PERfORMING A PRESENT fROM THE PAST The Värmland Heritage Gift, Materialized Emotions and Cultural Connectivity

Drawing on actor-network theory and theories of performance, this article discusses gift-giving as an expansive form of materializing relationships and delimiting boundaries between nations, regions, organizations and individuals in the wake of migration. Initially, I discuss gift-giving as a way of materializing relationships and building networks. Thereafter, I map out the social life of the Värmland Gift to America, a collection donated by the Värmland province in Sweden to the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis in 1952. I suggest the coinage of heritage gift as a term to describe gifts with dense biographies which contain and enact multiple performances that simultaneously create and recreate the idea of gift-giving in its role as an activity that binds people together. The analysis of the Värmland Gift shows how such a heritage gift kept on the move over time involves not one but a series of performances which have fostered dynamic transatlantic relationships for over fifty years.

gift-giving performance. The restaged 2009 version contains multiple performances. These raise questions about the malleable relationship between object, giver, recipient and the "thing" at stake.
Material gift exchange becomes important when Nordic cultural heritage takes center stage as a commodity for sale. Central premises for this study are that cultural heritage can be described as culture selected in the present and projected into the past (Kirshenblatt-Gimlett 1998: 7, 149) and that materializations are stylized expressions of who we are (Miller 1987(Miller : 215, 2005cf. Damsholt 2009: 9-39;Otto 2009: 143-174). Based on these premises, heritage solidifies contemporary perceptions of our past into material culture and such materialized heritage is apt to reconfigure processes of inclusion and exclusion as relevant to present circumstances. 2 In relation to discussions on regional identity in the Nordic countries (cf. Aronsson 1995;Häggström 2000;Olwig & Jones 2008), I take an interest in how communities such as the national and Nordic are challenged or strengthened by gift-exchange. The Värmland Gift collection emerges as a particularly interesting case as values, by definition, are condensed in it through careful selection, a process amplified when the collection is presented as a gift.
The purpose of this study of the Värmland Gift is to analyze gift-giving as part of a cultural economy, where the performance of cultural difference becomes an enrichment, and the tension between the local, regional and national an asset. What do cultural gifts actually do? How does gift-giving connect people and locations that are separated geographically? How do gift-giving performances delimit cultural boundaries over time? These questions have guided my inquiry into the poetics and politics of gift-giving propelled by kin and migration.
Cultural gifts are more meaningful than other gifts because they are invested with emotion, consideration and imagination. Tangible gifts are more meaningful than other gifts because they literally change hands and therefore have the potential of emotionally touching the lives of people who handle them. These notions of materialized gifts are true to people I have worked with in this study. Whereas the subject of gift-giving is vast and includes organ donation, birthday presents as well as loaves of bread, my aim is to provide a study of gift-giving as the nexus of ordinary people whose donations are kept in museums, the museums themselves and their staff. The example of the Värmland Gift is drawn from my ongoing research on gift-giving as an expansive form for materializing relationships. This particular study has grown from my experience in curatorial work and previous studies of transfers and transformations of material culture through transnational journeys (Gradén 2003(Gradén , 2004. Here I engage new theoretical perspectives. Drawing on new theories of materialization, actornetwork theory and performance, I suggest the term "heritage gift" to describe gifts that are singularized by reproduction of their specific biographies. The presentations I have observed show that heritage gifts are carefully selected. These objects invoke multifaceted emotions and aspirations in series of performances. These performances in turn create and recreate the idea of gift-giving as an activity that binds people together. In this exchange of gift-giving performances, the selected things are transformed into potential objects of identity through their (inter)acting that incorporates and constitutes the building of transnational networks. In their most tight-knit forms these networks take on an air of clubs or fraternities.

Grasping Things: Gift-Giving and the Materialization of Relationships
There is a profound relationship between "the material" and gift-giving. 3 That things, just like humans, have biographies is stated by anthropologist Igor Kopytoff. He shows that these biographies are longer and more complex in cultures where barter and recycling is common (Kopytoff 1986: 67). He also points out that an object may be viewed as a commodity in one situation but not in another, or viewed both as commodity and object of exchange in the same situation. I build on this perspective when I study gift-giving.
On a general level, gift giving is an act that holds the promise of furthering relationships. Gift-giving ethnologia europaea 40:2 has a long history entwined with ritual performances as well as everyday life through mundane acts. Between these two types of gift-giving there exist many other forms of gift-giving situations. These share the feature of being defined by the givers and recipients who participate, but also by powers beyond the immediate participants. Thus, gift-giving plays a role in shaping and regulating relationships between individuals, families, regions, and nations in macroeconomic structures in the post-industrial era, as the American economists Cele Otnes and Richard Beltramini (1996;cf. Komter 1996) demonstrate in their research overview. However, the idea of gift-giving as a means of furthering relationships is not new. The idea of reciprocity, in particular, has its own heritage. Within the Nordic realm, the principle for generating relationships through reciprocity appears for example in the Poetic Edda. It says: "with weapons and weeds should friends be won, as one can see in themselves, those who give to each other will be friends once they meet half way" (The Poetic Edda [1928] 1962: 40). 4 In a similar vein, anthropologist Marcel Mauss' analysis of the relationship between gift and community demonstrates that reciprocal gift-giving maintains and furthers moral relationships, builds trust, and fosters solidarity (Mauss 1990: 39-46). In the view then held, the gift stands in opposition to the commodity, the aim of which is to create financial profit. As mentioned earlier when stating that things may have biographies, this distinction has become a little blurred. Commodities are understood not as a particular category but as things moving through various regimes of value, an approach that makes the relationship between gift and commodity more fleeting and flexible (Appadurai 1986: 3-63;Kopytoff 1986: 64-91;Miller 2001: 91-118). 5 Although anthropologist Marcel Mauss' analysis of the relationship between gift-exchange as a moral act and the making of community has been questioned (Derrida 1992: 14;cf. Miller 2001: 91-118), I suggest that his idea can be fruitfully applied to the relationship between cultural institutions and their donors, as discussed in the introduction to this article. Mauss' work shows that there is a myriad of reasons for exchanging gifts but that the ultimate reason is to create a cement for society (Mauss 1990). When applied to the Värmland Gift, the ideas conveyed by Mauss shed light on the strategic and competitive aspects that the exchange of heritage gifts seems to entail. By giving more than their American relatives have given them, the inhabitants of Värmland may expect to win increased respect both from the recipients and from their competitors.
