Åsa Alftberg, The Practice of Ageing 29
Ethnologia Scandinavica, Vol. 42, 2012
During the 2008 United States’ presidential
campaign, Barack Obama told an
adoring crowd of more than 250,000
gathered in Berlin’s Tiergarten that he was
speaking to them as a citizen of the United
States and as a citizen of the world. The
President’s globalism contrasts sharply
with the fierce nationalism and anti-immigrant
fever plaguing parts of Europe and
the United States. How do we reconcile
these two seemingly clashing views? And
how might we move beyond them?
Museums are one place to look for answers.
Ever since the leaders of the new
French Republic opened the doors of the
Louvre to the general public, cultural institutions
have played starring roles in the
drama of nation building. But in today’s
global world, what kinds of citizens are
museums creating? What combinations of
identities, from the very global to the local,
do they reflect and who is embracing
them? What can we learn from the choices
curators make about how nations respond
to immigration and their changing positions
in the globe?
This article, based on research on museum
professionals in the U.S., Europe,
Asia, and the Middle East, focuses on the
cases of Sweden and Denmark to explore
these questions. All of the museums I
studied showcase their nation’s increasing
diversity and encourage visitors to engage
with global issues to varying degrees. The
relative weight given to the national, regional
or the global in each country reflects
an implicit division of labor within
and between institutions and differences
in how museum staff perceive the relationship
between nationalism and globalism
and the role museums play in shaping
it.
Migration, Globalization, and
Museums
We live in a world on the move. There
are an estimated 214 million international
migrants worldwide, up from 150 million
in 2000. In 2010, one in nine people
lived in a country where migrants made
up 10 or more percent of the population
(Terrazas 2011). One out of every 33 persons
in the world today is a migrant (IOM
2011).
Much migration scholarship has focused
on immigrant incorporation – on
how migrants become part of the countries
where they settle. Recent work, on both
sides of the Atlantic, reveals how migrants
continue to invest, vote, and pray in the
countries they come from at the same time
that they remain active in the economic
and political life of the countries where
they move (Faist 2012, Caglar 2007, Glick
Schiller 2005, Bocaggni 2011, Levitt and
Lamba-Nieves 2011). Both sending and
receiving states are waking up to these dynamics
and creating new ways to encourage
long-term membership without residence
and forms of participation and representation
that do not require full citizenship.
Among the EU-15, for example,
only six countries require that people renounce
their former citizenship when they
naturalize. Countries outside of Europe,
like Turkey, India, Tunisia, Mexico, El
Salvador, Colombia and the Dominican
Republic have also eased restrictions on
people that naturalize, allowing immigrants
to retain citizenship, make it easier
to regain it, or easing the consequences of
losing it. In general, though, while more
and more migrants live some aspects of
their lives across borders, they continue to
be served by legal, educational, and health
The Bog and the Beast
Museums, the Nation, and the Globe
By Peggy Levitt1
30 Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast
care systems that remain stubbornly inside
the boundaries of the nation-state.
At the same time, and as a result, we are
witnessing the rise of “superdiverse” urban
spaces (Vertovec 2007). Because migrants
from a wider range of countries are
settling in more places, with very different
legal statuses and access to rights and services,
new patterns of inequality and discrimination
are emerging. This new complexity
is layered onto existing patterns of
socioeconomic diversity, residential segregation
and social exclusion. What would
enable these migrants and the native-born
to embrace what Glick Schiller and her
colleagues (2011) call cosmopolitan sociabilities
or the competencies and communication
skills that allow people to
create social relations of openness and inclusiveness
in the world? What conditions
create what Gilroy (2005) calls “multicultural
conviviality,” that arises when cultures,
histories, and structures of meaning
that had been kept apart by large distances
now come together in the school, bus, café,
cell, waiting room, or traffic jam?
Achieving conviviality does not negate
difference or deny that power inequalities
persist. The end goal is not a universalistic
self-definition or a single global political
project. But if, as Beck (2008) argues, cosmopolitanism
is a necessity rather than a
luxury, how do we move beyond it as an
attitude or an ethos to create participatory
institutions that reflect and respond to
contemporary global integration (Calhoun
2008)? Where might the cultural elements
come from with which to reimagine, let
alone put into place, a social contract that
is not fulfilled solely inside the na-
tion-state?
The answers to these questions vary in
different countries according to their philosophies
of integration and narratives
about who already belongs to the nation
and who is allowed to join (Favell 2001,
Bramadat and Koenig 2009). They vary
based on how the nation sees itself in the
world. Each country’s diversity management
regime reflect deeply ingrained assumptions
about how much “they” can become
part of “us.” National incentive
structures also reward certain kinds of
identities and strengthen certain groups
(Bloomraed 2006). In the United States,
for example, accepting an ethnic or religious
label or creating a formal organization
based on race or ethnicity enhances
access to state protection and support
(Johnson 2007, Kurien 2007).
Cultural institutions both respond to
and create the backdrop against which
these intergroup dynamics take shape.
Nations perform themselves differently
(Errington 1998, McClellan 2008,
Coombes 2004, Dias 2008) and museums
are central stages where these imaginings
are articulated and disseminated (Prezioni
and Farago 2004). Breckenridge (1989),
for example, argued that museums and international
exhibits created a “Victorian
Ecumene,” a transnational imagined community
including Great Britain, the U.S.
and India in a discursive space that was
both global and nation-specific. Dias
(2008) argued that the institutional ancestors
of today’s Quai Branley wanted to simultaneously
affirm the distinctness of
French culture and stress its roots in universal
values. As McClellan writes (2008:
30), “the value of many works as national
patrimony stemmed directly from their
perceived worth as the cultural heritage of
Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast 31
mankind.” Moreover, the museum world
itself is becoming increasingly global.
More and more museums belong to global
organizational networks and/or franchises,
although museum governance still
remains primarily national.
The challenge writes Bennett (2006:59)
is to “reinvent the museum as an institution
that can orchestrate new relations and
perceptions of difference that both break
free from the hierarchically organized
forms of stigmatic othering that characterized
the exhibitionary complex and provide
more socially invigorating and, from
a civic perspective, more beneficial interfaces
with different cultures.” One way to
do this is to build on the museum as a kind
of “differencing machine” that facilitates
cross-cultural dialogue. According respect
and recognition to previously marginalized
groups, inviting their members
to tell their own stories, combining exhibits
with educational programming, and
repatriating objects with questionable
genealogies are now standard parts of museum
practice. Various museums, especially
those in former settler societies with
official policies of bi- and multiculturalism,
have done this with varying degrees
of success (Bennett 2006).
