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Artur Hazelius and the ethnographicdisplay of the Scandinavian peasantry:a study in context and appropriationDaniel Alan DeGroff aa School of History, Queen Mary College, University of London ,London , UKPublished online: 19 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Daniel Alan DeGroff (2012) Artur Hazelius and the ethnographic display of theScandinavian peasantry: a study in context and appropriation, European Review of History: Revueeuropéenne d'histoire, 19:2, 229-248, DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2012.662947

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

Daniel Alan DeGroff*

School of History, Queen Mary College, University of London, London, UK

(Received 22 March 2011; final version received 2 August 2011)

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 andScandinavian peasant ethnography at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878, where hisdisplays were reviewed positively in the international press. This paper argues that thesignificance of the Hazelian ethnographic project was embedded in overlappingcontextual frames with centres in Stockholm and Paris. If the displays most readilyspoke to a general concern with the decline of traditional life as rooted in thecountryside, they arguably took on other, different and occasionally conflictingmeanings as they were moved from one exhibitionary context to another. Whereas inStockholm the ethnographic displays were inscribed in the conciliatory rhetoric ofScandinavism, the exhibitionary setting of the exposition universelle imposed aninterpretative frame defined by the logic of a competitive nationalism. For Nordicaudiences, the scenes reflected the positive historical significance of the peasantry inthe unfolding narrative of Scandinavian political modernity; for the French audience,however, those same scenes were either applauded for their life-likeness or seen asreflective of the ethnographic richness of the ‘kingdom of Sweden’.

Keywords: Arthur Hazelius; ethnographic display; Scandinavia; Sweden; expositionuniverselle; peasantry; 1878; France

Artur Hazelius (1833–1901) regretted what he saw as the disintegration of Swedish

traditional life in the face of industrial change and urbanisation. In 1872, repeating a

journey he had made several years earlier, Hazelius took a tour through the Swedish

province of Dalarna (or Dalecarlia), a region often referenced for the richness of its

popular art and tradition.1 There Hazelius was struck by the changes that had so recently

altered the face of the old farming province.2 As Jules Henri Kramer (Hazelius’s Swiss

publicist following the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition) explained, Dalarna held special

value for Hazelius, who saw the province as symbolically representative of an Old Sweden

approaching extinction. Convinced that Dalarna was the last preserve not only of

traditional modes of production but also of a traditional morality, Hazelius perceived the

changes in the region as hugely consequential. ‘Even in Dalarna the warning bell had

sounded,’ wrote Kramer (in French) in a passage echoing the views of Hazelius:

the latest fashions began to replace the older ones which for centuries had been sufficient forthe people; the homogenising [egalisateurs ] products of modern industry, penetrating into

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*Email: d.degroff@qmul.ac.uk

European Review of History—Revue europeenne d’histoire

Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2012, 229–248

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even the most remote farms, had driven out the simpler and more solid products of domesticwork; ancient clothing, antique furniture and old utensils began, like so many obsolete thingsof the past, to be destroyed, discarded or sold to second-hand dealers in Sweden and abroad.3

It is in response to this profound impression of loss that Hazelius began to collect artefacts

representative of Swedish and Scandinavian folklife. His sense of nostalgia, however, was

not as localised as the above Dalecarlian conversion narrative suggests, for he soon began

to collect objects from further afield, including Norway, Finland, Denmark, Schleswig,

Lapland, Greenland, Iceland and the Estonian Islands.

The first of the collections that would later take the name of the Nordic Museum

(Nordiska Museet) were housed on Queen Street (Drottninggatan) in central Stockholm

where they were opened to the public on 24 October 1873 as the Scandinavian

Ethnographic Collection (Skandinavisk-ethnografiska samlingen). The initial display, the

precursor to the impressive exhibition held five years later at the Paris Universal

Exposition of 1878, consisted of some relocated and re-assembled cottage and farmhouse

interiors taken or gifted from the provinces of Halland and Scania (Skane) and the parishes

of East and West Vingaker. The collection also included a tableau portraying the

Lapps (Sami) in migration. These three-dimensional tableaux, or dioramas, in which the

spectator serves as the ‘fourth wall’ of a three-sided interior display, were complete with

mannequins designed by the artist Carl August Soderman. The Queen Street exhibition

also included a number of very large landscape paintings, including views of Lake Siljan

in Dalarna and Jarvso in Halsingland. Spectators were also introduced to one Finnish man

in his seventies playing a kantele, a musical instrument similar to a sitar. As the presence

of the elderly Finn suggests, Hazelius had soon broadened the scope of his researches

beyond Dalarna to include other regions and indeed other Scandinavian countries.

He worked indefatigably and his ethnographic collection expanded prolifically as a result.

In 1907 the Scandinavian Ethnographic Collection, having been re-named the Nordiska

Museet in 1880, re-opened at its current site on Djurgarden. The Skansen Open-Air

Museum, another of Hazelius’s projects, had opened on a neighbouring site six years

earlier in 1891. King Oscar II, who before 1905 was titular monarch of both Sweden and

Norway, donated the land on which both museums spaces were built.4

Some historiographical preliminaries

Scholars have approached Artur Hazelius and the display methods he pioneered from a

number of different directions. Mark B. Sandberg, in a book-length study, has analysed the

Nordiska Museet in terms of the ‘experience of visual mobility’ available to nineteenth-

century urban dwellers in Scandinavian cities such as Stockholm and Copenhagen. With

remarkable analytical force, Sandberg convincingly argues, somewhat surprisingly

considering the ‘traditional’ content of the folk museum, that the folklife tableau was one

of the defining features of ‘visual modernity’ in northern Europe during the latter half of

the nineteenth century.5 In Sandberg’s study, Hazelius is placed in a dialogic relationship

with other museologists and museum projects from the 1880s and 1890s, figures and

institutions such as Bernhard Olsen, the director of the Scandinavian Panoptikon

(Skandinavisk Panoptikon) and the Danish Folk Museum (Dansk Folkemuseum); Hans

Aall, the founder of the Norwegian Folk Museum (Norsk Folkemuseum); and Anders

Sandvig, the founder the Maihaugen Museum in Lillehammer.

Mattias Backstrom, more concerned with ideology than with theorising nineteenth-

century modes of spectatorship, argues that Hazelius’s desire to re-introduce the Swedish

people to their rural national heritage was informed foremost by ‘patriotic love’.6 Barbro

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Klein also notices the patriotic-emotional aspect of Hazelius’s project, arguing that

‘Hazelius thought that if he could open the eyes of all Swedes – particularly the urban

middle classes – to the beautiful sides of peasant life, their feelings for the fatherland

would be awakened and maintained’.7 Supporting this reading, Hazelius has been seen as

an archetypal Swedish Romantic Nationalist in that he ‘promoted love of one’s childhood

home and its landscape, as well as a respect for indigenous architecture, costume, and

handicrafts’.8 But, as has been suggested, Hazelius’s rather acquisitive love was not

checked at the Swedish border.