The art of gift-giving is also culturally specific. It matters how the gift is packaged and presented and by whom. 6 Many studies on gift-exchange are concerned with social distinction and notably, several recent studies have been carried out in Japan, where gift-giving is highly elaborate and an overt part of professional relationships. The anthropologist Katherine Rupp, for example, demonstrates how gift-exchange plays an important role in people's social mobility in contemporary Japanese culture, and that there is a very fine line between bribery and gift exchange that one needs to master to move in a desired direction (Rupp 2003). Studies carried out in Europe show that gift exchange has furthered relationships among the British aristocracy (Rosenthal 1972;Ben-Amos 2008). In Scandinavia the studies of gifts seem limited to baptismal, betrothal and wedding gifts, which played a key role with regards to social recognition in peasant culture (Hagström 2006;Kjellman 1979). Drawing on objects from a region marked by migration cultural diversity, the Värmland Gift seems to have successfully fostered a long-term relationship between its givers in Värmland and its recipients in Minnesota through repeated exhibitions and ritual performances.
When the donors in Värmland selected the American Swedish Institute as the host for their eclectic gift, they both tapped into and contributed to a long history of giving gifts to museums. Gifts were instrumental in the founding of the cabinet of curiosity, collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were yet to be drawn by scientists. Insofar the Värmland Gift resembles such a collection. The objects of these collections were theatrically presented and the visitor could walk through the display, making his own path and conclusions. A well-known example ethnologia europaea 40:2 It is interesting that the same gesture of gift-giving is chosen to strengthen ties between emigrants and their homeland. While gift-giving continues to play an important role as an extension of the giver in phi-Ill. 1: The bridal crown is a replica of the bridal crown in Karlstad Cathedral and was commissioned by the Historical Association. It was designed by the artist Oscar Jonsson and crafted by goldsmith Thure Ahlgren, both from Värmland. Its material is silver with gold filigree and inset gemstones. (Photo: Lizette Gradén) lanthropy (White 1995), commissioned gifts seem to be an expansive form of materializing relationships in the business of culture. The giving of gifts associated with heritage may therefore be understood as part of a cultural economy where the performance of cultural differences becomes enrichment.

Networks and Heritage Gifts
Moving from the view where it is obvious that people attribute meaning to objects (see Appadurai 1986) to the performative approach, allows me to unfold how gifts that people compose also compose people. When the Värmland Gift appears before an audience at the ASI and at the Swedish American Center, this activity is preceded by earlier acts. To speak in the words of Bruno Latour, one of the promoters of actor-network theory, social meaning is produced in networks of human and non-human actors. According to Latour, "anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor" (Latour 2005(Latour : 7, cf. 1998, and he continues: "even though it might mean letting in elements which, for a lack of a better term, we would call non-humans" (Latour 2005(Latour : 72, cf. 1998). Thus, human and non-human actors together create the reality we are part of and relate to. If we follow Latour, the gift may be seen as an actor -an entity with agency to set further action into motion. For example, when the Värmland Gift collection generally hosted in Minneapolis was turned into an exhibition in Karlstad, the selection of exhibited objects was based on conservatory conditions, the size of the gallery, and available funds for shipment and exhibit installation. Moreover, the selection of the Värmland Gift to play the role of the inaugural exhibition at the Swedish American Center was generated by the fact that it once originated and was put together in this province.
Thus, when the glass vase plays the star role in the Värmland Gift exhibition at the royal inauguration of the Swedish American Center in Karlstad it should be viewed as a consequence of a collective effort, not as the cause of such collective work (Latour 1998: 45). When the ASI gives the vase as a return gift for the bridal crown of 1952, it also evokes the role of the bridal crown as a return gift. The docuethnologia europaea 40:2 mentation that accompanies the Gift in 1952 bears witness to thoughts of transatlantic space, created through acts of reciprocity. According to the giftgivers, the Värmland Gift and its bridal crown are to be viewed as return gifts to family and friends overseas in exchange for the numerous American packages (Amerikapaket) consisting of coffee and other goods that were rationed in Sweden and Norway during the Second World War. The idea of reciprocity is articulated in this thought, which gives the collection exchange value (cf. Appadurai 1986). Thus, on one level, the collection is equated with the huge number of coffee cans which came to play a central role in the everyday life of Swedes and Norwegians during the war years. If the ASI did not provide the Värmland Gift collection for the inaugural exhibition of the Swedish American Center and present the glass vase as a return gift for the bridal crown, the story of close connectivity through gift-giving in the past and present would lack content. Viewed as a collective effort to connect places by materializing new spaces, the Värmland Gift collection resembles diplomatic gifts extended from one nation to another. Many monuments (cf. Frykman & Ehn 2007) are gifts. Perhaps the most recognized gift is the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States and a universal symbol of freedom and democracy. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, designated a National Monument in 1924 and restored for her centennial on July 4, 1986. A regional example is the kinsmen monument in Rottneros, Värmland, as a symbol of the Finnish immigration to Värmland in the 17th century and the emigration from Värmland to the United States. The inscription on its base reads: "In commemoration of the connection with our kinsmen to the west and to the east of the waters." 8 The monument was dedicated on June 22, 1953, and remains a site for ritual performances commemorating emigration. 9 These diplomatic gifts come with more or less overt expectations of receiving something in return. One European example where the expectations of return-gifts are more overt is the Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw, extended by the Soviet Russians to the Polish people. Giving and receiving heritage gifts is thus a performance that can be potentially used to strengthen a variety of relationships, and show that the distinctions between heritage gifts, bribes and patronage may be complicated. 10 Whereas these gifts are monumental and single, collections are assembled over time and across space, suggesting multilayered relationships.