Another view sees museums as simply
too flawed to redress their historical
wrongs. Ghassan Hage (1998), writing of
“zoological multiculturalism,” argues that
all too often museums become collections
of otherness that proudly display diversity
as a national possession. Because the
White majority still controls the discursive
and visual tools with which this is
done, difference is too often displayed in
an exaggeratedly self-referential, selfcongratulatory
manner.
Still a third view dismisses these critiques.
Writing in response to critics who
see museum installations and, therefore,
museums themselves, as “never not ideologically
motivated and strategically determined,”
James Cuno (2011:44) asks his
readers to confront the obvious: “Is this
your experience of museums? Do you
walk through the galleries of your local
museum and feel controlled in any significant
way? Do you feel manipulated by
a higher power?” (2011:45). He believes
that museums still matter and that “Enlightenment
principles still apply” (2011:
7). Collecting, classifying and presenting
facts, calling into question unverified
truths and opposing prejudice and superstition,
and being “confident in the promise
of rigorous, intellectual inquiry to lead
to truths about the world for the benefit of
human progress” are still at the core of the
museum’s mission.
This study contributes to these debates
by examining empirically how museum
staff think about these questions and why
they do so the way they do in particular
national contexts. The findings presented
here are based on a larger study of museums
and citizenship creation around the
world. They draw on my first-hand conversations
with museum directors, curators,
and policymakers; accounts of past,
current and future exhibits; observations
of gallery talks and educational programming;
and on the stories I’ve collected of
famous paintings, eccentric benefactors,
and iconic objects that define their institutions.
In the United States, I compare museums
in seemingly provincial Boston
with their counterparts in the alleged
center of the cultural universe – New
York. In Europe, I focus on Denmark and
32 Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast
Sweden, two former bastions of tolerance
that are now both dotted by pockets of
anti-immigrant sentiment. I then ask if
museums in Singapore and Qatar create
Asian or Muslim global citizens. How
does the tension between globalism and
nationalism play out outside the West?
Finally, my encounters with curators at
the Guggenheim and Hermitage Museums
in Bilbao and Amsterdam explore if and
how a new generation of museums creates
global citizens without a nationalist agen-
da.
Since the spring of 2009, I interviewed
over 70 policymakers, academics, museum
directors, educators, and curators in
Sweden (Stockholm and Gothenburg) and
Denmark (Copenhagen). My conversations
are about what these individuals
think they are doing not about how well
they are doing it. My respondents work at
all types of museums, both art and ethnographic
and not just official “national” institutions,
because all of these are sites
where the global and national might be explored.
In other words, I am interested not
only in the authorized, emblematic version
of the nation but in all the places
where it gets represented and how they fit
together. For that reason, I treat museums
as embedded in urban organizational
fields where they may or may not make
decisions in relation to each other. Although
I could not study all the museums
in each city, I did explore the extent to
which each institution saw itself as part of
a larger museum community and who its
conversations partners were. My findings
are not generalizable to the larger museum
universe. Rather, they shed light on how
staff in particular places, at a particular
time, see themselves as creating citizens,
what kinds and in what combinations, and
what their rights and responsibilities
might be. Their answers reflect how these
professionals make sense of the relationship
between globalism and localism (and
all other identities in between) and what
they think the role of museums should be
in working it out.
I found that an implicit distribution of
labor drives how and where difference
gets represented in Sweden and Denmark.
In both countries, museums showcase the
global and internal diversity but to varying
degrees and with different goals in mind.
As we will see, some curators do not feel
that museums are places to create citizens.
In general, however, Danish museums
engage with the global to reassert the national
while, in Sweden, museums try to
create global citizens as a valid goal in and
of itself. While institutional characteristics,
and the unique individuals, collections,
personalities, and policies that
shape them, explain some of these differences,
they also reflect differences in how
staff perceive national approaches to diversity
management and each country’s
global role.
The Bog and the Beast – the Danish
Case
Few people remember that the Dutch occupied
Northeastern Brazil between 1624
and 1654. One of their goals, besides getting
rich quickly by carving sugar plantations
out of the rainforests, was to flex
their colonial muscle and expand a commercial
empire that already stretched from
present-day Indonesia to Suriname and
New York City. The indigenous inhabitants
of Brazil were seen as godless savages
who needed conquering and convert-
Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast 33
ing. To accomplish their goals, the Dutch
set about documenting and classifying
daily life. The Governor-General’s entourage,
including Albert Eckhout and
Frans Post who worked as court painters;
German natural historian Georg Marcgraf;
and Dutch physician Willam Piso,
collected written and visual ethnographic
information. Art and science were also
tools of conquest.
While they never amassed significant
riches, the Dutch did produce some of the
first European scientific accounts of the
region. According to Art Historian Rebecca
Parker Brienen (2006), Nassau-Siegen’s
team generated spectacular, detailed
descriptions and illustrations of the plants,
animals, and everyday life of the people
living in the colonies – one of the richest
treasure troves of information about the
colonization of the new world and the first
glance that many Europeans had of
non-Europeans.
Eckhout painted still lifes and figures,
including the African, Indian, and
mixed-race people living in the colony.
Their rich, distinct tones and the range of
plants and animals they depicted fueled
fantasies about the exotic cannibals and
beasts to be found in the new world. Excited
viewers responded enthusiastically
when Nassau-Siegen brought these reports
and artifacts back to Europe in 1644.
In fact, people coveted new world accounts
and objects so much that some ended
up in the Curiosity Cabinets of Denmark’s
King Frederick III and Louis XIV
of France.
This is how the set of nine Eckhout
paintings came to be included in the Danish
National Museum’s ethnographic collection.
Walk in the door marked “Peoples
of the World” and that is the first thing you
see. The “Portrait of the Woman Cannibal
Carrying Human Meat in her Basket” is
perhaps the most famous and most striking.
Seen from far away, its layout resembles
many famous portraits of the day,
with its tall, imposing figure staring out
directly from the canvas.
Despite the major historical significance
of these works, many museum visitors
just keep walking. There are no wall
labels explaining who painted them, how
they got to the museum, or how they dramatically
influenced the ways in which
Europeans imagined “the other” for generations.
According to Karen Nyberg,
who was head of the department between
2010–2011, “the paintings are virtually
unexplained, they are just left as a kind of
monument to their artistic value. They are,
of course, set in an ethnographic context
with objects used by the same people that
they refer to, but it is a shame that there is
not a little more about how they came into
the collection or about the kinds of social
processes these kinds of paintings were
produced by.” The average visitor cannot
possibly grasp how much these works
shaped European sensibilities about the
world beyond their borders or about how
backward, inferior, and in need of help
from European saviors its inhabitants
were.
