Artur Hazelius and the ethnographic display of the Scandinavian peasantry: a study in context and appropriation

Artur Hazelius (1833-1901), founder of the Nordiska Museet and the Skansen Open-Air Museum, was a pioneering figure in the practice of ethnographic display in Europe. Hazelius achieved Europe-wide recognition following his presentation of Swedish and Scandinavian peasant ethnography at the Paris Uni...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:European review of history = Revue européene d'histoire 2012-04, Vol.19 (2), p.229-248
Main Author: DeGroff, Daniel Alan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
1878
Anthropology
Arthur Hazelius
ethnographic display
Ethnographic research
European history
Exhibits
exposition universelle
France
Hazelius, Artur
History of anthropology
Museums
Narratives
Nationalism
Peasantry
Peasants
Perception
Political activism
Press
Rhetoric
Scandinavia
Social representations
Sweden
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Summary:Artur Hazelius (1833-1901), founder of the Nordiska Museet and the Skansen Open-Air Museum, was a pioneering figure in the practice of ethnographic display in Europe. Hazelius achieved Europe-wide recognition following his presentation of Swedish and Scandinavian peasant ethnography at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878, where his displays were reviewed positively in the international press. This paper argues that the significance of the Hazelian ethnographic project was embedded in overlapping contextual frames with centres in Stockholm and Paris. If the displays most readily spoke to a general concern with the decline of traditional life as rooted in the countryside, they arguably took on other, different and occasionally conflicting meanings as they were moved from one exhibitionary context to another. Whereas in Stockholm the ethnographic displays were inscribed in the conciliatory rhetoric of Scandinavism, the exhibitionary setting of the exposition universelle imposed an interpretative frame defined by the logic of a competitive nationalism. For Nordic audiences, the scenes reflected the positive historical significance of the peasantry in the unfolding narrative of Scandinavian political modernity; for the French audience, however, those same scenes were either applauded for their life-likeness or seen as reflective of the ethnographic richness of the 'kingdom of Sweden'.
ISSN:1350-7486
1469-8293
DOI:10.1080/13507486.2012.662947