a blog by Peter Leonard
After the performance of Utrota varenda jävel Wednesday night, Swedish author Maja Hagerman took to the stage to discuss her recent book Det rena landet: Om konsten att uppfina sina förfäder (The Pure Land: The Art of Inventing Your Ancestors). This was part of Stadsteatern's effort to use Sven Lindqvist's play as a springboard for further discussion of race and colonialism in a European context, and Hagerman's book fits pretty well into the theme of the evening.
Det rena landet manages to knit together an entire world of ideas and intellectual movements, centered on Sweden's perceived status as a country uniquely unaffected by cultural or ethnic contamination. As Hagerman explains, the well-documented linkages between the Karolinska Institute's Race-Biological Institute in the 1920s and the nascent Nazi ideology in Germany is only the tip of the iceberg. She seeks to draw in Viking grave sites and even stone-age graves into the debate, arguing quite convincingly that the entire history of Swedish archaeology is tainted by race-biological notions of an eternal, unchanging Nordic race inhabiting the Swedish peninsula. When stone-age graves are dug up and skulls measured to ensure their conformity with Herman Lundborg's theories of phrenology, Hagerman suggests, there is reason to re-think the project of national history. (You can see a sample of the Race-Biological Institute's work on this page, from the Swedish Sámi association. Sámi skulls were themselves highly prized by race-biological researchers and collected by the dozen.) Hagerman goes so far as to question the whole notion of the "Viking Age" and the project of scholarship behind its promulgation. I don't know if this book will make it into English translation, but it would be a worthy balance to some of the more unproblematically triumphalist undergraduate-survey approaches one often finds in US colleges.