In the United States, several institutions performing Nordic culture can be described as effects of gifts. The Turnblad Mansion, which became the American Swedish Institute in 1929, was explicitly a gift to the "Swedish people in Minnesota and their descendants" from Småland immigrant and newspaper publisher Swan J. Turnblad. 11 The mansion, originally Turnblad's home, was reframed as a space where Swedish culture -literature, arts, crafts and music -could be developed, and later as a place where Swedish American culture would be collected. In a similar vein, Artur Hazelius, founder of the Nordic Museum and the open-air museum Skansen in Stockholm, Sweden, presented the collections as a gift to the "people of Sweden" (Medelius, Nyström & Stavenow-Hidemark 1998). Turnblad and Hazelius both envisioned their institutions as monuments of Swedish culture but also as spaces where their deeds and dedications could be reproduced and reciprocated as performances.
In a less overt way, gift-exchange also plays a role in materializing sister-city relationships. Founded in 1956 as a result of President Eisenhower's call, sister cities were an attempt to assist US cities reaching out to communities in enemy countries during the Second World War. Cities in the Nordic countries were among the first to embrace the idea of sister-city relationships. 12 The Värmland Gift, however, challenges the idea of a monument or permanent symbol of recognition such as sister-city agreements. Instead its continued movement and cumulative biography emerge as central. Building on Marcel Mauss' concept of the gift as a thing that can bind people together, and combining this thought with the assumption that objects become inalienable through appropriation and socialization (Appadurai 1986;Miller 2001) It enables the smallest community or institution to establish an international profile. 13 The gift-giving acts as performance emerge as a method of negotiating reciprocation.

Gift-Giving as Performance
Knowing how to give and receive gifts in transnational relationships is to be understood as performances of intercultural competence. The exhibiting of the Värmland Gift takes place in two different locales, Värmland in Sweden and Minnesota in the United States, and the exhibitions and their two central objects, the bridal crown and the vase, may be viewed from the viewpoint of performance. Drawing on the works of Richard Schechner, I understand performance as an activity that is framed, presented, highlighted, and displayed (Schechner 2006: 2) -an activity marked by a physical and temporal beginning and end. Understood as such, any event and action can be studied "as" performance (ibid.: 38, 40; cf. Goffman 1990: 15-16; Gunnell, this volume), and this is also the case for gift-giving. Thus there are two kinds of performance at work here: the cultural institution where objects interact with viewers and then the fact that gift-giving is an act, here approached as a ritual performance, which integrates thought and hands-on action (Schechner 1993(Schechner , 2006. When studied as performance, gift-giving and gifts both reflect and generate social, cultural, technical and economic circumstances beyond what takes place on stage. As this framing varies with context and situation (Schechner 2006: 240; cf. Gunnell, this volume), it is fruitful to study gift-giving and gifts because these contain and enact multiple performances presented in various places, at various times and in various situations. I understand the Värmland Gift exhibition and collection as two kinds of practiced performance. 14 To further understand these two senses of per-formance in the two locales, I draw on the studies of performance-scholar Richard Bauman, who characterizes performance as displays of expressive competence. This sense of performance focuses on form and composition (Bauman 1992), in this case on how gifts and gift-giving are carried out, and how they relate to life outside of the performance itself (cf. Patraka 1999: 91).
Performance is also understood here as stylized communication that takes place front stage, following Goffman (1990), that is, in rooms that are accessible to the public to a greater or lesser extent. Museum exhibitions and the public events that are linked to them are obviously part of the front stage. In this study, however, I also consider performances that take place in other areas where the objects are handled -rooms considered backstage for the museum visitor. In these backstage areas, participants in the study and I, the researcher, take on roles as collaborating actors (cf. Snellman, this volume) performing on stages, adding yet another dimension to the drama studied.
A further understanding of performance is where activities are repeated over time to the point that they are taken for granted. This understanding builds on Judith Butler's concept of performativity, defined as an endless effect of practice, which also defines the position from which it is being performed (Butler 1993;Damsholt 2009;cf. Schechner 1993). Viewing people's actions as performative allows us to see that the same process of making meaning as in explicit performance is present also in the continuum of everyday life. The ASI and the Swedish American Center take responsibility for how the Värmland Gift is framed, while the institutions' physical and financial circumstances and conventions affect the selection and framing. Over time the stylized and repeated gift-giving performances emerge as performative, as actors that set people, objects and organizations in motion. In this sense the Värmland Gift can be understood as a network of performances; the objects are gifts that serve to underline the fact that the exhibition is in itself a gift, with an added meaning that it is not limited to the locale, but also includes the givers.