Other scholars have rightfully argued that the significance of Hazelius transcends

both Sweden and Scandinavia. In a series of articles, Bjarne Stoklund has focused on

the relationship between the Hazelian ethnographic project and the great international

exhibitions as sites of national-identity construction.9 It makes perfect sense to draw

attention to the international dimension of a man so comfortable on the international stage,

Hazelius having mounted his displays in Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), Paris (1878),

and Chicago (1893).10 According to this reading, Hazelius and the Nordiska Museet are

embedded in the nation-building project common to many European countries in the latter

half of the nineteenth century, a project driven to no small degree by the competitive logic

inhering in the great international fairs.11

But to approach the Hazelian ethnographic project solely from the standpoint of

nineteenth-century nation building is to distort its significance. That at least is what

Magdalena Hillstrom suggests in an article in which she argues that nation building and

museum building have been too closely and too simplistically associated. She argues that

this elision refuses to recognise the intricacies of the Scandinavian context.12 Museum-

building is not a simple concomitant of nation building in other words; or, rather, perhaps

museum building has been a simple concomitant of nation building in some national

contexts, but Scandinavia, given its complexly intertwined history, is a case apart.13

Museum spaces, in her view, must be analysed according to their own unique terms, not

according to a supposed template of national development. At least in their early days,

museum spaces like the Nordiska Museet and Skansen, she argues, were more than mere

‘Swedish’ museums. Hazelius, we are reminded, was a Scandinavist as much as a Swedish

patriot. And, considering that Sweden and Norway were in a more or less amicable

political union until 1905, what would it even mean to label the Nordiska Museet a

national museum? Hillstrom concludes: ‘[The] Nordiska Museet was not underpinned by a

firm idea of contributing solely to the Swedish people’s identification with the Swedish

nation-state. The meaning of it was much more floating and the geographical borders of

the collections were never defined.’14

Keeping in mind the above historiography, I shall argue that the significance of the

Hazelian ethnographic project is multiple and context-dependant, acquiring different

meanings depending on whether the interpretative frame was Paris, Stockholm or

Scandinavia. Accordingly, the following discussion will alternate between Paris 1878,

Sweden (or Sweden-Norway) up to 1905, and, varying conceptions of Scandinavia. This

comparative approach had been implied in the opening section where I cited Hazelius’s

French-speaking Swiss publicist Jules Henri Kramer. As the recourse to Kramer suggests,

Hazelius is more than a Swedish or Scandinavian actor; he is, at least part of the time,

a continental European, and so his significance cannot be apprehended outside of a

European context. But then neither can Hazelius be understood outside an appreciation

of Scandinavian history and culture. The challenge is to marry the two perspectives,

to merge the European with the Nordic. A further recognition of the internationality

and multiperspectival nature of the Hazelian project is found in this article’s use of

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illustrations: the three images of Hazelius’s tableaux included herein originate not in

Sweden, but in Paris and Copenhagen.

Sweden (and Norway) go to the fair

One of the authors of the official illustrated guide to the Paris Universal Exposition of

1867 recounted his amazement upon first seeing the quality of the Swedish authorities’

ethnographic arrangements – which even at this early stage included non-Swedish

populations. The author described a scene in which he and an old Scandinavian general were

strolling along the Rue de Norvege, when, suddenly, the general decided to veer off course

in order to converse with a Telemark peasant (from the county in southern Norway). After a

few minutes, however, the general, as much to his astonishment as to his embarrassment,

realised that his conversation partner was not of this world, not of ‘flesh and blood’, but that

he rather belonged to the ‘curious salon of Curtius’ – a remark that recalls Philippe Curtius,

a Swiss pioneer of wax display and teacher of ‘Madame Tussaud’.15 Halted in their tracks,

the two passers-by then reflected on the lifelike qualities of the models:

To say of which substance these Danish, Swedish and Norwegian figures were made, thatwould be impossible: it is not wax, not plaster, not stone; it is a composition unknown to us,one which lends itself wonderfully to the representation of the human body. The flesh is alive,the colouring natural; blood actually flows under the skin; the hands of the women are delicateand fine. What is most remarkable, however, is the expression on their faces, and from everyangle. Certainly they are not statues; they are living beings.16

This passage suggests the trajectory of Swedish ethnographic display in the nineteenth

century as well as some of the reigning conceptual categories informing French

ethnography. At this stage, the mannequins installed by the Swedish authorities were de-

contextualised, solitary models lacking the kind of stage-crafted lived-in surroundings that

would come later in 1878, although they did wear clothes. Moreover, it is telling that the

French observer conceptualised his astonishment through a medical-biological language

well adapted to describing the life-likeness of the models: the ‘blood actually flows’; ‘they

are living beings’; ‘the flesh is alive’, and so on. This language, more in keeping with

French conceptions of ethnographic display than Swedish ones, contrasts with later

descriptions of Hazelius’s tableaux, where Scandinavian spectators in particular

emphasised the homeliness, cosiness and warmth of the folklife scenes – these words

recall the untranslatable ‘hygge’ in the Danish and Norwegian. It seems likely then that the

intended meaning of Hazelius’s early displays were somewhat lost in translation: the

French reader-response was to assimilate the mannequins within a pre-existing conception

of ethnographic display that had little to do with the intentions and values of Hazelius.

Dominated by the figure of Paul Broca, nineteenth-century French anthropology, and its

sister discipline ethnography, depended heavily upon the positive accumulation of cranial

and other corporal measurements as part of an effort to distinguish the various ‘human

families’ of the Earth.17 Assuming the story is true – admitting to being duped into

talking to mannequins is an oft-repeated trope of the wax-museum experience at this

time – there is little reason to believe that Scandinavian general would have approached

the Telemark peasant with the same ideas in mind. Whether Norwegian or Swede, the

general would likely have had a more personal, perhaps even emotional, response to the

peasant.

The ethnographic figures put on display by the Swedish authorities in 1867 did

not go unnoticed, but it was not until the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878, 11 years later,

that Swedish cultural authorities succeeded in drawing widespread attention to their

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ethnographic displays of rural Scandinavian folklife. The defining element of Hazelius’s

displays in 1878 was the depiction of scenes of family life within reconstituted interiors.

The mannequins, often made of plaster and clay (rather than wax), were costumed in

regional attire and painstakingly assembled within reconstructed domestic living spaces.

