Some thoughts about Cultural Heritage

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

~ George Orwell, 1984

Monument of the Vendel Age boat burials in
Vendel, Uppland

This blog post might be containing quite a lot of rambling. I read an interview with the Swedish riksantikvarie (National Antiquarian) Lars Amréus, about the usage of the Cultural Heritage in Sweden. It is a topic I think about daily in my work. Therefore I thought I should shared with you some of my thoughts on the matter. The interview is in Swedish, but I intend to write this post in English as always. The focus will be mainly on Sweden though, since that is the cultural heritage I have most of my experiences from both as a professional archaeologist and as a visitor to different cultural heritage sites throughout my home country. All the photos except the last one in this entry are taken by me on trips to more or less famous cultural heritage sites throughout Sweden.

Gamla Uppsala, Uppland

To define the term cultural heritage is not as easy as one might think. The definition varies a lot between people and also throughout time. A general definition would probably be that it involves everything that humans have shaped throughout time but which in turn also shape us. It can be buildings, places and other types of milieus, but also traditions, crafts, artefacts, folklore, music, literature, art and oral stories. The common thread between all these categories is the stories they can tell about us both in the present and in the past.

Stern of the Vasa ship

Contrary to popular beliefs, a cultural heritage is never static nor is it powerless. It can be extremely political and be used both to include and exclude. The traditional view of a nationalistic cultural heritage has been seriously questioned and challenged in recent years. Recently even more so, due to the uprising of racism in many countries throughout the world, not least in Europe.

I have talked about my view on the term culture in many previous entries to this blog (most notably in this and this) and I don't intend to repeat myself too much in this one. However I want to state that my definition of the term culture is that it is entirely a social construction. It is never finished and it is under continous negotiations. It has all to do with what is socially acceptable in different social contexts.

St Olof's church ruin,
Sigtuna, Uppland

The traditional view of cultural heritage is just as much a product of the Romantic nationalism of the 19th century as the term culture and also the Nation state. The thought of a monocultural nation with one collective culture and history has been strong since then and is still fundamental in our view of the world. In its construction, the museums's (and bascially also the rest of the cultural heritage research) main task was to reflect this monoculturalism.

In my entry about the Stone Age I talked about how European encounters with other social groups through the Western colonialization of the last few centuries pretty much created the whole time period. Analogies was used to the contemporary "hunter-gatherer" societies to show that they belonged to a stage of development the European countries had left behind a long time ago. Just like the Stone Age was created based on a focus of difference, so was the Nation state created through focusing of what it was not.

Rune stone U161, Risbyle
Uppland

The creation of a glorious past was a very important part of the nation building process and therefore ancient monuments (in Sweden for example the mounds of Gamla Uppsala, seen in the second picture in this entry, or the rune stone like the one in the picture to the left) became important.

However, this perspective was very excluding. It excluded certain groups of people (in Sweden for example the Samis) but also parts of the past that was not glorious at all. For example, the Age of the Swedish Empire (Stormaktstiden) during the 17th and the 18th centuries was portrayed as bellicose, heroic and not least masculine. One did not talk about the rather catastrophic results of those war and values: Sweden itself was about to destruct due to the wars and a lot of people, both in Sweden and abroad, suffered greatly because of them. (Sweden would totally have been destroyed if it had not been for the women, but that is a story for another time.)

This is not so much a thing of the past either. We still tend to view our history through "romantic nationalistic glasses". To take the example of the Age of the Swedish Empire again, the Swedish newspaper Expressen as late as last year had a magazine about Sweden's "bloody history" in which one could read:

"Karl XII ärvde en stormakt från pappa Karl XI och de andra lyckosamma regenterna från 1600-talets krigiska epok." (Karl XII inherited a super power from his father Karl XI and the other successful rulers of the bellicose epoch of the 17th century.)

I didn't really know what to think about this quote and the fact that they this summer had a similar magazine devoted to the Swedish war kings made me realise even more how important investments in public outreach really is.

Microlithic flint blade, dated to the
Mesolithic that I found at Kanaljorden,
Motala, Östergötland in 2013

Not everything is bad though. Another Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter had a series of articles about the skull collection of Anders and Gustaf Retzius last year. This is actually really what I think we need to talk about more. Not many Swedes today know that Sweden sort of invented scientific racism (Statens rasbiologiska institut opened in Uppsala in 1922, the first of its kind in the world) This also at the same time as we had the Folkhemmet ideology which managed to be both open and including (the part mainly focused upon) and racist and elitist (the part mainly forgotten)...

There is another example, which might sound even more strange and I realised just how strange it is that we emphasize it because I went to a show by the American ventriloquist Jeff Dunham in Copenhagen a couple of years ago.

He came directly from Stockholm where he had visited one of the major tourist attraction of the Swedish capital and by far the most visited museum of the country: the Vasa museum.

Vasa is a Swedish warship (The stern of it can be seen on the second picture in this entry.) which is mostly famous because it sank after barely having left the harbour in Stockholm on its first journey in 1628 and because it was salvaged 1956-61.

The DC-3, Flygvapenmuseum, Linköping

In his show, Jeff Dunham joked about the fact that the Vasa ship is really a big failure and why do we make a museum of a failure? It really got me to realise that the Vasa museum is kind of brilliant just because of that. It is something that went totally wrong, but still we are proud of it. We really should be proud of both our tragedies and our triumphs. They both make us part of who we are and I think it is really important that our cultural heritage actually portrays both.

Why do we need a cultural heritage then? Well, I think mostly because it seems like a basic instinct inside of us all to seek our history, but also to be able to orientate ourself in time as well as in place wherever we are really. The important thing is that it needs to be including. We need to focus more on what makes our own cultural heritage similar to anyone else's than differences.

Last, but not least I want to show you a photo I found on Tumblr called “Globalization is beautiful sometimes”. It was taken in the Stockholm underground by Ninni Andersson in 2015.

The girls seem different at first, but once you start to really look at them they have very much in common all the same: they have the same colours in red and black, they sit in a similar manner and they both are looking at their phones. I find the picture to be a beautiful illustration that we all are both different and similar at the same time.

PS. Om Ninni Andersson eller någon av flickorna på bilden ser detta: Det är en underbar bild! Jag hoppas det är okej att jag lånade den. Tack!