Ethnology. The Adaptability and Continuity of a Discipline
This article discusses the development throughtime and space of ethnology as a multifaceted disciplinaryfield. The objective of the article,however, is to challenge possible pre-assumptionsof ethnology as an incoherent i.e. variable and inconstant discipline, due to national limitations andtheoretical and methodological responsiveness, byproposing some core aspects regarding focalpoints,perspectives and methods that may beconsidered as prominent and unifying amongstethnologists both in Sweden and abroad. The articleargues for a general and continuing disciplinarianfocus on culture as a pluralistic, complexand individual-based phenomenon, as well as fundamentalinterest in the functions, social structures,constructions and experiences of cultures.Furthermore, the article describes how both earlierand later generations of ethnologists in generalhave chosen to study culture based on a selectionof recurring perspectives that comprise boththe intangible and tangible aspects of culture, aswell as the spatial and social contexts in whichcultures are formed and maintained. Finally, thearticle highlights how different types of ethnologicaldata are collected and analyzed via a combinationof constantly developed methods of culturalanalysis, though rooted in a disciplinarian tradition. In conclusion, despite a continuous progressionand adjustments within ethnology in regardto perspectives and methods over time and space,this has more often resulted in additions ratherthan replacements. For this reason, it seems relevantto define ethnology as a coherent discipline,designated by both adaptation and continuity.
Ideologization, manifestation and community making
- Processes of heritage production in two local communities in transition
As the local industry has taken on an increasingly marginalized role in post-industrial small towns, like Surahammar and Timrå, in Central and Northern Sweden, an industrial past has emerged as the more valuable politically, economically but also socio-culturally, to nurture, preserve and identify with in these local industrial communities that undergo transition. This article aims to analyze local heritage production as a use and representation of history. Empirically resting on data collection and analysis of primary and secondary sources, comprising interviews, observations, archives and contextual literature, the article argues that local post-industrial heritage production may involve continuation as well as alterations of processes started in the past industrial society. Also, it comprises local adaptation as well as adjustments on heritage discourses. In conclusion, despite of local differences similarities may, as shown in Surahammar and Timrå, indeed occur in both design and content. This involves a pre-dominance of “non-professional” producers and including and excluding representations of places and people. Furthermore, local heritage provide combined political, economic and socio-cultural arenas of different ideologies as well as sites for creation of shared values and evoking emotions of belonging in diversified communities. In Surahammar and Timrå this has been done recurrently with the use of effective homogenization strategies within the field of heritage, i.e. by emphasizing sufficiently remote pasts to induce temporary but nevertheless efficient “classless and rootless” unity in pride of local place and values.
Two old houses by the sea have made me an enthusiastic do-it-yourself man, performing manual work of different kinds. Switching between writing and manual DIY can be experienced as moving between separate realities, where body and mind are employed in different ways. Using autoethnography as a starting point I observe myself performing manual tasks, using various tools. Being an acting subject as well as an observed object I then try to capture complex events in written words. In this process the differences as well as the similarities between building and writing become clearer. For example, the questions of involvement, troubleshooting and aesthetics are crucial in both activities. You have to be mentally present, think hard and be concerned about the look of your result. The reality of manual work is linguistically organized. It is symbolically constructed, learned and communicated. Accomplishing DIY-projects you also need to acquire a tacit knowledge residing in your body. This tension or cooperation between hands, tools and brain seems to be more evident in manual work than in writing. Another difference is that in DIY there are ready-made answers. While building, for example a wood shed, mostly is a linear process where you pretty well in advance know the result, writing can take you almost anywhere. But in the end, switching between these activities, using different tools and senses, has integrated them with each other in everyday life as repeated struggles to create something valid.
Between Contemporary Art and Cultural Analysis Artistic research is an alternative way of producing different kinds of knowledge, inside or outside of the Academy. This is accomplished either by producing investigative artworks or by writing a doctoral dissertation about your own work. For cultural researchers the artistic methods utilized in these processes are both familiar and challenging. Ordinary ethnography is mixed with more unpredictable experiments. This article presents several contemporary artworks, such as sculptures, films, dances, installations and performances that explore various aspects of reality. One question asks what is to be learnt from these works. Another question is what an open exchange between artists and academic researchers could attain. Especially four methodological devices are pointed out as interesting subjects for discussion. The first one is that a lot of artists are living experimentally; they make use of themselves both as actors and as research objects. Second, contemporary artworks are approaching the theme of materiality in very tangible ways. Third, much of contemporary art is emotional – even when it is called conceptual – when it comes to the creation, the forms of presentation, and the influence on the spectator. When the artists systematically implement wild whims they exploit their spontaneity professionally. Finally, many artists have the gift to find and show surprising meanings in ordinary life. How do they accomplish that?