This kind of three-dimensional tableau often took the name ‘diorama’ in the French

and English literature.18 As one observer described Hazelius’s dioramas at the 1878

Exposition:

The costumes submitted by the Swedish Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm and presentedby Dr Hazelius were real tableaux. Scenes from family life took place within interiors filledwith furniture and utensils. From the grandmother’s spinning wheel to the child’s cradle,everything was true. There were also episodes taken from a Lapp’s life, showing him sittingamidst the snow, in front of his hut, or driving a pack of sled dogs.19

Levois, the French writer here cited, mistakenly referred to Hazelius’s museum space as

the Swedish Ethnographic Museum instead of the Scandinavian Ethnographic Collection.

This error, replacing Scandinavian with Swedish and Museum with Collection, is

significant in that it suggests that the international audience did not recognise, or perhaps

did not understand, the Scandinavist pretensions of Hazelius. As a later section argues,

perhaps the logic of the exposition universelle reduced the complexities of the

Scandinavian idea into a question of nations and empires, a view unwittingly promoted

here through the display of an ‘exotic’ internal population like the Sami (Figure 1).

A popular guide book to the exposition described how the Swedish installations

achieved a lifelike quality while ‘reproducing the interior of living spaces, making them

appear true to life in large groups, all with perfect execution, dramatising intimate scenes

from the life of the province or region in question, either in homes or in the middle of

nature’.20 The lifelike aura of the mannequins continued to provoke much commentary in

the French press, Le Journal des Debats (13 July 1878) noting the exceptional

craftsmanship of the mannequins’ eyes, said to be the creation of a leading ocularist in

Stockholm. It must have appeared strange to Hazelius that of all the details to note, the

French commentators chose the eyes. The Danish Illustreret Tidende (20 October 1878),

in contrast, noted rather enviously that Hazelius had managed to get his hands on some

beautiful traditional furniture during his travels through Scandinavia.

Precursors to the diorama or three-dimensional tableau are found in science, theatre

and religion. The use of anatomical waxes for the benefit of surgeons goes back to

eighteenth-century Italy, a practice that later filtered into France, but the more apposite

history for Hazelius’s displays, considering the central importance granted to

scenography, is that of the wax museum, founded most famously in London with

Madame Tussaud’s and in Paris with the Musee Grevin.21 One of the virtues of Mark

Sandberg’s study on museum spaces and modes of spectatorship in nineteenth-century

Scandinavia is that it draws our attention away from the better known examples of

scenographic display in London and Paris and focusses instead on developments in

Stockholm, Copenhagen, and other Scandinavian cities. As Sandberg explains, if ‘the wax

museum was largely a borrowed form’ in Scandinavia, ‘the folk museum, by contrast, was

a peculiarly Scandinavian project’ (Figure 2).22

Altering the terms of nationalist engagement

Although it is generally recognised that the nineteenth-century world’s fairs and certain

national museums pioneered the display of colonial exotica in the form of both inanimate

objects and people, the inclusion and display of traditional European folklife within

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Figure 1. Lapland at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878. With the curtain rolled back, thespectator-voyeur enters the world of one of Europe’s last remaining nomadic communities. (Imagecourtesy of the British Library Newspaper Archive.)

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similar exhibitionary settings has been less frequently discussed.23 The ethnographic

installations pioneered by Hazelius and his team of artisans in 1878 implicitly questioned

the values of a burgeoning field of exotic display heretofore dedicated to the portrayal of

scenes representative of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. If it were generally accepted

among the European powers that the ethnographic display of colonial or exotic

populations and artefacts constituted one form of legitimate cultural competition, then

Sweden effectively altered the terms of nationalist engagement through the valorisation

and display of its own ethnographic wealth.

Let us take France, the host of the 1878 Universal Exposition, as a contrasting case to

illustrate the difference in values. As William H. Schneider explains, the museum and

entertainment sectors worked together in France to great effect in their display of a colonial

popular ethnography.24 There they constructed an ‘empire for the masses’ that excelled at

blending mass patriotism, entertainment and popular education through the ethnographic

display of colonial possessions. In 1878 when Artur Hazelius was showcasing the Sami,

Scanians and peasant farmers from Dalecarlia at the Universal Exposition, the Parisian

exhibition authorities had constructed an ‘Algerian Bazaar’ and a ‘Cairo Street’, attractions

that formed the core of a series of peopled displays advertising France’s dominion over

North African territories. Whereas the Swedish exhibitions excelled in the creation of the

painted panorama and the mannequin diorama, the Paris exhibitions mastered the colonial

tableau vivant. It was more important to French cultural authorities to exhibit ethnographic

richness through the empire than to draw attention to the country’s internal diversity,

a diversity deemed troublesome by the defenders of la France une et indivisible. In any case,

such internal diversity appeared to exist in less impressive forms in France than elsewhere,

particularly the Nordic countries.25 The French may not have ‘possessed’ a nomadic

population at home that could compete with the star quality of ‘the Lapps’, but they did

Figure 2. Postcard (in French) of one of Hazelius’ cottage interiors. This scene from the provinceof Halland was displayed at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878. (Image courtesy of the NordiskaMuseet.)

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possess Dahomeyans (Republic of Benin), Gabonese, New Caledonians, Congolese,

Senegalese and Cochin-Chinese (South Vietnam). Whereas the Nordiska Museet was

eventually enlarged and the Skansen Open-Air Museum opened its doors in 1891 to a

Swedish public fond of their rural patrimony, French authorities sponsored a colonial

exposition in Marseilles in 1906.

Skansen was a venue where national education was blended with popular

entertainment. It was at the same time a zoo, an architectural display where different

types of buildings found throughout the country and larger Scandinavian region were

reconstructed, and a venue for concerts and theatre performances. In this regard, Skansen

can be seen as Stockholm’s answer to Paris’s Jardin d’Acclimation in the Bois de

Boulogne, which had a very similar profile as an educational and entertainment venue but

with one important difference: whereas in the Swedish venue the exhibition of ‘popular

tradition’ occupied pride of place, the Jardin was dedicated primarily to the exhibition of

exotic animals and colonial and other foreign populations.26

The Paris Universal Exposition of 1878 served as the ideal forum for the kind

re-evaluation of ethnographic display outlined above because, as Orvar Lofgren argues,

the world’s fairs served as an ‘arena where the national could be staged and where

competition between nations could be institutionalised and developed, and then transferred

to other fields’. Thus ‘if one could not be the biggest, best, or most modern’, then ‘one

could at least have the most beautiful scenery, the nicest handicrafts, the oldest cultural

heritage, or the most exotic folk culture’.27 As Lofgren argues in another article, the great

exhibitions, conceived in a period of high nationalism, developed ‘an international cultural

grammar of nationhood with a thesaurus of general ideas about the cultural ingredients

needed to form a nation’. 28 This argument, in its most basic formulation, is that in the

competitive context of the world’s fair, nationalist authorities from a given nation feel

compelled to emphasise, showcase, cultivate, construct or invent certain aspects of their

national culture in order to effectively compete with the cultural productions of other

nations.

