that, the
people who wrote her obituaries did not
fail to point out that she was an autodidact. It is difficult to avoid making
comparisons, or speculating that she
might have found it easier to achieve
better salary and treatment if she had
been a man. Otto Andersson (1879–
1969), well known in Swedish-speaking
Finland as a professor of music and folklore at Åbo Academy, also lacked a university entrance qualification, but for a
promising young man it was not impossible to achieve a dispensation at the
university.
The book shows that Nordiska Museet became an opportunity for competent women to establish themselves
in ethnology. Those who were born 20–
25 years later than Odstedt could be
something more than secretaries.
Gertrud Grenander-Nyberg and AnnaMaja Nylén both became acknowledged
textile experts. The former was recruited
as a newly qualified teacher of weaving
to the museum by Emelie von Walterstorff, while the latter was one of
“Gunnel’s girls”, having had Gunnel
Hazelius-Berg as her mentor. Gertrud
Grenander-Nyberg is described in the
book as Sigurd Erixon’s favourite pupil,
but she started a family and scholarship
had to wait. She took her doctorate at the
age of 63 and was actively publishing
until she was in her eighties. Besides following Sigurd Erixon’s theories, she
was familiar with the thinking of the
Hungarian ethnologists Edit Fél and
Tamás Hofer, who emphasized the emotional and symbolic dimensions of
everyday objects. A couple of years after her doctoral dissertation she published a book about weaving, Så vävde
de, which Janken Myrdal, author of the
section about Gertrud Grenander-Nyberg, considers an important book. He
also mentions that she was respectfully
known as “the grandmother of ethnology”.
The male researchers at Nordiska
have previously been visible in various
contexts. Their works were on the
shelves of the seminar library, while the
female scholars were still working on
their qualifications. Both the Sami researcher Ernst Manker and John Granlund were mentioned and quoted at lectures and on courses during my time as a
student in Åbo. In those days I did not
know that Gösta Berg and Sigfrid
Svensson had for a time been colleagues
at Nordiska Museet, but their book
Svensk bondekultur was among the first
required reading for beginners. Albert
Eskeröd’s Årets äring was also mentioned in various contexts. Gunnar
Granberg, on the other hand, is a new acquaintance for me, even though he lived
in Finland for several years and published in Budkavlen. Perhaps the explanation for this is that ethnology and folkloristics are two separate subjects in
Åbo. Granberg’s choice of Finnish as a
foreign language during his undergraduate days shows that he must have been
highly interested in Finland. He was one
of those who abandoned the study of
folk traditions for other work. During
the Second World War he was press attaché at the Swedish Embassy in Helsinki and then continued his diplomatic career.
The other branch of the ethnological
family has its seat in Lund. Four generations of professors have carried the main
responsibility. They are all in the book.
The first and second generations are
among the subjects of this book, while
the third and fourth generations are
among the authors. The female scholars
in Lund are represented by the archivist
Brita Egardt (1916–1990) and by AnnaBirgitta Rooth (1919–2000). Rooth won
the contest for the chair in Uppsala in
1973. Her rival was Phebe Fjellström,
five years younger, who was already
working in Uppsala. It was Fjellström
Reviews
who later laid the foundation for ethnology in Umeå, where she was appointed
professor in 1980. The biographies show
that the academic world had come so far
in the 1970s that women were taken seriously as applicants to senior posts.
They were granted the right to jobs corresponding to their competence, and
hence were entitled to comparable salary and status.
Yet another doctor from Lund is mentioned: Alfa Olsson, who worked at
Gothenburg Historical Museum. She became assistant in 1947 and keeper in
1964. In 1958 she gained her doctorate
with the dissertation Om allmogens
kosthåll. She died in 1967. She is esteemed by posterity as a researcher of
foodways.
One can browse through this family
book and follow intrigues and successes
in the lives of the different individuals.
Some prove to have been forerunners,
ahead of their time. Others lived a life
with international contacts. Some also
worked abroad, and together they made
Swedish ethnology known at many
foreign universities. Some were forced
to see their scholarly foundation disintegrate.
The foreword states that 35 representative and significant researchers have
been selected here to exemplify the
whole field of ethnology, both the nineteenth-century pioneers and the twentieth-century professors and other university scholars and researchers at museums and archives. The authors have
used a sympathetic insider perspective
and they have personal experience of
academic intrigues and the struggle for
positions.
Anyone with the energy to gaze out
over the field can see via the individuals’ biographies how the contacts of
Swedish ethnology extend to different
cultural and linguistic areas in Europe
and America. After the Second World
War they even managed to get through
the Iron Curtain and establish contacts
with the Hungarian scholars Fél and
169
Hofer, who were museum employees in
Budapest, but worked at an international
level. Those who do not have the time or
energy to read and digest the whole
book can put it on the shelf as a reference work where they can look for biographical data when necessary. The
source references provide the necessary
information for going into greater depth
than the articles here permit.
In many families there are shared expressions, puns, and jokes. Sven B. Ek
mentions that Sigfrid Svensson often
used the phrase “the importance of being
born somewhere” (p. 179) and that he
said he had heard it from a museum colleague. When I began to study cultural
history and folklife studies in Åbo, our
professor, Helmer Tegengren, used to
say that “one should ideally be born
somewhere”. It was easier to understand
things if one had personal experience
and could consider emic aspects. During
my first summer as a trainee at the Historical Museum in Åbo Castle, when I
quoted Tegengren, the caretaker smiled
and hinted that the expression already
existed when she had studied in Gabriel
Nikander’s times. He was a quarter of a
century older than Sigfrid Svensson. For
many members of the ethnological
family, this “somewhere” has been a resource.
Solveig Sjöberg-Pietarinen
Åbo, Finland
Nordic and European Cultural Processes
Flemming Hemmersam, Astrid Jespersen, Lene Otto (eds.): Kulturelle processer i Europa. Indlæg fra den 29. Nordiske etnolog- og folkloristkongres. Museum Tusculanums Forlag, Københavns
Universitet. København 2010. 292 pp.
Ill.
Nordic ethnologists and folklorists hold
a joint congress every three years. The
170
Reviews
29th congress was held in 2003 at Helsingør in Denmark. The theme was
“Cultural Processes in Europe”. It has
taken a long time – until 2010 – for the
congress publication to appear. There is
no comment in the book as to why the
publication has required seven years.
Congress publications should in principle appear as soon as possible since
they are supposed to reflect current research and discussions. It has not been
possible for the authors in this volume to
update their texts which, according to
the editors’ intentions, were supposed to
reflect the research situation in 2003.
They may therefore seem somewhat
outdated when appearing in 2010. I
think that at least the reference lists
could have been updated to assist today’s researchers working on the topics.
One of the Danish editors, Lene Otto,
has written an introduction to the book.
The arrangers’ goal for this Nordic congress was “to turn the gaze outwards and
remind ourselves about the European aspect of our subject” (p. 9). It is mentioned that there were different sessions
during the congress. It would have been
an advantage if these had been enumerated in the introduction. After the introduction come first eight plenary lectures
and then eleven papers delivered to different sessions. Finally, the congress is
summed up with one paper each from
Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. Some
of the congress papers have already been
published in scholarly journals and are
therefore not included in this book. In
this review I present some of the papers
that I find most relevant in relation to the
topic of the congress, “Cultural Processes in Europe”. Some papers are
peripheral to this theme. Some of the articles are in English (Cris Shore, Lisanne Wilken, Regina Bendix, Valdimar
Hafstein, and Maja P. Frykman) and the
rest are in Scandinavian languages.
Inge Adriansen from Denmark, who
has done penetrating research on national symbols in Denmark in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, has a paper here
analysing historical memorial sites as a
mirror of cultural processes at a national
level. The original stimulus for these
symbols need not be national; they may
very well come from outside. Adriansen
demonstrates this as regards the Danish
national symbol and national hero Holger Danske, who has his roots in the medieval European legend and ballad tradition. What appears to be extremely national may thus have its origin at an international level further back in time.
The anthropologist Cris Shore from
New Zealand analyses the significance
of the slogan for the EU’s cultural policy, “In uno plures” (Unity in diversity).
This expression was coined after 1992,
when cultural policy was first given a
place in the EU through the Maastricht
Treaty. This slogan is actually a problematic contradiction, but it seemingly
wants to demonstrate an intention in the
EU, as a combination of many states, to
assert cultural pluralism. Shore is critical, however, believing that it is a
bureaucratic term created within the EU
elite and thus a vision von oben that has
no democratic support. The author, who
works outside Europe, objects to the exclusivity vis-à-vis the rest of the world
that he sees in the EU: “It is not only
black, Asian, Muslim, or Third World
peoples who are excluded from the
canon of ‘European’ culture, but also
those from the United States” (pp. 46f).
According to Shore, the goal of the EU’s
elitist and bureaucratic cultural policy is
not actually “diversity” but “unity”,
which he deplores. “It would seem as if
‘diversity’ is to be encouraged, but only
if it does not obstruct the quest for unity
or further integration” (p. 49).
The Danish anthropologist Lisanne
Wilken also considers the question of
“unity in diversity” as regards the way
the EU handles minority languages. This
respect and support for minority languages did not exist from the beginning;
it emerged through a political process in
the form of lobbyism by minority representatives in the European Parliament in
Reviews
the early 1990s. This has officially been
regarded by the EU as an expression of
“a cultural vision for integration” (p.
56), but according to Wilken this is really a construction after the event. The researcher’s critical attitude to control
from the top in the EU is noticeable.
Bo Lönnqvist from Finland places
Nordic ethnology at the intersection
between east and west in Europe.
Thanks to its geographical location, Finland is the Nordic country where ethnologists had most contacts with the east
through its neighbour, Russia. Lönnqvist stresses the significance of studies
of border contacts and the cultural processes taking place there, both in earlier
days and in more recent times since the
fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Many
Finnish tourists have since visited Russia, and Russian guests workers have
come to Finland. It is along the external
Nordic borders that Europeanization
comes about in a special way.
Regina Bendix from Germany is the
only European author from outside the
Nordic countries. She argues for studies
of schools and learning processes as an
important and neglected research field
in Europe. This is “the subfield of anthropology of education” (p. 123).
Schools should be studied over national
boundaries, and at the same time there
can also be intercultural and multicultural meeting places in the same schoolroom. Moreover, it is important to implement ethnological knowledge in the
school system. Bendix chooses her examples from American cultural anthropology and German ethnology, having
worked for a long time in both the USA
and Germany.
Anne Leonora Blaakilde from Denmark has done fieldwork in Greece. She
has interviewed five grandmothers, aged
53–80, in the countryside about their life
history and relations to children and
grandchildren. Unlike their children and
grandchildren, these older women did
not go to school and are illiterate. The
author performs a narrative analysis of
171
their stories. At the end of the paper she
makes a very brief comparison with the
results of fieldwork that she did in the
1990s among elderly women on a small
Danish island. In view of the main
theme of the congress, cultural processes in Europe, I think she ought to
have gone deeper into this comparison
between old rural women’s narratives in
southern and northern Europe. The comparative perspective on different places
and regions in Europe ought to be important in current European research.
Flemming Hemmersam discusses
folklore about the EU which has arisen
since Denmark joined in 1972. There is
both positive and negative folklore
about the EU, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of belonging to
the Union. This reflects ideas espoused
by people in the for and against camps.
Norway has hitherto chosen to stay
outside the EU, after referenda in 1972
and 1994. Line Esborg has studied the
Norwegian opposition to the EU and
how this is expressed in folklore that can
be described as resistance stories. This is
a sign of a tradition of counter-power,
with Norway as a country on the northern fringe of Europe reacting against a
power centre in Europe that it wishes to
escape. The periphery turns against what
it perceives as a hegemonic centre in Europe. In 2008 Esborg presented a doctoral dissertation about the Norwegian opposition to the EU as cultural practice.
Maja P. Frykman discusses the concept of diaspora as an analytical tool applied to immigrants in Europe. Her emphasis is on Croatian immigrants, which
is natural since she comes from Croatia
but now works as an ethnologist in Sweden. The Croatians who have come to
Sweden were labour migrants in the
1960s and refugees in the early 1990s.
Frykman “argues for the necessity of a
transnational perspective in ethnological
research and migration-related topics
and promotes the use of diaspora as an
analytical tool” (p. 238).
My final verdict on this book is that it
172
Reviews
is very uneven, in that so many of the papers show little relation to the theme of
“Cultural Processes in Europe”. The
book would have had greater stringency
if those papers had been omitted, and
published elsewhere. The book would
also have gained from appearing earlier,
or from being updated with respect to
the research the authors have done since
2003. The Nordic area viewed in a European cultural context is such an important research topic that it should not be
mixed with other papers. I would nevertheless recommend the book to anyone
who is interested in the topic, and I have
therefore chosen to comment on the papers that I find most relevant to that
overall perspective.
Anders Gustavsson
Oslo, Norway
Legends of War
Camilla Asplund Ingemark & Johanna
Wassholm: Historiska sägner om 1808–
09 års krig. Skrifter utgivna av Svenska
litteratursällskapet i Finland. Helsingfors 2009. 236 pp. Ill.
The value of historical legends as source
material has long been an issue that has
interested historians and folklorists
alike. Yet whereas historians have largely refused to see any source value in
these narratives, folklorists have taken a
more nunaced view ever since the
Brothers Grimm published their
Deutsche Sagen (1816/1818). In Norway Andreas Faye (1802–69) was the
first to publish a critical assessment of
this type of legends. In the foreword to
the collection Norske Sagn (Arendal,
1833) he wrote: “In several of the historical legends presented in this collection
there are some not unimportant contributions which confirm, illuminate, and
summarize the testimony of history and
characterize those vanished times.”
Faye himself attempted a series of com-
parisons between such collected legends
and early written sources clearly linked
to the same people and events – Snorri’s
sagas of the Norse kings, the Icelandic
family sagas, early historians (Saxo,
Peder Claussøn, Tormod Torfeus, topographical works from the eighteenth
century, and so on) – examining them
“with the torch of criticism”. Although
he found several examples of correspondences between the oral and the
written sources, he was forced to conclude that very few historical legends
could be used as reliable sources. They
nevertheless had intrinsic value by
showing that “the great men and deeds
of the past still live in people’s memory”.
Since then, Norwegian and other
Nordic scholars have ventured into more
limited fields of this historical legend
tradition, undertaking far more detailed
studies of their value as sources. In the
pioneering dissertation Norske ættesogor (1922), Professor Knut Liestøl examined the content of a group of family
legends from Inner Agder from 1550 to
the eighteenth century, recorded at the
end of the nineteenth century. By comparing the legends with a variety of official documents (tax accounts, court
records, estate distribution protocols,
and the like) he concluded that the
“skeleton” of the tradition was historical, whereas the unhistorical parts were
additions and fillers that gave “life and
colour” to the narratives. In 1939 Lars
Reinton continued with the same comparative model, scrutinizing a cycle of
legends about the Villand family of Hol
in Hallingdal, and arrived at basically
the same result: despite added exaggerations, mistakes, and examples of stylization, the central content had a foundation in reality.
There was nevertheless a weakness in
this method, that it too easily dismissed
as unhistorical anything that did not
agree with the official documents. Could
there not be a source value even in the
“unhistorical” elements? This called for
Reviews
a new, extended concept of source,
which was provided by Professor Bjarne
Hodne in his dissertation Personalhistoriske sagn: En studie i kildeverdi
(1973). The basic material consisted of
23 legends about murders and murderers
in rural Norway from the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. By
comparing the legends with legal documents, church records, estate distribution protocols, and other official documents, he found that the legends were
able to convey factual data about names,
dates, kinship, ownership, the outcome
of events, and people’s relations to
events. This source value he called information. In addition to verifiable facts
like this, “the tradition could adopt certain stances in the form of assessments
of people, events, or situations, and/or
provide an explanation of them. This
knowledge that the legend gives about
how the social milieu viewed what was
narrated is classified in source terms as
an attitude (pp. 26f.). The conclusion of
the study was that historical legends
should be assigned a greater value as
historical sources. “In relation to official
source material, tradition will in most
cases provide secondary sources clarifying the actual course of events as it is expressed through the great information
value of the official sources. But in the
study of the setting and its perception of
people, circumstances, and events, the
historical legend tradition is a valuable
source” (p. 198). Moreover, there are
several separate analyses of the truth
content of historical legends about the
Kalmar War (1611–13) with the march
of the Scots mercenaries through Norway, the Great Northern War (1700–
21), and the Seven Years War (1807–
14).
When I start a review of this book by
Camilla Asplund Ingemark and Johanna
Wassholm with this outline of older, but
central, examples of research on historical legends, may main reason is that I
would have liked to see references to
them, but I miss a brief history of re-
173
search as an introduction to their study.
For even if the lists of scholarly works
and folkloristic sources give a good survey of the foundation of material on
which the authors build, the study lacks
a grounding in a broader international
scholarly context. This could have been
avoided, in my view, if a few pages at
the start had been devoted to the way
earlier scholars have assessed the source
value of historical legends. A result-oriented presentation like that would have
given the reader a better opportunity to
see what is really new and worthwhile
about this book.
The major authentic event that is the
basis for the historical legends retold
and analysed for their source value here
is the Finnish War of 1808–09, the last
war fought between Sweden and Russia,
when Finland ceased to be a part of the
kingdom of Sweden and became a Russian Grand Duchy. Sweden thus lost one
third of its territory and a quarter of its
population. For most people this is best
known through Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s popular heroic epic Fänrik Ståls
sägner (1848–1860). It is therefore important that the book starts with an informative chapter by the historian Johanna Wassholm, about what really happened in this watershed period, so that
the legends can be studied with the
whole history of the war as a backdrop.
Another part of this background
knowledge is the standard image of the
enemy, how Western Europeans had
conceived the Russians ever since the
sixteenth century, an image of which
there were still distinct traces in the legendary tradition when the Swedish Literature Society in Finland started collecting it in 1887. In 1919 there were
roughly 900 legends about the Finnish
War, the largest group of historical legends in the Folk Culture Archives in
Helsinki.
Like all other recorded folk tradition,
these legends of war have their own collecting history, which raises several issues of source criticism. Some cannot be
174
Reviews
answered because we lack biographical
information about some of the storytellers, the rest of their repertoire, their
outlook on life, their social context and
artistic skills. Many collectors did not
comply with the instructions to record
the stories in the original dialect, and instead submitted fair copies in standard
Swedish, so that it is difficult to know
how much was edited in relation to the
version that was actually noted down.
On the other hand, there is no shortage
of research showing that collectors in
general were trustworthy bearers of tradition were faithful to what they heard
and did their best to transfer the themes,
motifs, and plots from their notebooks to
the finished version. This task was nothing less than the rescue for posterity of
as many memories of the people’s past
as possible.
