From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

David Taylor:
Okay, well, good afternoon, everyone.  My name is David Taylor and I'm head of Research and Programs at the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress.  It's my pleasure on behalf of the entire staff of the American Folklife Center to welcome you to this lecture in our Benjamin Botkin series.  This is a series that gives us an opportunity to invite to the Library leading scholars in folklore, ethnomusicology and other related fields to tell us about their current research, other research that they've done, share their findings with us and, in addition to that, these lectures give us an opportunity to build our collections because we record them.  In the studio behind here our videographers will be filming this presentation today so we can add this to the collection of our archive at the American Folklife Center which is the largest archive of folk cultural materials in the United States and one of the largest in the world, and I hope you can come and see that collection if you are not familiar with it and certainly visit us on the Internet to learn more about it in that way.

Now today, it's my particular honor to introduce today's speaker, Mats Widbom, who is a folklorist from Sweden and he is also a Cultural Counselor at the Embassy of Sweden here in Washington.  I understand he's been in Washington since the fall of 2006, responsible for a number of programs there having to do with the cultural traditions and other aspects of the wonderful country of Sweden.  

Before coming to Washington, Mats worked at a Swedish government authority called the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions where he served as Head of Exhibitions, Acting Director-General and Artistic Director and I'm not sure if he did that all at one time or sequentially.  I'm not sure.  Mats holds a Master's degree in architecture from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and he also studied here in the U.S. at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City.  He produced and was the project leader for the highly successful exhibition Swedish Folk Art: All Tradition Is Change which toured the United States and Canada for over four years and perhaps some of us have been to that exhibition during its international tour.

He's also held a variety of important positions in the cultural sector, including his service as President of the Swedish National Committee of the International Council of Museums and he was also a member of the board of the International Committee on Exhibitions and Exchange.  During the 1990s, he was one of the program coordinators for Stockholm: Cultural Capital of Europe 1998, the largest cultural project within the European Union.  As well, Mats has written a number of articles and co-edited several important books on art, museum development and architecture.  One of the most beautiful of the books is Swedish Folk Art: All Traditions in Change which was a product of the exhibition I mentioned earlier, and I'm pleased to show you a copy of this book which I proudly have in my own library at home and I'm sure many of you do as well.  It's so beautiful and the pages are so luxuriant on this thick paper that handling it today I thought you could actually shingle a house with these pages.

[laughter]

It's so thick and wonderful, and I wonder if it has come from Swedish logs.  I don't know.  But, anyway, I certainly commend that to you so please join me in welcoming to the Library of Congress our colleague Mats Widbom to speak on the Vernacular Architecture of Northern Sweden: Mats.

[applause]

Mats Widbom:
Thank you so much for the nice introduction.  It's a pleasure to be here at the Library of Congress and when I got this invitation I was hesitating a little bit because it's more than 20 years ago since I was doing this research and writing these articles so a lot of things have happened in between but I was so thrilled at the idea of digging back in my own memories and going back to what I did 20 years from now so I said, yes, and I said, okay, I'll do it, and it has been great fun to look at my old pictures and also I had the opportunity last spring to meet an old colleague and good friend of mine, Henry Glassie, Professor Henry Glassie when he was invited by me to give a lecture at the House of Sweden, our new embassy building here in Washington, D.C. and that was also part of this digging back in memories and I had a great privilege and pleasure to travel with Henry in Sweden in these regions and this environment that I will show you some pictures from and tell you about stories about today.

So, I will now take you on a trip over to the cold Sweden at this time of the year.  Winter is at last starting to lose its grip over us Swedes but it's been a long, cold and dark winter: especially up in this region in the western Dalarna where the winter stays on a bit into late April or could even be a bit after that and when you look at this picture almost you start to freeze because -- and I remember when I took this picture. It was really, really cold that day and you can see the frost on the log houses and, but it's nice to come back to this very special place in Sweden, in northern Sweden.