Contrast this to what greets visitors
when they enter the New Danish Prehistory
exhibit just downstairs, revamped with
great fanfare, just a few years ago. “Experience
over 14,000 years of Danish prehistory,
from the reindeer-hunters of the Ice
Age to the voyages of the Vikings,” the
Museum website invites visitors. The
riches include Denmark’s most significant
34 Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast
archeological finds from the Iron, Bronze,
Stone, and Viking Ages. Professional archeologists,
farmers, and amateur diggers
– quite numerous in Denmark – discovered
many of these icons in bogs. So
the fascination with the Egtved girl, a
young, blond, about 16 years old who was
buried during the summer of 1370 BC or
the magnificent sculpture of a bronze
horse pulling an intricately decorated
gold-coated disk in a chariot that follows
behind him, depicting the sun as it travels
from East to West. The Chariot of the Sun,
which has become a national icon, is
unique. “No religious artifact like it,” the
Museum’s website boasts, “has been
found anywhere else in the world.”
(www.natmus.dk/sw20374.asp).
These treasures, found in bogs and elsewhere,
are sumptuously lit and luxuriously
ensconced in cases draped in velvet.
Extensive text, written in simple language
and displayed with eye-catching graphics
on attractive, back-lit panels explains in
great detail how people lived, worked, and
worshipped during each “age.” Although
commercial and trade links to the outside
world are highlighted and ancient,
chiseled coins are showcased, connection
to the outside is not the central theme. “If
you put up great signs telling these things
in a few sentences you would be a missionary.
The visitor has to work his way
through to get that a lot of what is there is
of foreign origin but it is also a national
treasure,” said Museum Director Per Kristian
Madsen. “The Sun Chariot, which
you see everywhere, was probably made
in Denmark but the belief in the sun as a
God was not widespread here during the
Bronze Age… Many things going on in
Denmark were also going on in Southern
Europe. There is a plaster caste of the Emperor
Augustus to remind you that 2000
years ago, the world was not restricted.
People up here knew of him and his ideas
and he knew about Denmark.”
The contrast between “the pre-historic
bog” and the ethnographic, meat-eating
“beast” reflects deep divisions within the
museum over how its sees its place in the
world. Most curators agreed that, at least
right now, Danish pre-history is the favorite
child while the ethnographic collection
is the step-child. This was not always
the case. In fact, the ethnographic collection
at the Danish National Museum used
to be its jewel in the crown. According to
Inger Sjørslev, a former curator who is
now a professor of Anthropology at the
University of Copenhagen, in the 1960s
and 70s, the museum staff saw their role
as pedagogical – to teach the Danish
people that there were other ways of living
and thinking – that you didn’t have to live
as Danes do.2
Before airplane travel, The
History Channel, and foreign films became
commonplace in Denmark, the public
flocked to the Museum but by the
1980s, mass media had brought the world
to Denmark. Danes began traveling widely.
They did not need the museum to learn
about the outside world.
According to Director Madsen, it is not
that the ethnographic collection has been
sidelined. It’s simply that I am conducting
my research at a particular point in the
museum’s cycle of renovations. If I had
come in the 1990s, when the ethnographic
material were last reinstalled, I would
have seen a state-of-the-art exhibit using
the latest technology. The ethnographic
collection was supposed to be like a
three-legged stool – the “People’s of the
Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast 35
World” exhibit; a sort of open storage,
treasure-trove exhibit that would display,
side-by-side, a variety of utensils, tools,
and clothing from the museum’s warehouses;
and a space for in-depth didactic
exhibits. Unfortunately, the department
lost that third space to make way for more
school programming.
Diversity, however, is represented in
other parts of the museum and other
places around the city. In the children’s
section of the DNM, there is an exhibit
about the Pakistani immigrant community
created in collaboration with and from
materials donated by its members. In the
classroom area, where school groups begin
their tours, there are religious objects,
instruments, and clothing from other
countries that children can touch and try
on. The Danish Modern History collection,
which reopened in 2001, tells the stories
of Denmark from 1660–2000. When
curators discussed the exhibit’s redesign,
and the herculean task of covering more
than 300 years of history, they struggled
with how to tell a single national story that
had grown so diverse. They realized, according
to Lykke Pedersen, the lead curator,
that Denmark does not have one story
but many and that they needed to celebrate
different perspectives at different points in
time that would sometimes struggle or
compete with one another. “Danishness
was more like a question than an answer,”
she said. In a section entitled “New
Danes” a 47 year-old taxi driver from the
former Yugoslavia and a 40 year old
woman of Jewish origin share their stories.
A Qu’ran is showcased in a short section
on Islam.
Across the city, the Copenhagen Museum
and the Statens Museum for Kunst
(National Gallery of Denmark) are also
doing their part. In 2011, the Copenhagen
Museum launched an exhibit entitled,
“Becoming a Copenhagener” which is
“the first exhibition that places immigration
at the very core of Copenhagen’s development…
not just as a curious feature
in the life of the town, but rather as a key
ingredient in the town’s growth and development.”
Copenhagen would not exist
without this continuous stream of immigrants
nor would it be “the metropolis
with which we are familiar today without
their contribution (www.copenhagen.dk/
en/2012).” The David Collection, a private
museum, houses a prominent collection
of Islamic Art. The Danish Jewish
Museum showcases the role of Jews in
Denmark since the 17th
Century. At the
Statens Museum for Kunst, educators are
one of eight institutions participating in a
nationwide project about citizenship. According
to Nana Bernhardt, an Art Educator,
the idea is to use active participation,
self-reflection, and polyvocality as educational
methods to teach young museum
visitors citizenship skills.
But most of the people I spoke with,
both inside the museum and out, agreed
that what Danes have in common is much
more central to most of these exhibits than
any kind of differences. They also felt that
while the New Danish Prehistory informed
visitors about Denmark’s outward
connections, it was still primarily a celebration
of national pride. Per Kristian
Madsen claims this is, in part, due to the
Museum’s mandate. Of the 5.5 million
people living in Denmark, 4.9 million are
considered ethnic Danes and 567, 932 are
immigrants and their descendants
(www.denmark.dk/en/menu/About-Den-
36 Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast
mark/Denmark-In-Brief/Facts-aboutDenmark.html,
2012). The museum’s job,
he says, is to put on display the national
experience, to collect and preserve the
Danish experience broadly and preserve
its common memory, not to focus too
much on particular regions. Documenting
“Danish peasant culture,” is key because
that is what Danes share as a nation. Even
though today’s curators document the urban,
industrial experience, collecting objects
and stories from peasants, including
registering each and every one of the
country’s churches is still an important
part of their job. It’s only right, he says,
that a very small amount of the museum’s
real estate should be dedicated to immigrants.
