Hilde Wallem Nielssen | Western Norway University of Applied Science (original) (raw)

Articles by Hilde Wallem Nielssen

Photography and Culture, 2012

Abstract RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok, the first Sámi museum i... more Abstract RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok, the first Sámi museum in Norway, was established in 1972 as part of the political struggle and cultural mobilization of the Sámi population. Since the beginning, the museum has collected both cultural history objects and contemporary Sámi art. The Sámi museum practices reflect an awareness of how the Sámi people's photographic legacy is dominated by the gaze of others. Perhaps the Sámi people always understood that photographs are cultural constructions? While most museums treat photographs as a transparent medium, a window to the world, the staff at RDM-SVD express a conscious and reflected attitude toward the use of photographs and the nature of the medium. Through reappropriating colonial photography in their cultural history as well as in the art section, the museum actively contributes to the project of taking history back. This paper discusses the way this museum relates to the photographic legacy, and the treatment of this legacy in its exhibition practices.

Museum & Society, 2019

This article argues that museum exhibitions often are formed through multiple layers. It presents... more This article argues that museum exhibitions often are formed through multiple layers. It presents readings of two contrasting exhibition narratives, the ethnographic display at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo and the national history exhibition at Lillehammer Museum. While the latter speaks about the national self, the museum in Oslo addresses the nation's radical other. Despite this contrasting thematic focus, they have much in common. As centres for research and dissemination of knowledge, they are connected to the development of the academic disciplines of history and anthropology. This evolution with its shifts and ruptures are visible as traces, or layers, in the exhibitions. We argue that such multi-layered museum exhibitions may be understood as intersections of shifting disciplinary knowledge regimes, curatorial practices, and concrete political agendas. Such layers may appear as unintended subtexts that often create a sense of 'unsettlement' within museum exhibitions.

Kunst og kultur, 2021

Taking Sámi activist Ingolf Kvandahl’s family photographs as a point of departure, this article d... more Taking Sámi activist Ingolf Kvandahl’s family photographs as a point of departure, this article discusses how a Sámi family uses photography to establish their own history. It demonstrates how the album photographs materialise concurrent historical processes: parallel, entangled and contradictory – Norwegianisation, modernisation and Sámi activism. Tensions caused by these concurrences are aesthetically brought to the surface on album pages loaded with contrasts and contradictions.
Keywords: Sámi activism, family photographs, Norwegianisation, postmemory, album, concurrences

Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 2018

This article explores how photographs of Sámi peoples were used in the context of Norwegian physi... more This article explores how photographs of Sámi peoples were used in the context of Norwegian physical anthropology in the interwar period, but also how they are re-appropriated in the Lule Sámi community in Tysfjord today. It also demonstrates how photography as used in in the Norwegian racial research publications, although designed to highlight physical characteristics, also include references to cultural characteristics and context. Such inclusion of cultural markers and contextual information may be understood as a strategy to overcome the failure of the scientific community to isolate race as a biological fact. The photographs worked to secure “evidence” where evidence could not be found. This strategy is based on the abundancy, or excess of meaning, of the photographic image as such. The article argues that it is precisely this photographic excess that is the key to understanding why and how photography contributed to establish credibility to a scientific discipline in continuous struggle and with frequent breakdowns. The abundancy, or photographic excess, is also a key to understand how photographs that once were used as instruments of racial research, over time have undergone a series of transmutations of functions and meanings. Thus, racial photographs may acquire new meanings when circulating in time and space.

Great Narratives of the Past. Traditions and Revisions in National Museumsopen access publication, Linköping University Press, 2012

