Now that I have you caught up, I can a last go back to blogging about present day occurrences in my time abroad, which I'm sad to report are not nearly as exciting as these trips away from Scandinavia...
February is turning out to be a very odd month indeed in Göteborg. With the disappearance of the Christmas lights, the fir branches, red ribbons, and spiced wine, a serious post-Christmas boredom has swept over the town. Of course, there are the small things in life that are quite pleasant with the absence of the holidays---going to fika in new places, costume parties, exhibition openings, and dinner parties---but really, things have gotten very quiet. Quiet, but nonetheless busy.
Class has been… Hmm. Well, let’s just say we are in the throes of a module called “Material Culture and Collection.” We have a total of four whopping hours of class a week, which has been taught by mainly female Swedish professors who, for some reason or another, developed a serious passion about 19th century Swedish textiles. So far, I have learned the following:
- I don’t think there could ever be a more boring lecture than a monotone thesis on the “immortality of laces” and croqueting patterns.
- Painted textiles from Southern Sweden called bonads. In addition to modestly decorating the rafters of Swedish cottages during major holidays, bonads sounds a lot like “gonads” in the Swedish-English vernacular. And boy, it’s hard to stop giggling when a Ph.D. student keeps insisting that they’re “essential to Swedish heritage.”
Needless to say, it’s been a bit of a struggle to attend class. Though I’m sure my sister and mother’d be quick to retort, I find I’m just not into collecting “objects”—or, at least the ones in ethnographic museums. As interesting as these behind-the-scenes tours are, fifteen clay pots from Bolivia don’t move me as much as 600 hummingbirds stuffed in a drawer or the complete skeleton of Linnaeus’ tortoise. And I don't expect to be ever touching a bonad in my life...
I knew this module was going to be tough. I just didn't think it would be this so one-sided. Not only hasn't there been a single course on scientific or natural history artifacts (that's not new), but there's been nothing either on art objects. So really, I'm at a loss here. It’s also hard given that ethnographic, archeological, and historical collecting is embedded in very old type of museum ideology that I feel leans too easily toward the overprotection of objects and the overspecialization of its faculty. I mean, there are so many institutions with great missions and great ideas that have just ground to a halt from pure object-fetishism. So many places that collect and collect and collect only to keep it all on shelves, to gather dust and require time and money to preserve later, to lay in special-made boxes and temperature-controlled rooms and seldom extracted for study—nevermind relevant scholarly research—or even (God forbid) an exhibition.
Ugh. I’m not interested in this. Instead, I find I'm deeply interested in immaterial culture. Intangible things nonetheless important to culture. Like radiowaves. And language. And natural laws. And scientific method. And creative ideas. And accessibility—I’m interested in that as well.
But(!), even though I’ve needed a bit more coffee this week to sit through class, I have been walking away with one lesson: I think I am more interested in the symbolism of the museum object—or rather, their educational capacity. This has led to me walking away in quite a literal sense. I find I've been bailing on class to instead devote two hours to steady reading on new materiality theory. And what I’ve found in this scholarly pursuit is definitely more up my alley than bonads:
Actor-network theory of ecosystems.
Phenomenology of visual arts.
Flow ontology and chemistry.
Environmental sociology.
Human exemptionism.
Hmm. Maybe this sociology stuff can be my long-lost corpus callosum.