On gender and the ideology of the celebration of Christmas in Swedish art turn of the century 1900: Elsa Beskow, Carl Larsson and Jenny Nyström
Contemporary art is not depicting the Christmas celebration in the same way as during the turn of the century 1900. In Sweden artists as Elsa Beskow, Carl Larsson and Jenny Nyström made illustrations of Christmas that also became part of the celebration itself, through then new media such as Christmas cards and illustrated magazines. It was a modern, urban, middle-class audience that consumed the images, but the motifs were looking back to a rural past. Christmas turned both patriarchal in connecting the family father with Christmas presents, foods and material richness. It also turned nationalistic when a Swedish version of the Santa Clause was invented from the traditional ”tomte” (gnome) who originally was guarding and working at the farms. Especially in the work of Nyström the images of Christmas celebrations was both connected to a presumed historical past as well as a modern future. References to pagan past, present Christianity and modern lifestyles collaborates in making a typically Swedish Christmas. Even more interesting, these century-old images are still part of Swedish Christmas celebrations. In a time when family constellations are changing and Sweden is turning more multicultural, we hold on to a traditional ideal of how to make a perfect family Christmas. There is a timeless quality in Christmas celebrations and a sense of a global community when we imagine that everybody else in the nation or globally are doing the exact same thing as we do right now. There are few things experienced more normal and working normative than families and home life.
Contemporary art is not depicting the Christmas celebration in the same way as during the turn of the century 1900. In Sweden artists like Elsa Beskow, Carl Larsson and Jenny Nyström made Christmas illustrations that also became part of the celebration itself, through then new media, such as Christmas cards and illustrated magazines. It was a modern, urban, middle-class audience that consumed the images, but the motifs were looking back to a rural past. Christmas turned both patriarchal in connection to the family father with Christmas presents, foods and material richness. It also turned nationalistic when a Swedish version of the Santa Claus was invented from the traditional "tomte" (gnome) who originally was guarding and working at the farms. Especially in the work of Nyström the images of Christmas celebrations were both connected to a presumed historical past as well as a modern future. References to a pagan past, present Christianity and modern lifestyles collaborated in making a typical Swedish Christmas. Even more interesting, these century-old images are still part of Swedish Christmas celebrations. In a time when family constellations are changing and Sweden is turning more multicultural, we hold on to a traditional ideal of how to make a perfect family Christmas. There is a timeless quality in Christmas celebrations and a sense of a global community when we imagine that everybody else in the nation or globally are doing the exact same thing as we do right now. There are few things experienced more normal and working normative than families and home life.
News reporters have been frequent travellers during the latest hundred and fifty years. The aim of this article is to analyse how some wellknown American and Swedish reporters have constructed and represented their identity as travelling reporters in their own writings and how they have been represented by others. The reporters discussed are Henry Stanley, Nellie Bly, Mauritz Rubenson, Ida Bäckmann, Tora Garm, Knut Stubbendorff, and Barbro Alving. These reporters often represented themselves as heroic adventurers; much like explorers, knights and detectives. The reporter stories are seen as parts of the construction of a specific reporter-identity. The formation of the reporter identity can be seen as a dialectic process where representations of the reporter and fictional characters tend to influence and run into each other. One interesting example is the Swedish author and journalist Knut Stubbendorff’s novel Den flygande (1928), about a news reporter in Stockholm; and the autobiographical Ishavsreportaget (1928) about his own adventures as a reporter. The journalistic character in these books, fictional or real, are described and presented in much the same way, as a hero on an endless news hunt with only one direction – to get the big scoop. My point here is that these narratives and representations must be analysed seriously, instead of being rejected as fake images that don’t tell us anything about the real life of working reporters. The stories of the heroic reporters show that the biggest news that these reporters deliver was often the news about their own adventures. Drawing from studies in public science, the self-representations of the reporters can be seen as an important part of what makes media reports legitimate and trustworthy.