So in this valley in the Parish of Lima, Dalarna in northern Sweden, I started during a period of over four years vernacular architecture as a cultural phenomenon.  As you heard, my training is as an architect and I will not consider myself to be a folklorist, though I've been maybe having more discussions and interaction with folklorists than architects in my field work and in my writing so I very much am inspired by the ethnologists, both in the past like Siegrid Ericsson [spelled phonetically], a legendary folklorist that was really going out over the entire Sweden documenting, measuring and commenting on the vernacular architecture of Sweden, but also present day-scholars like [unintelligible] Vaarna [spelled phonetically], for example, in the Royal Institute of technology.

The focus for my studies: the square-built farmstead with the double house or parstuga as we say in Swedish. I will use some Swedish terms, and I know that we have some Swedes in the audience here too -- the parstuga as a dwelling and with the old farm, Vestagarden, built in 1780 that you see on this image as the starting point.  

Now, Vestagarden is a local history museum but it still commands a view over the settlement and the river valley and these settlements include some ten villages in the Parish of Lima and each village comprises five to ten farms, and this was the region that I spent over, well, not four years entirely but from time to time coming up to this place and meeting the people here living in these villages.

Vastagarden, built of the straight pines of the mighty forest that you see on the image, oriented to the light and heat of the sun and deliberately fitted into the topography; the old square-built farms tell us about the peasants' careful choice of site, about their ability to meet the function and the needs of the farm with an ingenious use of natural materials, but it also tells us about men's lives and women's, about private and public songs, about festivals and work.  In short, the buildings and artifacts at Vastagarden is a material expression of the way people lived and thought in a specific place at a specific time.  It is a work of art, in which the form and aesthetics originate in the needs of life from the artistically carved bottoms of cheese molds like this one, which allowed the whey to drain off, to the division of the house into rooms for everyday life and festive occasions as seen here is a typical floor plan of a parstuga or a double house with the parlor and the living room on each side of the chamber and the whole and the size of the two main rooms is about five times five meters which would translate into like 15 times 15 or something in feet.  

So you also see in this site plan of Vastagarden you see the parstuga to the right and three rows of buildings surrounding the square courtyard with what is typical for this building type with a separate function for almost each of the houses, and the reason why I picked Vastagarden as the starting point is because it's really like the role model for the square-built farmstead and this use of different houses for different functions, and you will see how I will come back to that in the way these houses have been changed over time.

This view of the same farm shows how the houses turned in to face the enclosed courtyard so that the family was protected from the weather while going about everyday chores, and it's also something that you will see how, really, the sense of the buildings have changed when the square-built enclosed yard has been opened up, which is -- and today you see this picture from Matthisgarden [spelled phonetically], the arrangements of buildings around the courtyard has generally been this old. New materials and forms have been introduced and the old parstuga, as you see here, the red building in the middle, has been fitted with bathrooms and modern kitchens and this encounter of the tenacious structures of local architecture and the changed conditions and needs of modern life that really have interested me.

So how do local people relate to all the patches of housing when they rebuild and extend their homes, when they furnish and decorate them?  What sort of continuity can we see?  What are the expressions of tradition or modernity and change?  Well, these are some of the questions that I have asked during this field work.  

Above all, there are many farms where all the patterns of living and building persist despite modernization.  Of course, these categories are not absolute.  People combine them with a bias in one or the other direction.  I think it would be uninteresting, not to say impossible, to try to describe the everyday life in Lima in terms of either unconsciously inherited tradition or consciously shaped tradition.  I would, instead, present to you some Lima farms where the home has been shaped in a not wholly uncomplicated encounter of tradition and change.

One phenomenon I find really interesting is the relation between inside and outside.  The difference between interior and exterior is palpable.  In doors the emphasis is on the new materials and furnishings while the exterior still has its red painted cover boarding and traditional details such as barchboards and the ornate porch sometimes, and sometimes the difference between inside and outside is so great that it's hard to conceive that it's actually the same house you are looking at.

