Johanna Björkholm’s doctoral dissertation focuses on an aspect of cultural heritage that has been rather neglected in discussions of cultural heritage, namely, intangible cultural heritage. Here, the heritigization of Finland-Swedish traditional music serves as a point of departure for a wider consideration of cultural processes that is quite admirable in its scope.
The aim of the dissertation is twofold. Firstly, Björkholm examines how the concept of intangible cultural heritage has been used in the official documents of the Finnish public authorities, in international scholarly literature, and in the Swedish-language press in Finland. Secondly, she studies the process in which certain cultural components – in this case, traditional music – have received the status of intangible cultural heritage. Unlike Valdimar Hafstein and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Björkholm does not regard all folklore as intangible cultural heritage, instead arguing, in line with Stefan Bohman, that the status of cultural heritage is accorded to specific forms of folklore after a process of selection and ascription of value and symbolic weight.
This process is studied within the contexts of cultural institutions, scholarly research, and the media on the one hand, and of the formation of the Finland-Swedish folk music movement in the period 1848–1968, on the other. In the former case, the concept of cultural heritage is explicitly being invoked whereas in the latter, the contemporary concept did not exist, but the process itself is reminiscent of how cultural heritage is constructed today. It might also be added that traditional music is now being referred to as part of “our cultural heritage.” Björkholm uses discourse analysis to examine the rhetorics of heritage-making in her material, and she employs the concept of performativity to demonstrate how the categories of cultural heritage and traditional music are enacted and maintained.
In her discussion of the discourses on cultural heritage within institutions, Björkholm examines both national institutions and international ones, in the latter case chiefly UNESCO. She comes to the conclusion that the implicit assumption of all of these is that cultural heritage status is created through their own activity; these institutions are operative tools that are used to determine what cultural and natural components can be said to possess an inherent value, and thus qualify as heritage. Their concept of culture is product--rather than process--oriented. The Finnish authorities tend to view intangible cultural components as ancillary to material culture, and this has resulted in the non-existence of an official body responsible for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. In practice, intangible cultural heritage is neglected, and is fading away within the framework of these organizations. On a general level, intangible cultural heritage is understood as a complement to tangible heritage, as something completely different from “ordinary cultural heritage,” or as values inhering in tangible cultural heritage. Heritage as collective memory, connected with roots and identity, serves to promote cohesion within the ethnic group.
Scholarly discourses on heritage tend to fall within categories roughly familiar from other subfields of folklore studies. In the first trend, heritage is viewed as a symbolic construction, which says more about the aspirations and identity of its users than about the actual past. In the second, heritage is construed as a kind of performative act, and here the focus is on what heritage does. As for intangible heritage, the active role of the performer is emphasised. In the third trend of thought, heritage is understood as a mentality, and all heritage is essentially regarded as intangible, since the status as heritage involves ascriptions of value and meaning, which are intangible.
In contradistinction to the etic discourses of public authorities and international organizations, the discourses on heritage represented in newspapers and magazines are of a more emic sort. Here heritage is used in a variety of ways. “Heritage” can be utilized without further definition as a marker of value, of satisfaction guaranteed. These values are often connected to continuity, authenticity, and archaism. Cultural heritage must also be protected, either by allotting economic resources or by supplying platforms for the transmission of traditional knowledge. Heritage sites must either be maintained and restored or developed and refined, to achieve a coherent image. Moreover, heritage is related to roots, regional identity, ethnicity, and native language, and is apprehended as a tool in the active construction of the individual’s place in history: it’s a way of situating oneself. The view that cultural heritage is a construction is also represented, and issues of power – who has the prerogative to determine what constitutes heritage and how it should be interpreted – are addressed. The danger of reducing inhabited heritage sites to cultural reservations is another theme that is present in the material. Björkholm notes that the personal experience of value is fundamental to the individual’s apprehension of what constitutes cultural heritage.
Björkholm summarizes this part of the thesis with the observation that cultural heritage is a mental construction and that the kind of thinking involved in the construction of cultural heritage is not restricted to contexts in which the term “heritage” is explicitly used. It implies a particular relation to the past, which influences the ways in which the past is recruited and evaluated in the present. These issues then emerge as primary in Part Two of the thesis, cultural heritage as process.
Part Two begins with an adaptation of Stefan Bohman’s model of the heritage process to intangible heritage. An important addition to Bohman’s model, which was developed for artefacts, is that cultural components must be performed before they can undergo the heritage process. This can be roughly divided into four phases, which are partially overlapping. The initial phase is concerned with selection: defining and identifying cultural components that are to be promoted to the status of cultural heritage, and adoption by other social groups who adapt it to their own perspectives and situate it in new contexts. This means that other cultural components are ignored or even suppressed. The selected cultural component is then accorded a value in and of itself. The cultural component is also detached from its traditional context and transferred to a new one, perhaps also isolated from its original one. In this context, Björkholm stresses the importance of maintaining the possibility of variation, rather than turning selected cultural components into ossified, canonized master texts. The fourth phase is objectification, the ascription of inherent value being perceived as a natural matter-of-fact. Institutionalization, preservation, and inclusion on the scholarly agenda are phenomena associated with this phase.
When the collection of Finland-Swedish traditional music began in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the collectors were academics, elementary school teachers, and other members of the educated classes. In selecting the kind of music that would be labelled traditional, they emphasised the ancient roots of the music, the anonymity of its creators, and the artlessness of its performers. The folk were more or less construed as noble savages. As the music was supposed to represent the Swedish-speaking peasantry, Finnish-speaking performers were excluded from consideration and the popularity of “Russian” or “Gypsy” dances was ignored and viewed as an anomaly. Certain genres were singled out as unique, such as the minuet and polka, or as particularly ancient, such as the Scandinavian medieval ballad.
The ascription of value was largely based on authenticity and age. The latter was closely connected to the commonly held devolutionary point of view, and Björkholm notes that the interest in traditional music can be perceived as a reaction against modernity. In the demarcation phase, traditional music was adapted to the norms of its educated “assumers,” a process most apparent in its being given a contrapuntal arrangement. It was also transferred into a new context, that of schools, choirs, and cultural associations. This transformation of traditional music to suit the norms of art music was considered by some as a natural development. In the objectification phase, the value of traditional music was already viewed as intrinsic and it was safeguarded through the appointment of a chair in musicology and folk poetry at Åbo Akademi University, the publication of the monumental collection Finlands svenska folkdiktning (The Swedish Folk Poetry of Finland), and the emergence of a folk musicians’ association.
Björkholm evaluates the theory of the cultural heritage process by stating that it has allowed her to see new patterns and connections. I certainly concur with this assessment. Although many of the developments she discusses are partly well-known and have parallels in other subfields of folklore studies, the theory of the cultural heritage process places them in a context of meaningful ideological processes that still affect us today. It might be added that the thesis is also an unusually systematic and thorough account of the history of the consolidation of the concept of Finland-Swedish traditional music. For this reason, I am somewhat surprised to find that Björkholm accords so little space to the elucidation of her methods, close reading and discourse analysis; I would have expected more than a few lines on such an important part of the framework of the dissertation. However, this is only a minor remark on a thesis that deserves recognition outside the sphere of Swedish-speaking scholars.
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[Review length: 1513 words • Review posted on September 26, 2012]