The question of how and where Sámi culture is best represented is a debated issue in Norway. Howe... more The question of how and where Sámi culture is best represented is a debated issue in Norway. However, politically the problem has been "solved" through the establishment of Sámi museums, run by Sámi people and administered by the Sámi Assembly. The first Sámi museum in Norway was RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok. Sámi museums have, however, been subjected to considerable criticism. They have been accused for propagating ethnic reification and presenting a stereotypical and static image of Sámi culture and identity. The exhibitions are seen as replicas of conventional ethnographic displays, tending to represent Sámi culture as belonging to a traditional, pre-modern past, due to a lack of chronological narration and historical anchoring. Based on fieldwork at the RDM-SVD, this article presents an analysis of the exhibition practices that challenges such earlier readings. We argue that far from replicating the exhibition language of dominant western ethnography, the exhibitions can be seen as an effort to undermine the conceptions of time and history of the dominant society. Based on a study of the museum display as a total experience, our alternative reading suggests that the museum, by evoking a mythical landscape through aesthetic means, inscribes itself into a Sámi conception of time and space-a Sámi understanding of reality. Thus, we also address the debate concerning museums in non-western spaces, and the question of recognizing indigenous curatorial practices. Not least the art section leaves an impression of a museum space less marked by closure than earlier readings suggest. Here the museum opens up for articulations with the wider world, as Sámi contemporary art not only speaks from a position of a particular locality; it also communicates with the international art scene and incorporates visions and perspectives from a global or multiple world 1 .

Photography & Culture, 2012

RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok, the first Sámi museum in Norway,... more RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok, the first Sámi museum in Norway, was established in 1972 as part of the political struggle and cultural mobilization of the Sámi population. Since the beginning, the museum has collected both cultural history objects and contemporary Sámi art. The Sámi museum practices reflect an awareness of how the Sámi people's photographic legacy is dominated by the gaze of others. Perhaps the Sámi people always understood that photographs are cultural constructions? While most museums treat photographs as a transparent medium, a window to the world, the staff at RDM-SVD express a conscious and reflected attitude toward the use of photographs and the nature of the medium. Through reappropriating colonial photography in their cultural history as well as in the art section, the museum actively contributes to the project of taking history back. This paper discusses the way this museum relates to the photographic legacy, and the treatment of this legacy in its exhibition practices.

Kunst og kultur, 2014

The pavilion called The Expatriate Norway at the 1914 exhibition launched to celebrate the centen... more The pavilion called The Expatriate Norway at the 1914 exhibition launched to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the Norwegian constitution represented Norwegian emigrants as modern Vikings whose wanderlust and achievements contributed to the riches and greatness of the nation. Although Norway was not an empire in a political sense, the pavilion’s exhibitions created an image of a nation with global dimensions in the shape of Norwegian presence, activities and possessions world-wide.

Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift, 2007

«To the Ends of the World». Bringing the world to Norway and vice versa through ethnographic miss... more «To the Ends of the World». Bringing the world to Norway and vice versa through ethnographic mission exhibitions For more than a century, missionaries were the main contributors of representations of the outer world to the Norwegian public. This article examines the ethno-graphic mission exhibition «To the Ends of the World» touring in Norway between 1948 and 1960 and reaching a large proportion of the Norwegian population at the time. The exhibition and its reception are analysed and shown to echo similar and related practices and discourses emerging in the wake of colonialism. The article explores the way the exhibition relates to, and diverts from, what has been called «colonialism's cul-ture». Using the exhibition as an example of missionary representations, the article argues that the mission movement has been important in shaping a Norwe-gian version of orientalism centring on a Norwegian self-image as aides in a world of needy.

Journal of Religion in Africa, 2014

The point of departure for this paper is the particular role of Christian movements in Madagascar... more The point of departure for this paper is the particular role of Christian movements in Madagascar's most recent political crisis. During the coup d'état in March 2009, ritual specialists from the Christian revival movement Fifohazana were called on to carry out an exorcism to cleanse the presidential palace of evil forces. This incident not only shows the significance of Christian revival movements within the Malagasy political landscape and society in general, but also indicates how Malagasy politics is imagined in spiritual terms. With its recurrent efforts to restore the nation-state, Malagasy national politics is impossible to understand without taking into account how thoroughly the Malagasy political imagination is infused with the cosmology and ontolo-gies of power. This paper explores the ambivalent relationships between the various Christian movements and national politics in the light of history as well as through the recent transmutations of power, showing how Fifohazana have provided a site for the (re)production of the contemporary political imagination.

Book chapters by Hilde Wallem Nielssen

Sámi Research in Transition

Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 2011

This book makes visible an important but neglected aspect of Christian missions: its transnationa... more This book makes visible an important but neglected aspect of Christian missions: its transnational character. Missionaries considered themselves global actors, yet they operated within a variety of nation-states. The volume demonstrates how processes on a national level are closely linked to larger transnational processes.