The legends about the Finnish War
were collected in coastal areas in western and southern Finland – Österbotten,
Åboland, Nyland – and on Åland, and
the list of collectors contains sixteen
people, each of whom is presented in detail with information about where and
how much they recorded and the methods they used. Two collectors occupy a
special position: the lay preacher and
colporteur Jakob Edvard Wefvar (1840–
1911), who worked all his life collecting
Swedish folk traditions in Finland, and
Viktor Eliel Viktorinus Wessman
(1879–1958), the later editor of the volumes of legends in the composite work
Finlands svenska folkdiktning (1924),
who did exceptionally fruitful fieldwork
in the whole of mainland Finland from
1902 to 1919.
With his broad academic competence, Wessman was the right man to
undertake the job of editing the legends
for the published collection, and “opening the hidden treasures” to a larger audience. He made editorial changes to the
texts with a gentle hand, as Camilla Asplund Ingemark demonstrates well with
her examples. He modernized and revised the language, omitted narrators’
comments and unnecessary repetitions,
split up some stories and combined
others, left out legends that were more
mythical than historical (for example,
about the sinking of church bells), and
let some remain unpublished out of tactfulness.
The last and biggest part of the book
(pp. 71–210) is devoted exclusively to
the legends and the author’s analysis of
them. Her way of doing this is simple
but illuminating. The legends are
grouped thematically and presented
with a series of attested examples (213
in all) from Wessman’s edition, and are
commented and interpreted from the
perspective of the folk narrators: the local people and the soldiers. The theme
expresses “what the narrative is really
about”, unlike a motif, which is the concrete presentation of a situation or person (p. 66). She operates with eight
themes: 1. The only way out: escape to
the countryside. 2. The evil Russian:
cruelty and abuse. 3. The triumph of resistance: popular opposition and guerrilla warfare. 4. Hunger: a shared concern.
5. A life in captivity: the situation of
peasants obliged to provide transport. 6.
The theatre of war as a site of memory:
battles and engagements in the local environment. 7. Deceitful lords and heroic
men. 8. The hardships of war: life in the
field.
Let me take some examples about resistance by the people, illustrating the
reaction of “the common man” to the
enemy’s deeds and character. “In these
legends there are two figures that stand
out with particular clarity: the strong
man and the strong woman, and they can
be described as a kind of concentrate of
popular resistance. The strong man protects the weak and defenceless, but also
material values, chiefly in what was perceived as the male sphere, whether he
beats off the Russians in order to keep
his horses (nos. 8, 22) or he is angry that
they did not let the children eat their potatoes in peace (no. 39). The strong
woman generally defends property be-
Reviews
longing to the female sphere, such as
bread (e.g., no. 35) and cows (e.g., no.
31). The frequent occurrence of strong
women in the legends contrasts with
fairytales, where women are mostly portrayed as rather passive and helpless.
Their strength is often purely physical:
the woman “has turned man” (no. 33) or
is a “big, strong woman” (no. 31). Moreover, the woman is fearless (e.g., no. 33)
and strong-willed, like the woman who
gets up in the middle of giving birth to
take back her sour milk from the Russians (no. 32). Sometimes she is instead
rather foolish, like the older woman who
thought she could fend off the entire
Russian army with a pole (no. 25)” (p.
104).
The motifs in the broader themes are
analysed in this way, point by point,
clarifying the functions they may have
had in the narrative context, whether
seeking to establish an attitude, to
heroize, or to explain. The best-preserved folk memory is about the struggle
of ordinary people to cope with their
situation in an unpredictable, threatening, and meaningless war, often with a
choice between two strategies: “escape
and resistance on the one hand, or compliance on the other.” “To sum up, the
legends testify to how country people
perceived the war in Swedish-speaking
parts of Finland around 1900, what they
considered important in ordinary
people’s lives, and what was regarded as
crucial for the outcome of the war” (p.
210).
This is an important and inspiring
book for several reasons. It is an interdisciplinary effort resulting from collaboration between a historian and a folklorist; it is based on a larger number of
historical legends of war than any other
study of its kind that I know; and it is a
powerful confirmation of the source
value of these oral narratives about the
past. Moreover, it is interesting for the
novelty value of all the traditional material that it presents; I would assume that
most of it is unknown to people here in
175
Norway, even in academic settings. In
my opinion, all or part of the book
should be required reading for students
of history, folklore, and cultural history.
Thirty informative illustrations help
bring the text to life, most of them drawings and watercolours in black and white
with motifs from the history of the war.
Ørnulf Hodne
Oslo, Norway
Colour Makes the Person
Maja Jacobson: Färgen gör människan.
Om färg, kläder och identitet från antiken till våra dagar. Carlsson Bokförlag,
Stockholm 2009. 308 pp. Ill.
Colours, with all their shades and nuances, surround us in our life, ceaselessly. They shine and glimmer in all their
glory in light, and become dull in the
dark. They affect us physically and mentally. Some colours have a calming effect, whereas others make our hearts
beat. The symbolic impact of colours
has left many traits in our culture. The
preference for certain colours at certain
times and in certain societies raises the
questions as to why that Maja Jacobson
in Färgen gör människan (Colour
Makes the Person) aims to answer.
Maja Jacobson’s point of departure is
in many ways the issue of the symbolism of colour. A colour cannot, by itself,
be a holder of meaning. Still colours are
important as a base for communication,
in the sense of symbols. This is seen, for
instance, in the symbolic colours for different political parties, and in traditions
whereas some colours are preferred over
others on certain occasions, not to mention the tradition of Christian liturgical
colours. Through their association with
different things, different shades have
become symbols, for example navy blue
and its connections to the sea, the navy
and ocean voyages.
Jacobson aims to describe what
176
Reviews
colours were used during a certain era,
how the use of colour has been described. She surveys the dyes available
and the known techniques for dyeing in
order to explain which colours were preferred at different times. She does this
with the help of art history, literary
sources such as Chaucer and the Arthurian tales, and linguistics and the science
of colour. The book is divided into two
parts. After an introduction where the
reader is familiarized with physical facts
about colours and dyes, the first part
covers the separate colours and a brief
history of their symbolism, at different
times and in different societies. The second part digs deeper in history and gives
an overview of colours in combination
with clothes, from ancient Egypt until
today’s Sweden and western societies.
The first colours that babies perceive
are red, black and white. Jacobson also
points out that the names for black and
white in most languages are the first
ones to denote colours. In cultures that
have only used a few colours, black and
white are always among them. Here the
colours black and white have often come
to signify given moral values (as in
good/bad), truth-values (true/false), and
conceptions of space (home/away) or
time (day/night). If a third colour is
used, it is always red, often standing for
strong emotions, sexual lust, luck,
danger and chaos. After that, the colour
words which do not resemble anything
particular but themselves were formed,
such as yellow, green and blue.
The first part of the book provides an
overview of different values and meanings connected to different colours.
Jacobson proceeds instructively, starting with white and black, and continues
with red, blue, yellow, orange, green,
violet and brown. Some of the symbolism connected to colours is deeply rooted in history. One of the interesting examples that Jacobson investigates is the
negative connotations of yellow. In the
outline Jacobson tells a story that is
taken from real life. Flowers are to be
bought for a funeral, and the choice of
yellow roses is dismissed according to
the assumption of yellow as the colour
of bitterness and falseness. Jacobson
asks why this is. Through her survey we
learn that, when not connected to gold
and thus to the light of God, yellow has
been connected with evil, betrayal,
cowardliness and envy in European history since the Middle Ages. In Christian
art Judas was pictured with a yellow
cloak. The doors of traitors were painted
yellow (unfortunately we are not told
where and when). In the thirteenth century yellow became a colour to express
crimes related to religion, such as being
Jewish. In Europe Jews were forced to
wear a yellow ring, and in Muslim countries, a yellow turban. When Jacobson
discovers that yellow has much more
positive connotations in old Asian cultures, such as in ancient China where
yellow was the privilege of the empress,
Jacobson notices the impact of the material on the hue and saturation of the
colour. With European dyeing techniques used on wool and linen, yellow
was not hardy enough and soon faded. It
was also difficult to get a pure nuance; it
often turned green or grey. On Chinese
silk, however, the colour was strong in
hue, and as the material itself is more reflective of light, the yellow shines in a
quite different way. Jacobson sees the
difficulties in getting pure and durable
nuances as one of the main reasons why
yellow has not had such positive connotations in Europe as the other colours. In
this way Jacobson continues with her
outlines of the different colours, tracking different and parallel connotations
through different sources and explanations.
In the next chapter Jacobson proceeds
with a historical survey of colours and
materials with the focus on different eras
and regions. Starting with ancient
Egypt, Jacobson interprets extant paintings with aid of historical knowledge
and agricultural science. Linen was the
material in favour in ancient Egypt and
Reviews
the preferred colour was white. In order
to explain this Jacobson, as in the case of
the colour yellow, turns to the relationship between materials and dyeing techniques. First of all, the well developed
agricultural culture of ancient Egypt was
a condition for the cultivation of linen.
In regard to the climate, linen is in many
ways preferable to wool. But not only is
linen a material hard to dye, the white
colour, and the pleated construction of
the garments, filled a cooling function in
the warm northern Africa. This helps her
to explain the lack of colours. In contrast, as Jacobson continues, ancient
Greece was quite colourful. In contrast
to the idea of ancient Greece as a culture
of white statues, the Grecian culture was
rich in colours. Sheep farming was
widespread and served as a warming
material during the chilly winters. Wool,
unlike linen, is easy to dye. Many different shades of red were in use. From
spiny dye-murex they could get purple
nuances between red and blue, and from
Rubia tinctorum, they were able to create shades between brownish-red and
orange-red. Blue was produced by indigo.
An important discovery for the understanding of colours was the findings
of Isaac Newton when in 1666 he investigated the spectrum created by a prism
held in the light. He bound the spectrum
together in a circle as we still know it today, and distinguished the colours red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and
violet. At about the same time, findings
in newly “discovered” America gave
rise to new dyeing techniques. In Spain
this led to a quite new way to achieve a
new and better saturation in black, at
that time the leading colour of fashion.
In the middle of the seventeenth century
France took over the role as the dictator
of fashion, in the reign of Louis XIV.
Here, the influence from the Far East,
and the import of silk, gave rise to the
popularity of paler shades of blue, pink,
violet and almond green.
The period of the Enlightenment of-
177
fered new attitudes to the sexes, as well
as the classes. The impact on the colours
of clothes is most obvious when considering the male renunciation of
colours. From now on the male scale became darker and duller. At the same
time as the construction of men’s garments became simplified, women’s garments kept on being quite complicated
for another hundred years. The literature
intended for the guidance of young
women started advising them about
what colours suited what hair and eye
colours. The use of colour in female
dress became regulated in this way.
In Maja Jacobson’s journey through
history, the reader also gets a rich picture of the development of dress. This
means that Färgen gör människan can
be used as an introductory source for
this purpose too. What distinguishes this
book from other surveys of dress history
is of course the insertion of the reasons
for the choice of certain colours at different eras in the history of dress. yet
there are some assumptions that Maja
Jacobson does not seem to verify. She
argues for Chanel’s importance for the
fashion of the 1920s. I know this is a
common assumption, but according to
my own investigation of 1920s’ fashion
magazines Chanel did not really become
popular until the end of the decade. The
unfortunate thing about this identification of a whole decade with a designer
that really did not have that much influence, only that the House of Chanel is
the only one surviving from the era that
can still tell its history. Jacobson also argues for the preference of black, white
and beige during this decade, but she
does not substantiate this convincingly.
I find a few more dubious claims. For
example, in the descriptions of the
colours preferred after the Reformation
and the Counter-Reformation she is unclear about the facts, asserting both the
splendour of colours used and the absence of colours, referring to the preference for black at the court of Philip II of
Spain. I also feel a bit doubtful when
178
Reviews
reading her theoretical handling of symbolism and the zeitgeist. Focusing on
whether the symbolism of colours might
be seen as reflecting the zeitgeist of a
certain time, and using the concepts
regularly throughout the book arouses
expectations of a thorough handling of
the concepts.
This is not to say that Jacobson does
not mention the problem. In the introductory chapter in the parts entitled
“Colour – A Cultural Construction” and
“Traditions of Colours, Charging of
Symbols and Zeitgeist”, Jacobson maps
out different points of view, not really
taking sides. Here she mentions Michel
Pastoureau’s belief in the conception of
colours as being culturally constructed,
in which society as a whole defines its
meanings, how a colour should be perceived and its impacts on different areas.
Jacobson also mentions Wolfgang
Brückner’s statement that, instead of
looking for inherent meaning in colours,
one must take into account the connotations attached to colours over a long period. Jacobson also cites a point of view
enunciated by Goethe, in which he considers how colours affect our senses and
therefore, indirectly, our customs and
traditions. Jacobson seems to agree with
all three of those standpoints. The problem is that she does not problematize nor
take sides in this discussion. For example, she does not comment on the degree of contradiction which is to be
found between Goethe’s more passive
conception of how cultures construct
meaning and Pastoureau’s more active
description. A passive conception of
cultural construction of colours, attributes a higher degree of independent
agency to the colours, and thus a higher
degree of embedded meaning. Of
course, one main exception in this context is how colours impact on our physical and mental reactions, but still the
way we name those reactions and how
we use them to communicate is not inherent in them.
So, when Jacobson insists on return-
ing to statements such as “this or that
colour reflects the society of the time”
she inclines towards a more passive conception of society, and the traditions
formed by culture through everyday life
and its communication through literature, art, philosophy, religion and politics. What she might mean is that, from
our point of view, certain colours have
become symbols of certain societies and
eras, which is not the same as claiming
that a specific combinations of shades or
colours reflect or mirror traits of this period (see for example pp. 131, 145, 146).
Together with some of my questions
about the reliability of some assertions
about colour, this leaves me not quite
sure of what Maja Jacobson is actually
saying. In spite of this, there are many
interesting points about how the use of
dyes and materials in combination has
helped to shape the use of colour in history. Also, the manifold sources on cultural history, art and literature give a rich
picture of clothes and colours.
Lisa Svensson
Lund, Sweden
Children’s Books in Independent Latvia
Makiko Kanematsu: Saga och verklighet. Barnboksproduktion i det postsovjetiska Lettland. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm 2009. 194 pp.
English summary. Diss.
This extremely interesting and readable
doctoral dissertation is about the production of children’s books in Latvia after the implosion of the Soviet Union,
but it is ultimately also about ethnonational identity politics in young states,
and about the relationship between nation, Americanization, and globalization. It is praiseworthy on all three
counts. The main emphasis is on how
the economic, cultural, and political aspects of the post-Soviet transformation
Reviews
in Latvia were handled by the actors in
the production of children’s books in
Latvia, including the assessments, values, intentions, and hopes that they have
for their work.
The book is clearly structured and organized with an assured hand. It contains six chapters plus an introduction
where the author, as is right and proper,
presents her topic with the required demarcations and definitions. We are also
informed about theories and central concepts, the research context, and the
methods and materials. The work is
based on interviews conducted in Riga
in the years between 2003 and 2005, but
she also uses interview material from
various book fairs in Sweden. In theoretical terms, the dissertation primarily
relies on Bourdieu’s studies of the concept of field and on Michael Billig’s
idea of “banal nationalism”. This seems
to be a wise choice that interacts in the
best possible way with the empirical material. Of course there is no great surprise in this choice of theory, but it is interesting that the author also brings in
Katherine Verdéry’s theoretical perspective on national issues in Eastern
Europe since the fall of the socialist regimes, and not least the Latvian sociologist Daina Stukuls Eglitis’s extremely
interesting studies of post-Soviet Latvian society; her analytical and theoretical division into four ideal types of “narratives of normality” is particularly fascinating reading. It is always interesting
to come across unknown new theorists –
especially from Eastern Europe – instead of the old household names from
Western Europe, and Kanematsu’s use
of these types of normality helps to raise
the dissertation well above the familiar
standard. For that too the author deserves great praise.
There is also a great deal of substance
in the other chapters, especially the central chapter 4, which continues the treatment in chapter 3 of the shock encounter
of Latvia with market forces, going on to
examine what the new range of chil-
179
dren’s books consists of. According to
Stukuls Eglitis’s model of “narratives of
normality”, it is clear that the Soviet era
was regarded as an abnormal state, but
what does the new normality consist of?
In economic terms it entails a shortage
of finance for children’s books and
libraries. The Soviet era, in the opinion
of some people, but not all the interviewed Latvians, was an ideological
straitjacket with more or less explicit
censorship, but there were no economic
difficulties for the production of children’s books. There was plenty enough
money, if the content was acceptable. In
cultural terms, the new normality is synonymous with a switch from cultural
and ideological upbringing to a consumer situation. Children’s books become products and children become
consumers, as the author, somewhat disconsolately, cites the Latvian author Juris Zvirgzdins.
But what is the fulcrum of the new
normality? The answer Kanematsu
gives is very interesting, as we see from
chapter 4 and the concluding sixth chapter. It oscillates between traditional Latvian nationalism on the one hand, which
looks back – not entirely without problems – to the years of independence between the two world wars, with a strong
focus on and awareness of aesthetic and
linguistic quality, and on the other hand
a “world ideology”, as it is called. It is
the latter that is a cause of great uncertainty, and it is here that Kanematsu’s
book becomes really challenging. A
long series of the interviewed actors in
the field of children’s literature have
started getting cold feet since the culmination of the uncritical enthusiasm for
the new Western mass-market books in
the early 1990s. These products, issued
by European media corporation on licence from the Walt Disney Company,
meant a deterioration of quality in the
eyes of many actors, with Mickey
Mouse as the prime symbol. What
seemed interesting and Western at first
glance turned out to be “American” and
180
Reviews
thus superficial. This is of course a simplification, since there are many varieties of “American”, which can moreover
be used in many different ways in the receiving countries, but the term of abuse
had come to stay. And the response
came promptly too. The director of the
Latvian company with the licence to sell
Disney books in Latvia launched the
idea that Mickey Mouse was not
“American culture” at all but a universal
and global figure. Keine Hexerei, nur
Behändigkeit.
The new Western normalization, in
other words, proved to be a two-edged
sword. It could be used initially to distance oneself from the Soviet cultural
heritage, but it soon turned out that it
threatened Latvian culture and language and was of poor quality. To save
the image of the new normality, it was
necessary to change the brand, shifting
away from Western and American in
the direction of globalization. It is rare
to come across such a manifest and
strategically considered version of the
turn to globalization as this case. Latvian culture, which the Soviet power
was unable to break, is now threatened,
albeit less dramatically, by commercial
kitsch.
A significant reason can of course be
found, first of all, in the fact that Latvia,
for the second time in history, has
emerged as a young nation trying to find
its legs. Old nation states like Sweden
and Denmark are in quite a different
situation here. Secondly, these countries
have decades of experience of coping
with “Americanization” and the transformation of American cultural products
into acceptable hybrid forms. A third explanation, as we see from chapter 5, can
probably be found in the fact that, after
liberation from the Soviet yoke, there
were great expectations of the future
with an independent Latvian national
culture. Shattered illusions and obstructed prospects always make for a dangerous cocktail. The undesirable commercialization, and the Western element that
many of the actors in the field of children’s books find alien to the Latvian
tradition, can be envisaged as feeding
the nascent nationalism, which is not
necessarily “banal” and tolerant but can
develop into rabid intolerance if it is exploited politically. It is this historical
situation with an “open present” that
Makiko Kanematsu elucidates so splendidly in such a seemingly harmless topic
as children’s books. It is skilfully done.
