ISS 25 (1995).pdf - The International Council of Museums

Per-Uno Agren
NORDIC MUSEUMS AND NORDIC MUSEOLOGY - SOME INTRODUCTORY
REMARKS
ICOFOM, Stavanger juli 1995
I have been asked to give an introduction to the Nordic museum scene. It will
be sketchy and for personal reasons very much based on a Swedish
perspective. My intention is to show how easily ideas have circulated and
influences worked within the five Nordic countires, which means that
museum structures are very much alike and the ways museum work very
similar. There are certainly national differences but I am convinced that we
can claim a common museological heritage for our countries.
I.
I shall start with a simple statement: museums are creared from above or
from below.
Learned men who pursue their studies of the natural world establish
collections of naturalia, scholars who explore the temporal aspect of human
culture, create collections of artificaJia, testimonies of human history and
progress in their own and in foreign cultures; princes and aristocrats
display their fortunes and refinement in collections of fine arts and crafts
with rare and expensive items. They all represent museum initiatives 'from
above'.
And those collections mate and merge, dissolve and come together in new
combinations, becoming in the 19th century national treasures in national
museums. Most museum histories of the world deal with such museums and
most efforts in museum research are devoted to the tracing of the.
vicissitudes of collections and individual specimens through the ages of
warfare and political unrest. The whole project of the restitution of cultural
property is based on the result of this research.
In museum histories it is evident that the constant temporal changes in the
material surroundings caused by technological progress, social and ethnic
restructurings of the Western society have provoked emotional reactions in
sensitive minds and released collecting activities with the goal to salvage
material out of the flow of time in order to secure a picture of human
destinies in bygone times. What has been saved has been, roughly speaking,
ripples on the face of the stream, the splendour of power and glory, which
did not deeply affect the layers of society, which carry the burden of
sustaining and prodUCing, nor the minds and self-consciousness of the
working people. Museum history is largely a history of museums created
from above.
Only recently, in tIle 20th century, the revolutionary changes in
demography and democracy, the mass culture of the industrial age which
thoroughly transforms the world we live in and brutally desrroys the links
with our cultural past, have so affected the conditions of the mass of the
people, that an awareness of their own identity and a historical awareness
have been produced which at last made them reluctantly take up the
museum idea. Most clearly it has been expressed in the ecomuseummovement.
Museums have finally been created also from below.
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