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

Abstract

Artur Hazelius (1833–1901), founder of the Nordiska Museet and the Skansen Open-Air Museum, was a pioneering figure in the practice of ethnographic display in Europe. Hazelius achieved Europe-wide recognition following his presentation of Swedish and Scandinavian peasant ethnography at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878, where his displays were reviewed positively in the international press. This paper argues that the significance of the Hazelian ethnographic project was embedded in overlapping contextual frames with centres in Stockholm and Paris. If the displays most readily spoke to a general concern with the decline of traditional life as rooted in the countryside, they arguably took on other, different and occasionally conflicting meanings as they were moved from one exhibitionary context to another. Whereas in Stockholm the ethnographic displays were inscribed in the conciliatory rhetoric of Scandinavism, the exhibitionary setting of the exposition universelle imposed an interpretative frame defined by the logic of a competitive nationalism. For Nordic audiences, the scenes reflected the positive historical significance of the peasantry in the unfolding narrative of Scandinavian political modernity; for the French audience, however, those same scenes were either applauded for their life-likeness or seen as reflective of the ethnographic richness of the ‘kingdom of Sweden’.

Keywords:

• Arthur Hazelius
• ethnographic display
• Scandinavia
• Sweden
• exposition universelle
• peasantry
• 1878
• France

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 Musée d'Ethnographie Scandinave à Stockholm, 13. For more on Artur Hazelius and his museum spaces, see Bergman, Artur Hazelius; Bringéus, ‘Arthur Hazelius and the Nordic Museum’; Guide to the Collections of the Nordiska Museet Stockholm; and the entries by 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. Bäckström, ‘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 of National Cultures in the 19^th Century,’ 35–44; and ‘How the Peasant House Became a National Symbol.’ Orvar Löfgren 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 the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition; the Salle de France, founded in 1884 and incorporated within the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro (MET); the Amager Room, a reconstructed interior from the Danish island (with historic Dutch inhabitants) of the same name near Copenhagen and 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; the Breton Gallery of the Musée de Quimper, also founded in 1884; the Maihaugen Museum, founded in Lillehammer in the late 1880s by Anders Sandvig, a local dentist; Georg Karlin's museum Kulturen I Lund, which opened in Lund in 1892; Hans Aall's Norwegian Folk Museum, opened to the public in 1894; and, finally, the original dioramas of Frédéric Mistral's Museon Arlaten. The legacy of Sweden's (or Sweden-Norway's) participation in the 1878 Universal Exposition supports Anne-Marie Thiesse's claim that ‘Nothing is more international than the formation of national identities.’ See Thiesse, La création des identités nationales, 11. On some of these museum spaces, see de Jong and Skougaard, ‘The Hindeloopen and the Amager Rooms’; DeGroff, ‘Ethnographic Display and Political Narrative’; and Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons.

12. Hillström, ‘Contested Boundaries: Nation, People and Cultural History Museums in Sweden and 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: National Museums, Negotiating Differences, and the Community in the Nordic Countries.’

13. France and England can serve as useful contrasts. The South Kensington Museum was an outgrowth of the Great Exposition of 1851, as the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro was an outgrowth of the 1878 exposition. The South Kensington Museum was later renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum. Both museums are clearly linked to a form of nation building driven by the competitive environment of the international fairs.

14. Hillström, ‘Contested Boundaries,’ 593.

15. See Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks.

16. Ducuing, L'Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée, 123.

17. See de Quatrefages and Hamy, Crania ethnica: Les crânes des races humaines. Hamy was the chief curator of the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro. He and Quatrefages were practitioners of Brocean anthropology. For an overview of the history of French anthropology, see Bender, ‘The Development of French Anthropology.’ For an example of French ethnographic display from the period that contrasts with the Hazelian variety, see Aubagnac, ‘En 1878 les “sauvages” entrent au musée de l'Armée.’

18. On the visual technologies of the period, see François Robichon, ‘Le panorama, spectacle de l'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 Père Goriot. The panorama was, among the diorama, neorama, cosmorama, polyorama, etc., the star genre of these new spectacles of illusion.’ 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 du visiteur.

19. Levois, Rapport sur les habillements des deux sexes, 16.

20. From Dias, Le Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro, 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 et mortels.

22. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons, 146.

23. On the colonial roots of ethnographic display see Hale, Races on Display; Leprun, Le Théâtre 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. Löfgren, ‘Materializing the Nation in Sweden and America,’ 169.

28. Löfgren, ‘The Nationalization of Culture,’ 22.

29. H. Stang, ‘Nordism,’ in Nordstrom, Dictionary of Scandinavian History, 417–19.

30. H. Stang, ‘Nordism,’ in Nordstrom, Dictionary of Scandinavian History, 417–19

31. H. Stang, ‘Nordism,’ in Nordstrom, Dictionary of Scandinavian History, 417–19

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. Østergård, ‘Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture.’

37. Hillström, ‘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 national celebration commemorating Gustav Vasa's accession to the Swedish throne in 1523, an invented tradition that endures to this day. See the classic by Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.

38. The classic statement along these lines was made by Edward Said in Orientalism. Silvén, ‘Cultural Diversity at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm: Outline of a Story,’ 21–2. On the cultural 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 Norwegian Cultural Nationalism’; and Klinge, ‘“Let us Be Finns” - the Birth of Finland's National Culture.’

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 ideological commitments that often underpin actors in the museum industry can be modified to ask another question more suited to our context: who owns, in other words, who speaks for, the folk culture of traditional Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century?

43. Sandvig, I praksis og på 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 Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro, 167.

46. Breban, Livret-guide du visiteur à l'exposition historique du Trocadéro, 128.

47. Kramer, Le Musée d'Ethnographie Scandinave à Stockholm, 21–2.

48. Petersens, Royaume de Suède. Catalogue. Exposition universelle de 1878 à Paris.

49. Facos, Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination, 73.

50. Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus and the Rise of Sweden, 27.

51. Sørensen and Stråth, ‘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 régressive de l'idée du peuple: Jacquou le Croquant.’

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 a brief 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 19^th-Century Artist.’

58. Bengtsson, ‘Amalia Lindegren,’ 16.

59. Bengtsson, ‘Amalia Lindegren,’, 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. Østergård, ‘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.