Copenhagen is the most diverse
place in the country so the Copenhagen
Museum is a better place to take on these
kinds of issues.
But others disagree. According to one
curator, “The foreign is only interesting in
that it pertains to some aspect of Danish
history… I think there are pockets of the
museum (The Danish National Museum)
where the ethnographic collection is seen
as aberration.” Government support for
research has been dwindling. In fact, some
politicians have questioned why Denmark
needs ethnographic collections at all –
what light can they shed on Denmark
today? The only recent research to be
funded concerns the former Danish colonies,
including trading posts around
Accra, the Southeastern Indian coast, and
the Caribbean.
So, for now, the bog is clearly winning
over the beast, even if it is only a temporary
victory. While the New Danish
Prehistory Exhibit stresses Denmark’s
longstanding ties to the outside world, it
does so to assert and understand Danishness.
What happened in Denmark always
took place in conversation with the rest
of the world and influenced the country’s
national treasures, but they are still national.
Immigration and diversity are
showcased primarily in children’s programming
and by other cultural institutions.
“It’s okay to talk about diversity
with kids and young people because that
is at the periphery,” said Berit Larsen, the
Head of Education at the National Gallery,
“but once it gets closer to the core of
what the museum does, people hesitate a
bit.”
Bringing the World Home
The first thing that greets visitors when
they arrive at the Etnografiska Museet
(EM) in Stockholm is a permanent exhibit
called, “Bringing the World Home.” It’s
about how influential travelers brought
the world back to Sweden and how their
travel reports, radio broadcasts, and the
objects they collected reflected their understandings
of the world and Sweden’s
place in it at the time. How did these ideas
shape how Swedes imagined the world beyond
their borders and how did they gradually
become part of what Director Anders
Björklund refers to as the “Swedish
cultural knapsack?” “When 20 percent of
the Swedish population is born outside
Sweden, it’s evident that the border between
us and them has changed over
time,” he said. “Just as the museum’s collection
demonstrates that the outside
world came back to Sweden in multiple
ways in multiple voices, that also happens
today. Visitors need to listen, not just to
one voice, but to listen, read, and travel so
they can decide for themselves.”
Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast 37
The great men who influenced Sweden’s
understanding of itself (and they
were great men) included the great classifier,
Carl Linnaeus; Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld,
who crossed the Northeast Passage
for the first time; the explorer and geographer,
Sven Hedin, who, when not busy
leading four expeditions through Central
Asia, wrote the book that taught generations
of Swedish children their geography;
the Swedish missionaries who saved souls
in the Congo; and Sten Bergman, who enthralled
radio visitors each week during
the 1950s with his tales of “his father, the
cannibal”— a chief in Papua New Guinea
he came to know and love. The last part of
the exhibit includes a row of lockers from
Stockholm’s Arlanda airport. Behind each
door are examples of things travelers
bring home today – an ivory sculpture,
sacred objects, cheap souvenirs. Museum
staff want visitors to think about what
happens when people buy, collect, or steal
things from other places now, to understand
world power dynamics through the
prism of collecting. Is it right for individuals
to bring back something that is
sacred, even if it is for sale? Is it right to
collect something that is produced under
conditions that hurt the environment? Is it
possible to know the world without controlling
it?
Anders Björklund believes firmly that
museums should pose these kinds of questions.
In Sweden, the collections belong to
the public and should be used democratically,
for democratic purposes. Of course,
exhibits must be based on state-of-the-art
science that is tested. But they can also be
used to pursue social goals, to help create
a certain kind of Swede in a certain kind of
Sweden. It would be more of a problem,
he thinks, if the collections were in private
hands and served private interests. Society
uses different resources to solve different
problems. “Museums are like hospitals
and schools,” he said, “we just use different
tools to do our work.”
This kind of thinking underlies a temporary
exhibit on Human Trafficking.
“Across the globe,” the introduction
states, “the trafficking of human beings is
trailing its marks and evidence. The exhibit
“Trafficking” shows the indelible
stamp and imprints left on the bodies and
souls of people, most often vulnerable
women and children, by the trade in human
beings. Trafficking is about borders
and the violation of borders, about geographical
borders creating boundaries and
erecting barriers and about openings
penetrated and forced.” In essence, Anders
Björklund summarizes, Trafficking is
about modern slavery. All Swedes, he
says, especially young people need to
know that human trafficking is a global
problem and that therefore it is a Swedish
problem that everyone needs to do something
about. “In some sense, this exhibit is
about the fact that solidarity doesn’t stop
at the border,” Björklund said. “It’s like
air-born diseases, national borders are of
no importance. Trafficking is the same. It
crosses the border everywhere you look.
Young people need to understand that this
is not just a Swedish problem but a universal
problem but they also need to see it as
a Swedish problem that is structured in a
global way.”
The Ethnography Museum is one of
four museums that make up the State Museums
of World Culture, a new museum
authority created in the early 2000s. In the
late 1990s, following a period of rapid im-
38 Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast
migration, the Minister of Culture looked
to museums to help Sweden cope with its
new face. She focused her efforts on collections
dealing with non-Swedish matters
or what came to be known as World
Culture, including the Museum of Mediterranean
and Near Eastern Antiquities
(Medelhavsmuseet), the Museum of Far
Eastern Antiquities (Östasiatiska Museet),
the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm
(Etnografiska Museet), and the former
Museum of Ethnography in Gothenburg
(which was renamed the Museum of
World Culture—MWC). At least initially,
recalls Göran Blomberg, a former Director
General of the Swedish Arts Council,
“the idea was, in part, to use these collections
to make exhibits that were relevant
for immigrants – for them to see culture
from their homelands. I would say it was a
new way of handling old objects.”
But what also emerged was a series of
exhibits on global dynamics including
HIV/AIDs, ecofashion, and about rainforest
dwellers in southern Venezuela.
The MWC wants, according to its website,
to be “an arena for discussion and reflection
in which many and different voices
will be heard, where the controversial and
conflict-filled topics can be addressed, as
well as a place where people can feel at
home across borders” (www.varldskultur-
museerna.se/varldskulturmuseet/om-museet/in-english/2011).