The book can be most warmly recommended.
Niels Kayser Nielsen
Aarhus, Denmark
New Sounds in a Borderland
Sven-Erik Klinkmann: Från Wantons
till Wild Force. Nya sound i en gränsstad. Gidlunds förlag, Möklinta 2010.
503 pp. Ill.
Sven-Erik Klinkmann’s book is an ethnomusicological cultural analysis. It
studies what happens when global influences reach a border culture, in this case
the city of Vasa in Finland. The book describes musical culture in the area during the period 1960–1990, with a certain
emphasis on the 1960s. It is based essentially on ethnographical studies of six
male musicians from Vasa, whom the
author calls key figures. Five of these
people were interviewed directly, while
the experiences of the sixth are based on
conversations with people who knew
this now deceased musician. In addition,
there are interviews with a number of
people associated with this context.
Most of the informants were born in the
1940s, some in the 1950s. Klinkmann’s
intention is to find out what “the musicians in Vasa think about their music”,
what characterizes their experiences of
playing and producing pop and rock music in circles that find themselves in a
minority position and a bilingual context. The book also has an autobiograph-
Reviews
ical dimension, as the author was born
and grew up in Vasa.
After the preliminaries and the preface,
the introductory chapter considers potential questions, the author’s childhood, the problem of bilingualism, and
ideas about Vasa as a western port and
thus a likely recipient of international influences in music and other fields. The
second chapter continues the theme of
influences, looking at the enthusiasts in
the Vasa area in the 1960s who listened
to pirate radio stations like Radio Nord
and Radio London, despite the occasionally poor reception, and thus kept track
of new music such as rock and beat. We
hear about the mods who came to the
city, and about the emergence of other
subcultures and trends. The gender perspective is also considered, as pop culture in Vasa seems to have been dominated by young men. Girls are thus marginalized, becoming appendages or audiences, although there are exceptions.
The chapter ends with a particularly interesting account of the Swedish girl
band Plommon and their tours in Finland in 1966 and 1967, also including interviews with the members.
The next chapter is about a restless
personality from Vasa, Stig-Olof
“Stoko” Wahlbeck, who died a premature death at the start of the 1970s. This
musician’s way of life is described as
being in a “pop fantasy” that was typical
of the time, and it is compared with
other lives that ended at the transition
from the 1960s to the 1970s as a consequence of drug romanticism and a partly
destructive philosophy of life.
The subsequent two chapters are
about the 1960s rock group The Wantons, about its different members and the
people around them. The group never
released any records, possibly because
they refused to sing in Finnish, yet they
played as the warm-up band for Jimi
Hendrix in Helsinki in 1967. The chapter suffers from some redundancy and
the dialogue seems a little too romanticized, but it is probably an accurate por-
181
trayal of the birth and development of a
pop band, its frictions, and its fate of
ending up as a band of old men who can
reunite and journey back in time to the
nimbus of their youth. The author compares this revival to a semiophor (after
Krzysztof Pomian) for both the musicians and their former audience. No
doubt there are many people, even in
other times and musical trends, who
have played in bands or been in audiences and can recognize this situation.
We next meet artists and groups with
slightly different orientations, although
tending more towards the schlager
genre. The Slippers, a band playing instrumental guitar music and representing the “rautalanka sound” (comparable
to the Spotnicks), are considered in
some detail. Part of the chapter is based
on an interview with the group’s solo
guitarist, Björn “Nalle” Schauman.
Klinkmann makes an astute linkage
here, with reference to the musicologists
Brolinson and Larsen, to the concept of
copycats – that is, the good imitators
who may be sensitive to trends and seasoned musicians who are easy to produce, but without anything unique about
them. There is also a portrait of the remarkable “Elvis of Vasa”, the Finnishlanguage singer Reijo Hirvelä, who is
said to have made a decent living as a
musician in the USA, although he never
achieved any great fame. Hirvelä’s style
was old rock’n’roll, alongside country
and Latin music, and he collaborated
early on with one of Finland’s first steel
guitarists, the Finland-Swede Roy Rabb.
The arrangement of this chapter fails
somewhat, with several repetitions, poor
flow, and lacking cohesion. A more
chronological and stringent division
would have been preferable.
After this the author deals with a less
well-known Swedish-language pop
group, from Västervik north of Vasa,
with the plausible name The Royal
Babes. The group was contemporary
with The Wantons and The Slippers, but
lived in their shadow and were a few
182
Reviews
years younger. The band stuck together
for a couple of years without making
any great imprint in musical history.
Some of the members, however, had
morally concerned parents who had no
real idea of the boys’ precocious interest
in music, and would later carry on with
more serious music. The chapter contains interviews reported in slightly sentimental form. The tone is reserved and
the responses are no doubt a good reflection of specific recollections, but it all
seems somewhat vague.
In the next chapter we move to something different. The text is based on an
interview with the eccentric, officially
Christian musician and artist Ben Antell, who had an international hit with
“There’s a God in my Garage” as late as
1996. Here we sense a completely different kind of creativity from what is described earlier in the book. This is a portrait of a man who is one of a kind, making alternative rock music by following
his own instincts, but despite some success he is described as new-fangled and
strange. Klinkmann compares Antell’s
audiovisual rationality with Paul
Ricœur’s theories of individuality, what
he calls l’ipséité. In this case there may
be a link between the many changes in
the artist’s early life and the sonic
images he creates. On the other hand,
Klinkmann says that creativity can also
be viewed as a form of “active memory
work”. He sums up by saying that Antell’s distinctive profile falls outside the
geographical questions that follow the
theme of the book. He is hard to define
in the indigenous cultural sphere of bilingualism and is regarded as a more extremely globalized artist.
An account of the musical career of
Heikki “Hippi” Hivo fills the next part
of the book. Hivo has a background as
both a radio man and a festival arranger,
but it is difficult for an uninitiated reader
to grasp what music he represents. He
works with pop music, seemingly leaning towards trendy and banal but also
burlesque styles. He has appeared along
with M. A. Numminen and has played
dance-band rock, West Coast rock and
“hurrah rock”, the latter with the famed
1980s band Viktor Hurmio & Fetknopparna. The “Hurrahs” are perceived as a
Finland-Swedish phenomenon with an
element of retro and an odd habitus, but
can also lead one’s thoughts to postpunk, perhaps not always in terms of the
sound, but conforming to the time and
the pattern. Hivo is described by the author as a typical bilingual musical fixer
from Vasa, one who carries on the tradition of being versatile and keeping up to
date with both the regional and the
global.
The next part, about the rock band
Wild Force, builds on interviews with
the band’s guitarist Janne Stolpe. The
band had a hard-rock profile similar to
that of glam bands like Europe and Bon
Jovi, and is said to have had an unusually androgynous image (by Österbotten
standards) in its behaviour and dress.
The band was aiming to become big, and
carried on for about ten years but was
forgotten in the gap between Finnish and
Swedish rock history; they nevertheless
achieved a couple of record releases and
a memorable journey to Los Angeles,
where they also made a video.
In the next chapter we a given a background to the development of popular
music in Finland in the twentieth century. The author refers to Anna-Maria
Nordman’s dissertation Takt och ton i
tiden, in which the influence from Sweden is understood as significant for the
whole of Finland and is especially clear
in Österbotten. Klinkmann looks at the
arrival of jazz and dance-band music,
and dwells a while on the coming of
rock’n’roll. He asks several times why
Elvis never became so terribly popular
in Finland, unlike, say, Bill Haley and
Paul Anka, and states as the reason that
Elvis generally falls in popularity the
further east you come from the USA, but
also that his Afro-American style did not
fit in as well in Finland as the more melodious expressions of the others. The
Reviews
chapter contains fascinating observations, it could have been placed earlier in
the book, to give a historical background.
The three concluding chapters in this
interesting, pleasantly illustrated, perhaps rather too voluminous book contain analyses of the development of popular culture in Vasa as regards place and
language. The author perceives the area
as special, a sphere of its own between
east and west, between Swedish and
Finnish. Based on his research, he finds
that Swedish-speaking Österbotten and
the Vasa region are quick to adopt both
the English language and trends from
the west, importing instruments, sheet
music, and music styles from Sweden to
some extent; popular music is therefore
early to develop a more global and less
national attitude than in the rest of Finland. Klinkmann ends by tying things
together. He puts his findings in a cartographic and partly semiotic perspective,
and states that phenomena are not born
by chance. Based on Guy Debord’s
theories of dérive, that is, drift in social
environments, Klinkmann arrives at the
verdict that individuals in the area he has
studied at least temporarily rejected accustomed relations to let themselves be
carried away by powerful new influences such as music. On the other hand,
I wonder how free these cosmopolitans
of Vasa actually were, in view of the
paradox of simultaneously rejecting and
accepting new impressions.
Patrik Sandgren
Lund, Sweden
The Difficult Realm of Memories in
the Twentieth Century
Ene Kõresaar & Epp Lauk & Kristin
Kuutma (eds.): The Burden of Remembering. Recollections & Representations of the 20th Century. Studia Historica 77. Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki 2009. 252 pp. Ill.
183
Memories of wars, political depression
and the traumatic past are some of the
key topics in memory studies. The twentieth-century history of Europe unfortunately offers plenty of material for researchers interested in memories of war,
and remembering and forgetting traumatic events both on a personal and a societal level. The construction of collective memory, recollections of traumatic
events and oral history as a source of the
past are widely discussed by scholars all
around the world. In The Burden of Remembering: Recollections & Representations of the 20th Century the articles
focus mainly on the recent history of
Eastern and Central Eastern Europe. By
introducing different case studies, the
articles discuss the intersections of individual and collective ways of remembering and the contradictions between
them.
The Burden of Remembering has two
major themes. The first part of the book
is about the ways to remember and narrate the Second World War. The four articles in this section move from Russia
to Finland and from the Holocaust to
recollections of the end of the war.
James Wertsch (St. Louis, USA) examines the conflict between the official
grand narratives of Russia about the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret
protocol in 1939 and the Estonian counter-narrative. Wertsch reads textbooks
from Soviet and post-Soviet Russian
high schools as illustrations of the official history. In her article, Pirjo Korkiakangas (Jyväskylä, Finland) studies
memories of the transition to peace after
the Second World War in Finland. She
suggests that the end of the war was a
turning point both in individual lives and
in national history. “The return to peace
can be seen as a new beginning; as paradoxical as this may seem,” writes Korkiakangas. She adds that memories of
the time mainly concern very practical,
everyday matters, like the rationing of
food supplies, not the national political
history. Gender is an important aspect in
184
Reviews
the article by Susan Hogervorst (Rotterdam, The Netherlands). She studies the
memory culture of survivors of Ravensbrück, which was a camp for female political prisoners 1939–1945. Construction of the collective memory of the survivors of Ravensbrück was conducted
by the International Ravensbrück Committee (IRC). According to Hogervorst,
the IRC has never had male members
and men have never been part of the collective memories of Ravensbrück, although there was also a men’s camp and
male political prisoners.
The articles by Ksenia Polouektova
(Budapest, Hungary) and Nikolai Vukov (Sofia, Bulgaria) take part in a discussion about the contradictions between history and memory. Both articles
draw attention to the fact that museums
are places where history is written and
also rewritten. How should history, especially traumatic history, be represented? A museum exhibition is always a
message, but who decides what kind of
message is sent, and how (or even why)
the museum visitor’s experience or interpretation of the message should be directed? Museums have always worked
and continue to work with the construction of collective memories. The debate
about these ethical and practical topics
goes on, and it is good that difficult
questions are also openly and critically
discussed.
Vukov’s article is part of the book’s
second section, which deals with questions of memory after the collapse of
communism in Europe. The section is
opened by Csilla Kiss (Szombathely,
Hungary), who draws attention to transitional justice and its relation to collective and individual memories of the
communist period. Kiss argues that in
post-communist societies, transitional
justice has served the purposes of
post-communist elites to elevate one cohesive official memory about the time of
communist rule. People’s experiences
and personal memories are, however,
much more colourful.
The time of communist rule is still
present in concrete markers such as
monuments. Public statues are places of
commemoration, and in that way they
are also an important part of the construction of collective memory. Aili
Aarelaid-Tart (Tallinn, Estonia) uses the
statue called the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn as an example of a site of memory
(or as Pierre Nora originally named it, a
lieu de mémoire) with a different meaning for different people. The disorder
and even violent demonstrations that
took place as a result of the removal of
the Bronze Soldier in 2007 show well
how complex questions about cultural
traumas and collective memories are.
Renatas Berniunas (Belfast, Ireland)
gives another approach to the material
that reminds us about communism. The
theoretical and methodological tools
used in the article are based on the cognitive sciences, and Berniunas aims to
bridge the gap between anthropology
and psychology. In another interesting
article, Hélène Levesque (Quebec,
Canada) uses the written memories of a
particular family. Besides studying narrative processes and strategies, Levesque also highlights how fruitful individual memories can be as sources for
research on memory and narratives.
Besides interesting articles, The Burden of Remembering offers the reader a
very good introduction to research on
ways of remembering. The editors Ene
Kõresaar, Kristin Kuutma and Epp Lauk
have written a careful review of the
theoretical and methodological questions in the field. The introduction, The
Twentieth Century as a Realm of Memory, presents the basis for memory studies. The introduction describes strategies and practices for remembering in
general, but it also focuses on the two
themes of the book, the Second World
War and post-communism.
In their introduction the editors call
the twentieth century “a realm of memory”. That is very true, even though this
realm can also be a heavy burden. What
Reviews
people are allowed to remember and
what they are forced to forget and how
this affects present-day society and individuals is one of the themes studied in
the book. Nowadays, remembering the
traumatic past is permitted and maybe
even encouraged. The themes of the
book, the Second World War and memories of communism, have probably had
an effect on the researchers. However,
not many of them reflect on their own attitudes regarding the studied theme or
material, and their personal relation to,
for example, post-Soviet recollections.
The articles by Aili Aarelaid-Tart and
Hélène Levesque are exceptions to this
criticism, and the reflections by these researchers strengthen their interpretation
of what was remembered and forgotten.
The theoretical and empirical parts of
the articles in The Burden of Remembering are balanced and they differ from
each other enough to make it possible to
discuss them together but still read them
apart from each other. However, the
book forms a solid whole. It makes a
clear statement that politics have had an
influence on what people have been allowed to remember in the past, but politics and the past few decades have also
had an influence on collective memories, memory cultures and discussion of
personal and cultural traumas in the present day. This book deepens our knowledge about the ways of remembering
and forgetting, both at a personal level
and at the collective stage.
Kirsi-Maria Hytönen
Sawmill Workers in Their Community
Kaisu Kortelainen: Penttilän sahayhteisö ja työläisyys: Muistitietotutkimus
(The Penttilä Sawmill Community and
Worker Identity: A Study of Memory).
Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Helsinki 2008. 241 pp. Ill.
185
The late nineteenth century saw the rise
of industrial Finland and the late twentieth century saw the beginning of its decline. One factory after the other was
closed down because of low economic
profit or diminishing demand for its
products on the world market. Thus today the whole life span of many factories can be studied. One of the scholars
who have seized the opportunity is Kaisu Kortelainen, affiliated with the department of Folklore Studies at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu.
In her dissertation the author successfully continues the Finnish ethnological
tradition of industrial research begun in
the 1960s. Both individual factories and
occupational groups have interested
scholars. Kortelainen focuses her attention on the Penttilä Sawmill, which
stood near the centre of Joensuu on the
banks of the River Pielisjoki for more
than one hundred years. In general, most
Finnish factories were originally founded along waterways, not only for easy
transport of raw materials and products,
but also for power and the convenient
removal/disposal of waste.
Two private businessmen founded
the Penttilä sawmill in 1871 and a large
industrial company closed the unit down
in 1988. During its years of operation
there were several changes of owners
and managers. In the beginning the mill
employed less than one hundred workers but gradually the number increased.
In the late 1930s there were about 500
employees and in 1950 about 700. In the
1980s numerous workers were fired and
at the time of the closedown there were
less than 400 left. Most workers were
men, but after 1888 women were employed too, although their careers were
usually fragmentary and shorter. On a
local scale the mill was a significant employer.
The sawmill produced boards and
planks, staves and woodchips as well as
electricity. Besides, wooden prefabricated houses were made as war reparation
for the Soviet Union after the Second
186
Reviews
World War. For a while, a window factory, a carpenter’s workshop and an engineering workshop operated as well.
All the factories founded in the late
nineteenth century recruited most of
their workers from the surrounding
countryside and provided them and their
families with housing, basic education
and health care, and so did the Penttilä
Sawmill. It dominated all aspects of life
in the community. Although government later began to take care of education and social welfare, the mill continued to organize trips, sports events
and parties. When it abandoned these
activities the trade unions tried to develop corresponding ones.
Kortelainen is not concerned with the
sawmill as an economic enterprise or
with all the possible aspects of the
workers’ everyday life, such as the
working processes, housing, food, life
style, or world-view. Excluding the office personnel and the managers from
her analysis, she concentrates on the
workers’ community and identity. However, the directors frequently appear in
the narratives when matters of power
and responsibility are concerned. Kortelainen’s foremost interest is in the versatile and multifaceted nature of reminiscence, and her main research questions
are how the workers and their families
recollect their lives and the ways in
which they reconstruct and reproduce
the community and worker identity.
Hence the experiences and opinions of
the interviewees are important.
As her primary material Kortelainen
uses the oral memories – the term is the
author’s – produced in interviews. Most
of them she conducted personally in
1989 and 1994–1995 after the closedown of the mill. The first 18 interviews
were individual sessions, but many of
the later 23 interviews were discussions
with married couples or two relatives or
friends. Several persons were interviewed twice. In all 40 informants, 23
men and 17 women of different ages,
participated. In her research, Kortelai-
nen does not consider them as representatives of their gender but as playing certain roles in family and community.
Most of the subjects (36) were born before the Second World War and were
65–85 years old when first interviewed;
the younger ones were 45–50. Thus the
oldest narrators had experienced more
than half of the operation time of the
mill. Some narrators were born in the
community and others had moved there.
Their experiences, of course, were different.
During the 15 years of ethnographic
fieldwork the author gained a deep understanding of her subjects, whom she
often met in their daily activities. At the
same time she saw the narrators’ living
space, the factory, the residential areas
and the manager’s courtyard changing
constantly. In addition to the interviews
and observations, Kortelainen uses personal writings, photographs, and maps
produced spontaneously by three
workers identified by name – all others
are anonymous. Throughout her research process she is very well aware of
the fact that she is part of her investigation, influencing and contributing to the
creation, content, analysis and interpretation of the data.
History books and local newspapers
give further colour to the general discussion of the identity of the place and its
future. Kortelainen uses discourse
analysis while reading her materials.
She does not call her approach oral history but the study of memory, and in her
theoretical outlines she contributes to
the wider methodological discussion
taking place in cultural studies. Her
terms still remain somewhat vague.
