Ethnologia Europaea

Heritagelore and an Introduction to the Thematic Issue on Culture and Heritage under Construction

“The Swede from North Dakota,” a narrative folksong or ballad performed in a broken-English “Scandihoovian” dialect, has circulated in differing versions throughout America’s Upper Midwest since the early 1900s. Chronicling the misadventures of an itinerant Swedish farm hand, it has been: performed by vaudevillians, lumberjacks, hobos, labor activists, radio entertainers, and women’s groups; published in newspapers, reminiscences, and songbooks; recorded commercially; repurposed in folksong revivals; and documented yet never studied by folklorists. Fully considered, the song exemplifies ways in which immigrant agrarian and industrial workers simultaneously sustained their respective evolving ethnic/local identities; assimilated elements imposed by larger American institutions; and forged an emergent creolized regional cultural blend by creatively fusing varied Old and New World elements into expressive folk forms.

This article examines an audio recording with a Roma family made by the collector Arvid Andersson in Sweden, in the early 1950s. The aim of this article is to unfold this jointly constructed conversation between the collector and the Roma family members. The analysis of the conversation shows a delicate interplay between the Roma family and the interviewer, and we especially stress the agency of the family in the process of negotiating belonging, challenging a discourse about the Roma as a passive group merely subjected to discrimination and stereotyping. The foreignness of the Roma was continuously stressed, while the Roma opposed being positioned as foreigners and tried to clarify that they did belong in Sweden and contributed to society. 

Inspired by Barbro Klein’s research on silences and exclusions in the Swedish folklife sphere, this article explores how diversity is handled at the new Estonian National Museum, which opened in 2016. While its permanent exhibition Encounters makes the bold claim of representing the Estonian territory and its inhabitants from the Stone Age to the present day, a closer look at its contents and design suggests that it does so by repeating, sometimes inadvertently, broader societal silences and stereotypes surrounding ethnic minorities past and present and by sustaining essentialist notions of ethnocultural discreteness. Preference is given to historical minorities already included in the Estonian folklife sphere. 

This article examines the role of women in the construction of modern Swedish subjectivity through their participation in both quotidian activities and their networks of relations. Taking the work of Barbro Klein as a point of departure, I argue that Swedish women of the fin de siècle worked within overlapping and interconnected women’s networks through which they fashioned their own responses to the pressures of modernity within particular configurations of gender. Combining the social and political, formal and informal, labor and leisure, they created spaces for alternate cultural, commercial and social responses. These spaces from which femininity was lived as a positionality in discourse and social practice challenge the false dichotomies of past–future and tradition–modernity which have been central to the disciplinary narrative of folklore studies.

Barbro Klein’s “The Testimony of the Button” is still, fifty years after it appeared, a fundamental study of legends and legend scholarship. Inspired by Klein’s article, I analyze legends about “lord and lady” Margrethe (1353–1412), who reigned for decades as the effective ruler of the medieval union of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Proceeding through various groups of related legends, I show how these legends were adapted to Margrethe’s anomalous status as a female war leader, including their cross-fertilization with robber legends and the use of a ruse usually associated with male protagonists. This article ends by indicating the importance of place within history as articulated in legends.

This paper explores the dynamics of agency, media andauthority in the maintenance and construction of the folk cultural sphere– that is, asociety’s generalized perception and understanding of traditional culture. Thephenomenon is explored through a series of cases, organized chronologically, on:medieval manuscript technologies and Snorri Sturluson’s Edda; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century written representationsof Sámi; a nineteenth-century living ethnographic exhibition of Sámi; currentfieldwork documenting Rotenese and Tetun traditions in Indonesia; acommunity-driven living ethnographic exhibition on the island of Java. The finaldiscussion takes an overview of the perspectives gained from the individualcases to consider their broader implications.