Performing a Transnational Bond -Being Part of the World
The reproduction of the Värmland Gift's symbolic value takes place in complex processes of re-charging. The collection may be understood as inalienable through the act of repeated performances. When the Värmland Gift was given to the ASI in Minneapolis in 1952 and exhibited before an audience, objects such as grave markers from Ekshärad, ceramics from Arvika, glass from Eda, birch-bark shoes from Ritamäki, linen from Klässbol, Easter witches, spinning wheels, folk costumes, statues, photo albums from the local Coop store, the collected works by local authors Erik Gustaf Geijer, Selma Lagerlöf and Gustaf Fröding as well as the bridal crown appeared in a novel light. While these objects bear witness to their makers, users and givers, the collection itself and its exhibition perform the current relationships at the institutions that host them, articulated through the physical assemblage and conceptual framing of the objects (cf. Butler 1993). Collected by local historical associations in the parishes and assembled by the Historical Association in Värmland into the Värmland Gift collection, these objects drew up connections between networks of for example, craft, art, manor culture, peasant culture, Christian and pre-Christian culture and created something new. The donors' objects that people had crafted, inherited or lived with, anchored the gift on an individual level. In a Swedish-American museum setting, these objects become potential symbols of identity to the visitors and staff who interact with them. There were probably a multitude of emotions involved in making the Värmland Gift in Värmland. Suddenly, individuals in every parish could feel like actors on a global stage when selecting and sending a concrete object across the Atlantic. The gift-givers' overarching state of mind was summed up in the letter of intent that accompanied the gift. The letter of intent reads as follows: Inhabitants in all parishes, cities and towns of the province of Värmland in Sweden send greetings with a gift to citizens of Värmland lineage in the United States of America. The gift is a mark of friendship from the old home of the forefathers. It is an expression of the wish to maintain the affinity between American and Swedish citizens of the same origin.
The letter of intent may be interpreted as the giftgivers' performance of fear to be left in oblivion by relatives and friends who had created new lives for themselves in the United States. After all, Värmland had lost a quarter of its population to emigration between 1869 and 1930, an emigration that divided families and households. The letter of intent also conveys an image of the United States as the hub of modernization and novelty, in need of a material history with roots that run deeper than that provided by the American soil. The Värmland Gift materializes an image of such roots.
As recounted in the exhibition in Karlstad in 2009, the stories about how the collection came about vary. One of the most cited versions say that Carl Fredrik Hellström, the Swedish Consul General in Minneapolis, and Sigurd Gustavson, secretary of the Historical Association of Värmland, together conceived of the Gift as a way to demonstrate the good relations between Värmland and the United States. The idea captivated Värmland's governor, Axel Westling, and in October 1951 he invited every parish in the province to participate. The friendship gift became a popular movement throughout Värmland. Coordinated by Sigurd Gustavson, the committee of representatives from Värmland's approximately 100 parishes collected the Gift, having involved more than 1,000 individuals in materializing the Gift through making and selecting objects. The objects selected from the parishes became actors in the play of heritage and reflected the complexity of life in Värmland on a global stage. In hindsight it is noteworthy that in a similar manner objects from provinces were selected as building blocks when Artur Hazelius conceived of what later became the Nordic museum to reflect the Swedish nation internationally.
The Värmland Gift was not without controversy at the outset. People involved in making and collecting the objects, of course, appreciated the concept of ethnologia europaea 40:2 the Gift, including its complexity. As the exhibition in Karlstad demonstrated, some promoters of Swedish culture, including those working abroad, reacted strongly to the initiative of the Värmlanders to provide their relatives and friends in the United States with the collection of artifacts from the province. According to, for example, Albin Widén, a collection from Sweden in America should promote fine art and craft and downplay peasant culture, as a performative act favoring high-brow culture and a modern nation state. 15 The altercation over the Värmland Gift thus reflected different performances of heritage. In the mid-twentieth century, museums in the Nordic countries often presented their collections from a nineteenth-century view of "peasant" and upperclass cultures. For example, provincial costumes, everyday pottery, and religious objects were classified by region and unattributed to maker or donor ("man's folk costume, Östervallskog Parish, Värmland province"), whereas objects from the upper class were classified chronologically and always identified with owners and donors (Bronze statue, "The Sheaf Binder", Christian Eriksson, bequest 1952 of Ölme Parish). The Värmland Gift includes objects from both spheres, which made it an intercultural performance (Schechner 2006: 315) that became a cause of controversy at the time (cf. the project of Samdok 20 years later; see Snellman, this volume). Regardless of where the idea for the Värmland Gift originated, the organizers simultaneously drew attention to Värmland in the past and present performed as a place different from the rest of Sweden based on its cultural diversity and migration history. 16 Through ritual performances based on kin, Värmland was expanded beyond the province's physical borders to include Värmlanders in the United States.

Small Things Matter -the Art of Performing Return Gifts
For its givers in Värmland, the Värmland Gift played a key role in materializing feelings both of loss and debt of gratitude. It also expanded Värmland beyond its physical borders to include kin in the United States. In the United States, the same gift has played a key role as performance of pride and appreciation to the recipients. Once the Gift arrived in Minneapolis in 1952, it was given a room of its own on the top floor of the building where it was displayed in its entirety, organized by parish, and accompanied only by object labels, seemingly needing no further explanation.
Presented at the ASI, the Värmland Gift appeared as a collection of examples. In a similar way as we may walk through a cabinet of wonder or a city (cf. Österlund-Pötzsch, this volume), the visitor to this version of the Värmland Gift exhibition could meander from one object to the other, from parish to parish and connect them and creatively make them part of their own individual performances of the past.
