Linking the Local , the National and the Global Past and Present Trends in European Ethnology

The first part of the paper gives a historical overview of some ways in which the intercl:it in the local, the national and the global has shifted European ethnology mainly in Sweden during this century, whereas the second part d i scusRes cu rrent research strategies for linking these levels, exploring some poss i ble ethnological contributions to the current debate on space, place and identity lormations.

The first part of the paper gives a historical overview of some ways in which the intercl:it in the local, the national and the gl obal has shifted European ethnology -mainly in Sweden -during this century, whereas the second part discusRes cu rrent research strategies for linking these levels, exploring some possi ble ethnological contributions to the current debate on space, place and identity lormations.

The division of labour in Academia
We are sometimes misled into believing that there is a grand system behind the division of labour among the various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Ye t most of these disciplines were created by chance condi tions and political and cultural interests in the past. The making of European ethnology is a striking example of these processes. If we look at a map of Europe we will find a most uneven distribution of the discipline, and where it has been established it also has highly varying positions in the field of cultural studies and cultural history. With a grand simplification one can argue that European nations with strong colonial traditions tended to create a global kind of anthropology, whereas late or small colonial nations turned to discover "their prim itives within", either in the fo rm of fo lklore studies or as a more general cultural anthropol ogy of the nation. It is this latter tradition which today is labelled "European ethnology". Folk lore studies came to be integrated in this tradi tion or developed as a special discipline with an international and comparative orientation, but my fo cus in the fo llowing will be on the making and remaking of a European ethnological tradi tion. The emergence or non-emergence of this tradition in Europe also had to do with highly varying politics of nationalism. Seen in this light it is hardly surprising that a country like the Netherlands ended up with more anthro pologists per square metre than any other Eu ropean nation, but hardly any institutionalized academic tradition of either "European ethnol ogy" or "folklore studies". On the other hand, a country like Finland during the same period acquired more fo lklorists per square metre than any other nation, but was rather late in devel oping social anthropology as a fo rmal academic discipline. Here the making of a fo lkloristic national heritage profoundly shaped the aca demic landscape, whereas in Denmark archae ology took the position of"the national science" at an early stage. In countries like Sweden and Germany a more general ethnological study of the national heritage produced departments of European ethnology.
Unlike European ethnology, social anthro pology emerged rather late in Scandinavia. It lacked the support of a network of both central and regional museums as well as the moral support of cultural nationalism.
Although general anthropology and Europe an ethnology developed within the same tradi tions of cultural theory, and the early pioneers read much of the same classics, their position in Academia came to be very diHerent. European eth n o l ogy was defined as belonging to the hu manities with links to history, literature, art history and languages, whereas anthropology was seen as a natu ral science, with strong ties to geography and other natural sciences. This division of labour can be seen in the establish ment of the national museums during the nine teenth century. In Sweden anthropology be longed to the Natural History Museum, Euro pean ethnology to the Nordic Museum, and the re was a long fight about who had a right to the Lapps. Were they part of the Swedish na tional heritage and thus part of the Nordic Museum, or should they be seen as an exotic tribe, which belonged with the other primitives of the zoology collections? How significant is it that we in the Nordic countries and Central Europe have a division of labour between a general anthropological per spective and a regional specialization (with a historical perspective) in the fo rm of European ethnology? From the end of the nineteenth century and onwards, a new discipline has staked out its territory in these countries, there by shaping not only its own identity but also the orientation and aims of neighbouring subjects.
In countries without this tradition of European ethnology, the field of cultural studies has been divided up in a very different way. There was a strong ambivalence in this task.

From the global to the local
Ethnologists could demonstrate that national borders often had little relevance for traditional fo lk culture, but on the other hand the main raison d'etre for the discipline was its national task.

Reinventing European ethnology
The grand project of mapping Swedish fo lk culture kept the discipline on a steady course for decades, fr om Lithberg over to Sigurd Erix on -the great organizer and European entre preneur in Swedish ethnology fr om the 1930s into the 1960s. All ethnologists fr om old profes-sors to th e young studentR were united in th is common task. In the end, however, it turned into routine. They rarely asked the question: is this massive input of work really producing results worth the effort? In a way the atlas project had turned into a great ocean liner, which kept moving fo rward even when the engines were burned out.
When I started to read ethnology in the 1960s the ocean liner was still there -but stranded. As young students we moved around in a landscape of ruins fr om the Sigurd Erixon research industry at the department in Stock holm. On the abandoned desks we fo und boxes of excerpts, half-finished maps and long proto cols of evidence collecting dust. We never had a chance to experience the enthusiasm and the exhilarating fe eling which went with the idea of a common project uniting the discipline. For us much of the earlier knowledge was dead. We There was not much inspiration to be obtained locally fr om either history or sociology; instead an anthropologization of the discipline took place. The new utopian project was "Discover Sweden", and the rallying cry was "back to fieldwork", and in those days fieldwork mainly meant community studies. This new interest really dates back to the 1950s, when the Amer ican anthropologist Robert Redfield had visited Sweden, charismatically pleading for the study of "the little community". Inspired by him, sev eral ethnologists went out in quest of this mi crocosm. In the 1960s this interest in local communities grew in strength to become a dom inant mode of thought. We who received our ed ucation then learned to sec Sweden in terms oflocal communities. If we look at the choice of student essay and di ssertation topics in this period, we sec the emergence of views of which com munities were more community-like than others. Th is created a new selection principle, which was infl uenced in large measure by con tem porary anthropological theory, both the func tionalist and the interactionist variety. This interest fo cused on the periphery of society rather than the mainstream. It is in this light that we should sec the great interest, for exam ple, fishing hamlets; ior many of us they repre sented the perfect cultural fo rm of the little community: isolated, homogeneous, well-inte grated, self-sufficient, and so on. (On closer examination, these coastal communities re vealed a different reality.) The disproportionate nu mber of studies of such marginal settings was a quest for communities that were as "exot ic" or "anthropological" as possible. With this search profile, for instance, the study of work ing-class settings was chiefly concentrated to small fa ctory towns, and metropolitan studies fo cused on "urban villages", such as traditional, close-knit neighbourhoods .
There was a paradox in this development: in many ways it fe lt like a liberating period of internationalization. We were all busy reading  Certain phenomena and relations were fo und more "communicative" than others, and thus more interesting research topics. The search for subcultures grew out of this interest in interac tion and communication, but also fr om a wish to break down stereotypes of Sweden as a homoge neous society (or local communities as well integrated). The new concept was used to cap ture other social units and cultural systems than the local study, but here too the result was that some groups and milieux were considered "more subcultural" than others: teenagers, chil dren, women, workers, immigrants. (Middle-aged, mainstream, middle-class men were con sequently the least subcultural category that could be imagined.) The ::;tudy of subculture began in an interac tionist tradition but went on to fo llow a semiotic path: fr om roles and scenes to codes and mes sages. li began to fo cus more on the expressive: style, taste, codes, identity markers, and the like. There were striking differences in the way these studies were framed and delineated. Work ing-class culture was mainly studied in the fo rm of community studies, whereas bourgeois culture was analysed through a bricolage of materials on a national level. (This was for example striking in the project "Class and cul ture" in which I was involved myself, see the discussion in LOfgren 1988). Another effect of this research strategy was that working-class culture much more often was studied through oral history, whereas bourgeois culture was analysed through memoirs, etiquette books, diaries, mass media material, creating a brico lage approach.
Just as the study of peasant culture had previously drifted into a devolutionary search for "a golden age" or classic fo rms, working class studies tended to fo cus on the heroic age of early class fo rmation -often seen as a "purer" fo rm of class culture than, for example, tho periods after the Second World War.