Emphasising the competitive international dynamic of the world’s fairs and the role

played therein by ethnographic display nevertheless occludes other interpretive avenues.

If Hazelian ethnographic display can be understood as an attempt by Sweden to compete

innovatively on the European stage through the display of one’s own ethnographic

richness, then howmight these same displays function, or be taken to function, as a vehicle

for political claims, on both an international and more local level?

The politics of Hazelian ethnography

Which political claims were conveyed by Hazelius’s exhibits in Paris in 1878 and later at

the Nordiska Museet? In order to answer this question we must attend to three interrelated

features of the Hazelian project: Hazelius’s identity as a Scandinavist, an issue that

necessarily implicates the political history of the region; the political dynamic of the

ethnographic collecting-act; and, finally, the exhibitionary setting in which the displays

were ultimately presented. As the above interpretative framework suggests, the political

messages embedded in Hazelian ethnography were variable and context-dependent, often

defying the intentions of the actor at its centre.

Scandinavianism (or ‘Nordism’) has been defined as ‘[m]ovements and/or striving for

the (political, economic, cultural) integration or union of the Scandinavian countries’.29 As

a political force, the movement goes back at least to the 1397 Kalmar Union, which united

Norway, Denmark and Sweden against the threat of expansion by the Hanseatic League.

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The political face of Scandinavianism re-surfaced at various points in subsequent

centuries. In 1743 and 1809 it was proposed that the king of Denmark-Norway should

serve as elected monarch of Sweden. In 1860 there was an abortive plan to install Karl XV,

the Swedish-Norwegian king, as king of Denmark. When Norway changed hands in

1814, going from Danish to Swedish control in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars,

some Norwegians even considered a Danish prince as ruler. And then, upon achieving

independence from the Swedish crown in 1905, Norwegians once more considered

electing either a Swede or a Dane as their constitutional monarch.30

Scandinavianism reached a highpoint in the mid-nineteenth century at the time of the

First and Second Schleswig Wars (1848–51 and 1864), a series of conflicts that took place

in southern Denmark over the Schelswig-Holstein question. More than a few Swedes and

Norwegians had at this time called for collective military action to defend Denmark

against encroaching German nationalism. But the political-military pretensions of the

movement were shown to be hollow; the Swedish-Norwegian governments refused to send

troops to aid Denmark in 1864, and the subsequent loss of Schleswig-Holstein brought the

Germanic territories one step closer to unification.31

Hotbeds of Scandinavianism at this time included the university cities of Lund,

Copenhagen and Uppsala. It is not too surprising then to learn that Hazelius was a

committed Scandinavist during his university years at Uppsala, where he studied,

tellingly, the Nordic Languages.32 Like his Danish and Norwegian confreres, Hazelius

claimed that the countries of Scandinavia, although separated by political borders and

historical disputes, were constituents of a single unified culture.33 This conviction

informed Hazelius’s later decision to call his museum the Nordic Museum rather than, say,

the Swedish National Museum (Figure 3).34

Figure 3. The Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, located on Djurgarden. The Scandinavist claims ofthe museum are read in the building’s architecture, which recalls Vadstena and Gripsholm Castles inSweden and Frederiksborg and Rosenborg Castles in Denmark. (Photographed by the author.)

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The ‘Nordic idea’, however, was not merely a cultural response to the geopolitical

unrest of mid-century, for it had already found expression in multiple institutions and

individuals. Here one thinks of earlier cultural and academic expressions of Nordism like

the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquity (Det Konglige Museum for Nordiske Oldsager),

which opened in Copenhagen in 1819 (before changing its name to the Nationalmuseet in

1892) and The Nordic Journal of History, Literature and Art (Nordisk Tidsskrift for

Historie, Literatur og Konst), founded in 1827.35 Perhaps the most famous Nordicist was

the Danish priest Nikolaj Frederik Grundtvig (1783–1872), the founder of the Folk High

School and translator of the Icelandic Sagas.36 Hillstrom argues that it is difficult for

‘historians working in the context of the 20th century’ to fully understand the ‘important

cultural and political force’ that was Scandinavianism. Recognising the extent to which

Scandinavist sentiment could overlay other more local cultural sympathies, she argues that

‘[i]t was possible for Hazelius to mobilise the rhetoric of Swedishness and Swedish

patriotism within a framework of Scandinavianist nationalism’.37

The subtleties of Scandinavist thought and practice notwithstanding, a fact

nevertheless imposes itself: Hazelius asserted Sweden’s right to act as the cultural

guardian of a multifaceted region through a museumwhich, although claiming to represent

the whole of Scandinavia, was located in Stockholm. The point has been made time and

again: when institutional loci of knowledge production such as museums possess the

capacity to represent for their own political ends the valued cultural symbols of other

communities, political and epistemological contestation ensues. The classic statement

along these lines was made by Edward Said three decades ago. Eva Silven has recently

re-iterated the argument: ‘Where the objects are physically kept has great symbolic

significance, just as it had when once they were removed. Real things in real places play a

role in a social and cultural system. When they were taken away, they became markers of

power and influence, centre and periphery.’38

The mention of centre and periphery prompts a consideration of political history.

Sweden possessed an empire during the seventeenth century that covered many of the

regions later displayed in the Nordiska Museet; this fact would not have been lost on

the many Danes, Norwegians and Finns visiting the displays. The Danes had lost the

Scanian Provinces (Scania, Halland and Blekinge) to Sweden in 1658. (Skaneland was

misidentified by Danish authorities as the setting of Hazelius’s most famous tableau, The

Little Girl’s Last Bed, a point that will be discussed in the conclusion.) Norway only

achieved complete independence from Sweden in 1905 after nearly a century of political

union under the Swedish Crown. Similarly Finland had been an integral part of the

Swedish kingdom until 1809, when it was re-constituted as a royal duchy under nominal

Russian control.39 It would be indefensible to argue that Hazelius’s Scandinavian

Ethnographic Collections had been founded with the explicit intention of propagating an

image of Swedish imperial dominance, but as we saw in the previous section, ethnographic

display was regularly used to promote a vision of global reach, if not imperial richness,

especially at the great international fairs. Hazelius was necessarily implicated in this use of

ethnography as the Universal Exposition of 1878 imposed its own interpretative logic

upon spectators.