Well, perhaps this sums up one of the greatest differences between then and now.  The parstuga that you see here, the backside of the parstuga in Vastagarden a hundred years ago was a building where the exterior clearly reflected the interior: the simple structure of the faŤade and the general knowledge of the form and function of different buildings meant that the visitor to the farm knew which rooms and functions a house contained.  The corner jointing technique with the heads of logs projecting from the walls, made it easy to see the division of the rooms and the windows were clearly grouped in accordance with the rooms and clearly expressed here in Vastagarden, and you see the small windows on the north side here of Vastagarden, and you see that it's not really many windows facing out the surrounding here.

In the early 1900s, new ideals like natural romanticists originating in the transformations of industrialists found their way into the countryside with its nostalgic infatuation with the old agrarian society.  Features like blind windows and porches adorned with gingerbread work began to appear as seen here at the main building at Matthisgarden and probably the most noticeable change was the increasing dissolution of the form of the square-built farmstead.  When I interviewed the owner of the farm, Eric Matthis [spelled phonetically], he told me how his father, one of the most skilled carpenters in the village, undertook the heavy task of moving the whole row of animal houses 50 yards to the south since he thought that the manure heap caused so much disease.  Well, I heard similar accounts on other farms where the buildings had been moved apart because this was, of course, a very interesting question to ask: why was this enclosed yard opened up?  But was the risk of infection really the real cause?  Well, there must surely have been a more compelling reason for breaking up this ancient structure of the farmstead.  The square shape was, after all, a tried and tested arrangement of storehouses, animal houses and dwelling houses, turning its closed timber walls to the outside world to ensure protections from snowstorms, wild animals and perhaps even from supernatural beings.  Like Matthisgarden, many of these inward-looking farmsteads were opened up showing their fronts to the world instead of to the courtyard as here where the faŤade of the parstuga with the elaborate fretwork of the porch can be seen from the highway on the other side of the river.  The authorities at this time, as well as the church, pursued an energetic campaign to break up the square-built farmstead on account of the fire hazard, the risk of infection and the constant exposure to dirt and impurity.  Knowing that the freehold farmers of Dalarna rarely or never allow themselves to be swayed [unintelligible] the authorities I believe the dissolution of the traditional form rather should be seen as a change in the mentality of the local population, and need for clearer boundaries between people and animals, between cleanliness and filth or, let's say, between, to quote a classic, "the purity and danger."  It may also have been a way to manifest social status by imitating stately homes with their wings arranged to draw attention to the main building. Or, it could be an expression of a new attitude to nature, with a new importance attached to views of the surrounding landscape: in other words, a greater need to see and to be seen.  I'm really focusing also on a change in the views of nature and landscape which also brought up tourism to this region in Sweden, which I will come back to.

It is no doubt the same attitude to nature that lies behind the picture windows that were installed in the gable wall of the parlor in several farmhouses that changed the relation between outside and inside.  It is, in fact, the view of the surrounding landscape, in particular the view of the river, that many people today single out as one of the most attractive features about living in the valley like here at Gerlergarden [spelled phonetically], the Gerler farm, just a few hundred meters from the Matthis farm that I just showed you pictures of.

For a long time to farm of Gerlergarden was unoccupied and in desperate need of repair.  Today it has been given new life, since a granddaughter of the previous occupants moved in with her family some years ago and the married couple have carefully renovated the parstuga, the double house, and the clearest trace of their efforts being here at the gable where you can see on this photo how the house has been extended with a veranda accessed from the kitchen and the balcony opening from the bedrooms upstairs.  I think this picture is really interesting and it shows really a big change in the view of the house. The result here is a house with two main faŤades, originating in two different types of houses: one is the continental type where the gable stands out as the front faŤade and this is very common in the holiday villages in the nearby ski resort [swedish].  The other, of course, is the parstuga with one long wall and its porch facing the enclosed courtyard.  It cannot be seen on this picture but so this picture so this house really had two main faŤades and that's pretty interesting.

Forty years ago many villagers replaced their old small-pane windows with panorama windows that were easier to clean and also gave them more open view to the landscape.  Today people are returning to mountings but are still unwilling to renounce the demand for easy cleaning.