Approaches to national culture
The studies of culture and class came to prob lematize ideas about the typically Swedish and to look at the ways in which mainstream cul ture was produced and contested.  , Frykman 1993and Lofgren 1989. Nations are busy making themselves diffe r ent, but in an increasingly contrasting and competitive manner, which creates standards of comparability and symmetry. By trying to be unique they are at an other level becoming more similar.
The end-product is the image of the ideal nation, a cultural construction which has emerged step-by-step over the last two centu ries, and this normative, transnational image has had great influence on all kinds of nation building processes: it defines the perfect nation as one with: a homogenous population or "folk" -no dif fe rence between ethnicity and national iden tity a high degree of integration between the state and "the nation" a well-defined territory where physical space should be turned into cultural space a distinctive culture with a high degree of sharing between the members of the nation, a common language, a shared past and a common fu ture, high internal/external in teraction ratio.
As we all know, it is rather hard to find a nation state wh ich would fit this ideal model, but still it has been exported to different comers of the Ethnologi sts have devoted a great deal of attention to the ways in wh ich new cultural fo rms emerge over time, and become insiiiu tionali7.ed or n atural i zed paris of th e social land::;capc . In the cu rrent debate there is too much focus on disintegration, too much talk about "post": posinaiional, posimodern, posilo cal, too m uch "de-focused, de-centred, de-terri torialized, de-localized", and also too much "trans", as in transit, transnational, translocal, transcultural . We must balance our usc of post The same comparative approach may be used 166 to look at the procc::;::;e::; of uprooti ng and reloca tion among migrant::;, cosmopolita n::; and peo ple in transit in urban ::;ctti n gs ofihe 1890s nnd the 1990s. ln both settings we fi nd the same worries about di si ntegration , but what arc the similarities and diilcrcnces between these two contexts? In retrospect we can study how the homeless and u prooted in the cities ofihc 1890s claimed new spaces and made new places for themselves. It is also important to remember thai the great era of hypermobi liiy occurred during the latter pari ofihc nineteenth cen tury and up to the First World War. The waves of m igration and displacement takin g place then were on a much greater scale than the one we arc experiencing tod ay. Somehow these histor ical experiences and the processes of uprooting and re-rooting occurring then seem strangely absent fr om the current debate on displace ment and mobility. The fact that urban mi grants in the 1890s lived in social settings which may have seemed fluid, chaotic and dis organized does not have to mean that their identities were transient, fr agmented or disin tegrated. How did, fo r example, the peasants who turned into urbanites learn to cope, to look and overlook, to select and ignore. How were new identities crafted on this seemingly chaotic urban scene? Similar learning processes of cop ing and crafting are fo und among today's mi grants.
There might be a historical lesson here for our current discussion of identity constructs.
Instead of talking about bricolage or fleeting ness, we can ask what kinds of cultural compe tence are needed to handle all the alternatives and possibilities ofthe present: how do we learn to cope with complex or fr agmented settings?
Comparative discussions of identity and root edness tend to get trapped in measurements of how much, in terms of losses and gains of identity, but there is no cross-cultural or time less quota ofhuman need for identity. We should be wary of thinking in terms of compensatory identities: the loss of local identity being com pensated by emerging national ones, the loss of neighbourhood roots compensated by sub-cul tural identities etc.
Instead of asking whether place and identity meant more or less in the past, we should start by asking more basic questions, such as: what does place mean in different historical and cultural settings? Were identities really stable, secure und integrated in the past, or is this an example of' our own cultural projections of nos talgia for identity lost?
Comparative approaches like these also un derline the need for good ethnographies and close readings . It is quite plausible that many people today organize their lives, their anchor ages and ideas in new ways, but we need more detailed ethnographies of this: looking at the complexities and patterns in habituation, in routines and rhythms, as well as the processes whichAllison James (1986) has called "learning to belong".