Ethnographic objects – much like artefacts of Greek and Roman antiquity – have

often been regarded as the cultural accoutrement of given national populations. To the

extent that these ownership claims are disputed, the ethnographic collecting-act becomes

embroiled in cultural politics. In this sense, the ethnographic object can be a bearer of

political significance even before it reaches its ultimate destination in the display case

or the tableau scene. Illustrating the point, Bjarne Stoklund recounts a controversial

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transaction in Norway involving Hazelius’s agents and some undisclosed Norwegian

intermediaries. To quote directly from Stoklund’s account of the story: ‘The founder of the

open air museum in Lillehammer in Norway [Anders Sandvig] observed in 1886 a caravan

of five carriages loaded with antiques that some hawkers from Telemark had been buying

for Hazelius’s museum in Stockholm.’40 Another account tells how one of Sandvig’s

Norwegian agents came to an agreement with Hazelius whereby the latter would stop

collecting in Gudbrandsdalen, the valley running between Oslo and Trondheim, due to the

increasing scarcity of ethnographic objects.41 These anecdotes, however slim in detail, are

illustrative of the conflict that often bubbles to the surface in a nationalised context of

competing heritage claims. This sort of complex transaction (involving buyers, pilferers

and gifters, opportunistic intermediaries and frustrated third-party nationals) becomes

common in a world where the artefacts of national cultures become value-laden.42

The anecdotes further suggest that Norwegian collectors such as Sandvig were not

content to sit back and let Hazelius catalogue and exhibit the ethnographic richness of

Norway under the banner of the Nordiska Museet. It would be a mistake, however, to read

too much conflict into the relationship between Hazelius and Sandvig. It appears that

Scandinavianism could in fact be a conciliatory force. One of Sandvig’s agents, for

example, took an apologetic stance vis-a-vis Hazelius, suggesting that if Hazelius had not

collected items in Norway then those objects would have since vanished. (It is hard to

escape the conclusion, however, that all these various collectors played a major role in

heightening the demand for objects later declared to be scarce.) Indeed Sandvig, although

a competitor in the collecting field, lauded Hazelius: ‘With his [Hazelius’s] work he has lit

the torch that shines not only over the North, but over all of Europe.’43

Sandvig’s mention of Europe is important in that it recalls Hazelius’s participation in

the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878 and thus draws a line between the collecting field

and the world’s fair. As discussed above, Hazelius, as a participant in the exposition

universelle had altered the terms of nationalist engagement through the cultural display of

Scandinavia’s traditional folklife. The innovation brought Sweden much positive attention

on the international stage. The result, however, was to incite other nationalist actors

throughout Scandinavia to vie for the same ethnographic material as they too sought to

raise the international profile of their respective nations. ‘The folk-museum movement

created a new kind of market for everyday items,’ Sandberg writes,

a new economy of objects based on display value instead of use value. As the collectionactivity expanded, it sometimes overlapped, such as when Hazelius travelled to Norway tofind items for his pan-Scandinavian Nordic Museum, or when the nationally conceivedNorwegian Folk Museum competed with regional museums like Maihaugen for the rights tolocal materials, or when the museums in Stockholm, Lund, and Copenhagen all were activelycollecting material from southern Sweden at the same time.44

This situation has an interesting parallel among the great powers of the period, particularly

France and England. The richness of the collections on display in the halls and cabinets of

the Musee d’ethnographie du Trocadero (MET), a museum founded in the wake of the

Universal Exposition of 1878, proclaimed France’s global reach in an age of imperialism

as well the French anthropological community’s adeptness at representing foreign bodies.

With collections from Russia, central Asia, Syria, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela,

Africa, Cambodia, Japan, and China, the museum communicated to France’s rivals,

particularly Britain, that France was a legitimate guardian of the world’s cultural heritage.

But in order to project the image of benign cultural guardian it was first necessary to

procure the coveted objects in question, a concern voiced by a museum official in 1878:

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The exposition [of 1878] will bring ethnographic riches of inestimable value to Paris and weshould keep them here. To do so, it is necessary that these objects are located without wastingtime, and that someone should serve as intermediary with the relevant foreign delegates so asto facilitate exchanges and gifts. Already the South Kensington [Museum] has designatedsomeone, it would appear, to locate objects of interest during unpacking in order to prepare fortheir acquisition. The foreign ethnographic museums are going to do likewise; must we notprepare ourselves to fight against this competition?45

Although the profiles of the two museums differ, certain similarities emerge. In both cases

ethnographic objects, whether colonial and exotic or peasant and folk, were turned into

commodities to be bought, sold and gifted in the museum marketplace.

Commentators regularly remarked that Hazelius changed the terms of competition in

the field of ethnographic display: ‘[i]n contrast to the general principle that one should

firstly bring together . . . objects from faraway regions, Mr Hazelius demonstrated that

one ought to collect in the first instance the memories of the fatherland and of its

people.’46 What Hazelius’s supporters rarely discussed, however, was that Hazelius, the

bearer of an acquisitive gaze scarcely cognizant of established political borders, also

sought to collect, catalogue and exhibit the cultural memories of the Danish, Norwegian

and Finnish fatherlands. When displayed in Stockholm, these exhibits could be

interpreted as contributing to the vision of a united Scandinavia – at least until Norway’s

separation in 1905. But to an observer like Jules Henri Kramer, who interpreted

ethnography more through the optic of international competition than Pan-Scandinavian

unity, Hazelius’s project had imperialist and nationalist connotations. Kramer remarked

how Hazelius had enriched his collections with artefacts originating within the Swedish

sphere of influence. He included in that sphere all those territories where, for political

reasons, Swedes found themselves living under the control of a foreign power.47 It is

doubtful, to re-iterate a point already made, that Hazelius intended to present a picture of

Swedish imperial dominance through his ethnographic collections, but the reigning logic

of nineteenth-century nationalism nevertheless pushed that interpretation. Indeed

conforming to that same logic, the Swedish cultural authorities published a French-

language guide to their exhibits in 1878, entitling it simply Royaume de Suede – the

‘kingdom of Sweden’ without any mention of Norway or Scandinavia.48 In the context

of Paris 1878, ethnographic display served a very particular function. Whether the

subject matter was peasant and rural or exotic and colonial, ethnography was a means to

promote a vision of imperial richness. One could effectively argue that the validity of

this conclusion depends more on the question of audience appropriation than it does with

Hazelius’s own authorial intentions. But Sweden, as the title of the guide suggests,

seems to have followed the competitive and imperialistic logic of the exposition

universelle.

