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Nordic museology 2019 • 3, s. 96–117 Sociomaterial intertwinements in Sami research The Nordic Museum in Stockholm and the legacy of Ernst Manker Eva Silvén Abstract: This article summarises a study about Sami related research and collecting at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, with focus on curator Ernst Manker and the period between 1930 and 1970, however, in a slightly broader time context. Manker was a productive and influential actor in the sociomaterial network that comprised a broad range of people and phenomena connected to Sami issues. His legacy (objects, photographs, exhibitions, scientific research, popular travelogues) is analysed both in its historical context and as a complex contemporary heritage, starting from questions about its possible essentialising or emancipating effects. Although based on an asymmetric power relationship between the Sami and the museum, the research and collections are characterised as culturally intertwined constructions. A postcolonial perspective is used to discuss ways of strengthening the Sami dimension of such heritage: physical transfers (repatriation) and promoting Sami knowledge and meaning related to the collections. Keywords: Sami cultural heritage, Ernst Manker, Nordic Museum Stockholm, actor-network theory, critical/new museology, indigenous knowledge, repatria- tion, sociomaterial networks, museum collections, museum exhibitions. This article is based on experiences from a institution, including a Sami camp. Despite the long-term study of the Sami representation names, the museum did not have a particular at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm.1 In Scandinavian or Nordic profile, instead it took 1873 the museum opened to the public as on the role of serving as the main museum Skandinavisk-etnografiska samlingen (The of Swedish cultural history.2 Ever since its Scandinavian-Ethnographic Collection). In inception, the Sami have been represented in 1880 it was transformed into a foundation exhibitions, object collections, photographic and the name was changed to Nordiska and other archives as an actual part of what is museet (The Nordic Museum). From 1891 the considered Swedish, but at the same time in a Skansen open-air museum was added to the marginalised and exotic position. The museum Sociomaterial intertwinements in Sami research has been an authoritative voice through its growing Sami political movement, forced 97 selections, categorisations and displays, and legislation relating to reindeer husbandry, the collections reveal the same ambivalent the building of the welfare state and an and patronising vacillating between up- and expanding modern scholarly research, but downgrading the Sami as in the general also by “scientific”, political and ideological societal discourse. The Nordic Museum is not concepts such as race biology and eugenics, the only museum to suffer from this historical the discriminatory “Lapps-should-be-lapps imbalance, and all over the world efforts have policy” and Nazism.4 It was also a time when been made to change this, with the help of new the museums’ public role was debated and kinds of partnerships and new analytical tools developed with respect to visitors, education for scholarly research. and exhibitions. My aim here is to analyse and discuss the The Nordic Museum’s long interest in construction of the Sami collections at the relation to Sami issues peaked with the work Nordic Museum, its historical context and of Manker. Educated as an ethnographer, its long-term effects. The empirical focus but acting also as an ethnologist, he took will be the mid-twentieth century, and in up Sami research around 1930. After some particular the work of ethnographer and assignments at the ethnographic museums curator Ernst Manker. Theoretically and in Gothenburg and Stockholm, in 1939 he analytically, I have mainly been influenced by became curator of the Sami collections at the new/critical museology, actor-network theory Nordic Museum, where he created the new and decolonising/indigenous methodologies, “Lapska avdelningen” (“Lapp Department”), which will be introduced successively. As an with himself as the only member of staff. He employed curator and researcher at the Nordic carried out contemporary fieldwork as well as Museum, I can also situate myself in the historical research, acquired a large amount of subfield “museology from within” (Gustafsson artefacts and archival material for the museum, Reinius 2018). I have examined the collections gave lectures, wrote articles, published books and also been a part of the team behind the in various languages and took thousands of exhibition Sápmi – om att vara same i Sverige photographs (fig. 1). In the “Lapska arkivet” (Sápmi – on being Sami in Sweden, 2007–) (“Lappish