On Parade: Making Heritage in Lindsborg, Kansas (review)

On Parade is an ethnography of Swedish American identities in the town of Lindsborg, Kansas. Gradén approaches her topic as an ethnologist and a native Swede. As such, she is very well suited to explore the processes of heritage making in Lindsborg, a town that bills itself as “Little Sweden, USA.” Specifically, Gradén looks at how parades and the townsfolk’s preparations for them work to create Swedish American folk identity within the Kansas landscape during Svensk Hyllningsfest, an ethnic festival in Lindsborg. The festival that she examines is ostensibly a celebration of the Swedish immigrants who founded the town, and Gradén does a good job of problematizing this overt interpretation by delving into the historical development not only of the town but also of Svensk Hyllningsfest itself. The festival, which began in 1941, is situated within the immigrant history of Kansas as well as within the larger context of the run-up to American involvement in World War II. Gradén also discusses scholarly examinations of Swedish American identity in folklore and other disciplines. By exploring in some depth the historical contexts in which Svensk Hyllningsfest began and through which it evolved, Gradén gives the reader ample reason to trust her interpretations.

The book is rooted in folklore theory, including Roger Abrahams’s concept of the festival as a display event in which the folk enact their group identity, Richard Bauman’s performance theory, and Victor Turner’s and Barbro Klein’s ideas on festival as ritual setting. As an ethnologist, Gradén is comfortable incorporating more straightforward anthropological theorists, including seminal texts such as Turner’s The Ritual Process (Aldine de Gruyter, [1969] 1995), as well as more recent works from the likes of Kirin Narayan. Gradén’s interpretive approach is laid out clearly and understandably, despite the broad range of theorists from which she draws. For anyone contemplating this text for their classroom, however, the complex theory does skew the book more toward a graduate than an undergraduate audience. While the theoretical discussions are well constructed and presented, they would likely prove too thick a morass for a typical undergraduate class.

Gradén’s treatment of theory, while not a problem in and of itself, makes clear that the project began as a doctoral dissertation. Transforming a dissertation into a book is always tricky, and Gradén’s text shows its roots more than most. Each chapter begins and ends with expository statements, such as “This chapter is devoted to . . . ” (p. 57), “ . . . in this chapter I analyze . . . ” (p. 87), and “In this chapter, I will show . . . ” (p. 147). The first two chapters read very much like the introduction to a doctoral thesis, with subsections explaining the background and purpose of the study, as well as lengthy discussions of fieldwork methodologies and ethics. Examinations of such topics are always welcome within the field of folklore, of course, but here they prove distracting. An anecdote from the second chapter of an informant who “aggressively advised” Gradén to disregard the opinions of some other townspeople (pp. 42–3) was a welcome glimpse into the realities of the fieldwork on which the book is based. I felt myself wanting more of this humanizing narrative throughout the book, but the anecdote quickly yields to more discussion of methodology. While a lengthy examination of fieldwork methods is a necessary part of a dissertation, the extent of it here seemed to be overkill for a book that aims to be an ethnographic portrait.

Chapters 3 through 5 set up the analysis that follows by providing a thorough discussion of historical, geographic, and demographic context. When the ethnography begins, the reader is well prepared. The later portions of the book (primarily chapters 6 and 7) really dig into an examination of Svensk Hyllningsfest, and Gradén’s ethnography is admirable. The middle part of the book is easily the most impressive and will...