The three piece suits and the interest in modern history

Jack Robinson in Miss Fisher's
Murder Mysteries

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

~ L.P. Hartley

When I tell people I am an archaeologist, I usually get an entusiastic answer that they have an interest in history too. This is always wonderful to hear and I start to elaborate about my interest in the Vikings and the Vasa era. Then, however, almost everyone start to retract their answer a bit, saying they meant that they are only really interested in the latest 200 or so years.

This has for a long time made me extremely confused since I do not see any differences between modern history and earlier ones. In fact, I have longed find the 20th century quite boring. It was not until I got into imperialism and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries that I found something that actually interested me in the 19th and 20th century.

Because there are so much talk about fashion in the fandom of the latter, I thought they would enjoy seeing the Sture costumes (photo below), which are the only more or less completely preserved male renaissance costumes in the world today. However, the ones I have shown, have almost always said that they are not the least bit interested, because the perfect male clothing is the three piece suits. They claim that it's the only male clothing that enhance the male body.

There is nothing wrong with liking a modern male suit of course, but I cannot help but thinking there is a clue to people's preferences towards modern history in there.

The Sture costumes

Professionally, I work a lot with postcolonial theory in relation to Vikings as well as colonial narratives of history. There are a lot of things one can say about those theories and I can well understand the criticism that has been raised towards them, but at the same time, I also think they are thoughtprovoking in what they have to say.

Postcolonialism is really an umbrella term for theoretical standpoints based on colonial issues and the most important of the postcolonial theories for this blogpost is the thoughts about the creation of "The Other" that Edward Said deals with in his famous book Orientalism from 1978.

Said's thoughts deals with how the Western world tends to create stereotypes about the area in Asia and Northern Africa which usually goes by the name the Orient and that these stereotypes are created from a Western world view. This means that one has been very biased and onesided in portrayals of the societies and cultures of the Oriend, not least to legitimize imperialism. This has also created a hierarchy of cultures where the Western world has always been on the highest level and seen as the measurement for all other societies.

There is a clear tendency to view the Enlightenment as a breaking-point in history. A time where the modern society was created for real and then it became truely modern with the industrialism. Modernism is also very much based in the here and now and tend to have a small interest in the past. Can this be why we have a harder time to related to earlier history? From a Swedish perspective, there are Vikings of course, but the "real" history is often said to start with the king Gustav Vasa in what is known as the Early modern period (or the Premodern Period). The name of the period itself is quite interesting in this case too since it seems to depart in modernism and is often more or less seen as a long runway towards the Enlightenment.

This sort of shallow view of time is evident in Swedish ethnologists's interest too. Inger Lövkrona does not even go as far as Gustav Vasa in the 16th century and instead claim that the the premodern timeperiod starts with the Swedish Empire Era (Stormaktstid) in the 17th century. She also describes the premodern time as being qualitatively and structuraly different than the modern one in her article Hierarki och makt - den förmoderna familjen som genusrelation (1999:20).

I love ethnology and anthropology's perspective of societies and cultures, but for an archaeologist, the shallow time frame appears very strange and evolutionistic. Lövkrona's description of premodern cultures however is interesting in that it claims that our own society appears (suddenly from what it seems) from the industrialisation. That means it is not until then we can relate to people in the past.

I started this blog post with a quote from L.P. Hartley about historical individuals being different in the same way that foreign cultures are for us today. This has been paraphrased by Douglas Adams who said that people in the past is living in a foreign country since they act like us. I think they are both right and I think it is really important for us to realize that people in the past are both like us and not like us at the same time. Just as people of different cultures are for us today and I think one can learn a lot about this similarities and differences among living people of today, but studying them in the past. In the global world we live in, we need to be able to feel empathy and connections to people differnt from ourselves as well as for those similar to us. And it is not so easy to dismiss the more distant past. Quick breakups in history are seldom as quick when studied more closely and it all has to do with ones perspective. Modernity (and the Enlightenment) wanted to see itself as the beginning of something new and totally different and the older past was therefore viewed as less valued and an "Other" was created about it. A perspective we still seem to have today.

Children's scribbles?

I recently found what looks like children's scribbles in Kristina Gyllenstierna's Book of Hours from the 16th century (collage to the left) and I could not feel more delighted. They lived 500 years ago in a completely different world than myself, but I feel such a strange connection to them and the fact that some behaviours are really timeless.