This article describes and analyses foodways and media in everyday life, through collections of recipes and media material in private manuscript cookbooks. The research is based on about 200 private manuscript cookbooks from the south of Sweden, created from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. This period saw great changes in foodways as well as media use. Many people moved from the countryside to the cities, new technologies were introduced in the food industry as well as in private kitchens and new ingredients and dishes were imported. Newspapers and weeklies became guides in this new world of food, and the recipes in manuscript cookbooks were often collected from the papers.
The article shows that early cookbooks were compilations of recipes from the collector’s social networks of family, friends and neighbours. Gradually the sources of the recipes shifted from social networks to media. Recipes in the cookbooks from the 20th century were often cut or copied from papers or taken from radio or television. These recipes introduced new ingredients and foreign dishes, but also traditional everyday recipes and basic kitchen tasks. Recipes from the media helped the collectors to adopt new ways of cooking, but also cooking in its most basic form, e.g. how to fry. The collecting women did not learn as much from their mothers and social network, they got their recipes and skills from papers and published cookbooks.
Do Swedes love and adore natural scenery, perhaps even more than other people do. In this essay, the authors argue that nature – and certain images of a typically Swedish nature – has indeed played a vital role in Swedish cultural history, especially since the end of the nineteenth century. However, this has not been the case due to some "inherent element" within the Swedish population but is rather a result of a "collective learning process" at the social level. According to the authors, this learning process was initially connected to nationalism, industrialisation and modernisation and has over time been driven, shaped and mediated by many different institutions and practices in society, such as natural science, landscape painting, wildlife tourism, winter sports, nature protection, literature, environmental politics and agencies, and eventually business and marketing. Furthermore, the authors discuss similarities as well as differences between the modern environmental history and view of nature in Sweden and the other Nordic countries.
With the ‘new museology’ in the 1990s, a paradigm shift took place, and more critical and reflexive museology emerged. Characteristic of this was an increased focus on the museum activities themselves, their conditions, practices and ideological consequences. This paper examines the effects that the new museology has had on Swedish museums, especially in the light of the era of post-truth that has led to a questioning of traditional authorities, including museums. What forms of ideal of knowledge, ambitions and reflexivity characterize museums of today? What does the new museology mean in relation to the era of post-truth?
The study is based on qualitative interviews with Swedish museum directors, and the findings show that they apply different forms of reflexivity to describe the museums’ activities (epistemological, ontological and critical reflexivity). The findings also illustrate that the reflexive museology is problematic in relation to the era of post-truth, because it can reinforce the tendencies that it claims to counteract.
About the museums social commission and the museological analysis
The article begins with the question if the traditional role of the museum is to prevent the disappearance of material evidence of culture, in order to make exhibitions and visualise “culture”. The theme of material vs immaterial culture is discussed and the question of the status of the material traces on social identity and cultural meaning making is raised. In order to discuss this in a comprehensive way the starting point is the museum staff’s common identity: the museum business as “practical”. This practical identity connects to the museum’s task to collect and preserve. However, when we look at the task of conveying knowledge, with the exhibition as a venue, then it is hardly the practical competence that makes a museum successful or not. The major claim for the museum’s advantage to other institutions in society is that it represents unique resourses for knowledge and cultural identity. This self-image is sometimes reproduced without any reflections, even in museological analyses, of which I give examples. When the museums social commission is currently under negotiation, in relation to postmodern, global, multicultural and economic influence, it is important to deal with both the internal “museum culture” and external museolocial paradigmatic interpretation, in order to achieve any possibility of change. In accordance with Elaine Hooper-Greenhill, I argue that the museum indeed can be a place of cultural self knowledge and meaning making, but this presupposes that the museum staff is open for broader theoretical approaches and are willing to implement this into their exhibitions. With an example from The Museum of National Antiquities [Historiska Museet, Stockholm] exhibition Prehistories II, I argue that museums are in a state of deconstructive change, which first and foremost challenge the idea that the museum’s main task is to deal with artefact preservation. Secondly, change will also require exhibition curators that have a scientific or at least educated knowledge about the conditions behind historical interpretation.