Making cultural history New perspectives on Western heritage Edited by Anna Källén nordic academic press Making cultural v10.indd 3 2013-08-26 15:54 his volume is simultaneously published digitally and is available for free online through Creative Commons under licence 3.0 with the following limitations: Attribution required, no adaptations or commercial use allowed. Nordic Academic Press P.O. Box 1206 SE-221 05 Lund Sweden www.nordicacademicpress.com © Nordic Academic Press and the Authors 2013 Typesetting: Frederic Täckström, www.sbmolle.com Jacket design: Per Idborg Jacket image: he Acropolis, Athens. Photo: Johan Linder Printed by ScandBook, Falun 2013 ISBN 978-91-87351-19-8 Making cultural v10.indd 4 2013-08-26 15:54 Making cultural history An introduction Anna Källén & Inga Sanner Cultural history tends to elude positive deinition. While such an evasive character may still be deemed a weakness in some academic circumstances, it is not the case with cultural history: much of its strength and analytical potential is to be found precisely in this slipperiness, in its critical attitude to authoritative categorization, and its relentless movement towards new angles, new spaces beyond the evident and the canonical. Perhaps it is also because of its evasive character that cultural history has become a somewhat fuzzy concept, with quite diferent associations and connotations in diferent academic ields. It appears sometimes to have the outdated air of a tradition that is passé—as is the case in archaeology and ethnology, where ‘the cultural-historical perspective’ was originally taken to mean the view on ancient cultures as essential units that was predominant until the Second World War. While cultural history still carries that connotation in archaeology, ethnologists in the 1980s reclaimed the concept, saying that they are now doing a new form of cultural history, studying vernacular things and people on the peripheries of traditional history, outside the range of dominant discourses.1 In historical research, cultural history instead has radical Seventies associations, and refers to the microhistorical perspective pursued by Peter Burke and Carlo Ginzburg, among others.2 Moreover, a discussion has recently emerged about a cultural history beyond the cultural turn, which is critical of what is perceived as a too-narrow focus on the small detail in cultural history, and calls for greater emphasis on the relations between culture as a larger, oicial structure and culture as detailed, vernacular practice.3 7 Making cultural v10.indd 7 2013-08-26 15:54 making cultural history Given this variety of associations, we will leave the attempt at a precise deinition behind. In this volume we want to make a point of that fundamental slipperiness, maintaining that you can never know precisely what cultural history is until it is actually made. Suice to say that cultural history deals in some sense with culture, and with history, combined in a creative and often critical analysis. his volume has sprung out of the Research School for Studies in Cultural History, or FoKult, at the Faculty of Humanities of Stockholm University.4 FoKult was established by the faculty in 2009, in order to promote interdisciplinary collaborations and ind new fertile ground for humanities research on cultural history. Eight professors from diferent departments within the faculty joined the steering committee, and in the following two years nineteen excellent postgraduate students were enrolled in the FoKult programme. FoKult’s stated focus is “the change in the conditions of research in cultural history, by connecting knowledge issues with relexive perspectives. he idea is to study the new situation for cultural studies, as well as to problematize it and develop new methods from several diferent perspectives. he need for diferent perspectives is based on the duality of history itself. he past has created the present and is a source to our self-knowledge, but at the same time, the image of the past is continuously created and used in the present”.5 his creative interplay between past and present is key to all activities at FoKult. A diferent but no less important component of the research school is the interdisciplinary platform that it provides. hrough advanced courses, a seminar series, and various social activities, the nineteen postgraduate students meet regularly and exchange knowledge and ideas over the four years of their doctoral research. Having one foot in the research school, they also belong to a university department where they have the other foot in a traditional discipline (archaeology, art history, classical languages, ethnology, fashion studies, history, history of ideas, history of religion, literature studies, or cinema studies). he diferent disciplines provide distinct traditions, theories, methods, and materials, which are constantly challenged and enriched from new angles at the research school. he main reason for the creation of FoKult was to provide opportunities for creative collaboration in the spaces between traditional disciplines. 