This claim must be qualified, however, for ‘peasant’, ‘rural’, ‘exotic’ and ‘colonial’ are

not common expressions of ‘the primitive’. Unlike the displays in the Musee

d’ethnographie du Trocadero, Hazelius’s peasant displays were not used to gauge the

progress of modern civilisation; the peasant scenes rather reflected the purest and most

noble expression of the values of the national community. To conflate the two kinds of

displays would be a grave mistake; Sweden is not France. As Michelle Facos writes: ‘Our

notion of primitivism is embedded in a discourse of colonialism because it is tied primarily

to the experience of French- and English-speaking countries. The different conception of

primitivism in Sweden, as elsewhere on the margins of Europe, invites a rethinking of the

term.’49

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The peasantry and the political-emotional imagination

Hazelius’s ethnographic displays reflected the political imagination of nineteenth-century

Scandinavian elites. Taking a closer look at the displays themselves we should ask ourselves:

how is it that the peasant figure, the farmer and the rural free-holder came to occupy the

central positions in Hazelius’s portrayals of national life? And which contemporary sources

in historiography and the arts can be used to elucidate the significance of scenes such as the

Halland Cottage Interior scene or The Little Girl’s Last Bed?

Some historians have argued that Sweden, and Scandinavia more generally, followed

a ‘special path’ through political modernity. Whereas the mass of European humanity

strained under the feudal system, the Swedish peasantry had followed a different, more

liberal course. Having firstly developed within the egalitarian bonds of Viking society, the

Swedish peasantry had been sensitised to political action relatively early through the

Lutheran parish and its inclusion (as a social estate) in parliament from the fifteenth

century. Indeed an entire school of historical thought has developed around the argument

that the Swedish peasant had always known freedom, at least in comparison to his

oppressed southern brethren. ‘Nowhere else in Europe had the commonalty so direct a

voice in the affairs of state,’ writes one such committed historian. ‘[N]owhere else could

the sovereign meet the accredited representatives of the masses face to face and persuade

them to compliance with unpopular policies by appeals to their duty to God and to their

country.’50

Unlike in France, to take a contrasting example, where writers from Balzac to Zola

portrayed peasant life as boring, brutish and violent, the historic image of the Swedish

peasantry is overwhelmingly positive. Øystein Sørensen and Bo Strath argue for example

that the ‘Nordic Enlightenment . . . ironically and paradoxically enough had the peasant as

its foremost symbol. The peasant figure, who elsewhere was considered with contempt

as rude, ill-bred, and uneducated, was seen as the mythical incarnation of education

[bildning/dannelse ], freedom and equality.’51

This interpretation of Swedish political modernity is not of recent formulation but rather

the continuation of some earlier ideas first articulated in the early nineteenth century. For

Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793–1866) had written Svenska fattigdomens betyldelse (The

Significance of Swedish Poverty) as early as the 1830s, an essay which expressed what

would increasingly become a cherished myth of Swedish national identity, namely that

inhabitants of old Sverige were essentially ‘nature-influenced’, ‘poor’, ‘rugged’ and ‘hard-

working’.52 Hazelius’s ethnographic scenes, it could be argued, reflected the values found in

the writings of Almqvist, as the spectator encounters the freeholder redeemed through toil,

the farmer ennobled through physical trial, and the peasant family bending but not breaking

under the emotional hardship of infant mortality. In contrast to the mythical and literary

image of Jacquou le Croquant, the rebellious French peasant turned arsonist hell-bent on

torching the nobleman’s chateau, we find the Swedish peasant as a source of social

regeneration, as in ‘Odalbonden’ (The Yeoman Farmer) by the poet-historian Erik Gustaf

Geijer. ‘The great lords with thunder and cries / Burn countries and villages down; / Silently

the Farmer and his son build them up, / Sowing in blood-spattered earth.’53

If Hazelius’s ethnographic displays were inscribed within a pre-existing conception of

Swedish national identity as essentially rural, yeoman-led and Lutheran, then the objects

that the French exposition authorities chose to display at their own Paris-hosted Universal

Exposition in 1878 are truly revealing. In an official report written by the exhibition

authorities we find that France’s ethnographic display denied the existence of a peasant

patrimony. Instead of striking productions of scenes taken from the rural life of the

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provinces, the French exhibit offered clothed mannequins of ecclesiastics, magistrates,

and jurists from the universities and the academies of France: the administrative pillars of

the centralised and Catholic French nation.54

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, let us analyse Hazelius’s most famous tableau, the emotive scene

known as The Little Girl’s Last Bed (Lillans sista badd) (Figure 4). 55 One of Hazelius’s

original tableaux, The Little Girl’s Last Bed was first installed in the Scandinavian

Ethnographic Collection on Queen Street before being exhibited in Philadelphia (1876),

Paris (1878) and Chicago (1893).56 In keeping with the overall argument of the article, two

questions in particular merit our attention. What significance did this scene assume in

different contexts, and how might its meaning be appropriated by diverse audiences?

Unique among Hazelius’s dioramas, we know that the scene was modelled directly on

a painting from the period, Peasants in Dalarna Mourning their Dead Child, a genre scene

painted by the popular Swedish artist Amalia Lindegren (1814–91).57 (The Halland

Cottage Scene also has qualities reminiscent of a genre painting but it is not known

whether Hazelius drew from a particular painting.) Lindegren was prominent in the 1860s

and 1870s, her paintings regularly seen in both the illustrated press and shop-window

displays. There is every possibility in fact that Hazelius first saw Peasants in Dalarna in

the fashionable illustrated newspaper Ny Illustrerad Tidning (The New Illustrated

Journal), where a copy of the painting appeared in 1866.58 There is little wonder of course

that Hazelius was drawn to the image considering the centrality of Dalarna to his view of

Swedish and Scandinavian identity. Seeing the painting seemed to trigger an idea in

Hazelius’s mind, and the famous tableau followed soon thereafter.

Figure 4. The Little Girl’s Last Bed, a tableau based on a the painting by Amalia Lindegren (Imagecourtesy of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen.)

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Hazelius’s displays, however theatrical, were regularly praised for their pursuit of

ethnographic authenticity. The wall hangings, the furniture, the costume: all seemed

correct. Authenticity was also important for Lindegren, who, however guilty of

sweetening scenes of peasant life, reproduced with exacting detail the wardrobe and

furnishings characteristic of various rural milieux. Indeed her paintings were often

informed by extensive visits to the localities in question, something that recalls Hazelius’s

momentous visit to Dalarna in 1872.59

It was not simply the scene’s air of authenticity, however, that attracted audiences.

