The Image of the Peasant Within National Museums in the Nordic Countries
The Image of the Peasant within National Museums in the Nordic Countries Peter Aronsson National narratives are crucial to the construction of legitimate citizenship: who belongs to what community, what qualifies inclusion and exclusion, what virtues are celebrated and what vices are refuted? These questions do not have arbitrary answers, but instead are connected to rather stable ideas of states and nation, and are continuously changing alongside the emergence of new ideals and new territorial boundaries. The new ideas, which restructured earlier sets of feudal relationships at the turns of 18th and 19th centuries, show a remarkable resemblance, at least superficially, to those appearing in many parts of the world where social and political conditions might instead imply a greater variety of ideals. Cultural transfer and the creation of narratives of uniqueness appear hand in hand. The idea of citizenship itself might be seen as an infusion of aristocratic ideas of individual rights into a bourgeois setting, a Bürgerlische Öffentlich- keit, developing an independent sphere of equality, freedom of speech, toler- ance, and mutual respect. But at the same time as rapid change and turmoil, historical vision imagery was transformed from an earlier construction of a glorious past with Biblical and classical references into a national history where the persistence of an independent peasant culture that supposedly thrived before the development of a stratified society and the state created a decisive starting point. This is true for 19th century cultural Swedish heroes such as E.G. Geijer and E. Tegnér – but also for Karl Marx. This is the case for Sweden, which had a large number of historical free-owning peasantry within 18th and 19th C societies, but also for Denmark, which had just created a class of that standard, and for Iceland, which was more dominated by fish- ing than by toiling the soil, and finally for Romania.
[Show full text]