The central themes that come up in
the narratives are place and time as well
as power, responsibility and solidarity.
On one hand, place and time organize
the whole life of people. On the other
hand, power, responsibility and solidarity delineate the community and the
worker identity by regulating the activities of the members and determining
Reviews
what is right and wrong or how people
are supposed to function. In the narratives it becomes very clear that power
always entails responsibility.
Individual life span gives the time
frame for each narrator. Several layers
of time – past, present and future – are
simultaneously present in the reminiscences. There is the linear chronology
but there are also repetitive, rhythmic,
and cyclic times of daily, weekly,
monthly, seasonal and yearly routines
and customs. There are also special occasions which break or change the
rhythms. Changes in the working career
give structure to the life of men, and giving birth to children to the life of
women. In the narrations, time seems to
be on the move but place remains stable
enough to give people a sense of continuity. However, place never stays
completely static. The most important
change for the Penttilä people was the
closedown of the mill. It changed not
only their lives but also their social and
material environment. All the major
changes are heavily loaded with emotions and add meanings to the place.
Men and women had different territories and responsibilities, men mostly in
the mill, women at home. There were
also common meeting places, such as
the sauna, the laundry and the sports
field. Men could move in a wider area
than women, and children easily explored the whole area, even adventurously breaking the rules against trespassing in forbidden areas, for instance,
the manager’s courtyard and garden,
which many narrators did not dare cross
even after the closedown of the mill. The
old power structure of the community
still affected the spatial behaviour of the
narrators.
In the reminiscences, written memoirs,
photographs and maps the living space
becomes a represented space in multilayered time. Naturally, the two places
are not identical. The researcher can
only reach the latter through her ethnographic material. In addition to places,
187
the boundaries and the routes between
them are meaningful.
The sawmill community was later remembered as being filled with solidarity
and togetherness, cooperation between
neighbours and a strong support network. However, it was not socially homogeneous. Certain jobs required more
skills than others, and only a few, for example setters and trimmers, gained a
special competence. They were proud of
this and also respected by others and,
naturally, got better wages. In the official hierarchy the foremen were above
the other workers, and on the top of the
power pyramid stood the manager, who
was previously perceived as a gentle father figure. Especially the foremen were
often targets of irony and intimidation
from ordinary workers.
The worker identity, once adopted,
seems to have remained attached to the
person for a whole lifetime: once a
worker, always a worker. Yet, it is not a
singular phenomenon but many; age,
sex and political opinions give nuances
to the identity, and each narrator attaches different meanings to it. In this scholarly work, it is Kortelainen who eventually creates the worker identity on the
basis of her material.
If Clifford Geertz wrote “thick description” in his books, Kaisu Kortelainen makes her ethnography even thicker.
Leena Rossi
Turku, Finland
A Folkloristic Study of Finnish Folk
Belief Tradition
Kaarina Koski: Kuoleman voimat. Kirkonväki suomalaisessa uskomusperinteessä (Powers of Death. Church-väki in
Finnish Folk Belief Tradition). Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Helsinki
2011. 371 pp. English summary. Diss.
A number of Finnish folklorists have, in
recent years, approached old archive
188
Reviews
materials from new perspectives. This
certainly applies to Kaarina Koski,
whose doctoral dissertation deals with
the kirkonväki (which she translates as
‘church-väki’) sometimes described in
tradition as the spirit of the dead, sometimes as a crowd of small beings, or as
an invisible force. In all these manifestations it may be accompanied by the
stench of death. The Finnish word väki
means both a crowd (of people) and a
force. Church-väki is a general term for
a focal yet little-researched phenomenon in Finland’s Lutheran folk belief
tradition. It is also reported as being a
contagious disease and fear.
The study’s primary objective is to
construct a complex of disjointed images of death and their use – to determine “what kinds of traditions, ideas
and factors have shaped it into the forms
it took in the 19th and 20th centuries”.
The topic is a challenging, ambitious
one, because concepts of väki and force
in the proximity of death are expressed
in a number of genres, even though the
material consists primarily of belief legends. By using new methods, Kaarina
Koski wants to make the written archive
text “speak more volubly”.
The dissertation is in five main chapters. The “Introduction” defines the research questions, presents the material,
the concepts employed in its interpretation and the research methods. “The
Contexts of Folk Belief Tradition” deals
with folk belief, world-view and the culture of death. “The Concept of Churchväki” leads the reader to conceptualization issues and semantic variation in the
material. “Images of Church-väki” analyses narratives and gives a detailed exposition of motifs and images. “The
Dynamics of Folk Belief Tradition” examines variations in form and meaning
and draws conclusions.
The research material consists of over
2,700 archive items, most of them in the
Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society. The core corpus comprises
items representing narrative types con-
nected with church-väki (Jauhiainen
1998: C 1341, C 1721–1871 and D 301–
361). Koski has supplemented these
with material connected with the topics
of the narratives, such as burial and
graveyards, the use of magic, omens of
death, diseases, the effects of death and
belief beings. Some of the material is
taken from the Lexical Archive of Finnish Dialects, dialect publications and
newspapers of the turn of the century.
The belief legends span a period from
the end of the nineteenth century to the
1960s. Unlike most belief tradition researchers, who have concentrated on the
belief and memorate tradition, Kaarina
Koski stresses the folkloristic perspective and also includes European belief
legends about the dead. Creating this research corpus was indeed a formidable
task.
The large corpus, incorporating many
genres, proves useful at many points, but
only with careful, detailed analysis is it
made to speak. As Koski points out, material gathered years ago was not designed to answer the questions she asks
it. And indeed, belief legends recorded
in literary form do not afford an insight
into the authentic telling context. A
thorough researcher may, however, be
able to discover the collective polyvocalism that, according to Koski, embraces all kinds of interpretations of the
same motifs and expressions of both the
acceptance and the disparagement of belief motifs. As background information
she presents concepts of death and the
dead, along with burial practices maintained by the Lutheran Church. The necessary context information is provided
by her description of the graveyards to
which many of the narratives refer.
New perspectives mean that the concepts, theories and methods all have to
be honed if they are to be tools fit for the
researcher’s own use. Kaarina Koski’s
dissertation presents a wealth of concepts ranging from the core terminology
of folkloristics to narratology, linguistics and the philosophy of language. The
Reviews
way in which she handles these concepts
demonstrates her command of both
theory and research history. She contributes to both Finnish and international
debate and proves she is well familiar
with both the research tradition and contemporary trends.
One of the models applied by Kaarina
Koski is the genre analysis stressed in
the study of belief tradition. She also
uses linguistic genre and register analysis, and adopts the concept of genre as
an open system. For genres are, she says,
context-specific and mutable frames for
production and interpretation. Linguistic genres, which are based on structure,
function in her study as narrative registers of folklore genres.
Taleworld is a focal concept in this
study, and Katharine Young’s idea of a
narrator’s world that differs from everyday reality is readily applicable to Koski’s study. For the distance between the
taleworld and reality does, she stresses,
have concrete (local and temporal), narrative and normative aspects. Narratives
indicate “what would be expected outside the socially constructed everyday
order”. Belief legends depict the anomalies and threats that arise when the order
between the living and the dead is upset.
Kaarina Koski’s dissertation falls
within both folkloristic belief research
and the narrative research tradition. In
the case of fabulates in particular, but
also other narratives, it expands to take
in analysis of narrative practices and significations. She asks what, why and how
people talked about church-väki as a
folk belief phenomenon. What is new is
the wide-ranging analysis of the aesthetic devices.
What was people’s attitude to a
church-väki tradition that was considered a threat but also a resource?
Koski notes that the boldest among them
sought to make use of death and
church-väki by magic means. The belief
motifs were multi-purpose, and people
who thought they were correct might
also believe they were true. The ques-
189
tion of credibility is, however, only secondary; more important are the significations and significance of what is narrated. Narratives could be used as means
“of expressing abstract and delicate attitudes, feelings and arguments”.
One major finding is that Kaarina
Koski has discovered a folkloristic field
in the Folklore Archives of the Finnish
Literature Society. She has realized that
the vast archive collections and the frequencies of individual folklore items
may possibly be able to answer questions that could not be solved by an interview study. With the help of a sizeable research literature she is able to see
that archive collections are not just texts
but living narrative tradition. By applying linguistic genre analysis she was
able to establish when church-väki lore
was performed “as narratives proper”,
and when as more disjointed telling woven into the discourse. The archive material does not just speak more volubly,
as Koski hoped; it also has more voices
than before.
Church-väki is ultimately a complex
of ideas defined by Kaarina Koski as a
category of three prototypical cores. As
her variable she uses the relationship of
the väki image to force on the one hand
and the dead on the other. The first core
is a crowd of the dead and is found most
commonly in belief legends such as the
international legend type Church Service for the Dead (Jauhiainen: C 1341, C
1821). The other core is an indistinct
swarm of beings which appears when
someone dies, insults the dead or violates the boundary between the living
and the dead. This type is found in local
legends and memorates. The third core
appears in reports of folk medicine and
magical rites, and it is an invisible, contagious power. The difference between
these prototypes is not always as clear as
this – their being part of living tradition
– but they do clarify the scale of the descriptions of church-väki. Church-väki
will remain a broad and, as Kaarina
Koski says, a “flexible” concept, but her
190
Reviews
study looks to see why this is so. The
fact that the concept carries many meanings offers narrators and listeners alternative interpretations and countless contexts. Meanwhile, the wide variety of
motifs and images speaks of a thriving
tradition.
Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj
Kerava, Finland
Pictures of the Northern Universe
Kerstin Eidlitz Kuoljok: Bilden av universum bland folken i norr. Carlsson
Bokförlag, Stockholm 2009. 272 pp. Ill.
Kerstin Eidlitz Kuoljok has chosen a
fine cover picture for her latest book
Bilden av universum bland folken i norr
(“Pictures of the universe among people
in the North”). It is a woven tapestry by
Eva Ek-Schaeffer presenting a mythological view of the universe. There is a
huge bear floating in space trying to
catch a silvery fish – or perhaps it is
some kind of an ancient early sea they
are swimming in. There is a Sami
woman sitting on the back of the bear,
weaving a patterned woollen belt, a
typical Sami handicraft. The orangecoloured ball of yarn in the upper corner
symbolizes the full moon or the sun. The
long belt floats and winds in the air
wrapping up treetops, thus binding
heaven and earth.
Like the weaver of the cover picture,
Eidlitz Kuoljok has woven together the
contents of this book, binding ideas of
the universe from a variety of different
sources. The book is a continuation of
her earlier work, Moder jord och andra
mödrar (“Mother Earth and other
mothers”, 1999) which focused on ideas
of reality among the people of the north.
This time around she scrutinizes the
conceptions of the universe among the
Sami and some Siberian people.
There is a strong autobiographical aspect present in this book. Half a century
ago Kerstin Eidlitz Kuoljok started her
studies in ethnology in Uppsala. In this
work she explains to the readers that she
has been frustrated over the Sami research done by some Swedish researchers since her student days, but it isn’t until now that she has openly expressed her
criticism. However, the author also
warns the reader not to misinterpret her
message; she doesn’t want to crush all
Swedish research done on Sami issues.
She admits there are also good examples
of research, but she has decided not to
comment on those ones or to include
them here (p. 16, 23).
Instead, she wants to point out some
of the weaknesses in the research of certain established names, in particular Åke
Hultkrantz, Phebe Fjellström and Ernst
Manker. The research she is criticizing
was primarily undertaken some decades
ago. Her point of view is that they did
not really know the Sami way of life but
rather presented it from an outsider’s
point of view, making it look more different than it really is. She gives examples of simplifying, homogenizing
and essentializing Saminess, presenting
the Sami as if they were a very different
kind of people – an Exotic Other – compared to the Swedish majority.
Eidlitz Kuoljok also criticizes western anthropological and ethnological research, saying she is not interested in the
theoretical research of western academics and doesn’t bother discussing
them (p. 15). She is more inspired by
Russian/Soviet ethnologists and wants
to use the empirical material they have
collected. Her knowledge of Russian is
of great benefit, giving her access to the
Russian-speaking academic world. Presenting their research to the Swedishspeaking audience can be seen as one of
the strengths of this book.
One of the starting points for writing
this book was the author’s desire to
study the Sami drums and the variety of
different pictures and images painted on
them. As a matter of fact, these drums
have been a popular target for many
Reviews
researchers who have interpreted their
iconography in many different and contradictory ways. Eidlitz Kuoljok doesn’t
accept the earlier interpretations, saying
that they are simplifications. Therefore
she wants to have a new look at the
drums’ iconography, comparing it with
drums of some Siberian people. In particular she is interested in the groups that
are still, at least partly, living on hunting, fishing and reindeer-keeping.
The author is familiar with the research Russian ethnographers have done
among the Northern Siberian people and
refers to them in her own book. In fact,
her book is so full of detailed examples
that it is easy for the reader to become
confused by the abundance of the empirical data. There are examples of the visible and invisible aspects of life, as well
as questions of death, just to mention a
few. However, the main point of presenting all this material is to show the
similarity of the images and symbols
within the world view of different
peoples.
There are also pictures drawn by different Siberian groups that were collected by early Russian ethnographers between the end of the 1800s and the
1920s. Some of this material consists of
pictures of the universe from certain Siberian groups, namely the Chukchi,
Orochis and Teleuts. These pictures
have been interpreted by the persons
who drew them or by local shamans.
They describe their world as a multidimensional entity with the spiritual and
practical side of life intertwined with
each other. It becomes clear that the
world views are very individualistic and
complicated, and that there is a lot of diversity within them. There are plenty of
interesting drawings in this book.
In summary, Eidlitz Kuoljok compares these Siberian images with the
Sami ones; it is evident that many of the
images and symbols are commonly used
by all these people. She emphasizes that
it is important to pay attention to all
these general human features that are
191
common to different people instead of
focusing on aspects that might be different. By focusing on differences, and deliberately searching for them, we take
the risk of presenting the Sami people,
or any other people, as more unknown
and different than they really are. This is
the danger and problem of presenting
people as “others” instead of presenting
them as “some of us”. Kerstin Eidlitz
Kuoljok says we should not have different concepts for “us” and “the others”
because phenomena that exist with “the
others” also exist with “us”. This is, in
fact, the most important message of her
book.
Getting back to her comments about
not wanting to join the theoretical discussions of what she calls western studies, there seems to be a certain stubbornness in her reactions when she opposes them. However, had she been
more familiar with the theoretical
changes in ethnological and anthropological studies over the past two decades, she would have noticed that there
is a lot of support for her own theorizations. Present-day ethnology and anthropology would support her critique of
homogenizing, simplifying and essentializing Saminess, just as they would
support her understanding of cultural diversity within different groups.
Marjut Anttonen
Turku, Finland
A Study of Medieval Superstition
Emilie Lasson : Superstitions médiévales. Une analyse d’après l’exegèse du
premier commandement d’Ulrich de
Pottenstein. Honoré Champion 2010,
Paris. 1 vol.in-8° 560 p. (Nouvelle bibliothèque du Moyen Âge 102.)
Emilie Lasson propose d’étudier en profondeur l’oeuvre d’Ulrich de Pottenstein
(1360–1416?). Cette thèse doctorale n’a
rien de laborieux et d’aride. Au contraire, son exploration d’un corpus im-
192
Reviews
mense est très impressionante, pleine
d’observations remarquables et pertinentes. L’a place von Pottenstein dans
son contexte religieux et intellectuel,
souligne le fait qu’il fut influencé par
“l’école de Vienne”, un cercle informel
d’intellectuels et de clercs bien connus
par leurs contemporains. von Pottenstein voulait éliminer les superstitions
du peuple, caractérisées de déviations
des doctrines de l’Eglise. Les sources
utilisées pour réaliser ce projet ambitieux furent surtout la Bible, le Decret
de Gratien, et la Somme théologique de
Saint Thomas d’Aquin.
L’a fait une analyse méticuleuse de
ces sources pour mieux évaluer leur signification pour le travail de von Pottenstein. Une vaste partie de la thèse est
consacrée à une description comparative
de diverses superstitions dans l’exegèse
du premier commandement d’Ulrich
von Pottenstein. Il me semble que le
chapitre sur la divination est le plus
réussi; bien des procédures à cet égard
ont certainement été influencées par des
sources littéraires.
L’a examine de près les normes, les
valeurs, les attitudes du peuple relatives
aux croyances et aux formes prises par
la magie. Elle a bien dressé des listes et
des tableaux pour mieux élucider les aspects significatifs de la documentation.
Le substantif “superstition” est déjà à
voir dans le titre de cette thèse, mais ce
n'est qu’à la page 207 que l’a en explique l’étymologie. Aux pages 251 sqq.
l’a mentionne que les augures romains
observaient le vol, la nourriture et le
chant des oiseaux et qu'ils regardaient
aussi leurs entrailles avec attention. L’a
aurait dû remarquer que cette catégorie
de divination fut en effet un héritage des
anciens Étrusques.
La thèse de Emilie Lasson laisse
émerger l’impression qu’il y avait une
dichotomie entre les croyances du
peuple et celles du clergé. L’a a sûrement raison sur ce point. L’a souligne
que l’on ne doit pas considérer von Pottenstein seulement comme un compila-
teur, mais comme un auteur réfléchi.
L’ouvrage possède un grand dictionnaire de superstitions avec des renseignements précis sur leur provenance,
une bibliographie, un index des mots
clés, un autre des personnes, une table
des schémas, une autre des tableaux et
une table des matières. Pour conclure :
La thèse d'Emilie Lasson est un témoignage éloquent de l’excellent niveau
de l’étude du folklore en France actuellement. C’est un véritable trésor!
Ronald Grambo
Kongsvinger, Norway
Öresund Regionauts
Orvar Löfgren & Fredrik Nilsson (eds.):
Regionauterna – Öresundsregionen
från vision till vardag. Centrum for
Danmarksstudier 24. Makadam förlag,
Stockholm & Göteborg 2010. 218 pp.
Ill.
The title means “The Regionauts: From
Vision to Everyday Reality”, and this
edited volume proceeds from the question of what has happened since the
Öresund Bridge was opened in summer
2000. The book consists of texts in
which Danish and Swedish scholars,
mostly ethnologists but also some economists, an economic psychologist, and a
marketing director, look back in essay
form on the first ten years of the
Öresund Bridge. Fredrik Nilsson describes the book as a collection of quickly drafted ideas aimed at a broad audience, perhaps chiefly at people working
with regional matters. Despite that description, the book as a whole is well
written and generates new knowledge.
Especially interesting are the more
strictly ethnological analyses of everyday practices at the micro-level that
emerge from the essays by Tom O’Dell,
Caroline Beck, Fredrik Nilsson, Orvar
Löfgren, and Hanne Sanders. The interesting thing about the book is that it can
Reviews
be read as empirical evidence, in the
sense that the volume, in its ambition to
describe what is and has been associated
with the construction of the Öresund
Bridge helps to shape the character of
Öresund people and the region formed
by the bridge. The authors put ontological flesh on Tom O’Dell’s term “regionaut” in their descriptions of the
people who use homes, trains, cars,
bridges, jobs, and shops in the vicinity
of the Öresund Bridge. This review focuses on how the authors in Regionauterna shape the Öresund region and
its people through their texts. To use the
words of the dynamic nominalist Ian
Hacking, it describes how “the making
up” of the Öresund region and the
Öresund inhabitant happens in the academic context constituted by Lund University’s Centre for the Study of Denmark.
