Rural Development Peripheral Communities Crisis, Continuity and Long-term Survival Editors: Marie Emanuelsson, Ella Johansson & Ann-Kristin Ekman Reports Department of Urban and Rural Development · no 6/2008 Rural Development Landscape Architecture Environmental Communication Swedish EIA Centre Peripheral Communities Crisis, Continuity and Long-term Survival Editors: Marie Emanuelsson, Ella Johansson & Ann-Kristin Ekman Reports Department of Urban and Rural Development 6/2008 Skrifter från forskningsprojektet Flexibilitet som tradition, Ängersjöprojektet no11 Reports Department of Urban and Rural Development · no 6/2008 Rural Development This report, no 6/2008, is published by the Department of Urban and Rural Development SLU - Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Within the series are published reports from the units at the department; Environmental Communication, Landscape Architecture, Rural Development and the Swedish EIA centre. This publication is also no 11 within the series Skrifter från forskningsprojektet Flexibilitet som tradition, Ängersjöprojektet, ISSN: 1650-9102 Legally responsible publisher: Rolf Johansson ISSN: 1654-0565 ISBN: 978-91-85735-05-1 © 2008 Emanuelsson, Johansson & Ekman (eds), Uppsala Print: Kopieringshuset, Uppsala Cover picture: Roland Ekman Department of Urban and Rural Development SLU - Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Postal address: P.O. Box 7012, SE-750 07 Uppsala, SWEDEN Visiting address: Ulls väg 28 A-B Phone: +46 18 67 10 00 Fax: +46 18 67 35 12 E-mail: [email protected] www.sol.slu.se Contents Contents An introduction to a study of peripheries 5 Ella Johansson Keynote lectures at the conference Boundaries and continuity: Reflections on some muddles in the models 13 Sandra Wallman The Early Medieval aristocracy and market, outlaying land and deserted farms in Jämtland 29 Stig Welinder Flexibility in peripheral communities: An asset or a brake? 43 Ulf Jonsson Traditions, value systems and modernity in local communities “It’s a place I want to go”: Forest, forestry and gender in Finland 61 Tiina Suopajärvi The call of the wilderness: Forestry professionals’ motives for staying in the countryside 73 Katri Kaunisto Traditional art from the world’s forests: Split-wood fan tower carving 83 Margaret R. Yocom Extracting companies and the local communities: Building the relationship 95 Ksenia Ryabinkina British Columbia’s Community Forest Pilot Project: Can a localized trend survive in an increasingly globalized forest sector? 107 Kirsten McIlveen När-democracy: Equality and leadership in a marginalised Gotlandic community 115 Carl von Rosen Changing markets and the space of authority The periphery and the market 131 Eva Svensson, Marie Emanuelsson, Annie Johansson, Stefan Nilsson & Susanne Pettersson Speculative peasants on the pre-industrial timber market 143 Sven Olofsson From share-cropping to room service: Transformation of local labour with emerging tourism industry 153 Aslihan Aykac Periphery today and yesterday: A macro-level identification of archaeological peripheries in Sweden 163 Leif Häggström Migration, frontiers and boundaries during the early modern period: Land use, rights to land and the Forest-Finns 175 Gabriel Bladh Contents Social relations, identity and lifecycles “No city, no sex”: On the impossibility of being ‘single’ in the back of beyond 185 Lissa Nordin Free zones and pockets of resistance: Dance among the youth in the agrarian society during the expanding period of the timber industry 197 Håkan Berglund-Lake Swedish rural inhabitants coping with change: Moose hunting, the school and the church 211 Yvonne Gunnarsdotter Forest cultures: Nature, work and freedom as culturally constituted themes in different forest contexts – outline of a project idea 237 Ingar Kaldal Margined people of the karstland: Pastoral cave-centred survival strategies in the Central Mediterranean 245 John Chircop Resource management, settlement and ownership …a little closer to Paris: On 18th- and 19th-century crofts in Northern Scania 261 Annika Knarrström Medieval iron production, surplus and subsistence economy: A case study from Østerdalen, East-Norway 273 Ole Risbøl Palaeogeographical evidence of an advance of the peripheral zone of agriculture in Eastern and Northern Europe 291 Sergei Savchik, Valentina Zernitskaya & Galina Simakova Pre-Roman Iron Age occupation of the vast peat areas near Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Peripheral society? 