The museum uses
objects to tell different kinds of stories in
non-traditional ways. A recent exhibit on
Bollywood, for example, featured a collection
of Bollywood posters that had been
paired with objects and labels about Hindu
practice when they were displayed in another
venue. When the posters came to the
MWC, according to Klas Grinell, Curator
of Globalization, the staff used the materials
to make the point that “World culture
is not ethnification or Americanization but
polycentric with connections everywhere.”
Bollywood is the largest film industry
in the world, even bigger than Hollywood
and it produces world culture that
is consumed by a global market. “By consuming
artifacts from other parts of the
world,” Mr. Grinnell says, “we are drawn
in and we learn things about daily life in
these places even if we’ve never been
there. You learn things about the United
States by watching Hollywood movies.
You learn things about Japan through
Manga.”
Destination X, which opened in March
2010, takes up similar themes. Here
curators sought to explore how and why
people travel and to get visitors to think
about how people change as they move.
“We wanted to explore,” says Grinell,
“who has the freedom to move and who
doesn’t. We are more mobile today than
ever before but we are also more stuck.
We need visas and passports to be able to
travel. Today if you don’t have the right
color passport, money, or skin you can’t
move freely. Refugees and tourists move
differently. The global businessman is
very different from people who are locked
out or forced to return. The difference between
illegal and legal is very little – it’s
all about having the right piece of paper in
your hand. Societies are not stable because
mobility is a fact of modern life.
The nation-state might just be a ‘parenthesis.’
It’s just one way of understanding
and organizing human life.” Destination X
doesn’t propose another option or solution,
it just drives home that how “we imagine
who belongs somewhere, who
Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast 39
should stay, and who should travel is rather
contingent.”
This commitment to taking on global issues
and to telling stories that stress global
interconnectedness does not stop here.
Even institutions one might expect would
be bastions of Swedishness, like the National
Historical Museum (NHM) in
Stockholm, adopt a global storyline. In
contrast to the New Danish Prehistory Exhibit
at the Danish National Museum, the
introductory text to Sweden’s comparable
exhibit reads, “In the year 1000, there was
no Swedish nation, there were no fixed
boundaries or borders. There was no common
law or currency and there were few
common traditions. People did not think
of themselves as “Swedish” but rather as
living in a particular place, belonging to a
certain clan or having a certain lord and
master. The history of what we call Sweden
is really the thoughts, decisions, and
actions of innumerable people – a chorus
of voices, only a few of which can be accommodated
in this exhibit.”
Archeology, says curator Fredrik Svanberg,
has always been used to build nations
but the staff at the NHM wanted to
use these materials in different ways. The
first part of the exhibit moves chronologically,
following a set of characters who
lived during different time periods. The
second part is organized thematically
around a set of questions about who the
visitor is, what he or she believes, and how
history is made. The visitor is now the
ninth person in the line of the eight characters
he or she encountered earlier. Based
on the direction they choose (organized
like the gates in an airport), visitors explore
these issues in different rooms organized
around these questions – in what
is, according to Museum Director and
Head of the Swedish Museum Association
Lars Amreus, “one of the few postcolonial
pre-history exhibits.”
But while Swedish museums showcase
the nation’s deep connections to the world
beyond its borders, one has to look harder
to find the diversity within. As in the
modern Danish history exhibit in Copenhagen,
the immigrant experience is there
but subtly. “Where are immigrants represented
in the museum,” one curator at the
Nordiska Museet3
responded to my question,
“Maybe you don’t see them explicitly.
Nowhere, really. But, of course, they
are there. When you look at the silver, you
realize it reflects the German influence
which was big in Sweden in the 17th
century.”
Recently, staff began using labels to
signal these points of connection in the
permanent collection. The visitor is told
that the quintessentially Swedish potato is
really an import from South America or
that the coffee culture that Swedes are so
proud of was first introduced in the 18th
century when Charles XII, who developed
a liking for the beverage while imprisoned
in Turkey, returned to Sweden after his re-
lease.
As in Denmark, there is an implicit institutional
division of labor. Over and
over, respondents mentioned The Mångkulturellt
Centrum or the Multicultural
Centre, located in the municipality of Botkyrka
with its large immigrant population,
as the place where the immigrant experience
is on display. The Centre, founded in
1987 “promotes a society where diversity
is reflected in the national self-image and
where migration-related phenomena are a
natural part of the Swedish cultural heritage”
(www.mkc.botkyrka.se). It’s re-
40 Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast
search and documentation tries to capture
how migration changes society – that being
a multicultural society is not just about
people from different countries but about
all Swedes. At the Stockholm City Museum,
according to the Head of Documentation
unit, Anna Ulfstrand, most work on
immigration revolves around children’s
programming or contemporary collecting.
“We have not worked very hard on it although
we are trying now with contemporary
collections,” she said. “I want to
find themes where the immigrant experience
can be part of another theme, not special
projects about how is it to be an immigrant…
I think it’s really important to say
that immigration is a part of contemporary
Swedish history, it’s not something at the
side, it’s really something in the middle.
In Sweden, the idea of immigrants has
been talked about as a problem, as something
that is not a part of the society and I
think after all these years we have to let
that go.”
The Bog versus the Eco-friendly
T-shirt?
The museum communities in Sweden and
Denmark have responded differently to
the demographic sea changes underway in
their respective homes. While institutions
in both countries took on the global, Danish
museums did so primarily to understand
and reassert Danishness while
Swedish museums saw creating a globally-minded
public as a valid goal, in and of
itself, and one that would ultimately lead
to a stronger Sweden. Museums in both
countries took on internal diversity reluctantly.
The immigrant experience was
showcased subtly, as part of larger exhibits
with larger messages. The characteristics
of the museums themselves, aspects
of curatorial practice, and differences
in how museum staff understand approaches
to nationalism and diversity
management in each country help explain
these differences.
For one thing, some curators believe
that museums are not the right place to
create citizens. They are made of bricks
and mortar. They are not built to respond
easily to new developments but to produce
permanent exhibits that last a long time.
“We are not set up to respond quickly and
with agility,” said Håkan Wahlquist, Curator
for Asia at the Ethnography Museum
in Stockholm. “Our exhibits are too blunt.
It’s a pretty slow medium.”
Sharp divides also plague the curatorial
field in both countries (and around the
world). In general, older curators, who
were often trained in art history, tend to
see “the present” as not part of their job
description. Rather, they are responsible
for mastering every detail of the collections
in their care and to make sure that
scholars around the world have access to
that information. “A Curator for Globalization
is not responsible for collections,”
Staffan Brunius at the EM in Stockholm
commented, “it is a person who is floating
in the philosophical sphere. We are getting
rid of everything that is the backbone
of the museum.” Younger curators, many
who were trained in anthropology or cultural
studies, see their older colleagues as
benign dinosaurs at best and obstructionists
at worst. How can you possibly continue
with business as usual – as if at least
some of the objects in the museum’s collections
did not come into its hands
through coercion or force? How can you
sidestep turning up the volume on stake-
Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast 41
holders’ voices when they now live next
door?