Adjusting the Lens. Indigenous Activism, Colonial Legacies and Photographic Heritage, 2021

Adjusting the Lens explores the role of photography in contemporary renegotiations of the past an... more Adjusting the Lens explores the role of photography in contemporary renegotiations of the past and in Indigenous art activism. In moving and powerful case studies, contributors analyze photographic practices and heritage related to Indigenous communities in Canada, Australia, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the United States. In the process, they call attention to how Indigenous people are using old photographs in new ways to empower themselves, revitalize community identity, and decolonize the colonial record.

Adjusting the Lens presents original research in this emerging field in Indigenous photography studies, juxtaposing the historical and the contemporary across a range of geographically and culturally distinctive contexts. The transnational perspective of this exciting collection challenges old ways of thinking and meaningfully advances the crucially important project of reclamation.
https://www.ubcpress.ca/adjusting-the-lens

Elizabeth Edwards, & Sigrid Lien, Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work ofPhotographs, London: Ashgate , 2014

Nielssen, Hilde, Inger Marie Okkenhaug & Karina Hestad Skeie (red.): Unto the Ends of the World. Protestant Missions - Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. Leiden: Brill Academic Publications, 2011

Ritual Imagination. Tromba possession among the Betsimisaraka of Eastern Madagascar. Brill Academic Publications , 2011

Ritual Imagination is a study of spirit possession and ritual dynamics. Based on fieldwork in eas... more Ritual Imagination is a study of spirit possession and ritual dynamics. Based on fieldwork in eastern Madagascar, Hilde Nielssen shows how tromba possession works as a flexible and fluid force, whose ritual imaginary playfully draws together elements from radically different cultural and social domains, thereby constituting human realities and creating ways of relating to changing and disjunctive circumstances. Tromba's strength lies in its fluid capacities to relate to ongoing social change by altering its own practices, while at the same time continuing to heal person and cosmos. The book critically addresses the still dominant perspective in anthropology, where rituals are understood as representations of culture and society. Using tromba as a pivotal case in the critique of ritual as representation, this book offers a fresh perspective on ritual and spirit possession.

Papers by Hilde Wallem Nielssen

Sámi Research in Transition, 2021

Photography and Culture, 2012

Abstract RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok, the first Sámi museum i... more Abstract RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok, the first Sámi museum in Norway, was established in 1972 as part of the political struggle and cultural mobilization of the Sámi population. Since the beginning, the museum has collected both cultural history objects and contemporary Sámi art. The Sámi museum practices reflect an awareness of how the Sámi people's photographic legacy is dominated by the gaze of others. Perhaps the Sámi people always understood that photographs are cultural constructions? While most museums treat photographs as a transparent medium, a window to the world, the staff at RDM-SVD express a conscious and reflected attitude toward the use of photographs and the nature of the medium. Through reappropriating colonial photography in their cultural history as well as in the art section, the museum actively contributes to the project of taking history back. This paper discusses the way this museum relates to the photographic legacy, and the treatment of this legacy in its exhibition practices.

Museum & Society, 2019

This article argues that museum exhibitions often are formed through multiple layers. It presents... more This article argues that museum exhibitions often are formed through multiple layers. It presents readings of two contrasting exhibition narratives, the ethnographic display at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo and the national history exhibition at Lillehammer Museum. While the latter speaks about the national self, the museum in Oslo addresses the nation's radical other. Despite this contrasting thematic focus, they have much in common. As centres for research and dissemination of knowledge, they are connected to the development of the academic disciplines of history and anthropology. This evolution with its shifts and ruptures are visible as traces, or layers, in the exhibitions. We argue that such multi-layered museum exhibitions may be understood as intersections of shifting disciplinary knowledge regimes, curatorial practices, and concrete political agendas. Such layers may appear as unintended subtexts that often create a sense of 'unsettlement' within museum exhibitions.

