Göteborgs födelse - Göteborgs stadsmuseum

Poster of Göteborgs födelse

During my stay in Göteborg recently, I had time to visit Göteborgs stadsmuseum's (Gothenburg City Museum) new exhibition Göteborgs födelse (The Birth of Gothenburg) about life in the new town Göteborg during the 17th century.

Already when I first arrived by train, the day before my museum visit, I saw the poster (seen here to the left) and thought it looked interesting and cool. However, I was a bit sceptical since the museum could have put all the money into the marketing, but I decided to try it out anyway and I was not disappointed.

The symbol of the exhibition is a heart-shaped pendant made out of silver was found in a female grave dating to the first half of the 16th century in one of Göteborg's predecessors, Nya Lödöse. The town is situated in the district today known as Gamlestaden and has been the subject of a massive archaeological excavation in the last couple of years (The project has its own web site which can be found here. The site is in Swedish, but you can use Google translate in the upper left corner.). The excavation has revealed a lot of burials (many more than expected and what the written sources say should be there), but this one particular grave was excavated in 1916 and the skeleton reburied at Östra kyrkogården in Göteborg.

The exhibition catalogue

The heart-pendant has an interesting story which is told in the exhibition and also in the exhibition catalogue. It is decorated with symbols and letters and a coat of arms that might belong to a Dutch family. Inside it was a small packet of several layers of fabric wrapped around parts of plants. Pollen analyses showed that cornflowers and heather were at least part of the packet.

I just love it when museums really emphasizes one or more artefacts from their collections in their exhibitions. Yes, this might be because I am an archaeologist and my main focus is the material culture. We are most of the time unaware of how we are affected by materialities. How symbolical they can be, how we interact with other living beings (even they materialities mostly) through them and how we basically keep ourselves grounded in reality with the help of them. (This is really a subject that deserves its own entry some day, but I cannot help talking a little about it here as well.) Artefacts also often make history come alive in an extremely physical way. It can over-bridge time and both geographical and cultural space and can have us reflect on life both in the past, the present and the future. Emphasizing on one or more objects in an exhibition puts the focus on that particular object and it encourage you to reflect. This is really the case with the heart pendant in the Göteborgsfödelse exhibition.

The first thing that meets you when you walk into the exhibition is the sound of heart beats. It engages you and makes you curious. In the rest of the exhibition, I miss this engaging of other senses than sight. I really have nothing negative to say about the visual aspect of the exhibition. It really is great. The texts are mostly not too long and it is interesting when they tell stories about different inhabitants of the town.

The exhibition stands in stark contrast to the one about the 18th century. It is obvious that they have thought a little about making the material and information fun. Some attempts at interactivities have been made, but it really does not work nearly as well as the new exhibition. This is particularly sad because the material from 18th century Göteborg is just amazing. This was the time of the Swedish East India Trading Company and the museum is even lodged into its house so there are real potentials in the material of the time period. Did you know that the biggest collection of Chinese 18th century china that is known from outside of China is in Göteborg? I cannot find my notes from the lecture about it now, but there are tens of thousands only from the museum's courtyard and than from the East Indiaman Götheborg who sank as it ran aground in the Göteborg archipelago on its way home from its third journey to China 12 September 1745. Based on the knowledge of this and all the other amazing things the museum has in its collections, I do hope they make an exhibition just as amazing as Göteborgs födelse about that century too soon.

Playground, Etnografiska museet

Today I visited Etnografiska museet in Stockholm with a friend. They have a new temporary exhibition called Playground which was about norms and about questioning them. I had been looking forward to it. I was at the museum only a couple of days before it opened and it looked promising. Therefore I have to admit that I was somewhat disappointed. Not that it was a bad exhibition per see. It was just that I had expected a little bit more.

So, what was good about it? I really liked that it explained what a norm is and how it is used in society both in the past and present. I liked how it showed that not everyone will be able to live up to the norms and that it is nothing wrong with that. I also enjoyed how it got you to question norms and asked you how privileged you are. It was also good that they had made signs telling about norms and norm breakers in their permanent exhibitions.

Despite all this I never got engaged in the exhibition for real. It was interesting, not least to read about HBTQ people in Vietnam and see the photos of the colour scheme of people's skin and everything. However, there were just so many longer texts. I would have loved to read people's stories and all that, but there were just so many of them. I think it would have been better if they had made shorter texts and refered to a website for more studies. Some of the interactive "tests" were also a little hard to understand.

The exhibition was not bad. I think I just had hoped it would be more. I love questioning norms and my own worldview! Maybe it was because I had read the opening sign (shown in the photo above) beforehand or maybe it was because I liked the Vodou exhibition they had a couple of years ago so much. I just got the feeling that the exhibition could have been so much more.

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