Borders As Experience
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Borders as Experience The academic book series Forskning i Halmstad is open for researchers at Halmstad University. Reports from different kinds of scholarly projects, larger and smaller, can be published in the series. Papers and articles from conferences, seminars, and workshops are also welcomed. Manuscripts submitted to the series will be reviewed by two or more competent peers prior to their approval for publication. More information on manuscript submission guidelines and referral procedures (in Swedish) can be found on the University’s web site: www.hh.se/forskning Borders as Experience © the authors 2009 Borders as Experience Forskning i Halmstad 16 Högskolan i Halmstad 2009 Distribution: School of Humanities, Halmstad University, PO Box 823, S-301 18 Halmstad, Sweden Printed by the Reprographic Unit, Faculty of Arts, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg 2009 ISSN 1400-5409 ISBN 978-91-978256-0-3 Forskning i Halmstad 16 Contents Preface ....................................................................................................... 7 Johanna Bartholdsson: The Borders between the Historian and Those Whom She Studies........................................................ 9 Kristina Gustafsson: ‘As a researcher it is important to actually deal with one’s own privileged situations and positions...’............................ 21 Åsa Bengtsson: Emilie Rathou: A Movement Intellectual Crossing Borders ......................................................................... 32 Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg: ‘...an intellectual capacity to be wondered at...’ ... 64 Jonnie Eriksson: Travelling Savage Spaces: Jean de Léry and Territorializations of ‘Antarctic France’, Brazil 1555-60............... 68 Anna Fåhraeus: Postcolonial Concepts without Politics? .......................... 92 Per-Olof Grönberg: The Engineer Paradox: International Migration as a Patriotic Act........................................................................... 98 Kristina Gustafsson: The Paradox of Migration and Patriotism............... 108 KG Hammarlund: Between the Mirror and the Wall: Boundary and Identity in Peter Weiss’ Novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands ........ 117 Jonas Hansson: Towards a Phenomenology of Borders ........................... 130 Ronald Kowalski: Anti-Englishness and Sectarianism in Scottish Sport and Society: the ’90 Minute Bigots’ .................................. 136 Jonas Svensson: ‘...sport – like religion – is ideal in expressing boundaries between us and them.’.............................................. 163 Tomas Nilson: ’Those ever changing boundaries…’ Political Delimitation, Organisation, and Praxis in Örebro, ca. 1900 ...... 170 Mattias Hansson: ‘...the identity of a person or a group is manifested through language...’.................................................................... 183 Charlotte Tornbjer: Symbolizing Borders. Swedish Travels into the Soviet Union during the 1930’s.................................................. 188 Dagmar Brunow: Allegory, Performativity, and Intervention: The Function of Travelogues in a Contested Space .................... 201 The authors ............................................................................................. 216 v Preface A border can, simultaneously, have influence on landscapes of three different kinds. Rivers, mountains, and political borders split the physical landscape (or its representation on a map). A border can also have influence on what Jerome Bruner has called the landscape of action constituted by the arguments of action: agent, intention, situation, and instrument. And finally borders have influence on the landscape of consciousness : what those involved in action do or do not know, think, or feel. These three different landscapes are intertwined in mutual dependence. Our image of the physical landscape shapes our consciousness, which in turn has influence on our actions. And our actions can change the borders of the physical landscape. When historians deal with borders they most often concentrate on the relationship between the physical landscape and the landscape of actions. The borders that exist within an actor’s consciousness are accessible to the scholar only indirectly, fragmentised and difficult to ascertain. Herein lies a challenge: When it comes to images of people’s consciousness, the distinction between reconstruction and free-hand construction becomes blurred. The result can seldom be validated through traditional methods of source criticism. The texts collected in this volume were, in earlier versions, presented during a session at the 4 th Swedish History Conference, held at Lund University, April 24-26 in 2008 and organised around the main theme ‘Borders, Identities and Cultural Encounters’. Borders, boundaries, and culture constitute a common field of interest for lecturers and researchers at the School of Humanities at Halmstad University, where the research group Context and Cultural Boundaries was set up five years ago. A session proposal was therefore more or less a matter of course. The proposal was accepted and eventually the session was built around eight papers written by historians, dealing with different kinds of borders, their constitutive elements and their influence on the physical landscape as well as on the landscape of actions. During the session the papers were commented on by scholars from neighbouring academic disciplines and the concepts of vi 7 ‘borders’ or ‘boundaries’ and the processes of reconstruction and con- struction of the landscape of consciousness were of frequent occurrence. The concept of ‘borders’ is of course a common denominator in all of the The Borders between the Historian and Those texts, but not the only one. The texts can be grouped or linked together in Whom She Studies many ways: chronologically, geographically, or thematically (class, gender, ethnicity, and migration are just a few possibilities). Suggesting a given path to follow might, however, obfuscate other equally important links between Johanna Bartholdsson the texts. Instead the papers appear in alphabetical order by author, each paper followed by its comment. Thus the reader is free to choose to link the texts together according to his or her own preferences. The more we try to separate our sympathies and antipathies, the more we All academic disciplines, History studies among them, have their own try to distance ourselves from our experience, the more this comes out from us in the writing of history. 1 borders, present in the landscapes of actions and of consciousness. The multi-disciplinary character of the session was therefore in itself a challenge In my late teens, I often visited my grandmother in her small one-room of borders, the aim of which was to contribute to a further discussion on apartment. We sat at her kitchen table and she told me stories from her life, theoretical and methodological obstacles arising from studying the mostly from the time before she immigrated to Sweden. She was born in landscape of consciousness. Historians were thus given the opportunity to Budapest in 1912 in a Jewish middleclass family. She wanted to become a pick up new perspectives and new tools from neighbouring disciplines and, gym teacher, but as she was Jewish, she was not allowed to study according correspondingly, historians’ viewpoints were given to offer new thoughts to the principle of numerus clausus that limited the number of Jewish and starting-points for scholarly work all through the field of Humanities. students at Hungarian universities during the 1920s. 2 She managed to Through publishing the papers and comments from the conference we survive, with her six year old daughter (who later became my mother) hope to provide impulses and inspiration so that the discussion that started through 1944 and the beginning of 1945 by hiding with false identification during the conference session can continue. Borders are ubiquitous – we papers outside Budapest. Her husband was deported to Auschwitz where he may cross them or bang our heads against them, accept them or challenge perished. In 1957, when she was forty-five years old, she fled to Austria them, but we can never get around their existence. We should therefore do together with my mother, who was then 19 years old. Later they were our best to understand them. allowed to settle in Sweden. She told me her reasons for fleeing were that she did not want to re-encounter the anti-Semitism which she had experienced during the period from the twenties to the forties. In the aftermath of the revolution, in 1956, she recognized the same anti-Semitic arguments that she had heard before. 3 She chose to flee. It is my impression that, in many respects, her life effectively came to an end after that. She never really adjusted here in Sweden. Since she was almost deaf she never mastered the Swedish language. She had very few friends and lived mostly for her daughter and her granddaughters. 1 Liakos 2008 p. 47. 2 Lajos 2002 p.7. 3 About 10% of the Hungarians that fled in 1956 and 1957 were in fact Jewish and their reasons were often the same as those of my grandmother. Svensson 1992 p. 66. 8 9 Even though both her Swedish and her hearing were poor we found a built houses. The relationship between us is not in fact as familiar as the way to communicate. I imagine it was then that I developed a skill at one between me and my grandmother. They didn’t invite me; it was I who inferring what she meant which has been very useful later on while asked them to tell me their story.