A second problem all curators face, be
they Danish or Swedish, is neo-liberalism.
Museums around the world are facing major
cutbacks. Concerns about the performance
measures and visitor targets museums
must meet peppered my conversations.
Pressures to appeal to tourists sometimes
directly conflict with pressures to
appeal to national audiences. There are so
many other things competing for the public’s
attention, several respondents complained.
If you want to learn about Native
Americans, you can just stay home and
look it up on the Internet.
In both countries, particular institutions
play particular roles in performing difference
– there is an implicit organizational
distribution of labor. The interests and
commitments of curators and administrators
often determine this. In addition to the
citizenship project at Denmark’s Statens
Museum for Kunst, for example, curators
are also reinstalling the permanent collection
with an eye toward telling a different
national story. Although constrained by
their institutional mandate, and by what is
in their collection, just as the New Danish
Prehistory exhibit stresses connections
between Denmark and the outside world,
the newly-installed “national identity”
gallery will also highlight how foreign
artists influenced the Danish National
Academy.
Some institutions are also just considered
more appropriate venues for
showcasing diversity. The Copenhagen
Museum was seen as the right place to
jumpstart these debates not only because
Copenhagen is so diverse compared to the
rest of Denmark but also because the Copenhagen
City Government, which tends
to be more liberal than the national legislature,
owns, funds and runs it (http://
www.copenhagen.dk/en/about/).4
In
Stockholm, the Mångkulturellt Centrum
fulfilled a similar function. In both countries,
much of the programming focused
on immigration is aimed at children and
school groups.
Both Swedish and Danish Museum
staff are grappling with how to tell immigrant
stories and with how to connect
them to the national narrative. Their
choices reflect national styles of diversity
management and national attitudes about
who can become part of the nation. Writing
about the Nordic countries in general,
Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad
(2002) argues that there are few
words for expressing that something or
someone can be different but also equal.
The Danish word generally used for
“equality,” she says, is likhet or “likeness,”
“similarity,” “identity,” or “sameness,”
meaning that people have to feel
more or less the same to be of equal value
(Gullestad 2002). This kind of logic
makes people interact in ways that emphasize
their similarities and downplay their
differences. It also implies that too much
difference, whether between individuals
or opinions, can be problematic. Open
conflict goes against the basic grain so
that “different” parties may avoid each
other to keep the peace.
Therefore, actively signaling ethnic or
racial difference, various respondents on
both sides of the border feared, can lead to
marginalization. While the United States
allows and even encourages groups to
claim “Irish-Americanness” or “IndianAmericanness,”
as a way to assume their
42 Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast
rightful place at the American table, in
Sweden and Denmark, embracing such labels
is often seen as a step toward social
exclusion. According to Birgitta Svensson,
Professor of European Ethnology at
Stockholm University, “The United States
does a good job when it comes to this but
we have nothing like it. All the Americans
you meet say ‘I come from India, my
grandmother was from Italy.’ It’s natural,
they are Americans but they are proud of
their heritage.” In Sweden, she goes on to
explain, outward expressions of ethnicity
mark you as different and, therefore,
somehow deviant. Once you are labeled, it
is hard to escape the box – even if you
don’t identify primarily as a Somali or as
a Muslim, people may label you that way.
It is easier, several curators believed, to
showcase the experience of the foreignborn
based on their global connections
rather than their immigrant status. The
MWC in Gothenburg, for example,
reached out to the Peruvian community
around it Paracas textiles or to the Bolivian
community when it mounted a show
about the Orinoco River but it has not
done exhibits on the immigrant per se.
“Swedish culture,” curators commented,
“is not always included in world culture.”
But while Sweden and Denmark have
similar ideological responses to diversity,
their policy responses have been somewhat
different, which is also reflected in
museum practice (although the political
backdrop against which this takes shape is
changing, even as I write). Swedish policy
recognizes five official national minorities
including the Sami, the Swedish
Finns, the Tornedalers, the Roma, and the
Jews. These groups, states a government
website, “have existed in Sweden for a
long-time and are part of Sweden’s cultural
heritage. The policy aims to protect,
promote the participation of, and keep the
languages alive of these groups in accordance
with the National Minorities Law in
Sweden (Government Bill 1998/99:143)
and two Council of Europe conventions:
the Framework Convention for the Protection
of National Minorities (the Framework
Convention) and the European
Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
(Minority Languages Charter)”
which Sweden ratified in 2000. By so doing,
the Swedish government institutionalized
difference and linked it to political
visibility and resource distribution
(www.humanrights.gov.se/extra/pod/
?module_instance=2&action=pod_show
&id=55).
This way of managing minorities also
reflects, some respondents noted, the
Swedish states’ longstanding strategy of
dealing with citizens as members of
groups. Because, in the past, people received
services or were mobilized as
“workers” or “women,” creating a new
category, “immigrants,” was a natural
next step. Minority status allowed these
groups to use their officially recognized
languages in legal and administrative contexts,
to send their children to pre-schools
where the language of instruction was
their ancestral tongue, for senior citizens
to be cared for in elder care facilities
where they could use their native languages,
and to expect “particular attention”
to be paid to their cultural activities
which the government would support
(http://www.minorityrights.org/1501/
sweden/sweden-overview.html).
So-called “new” minorities could also
claim rights and recognition. Minority
Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast 43
Rights Group International points out
that “the Swedish Constitution also
makes provision for the promotion of opportunities
‘for ethnic, linguistic and religious
minorities to preserve and develop
a cultural and social life of their own’;
and it states that ‘a foreigner within the
Realm shall be equated with a Swedish
citizen in respect of protection against
discrimination on grounds of race, skin
color, ethnic origin, or sex’.” Here again,
the Swedish government relates to its
citizens as members of groups which
guarantees them a certain level of recognition
and services.
Economic downturns and the rise of Far
Right parties dampened Sweden’s commitment
to multiculturalism, which many
came to see as a threat to Swedishness
leading to tolerance without integration.
What had been called Immigration Policy
is now called Integration Policy. Policies
should meet the needs of immigrants and
citizens alike. But rather than abandoning
their focus on diversity, some respondents
felt, politicians simply expanded it to include
a wider range of differences including
age, gender, sexual orientation, and
disability status.