8 Making cultural v10.indd 8 2013-08-26 15:54 introduction Now, some way through the process, it is clear that this goal is fully realizable. his volume relects the ongoing research and continuous dialogue at FoKult, and it is a testimony to the creative potential of intellectual border-crossing and the fertility of spaces between academic disciplines. he ways of doing cultural history presented in this volume share a key feature that we believe is characteristic of FoKult’s intellectual activities, and which is also a common factor in cultural history in general: the focus on the interplay of traditional and alternative discourses. By looking at the canonical and monumental from unexpected angles, it is not only possible to shed new light on what has previously been taken for granted as established academic knowledge, but also to ind previously invisible spaces outside traditional academic discourses. his approach often comes with a critical ambition to reveal hidden spaces and listen to voices that have thus far not been heard in academic discourse. When such critical interests meet across disciplinary borders, a further dimension is added. It often turns out that the most obscure corner of one discipline is the brightly illuminated centre stage of another. In a present-day-oriented ield like media studies, the deep historical structures of the distant past are one such obscure corner, whereas in classical languages or archaeology the distant past is the illuminated centre, and our contemporary world is more or less unknown territory. All academics who have stepped outside the borders of their academic discipline know that it can be a lonely enterprise, demanding both resilience and self-conidence. Here FoKult has become a resource, where nineteen border-crossing young scholars have been able to get support from others in the same situation, and at the same time be inspired to new approaches, increasing their knowledge of theoretical approaches and methods that are well tested in disciplines other than their own. In this way, FoKult has provided a productive space for border-crossing academic enterprises. And as a result, we see in this volume a number of innovative approaches to traditional academic subjects such as celebrity, literary genre, prehistoric remains, television, and historic monuments. All stem from unexpected combinations and sliding perspectives, focusing 9 Making cultural v10.indd 9 2013-08-26 15:54 making cultural history on obscure corners and gaps between the illuminated centres of traditional academic knowledge. Of the general themes addressed in this volume, the irst is media. Media has been used in two diferent but related ways in this volume. For disciplines accustomed to search for meaning in written source material (such as the history of ideas and literature studies), a focus on media—technologies and the things involved in writing and communication—can ofer a new, fruitful perspective. Emma Hagström Molin’s essay on war booty books in a seventeenth-century library inds new historical meaning by looking at the books as things deined by their materiality rather than the written words they contain. Adam Wickberg Månsson demonstrates in his essay the importance of paper as a medium for understanding the literary and political developments in seventeenth-century Spain, while Per Israelson looks at whether a new medium, the digital William Blake archive, may add to the experience of reading—or indeed viewing—Blake, compared with traditional archives that have not ofered the same lexibility for the viewer. Finally, Matts Lindström demonstrates how the medium in itself is a message in his study of micromedia. Another media approach departs from a traditional focus on present-day media (as in media studies), and uses a cultural-historical contextualization to add further knowledge and new critical angles. Representing this approach is Tove horslund’s essay on early Swedish television, using a cultural-historical perspective to paint a more elaborate picture of what is commonly known as an Americanization of Swedish television; and Lisa Ehlin’s essay on Google Maps, where a more common inclination to focus on the Internet as a medium and technology is challenged by talking about Google Maps as a form of heritage institution. A second theme concerns historical authenticity and the ownership of heritage. Here Daniel Strand makes a plea for the deliberate use of anachronism as a critical approach to historical heritage, while Johan Linder is critical of the active role of the Stockholm City Museum in sightseeing tours. Britta Zetterström Geschwind’s essay considers a plaster copy that has become an important artefact in the collections of the National History Museum in Stockholm, and Adam Hjorthén discusses the meaning of two very diferent 10 Making cultural v10.indd 10 2013-08-26 15:54 introduction historical monuments in the US. Lisa Ehlin’s essay on Google Maps shows how heritage, which is often valued in terms of authenticity, can indeed be created and recreated in real time by communities of Internet users, while Ingrid Berg discusses visible and invisible actors involved in the creation of an archaeological heritage site in Greece from the late nineteenth-century until the present. Another third theme is the interplay of language and materiality, at times spanning millennia. In this theme, Robin Wahlsten Böckerman experiments with using the material metaphor textus superimposed by a more lexible rhizome metaphor to broaden his analyses of the texts of Ovid. In an opposite analytical movement through time, Anders Lindström takes us all the way back to Greek tragedy to ind clues to understanding the New York City art and architecture of Rothko and Mies van der Rohe. Adam Wickberg Månsson’s essay on the importance of paper in Spain and Per Israelson’s on the William Blake archive both work with diachronic perspectives on the mutuality of language and materiality, while Matts Lindström’s study of micromedia, with its more contemporary focus, shows the intimate relationship between the two. A