Performing Nordic Heritage: Everyday Practices and Institutional Culture ed. by Peter Aronsson and Lizette Gradén (review)

Aiming to "scrutinize the creation of Nordic heritage as a performative action" (p. 4) and to examine how "Nordic spaces emerge at the intersection of the global and the local from tensions between the institutional and vernacular" (p. 4), the editors of Performing Nordic Heritage: Everyday Practices and Institutional Culture have gathered a multidisciplinary array of papers. The book forms part of a broader series of edited works, The Nordic Experience, which explores, from various perspectives, "the negotiation of which territories, activities, objects, traits or ideals should qualify as Nordic" (p. ii).

The premise of Performing Nordic Heritage is ambitious in seeking to foster an understanding of how images of Norden are perceived, represented, and performed not only in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, but also in the United States and the Baltic countries. Further, the book is devoted to examining, through a few case studies, how a transnational dimension of Nordic identity has offered, and continues to make available, "arenas for negotiating cultural understandings of community in specific public contexts" (p. 301).

Drawing on the methodology of performance and heritage studies, the book's editors interpret heritage as performance—not solely as a vestige or conscious reminder of the past. They emphasize that the enactment of such performances plays a significant role in shaping both society and identity. Within this framework, scholars from the fields of cultural studies, history, and folkloristics were chosen to provide a range of perspectives and topics for this volume. The intended audience is wide and includes cultural historians, museum professionals, policymakers and theorists, and those interested in the fields of heritage, ethnology, and folkloristics.

The introductory essay of Performing Nordic Heritage provides a brief historical sketch of the development of the geographical and physical concept of Norden forged during the past 700 years. The authors explain that it was primarily during the "twentieth century that the Nordic countries reached beyond territorial boundaries to include numerous cultural and educational networks" (p. 9). Initiatives intended to foster Nordic culture and cooperation expanded into movements not only situated within governmental institutions but also in museums, the world of high art, and other cultural realms. In this volume, the editors feature examples of Nordic heritage-making within these contexts performed both in and outside of the physical boundaries of the Nordic countries and representing both public and private settings. The chapters range from exploring specific expressive practices chosen from Nordic life and the maintenance of Nordic heritage in the United States, to the negotiation of identity in the planning of international Nordic commemorations and jubilees and the role of museums—both in the Nordic countries and abroad—in the representation of Nordic identity.

The volume's initial chapters focus on examples of everyday life that represent distinctive aspects of Nordic identity. Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch's chapter features an analysis of the popular Finnish form of nature walking with poles referred to as "Nordic walking" and also of the recently revitalized concept of pilgrimage or "pilgrim tourism" in the Nordic countries. Both of these popular trends are described as playing "an integral role in the processes of negotiating and performing Nordic identities" (p. 48). In the next chapter, Katla Kjartansdóttir and Kristinn Schram present a fascinating ethnographic analysis of Icelanders living in Denmark, describing how they negotiate and communicate their identity amongst themselves and with Danes through food, festival traditions, and child-rearing practices.

The second segment of papers covers international images and expressions of Nordic heritage and identity that involve nostalgia about the past—their forms of representation and also their contradictions. Hanne Pico Larsen focuses on the icons of Danish heritage as represented by the structures of a Danish American windmill and vikinghjem ("Viking home") in Elk Horn, Iowa, and ponders the question of how long such visual memories of heritage can continue to embody a Danish...