[laughter]

Therefore, removable mountings and even more so, which I think was pretty funny when I found out, that ready-to-mount corner joints also exist and these are good illustrations of the images of tradition that have, in part, been fostered by culture tourists and how the building culture has changed in relation to culture tourism could really be, you know, really a doctor's dissertation because it's so much to dig into that.  I was only grasping a little bit on this but the reason that we find so many examples in Dalarna probably has to do with the fact that people here developed a very early awareness of their cultural heritage.  It was here that Swedes first began to cultivate their local history and culture and it was Dalarna that attracted folklife scholars, artists and the tourist traffic at the turn of the century.  

In this photo from 1924 the famous Fulbright scholar that I mentioned before, Siegrid Ericsson on the left here is depicted with one of his colleagues during a roadside pause for lunch.  Siegrid Ericsson was an indefatigable field worker whose ambition was to visit every village in Sweden and I don't know--I guess you have some Siegrid Ericsson books here at the Library, but it's just amazing to see how much he did during his lifetime.

And, of course, Dalarna was also attracting many artists like Carl Larsson and Anders Soren [spelled phonetically] and many others, so it's really interesting to see this dialogue going on between the local culture and the people that was coming up to look into the culture.

The self image of the inhabitants was developed in a constant dialogue with the outside world and its values, expectations and dreams of the secure, egalitarian and exalted Dalarna culture, and this image was then exploited and adapted to suit the tourists, particularly as regards the built environment but also regarding different culture artifacts transformed into souvenirs and I have one with me here.  You probably recognize--

[laughter]

The most famous of them all, the Dalarna horse and I'll put it here and it can listen to the lecture here as well.

[laughter]

Going to Gerlergarden, the living room, now we are inside the house.  The living room is still big.  It's still five times five meters with the room not only for cooking and dining but also for work, play, and mixing with neighbors.  The living room, in contrast to the parlor, appears to have retained its function as an all-purpose arena for everyday life and here, as everywhere else, and this is really interesting; the old iron wood stove has survived.  Tiled stoves and open fireplaces are also common and neat piles of firewood can often be seen along the outside walls of the houses.

Many people pointed out to me how practical a wood stove is as a source of heat but, no doubt, it also continues to fill a symbolic function as the social center and the life-giving heart of the home.  The husband, Mats Lindgren [spelled phonetically], tells how the old wood fire stove was dismantled and rusting in a barn when he and his wife Karen took over Gerlergarden.  Now that it has been renovated, it's really the only memory of the earlier life of the house, apart from the tiled stove.  The fire crackles in the modern kitchen with its bar, it's ceramic hob cooker, it's microwave oven and the other high tech amenities like a link with the life of the ancestors who depended on the hearth of the old source of light and heat in the home as seen here in this late 19th-century interior from a parstuga in Lexa Dalarna [spelled phonetically] which is another part of Dalarna. If you see these two pictures with the kids in front of the fire, it's pretty nice.

[laughter]

Mats Lingen at Gerlergarden also pointed out to me the convenient hot water, under-floor heating, but added that the family could probably manage well with the heat of the stove if need be.  Well, during my field work I heard similar statements of many farms.  It seemed, for me, to be important that the farm, at least, had the potential to be self-sufficient with regards to food and energy and that's independent of the authorities and unreliable forces.

Well, today we still see and even it has increased: wood stoves, underground heating and small solar panels on the roofs as well as people growing their own vegetables, recycling and exchanging labor in numerous ways.  The strategies of the independent freehold peasant persist in Dalarna, although in new forms, and the step to living green is shorter than we think in these villages, and living green is actually the theme that we will start in House of Sweden next week and so I brought some folders if you are interested to look into all the seminars and exhibitions that we will have been there.  And, actually, that is another subject for research that is really interesting to look into.  We talk a lot about green buildings today, but you only have to look back to the old peasant society and you will find many interesting lessons to be learned.