Upon receiving the Gift in 1952, the museum hosted a gathering of Swedish Americans and invited guests from Värmland who had coordinated the Gift. The ceremonies included a presentation of the Gift in the Turnblad Mansion, a banquet, private parties, and receptions, and culminated in the visiting Värmland delegation being featured at Svenskarnas Dag in Minneapolis, a performance within a performance of one of the major festivals in the United States for Swedish immigrants and their descendants. It also involved a wedding in which the crown played a key role as performance of embodied heritage (Gradén 2010). While these performances are effects of the Värmland Gift, these performances simultaneously play key roles in solidifying the Värmland Gift's status as a heritage gift; they add to the singularization of the crown and growing biography of the Värmland Gift.
At the ASI, the Värmland Gift has since the inauguration in 1952 been displayed throughout the Turnblad Mansion. Restaged in 1996, the exhibition presented the province of Värmland instead of each parish and labels recounting the gift-giving ceremony were added. In 2002, the ASI organized the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Värmland Gift in Minneapolis. The three-day celebration brought together 120 artists and official representatives from Värmland and thousands of Swedish Americans for a renewed exhibition of the Värmland Gift. The  The Institute's relationship with Värmland took on a very special meaning in 1952 with the presentation of Varmlandsgåvan, the Värmland Gift. This "friendship gift" of more than 300 objects and books constitutes the largest donation ever made to the Institute's collections. Its presentation in June 1952 by a delegation from Värmland led by Governor Axel Westling was a singular milestone in the history of this museum. (…) over the years, the Swedish American community has changed. This is inevitable, as the distance between the early immigrants and later generations has grown in length. One could fear that this distance, coupled with the dramatic social changes happening in America and throughout the world, constitute a threat to the close ties between Sweden and those of Swedish descent. However, there is much evidence to support a different view, being that Swedish-Americans today feel an even greater need for even closer connections with their roots in Sweden. As this world grows increasingly more complex and operates with quickening pace, there is a growing yearning among Swedish-Americans for this connection. 17 While Karstadt's scripted speech marked a climax of the Värmland Gift inaugural dinner, its content seemed to sum up emotions and spontaneous performances that permeated the entire process of making the exhibition.
When preparing the Värmland Gift's pilgrimage and homecoming to Sweden, a volunteer at the ASI made a point of telling a staff member that he looked forward to the Gift returning from Värmland. He thought the celebration over there would strengthen many museummembers' ties to Sweden regardless of where their families came from: "A gift so large, so unusual, and so heartfelt must be taken into account." When summing up the installation of the exhibition of the Värmland Gift in Karlstad, several performances backstage (Goffman 1990) highlighted pride and honor on being selected part of the team and trusted to work with these objects. Joel Pieper, contractor with ASI for 15 years, said: Being asked to go to Sweden with this particular collection was an acknowledgement of my aesthetic and technical skill (…) and being in Sweden gave me a rare opportunity to get to know a culture outside my own, work with Swedish people as part of the same team, with the same goals, challenges and deadlines and work as a group to accomplish our shared mission to display this unique collection again. piece. I look back on my involvement, directly working with the gift itself for many years at ASI and installing it at the Swedish American Center, and relationships formed as a result. Yes, this gift has a greater capacity than a gift in general. I suspect the in-depth-value, and potential, of such gifts are not always realized, utilized and appreciated.
After more than fifty years, the Värmland Gift continues to play a central role for the museum leadership, the members of the museum, its staff and related contractors. The Gift invokes feelings of thankfulness, pride, honor and connectivity. As the curator and contractor point out, the Gift generates increased knowledge about location, extends networks and create new relationships. This also applies to me as researcher of the Värmland Gift and member of the exhibition production team. 18 As the largest donation ever to the ASI, the Värmland Gift becomes a leading actor in the play of transnational heritage which the museum is to perform. It shows how a gift given in 1952 has generated multiple performances, which create and recreate relationships over time and across geographic distances. The ritual performances of gift-giving seem to emerge in times marked by ambivalence, when relationships are at stake. In the United States, and due to the frosty relations between the United States and Sweden during the Second World War, the Värmland Gift was granted a particular cultural and diplomatic status. Moreover, the time when the Värmland Gift was donated to the ASI coincides with a time of expansion for the museums established by immigrants themselves to collect and display mementos of the great emigration from the Nordic countries. As highlighted in the ASI eightieth anniversary exhibition in 2009, "between 1941 and 1945, the Institute's ability to interact with Sweden was made difficult by the war. Its image was complicated by the reactions of some to Sweden's (so-called) neutrality. Many Americans and Swedish-Americans alike could not understand how the country could stand outside the struggle against the Nazis." 19 Taking the strained relationship between Sweden and the United States into consideration, the choice to "perform" the province of Värmland rather than Sweden probably contributed to the Värmland Gift's success at the ASI at this time. Framed as regional, the Gift included craft specific to the descendants of Forest Finns who settled in Värmland in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, textiles from the Norwegian border and books about the activity at Bofors, a weapon industry in the province. 20 In hindsight, the Värmland Gift, as the largest donation to the ASI, contributed to the institution's growing role as a museum, where people could experience universal themes such as migration and places of home. As such the ASI performed the heritage of Swedish descendants in America, whereas the donation of the Värmland Gift performed glimpses of contemporary culture in the areas from which their parents and grandparents had come. 21

Keeping the Gift on the Move
A gift must be reciprocated to advance relationships. When applied to the Värmland Gift, the question becomes what reciprocation of such a gift requires. If someone receives a gift and refrains from giving something in return, it will be a choice that creates an unfavorable position in the eye of the one who first extended a gift (Mauss 1990). In other words, to accept gifts means to take on an obligation of also giving a gift, to foster solidarity. I have suggested that ASI's caring for and exhibiting the Värmland Gift can be viewed as a return gift, understood as an act of solidarity with the donors, and an act of respect towards immigrants from Sweden and their descendants, for which the Gift was explicitly intended.