A local Swedish journalist reported the emotional force of The Little Girl’s Last Bed,

writing that ‘[n]ever have waxen or wooden figures or theatre decorations achieved such

artistic effects of truth and life. All mothers cry beside the little one’s last bed.’60 Trading

on the ‘affective capital’ produced by the scene, The Little Girl’s Last Bed reveals the

emotional underpinnings of national identification.61

The Little Girl’s Last Bed functioned differently in different contexts. In a Swedish

context, the scene, recalling Backstrom’s interpretation of Hazelius as a man filled with

patriotic love, prompted an emotional response to the scourge of infant mortality. What is

perhaps more remarkable, however, is that the setting of the national museum then

effectively married that emotional response to a vision of national identity. For not only

was the tableau in a national museum on Djurgarden, it portrayed a province, Dalarna, that

was seen by many as the most Swedish of all Swedish provinces.62 The tableau in its

institutional setting therefore cast the universal human experience of mourning in the

warm glow of nationalism.

Predicated as it was on the experience of a double loss, the Danish response to the

tableau was even more complex than the Swedish one. For the Danish spectator, the scene

of human loss was (mistakenly) doubled by the loss of the Scanian provinces to the Swedish

Crown in 1658. A Danish journalist for the illustrated newspaper Illustreret Tidende,

having attended the Universal Exposition of 1878, identified the tableau scene not as from

Dalarna but as from the province of Scania, one of the three Danish provinces given to

Sweden according to the terms of the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658.63 To further complicate

matters, any emotional response predicated on a sense of loss - whether existential or

political in kind - would have been exacerbated by, and bound up with. the ongoing concern

over the disintegration of the traditional way of life portrayed in the tableau.64

It is remarkable that the Danish journalist should have misidentified the scene,

Lindegren’s original being in such wide distribution, at least in Sweden, but then Hazelius

had already included one tableau from Skaneland, the Halland Cottage Scene (Figure 2),

in his museum, and so perhaps the Danish journalist suspected a trend. Or, perhaps he

sought to appropriate such a powerful scene for his own nationalist ends, casting the

peasant virtues displayed as quintessentially Danish. In any case, it is significant that one

of the very first mannequin tableaux to be installed in Bernhard Olsen’s Danish Folk

Museum following its opening in August 1885 was taken not from Danish territory but

from Ingelstad, a Swedish town (from 1658) also located in the province of Skane.65 This

is remarkable. As Bjarne Stoklund has compellingly argued, the creation of a national

ethnography often relies on the presentation of ‘specifically national areas’: national

ethnographers often privilege certain ‘flagship regions’ as particularly representative of a

given national identity.66 What is so remarkable in the present case is that two different

political territories chose to identify culturally with the same border region, a region that,

in different senses, belonged to neither of them.

And so, to conclude, how might French spectators have responded to a tableau like

The Little Girl’s Last Bed? It makes sense, of course, to assume that most spectators,

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regardless of passport, were united by a primary emotional response in keeping with the

mournful subject matter. But as I have tried to suggest throughout this article, deeper and

different readings were available. This is probably what the author of the article in the

Illustreret Tidende (25 October 1878) had in mind when he wrote that Hazelius’s tableau

‘evokes admiration both from those who understand what is meant by it, and with the

naıve [French] audience who tend to take the appearance for reality’. What is certain, in

any case, is that most of the visitors within the French exhibitionary setting lacked that

extra psychological-contextual layer in which the symbols of ‘the folk’ become the ready

recipients of the spectator’s nation-based affection.

Notes

1. See Rosander, ‘The “Nationalisation” of Dalecarlia.’2. Hazelius’s decision to become a collector and later a museologist of Scandinavian folklife has

a Damascus Road-conversion quality about it.3. Kramer, Le Musee d’Ethnographie Scandinave a Stockholm, 13. For more on Artur Hazelius

and his museum spaces, see Bergman, Artur Hazelius; Bringeus, ‘Arthur Hazelius and theNordic Museum’; Guide to the Collections of the Nordiska Museet Stockholm; and the entriesby Hazelius in the bibliography.

4. ‘Preface,’ in Hazelius, Guide to the Collections of the Northern Museum in Stockholm.5. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons, particularly chapters six, seven and eight.6. Backstrom, ‘Loading Guns with Patriotic Love.’7. Klein, ‘Cultural Heritage, the Swedish Folklife Sphere, and the Others,’ 59.8. Facos, Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination, 47.9. See Stoklund, ‘International Exhibitions and the New Museum Concept in the Latter Half of

the Nineteenth Century’; ‘The Role of the International Exhibitions in the Construction ofNational Cultures in the 19th Century,’ 35–44; and ‘How the Peasant House Became a NationalSymbol.’ Orvar Lofgren also makes links between ethnographic display and nation building in‘The Nationalization of Culture.’

10. Stoklund, ‘Between Scenography and Science: Early Folk Museums and their Pioneers,’ 26.11. Hazelius’s international impact is evident in his legacy as a museologist. Museum spaces

arguably influenced by Hazelius’s exhibition methods are numerous: the Hindeloopen Room,an interior from the province of Friesland in the Netherlands and exhibited by the Dutch at the1878 Paris Universal Exposition; the Salle de France, founded in 1884 and incorporated withinthe Musee d’ethnographie du Trocadero (MET); the Amager Room, a reconstructed interiorfrom the Danish island (with historic Dutch inhabitants) of the same name near Copenhagenand installed in Bernhard Olsen’s Danske Folkemuseum from 1885, and, later, Olsen’s open-air museum (Frilandsmuseet), which opened in Sorgenfri, north of Copenhagen in 1901; theBreton Gallery of the Musee de Quimper, also founded in 1884; the Maihaugen Museum,founded in Lillehammer in the late 1880s by Anders Sandvig, a local dentist; Georg Karlin’smuseum Kulturen I Lund, which opened in Lund in 1892; Hans Aall’s Norwegian FolkMuseum, opened to the public in 1894; and, finally, the original dioramas of Frederic Mistral’sMuseon Arlaten. The legacy of Sweden’s (or Sweden-Norway’s) participation in the 1878Universal Exposition supports Anne-Marie Thiesse’s claim that ‘Nothing is more internationalthan the formation of national identities.’ See Thiesse, La creation des identites nationales, 11.On some of these museum spaces, see de Jong and Skougaard, ‘The Hindeloopen and theAmager Rooms’; DeGroff, ‘Ethnographic Display and Political Narrative’; and Sandberg,Living Pictures, Missing Persons.