In Matthisgarden, that is also near the other farms I have shown you, it illustrates change at the turn of the century and here at the [swedish]garden, we see a good example of the wave of postwar modernism.  Here in the kitchen the old fireplace has been taken out.  The single glazed windows with bars have been replaced by sealed, double-glazed windows with no bars and new materials such as plastic floor covering have been installed.  In this case, you could speak of the outright rejection of forms and artifacts originating in peasant society as when the previous occupants, sometimes in the 1940s, fitted a newly-varnished sheet of plywood to the worn top of the old table, as you see on the right of this picture.  Whereas when I saw this I felt with my cultural lenses that I was really frustrated that I could imagine the marks on the table as traces of the souls of past generations but, of course, the modern housewife's priority in the 1940s was to keep her home clean in a rational way and, perhaps, it is true that the innovations and new ideas of the 1940s actually did represent a better life, but when I interviewed the owner, Leah Martinson [spelled phonetically] here seen on the picture in the family photo album, she told me that she regretted the extensive renovation and such objects as this grandfather clock remained cherished possessions in the home.

However, combining the new with the old is something the inhabitants of Lima do not view as unproblematic.  Different worlds with different values and ideas have to meet, and sometimes the new blends with the old almost imperceptibly and sometimes there's a sharp dividing line.

The peasant artifacts that I find that I first had expected to see in the home of the former chairman of the local history association [swedish] was found here deep in the forest in one of the ceilings belonging to Bundesgarden [spelled phonetically].  Here I found the wardrobe bed, a log chair, a whitewashed fireplace, an old grandfather clock, a rose painted chest and carved window surrounds painted in a traditional Lima blue color.  Several pieces of furniture and household utensils had been carved, painted and decorated by Bundes Ivar [spelled phonetically] himself, including the fire guard with imaginatively [unintelligible] Biblical motifs. 

It struck me after this unexpected change of scene that I too, and many other Swedes, divide our lives in a similar way when we leave our modern homes, often in the cities, and we go out to the red holiday cottages in the countryside.  Maybe some of you saw the exhibition we had in House of Sweden, the red houses, and also was the reason why I was inviting Henry Glassie to give a lecture on that last spring and the summerhouse has, no doubt -- the red summerhouse with the white corners has no doubt brought many Swedes into contact with older patterns of architecture and homemaking: a channel to life closer to nature.  I go myself each summer into the archipelago of Vastabaake [spelled phonetically] to my old farm built in 1780, the same year as Vastagarden. That was the focus of my study here, and yet it also seems to be an expression of a need to be able to move from one place to another: to experience one world as a contrast to the other and here at Donnesgarden [spelled phonetically] in [swedish], perhaps the most famous farm in Dalarna where the annual gathering of fiddlers is held which attracts thousands of visitors from all over Sweden.  This is really the dream of the Swedish summer but Donnesgarden is also famous for its masterly wall paintings by [swedish] Hanson [spelled phonetically], often singled out as one of the foremost style setters in [swedish] painting and the only thing, perhaps, that I was a little bit -- that I would have liked to have seen more of in Lima was wall paintings like this but you don't find so many painted walls as you do in this part of the eastern part of Dalarna and around the Lake Celion area.

Having seen an expression of the separation of old and new, I will turn I will now turn over to some examples of the synthesis of the two.  In the parstuga of Scumagarden [spelled phonetically], both old and new forms and patterns of life have been combined in the living [unintelligible]: the living room of [swedish] just like the parlor [swedish],  has been allowed to keep its open square form since the bathroom and hobby room has been fitted through carefully measuring into the entrance hall on either side of the front door.  In the parlor, seen on this picture, the television, which was formerly mounted to the ceiling above the fireplace, has been moved to a shelf nearby.  Perhaps it was damaged by smoke in its previous position.  In any case, the old social center of the home, the fireplace, is still combined with the present-day assembly point, the television set, and I think this picture is so funny because it really brings in two different worlds but still, you know, desperate to find a way to create: put them both together and so this picture has a lot to tell about what's going on.

