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During the last five decades we have witnessed an increase in activity among artists identifying themselves as Sami, the only recognised indigenous people of Scandinavia. At the same time, art and duodji (traditional Sami art and craft) have been organized and institutionalized, not least by the Sami artists themselves. Sami Art and Aesthetics discusses and highlights these developments and places them in historical and contemporary contexts for an international audience. At stake are complex, changing terms regarding the creative and the political agencies. The question is not how indigeneity, identity, people, art, duodji, and aesthetics correspond to conventional Western ideas, rather it is how they interact with the Sami and their neighbouring cultures and societies. The volume is written by some of the foremost art historians and literary scholars in Sami art, craft, architecture, culture, and indigenous studies. Artists presented include Johan Turi, Ivar Jaks, Outi Pieski, Folke Fjellstrom, Katarina Pirak Sikku, Geir Tore Holm, and Silje Figenschou Thoresen.
Less tangible than melting polar glaciers or the changing social conditions in northern societies, the modern Arctic represented in writings, visual images and films has to a large extent been neglected in scholarship and policy-making. However, the modern Arctic is a not only a natural environment dramatically impacted by human activities. It is also an incongruous amalgamation of exoticized indigenous tradition and a mundane everyday. The chapters in this volume examine the modern Arctic from all these perspectives. They demonstrate to what extent the processes of modernization have changed the discursive signification of the Arctic. They also investigate the extent to which the traditions of heroic Arctic images – whether these traditions are affirmed, contested or repudiated – have continued to shape, influence and inform modern discourses. Sometimes the Arctic is seen as synonymous with modernity itself. Sometimes it appears as a utopian space signalling a different future. However, it still often represents the continued survival within modernity of the past as nostalgia, longing, dream and myth.
Art/ifacts and ArtWorks : De-Colonizing the Study and Museum Display of Ancient and Non-Western Things / Karen Sonik -- Beyond Representation : The Role of Affect in Sumerian Lamenting / Paul Delnero -- Seeing and Knowing: Cultural Concepts and the Deictic Power of the Image in Mesopotamia / Beate Pongratz-Leisten -- The Context(ualization) of Art in Non-Literate Societies : Images and Animal Bronzes in the Armenian Middle Bronze Age / Karen S. Rubinson -- To Be or Not to Be (Divine) : The Achaemenid King and Essential Ambiguity in Image, Text, and Historical Context / Matthew W. Waters -- Glyptic Images as Reflecting Social Order : Changes in Seal Iconographies from Egalitarian to Early Cen...
Literary museums today must respond to new challenges; the traditional image of the author’s home museum as a sacred place of literary pilgrimage centered around a national hero has been questioned, and literary museums have begun to develop new strategies centered not only on biography, but also literary texts, imagined spaces, different readers, historical contexts, architectural concepts, and artistic interventions. As this volume shows, the changing of spaces asks how literary museums create new ways of interlinking real and literary spaces, texts, objects, readers, and tourists.
This edited volume foregrounds new and vital scholarship shaping Scandinavian art historical research on the representations of the natural world. Contributors deconstruct the interlinking of people and land through critical readings of the Scandinavian representation of nature, bringing to the fore how the traditional focus on the landscape as a manifestation of temperament has tended to obfuscate critical approaches to the representation of the landscape. Making interdisciplinary connections, this volume redresses the imbalance in scholarship on the region that often emphasizes teleological national narratives and instead situates encounters with nature and the landscape in relationship to more interdisciplinary perspectives. Each chapter serves as a specific case study on topics ranging from circumpolar exploration and colonial practices, deconstructing National Romanticism myths, and contemporary artistic responses to the history of the politics of land. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, nature studies, and environmental history.
The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 is the final volume of the four-volume series of cultural histories of the avant-garde movements in the Nordic countries. This volume carries the avant-garde discussion forward to present-day avant-gardes, challenged by the globalisation of the entertainment industries and new interactive media such as the internet. The avant-garde can now be considered a tradition that has been made more widely available through the opening of archives, electronic documentation and new research, which has spurred both re-enactments, revisions and continuations of historical avant-garde practices, while new cultural contexts, political, technological and ecological conditions have called for new strategies.
This Handbook provides the first comprehensive international overview of significant contemporary Indigenous architecture, practice, and discourse, showcasing established and emerging Indigenous authors and practitioners from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, Canada, USA and other countries. It captures the breadth and depth of contemporary work in the field, establishes the historical and present context of the work, and highlights important future directions for research and practice. The topics covered include Indigenous placemaking, identity, cultural regeneration and Indigenous knowledges. The book brings together eminent and emerging scholars and practitioners to...
Dress helps us fashion identity, history, community, and place. Dress has been harnessed as a metaphor for both progress and stability, the exotic and the utopian, oppression and freedom, belonging and resistance. Dressing with Purpose examines three Scandinavian dress traditions—Swedish folkdräkt, Norwegian bunad, and Sámi gákti—and traces their development during two centuries of social and political change across northern Europe. By the 20th century, many in Sweden worried about the ravages of industrialization, urbanization, and emigration on traditional ways of life. Norway was gripped in a struggle for national independence. Indigenous Sámi communities—artificially divided by...
In response to systemic racism and institutions’ implications in histories of colonialism, nationalism, and exclusion, museum curators have embraced new ways of storytelling to face entangled memories and histories. Critical museum practices have consciously sought to unsettle established forms of representation, break with linear narratives of progress, and experiment with new modes of multivocal, multimedia, and subjective storytelling. The volume features analyses of narratives and narration in museums and heritage institutions today, as well as visions for future museum practices on a local, regional, national, transnational, and global scale. It is divided into three sections: Narrati...
Pastoralism is a diffused and ancient form of human subsistence and probably one of the most studied by anthropologists at the crossroads between continuities and transformations. The present critical discourse on sustainable and responsible development implies a change of practices, a huge socio-economic transformation, and the return of new shepherds and herders in different European regions. Transhumance and extensive breeding are revitalized as a potential resource for inner and rural areas of Europe against depopulation and as an efficient form of farming deeply influencing landscape and functioning as a perfect eco-system service. This book is an occasion to reconsider grazing communities’ frictions in the new global heritage scenario.