Gender, Emotions and Material Culture in Scandinavian History (original) (raw)
NaMu VI, European National Museums, Globalised Culture. International research conference in Oslo, Norway, 17–19 November 2008. Organised by the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo; Dept of Museum Studies, University of Leicester; Theme Q, Linköping University, 2008
The 1890s Spring Festivals at the open-air museum Skansen in Stockholm, Sweden, were organised as socio-emotional spaces, in which women from Stockholm’s high society could act in public for a cause that they considered to be good: the awakening and spread of patriotic love in Swedish society. In my conference presentation, I aim to show how this socio-emotional space was organised and maintained in order to be a morally sound and safe space for the upper-class women. Moreover, I will show how they – the ‘Women of Spring Festival’ (vårfestfruarna) – acted as idealised figures and role models for a motherly society founded on ideas about patriotic love, family-like bonds and morally sound values. To read more, please see the scholarly article ‘Loading guns with patriotic love. Artur Hazelius’s attempts at Skansen to remake Swedish society’, published by Routledge in 2011, in the present website, Academia: https://www.academia.edu/37495460/
English Abstracts/ Vol. VI No.1
University of Kurdistan, 2020
Society, as the most fundamental factor in the formation of culture and the social structure, carries all aspects of culture, politics, art, and literature. Society and human productions are being produced and reproduced in a comprehensive contrast with each other. Society is thus the fundamental framework directing human actions and activities. Art and literature in particular, as human productions are surrounded by the social as opposed to the past belief considering them the products of taste and creativity and of imaginational nature only. It is illuminating to employ social theories in order to analyze literature and to study it within the framework of society. This is what the sociology of literature is concerned with. Researchers in the field of sociology of literature argue that all stories and other literary works retell the events of their times. The purpose of this research is to study the intellectual and aesthetic structures constructing the collective consciousness in the novel, The Last Pomegranate of the World, based on Lucien Goldmann's genetic structuralism. In this approach, the content of a literary work and its relationship with the society the work was created in are studied. Instead of describing the content of a literary work, its content is examined considering its relationship with the worldview of a specific period. The results of the study indicate that in this novel we are faced with three periods of the social-political history of Kurdistan. Both the content and the form of the novel are accompanied by characters each representing a particular period of the social-political history of Kurdistan: Kurdistan before the uprising, Kurdistan after the uprising, when the civil war occurs, and the political and social consequences after the formation of Kurdish political ideas.
English Abstracts/ Vol. VI - No.2
University of Kurdistan, 2021
The archetype of the motherland, related to the unconscious and defined by Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Yung, includes positive and negative interpretations and is observed in Arian culture. The motherland archetype carries a broad meaning, and it is the first example to be transferred from the senses to the interior, depending on the geographical, historical, and cultural conditions, before extinction. According to Kurdish feminist culture and based on the presence of different female deities like Anahita and Nahid, Sherko Bekas, as a renowned Kurdish poet, is under the direct impact of the Aryan culture and employs the examples of the motherland in his poems. In the present study, the researchers, while using an analytical descriptive, attempt to argue that Sherko Behas manages to demonstrate both the positive and negative aspects of this archetype in his works. The way in which Sherko employs the poetic images expresses the positive meanings; on the other hand, he also points to the negative connotations including disgust and impurity. The result of the present analysis shows that Bekas' poems represent a clear and beautiful picture of the architype of the motherland, which, although carrying senses of torment and pain, rather deserves praise. This treatment demonstrates the broad view of the Kurdish poet of Kurdish culture, represented in an unconscious way in his poetry.
Women's Studies International Forum, 2002
Synopsis -In this paper, we describe an exhibition on gendered artifacts we have organized in the Netherlands and Norway. The major aim of the exhibition was to show the public the ways in which technical objects are inscribed with gender; this in order to make people aware that we live in a technological and gendered culture. Reflecting on our experiences with the exhibition, we discuss the two different approaches to theorizing the gendering of artifacts underlying the Dutch and the Norwegian version of the exhibition: the genderscript approach and the domestication approach. We conclude that the gendering of artifacts can be understood only by representing designers as well as users as active participants in the social construction of artifacts. Designers are important by shaping the initial forms, functions, and meanings of objects. Users, by their different ways of interpreting, using and talking about technologies, further contribute to their social shaping. They define whether they experience things as gendered and whether they find them useful in articulating and performing their (gender) identities. By interpreting and using technologies, users are thus active participants in shaping the gendering of artifacts. D
Interview with Bjornar Olsen. Studii de Preistorie Volume 7 (2010)
2010
Bjørnar Olsen graduated in Archaeology (in 1984) at the University of Tromsø where he is Professor of Archaeology. Professor Olsen has published widely on theoretical archaeology, material culture studies, Norwegian prehistory, the culture history of the Sámi, and Museology. Bjørnar has held visiting professorships at Cambridge, Stanford, and University College London. DWB: How is a material culture approach to an artefact different from a traditional typological or functional one? BO: Well, this has changed considerably since the 1980s and today we see a number of material culture approaches. Initially it was very much about elucidating that the artifact also was a sign conveying a meaning or a message. The design of an arrow or pot was not just a matter of practical function, it also said something about the producer/ user or which group he belonged to. The artifact was used actively in social communication; it was, to paraphrase Ian Hodder, a symbol in action (I. Hodder 1982). Later, material culture studies become very much concerned with the concept of embodiment-that due to the fragile and abstract nature of our human existence there was a kind of immanent need to externalize or objectify it in something solid and concrete. Through these processes of embodiment, abstract and ambiguous phenomena such as identity, selfhood, social relations, gender, etc, were thought to become imbued in matter. They created a kind of "material imprint" of society from which social and ideological conditions later could be read or inferred. Another approach, inspired by scholars such as Alfred Gell (A. Gell 1988) and Bruno Latour (B. Latour 2000), took a more radical position by claiming that things were not just means for human projects and ambitions: things also had agency and the capacity to act. Society was not an exclusive gathering of humans only but a hybrid collective containing both human and non-human actors. Without the latter, society would not be possible. Thus, instead of anchoring all social phenomena in human intentionality or action, one started to ask what role things played in enabling these phenomena. For example, how could our current societies be possible without cell phones, electricity, computers, roads, pipelines, gas reserves, airline systems, banks, university campuses, custom points, maps, cities, etc, ? I think few would disagree that we depends on things; to reduce society to humans only, produces a very biased and even false representation of our existence.