Regional cultural heritage versus national heritage in Scania's disputed national landscape

Abstract

This article argues that the official landscape heritage in Sweden is formed in an interplay between regional and national discourses, and that the national ideology during the last century has promoted the preservation of stereotyped landscapes that partly ignores the conditions under which these landscapes were actually formed. This tends to naturalise the landscape, often cleansing it of human action and thereby generating a notion of an innate and given national landscape. To illustrate this, the landscape of the province of Skåne in southernmost Sweden is discussed from a heritage perspective. This province (which was Danish up to 1658) has a landscape characterised by its openness and contrasting to the emblematic Swedish cultural landscape of forests and small hamlets. A conclusion is that Skåne's landscape heritage runs the risk of being alienated when it is valued from a national criterion, and that a critical questioning of official heritage practice is therefore needed.

Keywords:

• Landscape
• Heritage
• Preservation
• National
• Skåne (Scania)
• Sweden

Notes

Tomas Germundsson, University of Lund. Correspondence to: [email protected]

Törnqvist, Renässans för regioner .

Skansjö, Skånes historia , 16–46; Karlsjö, Skånes och Blekinges riksgräns .

Linde‐Laursen, Det nationales natur .

Strindberg, Svensk natur , 245–72 (245).

Sundin, ‘Upptäckten av hembygden’, 11–27.

Mels, Wild Landscapes .

For a treatment of this in English, see Crang, ‘Nation, Region and Homeland’, 447–70.

Schama, Landscape and Memory .

Duncan and Duncan, ‘The Aestheticization of the Politics of Landscape Preservation’, 387–409 (392).

Hastrup, Den nordiske verden ; Olwig, ‘Landscape, landskap, and the Body’, 154–69; Olwig, ‘In Search of the Nordic Landscape’, 211–32.

This can be noted in preservation programmes for Skåne's cultural landscape; see, for instance, Kulturminnesvårdsprogram för Skåne.

Svensson, ‘Bruk och obruk i naturen’, 43–60.

Johansson, ‘Kulturmiljövård och odlingslandskap’, 17–23.

Cf. Setten, Bonden og landskapet ; Olwig, ‘Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape’, 630–53; Mitchell, Cultural Geography , 89–184.

See also Mels, Wild Landscapes ; Olwig, ‘Sexual Cosmology’, 307–43; Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic , 99–124; Saltzman, Inget landskap är en ö ; Setten, Bonden og landskapet .

My ideas on this topic have been influenced by the ethnologist Birgitta Svensson, in the context of the development of a joint research project application.

Kulturreservat.

Germundsson and Lewan, ‘Enskiftet 200 år’, 1–32.

Cf. Tollin, ‘Skurup‐Saritslöv’, 27–34.

Ek, Öresundsregion .

Vår nya region.

Ibid., 33.

Ibid., 62.

Ibid., 64.

Berg et al., Invoking a Transnational Metropolis .

And, talking about the Öresund region, it could be noted that the same question on the Danish side—‘What about the mosque in …?’—would be quite illustrative, as the authorities so far have not allowed the construction of mosques on Danish soil (which in turn partly works as an integrating factor in the region, as many Danish Muslims visit the mosque in Malmö).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tomas Germundsson

Tomas Germundsson, University of Lund. Correspondence to: [email protected]