303 Corrie Bakels [Settlement] continuity as a matter of view? Shifting centralities in the central Swedish forest region during the Iron Age 311 Stefan Nilsson Colonisation of a periphery in southern Sweden: Some aspects of marginality 325 Mats Anglert Partible inheritance and the physical features of the cultural landscape 335 Elisabeth Wennersten Appendices Appendix 1 347 Addresses of the authors Appendix 2 353 Programme of the conference in Ängersjö, August 14-17, 2003 Appendix 3 355 Participants of the conference Appendix 4 359 The series Skrifter från forskningsprojektet Flexibilitet som tradition, Ängersjöprojektet An introduction to a study of peripheries An introduction to a study of peripheries Ella Johansson In discussions about resources, prosperity, work and rights, Sweden is usually descri- bed in contradictory terms as both centre and periphery, both as a ‘model’ of a successful industrial and welfare state and as an exceptional extreme – an almost non-European country, thinly populated with ‘unspoiled nature’. Sweden has long traditions as an organised and strong state, as well as of local self-governance. During the 20th century, there were powerful tendencies towards centralization, economies of scale, and concentration of resources. The strength of the centre was regarded as a support for the periphery. In today’s Sweden, as in the European Union, there are peripheral areas suffering serious depopulation and recession, while other rural areas manage very well by their own efforts. Recent research has shed constructive light on the conditions of the periphery, and pointed at the strength of networks, beyond the concentration on centres. In today’s negotiations about resources and political strategies, in confrontations between perceptions of rights and welfare system, between different civil traditions and local political systems, there is cause to believe that these differences to some extent are encounters between different long lines and traditions. Bygone societies in peripheral areas have had an economic, social, and cultural structure that differed in crucial respects from e.g. the rural centres in Western Europe, with their focus on tillage. People were unable to make a living from one single livelihood, instead exploiting many different niches. A nuanced scholarly articulation of the cultural character and distinctiveness of peripheries and forest districts, in a comparative European and global perspective, can be of great significance for sustainable deve- lopment. This publication is the outcome of the multidisciplinary conference Peripheral Communities: Crisis, Continuity and Long-Term Survival, which took place in the small Swedish village Ängersjö in August 14–17, 2003. Scholars studying social, ecological, cultural and economic aspects of peripheral communities from pre- historic. to modern times gathered in order to create a comparative perspective 5 An introduction to a study of peripheries on life in peripheries from a wide range of research perspectives. Some of the contributions focuses on forest communities in northern Sweden, but studies of various kinds of peripheral communities from different parts of the world as well as for various times form a substantial part of the book. The economies of local communities in peripheries are in many cases charac- terised by complexity, with multiple uses of resources and territories. This is often matched by a flexibility and variety in human skills and abilities, in terms of tech- nology and the organisation of co-operation. Many peripheral communities have developed particular skills in managing relations with the centres, with the market and with the state. Economic and social organisation, cultural identities and value systems of such communities seem connected to a certain readiness to adapt to changing conditions, changes that may originate from internal relations of these communities as well as from external factors. The ability to adapt, however, can be combined with quite strong traditional strains within local culture and lifestyle. The conference hosts: a village and a research project Host of the conference was the interdisciplinary research project Flexibility as Tradition: Culture and Subsistence in the Boreal Forests of Northern Sweden, funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation 1998–2002. The project has stu- died the flexible, composite, and changeable character of economic activities and resource utilization in the forest districts over a long temporal perspective. The inhabitants of the village of Ängersjö in Northern Sweden were the ori- ginal initiators of the project. In Ängersjö, a revitalized village association has built and is running an impressive open-air museum of the logging era. They have also gathered a local history archive. An archaeological research project has worked for several years excavating medieval blast furnaces and – an up till then unknown type of – ‘old foundations’, as well as surveying remains of forestry and forest culture from historical times. One result of contacts with the academic world was that the