Making
cultural history
New perspectives on
Western heritage
Edited by Anna Källén
nordic academic press
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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
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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sometimes to have the outdated air of a tradition that is passé—as is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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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