But what about the three piece suits then? Is that not a matter of different taste? Well, taste is also quite a lot connected to culture even though we do not think about it so much. The three piece suit is not only a piece of clothing either. It is, and has been since the industrialisation, a symbol of power and status.

And the Sture costumes can also show a lot of their owners's figures. Svante Sture's for example indicate that he was a short and stout little man. His story is a bit tragic because he lost most of his family due to the wars between Denmark and Sweden and spent his early childhood in Danish prison where a lot of his family and friends died. This has me wondering if he was not malnourished which often results in children ending up shorter than they should otherwise. He might also have had an eating disorder because malnourishment in children often ends up with them getting a disrupted sense of food. Despite all this, I cannot help wondering if there ever has been a piece of fashion enhancing "masculinity" as well as the codpiece...

• Lövkrona, Inger 1999. Hierarki och makt - den förmoderna familjen som genusrelation, i: Familj och kön. Etnologiska perspektiv. red: B. Meurling, B. Lundgren & I. Lövenkrona, Lund, s19-39

A Sami hat and how it affected my view of culture

Photo by Elisabeth Eriksson, Nordiska museet

I have not posted in awhile due to a deadline of a grad school application on Monday (August 1st 2016). My PhD project involve Viking colonialism and therefore the concept of culture is at its center. It has a long tradition in archaeology and has from time to time been slightly misused, but more on that later, because first I want to tell you a little story.

The hat in the photo above is part of the Sami exhibition Sápmi at Nordiska museet (Nordic Museum) in Stockholm and it had a great influence on my view of cultural interactions. It is a traditional Samish hat intended to be borne by a little girl and it dates to the 1930's (or maybe 1940's, I do not remember the exact date the guide told us.). It is traditional in every way, but an older lady taking the same tour as myself seemed really surprised by the images from Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) in the front. She claimed it was not Sami, but the tour guide informed her that the Sami people did not live in any kind of vacuum either in the 1930's or today. They are just as much a part of the modern world as anyone else and like we are influenced by other cultures, so are they.

I had been influenced by Postcolonial Theory before this incident, so I was used to the hybrid concept of culture that they talk about, but I think this was the time when I realised how to define the term and also how it probably is best to view it.

The concept of culture as we know it today is actually to a greater extent a product of European imperialism and the foundation of the nation state in the 19th century. The archaeologist Bruce G. Trigger has made a very good overview both on the origin and development of the concept in his book A History of Archaeological Thought (2nd edition 2006, Cambride) which I found to be fruitful both for archaeologists and others. With time it was combined with Charles Darwin's theories about evolution given the concept a biological foundation. The borders of a culture was also equalled to the borders of a Nation State proclaiming its origin in a homogenous, biological entity (or a race). The biological evolution shown by Darwin was also used as model for cultural evolution and they were classified in a hierarchical structure from simple to complex (Of course with Western cultures on top!). (In a post from about a month ago I discussed how this imperialistic perspective also has shaped our view of the Stone Age.) This "biological" definition of culture has really had some terrible consequences throughout the last 200 years and I think it is about time that we talked about this issue.

What most people do not know is that Sweden was actually sort of "the inventor" of Scientific Racism as a academic discipline. The first institute in the world was opened in Uppsala in 1922 and was then spread across the world, not least to Nazi-Germany. So it has had really terrible consequences indeed...

Back to the Sami children's hat from the photo above. It is one of those artefacts that really can show us how cultures interact. It is made according to Sami tradition, but its use of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs makes it unique because it shows how traditions changes in the meeting with influences from some place else. Snow White was a popular children's movie when it first came out in 1937 just as any Disney film of today is. Therefore it should not be so surprising that even a Sami girl has seen it and probably liked it (Why would the maker otherwise include it in the hat?). To me it shows that cultures is much better seen as entirely social. I think it is ongoing negotiations of what works socially in different settings. Anything that carries a social value will be picked up and only the phenomena that looses their social value will disappear. It gives us a much more flexible and open-minded view of cultures which hopefully will not cause any trouble for anyone in the future.

And on that note: To me the biggest problem with Snow White on the Sami hat is that Snow White seems to be much smaller than the dwarfs...


Photo from http://digitaltmuseum.se/011023761482?query=m%C3%B6ssa%20samisk&pos=7