Ethnologia Europaea

PEDESTRIAN ART

Drawing on actor-network theory and theories of performance, this article discusses gift-giving as an expansive form of materializing relationships and delimiting boundaries between nations, regions, organizations and individuals in the wake of migration. Initially, I discuss gift-giving as a way of materializing relationships and building networks. Thereafter, I map out the social life of the Värmland Gift to America, a collection donated by the Värmland province in Sweden to the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis in 1952. I suggest the coinage of heritage gift as a term to describe gifts with dense biographies which contain and enact multiple performances that simultaneously create and recreate the idea of gift-giving in its role as an activity that binds people together. The analysis of the Värmland Gift shows how such a heritage gift kept on the move over time involves not one but a series of performances which have fostered dynamic transatlantic relationships for over fifty years.

This article discusses the first project of the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, dealing with immigrants. It was carried out between 1972 and 1990, and it produced material based on interviews, participant observation, photographs and other written and visual sources. The article first examines why and how this extensive research project was carried out and then discusses the documentation project as performance. The project was an early attempt to document the contemporary lives of people through fieldwork, although the original aim of this pioneering project was merely to create and preserve ethnic identity by documenting “authentic” Finnish characteristics. Thus, it is a good example of changing paradigms in ethnological research.

This article* investigates how Votian identity has been staged and performed in the context of the Votian Museum and in the course of the Luzhicy village feast. Our analysis concentrates on performative aspects of cultural heritage and ethnic identity related to the creation of specific cultural spaces. The Votian Museum is examined as the setting of the village feast, reflecting the display aspect of heritage and identity production. We focus on the key elements – the opening ceremony, the communal meal, and carnivalesque aspects – of the feast, which involve various embodied practices and articulate the manifestations of traditional culture chosen by the organisers of the festival, as well as contemporary enactments of village life.

Drawing on Richard Schechner’s ideas of performance, modern ritual theory (especially the work of Seligman, Weller, Puett and Simon), and Butler’s considerations of performativity, this article considers that the performativity of Nordic Space is located in the tension between ritual and sincerity. Using examples from the 150th televised installment of Allsång på Skansen (a Swedish community sing-along event) I examine how repetition affords us the opportunity to create and re-create a sense of what Nordic could mean in a variety of arenas. Repeating Nordic Space as a blend of memory and re-creation continually reestablishes the refreshing tension between ritual and sincerity.

At noma, a gourmet restaurant in Copenhagen, food is a performative medium. While renewing the Danish cultural heritage it also adds to it a very trendy life. By both regenerating and updating the Nordic Cuisine, the chef gives his unique interpretation of the New Nordic Kitchen. The performative experience is based on the narrative of terroir, ingredients, heritage and authenticity of place. In turn, playful nostalgia arises. Through limiting itself to one place, or region, emphasis is focused on the embodiment of the Nordic heritage. Restaurant noma is simultaneously playing with nostalgia and innovation. Nostalgia provides justification, material and sheer force, while the innovativeness makes the heritage playful, fun, and, above all, tasty.

Maps can play an important role in understanding the close connection between individuals, their lived environment and their story repertoires. The legend genre is particularly related to local environment. Although the original historic-geographic method proposed by Kaarle and Julius Krohn has been largely abandoned by folklorists, the role the map can play in advancing our understanding of the important relationships between teller, told and the environment should not be dismissed. A new approach to folklore repertoire is presented here. This approach makes use of digital archival resources and geographic information systems that allow folklorists to visualize and interpret aspects of folklore closely linked to the environment. This paper presents several small experiments based on the legend collections of Evald Tang Kristensen as an illustration of the power of this new historic-geographic approach.