Tom O’Dell, in his chapter “The arrival of the regionauts”, reflects in more
sociological terms on everyday life
around Öresund with the aid of Bourdieu and concepts such as mobility and
integration. O’Dell considers the question of what it means to live in a region
and come to feel at home in it. The text
focuses on everyday practices and routines. It is about people who take the
train from Malmö to Copenhagen and
vice versa; he calls them regionauts. The
chapter examines these regionauts’ encounter with the other side of the sound
and what the encounter does to them,
how cultural aspects linked to commuting affect the regionauts emotionally.
The chapter also has an interesting problematization of the concept of home,
which is put in a new context. For the regionauts the home is not a permanently
screened-off structure but is something
more “rhizomatic that expands, affects
us, and helps us to organize our everyday life. The commuter’s route over the
bridge, his or her presence in the intervening space that the bridge constitutes,
in the no man’s land that the journey
from one place to another can consist of,
193
leads to a kind of integration through
which Swedish and Danish meet and
create something new.
In the chapter “Just around the corner
– an everyday trip over Öresund” Caroline Beck considers the phenomenon of
“intervening space” constituted by
places like railway stations and rail journeys and especially by airports and
flights. These spatial commons lack national identity by virtue of their architecture and the range of goods on sale, but
also because the majority of the travellers have a very heterogeneous ethnic
composition. These intervening spaces
are peopled both by the desirable regionauts, the people commuting to work or
university between Denmark and Sweden, and by a large number of undesirable regionauts in the form of mentally
ill people, drug addicts, alcoholics, and
homeless people who make the station
or the platform into their home.
In “Öresund Plaza – on the art of
passing” Fredrik Nilsson performs interesting analyses of what he calls border
practices, such as paying a fee at the toll
station to drive over the Öresund Bridge,
and how these border practices create
meaning when regarded from an ideological, moral, and existential perspective. Nilsson emphasizes how border
zones are emotionally charged, as the
new interfaces established between
Sweden and Denmark by means of the
bridge can be said to contain affective
elements, such as longing, fear, and fascination.
In the stimulating chapter “How does
the region exist?” Orvar Löfgren describes how a global grammar has been
created for transnational regions like
Öresund. An important part of the grammar is spatial demarcation with the aid
of the concept of region, as a community
is shaped by ringing in an area cartographically and then giving it a name,
such as the Västra Götaland Region or
the Öresund Region. In this grammar,
according to Löfgren, the space making
up the region is given a culturally ho-
194
Reviews
mogenizing force. The definition of the
area as a whole has the effect that the
people who live there can define themselves as a “we” with a more or less delimited repertoire of lifestyles. The
chapter is about how the Öresund region
comes into existence through the individuals who live their lives in it. They
develop Öresund competences that
teach them how to cope with, and perhaps even to avoid, the diversity offered
by the region. Special features of the
Öresund citizen, according to Löfgren,
include a lack of loyalty linked to
whichever country one lives in. The
Öresund citizen has a geographical mobility that is not so affected by national
sentimentality, which in turn has to do
with the proximity between Sweden and
Denmark. The chameleon-like identity
developed by the region means that
Öresund acquires its form and content
depending on who is looking at the area.
We have here an example of the relative
ontology of perspective-bound truth.
In Hanne Sanders’ well-written
“They’re shooting in Copenhagen”, the
title alludes to “gang wars” in the Væsterbro district, which is generalized from
a Swedish perspective to apply to the
whole of Copenhagen. She examines the
communication of culture and ideas between Skåne (or Lund) on the one hand
and Copenhagen on the other. An interesting conclusion is that the news published in Skåne about Denmark and Copenhagen lacks national references; it is
not specified as having happened in
Denmark. This is used as an example of
cultural integration in the Öresund region. Sanders nevertheless observes that
there is a relative imbalance between the
large proportion of Danes who settle and
shop in Skåne and the proportion of
Danish culture that comes in their wake.
In this volume, four themes contribute to shaping the Öresund region in an
academic context: (1) The market and
welfare; (2) Everyday practices; (3) Individual identity; and (4) Spatiality and
temporality. First of all, the region
comes into existence in the volume with
a style of thought typical of traditional
political science and business administration, with the focus on the market, enterprise, and the maintenance and development of welfare. Secondly, there is a
more ethnological and socio-cultural
style of thought with the focus on how
seemingly trivial everyday practices can
have ideological and existential consequences. Thirdly, there is the development of identity and the relationship between Swedish and Danish stereotypes.
Fourthly, we have spatiality, with maps
and the definition of areas as regions
having consequences for collective
identity and the establishment of a “we”
that embraces the inhabitants of the
Öresund region. Closely connected to
spatiality is temporality, and the fact that
the Öresund Bridge makes the distance
between Sweden and Denmark, between
Malmö and Copenhagen, shorter when it
comes to the time it takes to travel between the two countries and the two
cities.
To sum up, this is a readable book
both for genetically sceptical academics
and for politicians and public officials in
search of knowledge. The book would
have benefited from concentrating on a
more uniform ethnological analysis of
everyday practices, individual and collective identity, and spatiality and temporality. I also lack a more critical analytical approach in the book, which instead tends to have an open, reflective
stance. The critical perspective could
concern the modern industrial culture
that Europe still reproduces, where the
dream of the good life and the right life
still concerns the consumption of commodities, and how enterprise, innovation, and capital generation can be developed in the best way, and where the
Öresund region is viewed as an important piece in a modern Scandinavian
project with a twentieth-century character. But it is simultaneously a modern
project that has been overtaken by the
post-industrial culture that typifies the
Reviews
multinational companies working in the
twenty-first century, which are especially establishing themselves on the Danish
side of the bridge. What will happen to
the Öresund region when it houses these
megalomaniac corporations that view
the nation state, boundaries, and ideologies as nothing but obstacles in the endless hunt for higher dividends for the
shareholders? And how will the Öresund region and its regionauts be affected by the fact that these global corporations elevate themselves above the nation states to work in their own higher
sphere?
Rikard Eriksson
Oslo, Norway
Clothing as a Cultural Arena
Bo Lönnqvist: Maktspel i kläder. Om det
osynligas kulturella anatomi. [Finnish
transl. Kaisa Haatainen. Vaatteiden
valtapeli. Näkymättömän kulttuurianatomia.] Schildts, Helsinki 2008. 252 pp.
Ill.
The title treats clothing as a game of
power or as a competition for power.
The book discusses clothing as a cultural
arena, where dressing and undressing
reveal unseen facts about a culture.
Fashion is one part in that game of
power. It is evident that clothing has
been and is connected to social and public power, but in this book clothing is
also much more than that.
The traditional way of dealing with
clothing and the body and also fashion
would have been a chronological format, but this book does not discuss
clothing and dressing in a traditional
way. The author is an ethnologist and,
therefore, the perspective of the book is
often historical, but the author uses all
kinds of other aspects as well. The book
is full of examples. By using so many
examples, the book challenges readers
to find examples from their own lives.
195
Clothing is an area in which everyone
can be an expert.
The author seems to be a real specialist in the field of clothing and, therefore,
reading the book is a great pleasure. But
it is also quite a demanding task. The author deals with so many dimensions at
the same time that readers must decide
for themselves where to focus their attention.
The author begins with an example
where this power is evident: the equipment of a soldier. He proceeds from
there to examples from coronations.
Coronation clothes represent the combination of power, art and adoration. The
author explains how the paintings of
some earlier kings of Sweden — Erik
XIV and Gustaf Vasa — came into being and how some of those paintings relate the fashion of that time. He analyses
the paintings and shows how the clothing strengthened the political power of
the king.
Clothing makes a social difference.
The story of the court in Espoo in the
year 1726 is a good example of this. A
girl, a peasant named Johanna Johansdottir, was accused of using a hat made
of the fabric that was not allowed for
someone of her social class. The hat was
made of green taffeta and decorated with
a piece of lace. The edict on luxury
items denied persons of her class from
using this kind of material. The girl defended herself by saying that she had received the hat as a gift. She also said that
she did not know about the prohibition
at all and that she did not know what
kind of fabric the hat was made of. This
kind of edict was, on the one hand, justified on economic grounds but, on the
other hand, the real reasons were just as
often social; it was essential that everyone was able to segregate people in the
upper class from people in the lower
class in social rank. The social distinction in clothing was maintained through
this kind of edict.
Lönnqvist quotes authors and philosophers who have been experts in the
196
Reviews
area of clothing. For example, he discusses the main idea of Georg Simmel,
who in 1905 wrote The Philosophy of
Fashion, a groundbreaking work on the
subject. According to Simmel, there are
two important tendencies existing at the
same time when a new fashion arises:
the tendency towards uniformity and the
tendency towards differentiation. Lönnqvist writes: “Although after Simmel
many definitions have been made about
fashion as a form of power or as a phenomenon, no one has been able to say
anything more remarkable than Georg
Simmel.”
The author also uses many examples
of clothing today. What does the use of
overalls among students mean? Students
are wearing the most common and
simplest worker’s garments, originally
designed to protect labourers from the
dirt. However, now it has become an essential part of festive clothing among
students. A backpack or a plastic bag
full of beer completes the outfit! In this
case the overall is an example of ritual
dress; it is a sign of being part of the
group. This kind of festival is also a reverse of everyday life at the university:
drinking alcohol replaces knowledge,
drunkenness replaces wisdom.
The author also thoroughly discusses
the use of male underpants – in the past
and in the present. An interesting detail
is the underpants that skateboarders
wear. The brand label on the waistband
of the underpants is important. When
skating in large jeans, the waistband of
the pants and also the brand label is visible. But the brand of the male underpants is also important, although it may
not be visible. Choosing an appropriate
pair of underpants is also part of creating
an identity of one’s own. The paradox is
that millions of men are choosing the
same model and the same label – and in
truth it has nothing to do with personal
identity!
The book is also a history of clothing
research. It tells how the whole field of
clothing research has changed over the
centuries. The beginning of modern
clothing research may have started with
the age of discovery. Finding out about
clothes that were completely different
from those worn by European people
was significant. The early research focused on three dimension of clothing:
protection, shame and decoration. The
perspective in research has become
more extensive and more comprehensive.
The picture on the cover of the book
is a painting by Ilya Mashkov: “The
self-portrait and the portrait of Pyotr
Konchalovsky 1910”. That picture is
well selected – it shows men in underpants with well trained muscles sitting
next to the piano and one of them with a
violin in his hands. The picture depicts
quite well the idea of the book. The picture is ironic − men in underwear have
no intellectual power. However, at the
same time that the picture on the cover
tells the idea of the book very well, this
reader does not find it attractive! When
looking at that picture I realized: I’m
used to beautiful and attractive pictures
in this kind of book! This picture is
something different.
The book contains numerous coloured pictures. It is essential that this
kind of a book with a visual topic is illustrated. In this case, the pictures are
also well selected, of high quality and
diverse. They are from different kinds of
sources. There are paintings, advertisements, drawings, and pictures taken
from exhibitions as well as photos from
archives.
Very often books concerning clothing and fashion are full of pictures of attractive women. Sometimes the whole
area of fashion and also fashion research
seems to be more feminine than masculine. In this case, the situation is quite
the contrary: there are more pictures of
men. Actually, there are not many pictures of women at all. Also, many examples are from masculine fields. The
author has chosen the topics and pictures
according to his own interest, but I will
Reviews
not dispute his selection. Still, perhaps
there are too many pictures of male underpants – fewer would have been
enough for me!
At the end of the book there is a list of
books used as sources in each chapter.
That is useful and also reveals the huge
number of publications by the author
concerning clothing. The book is a diverse and multifaceted text. It is also
multidisciplinary. It uses perspectives
from history, anthropology, philosophy
and sociology. Clothes as works of art in
art museums are discussed. It is the task
of the reader to connect different kinds
of details and stories and create his or
her own perspective. I started to think
about how fashion blogs convey attitudes to clothing. When creating a blog
and showing clothing to an audience
through pictures and stories, one is creating a piece of art. On the Internet that
artwork is visible to a large audience. Is
it also a way to have more power?
The power of clothing is disguised; a
person’s way of dressing can reveal
much about him or her, but it can also
hide and conceal much as well. The author finishes the text by quoting from the
Bible: “Beware of false prophets who
come disguised as harmless sheep but
are really vicious wolves.” The reader
may interpret the verse from his or her
own perspective.
Päivi Aikasalo
Helsinki, Finland
Viewpoints on the Sixties
Katja-Maria Miettunen: Menneisyys ja
historiakuva. Suomalainen kuusikymmentäluku muistelijoiden rakentamana
ajanjaksona. Bibliotheca Historica 126.
Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Helsinki 2009. 306 pp. English summary.
Diss.
Claire Aho & Kjell Westö: Helsinki
1968. WSOY, Helsinki 2010. Translations in Swedish and English. 106 pp. Ill.
197
The subject of Katja-Maria Miettunen’s
doctoral thesis is the image of the Finnish Sixties. It is a dissertation in history,
and the source material consists of published memoirs, autobiographies, autobiographical novels and interviews published in the media. In all, the material
consists of the published reminiscences
of 139 individuals. The diligence of the
work is exemplified in the index of
names, which will help the reader to find
specific figures of interest.
Miettunen conceives an image as a
general conception of what some past
matter was like and what significance it
may have for the present. The starting
point of the study is that such images are
important because they mould conceptions of the past and its significance.
One’s conception of the past has an impact on how one views the present and
the future. The aim of the study is to find
how the image of the past is formed and
what its relation is to real past events.
Images of the past are not formed
contingently but through the activity of
actors with motives of their own. Miettunen’s standpoint is that in seeing the
past, an individual is not projecting the
present on the real past but on the image
of the past that she or he has conceived.
The significance of past events is in the
meanings attached to them at different
times. “The Sixties” is not a reference to
the decade 1960−1969 but to a kind of
mental landscape which is not necessarily bound to the calendar. In the image
of the past the reality may be arranged in
ways other than chronologically.
Miettunen has grouped the reminiscences into three parts. The radicals, the
popsters and the writers all have their
own ways of making the Sixties theirs
from their own perspectives. For the
radicals, radicalism and the Sixties are
so closely connected as to be virtually
synonymous. The ideas that the radicals
associate with the Sixties include pacifism, tolerance of difference, solidarity
with the Third World and the new leftism. The popsters claim that pop culture
198
Reviews
had an impact on many spheres of life
and made the Sixties important. Both the
radicals and popsters claim that Finland
had been an isolated country and present
the phenomenon that they themselves
represent as an important factor in ending this isolation. The writers differ
from the radicals and popsters in that
each writer recalls the Sixties mostly
from his or her own point of view. For
the writers, their common profession is
the overarching aspect.
All three groups associate cultural
change with the Sixties. The radicals
concentrate mainly on theatre, and the
writers recall debates sparked by certain
books. The popsters create their own
picture of the cultural change with music
at the core and phenomena such as fashion, stardom, fan culture, and alcohol
and drugs. Out of line with the radicals
and writers, popsters mention things
such as the contrast between the urban
and rural and media culture. Miettunen
points out that the narratives of the radicals, popsters and writers leave most of
the young people of the 1960s out of
their reminiscence. “The mass” of
young people is left grey on the margins
of their image of the Sixties.
One component of an image of the
past consists of events. The popsters and
the writers describe the events of the
Sixties as incidents that happened to
take place at that time. The radicals’ accounts differ from those of the other
groups in that, for them, certain events
have become moments. A background
and meaning is provided for these moments, and they are characterized as important turning points both for radicalism and for the Sixties in general. The
moments are events which the narrators
claim to have felt particularly strongly
about. The great moments in the image
of the past are those events interpreted to
be so significant that they ought to be
unforgettable.
An important device in building an
image of the past is legitimizing one’s
role as a constructor of that image
through personal experiences. The narrators claim that only those who have
experienced the Sixties should tell about
it. Still, having lived in the 60s is not the
same as having experienced the Sixties.
According to the narrators, the decade
cannot be understood unless one has experienced it oneself, and in the right
way. The narrators link the concept of
experience with the events in a straightforward manner: they claim to recount
the real past when they describe their
own experiences. For the narrators, their
experience is something that has actually happened, and they seem to believe
that the memory of it has survived unchanged in their minds.
Miettunen’s research shows that narratives about the Sixties are connected to
life in the present. They shed light on the
particular present by showing what has
been considered to be worth remembering. The reminiscences participate in the
building of the image of the past as a part
of a larger whole. The reminiscing cannot be understood unless it is viewed as
a process in which each single text has
its own particular role to play.
The image of the past is a whole, and
Miettunen’s method has been to study it
by breaking it up. According to her, the
image must be broken into its components in order to grasp it. The narrative
of the Sixties becomes concrete in the
answers to questions such as: When did
the Sixties begin? How did it manifest?
What were its significant moments?
Where did it end, and what did it signify? Words such as novelty and change
are keywords in the image of the Sixties.
According to the radicals, the Sixties reshaped values and modernized Finnish
society. The popsters put the emphasis
on what the Sixties meant to them personally. The writers, like the radicals,
talk mainly about the changes in values
and attitudes, but whereas the radicals
stress the permanent nature of these
changes, the writers often present them
as transient.
In exploring the margins of the image
Reviews
of the past, Miettunen points out how the
image of the Other is constructed. In the
reminiscences, the underground movement, the hippie movement and Maoism
are relegated to the margins of the image, but nevertheless belong essentially
to it. Also, phenomena such as the structural change in Finnish society, the sexual revolution, the change in the position
of women and the liberalization of the
alcohol policy are left aside. An important way to give meaning to the Sixties
is to compare them with later periods
and conclude that they were better by all
accounts. The narrators compare the
Sixties especially to the Seventies,
which are remembered as being dismal
in all respects. The radicals have perceived certain features of the Sixties in
later phenomena, for instance, in various
grassroots movements. According to
Miettunen, the wish to bring the Sixties
back demonstrates how the object of
reminiscing is above all a mental epoch.
The real decade cannot return, but the
Sixties of the image of the past can.
The dissertation skilfully brings together the extensive and conflicting
views of the 1960s, but would have
benefited from a more profound theoretical deliberation. The concepts of nostalgia and identities are very briefly
covered. For example, the ideas of Maurice Halbwachs and Jacques Le Goff are
mentioned only at the very end of the
dissertation, but are not woven into the
analysis from the beginning. The English title “The Past and the Image of the
Past” is evidence of the author's not
completely developed theoretical thinking. The title implies that there is “a real
past” even though in the text Miettunen
writes that the past is but different views
and representations of the past.
