Ethnologia Europaea

While heritage is almost by definition understood as fragile, vulnerable and in need of protection, this article argues that it is also a powerful cultural force in contemporary society. The small community of Borre, south of Oslo in Norway, is used as a case to investigate how heritage has the power to invade and colonise, and how it has the capacity to create new meanings and redefine social relations. A triad of concepts – expansion, intensification and entanglement – is proposed as a tool for investigating these processes. The article argues that heritage processes “devour” the local culture, turning sites, activities and objects into a Viking mode and becoming a dominant key of understanding.

Trousers have traditionally been men’s clothing that women have not been allowed to wear. In this article, I study the history of women’s wearing of trousers in the twentieth-century Finnish context by analysing women’s own memories and experiences of the trouser trend. My research material consists of written reminiscences, which I use, first, to reconstruct the social and cultural factors that framed women’s choices. Second, I approach their personal preferences and choices by analysing their narrative identities in the context of dress. My analysis shows that the cultural norms, conventions and expectations about a proper dress were crucial for adopting a new fashion trend. The most important factor in the choice of apparel was, however, the sensual, embodied experiences of wearing clothes. 

The European Commission has recently identified cultural heritage as one of the focus areas for EU cultural diplomacy. The article explores EU cultural diplomacy that deals with cultural heritage and discusses the concept of heritage diplomacy based on a discourse analysis of interviews with EU officials and heritage practitioners working at sites awarded the European Heritage Label. How do EU officials and heritage practitioners understand the role of cultural heritage for cultural diplomacy and what kinds of discourses do they use in talking about it? My analysis indicates that heritage diplomacy means different things for EU officials and heritage practitioners. Their discourses on the uses of cultural heritage for diplomacy construct divergent understandings of cultural heritage and heritage diplomacy, and the power relations between these understandings.

In this article we explore relations between personal, collective, private, and public dimensions of remembrance in the context of the Ingrians – The Forgotten Finns exhibition presented at the National Museum of Finland in 2020 by analyzing it through the lenses of memory, heritage, and tradition. We argue that while promoting remembrance of allegedly absent pasts and experiences of a forgotten group of people, the exhibition simultaneously relied on and reinterpreted earlier nationalistic projects related to heritage and folklore connected to Ingria. Moreover, while the National Museum of Finland enabled the heritagization and mobilization of the exhibition’s message, the exhibition reciprocally supported the message of transformation that the museum arguably wished to convey about itself.