The Folk Museum and the foreign: Scandinavian folk museums and transnational connections

Abstract

The world’s first open-air folk museums were launched in Sweden-Norway during the latter half of the 19th century. The everyday life and traditions of bygone days now acquired its own institution, and the relocating of buildings to create rural and regional microcosms easily available to urban centres ensured that national unity could grow. The Scandinavian folk museums have repeatedly been studied as parts of a nation-building process, but a recent transnational bloc in history writing have brought to the fore a need to reorient and look beyond national framings, aiming to shed light on the connections below and beyond the national state level. In this thesis the object is to provide such a historical perspective for the museums of Sweden-Norway by tracing the folk museums through their formative years, using nationalism only as a backdrop for a more expansive discussion on the role of the museum as part of transnational networks exchanging, adopting and adapting foreign ideas to suit local contexts. I suggest that the emergence of the Scandinavian folk museum can only be understood as consequence of the unique confluence of national frames and transnational networks – an entanglement that remains challenging for many museums today.