Kunst og kultur, 2021

Taking Sámi activist Ingolf Kvandahl’s family photographs as a point of departure, this article d... more Taking Sámi activist Ingolf Kvandahl’s family photographs as a point of departure, this article discusses how a Sámi family uses photography to establish their own history. It demonstrates how the album photographs materialise concurrent historical processes: parallel, entangled and contradictory – Norwegianisation, modernisation and Sámi activism. Tensions caused by these concurrences are aesthetically brought to the surface on album pages loaded with contrasts and contradictions.
Keywords: Sámi activism, family photographs, Norwegianisation, postmemory, album, concurrences

Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 2018

This article explores how photographs of Sámi peoples were used in the context of Norwegian physi... more This article explores how photographs of Sámi peoples were used in the context of Norwegian physical anthropology in the interwar period, but also how they are re-appropriated in the Lule Sámi community in Tysfjord today. It also demonstrates how photography as used in in the Norwegian racial research publications, although designed to highlight physical characteristics, also include references to cultural characteristics and context. Such inclusion of cultural markers and contextual information may be understood as a strategy to overcome the failure of the scientific community to isolate race as a biological fact. The photographs worked to secure “evidence” where evidence could not be found. This strategy is based on the abundancy, or excess of meaning, of the photographic image as such. The article argues that it is precisely this photographic excess that is the key to understanding why and how photography contributed to establish credibility to a scientific discipline in continuous struggle and with frequent breakdowns. The abundancy, or photographic excess, is also a key to understand how photographs that once were used as instruments of racial research, over time have undergone a series of transmutations of functions and meanings. Thus, racial photographs may acquire new meanings when circulating in time and space.

Great Narratives of the Past. Traditions and Revisions in National Museumsopen access publication, Linköping University Press, 2012

The question of how and where Sámi culture is best represented is a debated issue in Norway. Howe... more The question of how and where Sámi culture is best represented is a debated issue in Norway. However, politically the problem has been "solved" through the establishment of Sámi museums, run by Sámi people and administered by the Sámi Assembly. The first Sámi museum in Norway was RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok. Sámi museums have, however, been subjected to considerable criticism. They have been accused for propagating ethnic reification and presenting a stereotypical and static image of Sámi culture and identity. The exhibitions are seen as replicas of conventional ethnographic displays, tending to represent Sámi culture as belonging to a traditional, pre-modern past, due to a lack of chronological narration and historical anchoring. Based on fieldwork at the RDM-SVD, this article presents an analysis of the exhibition practices that challenges such earlier readings. We argue that far from replicating the exhibition language of dominant western ethnography, the exhibitions can be seen as an effort to undermine the conceptions of time and history of the dominant society. Based on a study of the museum display as a total experience, our alternative reading suggests that the museum, by evoking a mythical landscape through aesthetic means, inscribes itself into a Sámi conception of time and space-a Sámi understanding of reality. Thus, we also address the debate concerning museums in non-western spaces, and the question of recognizing indigenous curatorial practices. Not least the art section leaves an impression of a museum space less marked by closure than earlier readings suggest. Here the museum opens up for articulations with the wider world, as Sámi contemporary art not only speaks from a position of a particular locality; it also communicates with the international art scene and incorporates visions and perspectives from a global or multiple world 1 .

Photography & Culture, 2012

RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok, the first Sámi museum in Norway,... more RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok, the first Sámi museum in Norway, was established in 1972 as part of the political struggle and cultural mobilization of the Sámi population. Since the beginning, the museum has collected both cultural history objects and contemporary Sámi art. The Sámi museum practices reflect an awareness of how the Sámi people's photographic legacy is dominated by the gaze of others. Perhaps the Sámi people always understood that photographs are cultural constructions? While most museums treat photographs as a transparent medium, a window to the world, the staff at RDM-SVD express a conscious and reflected attitude toward the use of photographs and the nature of the medium. Through reappropriating colonial photography in their cultural history as well as in the art section, the museum actively contributes to the project of taking history back. This paper discusses the way this museum relates to the photographic legacy, and the treatment of this legacy in its exhibition practices.

Kunst og kultur, 2014

The pavilion called The Expatriate Norway at the 1914 exhibition launched to celebrate the centen... more The pavilion called The Expatriate Norway at the 1914 exhibition launched to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the Norwegian constitution represented Norwegian emigrants as modern Vikings whose wanderlust and achievements contributed to the riches and greatness of the nation. Although Norway was not an empire in a political sense, the pavilion’s exhibitions created an image of a nation with global dimensions in the shape of Norwegian presence, activities and possessions world-wide.

Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift, 2007

«To the Ends of the World». Bringing the world to Norway and vice versa through ethnographic miss... more «To the Ends of the World». Bringing the world to Norway and vice versa through ethnographic mission exhibitions For more than a century, missionaries were the main contributors of representations of the outer world to the Norwegian public. This article examines the ethno-graphic mission exhibition «To the Ends of the World» touring in Norway between 1948 and 1960 and reaching a large proportion of the Norwegian population at the time. The exhibition and its reception are analysed and shown to echo similar and related practices and discourses emerging in the wake of colonialism. The article explores the way the exhibition relates to, and diverts from, what has been called «colonialism's cul-ture». Using the exhibition as an example of missionary representations, the article argues that the mission movement has been important in shaping a Norwe-gian version of orientalism centring on a Norwegian self-image as aides in a world of needy.

Journal of Religion in Africa, 2014

The point of departure for this paper is the particular role of Christian movements in Madagascar... more The point of departure for this paper is the particular role of Christian movements in Madagascar's most recent political crisis. During the coup d'état in March 2009, ritual specialists from the Christian revival movement Fifohazana were called on to carry out an exorcism to cleanse the presidential palace of evil forces. This incident not only shows the significance of Christian revival movements within the Malagasy political landscape and society in general, but also indicates how Malagasy politics is imagined in spiritual terms. With its recurrent efforts to restore the nation-state, Malagasy national politics is impossible to understand without taking into account how thoroughly the Malagasy political imagination is infused with the cosmology and ontolo-gies of power. This paper explores the ambivalent relationships between the various Christian movements and national politics in the light of history as well as through the recent transmutations of power, showing how Fifohazana have provided a site for the (re)production of the contemporary political imagination.

Sámi Research in Transition

Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 2011

This book makes visible an important but neglected aspect of Christian missions: its transnationa... more This book makes visible an important but neglected aspect of Christian missions: its transnational character. Missionaries considered themselves global actors, yet they operated within a variety of nation-states. The volume demonstrates how processes on a national level are closely linked to larger transnational processes.

Adjusting the Lens. Indigenous Activism, Colonial Legacies and Photographic Heritage, 2021

Adjusting the Lens explores the role of photography in contemporary renegotiations of the past an... more Adjusting the Lens explores the role of photography in contemporary renegotiations of the past and in Indigenous art activism. In moving and powerful case studies, contributors analyze photographic practices and heritage related to Indigenous communities in Canada, Australia, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the United States. In the process, they call attention to how Indigenous people are using old photographs in new ways to empower themselves, revitalize community identity, and decolonize the colonial record.

Adjusting the Lens presents original research in this emerging field in Indigenous photography studies, juxtaposing the historical and the contemporary across a range of geographically and culturally distinctive contexts. The transnational perspective of this exciting collection challenges old ways of thinking and meaningfully advances the crucially important project of reclamation.
https://www.ubcpress.ca/adjusting-the-lens

Elizabeth Edwards, & Sigrid Lien, Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work ofPhotographs, London: Ashgate , 2014

Nielssen, Hilde, Inger Marie Okkenhaug & Karina Hestad Skeie (red.): Unto the Ends of the World. Protestant Missions - Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. Leiden: Brill Academic Publications, 2011

Ritual Imagination. Tromba possession among the Betsimisaraka of Eastern Madagascar. Brill Academic Publications , 2011

Ritual Imagination is a study of spirit possession and ritual dynamics. Based on fieldwork in eas... more Ritual Imagination is a study of spirit possession and ritual dynamics. Based on fieldwork in eastern Madagascar, Hilde Nielssen shows how tromba possession works as a flexible and fluid force, whose ritual imaginary playfully draws together elements from radically different cultural and social domains, thereby constituting human realities and creating ways of relating to changing and disjunctive circumstances. Tromba's strength lies in its fluid capacities to relate to ongoing social change by altering its own practices, while at the same time continuing to heal person and cosmos. The book critically addresses the still dominant perspective in anthropology, where rituals are understood as representations of culture and society. Using tromba as a pivotal case in the critique of ritual as representation, this book offers a fresh perspective on ritual and spirit possession.

Sámi Research in Transition, 2021