While having the collection on show creates a degree of reciprocity, leaving it at that would keep the relationship at the status quo. Developing a relationship into a dynamic and long-lasting one requires further acts that can be observed and recognized by both the Swedish and the American sides. The following performance is thus an effect of previous ones.
At the inauguration of the Swedish American Center, the ASI ceremonially presented a 60 cm tall glass vase to "the people of the province Värmland".  While all other gifts to the Swedish American Center were presented following the inauguration speeches in the auditorium, the presentation of the vase was reserved for when His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia were ushered through the inaugural exhibition. The presentation, carried out by the ASI's President and CEO, highlighted the vase as a return gift for the Värmland Gift to the ASI in 1952, and as an attempt to match the artistic quality and symbolic value of the bridal crown, the key object of the original gift; this can be seen as an incantation in which gift-giving as a ritual performance emerges as a creative force in the dialogue between two time periods, two countries, two places, two cultural institutions, two objects. The vase took center stage in the 2009 exhibit. As a result, a long series of complex and symbolically charged ritual performances unfolded. 22 One of the stories brought to the fore was materialized in the room next to the vase and dedicated to the bridal crown, the key gift from 1952, described as "an emblem of a desire that the ties between American and Swedish citizens of the same tribe shall be joined generation after generation." 23 The crown was positioned at the center of the room, surrounded by labels and photographs presenting its American biography highlighting the gift-giving act in 1952 as a wedding ceremony. Along with its placing in a display case lit by fiber optics, the exhibition's presentation of the crown's biography singularize it (Kopytoff 1986; cf. Gradén 2010), renews it and contributes to its aura of being "different" from other objects in the exhibition. When brought together in the same exhibition, the bridal crown and the vase underline that the exhibition in Minneapolis in 1952 and the exhibition in Karlstad in 2009 were both seen as return gifts.
The vase itself brings to mind the characteristics of a kaleidoscope or a concretized slideshow, which recompose selected images and highlights the artists' practice as performance. In 2008, when the glass designers Warren Olson and Andrea Blum were commissioned to create a vase for the people of Värmland, they thought the vase should clearly illustrate the multiple connections between Värmland and Minnesota, involving both nature and objects from the collection. They chose to work in the grail technique because according to them the technique itself, the layered glass technique, best emphasized the heritage-making process. Its layers, separated yet merged, highlight the vase's materiality, creating depth, representing time and space, with the past encapsulated in the present. In Andrea Blum's story about the selection process of making the piece she declares that: On the interior, a clear layer incorporates expanded silver and gold leaf, symbolizes the promised richness of the new land. The background color of deep blue symbolizes the lakes common to both Värmland and Minnesota. In the next interior layer symbols are drawn from objects in the collection: the eagle, the wrought iron cemetery cross, the folk art horse, and the family tree representing the Värmland Gift and the life left behind when the Värmland emigrants moved to Minnesota. The exterior incorporates trees, wheat and corn, representing the timber and farming industries, the two predominant occupations of the emigrants upon arrival in Minnesota. 24 The artists' close study of both of the collection of objects and the landscapes gives this gift a particularly rich potential to perform long-lasting relationships through which places are connected. Just as the bridal crown was created out of silver and gold filigree and gemstones, the vase is created from material that is transformative. Made from sand, water, fire, and air this particular glass vase is simultaneously transparent and opaque, sustainable and fragile. Shaped into an object, the gift from the Minnesotans to the Värmlanders is rich in visible symbolism, created in layers compressing space and time -characteristics that were also true for the crown. Although the crown and the vase were created to be used as gifts, they refer to performances of different kinds. Furthermore, just as a play has a climax, the climax of the 1952 gift was the crown, a ritual performance that is repeated in the ASI's giving of the glass vase.  The invocation is the core of the work of the artist according to the curator Lewis Hyde as he discusses pieces of art as gifts (2007: 4). This is evident in the performance of gift-giving as well. Cultural competence goes beyond professional skill and artistic talent and includes intuition and emotional presence. The crown and the vase, both commissioned pieces of craft, are transformed into inalienable objects through their detailed personification (Miller 2001) and socialization into the network of Värmlanders in Sweden and the United States. Similarly, the attention to detail, including when selecting artists, demonstrates the gift-giver's degree of cultural competence.
There seems to be two ways of returning the Värmland Gift: the on-going honor of displaying a gift and the concept of echoing the original gift. A third way is to keep the gift on the move by commissioning brand new return gifts which echo the artistic quality and materiality of previous gifts. In the light of Marcel Mauss' theory of gift exchange, the glass vase emerges as a catalyst for a phase in the reciprocal exchange and cultural competition between two institutions, two regions and two countries to expand their networks and strengthen their positions within the increasingly global cultural economy.