An interesting comparison to Miettunen’s research is a photography book
by Claire Aho. She was assigned in 1968
to take photos of everyday life in Helsinki for the exhibition “Four Scandinavian
Capitals” held in Kiel. Aho portrayed
urbanites on the streets, squares, parks
199
and cafés. The novelist Kjell Westö’s
essay in the volume revises the global
and local events of 1968 and contemplates the ways in which we reminisce
about past times.
Aho’s photos are glimpses of the
everyday life of so-called ordinary
people, whose life or reminiscences are
not covered in Miettunen’s study. They
are magic: a photographer’s magic in
“freezing” a moment and the magic of
letting oneself imagine the developments and atmospheres around the photos. Aho has photographed street views
and people, in both groups and portraits.
Footprints on the slushy streets, fishmongers on Market Square, First of May
celebrations, people enjoying the sunny
spring days at the waterfront in South
Harbour or on the steps of the Helsinki
Cathedral – the images inspire the reader
to think of cyclicity and change. In the
introduction Aho writes about the photographer’s “selective eye”, which immediately brings to mind the “ethnologist’s eye”, the intangible way of studying reality from a cultural perspective.
Cropping or bounding, focusing and
timing are important for photographers,
researchers and everyone reminiscing
about the past.
Tytti Steel
Helsinki, Finland
Formation of an Irish Folklorist
Séamas Ó Catháin: Formation of a
Folklorist. Sources Relating to the Visit
of James Hamilton Delargy (Séamus Ó
Duilearga) to Scandinavia, Finland, Estonia and Germany 1 April – 29 September 1928. (Scríbhinní Béaloidis. Folklore Studies 18). Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann/The Folklore of Ireland
Council, Dublin 2008. 363 pp. Ill.
The prominent Irish folklorist Séamas Ó
Catháin has walked in the footsteps of
his predecessors, in both a physical and
200
Reviews
a metaphorical sense. Séamas Ó Catháin
himself has been in close contact with
Scandinavian colleagues for many
years, and by presenting material about
his forerunner Séamus Ó Duilearga
(1899–1980) and his first trip to Scandinavia, Finland, Estonia, and Germany in
1928, he has also helped to shed light on
an important aspect of the history of
Irish and Scandinavian folkloristics.
Séamus Ó Duilearga was one of those
whom the young nation of Ireland entrusted with the task of building up a collective identity. There was no real academic tradition of studying folklore in
Ireland, so Séamus Ó Duilearga deliberately set off to establish contacts with
colleagues abroad. With this publication
and analysis of Ó Duilearga’s letters and
reports, the reader gets a good picture of
a small but international network of
knowledge concerning the collection
and study of folklore in the 1920s.
Through his contacts with, for example,
Carl Wilhelm von Sydow in Lund, Séamus Ó Duilearga was incorporated in
the leading expertise of the time in the
study of folklore, and his ties to Lund
and von Sydow remained active and intact for several decades. His contacts
with Norway were likewise important,
especially with Reidar Th. Christiansen
and Ole Mørk Sandvik, whose own research also reflected their interest in the
links between Scandinavia and Ireland.
In his encounter with Estonia and Finland, Séamus Ó Duilearga was profoundly impressed by the significance
that a knowledge of national folklore
could have in the construction of a
shared national identity. When it came
to the practical side of organizing the
collection and archiving of folklore too,
Séamus Ó Duilearga’s study trip in 1928
was likewise of crucial importance.
Séamus Ó Duilearga’s base during
his stay abroad was the Folklore of Ireland Society, founded in 1926. On his
return Ó Duilearga was pivotal in the development of important institutions such
as the Irish Folklore Institute (1930) and
the Irish Folklore Commission (1935).
Without the experience he gained and
the networks he established during his
trip in 1928, these institutions could
scarcely have come into being.
With this book Séamas Ó Catháin
presents and sheds new light on littleknown material about the history of
Northern European folkloristics. Once
again the reader is reminded of the significance of academic networks in a
small academic discipline, a significance that can hardly be overestimated if
one wishes to understand the history of
folkloristics in the twentieth century.
Arne Bugge Amundsen
Oslo, Norway
Ethnology and Disability History
Claes G. Olsson: Omsorg och kontroll.
En handikapphistorisk studie 1750–
1930. Föreställningar och levnadsförhållanden. Institutionen för kultur- och
medievetenskaper, Umeå universitet
2010. 314 pp. Ill. English summary.
Diss.
Claes G. Olsson’s dissertation, the title
of which means “Care and control: A
study in disability history 1750–1930”,
is a profound study that points out a direction for ethnology in the field of disability history. Olsson shows that ethnology, with its methodological and
theoretical approaches, has something
vital to add to this multidisciplinary research field. But it is also a dissertation
in which the reverse occurs, it also provides ethnology with important perspectives on how to approach research issues
concerning people with disabilities. In
this way Olsson’s thesis is a good start
for an ethnology that is making a place
for itself in the disability studies field.
Olsson has two aims that cover quite
wide problem areas. The first aim focuses on how impairments in hearing,
sight, mobility and comprehension skills
Reviews
are expressed in scientific papers, folk
tales and in education and care. The second aim examines the lives of individuals with disabilities, their self-sufficiency and dependence/independence of
others. In this way Olsson has the ambition to analyse both the societal perspective and a more individual, experiencebased level. He has an important theoretical discussion of why it is crucial to
relate these two perspectives to each
other when studying disability. It is also
an important discussion for ethnology,
and Olsson makes some essential points.
The material for the thesis goes back
to the 1700s and how people with disabilities at that time were made visible in
different texts. Two other important
breakpoints that Olsson finds are the establishment of the first special school in
1809 and the first inspection trips to the
former students of blind schools in early
1903. This is a broad corpus of historical
material that Olsson presents in an informative and analytical way. It becomes obvious in the reading of the thesis how important this historical perspective is for an ethnology that study
individuals’ experiences and simultaneously places this knowledge in a historical perspective.
In chapter 2, “Folktales and perceptions”, Olsson analyses the folktales
about disability in the 1700s, with a focus on folktales about children that did
not develop as expected. Through these
narratives there is a possibility to see
what people at this time defined as normal, but also to analyse the conflict between the popular and the scientific perspectives at that time. Olsson has here a
very important discussion about how
folktales became central in crisis when
there was a disruption in normal life, an
argument he takes from Mary Douglas.
He points out that the folktales had a cultural and social calming effect, an interesting point that Olsson could have developed little more.
Chapter 3 focuses on the scientific
201
perspective from the 1700s and how this
scientific discourse emerged under influence of the Enlightenment. In the
middle of the eighteenth century new organizations like the Royal Swedish
Academy of Science and National Bureau of Statistics started the search for
knowledge about society for the benefit
of the nation. In this search people with
different disabilities were made visible.
This was when the state began to take
more and more control over persons
who had been categorized as disabled,
and the care of these people became an
important issue. In this way Olsson
points out how, to borrow a term from
Foucault, the gaze began to take its place
in society. At the same time, the folktales continued to exist at a local level,
thus coexisting with the scientific discourse.
Chapter 4 is a long chapter about Pär
Aron Borg (1776–1839) and his educational efforts for the blind and the deaf.
The reader learns of the success and setbacks that Borg experienced when he established special schools for them in
Sweden. This is an interesting chapter,
based on a form of personal biography
and seeking to illuminate a larger and
more general discussion about disability
at the start of the nineteenth century.
Combining a biographical method with
ethnological analysis works very well,
and for this reason it would be desirable
if Olsson at the same time had a more
detailed discussion of this method.
Through this biography Olsson develops an analysis of the kind of disciplinary structures that were constructed
at this time, as well as the organization
of care. Pointing out the scientific perspective from the eighteenth century,
Olsson discusses how the perception of
disabled people now came to be shaped
by a moral and a Christian upbringing,
as well as the view that these people
should support themselves through
some kind of work.
In chapter 5 Olsson analyses the third
breakpoint, the introduction of a nation-
202
Reviews
al inspection tour to follow up the blind
men and women who had completed
their schooling. This inspection started
in 1903 and was intended to identify the
need for further support. As Olsson
points out, this was a time when the intervention, care and control performed
by the professionals increased and culminated in the forced sterilizations in the
1930s. This increasing control it also
gives Olsson a possibility to discuss care
and control on a more theoretical level,
which is necessary. In the chapter there
is an interesting discussion of how gender, class, sexuality and age are factors
that interact with disability in different
ways. This interaction is crucial if we
want to understand how people with disability are encountered by the professionals.
The study is concluded in chapter 6
with an in-depth discussion of the terms
care and control and how they relate to
each other. At the same time as care became an important concept in relation to
disabled people, the concept of control
intensified. It primarily came to concern
controlling people and groups in society
that were categorized as not fitting the
norm. This categorization is central if
we want to understand how people and
groups with disability are oppressed in
society, and also how this oppression is
closely linked to the care that is given to
these groups. Even if care is given with
good intentions, there is always some
control lurking in the background. Olsson links this reasoning very neatly to
the ethnological discussion of bourgeois
culture. What also is crucial in the chapter is how we must understand both care
and control from a historical perspective
and how this concept changes through
history. It could be interesting to have a
deeper analysis of how this change can
be understood from an ethnological perspective.
Ethnology has an important role to
play both in the field of disability studies
and in the field of disability history, and
Olsson’s study is a good example of this.
Here we have the perspectives of culture
analysis that focus on the individual and
simultaneously these narratives are
linked to the bigger story about how society deals with disabled people. Olsson’s study, along with his articles from
the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, is of central
importance, and points out a direction
for ethnological research in the field of
disability studies.
Kristofer Hansson
Lund, Sweden
Meanings of Folk Healing
Ulla Piela: The Meanings of Folk Healing as Narrated in Northern Karelia in
the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu
2010. 331 pp. Diss.
Ulla Piela, who runs the Kalevala Society, has summed up her many years’
work with and enormous knowledge of
folk medicine in a doctoral dissertation
about folk healing. The focus is on the
narrative meanings of folk healing in
North Karelia in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The aim of the dissertation is to study “how traditional
texts relating to healing give expression
to North Karelians’ interpretation of
health and illness and to the change
which took place in them in the course
of modernisation of agrarian Finland.”
This is a broad ambition, which is in itself a great challenge.
Her dissertation consists of seven
previously published articles introduced
by a new 114-page monograph. The first
article was published back in 1983, but
most of them are from the start of this
century. This is an impressive and admirable course of research lasting more
than 25 years. Presenting one’s research
findings in a doctoral dissertation by
combining a monograph with articles
has both advantages and disadvantages.
The articles were published in different
Reviews
contexts and present different aspects of
her theme. One disadvantage of this approach is that the articles are already
published, even some time ago. Here it
might have been preferable if the central
findings of the articles had been worked
into the monograph, especially for the
sake of readability. As it is now, there
are quite a few repetitions in the text.
Moreover, the monograph is at a higher
theoretical level than many of the individual articles.
One advantage of the presentation is
that the articles shed light on the different themes in a detailed way. But above
all, the different articles show the processual character of research. This applies in particular to the way Piela herself has developed as a researcher, and
also how research on ethnomedicine has
changed, from examining texts about
healing and charms, to studying healing
in a narrative context and as part of process of societal change. This is clear
from a reading of the separate articles.
The opening article from 1983 questions
the claim that healing charms are stable
and immutable, while the last article
from 2005 studies healing as a narrative,
proceeding from the concept of ritual
space. The process thus goes from being
text-centred to focusing on ritual spaces.
In the last article Piela analyses the
meaning attributed to nature in folk
healing in the modernization process between the 1860s and the 1970s. Here the
focus is on the understanding of sickness
and health from the perspective of societal change. The presentation of the
different articles is summed up in a common question: “how the meanings of
health and illness are formulated in different healing situations.” Altogether,
then, the dissertation builds on one very
large question that Piela wishes to
answer.
In the introduction to the monograph,
the author presents her research material, previous research, the theoretical
premises, and the research perspective,
which includes the individual articles.
203
The material that Piela analyses is certainly comprehensive. There are a considerable number of epic and lyric
poems in Kalevala metre, recorded from
oral sources and preserved by the Finnish Literary Society. Then there is written material produced in the form of two
writing competitions on the theme of
folk medicine, one in 1974 and another
in 2002. The material was collected during a period of more than 180 years and
varies in character. In the first chapter
the author also introduces earlier ethnomedical research with the focus on studies from Finland. It would have been
good here if something other than indigenous research had been included. It is
not enough to mention classics of folk
medicine such as Arthur Kleinman and
Cecil Hellman. Since the focus is largely
on the analysis of healing charms, I particularly miss Jonathan Roper’s works
in this dissertation.
The theoretical starting point is hermeneutics and constructivism, along
with the “formulation of cultural analysis in healing contexts and healing narratives as a shifting construction”. Here
Piela uses Paul Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis, which involves a reading whereby the researcher can establish a relationship between cultural competence
and the text. Piela views her material,
the healing charms, as a narrative genre.
She is inspired by Jerome Bruner’s ideas
about narrativity – a narrative as a culturally shaped cognitive tool and as a
representation of this process. I have no
objection to this choice of theoretical
foundation, but these theories are not especially obvious in the articles making
up this dissertation. This means that the
monograph and the articles do not make
the coherent whole that ought to be the
ideal.
The second chapter in the monograph
deals with the narrative construction of
concepts of health and illness. Piela focuses on expressions of sensuality and
corporeality in Kalevala-metre healing
charms, and on narratives of experiences
204
Reviews
of health and illness in the more modern
material – stories of a nostalgic character. The final part of the monograph investigates how talk of sickness and
health has changed from the magical notions of bygone times to today’s more
multifarious explanations, often with the
focus on people’s lifestyles. Ritual healing, with the idea that the cure can be
found in the origin of the sickness, was
based on magical thinking and lost its
power with the modernization process.
The older and the newer explanatory
models are analysed with the aid of the
concepts of this world and the opposite
world. In the ritual space, a sick person
is in this world while the sickness and its
cure are in the opposite world. Piela
clearly shows in her dissertation that
ideas of health and illness are strictly
context-bound and that certain cultural
patterns of thought have persisted
through the centuries.
Although I am not wholly convinced
that the form of the dissertation with a
monograph and seven articles is the
most suitable from the reader’s point of
view, I still think that the dissertation is
extremely interesting to read. Ulla Piela’s enormous knowledge of the topic
and her ability to analyse healing narratives and ideas about folk medicine from
new, relevant, and fascinating angles is
admirable. From this point of view, the
dissertation is brilliant. But if one ignores the long research process and
looks at the dissertation solely as a book
about folk medicine, one might wish for
a narrower but deeper analysis of one or
more of the questions posed by the author.
Lena Marander-Eklund
Åbo, Finland
Tracing Sami Traditions
Håkan Rydving: Tracing Sami Traditions. In Search of the Indigenous Religion among the Western Sami during the
17th and 18th Centuries. The Institute
for Comparative Research in Human
Culture. Novus forlag, Oslo 2010. 168
pp.
Professor Håkan Rydving at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural
Studies, and Religion, University of
Bergen, Norway, is a scholar with a
broad knowledge of Sami religion as
well as Sami languages. His Ph.D. dissertation, The End of the Drumtime
(1993), has become a milestone in the
understanding Sami culture before the
nineteenth century. This book, Tracing
Sami Traditions, is a compilation of
Rydving’s earlier articles. His focus has
been on “problems of source criticism
and methodology” in his own research
from 1987 to 2002. The syntheses he
makes are based on primary sources,
verbal and non-verbal, and secondary
sources such as texts, reports and oral
traditions. However, the sources for early Sami religion comes from the Christian period, which makes it difficult to
distinguish what is pre-Christian form
what is not. Rydving subdivides the contents into three parts: “From historical
research”, “Searching for traces” and
“Ritual landscapes, ritual specialists”;
the second part is the largest of the three.
What “sacred places” are is a relevant
question; it is not only always places for
rituals or places for performing rituals, it
is also lakes and mountains with sacred
names (p. 35). Rydving makes an apt
statement about place-name research:
“anyone studying the indigenous religions in the Nordic area – be it the Finnish, the Sami or the Scandinavian – can
no longer disregard place names as a
source” (p. 111).
One important research task has been
the interpretation of the drum used before Christian Lutheran/Orthodox time,
what Rydving calls the drum time. The
written sources come from clergymen or
statements from court records, where the
prosecuted person sometimes had to defend himself to escape the death penalty.
Reviews
On the other hand, the silent, non-written sources cannot be interpreted without the written ones. Rydving discusses
these facts with examples from Kemi
Lappmark in the winter of 1671, when
the biggest drums, not small enough to
hide, were taken away; we read that the
county sheriff in Vaadteje thought that
the drums were only like a compass for
the user. Rydving’s own hypothesis is
“the drum figures should be regarded as
an internal Sami development that arose
in response to the encounter with Christianity, a religion that demanded exclusiveness, thus forcing the Sami to reflect
on their own religion and to give it new
structure” (p. 44). In addition, Rydving
compares two different types of missionary accounts, like the one Thomas
von Westen created in Norway, and the
one by Pehr Högström who served in
Gällivare as a minister in the same era,
the eighteenth century. Von Westen’s
informants did not provide this information voluntarily; he forced them with
threats or torture. In contrast, Högström
had a better and humbler way to collect
information that he used in his own report, Beskrifvning öfwer de til Sweriges
Krona lydande lappmarker (1747).
One of Rydving’s major contributions to academic research in the study
of religion is his proficiency in language. He is meticulous about using the
right orthography for where he found the
term or the sacred place. I find his chapters about terminology, dialect and
place-names particularly interesting.
Rydving argues that linguistic evidence
alone cannot allow conclusions to be
drawn about Sami religion, but as a supplement it can be the perfect tool to use.
Noaidevuohta is one term he discusses,
examining the many different meanings
given to the term among the Sami
people. I wonder myself how the name
of a wicked noaidi, frimurar-noajdde
(free-mason noajdde), came to be a term
used in my home areas. The noaidi as a
ritual specialist has become an important factor in interpreting Sami religion.
205
The word noaidi can be found in all
Sami languages, and in Finnish and
Mansi as well. Rydving’s concludes that
it can be reckoned as Finno-Ugric, a
conclusion he refers to the late Björn
Collinder, former professor and head of
the Finno-Ugric language department at
Uppsala University.
Håkan Rydving has created a perfect
tool for teachers to use in their lectures
about Sami culture in general, but Sami
religion in particular. I know that I will
use this book in my lectures in Sami
Studies, and I hope others will do so as
well.
Krister Stoor
Umeå, Sweden
Lifestyle Consumption on the Emotive Market
Maria Strannegård: Hotell Speciell.
Livsstilskonsumtion på känslornas
marknad. Liber, Malmö 2009. 263 pp.
Ill. English summary. Diss.
“If you don’t look good, don’t even
bother coming in.” This doctoral thesis,
the title of which means “Hotel Special:
Lifestyle Consumption on the Emotive
Market”, is written within the framework of the interdisciplinary research
project “Att möta gästen” (Meeting the
guest). When writing the thesis, the author was affiliated with the Department
of Ethnology, University of Lund, and
the Department of Service and Management, University of Helsingborg. There
are few ethnological doctoral theses on
hotels in general or lifestyle hotels in
particular; the research field (“new”
economy, adventure economy or emotive economy) is, however, well known.
