Hind: 50eek/3,20eur

Esimeses numbrisse on koondatud artiklid, mis keskenduvad kultuuri ja võimu suhetele ning muuseumide arengu perspektiividele:

Božidar Jezernik
The Abode of the Other (Museums in German Concentration Camps 1933-1945)

In major German concentration camps, museums were set up with the aim of collecting exhibits and displaying them within a Rassenkunde (race science) framework. As the discourse of racial anthropology was built on the rhetoric of the difference between the ‘pure’ races and people with ‘inferior hereditary quality,’ SS museums put on display ‘pieces of evidence’ with a view to rendering present and visible that which was absent and invisible: the hierarchical order of different races. Thus, collections displayed in SS museums in concentration camps were instrumental in the process of defining the Aryan Übermensch (superhuman) as the personification of all desirable physical, cultural and intellectual attributes, born to conquer and rule the world as a member of the Herrenvolk (master race), and the non-Aryan, above all the Jewish Untermensch (subhuman) as his opposite, a radically other and barely human, suitable only for menial chores.

The first museum established in German concentration camps was opened in Dachau early in the 1930s. Similar museums worked in other German concentration camps (Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Auschwitz). The richest was the museum in Gusen I, the sub-camp of Mauthausen. In autumn 1940, when the SS began with the construction of a railway between KZ Gusen I and St Georgen railway station, a grave-yard from the Bronze-Age was found. All the finds were housed in an archaeological museum that was established at the Museumsbaracke (museum barrack) within the camp. By the side of archaeological findings, human skins, skulls and body parts were put on view. At the time of the liberation of Gusen I, on 5 May 1945, a collection of 286 body parts was found and a voluminous album with fragements of tattooed human skin.

Today, from all the SS museums’ anthropological exhibits not a single one is on display in the museum exhibitions set up in the former concentration camps. So far, these establishments also escaped the attention of scholarly research. Thus, when I interviewed historians employed in Mauthausen Memorial Museum and in Gusen Visitors’ Centre, in 2005, they were completely unaware of the existence of above-mentioned museums during the war time.

Karin Konksi
Sovietisation and the Estonian National Museum during 1940s-1950s

The article deals with the impacts of the policy of the 1940s-1950s Soviet authority on the Estonian National Museum. The first, introductory part observes the general frameworks of the (ethnographical) museums in the Soviet Union, thus providing an overview of the goal of Sovietisation policy – what was the system’s perception of the institution that the ENM was supposed to become. The main part of the article focuses on Sovietisation practice in the ENM: what kind of reorganisation took place within the work of the museum in connection with political changes, whether and how the new norms were adapted to and to what extent they were adopted. The source material used for the treatment of the subject matter comprises, in addition to the ENM’s archive materials, the memories of three ethnologists who worked in the ENM during the observed period.

Hanneleena Hieta
On the Survival of Rare Plants – Hungarian Museums in the Decade of Changeover

The purpose of this article is to assess changes in the museum institution as a response to the social environment. A metaphor of natural evolution is employed. The idea of ‘effective history’ is also introduced. The case in point in this article is Hungary and its museums. The period after 1962 witnessed strong growth in the public sector. The growth was seriously hampered by inflation in the second half of the 1980s. The environment, however, did not change drastically until the 1990s when there were dramatic changes in the amount and principles of public funding. A case study is introduced to mirror these changes.

Mare Kõiva 
The Contemporary Museum as a Site for Displaying Values

Museums constitute an important cultural and social resource. The main objective of museums is making certain objects in the collection visible or, on the contrary, leaving them invisible. In contemporary society the institution serves many important roles, being a place for displaying historical and contemporary values, an institution for preserving and displaying personal and collective memory, cultural values, for collecting tangible and intangible values, an institution for creating identity and ethnic kudos, a work place, an educational environment, a framework for promoting ethnic handicraft and art, a place for integrating different folklore festivals, exhibitions, shows; they are connected to tourism patterns and museum business. The article reflects the changes in the development of museums in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, focusing on the main key words being multifunctional museum, the museum as an open classroom, presentation of tangible and intangible history, the relation and mergence of permanent and temporary exhibitions. The issues of digitalization and preservation and the role of the exhibition curator and the person represented on displays have increased in the museology of the past few decades. The museums’ tradition of self-replication and an increased interest in museological anthropology indicate that museums fulfil an important role in society.

