Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights

4. Cultural Heritage, Human Rights, and Reform Ideologies: The Case of Swedish Folklife Research

C h a p t e r 4 Cultural Heritage, Human Rights, and Reform Ideologies: The Case of Swedish Folklife Research Barbro Klein In Sweden today, politicians, museum employees, members of local tourism boards, academics, and many others tend to use big words when they speak about the protection of cultural heritage: a moral good, a democracy issue of great importance to civil society, a human right. Heritage issues are deeply entangled with hopes to improve integration in a country that during the last few decades has received great numbers of refugees and other immigrants in proportion to its population of nine million. Indeed, today’s expanding heritage project can be seen as a reform ideology for our time. On the following pages, I sketch some of the background to the current concerns with heritage protection and human rights. I do this by examining the contemporary heritage project in Sweden in relationship to the history of folklife research (or ethnology) in the country. Of course, the concerns addressed here are not limited to Sweden; they can be found also elsewhere, albeit in different configurations. Two aspects are of particular interest. One is reform ideology and reform politics. In a way, one could speak about the entire history of Swedish folklife research as a series of engagements in social and moral reforms. Tony Bennett’s Culture: A Reformer’s Science is basic in this context (T. Bennett 1998: 87–106). It could be said that whenever the field has been truly successful, it has 114 Barbro Klein been preoccupied with reforms, sometimes in ways that have not been immediately apparent, neither to the scholars themselves nor to the public at large. A second aspect in focus is that folklife research can be said to have been more clearly implicated in the production of cultural heritage than many other academic undertakings. A main reason for this is that the discipline grew out of the folklife museums or cultural historical museums and their efforts to collect, preserve, and present the culture and arts of the peasant folk (cf. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2007). The field developed because these museums needed researchers to classify and study their growing collections. Sweden was one of the first countries in which this happened on a large scale. Therefore, its folklife research is an interesting case in the study of heritage issues. Creating a National Cultural Repertoire: 1870–1910 Efforts to preserve the arts of the simple folk were begun in Sweden as early as the 1600s. At this time, the country had imperial ambitions and heroic songs and ballads were eagerly collected. A hundred years later, parish ministers and other dignitaries authored massive inventories of local cultures, as was also the case in other European countries. However, I will forgo these early efforts and begin with the years 1870–1910. All over Europe, this was a period of immense social and cultural transformations: agricultural restructuring, population increase, urbanization, industrialization, crop failures, emigration, workers’ movements, temperance movements, struggles to achieve universal suffrage, new communication technologies—and the founding of scholarly disciplines and cultural establishments, such as museums. One could say that having culture was “one of the main duties of a modern state” (Beckman 1998: 17, my translation), and the cultural achievements of nations were repeatedly compared in international congresses and world’s fairs. Artur Hazelius (1833–1901) was internationally the best known of several learned and enthusiastic museum founders and scholars in Sweden at the time. In 1873, he founded the Scandinavian-Ethnographic Collection, which, in 1880 was renamed the Nordic Museum (Nordiska museet), and, in 1891 he established its open-air pendant, Skansen. While, at first, it was not clear what kinds of materials were to be emphasized in the Nordic Museum, it was eventually decided that the museum was to concentrate on the cultural history of Sweden. All groups, social classes, and geographical regions were to be repre- Cultural Heritage, Human Rights, Reform Ideologies 115 sented: the nobility, the urban bourgeoisie, tradespeople, the Sámi, and the peasantry, landed or not. (The growing numbers of urban/industrial workers were not yet considered possibilities.) Yet, in actuality, Hazelius gave priority to peasant (allmoge) culture, and Skansen was organized as a miniature of rural Sweden, containing its natural and cultural varieties: animals, houses, people, and industry typical of most of the provinces from north to south. Yet, Hazelius and other intellectuals did not aim to erase cultural...