The purpose of this study is to show
how lifestyle hotels illustrate central
characteristics in the recent decades of
the development of this market. The
main research material consists of interviews with hotel owners and guests, as
206
Reviews
well as participant observation, which
means that Strannegård has stayed in 17
European and American lifestyle hotels
in the period between 2003 and 2009.
Theoretical perspectives in the thesis are
taken from theories of discourse, phenomenology and identity, as well as
semiotics.
The author, Maria Strannegård, has
studied hotels that work hard to be special and to provide their guests with
unique experiences. Such hotels are often called boutique hotels, design hotels,
lifestyle hotels or contemporary hotels.
The owners make great efforts to present
the hotels as an alternative to chain hotels and to the safe and secure, but also
boring oases.
When lifestyle hotels first appeared
in the 1980s and 1990s, the target group
was the rich fashion and design lovers –
the so-called creative outsiders – and the
aim was to get them to choose a hotel
first and a destination second, instead of
vice versa. It was of great importance for
hotel owners that the guests were people
with “high cultural capital resources”
(HCCs). The author, however, highlights that the hotels did not speak loudly about the fact that a certain economic
capital is needed in order to demonstrate
one’s cultural capital. The lifestyle hotels expected not only elite guests, but
also elite employees. Staff were supposed to be good-looking (and in some
cases, to not look “too ethnic”), and often models and actors without prior experience of the business were hired.
From the very beginning, the lifestyle
hotels did not take service and experience seriously: Staff were good-looking,
but could also be totally incompetent, a
fact that resulted in criticism of the hotels as being superficial and arrogant.
In the subsequent six chapters, the
readers learn more about the phenomenon by moving between rooms: the lobby, the library, the bar, the corridor, the
bedroom and backstage. The lobby, being an important room, communicates
the hotel’s atmosphere and attitude. It is
a semi-public room in which one may
both be seen and see others. Some lobbies are minimalistic and easy to interpret, while others emit a confusing mixture of signals, where only the guests
with the correct interpretation key and
the discourse knowledge stand a chance
of interpreting the ambiguous message.
Lifestyle hotels also have ambitions
to attract cultivated guests who have
enough knowledge and cultural (and financial) capital to stay there. These hotels are not for everyone; charter tourists
or coaches with senior citizens, for example, are not encouraged. According to
Strannegård’s informants, these categories of tourists might spoil the other
guests’ experience of staying at a unique
hotel. If guests who do not constitute the
target group were to turn up, it would
break the spell and the promise of belonging. The aim is not necessarily to
make contact, but rather to experience a
feeling of being with others who have
made the same choices as oneself and
who are in the same capital group. The
author interprets this kind of network
building – imaginary communities or
“tribes of strangers” – as a social practice of the urbane and culture-interested
middle class, and this practice has been
inspired by network building by the cultural and financial elites of the past. A
refusal to mingle with just anyone (e.g.
bus loads of pensioners) is expected to
influence an individual’s image, but will
also affect the image of a business: “I
stay at the Marriot” might ruin both image and commercial deals, while “I stay
at the W” will enhance them. The hotel
owners are aware of this fact and therefore do not welcome just any boring
business, e.g. a business that sells a
make of car that is considered boring
and out-of-date. Lifestyle hotels are particular about underlining that not everyone is welcome. It does not solely help
to have a great deal of financial capital,
because if the right kind of cultural
capital and attitude are lacking, one will
fall victim to the logic of exclusion.
Reviews
Strannegård gained only a tiny
glimpse into the backstage workings of
the hotels. Only one hotel granted her
access to this less than magical part of
the building, but she was refused permission to interview staff. This particular hotel, W, had invested a great deal of
effort in contriving new terms for different groups of staff. All staff were called
talents, and the cleaners’ title was style
attendant; they did not clean, but styled.
It is interesting that all style attendants
in this hotel were women, and according
to the hotel owner, this was due to the
fact that style attendants always have
been women and that is “just the way
things are”. There is of course a reason
why Strannegård was granted only partial access to the backstage. It could
however be an interesting future research project to study the backstage of
lifestyle hotels.
Maria Strannegård’s doctoral thesis
is well written and gives insight into a
topic that is exciting as well as alarming.
Many people have already stayed at lifestyle hotels, but Strannegård’s insightful
analysis will guarantee a new dimension
to a stay in such a hotel. If I could wish
for further research in this field, I would
wish for a study on the backstage of lifestyle hotels.
Tove Ingebjørg Fjell
Bergen, Norway
Gendered Forest
Tiina Suopajärvi: Sukupuoli meni
metsään. Luonnon ja sukupuolen polkuja metsäammattilaisuudessa. (Gendered
Forest. The Paths of Nature and Gender
in Finnish Forestry Professionalism.)
Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran
Toimituksia 1255. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Helsinki 2009. 387 pp.
In recent years, the forest industry and
forest professionals have received a lot
207
of attention in Finnish academia. Besides traditional corporate histories,
different perspectives on the forest industry and of the working cultures and
traditions of related professional
groups (such as foresters/forest officers, lumberjacks and their foremen)
have been examined. These research
efforts tell about the importance of this
vast industry for Finland, but also of its
change, problems and crises. Tiina
Suopajärvi’s doctoral dissertation is
concerned with forestry engineers, gender and nature. In Finland, women were
not allowed to study forest engineering
until 1965. The first female student to
do so started her studies in 1968. Using
interviews with thirty-three men and
thirty-three women, including early-industry female pioneers, Suopajärvi examines the gendered world of the
forestry industry.
The appearance of women in the professional arena coincided with other
changes in forestry. Throughout the past
few decades, technology and knowledge
as well as ideologies – especially nature
conservation – have transformed the
practices of logging. Suopajärvi considers the influence of all of these developments on the profession of forest engineers: What is their current relationship with the forest and how did that relationship develop?
Suopajärvi has carefully reflected on
her role as the researcher in the research
process as well as on the limitations of
the research material and the methods
chosen. Analysing life stories collected
as part of an oral history project on
“Forestry Professions in a Changing Society”, Suopajärvi uses the frameworks
of sex/gender systems and of gender as
individual action, emphasizing the negotiation and balancing between the
subjective and the social worlds. Her
analysis begins with periods of early socialization: stories of childhood, memories from the times of studying forest engineering, and experiences of first jobs.
Recalling their childhood, forestry pro-
208
Reviews
fessionals describe their actions in the
forest in a similar way. Most of them became familiar with the forest at an early
age, playing there, doing sports, and
moving there with their parents, with no
apparent gendered divisions. Gender
distinctions, for these young people, became relevant when it came to working
in the forest. Male interviewees had
taken part in forest work with their fathers and carried out all sorts of tasks
they were capable of doing, whereas
many female respondents had to stay at
home with their mothers. Naturally,
there were exceptions to this setting, but
generally male children were allowed
working experiences in the forest.
On entrance to the forestry institutes,
which until very recently had been
boarding schools, the few women who
ventured into this training were noticed.
The first female students had to adjust to
masculine culture and meet male standards, and their role was contradictory:
both challenging and confirming the
gendered norms. Even today, many female forestry professionals are still tokens at their workplaces.
The most crucial parts of Suopajärvi’s research consider the gendered
dynamics of working life and the professional knowledge of forestry workers. Both female and male interviewees
report that in the beginning, women
had to work hard to be acknowledged
as forestry professionals. Female interviewees told about experiences of discrimination and saw that gender affected their career trajectories. Interestingly enough, physical strength has little to
do with the work of forest engineers.
However, physical strength and masculinity are still attached to the profession. In addition, female engineers are
thought to lack managerial authority.
However, female professionals were
seen to possess positive communicative
skills that are needed in today’s world.
This leads to changes in professional
knowledge, which was previously more
stable and authoritative. The people in-
terviewed by Suopajärvi were concerned with the continuity of their profession, and they saw nature conservationists and the media as a major threat
to forest economy and to their own professional knowledge. Since the 1990s,
ecology and natural values have gained
more ground. Forest legislation has
changed and new practices such as certification of forests have emerged.
Open communication and public relations take up a big part of forestry professionals’ work.
Suopajärvi points out that, despite being critical of nature conservationists,
these forestry professionals did not neglect the value of the forest as a recreational resource or as an important facet
of national heritage. For these professionals, the forest was the source of both
their livelihood and their lifestyle. Thus,
in their view, forests should be taken
care of in sustainable ways. All forest
professionals had a personal, somewhat
emotional relationship to the forest, and
most of them wanted to pass that investment and concern on to future generations. However, interestingly enough,
they did not recommend the profession
to their children.
The biographical account of Finnish
forestry professionals reveals the changes in the profession and the relationship
between humans and nature in a globalized world. However, they also seem
to be grounded in traditional ways of
thinking about the world, for the stories
echo nationalist and even mythical images of the Finns and the forest. Banal or
not, these collective images could also
have been examined and questioned further from gendered perspectives. However, Suopajärvi’s research is well outlined and carefully reflected, as doctoral
dissertations should be.
Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto
Reviews
The Quest for Norse Shamanism
Clive Tolley: Shamanism in Norse Myth
and Magic. FF Communications 296 &
297. Academia Scientiarum Fennica,
Helsinki 2009. 589 + 304 pp. Ill.
This is a comprehensive and impressive
study of the evidence for shamanic elements in Norse religion. The nearly 600
pages of the first volume are filled with
Clive Tolley’s detailed analysis of the
data, while the second volume contains
the source texts (in the original languages with English translations), references, and illustrations, along with a
general index. This division requires
constantly moving to and fro between
the two volumes, which complicates the
reading somewhat. However, it is difficult to see how the publication could
have been arranged otherwise, given the
amount of material, and it must be said
immediately that it is well worth the effort.
Tolley begins with an outline of his
methodology and a definition of some
key concepts such as religion, ritual, and
myth. He then examines the nature of
the sources, first those for Eurasian shamanism and then those for Norse/Germanic traditions.
As the first stage in determining
whether the Norsemen could have incorporated elements of shamanism in their
myth and magic, Tolley looks at the historical sources for contacts with FinnoUgrian peoples. This is followed by a
survey of shamanism among those
peoples in Eurasia, with the crucial
definition of the phenomenon itself. The
problem, of course, is that shamanism is
a composite, with a number of features
that scholars consider essential to fit the
definition: ritual ecstasy, animal helping
spirits, the vocation of shaman, initiation, travel to the otherworld, a typical
cosmology with a layered universe, and
so on. One or more such features can be
found in other cultures, as Tolley shows
with examples of “shamanism” (in inverted commas) in ancient Greek reli-
209
gion and in European witchcraft. If evidence of such features can be found in
Old Norse sources, then, it does not
necessarily represent proof of Norse
shamanism or of Sámi influence.
Having prepared the ground in this
way, Tolley then begins a meticulous
step-by-step analysis of all the spheres
of tradition where shamanic influence is
conceivable. In each chapter he begins
with the Eurasian evidence and then
searches the Norse or Germanic sources
for parallels. The result is a broad survey
that ends up covering most of Norse
mythology. We learn about the purposes
that shamanism and its Norse analogues
have in society. There is a chapter about
community and gender, including evidence of gender crossing. A particularly
interesting chapter, in my opinion, is the
one about notions of the soul. Here we
are given a detailed semantic analysis of
all the Old Norse words to do with the
soul and the mind, such as sál, munr,
hugr, hamr. This is followed by an examination of spirits, first the Eurasian
notions, then the Old Norse supernatural
beings from the Æsir and Vanir to the
dwarfs and giants.
The following section looks at cosmic structures, such as the pillar or pole
and the world tree, the mill and the
Norse god Heimdallr. The last major
section considers the workings of shamanism: vocation and initiation, performance, and accoutrements such as the
staff. The survey in volume one ends
with a look at two kindred concerns: the
smith and the bear.
Tolley sums up the evidence at the
end of each chapter, and in a nine-page
conclusion at the end of the volume, and
his measured judgement is that the many
isolated resemblances do not constitute
proof of the presence of shamanism as a
belief system in Norse culture. He thus
opposes the commonly expressed idea
that the Norse magic known as seiðr,
which we know from patchy and sometimes unreliable literary sources, was a
form of shamanism. The recorded Norse
210
Reviews
myths and practices, Tolley says, do not
correspond closely to classic Siberian
tundra shamanism or its Sámi variant. In
fact, there are closer parallels to be
found in the shamanism practised in
more southerly agricultural areas, and
even that in Japan, where of course there
can be no genetic connection, merely a
typological one resulting from similarities in the hierarchical structure of agrarian societies at a comparable stage of development.
A few years ago François-Xavier
Dillmann published a detailed study of
magicians in ancient Iceland, Les
magiciens dans l’Islande ancienne:
Études sur la représentation de la magie islandaise et de ses agents dans les
sources littéraires norroises (Uppsala,
2006). When I reviewed that book in
Gardar 38 (2006), I expressed a wish
that the chapter on seiðr – with its critical scrutiny of the sources and its convincing arguments that the features
cannot meaningfully be termed shamanic – could be made available in
English translation, as a valuable counter to some over-imaginative interpretations. Clive Tolley’s book is more
than an adequate answer to that wish.
This is a work of solid and cautious
scholarship. Moreover, since it conveniently assembles all the written
sources, there is plenty of material for
anyone who wishes to interpret the
evidence from a different angle, perhaps in the light of other types of
sources such as archaeological finds
(and with the find of a cult-house at
Uppåkra near Lund, Tolley might wish
to revise his statement on page 279 that
there is no evidence of pagan edifices
built as places to worship). The book
will thus be useful even to scholars who
may still feel inclined to argue for shamanic practices among the Norsemen. I
myself find Tolley’s arguments and conclusions well-founded and persuasive.
Alan Crozier
Lund, Sweden
Narrative Intoxication
Susanne Waldén: Berättad berusning –
kulturella föreställningar i berättelser
om berusade personer. Etnolore 23,
Uppsala universitet 2010. 210 pp. Ill.
It was a cloudy morning at a rock festival in Seinäjoki, Finland, at the end of
the nineties. I woke up hungover and
stuck my head out the opening of our
tent. Imagine my surprise when the first
thing I saw was a young man a few
metres away wearing only his sunglasses repeatedly pulling his, erm...
limp willie with one hand, drinking wine
straight from the bottle with the other.
This continued for a few hours. He
walked around the crowded camping
area heavily drunk and clearly short of
sleep, performing his repetitive jerks as
if it was the most natural thing in the
world, and every now and then complaining loudly about not getting an
erection.
What do you make of this story? Is it
offensive, provocative, funny, pointless,
disturbing or just plain childish? Whatever you think of it, this is the kind of
story that Susanne Waldén has been
studying in her doctoral thesis, the title
of which means “Narrative intoxication
– cultural concepts in narratives about
people under the influence of alcohol”.
Her material consists of narratives about
people under the influence of alcohol
collected in archives, interviews and
from newspaper articles. She writes that
they “are filled with norms and values
that reflect unspoken social rules about
how people should or should not behave. The narratives become interesting
when these unspoken rules are broken.”
The analysis is divided into three
main chapters, which are also, in a way,
part of the result. There are narratives
that show the contemporary social and
cultural order, narratives that maintain
the social and cultural order, and narratives that provoke the social and cultural
order – but they all show us our every-
Reviews
day norms in telling what goes on beyond them.
Waldén compares the old stories
from early modern rural society found in
the archives with the new ones she has
collected herself, and finds that they are
strikingly similar. Powerful men who
embarrass themselves when intoxicated
is a popular theme in both ages. Others
are, for example, masculinity, practical
jokes and the absence of bodily control,
but there are really too many to list here.
The theoretical outset is twofold. On
the one hand, she studies the hegemonical structures that the stories show, how
they tell the tale of resistance against the
power and authority of norms and good
behaviour. You guessed it, we are talking Michel Foucault here. On the other
hand, Waldén approaches the subject
from a more classical structuralist viewpoint, and sees the drunk people in the
stories as people who cross and therefore also expose the cultural boundaries
that are taken for granted in everyday
life. Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of
carnival are central here.
I find the theoretical discussion at the
beginning a bit light. Squeezing names
like Michel Foucault, Margaret Mead,
Thomas Ziehe, Edmund Leach, Claude
Lévi-Strauss and a few high-profile
names in late-twentieth-century Swedish ethnology into the same opening
feels like rhetorical overkill, especially
since the discussion of their ideas is left
rather short throughout the chapter. The
names are used to give some kind of
background to her viewpoint, which is
fine, but at the same time Waldén herself
seems wary of entering questions of the
relation between language, reality and
culture.
There are some methodological issues that could be discussed as well.
How, for example, does the fact that the
interviews are not recorded, but written
down afterwards, limit a close read of
the stories? And why speculate about the
contexts that the stories the informants
211
have written down are supposed to be
told in?
But I suppose I am being a little picky
here, because there is no doubt that Susanne Waldén knows her material.
When she starts examining the narratives about drunk people, this book really starts to live up to expectations. The
tempo is raised, the expressions are
clear, the connections to the theories
make sense and Waldén’s interpretations are both interesting and in line with
the theoretical premises. At this stage
the book makes for pleasant reading.
Among other things, Waldén finds
that the function of many drinking
stories is to criticize the people in power,
provoke unspoken rules and caution us
about what happens if we break them.
The stories often revolve around the
dichotomy of private/public, and the
shame that comes with breaking the
norm in front of other people, and not
behaving according to their expectations. All in all, the book could be a bit
clearer at times, but it does make for an
interesting read.
Oh... A few years after the incident at
the rock festival, my friends and I saw
the young man again. It was the same
festival but he was completely different:
dressed, quite sober, shy and really embarrassed when we identified him. Poor
bloke.
Nicklas Hägen
Åbo, Finland
Folk Beliefs about the Soul
Eva Carlsson Werle: Vålnaden går före… Folktron om själen. Carlsson Bokförlag, Stockholm 2010. 213 pp. Ill.
Folk beliefs about omens, ghosts, and
similar phenomena are a familiar topic
for a folklorist. Many books, both scholarly and popular, have been written on
the subject, which is of interest to students, the media, and the man in the
212
Reviews
street, whether it concerns beliefs in
ghosts or views of witches. Although
Eva Carlsson Werle’s book on folk beliefs about the soul deals with a familiar
topic, the approach differs from what is
normal in folkloristic research. Folklorists have studied the beliefs through concepts such as fate and luck, or with the
focus on supernatural beings. Carlsson
Werle’s approach to the study of how
people 100 or 150 years ago conceived
of the world is to look at their beliefs
about the soul. She proceeds from the
Swedish concept of vård (or vålnad,
originally meaning a guardian spirit),
which ought to have been introduced
and problematized further. She thus
reads the material in the folklife archives
with the focus on beliefs about the soul.
This can be regarded as a creative new
way to study old material.
Carlsson Werle is a historian of religion, and this book, which is relatively
popular in tone, is based on a long essay
written at Stockholm University. She
considers folkloristic research about
folk beliefs and research findings about
the soul in the anthropology of religion
(e.g. Åke Hultkrantz, Ivar Paulson, and
Ernst Arbman). It is presumably her
background in the history of religion
which makes me find that familiar
themes are treated here in a fresh way.