Recent studies have suggested that commissioned art should be viewed as commodities because such art is exchanged for money (Timm & Waade 2010). This view is challenged when commissioned art and craft is entered into the cultural economy of gift-giving. Although the time, skill and invocation invested in art and craft may make them popular presents, it is the gift-giving performances that transform commissions like the bridal crown and the vase into heritage. The attention to details here demonstrates the gift-giver's degree of (inter)cultural competence. This competence in performance, ultimately, produces the inalienable heritage gift. Although it was never articulated as such by the ASI, the institution and its staff demonstrate reflexivity when they select artists whose heredity goes back to Värmland, frame the vase as a return gift, and organize the giftgiving in the Värmland Gift exhibit in Karlstad so that it is witnessed by Swedish royalty and invited guests. Such multilayered ritual performance fosters connectivity (Schechner 1993(Schechner , 2006. For both parties -the ASI and the Swedish American Center -the receiving and returning of the Värmland Gift is a competitive act that strengthens the ties that bind, and each exchange seems to offer the possibility of furthering the networks invoked when the Värmland Gift was originally made. According to the director of the Swedish American Center, the choice to "perform" the Värmland presence in Minnesota in Karlstad was a success. The exhibition attracted more than 5,000 visitors in 2009 of which a great number were descendants to the original gift-givers. 25 While the Swedish American Center performed the Värmland Gift as part of a Värmland heritage in America, the Värmland Gift performed gift-giving as an emerging form of contemporary cultural economy, connecting cultural institutions and ordinary people in the United States and Sweden.

Materializing Emotions: Composing and Recomposing Cultural Connectivity
In this article I have suggested the term "heritage gift", exploring the role of material gift-giving as part of a cultural economy. This specific part of such an economy reaches beyond a market with visible transactions of sponsorship and grants, to a form of exchange where gift-giving performances take center stage. The purpose has been to draw attention to heritage gifts and exhibitions and rituals as gift-giving performances, aiming at an understanding of the role these have in furthering relationships between museum institutions, its donors as well as collections and audience.
Utilizing theories of materialization, performance and actor networks and applying these to the Värmland Gift to America, I show how gift-giving becomes a means of both materializing relationships and delimiting boundaries between regions and nations. Moreover, I demonstrate how the presentation to a region or a museum of a heritage gift with a dense biography actually involves a series of ritualistic performances. Drawing on these multiple per- formances of the Värmland Gift I suggest that cultural differences become enrichment, and tension between the local, regional and national becomes a flexible and creative asset in relationships developed in the wake of migration. The point is that heritage gifts -as in the case of the Värmland Gift -with their dense biographies, have a particular capacity to act on human emotions: to anchor them, transfer them and connect them into networks, over time amplifying them, strengthening the position of the heritage gift even more. For example when the ASI in Minneapolis lent the Värmland Gift to the United States in 1952 to be the key exhibition at the royal inauguration of the Swedish American Center in 2009, the institutions on both sides invested in transatlantic networks through the collective performance of locally anchored material culture. As a result, the differing performances involved in the Värmland heritage gift have served to foster a wide range of binding dynamic transatlantic relationships. Even the smallest community or institution, family or artist is able to establish an international profile, and infuse a feeling of being part of a larger network -one that spans generations and physical locations in Sweden and the United States.
Moreover, the heritage gift illuminates how the real homeland and the imaginary are not easily separated. A location is not only material; it is also spiritual and emotional. Whereas territorial boundaries define where Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland or Denmark begin and end, the ritual performances of gift-giving demonstrate how emigrants in the United States and people in the old homeland together create a transatlantic space that circumvents such boundaries. The transfer of heritage gifts from Värmland to Minnesota, and from the country to the city, is deeply symbolic, challenging the limits of solidarity both within and between nations. This is explicit in border regions in the Nordic countries such as Värmland.
The regional connotation of the stars of the collection -the bridal crown and the glass vase -means they are uniquely Swedish, viewed as an area of folklore and authentic heritage, but they are also apolitical, non-nationalistic or partisan, and open to broader and inclusive cultural uses. Not all regions in Sweden are equally usable in this sense -the provinces of Värmland, Dalarna and Småland are used more often than Sörmland, Östergötland, Halland and Öland (see Aronsson 1995;Häggström 2000;Olwig & Jones 2008;Turtinen 2006). When the same regions are highlighted in the United States, such performances may be interpreted as mirroring the activities in Sweden. The situation is, however, more complex. As the gift-giving performances involving the stars of the collection show, the bridal crown and the vase are reproduced as heritage gifts.
Similar to an actor on stage performing emotions for an audience to perceive, the heritage gift performs affection, allegiance, honor, submission and diplomacy and more. Although there are lots of differences in size and scope, there are parallels between the collective effort of Värmland extending the provincial Gift in 1952 and keeping it on stage as a star of the ASI and other cultural institutions, whose appointed heritage sites can be seen as presents from the past -performances staged in the present (Schechner 2006: 28) and an alternative modus of exchange from looting and repatriation. This is a much discussed topic among museum scholars (Cooper 2008), including those in the Nordic countries (see Reinius 2007;Kuoljok 2007;Grønnow, Gabriel & Dahl 2008;Svanberg 2009;Skrydstrup 2009). Small or large organizations, in their authoritative lead role in the drama of heritage making, legitimize, maintain and amplify the values of gifts into heritage gifts. Because of their capacity to contain and enact a multitude of performances, heritage gifts have a greater capacity than a gift in general to act on us as human beings and make us perform accordingly. As such, these presents from the past are returned to givers and distributed to various audiences in the form of preservation, ceremonies, performance and exhibitions to be carried on into the future, performances that reflexively also explain the performances.
