The Moral Content of Tradition: Homecraft, Ethnology, and Swedish Life in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

During 1970s, young Swedish folklife researchers worked hard to sever already weakening links between their field and old peasant (det gamla bondesamhallet).1 Renamed ethnology, discipline was to be liberated from its role as handmaiden of cultural historical museums and folkmusic, folkdance, local history (hembygd), and (hemslojd) movements.2 Young sociologically and anthropologically oriented scholars such as Ake Daun, Jonas Frykman, and Orvar Lofgren questioned role that discipline had played in cahoots with cultural historical museums and other institutions in creating a stock of traditions that had become symbols of a national cultural heritage. In jest or in earnest, with affection or self-irony, young and radical researchers would occasionally refer to field that they were about to take over with such names as knatofsforskning (pompom research) or tomteforskning (pixie research). The former referred to pompoms on pants of men's traditional clothing and latter to supernatural creatures that populated peasant legendry. The message was clear: folklife research had studied and celebrated trio ial aspects of an agrarian society that was now gone forever. The new ethnology, on other hand, was to become far more theoretical and far more closely linked to social sciences than its predecessor. Potentially, all human life forms were to be studied from a cultural perspective. Many of new ideas were also realized. Even though peasant culture was to be studied occasionally also during years to come, investigations were now often conducted in accordance with premises of cultural analysis in an anthropological vein (Frykman and Lofgren 1987). Such mainstay concepts within folklife research as tradition were deconstructed, questioned, or marginalized along with liaisons to folklife museums and various folk movements. Among these, homecraft movement with its interest in such minutiae as stitches and weaving patterns, stood out as a particularly suitable target.3 Some of ethnologists who were young and rebellious thirty years ago are now leaders of field and many of directions that they laid out still dominate discipline. Few contemporary Swedish ethnologists study in earnest such phenomena as homecraft. The exceptions are a handful of highly accomplished, now retired, women, such as Ingrid Bergman, Sofia Danielson, and Gertrud Grenander-Nyberg who have all been employed at cultural historical museums. Within homecraft movement they are sometimes lovingly called the homecraft mafia. But their books and papers, which include important Ph.D. and M.A. theses, have not been at center of ethnological discussions. Indeed, neither pre-industrial craft nor homecraft revival have been dominant topics within discipline during past thirty years, just as little as peasant art, legendry, or traditional medicine have been. The many ambivalent feelings toward homecraft, from irony to love, come forth in such widely used puns and word plays as hemsk slojd (horrible craft) and slemhojden (the slimy hill). Ethnologists are not alone in their ambivalence. Many Swedes share it. Indeed, home craft movement and related phenomena are a part of deeply rooted discourses in Swedish twentieth century culture, discourses that involve debates concerning nature and status of national symbols, politics, economics, ecology, regionalism, gender, and class. To begin with, and not unlike our leading ethnologists, many people, in particular people within cultural, artistic and radical left, are embarrassed or even disdainful when subject of homecraft is raised. Often they speak about people in homecraft movement as meddlesome and moralizing arbiters of taste. Others do not share these views, among them many people who represent ecological movements or centrist party and other rural interests (i. …