På spaning efter Västerhavets kulturarv

• Voices of the Western Sea Cultural Heritages of Scandinavian Peripheries For some years a cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional research and development program titled ”The Cultural Heritage of the Western Sea” and financed by the EU/Interreg IV has been working with the so-called Western Sea area from a heritage and heritage production perspective. An important structural idea behind the project has been to establish cooperation between representantives of different university disciplines and practitioners in central museums. This cooperation has made it possible to connect traditional historical and ethnological and artefact-based research traditions with reflection on and construction of cultural heritage in the region. This cooperation has thus been an important arena for asking new questions and establish new perspectives in the cultural heritage field in Scandinavia. The project’s point of departure is that the Scandinavian coastal regions around the Western Sea to a large extent were marginal or peripheral in the nation building and national cultural heritage construction in the 19th century. In Denmark and Sweden, the regions Jutland and Bohuslän were distant from the national capitals Copenhagen and Stockholm, while in Norway the most important national cultural symbols were related to inland peasant districts. At the same time, there obviously were a large number of transnational contact zones and areas in the Western Sea regions. Even if a transnational “Western Sea” identity is difficult to find, both in past and in present, there have been and still is a series of important and identity creating cultural heritage practices in the Western Sea area – practises that have many structural and substantial similarities, and focussing e.g. on the close connections with sea and trade, with crafts and art, with manors and industrial elites, with urban cultures, migration and mobility. Our project has been explorative aiming at understanding the distribution and communication of symbols, people, commodities and ideas and how this is embedded in the collective memory and cultural heritage production of people living around the Western sea. Focus has been on the analysis and re-enactment of what might be called the non-authorised cultural heritage practises and constructions in the Western Sea regions, heritage and heritage practices that are not in conflict with the national but represent an alternative perspective on spatial and cultural identity. In fact, it is obvious that the Scandinavian regions areas around the Western Sea have provided "raw-material" to the constructions of the "great" national heritages narratives of Sweden, Norway and Danmark. As a consequence, the inhabitants of these regions seem to have developed a complementary and complex cultural identity where the national heritage lives side by side with the regional and local heritages. Our conclusion is that it is more relevant to analyze this not as a conflict but, on the contrary, as a creative relation between these different "layers" and voices of cultural heritages.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Västerhavet

kulturarv

hav

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