Not far and not far from Scumagarden lives Gunnar Trund [spelled phonetically], a former chairman also of the historical, local history Society in Lima. Trund had recently, when I did my fieldwork, moved into the old parstuga of Trundgarden and he was painstakingly and skillfully renovating with both new machines, such as a band saw and a router, but also older tools that he borrowed from the local history museum, not taking too much notice that they were museum objects, but rather something that you still could use when you were working on your parstuga at home so he profiled window surrounds, [unintelligible] and skirting boards with an old plane. He forged fittings and handles, built new cooker hoods and made all the furniture and fixtures himself, including the new kitchen cabinets with their profiled panel doors and an ingenious construction in which the skirting strip under the cabinets serves as the front of a system of storage drawers: a wardrobe bed and grandfather clock, a long table with benches, a log chair, shelves, boxes, brooches; these were just some of the homemade artifacts and furniture to be found in the parstuga at Trundgarden: objects that are at once examples of backward looking nostalgia and evidence of innovative creativity and great craft skill.  All the furniture was made of stand-dried timber, treated with egg white and milk: the best impregnation possible according to Trund. 
And here you see Gunnar Trund in the little room known as the [swedish] or chamber, working hand painted the walls with a flower motif of his own composition, using stencils made out of old beer cans.

[laughter]

And Trund told me of all the projects still to be completed: new bunk-beds had to be made, stenciling the crown rail or krum stone [spelled phonetically] to be carved and you see--no, it's not on this picture--not to mention the entire furnishing of the parlor.  It appeared as if the driving force for all the meticulous renovation was the creative process itself: the need to have projects to work on, ideas and dreams to realize.  

By taking a brief look at a number of farms in Lima, I pointed out how the rebuilding of the farms reveals different attitudes to local history and traditional building culture.  All of this is interesting in itself but I think we also must ask how well these attitudes agree with the norms and values of authorities regarding the appearance of houses of cultural and historical significance.  

And I will now conclude by returning to Matthisgarden where we started our journey.  Down by the bank of the river stands the farm's storehouses or [swedish], that you see on the left on this building with their finely chiseled mouse shelves, projecting boards to prevent mice from getting at the grain.  [swedish]Matthis' sister Esther was able to move in here first after a protracted struggle with the authorities.  She told me how the county custodian of antiquities first wanted her to make do with small slits for windows and buy high dining tables and work tops that could catch the little daylight that was coming in.  She took her case to the local building committee with the ironic question of whether she was also obligated to wear full costume inside her home.

[laughter]

Well, after much discussion back and forth Esther was granted permission to join the two storehouses and put in windows as you see here in the picture, thus giving her a charming and functional little home with a kitchen and workroom downstairs and a living room and bedroom upstairs where there is a good view of the river, of course.  You can speak here of a collision of two opposite, opposing views: the planning and decision-making authorities see things from the exterior.  They expect a house to conform to the picture of traditional buildings, a picture formed, to a great extent, in programs for the preservation of historic buildings or descriptions of vital national interest.  The local people, in contrast, see the house from both the outside and the inside: a timber house is and always has been the construction kit, which can be moved easily or converted for new functions.  The square-built farmstead is still a multi-house system with different areas of use.  The only change is that the interior functions are different today.  Many storehouses and loft stores have become guestrooms or small apartments.  Stables and cow barns now make excellent garages.  Threshing barns are used as stores or hobby rooms while old storage buildings house electric boilers for heating up the entire farm.  In many cases, the new functions have also affected the exterior. Material culture has changed along with new lifestyles.

I think Matthis' combined storehouses at Matthisgarden really shows that what is important from the point of view of the people who live there is not that a house should look exactly as it did a hundred years ago but that it can be used in a most expedient way: in this case, as a permanent dwelling.  The important thing is to go on living on the farms of one's birth.  Perhaps the strong attachment of the people to their native Lima is the most lasting of all passions.  Some farms have continuity of occupation in the same family going back 11 generations and almost every farm has a framed list of owners on the walls.  This list appears to be an important link between the individual, the family and the farm and an expression of the inhabitant's identification with the habitation site.  Like the house mark, which is a ruin-like symbol used to mark artifacts with a signature, and the tradition of placing the name of the farm before one's first name like, for example, Bundes Ivar in the Bundesgarden farm.