The intended audience of the book remains somewhat uncertain, but judging
by the style, the target group is probably
a relatively broad audience with an interest in the past and/or the supernatural.
The book would have benefited from a
more detailed introduction discussing
the target group and also the actual topic
and the material on which the study is
based.
I experienced a high recognition factor as I read the different chapters in the
book. The reader learns about omens,
about the free soul of a person, here
called the vård, about blood as a person’s life-soul, about the spirit in a person’s breath, and about apparent death.
In a section about how the soul can go
out and in, we read about a vulnerable
soul, and the evil to which especially
newborn children were exposed. We can
also read about people and animals who
had their power and courage stolen,
based on the idea of luck as a limited resource. The author also deals with ideas
about people who knew the art of leaving their bodies, about the journey of the
soul, and the idea of how people could
become ill because of evil thoughts or
looks. Other chapters are about with hug
(the mind), about the notion that certain
people had the ability to do soul-travel,
about the shadow as a reverse of the
vård, and about the soulless dead, that is,
ghosts and revenants.
The examples cited by the author
come from the archives, that is to say,
the folklore material that was recorded
at the end of the nineteenth century and
the start of the twentieth. One weakness
of the account is that the reader is not informed about how frequent the different
beliefs were. They are presented as isolated narratives from different parts of
Sweden and Swedish-speaking Finland,
with no links to existing studies of legendary complexes. This is presumably
due to the author’s desire to present the
material in a popular, reader-friendly
way.
The most rewarding thing about the
study is a summary of the ideas about
the soul, with a human lifetime as the
starting point. In Carlsson Werle’s account, the entrance of the soul occurs in
stages, from a life-soul that takes its
place in the foetus, to more parts of the
soul that are introduced with baptism,
and the rest of the soul which makes a
person complete, a vård with personality
and psyche. Correspondingly, the exit of
the soul takes place in stages, with
omens of death as the first sign when the
soul leaves a person temporarily, the
vård and the life-soul leave the body at
death, and with burial the soul is transformed into a kind of death-being. The
last chapter of the book is about differences in the outlook on the soul in folk
Reviews
belief and in Christianity. This section
would have been better at the start of the
book, since in a study like this it is it is
crucial what is meant by folk belief and
how it differs from the church’s view of
the soul. In a brief conclusion the author
sums up ideas about the soul by pointing
out that the beliefs can be divided into
some that are rooted in the body and
some that are not. There are also links
between folk belief about works of literature and film.
Many beliefs that are familiar to a
folklorist are explained in terms of the
nature of the soul. Carlsson Werle’s account suffers a little for her ambition to
prove this, in some cases at the expense
of other possible explanations. For me
as a reader, this unfortunately leads to
suspicion rather than conviction about
the validity of the interpretations.
Lena Marander-Eklund
Åbo, Finland
Things that Matter
Margrit Wettstein: Livet genom tingen.
Människor, föremål och extrema situationer. Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, Stockholm/Stehag 2009. 155 pp.
Ill. English summary. Diss.
What roles do objects take on in the process of dealing with sorrow in extreme
situations? This is the central question in
Margrit Wettstein’s doctoral dissertation. Her study is based on individuals’
experiences of traumatic situations
which have changed their lives forever.
Wettstein’s interest is focused on how
these individuals try to organize their
lives afterwards and how everyday objects of no great monetary value can become invaluable to them in this process.
The material for the study consists of
eleven people’s stories of grief and loss.
The stories are grouped around two human tragedies that irrevocably changed
history and the lives of millions. The
213
first group of stories concern people
who survived the Holocaust or were
forced to flee Nazi persecution. The second group consists of people who lost
relatives in the attack on the World
Trade Centre on September 11th, 2001.
Both situations brought about profound
personal tragedies as well as a long-lasting collective sorrow. However, in the
present work very little is said about
general or collective grief; here the focus of attention is on how individuals
deal with personal feelings of loss.
The fieldwork behind this study
stretched over a period of four years,
2004–2008, and covers a wide range of
materials such as interviews, conversations, fieldwork notes and observations, correspondence, archive materials, artworks and literature. The author’s account of her fieldwork process
is thorough and constitutes an important
part of the study as a whole.
The dissertation is divided into an introduction and four chapters. The chapters are called “Movement”, “Loss”,
“Pain”, and, finally, “Re-creation”. The
theoretical perspectives are not contained in one specific chapter but are interwoven throughout the text. Two concepts, “rite of passage” and “linking objects”, are discussed in the introduction
and referred to on several occasions.
Wettstein is especially interested in the
transitional stage of rites of passage, the
stage referred to as “liminality” by the
anthropologist Victor Turner. She points
out that people’s progress through this
passage is not always smooth or, sometimes, not even completed – some might
remain in the transitional phase or experience a series of transitions. Another
important concept is the idea of transitional or linking objects (Winnicott
1971/2003). As the author later demonstrates, the “linking object” can be imaginary or a memory of an incident.
The chapter “Movement” deals with
some of the drastic changes the September 11th attack and the Nazi persecutions gave rise to. Traumatic changes
214
Reviews
throw people into a state of uncertainty
in which they have to find their footing.
This is the theme of the following chapter, “Loss”, which contains the individual case-studies and is by far the largest
chapter. We are introduced to eleven
people, five who survived or fled from
the Holocaust and six who lost close
relatives in the attack on the World
Trade Center in 2001. Nine of the people
the author met herself, two of the portraits (Nelly Sachs and Thomas Mann)
have been written based on archive material and literary sources. The portraits
are of somewhat uneven length. The
personal portraits of Holocaust survivors Nelly Sachs, Lenke Rothman,
Thomas Mann and Roald Hoffman are
more detailed, whereas some of the accounts by relatives of victims of the
WTC attack are more succinct. It is clear
that the author has been highly sensitive
about the degree to which her contributors have been willing to expose themselves and their feelings.
In the chapter entitled “Pain”, the
concepts of transition and linking objects are discussed in more depth against
the background of the life stories introduced in the previous chapter. In the final chapter, “Re-creation”, Wettstein
underlines that in this context it is the
owners who instil the objects in question
with value – it is the owner’s interpretation of the object that makes it act as a
link between the past and the present. At
the end remains the question of what
happens to these objects after their
owners are gone. Is it possible for someone else to perceive the power of a personal “linking object”? The author leans
towards the conclusion that it is difficult
to transfer the feelings for the object to
the next generation.
The real strength of this dissertation
lies not so much in its theoretical advancement as in its methodology, the integrity of the fieldwork and the insightful close reading of people’s personal
stories of loss. In this the author has
been sensitive to the character of her
material. By not opting for distance and
clinical analysis Wettstein’s study opens
doors otherwise closed. In the same
manner as a good museum presentation
makes us see objects in a new light, this
study both asks questions and gives
answers but also lets objects and stories
speak for themselves.
Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch
Helsingfors, Finland
Historical Ethnomusicology
Susanne Ziegler (ed.): International
Council for Traditional Music Study
Group on Historical Sources: Historical
Sources and Source Criticism. Proceedings from the 17th International Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, May 21–25
2008. Svenskt visarkiv, Stockholm 2010.
320 pp. Ill.
Historical research is not something one
associates with ethnomusicology. Instead it is fieldwork that is the hallmark
of the subject, with synchronic studies
as a result. But the discipline includes
scholars of folk music who have always
worked with old source material. In recent years they have been joined by
fieldworking ethnomusicologists in
search of the historical depth behind the
things they find in the field. These two
trends come together in a study group
working with “historical sources of traditional music”, which meets regularly
within the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM). The last meeting took place at the Centre for Swedish
Folk Music and Jazz Research (Svenskt
visarkiv) in Stockholm, and it is the conference papers in book form that are the
subject of this brief review.
The volume is edited by Susanne
Ziegler, senior researchers at the legendary Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv and
responsible for its collection of historical recordings. The book contains 23 papers, sorted into seven themes.
Reviews
“Historical Sources and Source Criticism” was the title of the conference,
which sounds useful but not particularly
innovative. But one must remember that
the participants in the study group include fieldworking ethnomusicologists
who are interested in the historical background. The fact that the theme is exceedingly relevant to them is evident
from a footnote (p. 43) in Ingrid Bertleff’s paper concerning errors about the
discipline’s (German) pioneers in recent
American handbooks. In the footnote
she observes that neither “source” nor
“source criticism” is treated as a concept
in the six introductory handbooks (with
a total of 11 editions) published since
the 1960s. The fixation on fieldwork obviously leads to blind spots among those
who advocate spending time in the
places where the music is made.
The ICTM facilitated contacts between colleagues on either side of the
east–west demarcation line during the
Cold War. That could almost be described as the main task of the organization. For a long time, therefore, German
was the conference language in a context like this. A reminder of that era can
be seen in the dedication of the book to
the memory of Doris Stockmann (1929–
2006), who was the driving force of the
study group for many years; she was a
citizen of the German Democratic Republic while it existed, and also a frequent visitor to Sweden, with several
works about yoiking on her list of publications.
I was also reminded of that background by two interesting papers with a
similar content. At one time folk music
was a symbolically charged constituent
of the socialist nation-building in Eastern Europe, but it could not be just any
folk music. It had to be folk music that
was new in every way, with the task of
uniting the entire nation. Collectors, researchers, and archives were involved in
this thoroughly politicized work of ensuring the legitimacy of the new folk
music. Maurice Mengel writes about
215
how this happened in Romania. Ardian
Ahmedaja provides corresponding testimony from Albania. It is possible that
these aspirations for legitimacy can be
glimpsed before 1989 in contributions to
the ICTM’s conference reports. In this
volume, at least, there are honest accounts of the sorry post-war history of
folk music research in two of the affected countries.
Bjørn Aksdal also takes a critical look
at the predecessors when he writes about
the large collections of fiddlers’ music
published in Norway. Folk music there
too was collected and researched in the
name of the young nation, with consequences that the users of the books still
have to live with.
Unsurprisingly, this volume also suffers from the diversity of topics and the
uneven scholarly quality. Furthermore,
some of the authors have an inadequate
command of English – evidently they
are not accustomed to the new conference language. But the book nevertheless gives a good idea of how the interest
in ethnomusicological research with a
historical focus is distributed, chiefly in
northern and eastern Europe. It is a mixture of recognizable folk music research
and synchronic studies with historiographical ambitions.
Gunnar Ternhag
Falun, Sweden
Swedish Folklore Studies in Finland
Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch & Carola
Ekrem: Swedish Folklore Studies in Finland 1828–1918. The History of Learning and Science in Finland 1828–1918.
Societas Scientiarum Fennica 13b, Helsinki 2008. 118 s. Ill.
When Finland, having been part of the
Kingdom of Sweden for centuries, was
separated in 1809, it became a Russian
Grand Duchy. The divorce from Sweden
led almost immediately to Fennomania,
216
Reviews
deliberately intended to make the country more Finnish. This process had the
dual goal of distancing Finland from the
old Swedish dominance and avoiding
Russification. As in many other national
projects, folk culture was selected as a
symbol of everything that was genuinely
Finnish. For example, the physician and
later professor of Finnish language and
literature, Elias Lönnrot, through systematic collection of runo songs, especially in Karelia, put together the national epic. The Kalevala (1835, 1849),
which became a powerful nationalist
symbol of tremendous cultural scope
and significance. Lönnrot was inspired
both by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and
by the Poetic Edda; in other words, he
consciously strove to create a Finnish
epic of the same dignity.
At the time of the divorce the Swedish language, although it was spoken
by a small minority in Finland, was the
language of culture, used by the intellectual and political elite. Finnish was the
language of the poor and powerless majority, a spoken language but without
printed literature. For the nationalists it
was therefore essential to make it into a
language of culture. One element in this
endeavour to raise the status of Finnish
was the formation of the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki in 1831.
Elias Lönnrot was far from being
alone in wishing to collect and publish
Finnish folklore in order to create a cultural heritage for the construction of the
Finnish nation. In their excellent summary of the collecting efforts, Österlund-Pötzsch and Ekrem also mention
giants like Henrik Gabriel Porthan (“the
father of historiography”) and Christfrid
Ganander. These men were influenced
by the contemporary European and
Scandinavian infatuation with folk
poetry, deriving concrete inspiration
from people like Macpherson and his
Works of Ossian. The Ossian cycle was
immensely popular in the decades
around 1800.
Several decades would pass before
the systematic collection of orally transmitted Swedish-language folk culture
gained momentum in the 1860s. As the
authors point out, however, the headmaster from Vasa, Johan Oskar Immanuel Rancken, made an appeal in the
magazine Ilmarinen in 1848 about the
importance of also collecting Swedishlanguage folklore in Finland. Rancken’s
prominent position in this connection is
reflected in his epithet, “the father of
Finland-Swedish folkloristics”. He was
especially interested in collecting folksongs. Several of Rancken’s students
continued this collecting, including Jakob Edvard Wefvar and Johannes Reinhold Aspelin.
In 1885 some students under the leadership of Carl Gustav Estlander founded
the Swedish Literature Society of Finland (SLS). The main task of the Society
was collecting, with the emphasis on
folksongs and tales. The Society soon
began to award grants for fieldwork in
the Swedish-speaking parts of Finland.
Those who received grants and set out
into the field were expected not only to
collect folklore but also to keep a diary
of their work. The diaries give valuable
insight into how the work of collecting
was organized and implemented, and
what the results were. But the diaries
also reveal that the collection was based
on strict selection principles and on a
strict pre-understanding of what was
worth collecting and what could be ignored.
One of the driving forces in the SLS
was Ernst Lagus. He organized the collection strategies and the ordering and
cataloguing of the collected material.
Some of the better-known collectors
during his time were Vilhelm Eliel Victorinus Wessman and Otto Andersson.
Wessman became famous for his interviews with the great storyteller Berndt
Strömberg, “Blind-Strömberg”, from
Leksvall near Ekenäs. Andersson later
became professor of music and folkloristics at Åbo Academy (which was
founded in 1918).
Reviews
From these pioneers of Swedish-language collection in Finland, the reader
follows the developments up to the present day, with its collectors and university teachers in the subject of folkloristics. The authors bring us up to Ulrika
Wolf-Knuts, since 1985 lecturer and
later professor of folkloristics in the department that was founded at Åbo Academy in 1968. On the way there, the authors mention another important milestone in the history of Finland-Swedish
folkloristics, namely, the foundation of
the Archives of Folk Culture in Helsinki
in 1937, with Olav Ahlbäck and Ragna
Nikander as the first people in charge of
dialectology and folklore respectively.
Swedish Folklore Studies in Finland
is a history of men. Women are few and
far between, which is partly because few
women were active in this field before
the 1950s, and partly because women
tend to be ignored in surveys of subject
history. The authors seem to have exerted themselves to include the women
who actually were active, but it is still
the men who occupy most of the space
in the study. Their research efforts are
also described in detail, while the
women and their scholarly contributions
are more in the background. Nor do the
women have their photographs in the
217
book as the men do. Why this is so is
hard to know, but I think that wellknown and respected researchers like
Alfhild Forslin and Ulrika Wolfs-Knut
could surely have been given more room
and also have their portraits in the study.
Perhaps they will be given greater space
in subsequent surveys?
The content is of course very interesting for the history of the subject. With
care and detail, the authors describe the
emergence of Swedish-language folklore studies in Finland, and present some
of the most important (male) figures in
this field of scholarship. In terms of layout, however, the book is not quite as
successful. The text is complex to negotiate and it is difficult to gain a general
view because there are far too many abbreviations and references, sometimes
over-long. Moreover, the illustrations
are grouped separately, not scattered
through the text where they could have
enhanced the reader’s enjoyment by
breaking up the monolithic print. Despite these flaws, Swedish Folklore
Studies in Finland 1828–1918 is a welcome addition to the history of Nordic
folkloristics.
Agneta Lilja
Huddinge, Sweden
218
Reviews
Reviews
219
Books Received by the Editor 2011
Björkholm, Johanna: Immateriellt kulturarv som begrepp och process.
Folkloristiska perspektiv på kulturarv
i Finlands svenskbygder med folkmusik som exempel, Åbo, Abo Akademi 2011. 355 pp. Ill.
Christiansen, Palle Ove: De forsvundne.
Hedens sidste fortællere. Gads forlag,
København 2011. 237 pp. Ill.
Hemmersam, Flemming, Astrid Jespersen & Lene Otto (eds.): Kulturelle
processer i Europa. Indlæg fra den 29.
Nordiske etnolog- og folkloristkongres, (Etnologiske studier vol. 13),
Museum Tusculanum forlag, København 2010, 294 pp.
Noss, Aagot: Draktskikk i Aust-Telemark. Mangfald og endring. Bø,
Gransherad,
Heddal,
Hjartdal,
Sauherad, Oslo 2010, Novus Forlag
& Norsk Folkemuseum, 195 pp. Ill.
Prusac, Marina & Mona Bramer Solhaug & Marianne Vedeler (eds.): På
spor av Gud? Pilegrimsreiser i middelalderens kristenhet. Novus forlag,
Oslo 2009, 138 pp Ill.
Siikala, Anna-Leena & Oleg Ulyashev:
Hidden Rituals and Public Performances. Traditions and Belonging
among the Post-Soviet Khanty, Komi
and Udmurts. (Studia Fennica. Folkloristica 19). Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki. 365 pp. Ill.
Johansson, Karl G. & Maria Arvidsson
(eds.): Barlaam i nord. Legenden om
Barlaam og Josaphat i den nordiska
medeltidslitteraturen, (Bibliotheca
Nordica 1), Novus forlag, Oslo 2009,
207 pp. Ill.
Sykäri, Venla: Words as Events. Cretan
Mantinádes in Performance and
Composition, (Studia Fennica. Folkloristica 18), Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki s.a., 224 pp. ill.
Klinkmann, Sven-Erik: Från Wantons
till Wild Force. Nya sound i en gränsstad, Gidlunds förlag, Möklinta 2010,
503 pp. Ill.
Venås, Kjell: Hans Ross. Målføregranskar, ordboksskrivar og grammatikar. Novus forlag, Oslo 2009, 264
pp Ill.
Mitchell, Stephen A.: Witchcraft and
Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages,
(The Middle Ages Series), University
of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia
& Oxford 2011, 368 pp.
Wæraas, Øyvind: Brytningstid i Hammerfest 1860–1885. Modernisering –
Religiøsitet – Diskriminering, Novus
forlag, Oslo 2010, 303 pp. Ill.
220
Reviews

Contents - Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur

Transcription

Similar documents

days of our lives days of our lives

1994 - 2000 - . . 1846 . . . Location: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll

Baby Shower Packages - Children`s Museum of Phoenix

Appendix VII

Discover Västerbotten Lapland

TAC Update 2/19/16

PIONEERS AND DRIFTERS, COWBOYS AND INDIANS

A tribute to Norwegian Composer Halfdan Kjerulf Friday, February

Future Vilnius

HP-U-505 MSI.indd