Alexey Zagrebin
The Scientist and Authority in the History of Finno-Ugric Research in Russia

The history of Finno-Ugric Ethnology has already come a considerable way. There have been periods of brilliant discovery as well as periods of stagnation; or, what was worse, periods when what was said depended on what the prevailing conditions demanded. Looking back, we are to some degree able to reconstruct the facts and to follow the development of the ideas that contributed to contemporary studies. The main subject of this paper is the interpretation of mutual understanding between the ethnologist and government in the history of Finno-Ugric studies in Russia between the 18^th and 20^th centuries.

Kjell Olsen
When Ethnic Identity is a Private Matter

This article analyses the change of articulation of ethnic boundaries on the coastline and the fjord areas in Finnmark, Northern Norway in the post-World War II period. From being a ‘social stigma’ in the 1950s a Sámi identity is today something that can be expressed in certain cultural constructed spaces. This change can be described as a result of socio-economic changes in the region, the populations’ firmer integration in a Norwegian culture and the ethno-political struggle of some Sámi that corresponded with a general development in the view on indigenous people in the Western world. Even if great changes have occurred there are still some resemblances with ethnic processes 50 years ago. A spatial ordering of ethnic boundaries and pragmatic assumption of Norwegian culture being neutral norm are among those features perpetuated until today.

Petras Kalnius
Challenges Faced by the Lithuanian State from Regional Identities

The article examines how a search for identity attempted by Žemaitians (Samogitians), a Lithuanian local cultural group, eventually evolves into the demand that Žemaitian community should be recognised as an autochthonous nation, and Žemaitian dialect – as a separate language, with all implicit rights. Attempts to implement the idea of a self-governed region as a guarantee of reconstruction and protection of Žemaitian identity is the most recent and vivid representation of such proceedings. Since Lithuania’s accession to EU is increasingly perceived as a threat to cultural identity, other local cultural groups also tend to support the idea of self-governed regions. A suggestion that four (4) self-governed regions covering respective local culture distribution areas should be created in Lithuania is promoted. The authors of such demands, due to a multitude of historical, political, and social reasons, still do not have many supporters in central government bodies, and even in local communities, although in Žemaitija their number is greater.

Rasa Paukštytè-Šakienè 
Ritual, Power and Historical Perspective: Baptism and Name-giving in Lithuania and Latvia

Power in our life can certainly be expressed in a variety of ways. One of them is power transmission through life cycle rituals. Soviet rule denied “religious traditions” and tried to form a new atheistic communist culture (and traditions). The new rituals were expected to replace older religious rites because communist morality and socialist internationalism was expected to overpower bourgeois nationalism. As indicated by scholars investigating into Soviet rituals and by my fieldwork data collected in 1999 in Northeast Lithuania and in 1998 in Southeast Latvia, the mission of creating communist traditions has not always been successful. I shall try to examine this process in my article by analysing the cases of “traditional” baptism as well as the phenomenon of the so-called “modern” name-giving ritual in Latvia and Lithuania.

Kristel Rattus
Which Heritage? Which Landscape? Defining the Authenticity of Cultural Heritage in Karula National Park

The article focuses on the conflict between Karula National Park in South-Estonia and a local tourist entrepreneur, caused by restrictions due to the heritage protection of the national park. The conflict is regarded as a dialogue between different ways of interpretation of cultural heritage or heritage representations in which different ideological contexts, convictions and coping strategies are intertwined. The article describes the representational practices of both dialogue partners or the implementation of conceptual worlds through concrete behaviour and demonstrates how such actions can express certain social relations, as well as the use of the notion authenticity as an ideological argument in order to legitimize specific heritage representations or, on the contrary, prevent them.