12. Hillstrom, ‘Contested Boundaries: Nation, People and Cultural History Museums in Swedenand Norway 1862–1909.’ See the full-text article online at: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v2/cu10v2-Uses_of_the_Past.pdf. Also see Aronsson, ‘Representing Community: NationalMuseums, Negotiating Differences, and the Community in the Nordic Countries.’

13. France and England can serve as useful contrasts. The South Kensington Museum was anoutgrowth of the Great Exposition of 1851, as the Musee d’ethnographie du Trocadero was anoutgrowth of the 1878 exposition. The South Kensington Museum was later renamed theVictoria and Albert Museum. Both museums are clearly linked to a form of nation buildingdriven by the competitive environment of the international fairs.

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14. Hillstrom, ‘Contested Boundaries,’ 593.15. See Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks.16. Ducuing, L’Exposition universelle de 1867 illustree, 123.17. See de Quatrefages and Hamy, Crania ethnica: Les cranes des races humaines. Hamy was the

chief curator of the Musee d’ethnographie du Trocadero. He and Quatrefages werepractitioners of Brocean anthropology. For an overview of the history of French anthropology,see Bender, ‘The Development of French Anthropology.’ For an example of Frenchethnographic display from the period that contrasts with the Hazelian variety, see Aubagnac,‘En 1878 les “sauvages” entrent au musee de l’Armee.’

18. On the visual technologies of the period, see Francois Robichon, ‘Le panorama, spectacle del’histoire,’ particularly p. 65: ‘At the end of the eighteenth century painting took a new path,that of the “rama”, which Balzac ridiculed in Le Pere Goriot. The panorama was, among thediorama, neorama, cosmorama, polyorama, etc., the star genre of these new spectacles ofillusion.’ See also Bapst, Essai sur l’histoire des panoramas et des dioramas; and Hyde,Panoramania. For more on the 1878 Universal Exposition, see Breban, Livret-guide duvisiteur.

19. Levois, Rapport sur les habillements des deux sexes, 16.20. From Dias, Le Musee d’ethnographie du Trocadero, 167.21. On the rise of the wax museum, see Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks

and Schwartz, Spectacular Realities. For the history of wax display, see Lemire, Artistes etmortels.

22. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons, 146.23. On the colonial roots of ethnographic display see Hale, Races on Display; Leprun, Le Theatre

des colonies; Bancel et al., Zoos humains.24. Schneider, An Empire for the Masses and ‘Race and Empire.’25. For more on the difficulties of creating a French national ethnography, see Daniel DeGroff,

‘Ethnographic Display and Political Narrative.’26. Schneider, An Empire for the Masses, 129.27. Lofgren, ‘Materializing the Nation in Sweden and America,’ 169.28. Lofgren, ‘The Nationalization of Culture,’ 22.29. H. Stang, ‘Nordism,’ in Nordstrom, Dictionary of Scandinavian History, 417–19.30. Ibid.31. Ibid.32. ‘Hazelius,’ in Nordisk familjebok, 11: 148–50.33. For more on the history of Pan-Scandinavianism, see Hilson, ‘Denmark, Norway, and Sweden:

Pan-Scandinavianism and Nationalism.’34. Alexander, Museum Masters, 242.35. I owe the ERH’s referees credit for informing me of the above-named cultural institutions.36. Østergard, ‘Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture.’37. Hillstrom, ‘Contested Boundaries,’ 602. Hazelius’s more narrowly nationalist preoccupations

are evident in the role he played in the institution of 6 June as Sweden’s Flag Day, a nationalcelebration commemorating Gustav Vasa’s accession to the Swedish throne in 1523, aninvented tradition that endures to this day. See the classic by Hobsbawm and Ranger, TheInvention of Tradition.

38. The classic statement along these lines was made by Edward Said in Orientalism. Silven,‘Cultural Diversity at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm: Outline of a Story,’ 21–2. On thecultural politics of the museum more generally, see Sherman and Rogoff, Museum Culture.

39. Barton, ‘Finland and and Norway, 1808–1917.’ See Haugland, ‘An Outline of NorwegianCultural Nationalism’; and Klinge, ‘“Let us Be Finns” - the Birth of Finland’s NationalCulture.’

40. Stoklund, ‘How the Peasant House Became a National Symbol,’ 14.41. See Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons, 301 (n. 15).42. On the intersections of nationalist sentiment and the custodianship of the material vestiges of

the past, see Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity? Cuno’s insights regarding the ideologicalcommitments that often underpin actors in the museum industry can be modified to ask anotherquestion more suited to our context: who owns, in other words, who speaks for, the folk cultureof traditional Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century?

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43. Sandvig, I praksis og pa samlerford, 135. Cited in Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons,148.

44. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons, 184.45. Letter dated 1878 from Armand Landrin to the Ministry of Public Instruction as cited in Dias,

Le Musee d’ethnographie du Trocadero, 167.46. Breban, Livret-guide du visiteur a l’exposition historique du Trocadero, 128.47. Kramer, Le Musee d’Ethnographie Scandinave a Stockholm, 21–2.48. Petersens, Royaume de Suede. Catalogue. Exposition universelle de 1878 a Paris.49. Facos, Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination, 73.50. Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus and the Rise of Sweden, 27.51. Sørensen and Strath, ‘Introduction: The Cultural Construction of Norden,’ 1.52. Algulin, A History of Swedish Literature, 90.53. Warme, A History of Swedish Literature, 182. On the literary representations of Jacquou Le

Croquant, see Garavini, ‘Un exemple d’utilisation regressive de l’idee du peuple: Jacquou leCroquant.’

54. M. Levois, Rapport sur les habillements des deux sexes, 16.55. The Little Girl’s Last Bed was displayed for many years in the Nordic Museum and served as a

commemorative display in 1951 to honour the 50-year anniversary of Hazelius’s death. See abrief discussion of the tableau in Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons, 176–7.

56. I have not considered how an American audience would have appropriated Hazelius’s displays.57. For a profile of Lindegren, see Bengtsson, ‘Amalia Lindegren: Aspects of a 19th-Century

Artist.’58. Bengtsson, ‘Amalia Lindegren,’ 16.59. Ibid., 19.60. Quoted in Alexander, Museum Masters, 246.61. Geoffrey Cubitt discusses ‘affective capital’ in the ‘Introduction’ to Imagining Nations, 7.62. See Rosander, ‘The “Nationalisation” of Dalecarlia.’63. See Illustreret Tidende, 20 Oct. 1878.64. Østergard, ‘Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture,’ 179.65. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons, 217. See an illustration of the tableau in Illustreret

Tidende (20 Sept. 1885).66. Stoklund, ‘The Role of the International Exhibitions,’ 42.

Notes on contributor

Daniel DeGroff is a PhD candidate in French history at Queen Mary, University of London.

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