In contrast, since World War II, Denmark
has developed a universalistic welfare
state that provides health care, education,
unemployment benefits and old-age
pensions to all citizens and legal residents.
Successfully integrated immigrants had to
accept “Danish values,” because the Danish
political system does not officially recognize
minorities and only rarely acknowledges
minority rights and cultural
claims based on minority status. There is
also little support for multicultural policies
or for policies that tell institutions
how to deal with cultural diversity (Hedetoft
2006) which also helps explain why
these themes have been less common in
the Danish museum landscape. According
to Berit Larsen at the National Gallery,
many middle-aged Danes grew up in a
very white, western environment at the
height of the Danish welfare system.
There were supposedly no class differences
or poor people in Denmark. But in
the last five years or so, you can openly
discuss inequality or the different cultures
that live next door with whom you don’t
mingle but “we don’t really have the language
to talk about it.”
The last government coalition introduced
a legislative “package” which restricted
the numbers of immigrants and
refugees allowed to enter the country,
toughened the requirements for permanent
residence or citizenship, and tried to
make sure that newcomers embraced
“Danish values” and became socially integrated.
Since 2002, to become a naturalized
Danish citizen, immigrants have to
live in Denmark for nine consecutive
years, be economically self-sufficient,
have proper housing, no criminal record,
and be fluent in Danish. A second law, introduced
in 2003, included a “24-year
rule” for family reunification. It states that
no Danish citizen can marry a non-EU or
Nordic foreign national and settle in Denmark
with his/her spouse unless both parties
are 24 years or older. The law was designed,
in part, to prevent family members
from pressuring young women into marriage.
One unintended consequence,
though, is that young, native Danes with
foreign spouses have to settle in other EU
countries, primarily Sweden (Hedetoft
2006).
44 Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast
The Danish government also decreed
an official national cultural canon in
2006–2007, designed to specify what is
special about Danish culture and preserve
it. Minister of Culture, Brian Mikkelsen,
hoped that the 108 works that were ultimately
included would create a “collection
and presentation of the greatest most
important works of Denmark's cultural
heritage.” The canon would “give us reference
points and awareness of what is
special about Danes and Denmark in an
ever more globalised world and to
strengthen the sense of community by
showing key parts of our common historical
possessions” (http://www.kum.dk/kul-
turkanon/english).
The canon evoked a strong response
from almost everyone I spoke with. Opponents
saw this as a way to nationalize culture
and to keep non-ethnic-Danish elements
out. Supporters, including Ole Winther,
the Head of the Museum Department
at the Heritage Agency of Denmark, saw it
as a catalyst for positive public debate.
“Denmark is changing and people have to
be able to see what they are changing
from. When you specify the ten most important
works of Danish art, it forces
people to react and discuss what they are
in favor of. In Sweden, they don’t even
talk about it.”
Denmark is such a small country, sums
up Janne Laursen, the Director of the Danish
Jewish Museum, that people can go
their whole lives without ever meeting
someone from another island, let alone another
country. This sense of valuing the
local as a way to embrace and strengthen
the national encourages that inward, singular
focus. The history of the Jewish
community and its contributions to Danish
society, she says, went unrecognized
by many Danes even though Jews had
lived in Denmark 400 years and owned
some of its most important industries.
When she first began her studies, the museum
classification system she learned
had no categories for non-Christian ob-
jects.
Moreover, many Danes associate the
birth of democratic Denmark with an ethnically
Danish, egalitarian nation-state
that looked inward, to pursue its own internal
social and economic growth (i.e.
outward losses must be compensated by
inward gains) after the traumatic loss of
much of its territory and people in 1864
(Olwig 2003). This perception of the nation
also informs museum practice. The
emergence of the successful modern welfare
state is seen to rest on a long shared
culture and history (Olwig and Paerregaard
2011). So, said National Museum
Director Madsen, “Danes are a small tribe,
communicating with our backs to the
world.” Ole Winther agreed. “So few
things have changed since we became a
democratic nation. A lot of our institutions
are several hundred years old. We’ve
never actively said we don’t want this
anymore. There’s so much continuity. So
Danishness is something within me. My
kids are in school now and they are learning
many Danish songs and psalms. I hear
two notes and I know which song it is because
it is so deeply rooted. It is almost a
pre-cultural, beyond words, tacit knowledge
that we all understand.”
Although Denmark has never been as
homogenous as many people would like to
believe, discourse often trumps demography.
The idea of Denmark as a culturally
homogeneous society persists and new-
Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast 45
comers are often seen as not being able to
or wanting to fit in. Although the welfare
state has extended considerable social and
economic assistance to immigrants and
refugees, thus helping them settle in Denmark,
“Danish perceptions of these people
as culturally different – and therefore as
foreign elements in the country – have
presented serious obstacles to their social
acceptance” (Olwig and Paerregaard
2011:3). Many people simply ignore how
socioeconomic conditions in Denmark
might influence immigrant incorporation
or why people might want to maintain
their religious practices and traditions.
Swedish museums’ greater willingness
to showcase diversity and globalization
also reflects Swedish attitudes toward nationalism
and the country’s perceived role
in the world. If Denmark turned its back
on the world, Sweden has always looked
face front. It sees itself as an outward-looking
internationalist state whose
commitments to justice and equality do
not stop at the national border (Bergman,
2006b). Swedes feel a sense of cosmopolitan
duty, not just to Swedes alone (Bergman
2004). Olof Palme (1968:22) championed
the idea that ‘solidarity has no
boundaries,’ inextricably linking domestic
and international appeals to justice and
proclaiming them two sides of the same
coin. During the height of the Swedish
welfare state, Sweden considered itself a
model for the rest of the world – the world
needed Sweden as an example of tolerance,
equity, and responsibility. In the
1980s and 90s, as the welfare state lost
steam, according to former MWC Director,
Thommy Svensson, “Sweden had
great difficulties finding its new identity
because now Sweden needed the world instead.
The MWC project was an attempt to
work this out which became even more
challenging as so many new immigrants
came in.” The way the museum was built
and its exhibition style reflects how
modern day Swedes think about their
place in the world. “I think it reflects an
openness, interest, and curiosity in the
world around us, respect for other cultures,
a sense of wanting to do good in the
world outside,” said Lars Amreus, “but
also an annoying self image of being
somewhat the conscience of the world, the
do-gooder of the world, perhaps.”
“Sweden,” says MWC Curator of Globalization
Klas Grinell, “came late to industrialization.