somewhat diferent theme focuses on academic practice. Either it operates from a meta-perspective with the outspoken aim of investigating and relecting on a speciic academic or institutional practice, or it relects upon previous practices by testing new viewpoints and new methods. An explicit meta-perspective is used by Ingrid Berg in her study of archaeological practices and blind spots in the history of archaeology at Kalaureia in Greece. Elisabeth Niklasson has an equally explicit aim to study the premises of academic practice in her study of archaeological projects funded by the EU. A metaperspective is also used by Elin Engström in her essay on visible and invisible masculinities in the history of archaeology at Eketorp, and by Britta Zetterström Geschwind following the giant plaster copy of the Lion of Piraeus through the history, and the corridors, of the National History Museum in Stockholm. Frederik Wallenstein, on the other hand, relects on past academic practices in the history of religion by treating Icelandic sagas as a source material for culturalhistorical analysis. Robin Wahlsten Böckerman and Anders Lindström take a similarly outside view by applying theoretical and conceptual 11 Making cultural v10.indd 11 2013-08-26 15:54 making cultural history frameworks from another temporal space on their objects, the texts of Ovid and the art and architecture of Rothko and Mies van der Rohe. Focusing on the more recent past, Robert Nilsson advocates the use of oral history as a new perspective in studying a Swedish miners’ strike. he ifth and inal theme is politics and history. his theme deals with questions of representation and power, and views science and academia as cultural phenomena related to discourses, be they political, gender, and so on. Robert Nilsson’s essay on the miners’ strike has a double political focus, for it not only deals with a politically important event in Swedish history, but the oral history approach also addresses issues of representation and power in academic practice. Elisabeth Niklasson’s essay on the EU funding of archaeology also deals with the politics of historical narratives in a very direct sense. Daniel Strand’s interest is political in a diferent sense, with his suggestion that heritage objects should be used with explicit political aims. And with yet another approach, showing how television programmes that are considered essentially Swedish are in fact imported American formats, Tove horslund complicates the notion of national heritage. On a similar note, Adam Hjorthén demonstrates how notions of national identity and transnational relations have an impact on the use and perception of monuments, while Emma Hagström Molin’s study of war booty further complicates the concept of national heritage. Elin Engström focuses instead on the politics of gender and identity in her study of masculinity among archaeologists and how that relates to images of prehistoric people on Öland, and Frederik Wallenstein uses a similar perspective to study male identities in the Icelandic sagas. And inally, Johan Linder formulates a twofold critique of commercialism and gender issues in the oicial heritage politics of the Stockholm City Museum in his essay on the Millennium sightseeing tours. All these ways of doing cultural history are ultimately concerned with the politics and poetics of history and culture. By inding new viewpoints outside their disciplines’ boundaries, by crossing borders and moving between academic spaces that are otherwise rarely connected, these young scholars all demonstrate the value of situated academic knowledge.6 And with a view of academic knowledge as 12 Making cultural v10.indd 12 2013-08-26 15:54 introduction situated—as a partial perspective—follows the realization that all narratives, representations, and claims of culture and history are in some sense political. he seventeen essays in this volume demonstrate how a shifting kaleidoscope of the academic subjects makes new knowledge possible, and enables the formulation of new critical questions. Challenging, disturbing, inspirational, these essays all make cultural history. Acknowledgements All the essays of this volume have been peer reviewed by experts at universities and cultural institutions around the world. We want to extend our warmest thanks to all the reviewers for their important and much appreciated contributions to the end result. Our heartfelt thanks also to W. J. T. Mitchell who read and gave valuable comments on early drafts of all the essays at a workshop in September 2012. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 Hunt 1989. For example, Burke 2004; Ginzburg 1980. Bonnell & Hunt 1999; Ekström 2009. FoKult 2011. Ibid., s.v. ‘Programme’. Haraway 1988. References Bonnell, Victoria E. & Hunt, Lynn A. (Eds.) 1999. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Burke, Peter 2004. What is Cultural History? Oxford: Polity Press. Ekström, Anders 2009. Representation och materialitet. Introduktioner till kulturhistorien. Nora: Nya Doxa. FoKult 2011. ‘Research School of Studies in Cultural History at Stockholm University’, available at <http://www.fokult.su.se/english/>, accessed 3 April 2013. Ginzburg, Carlo 1980. he Cheese and the Worms: he Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna 1988. Situated Knowledges. he Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14:3, pp. 575–599. Hunt, Lynn (Ed.) 1989. he New Cultural History. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. 13 Making cultural v10.indd 13 2013-08-26 15:54 Making cultural v10.indd 14 2013-08-26 15:54