Archives”) he assembled earlier (Silvén 2007, 2009; Westergren & Silvén Sami-related documents and images in the 2008). Later, I have carried out the externally museum’s collections, along with his own funded project Konstruktionen av ett samiskt research material and other acquisitions. kulturarv: Ernst Manker och Nordiska museet Moreover, he curated the cultural-historical (The Construction of a Sami Cultural Heritage: Lapparna (The Lapps) exhibition, which Ernst Manker and the Nordic Museum).3 opened in 1947. Right after, Manker stepped into yet another scholarly field: the emerging archaeological research in northern Sweden, Ernst Manker and the Nordic mainly due to the substantial expansion of Museum hydropower plants. He then participated in Ernst Manker (1893–1972) was professionally examinations of Sami settlements, trapping pit active during the decades around the Second systems for wild reindeer hunting, sacrificial World War, a period characterised by the sites and human graves (fig. 2). Eva Silvén 98 Fig. 1. Ernst Manker during fieldwork, with a camera under his left arm. Liddobakte, Finnmark, Norway, early 1950s. Photo: Ørnulv Vorren, Tromsø University Museum. Manker retired in 1961 but continued study of Sami culture and history and are – of writing for a further ten years and became a course – filled with compelling challenges. well-known researcher of Sami cultural history. “Lappology” was the term for the study of Among his many hundreds of publications are, Sami issues at the beginning of the twentieth on the one hand, a series of popular travelogues century, but Manker entered the scholarly based on narratives and photos from his field field a little too late to be called a “lappologist” tours, and, on the other hand, the scholarly (Pulkkinen 2005; Korhonen 2008).5 Instead he series Acta Lapponica, containing his own was active during the interregnum between as well as other studies. There he published that period and the establishment of modern the two parts of his monumental work Die Sami studies in the 1970s. Although he was lappische Zaubertrommel (1938, 1950), which considered an authority on Sami issues, he did contributed to his honorary doctorate in 1953. not work as an “expert” with governmental The material and collections he created, which assignments, as some of the “lappologists” did. he sometimes called “a central museum for Instead, he contributed to the creation of a Lappish culture”, form a rich source for the new research interface between museums and Sociomaterial intertwinements in Sami research universities with a focus on materiality, and his 99 extensive social network included scholars in Sweden, the Nordic countries and elsewhere. He also collaborated continuously with the Sami, both publicly known activists and artists as well as the principals of the around fifty local reindeer herding communities, siidas, which he enrolled in a “Lappish body of representatives” and connected to the museum (Silvén 2012). Their first task was to answer his questionnaires, but some of them also assisted during his fieldwork, which he, in turn, compensated in different ways. Fig. 2. The Sami Anders Ponga performs a joik Contemporary contexts and during a lunch break, with one of the Swedish conjunctions researchers listening in the background. From the archaeological excavations of the sacrificial site at A crucial starting point for my project Seitesuolo. Råstojaure, Könkämä siida, Kiruna 1950. was the question of concurrences (or non- Photo: Ernst Manker, Nordic Museum. concurrences) in a wider perspective, namely the importance of situating Manker in relation to the contemporary political and ideological acted like patrons of the reindeer-herding climate, or conjuncture. How did his efforts Sami. Principally, he always backed the Sami, interact with the radical transformations of but he also reflected the current discourse the time? How did he relate to the growing and its ambivalence between a structural Sami political movement, to the conflicts subordination of the Sami compared to the between the state and the Sami, to the views of Swedish majority and a parallel assessment of race biology and Nazism, and how did he act them as a proud and eminent “race” compared during the war? Finally, how did all this affect to other minorities and indigenous peoples. In the results of his research? Sweden, race biology was for many decades In his collecting and research, Manker a mainstream and legitimate “science”, and maintained the museum’s earlier focus on past Manker adhered to its way of depicting times, although he in fact also documented the different peoples in terms of skull forms and contemporary changes. He acknowledged the “race typical” mental characteristics, even Sami’s right to a modern and comfortable

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