We don’t have our own
enlightenment thinkers. Secularization
was created elsewhere. Swedes pride
themselves in always being a bit careful at
the beginning, in not being the inventors
but in being the best adopters… when we
realize that multiculturalism is what is
happening and that we are leaving behind
the old kind of nation-states, then we go
one step further than everyone else. We’re
not the first nation to not put national pride
first but we might be the first to be truly
global.”
So just as the Nordiska Museum and
Skansen were created during a period of
major social change in the late 1880s to
preserve and protect Swedishness, now
the MWC is also “a bridge over troubled
waters” suggested Historian Patrick Henry,
a response to the collective identity crisis
caused by Sweden’s entry into the European
Union, the economic downturn of
the 1990s, and soaring immigration. And
just as, in the 1940s, cultural institutions
helped transform rural farmers into urban,
middle-class workers so, today, museums
46 Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast
can also be used to make immigrants into
Swedes. “The Government expects,” said
Thommy Svensson, “that museums and
other cultural institutions should be a kind
of mouthpiece for our cultural policy, that
they should talk about democracy, diversity,
equality, and integration of recent arrivals.
It’s sometimes a difficult position.”
Though he won’t go so far as to put a
Swedish label on it, Anders Björklund believes
that this willingness to see museums
as tools that can take on big questions
is unique. “Museums are not sanctuaries…
You should work scientifically but
the outcome should be available for all
people in a very broad sense… Maybe that
is Swedish, making it more democratic.”
Sweden’s global embrace also reflects
its discomfort with nationalism. To be
able to express guilt-free national pride,
Swedes would have to face up to parts of
their history (and of their present as recent
elections reveal) that they would rather
not talk about. The country’s cooperation
with the Germans during World War II, its
treatment of the Samis, and its experiments
in genetic engineering and racial
purity are just some of the things most
people would like to forget. According to
Political Scientist Krister Lundberg, “We
try all the time to keep it back. Not talk
about it at all. That is the Swedish solution
for many things. Social democracy educates
people but you are supposed to think
only the right things.” Many people see
nationalistic displays as intolerant, antiimmigrant,
and dredging up dark episodes
in Swedish history. In fact, several museum
staff saw their job, especially following
the Sweden Democrates’ success
in the last election, as preventing ultra-nationalists
from hijacking traditional symbols
for their own ends. “It’s so much
more convenient,” said Lars Amreus, “to
not address these issues about the nation
and nationality and to focus on other exhibitions,
but the worst we can do is just ignore
this…there was a big discussion
about ten years ago when Neo-Nazi supporters
kidnapped the symbol of Thor’s
hammer from Viking age mythology and
made it theirs, so people could not wear
that as a necklace any more. We wanted to
take back those kinds of symbols and not
let them be kidnapped by certain groups.
Institutions such as ours must do that with
things like the Swedish flag, to continue a
dialogue with our visitors about what
Sweden is and what its history has been.”
Conclusion
Half way around the world, in November
2010, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts
(MFA) opened its new Art of the Americas
Wing. Visitors are greeted on the
ground floor by a magnificent set of
Pre-Columbian funeral urns. The message
is that American art is strongly influenced
by its neighbors to the north and south.
“The wing is very different than every
other wing of American art in the country,”
Elliot Bostwick Davis, the John
Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the
Americas Department told me, “because it
includes the ancient cultures as far as we
can go back. We are going north, central,
and south to work with that as a continuum.
We will walk people through so
they get a sense of this layering and richness,
and I hope for each individual there
is an opening of the mind of what is
American.” This is a radical move for an
institution that has always defined colonial
America as a New England phenome-
Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast 47
non. But change goes only so far. The
United States is still at the heart of the
agenda. The exhibit questions the sources
of Americanness but not the country’s
place in the world. It recognizes that
“American art” is shaped by forces at
work both inside and outside national borders
but it does not take the next step to rethink
how that shifts America’s global status.
“I do not think that museums create
citizens,” Ms. Davis told me, “I hope that
universities do that.”
Kevin Stayton, Chief Curator at the
Brooklyn Museum, where a comparable
exhibit, American Identities, was reinstalled
in 2001, disagrees. “It is not a question,”
he says, “of whether museums are
the right place to do this (creating citizens).
Museums have to do it because we
won’t survive for the next 100 years doing
what we have always done which is collecting
things together and sorting them
into library-like categories for a handful of
scholars to look at. We still have to play
that role but we also have to present the
arts in a way that our mission is possible,
to find that connection with art that makes
some of us devote our lives to it, the fact
that these human expressions are moving,
that we want to share that pleasure with
people who might otherwise not find it.”
President Obama used aspirational language
when he addressed that 2008 crowd
in Berlin’s Tiergarten. He wasn’t predicting
that someday we’d all carry global
passports. He was saying that we live on
the same planet and face similar problems
that we need to do something about. But
we still define problems and their solutions
nationally. When we create international
institutions, like the United Nations
or the World Court, national interests often
interfere. If global connection is the
wave of the future, then understanding
how a global ethos is created, who gets to
embrace it, and what it looks like from different
national standpoints is of pressing
concern.
Peggy Levitt
Professor
Department of Sociology
Wellesley College
Wellesley, Mass. 02481
Notes
1 Thank you to Tine Damsholt, Birgitta Svensson,
Eva Silvén and two anonymous reviewers
for their helpful comments on earlier
drafts.
2 This was, in part, adds Sjørslev, because curators
showcased the collections in special exhibits
(’Bredeudstillingerne’) with themes
like “The White God” (about myths in colonial
and contemporary Latin America), “China”
(with included a naturalistic representation
of a Chinese commune) or “Brasil 86”
that the objects became such an eye opener to
the world. Even given this, there was a sense
among several respondents that the museum’s
ethnographic materials were always primarily
regarded as comparative material for understanding
how “Danes” lived in prehistoric
times – from a strong evolutionary perspec-
tive.
3 The Nordiska Museum, a cultural history museum,
housed in an imposing castle, and
Skansen, the world’s first open-air museum,
were created by Artur Immanuel Hazelius in
the late 1880s to showcase Scandinavian material
culture. Its website invites visitors to
“Discover Sweden's cultural history. Exhibitions
on the home, clothes and fashion, customs
and traditions uncovering daily life in
Sweden through the ages (www.nordiskamu-
seet.se/category.asp?cat=187&catname=English&topmenu=142,
2012).
4 Between 2001–2011, the City Council stood
in opposition to the National government but
in October 2011, a new government was
elected and the City Council is no longer at
odds with its national counterpart.
48 Peggy Levitt, The Bog and the Beast
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