To regard gift-giving as ritual performance (Schechner 2006(Schechner : 57, 1993 and network (Latour 2005(Latour , 1998  Notes 1 � Letter of intent, Värmlandsgåvan, ASI archives. 2 � In his analysis of consumption focussing on the objectification of mass-produced goods, Daniel Miller underlines that "The authenticity of artefacts as culture derives, not from their relationship to some historical style or manufacturing process (...) but rather from their active participation in a process of social self-creation in which they are directly constitutive of our understanding of ourselves and others" (Miller 1987: 215). 3 � Even if material culture was put on the back burner as the theoretical interest in discursive models began to grow in ethnology in the 1960s, interest in it continued, viewed in semiotic terms or as products of discourses. This focus changed in the early 2000 with a new approach to materiality (see for example Damsholt 2009), sometimes referred to as the "material turn". 4 � I would like to thank folklorist Lena Norrman and translator Ylva Hellerud for pointing me in the direction of this particular translation of the Poetic Edda. 5 � French Philosopher Jacques Derrida, however, has claimed that there is no such thing as a free gift (1992: 14) and criticises Mauss by saying: "Mauss does not worry enough about the incompatibility between gift and exchange or about the fact that an exchanged gift is only a tit for tat, that is, an annulment of the gift" (Derrida 1992: 37). As Katherine Rupp has pointed out, Derrida writes about giving from his own culture's position where gifts and exchange are not conflated, whereas Mauss is trying to understand giving and re-ceiving from a perspective in which gifts and exchange are not separated (Rupp 2003: 179-181). In a similar vein Daniel Miller points out that it is the actual exchange that makes things happen (Miller 2001: 94). In other words, the gift has agency and gift-giving as performance is an effect of a previous performance. 6 � Although receiving and giving gifts remain an important activity at the museums in the Nordic countries, this activity has been largely overlooked by recent scholarship on museums (see for example Svanberg 2009). 7 � When the Nordic museum introduced Samdok, its department for documentation, curators sometimes gave packages of coffee as gifts to people they interviewed in exchange for their time and information (cf. Snellman, this volume). 8 � "Till hugfästande av sambandet med stamfränder västanhavs och östanhavs." 9 � Another example of monumental gifts in northern Europe are the Nordic cultural houses Hanaholmen in Helsinki, Voksenåsen in Oslo, and Shaeffergården in Copenhagen. These are all cultural spaces that were performed as gifts from one nation to another to maintain friendly relationships with northern Europe in the wake of the Second World War (Gradén & Larsen 2009: 7). 10 Besides monuments, many museums may be viewed as results of gift-exchanges. Some of these gifts have been ambiguous as they are exchanges of goods as the effects of missionary work and anthropological research and expeditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The assembling of these goods has evolved into for example ethnographic museums. In recent years, these objects have generated acts of repatriation, and re-contextualizations in countries from where they once came. In hindsight the acts of repatriation for museum purposes may be understood as translations into a space where Nordic versions of colonialism is performed. 11 www.americanswedishinstitute.org.
12 For examples, see Gradén 2003. Compared to the quite similar restitution process (Skrydstrup 2009), the heritage gift is less oriented towards the juridical rights to the object. 13 As the Värmland Gift shows, the heritage gift's value increases with reciprocation. 14 I view the exhibition as the result of the researchers' and curators' selection and connection of things into meaningful entities. Each exhibition, here of the Värmland Gift collection, is therefore understood as a new collection, which adds another layer to an ongoing performance that takes place in a museum. fyllas med gåvor av snidade träsaker, trasmattor och modeller öppnar svindlande perspektiv. (...) Man ska inte överdriva det sentimentala värdet som allmogesakerna kan ha för emigranterna. När en svenskamerikan går på museum vill han hellre se konstverk av klass som ger honom en känsla av stolthet att vara svenskvisar man honom en spinnrock av det slag han minns från sin barndom blir det för honom en påminnelse om det Fattigsverige som han ville slippa ifrån när han reste till Amerika. (...) Nu måste det sägas ifrån: svensk-amerikanska institutioner är icke avsedda att bli avläggare av rikssvenska hembygdsmuseer. Från museal synpunkt är det orimligt att blanda upp de samlingar av svenskamerikas nybyggarkultur som hopbragds i Minneapolis och på andra håll med sändningar av allmogesaker från Sverige. Exportera konst och konsthantverk, men låt allmogesverige stanna hemma!" 16 The project was granted cultural and political approval through collaboration with all parishes and municipalities, which in turn collaborated with businesses, churches, folklore association, artists and artisans. 17 CEO Bruce Karstadt's speech was also performed in the form of a label in the exhibition. 18 This article can be viewed as yet another performance generated by the Värmland Gift. 19 Perhaps to ease this strained relationship, some of the Institute's activities in this period were designed to offset the criticism and included programs and exhibits on wartime Sweden and participation in fund raising efforts to aid victims of the war. Exhibits featuring Swedish and Swedish-American themes included "Sweden's War Preparedness: An Exhibition" (1943), Swedish-American art (1941), and the immigrant community of Bishop Hill (1943). 20 For further readings on immigration from Savolax, please see literature by Gabriel Bladh. 21 The so-called pioneer museums performed heritage just as the tilled and ploughed landscapes of the prairie, had become popular venues at the turn of the twentieth century, as manifestations of the successful development of settlements to townships. The new museums were formed by urban immigrants. 22 Presented in the third gallery, yet visible when the visitor entered the exhibition, the vase was encircled by other objects: pewter plates, brass candle holders, a manor house chair, folk costumes, iron candle sticks, and oil portraits of the local authors Selma Lagerlöf, Gustaf Fröding, and Erik Gustaf Geijer. For the staff and members of the organizations involved and for visitors to the exhibition in Värmland, the presentation in the center of the gallery, with all other objects circulating around it, made the vase a lead actor. 23 �"Den är en sinnebild av en önskan att banden mellan amerikanska och svenska medborgare av samma stam måtte förbliva fasta släktled efter släktled" (official gift letter, ASI archives). 24 Interview with Andrea Blum, Minneapolis, February 12, 2009, and label based on Warren Olson and Andrea Blum's artists' statement. 25 Director's report to ASI, September 2010.