So, friends and colleagues, the conclusion from my fieldwork in Lima is that tradition is not something permanent that must have a particular appearance and derivation from the past.  Tradition is something that is constantly being re-interpreted and re-created in the present: a dynamic oscillation between continuity and change.  It is this movement, the ability to renew one's home within the framework of tradition, to make extensions, refurbish, refurnish, replace and redecorate, that is one of the most powerful incitements to everyday creativity.  Thank you.

[applause]

And this is tack mycket in Swedish: thank you.  So if there are any questions, I would be happy to answer.

Male Speaker:
You mentioned towards the end there that there are entities, there is a board or some sort of entity within the community or is it without the community that controls the exterior appearance of the buildings?

Mats Widbom:
It's on the county level.

Male Speaker:
On the county level.  How much friction is there between those people and the people who live in the house who expressed just what you expressed at the end: that they see continuity in living in the house as more important than physical continuity of looking exactly the same?

Mats Widbom:
Yes, I would say there's quite a bit of friction.

[laughter]

And it's something that I think it's important that the people working at the county administration on these issues are aware of that tradition can not only be defined as something static: that it's frozen in time because you have the local history farms like Vastagarden that is a local history museum and, of course, there you are frozen in time, in a specific time but the farms where people have been living for 11 generations; of course, they have to be changed, and it's true to say that very few examples where you really feel like, "Oh my god.  How could they really put up this house here?"  So it seems to be kind of self-controlled also: that you're aware of the traditions and the built environment and you are, for example, using red paint naturally to add to the existing building that is already there and you would not paint a house pink.  So, well, that's really interesting to see this conflict that is the emerging in a situation like this with the [swedish] the woman here that wanted to move into.

Male Speaker:
We have the same exactly the same issue here.

Mats Widbom:
Yeah, I would guess that.

Male Speaker:
[inaudible]

Mats Widbom:
Yes.

Female Speaker:
[inaudible] are they appointed or elected [inaudible]

Mats Widbom:
The members of--

Female Speaker:
[inaudible]

Mats Widbom:
Okay, no, they are working as antiquarians at the county administration offices and it's not like--but I think it's also, there is also a committee taking decisions if there is a fight going on for a special [inaudible] [unintelligible], which I don't want to translate it but it's a committee taking decisions on this kind of-if, for example, if you apply to build a new house it has to be approved by a special committee and the same committee would approve if you are allowed to change a building: especially when there is -- you have certain levels of protection of different areas and I think, I have to say that I think it's good that there are protections because you have a system of making sure that areas in, for example, in Dalarna, which is really unique, cannot be totally changed to something else but I think you have to take into account also that you not only define traditional buildings in a way of it should look like it did exactly like a hundred years ago.  It still could be, you know, protected.  Yes.

Female Speaker:
I'm interested in your talk about it could almost be a conceptual change [inaudible] and particularly with the windows starting to look out [inaudible] I'm wondering if those changes really reflect practicalities like better heating, you know, [inaudible] and also better - you know, you talked about the double glazed windows.  I'm wondering if those - if it's simply a matter of practicality and also I'm wondering if this is above the Arctic Circle, is it dark all winter, you know, I'm wondering how those things play into these changes.

Mats Widbom:
I think there are often many different factors that are interacting and, of course, one very practical factor here is that you wanted more daylight into the homes but, still, it's very clear in my findings and in my interviews that you talk a lot about the view of the river: the view of--and if you look back in the old material when you see that -- you very seldom refer to the view as something particular.  The houses have totally different meaning so and I must say that I clearly see that what is happening when the enclosed courtyard is opened up the front, the faŤade, the main faŤade of the dwelling becomes suddenly very important, as I said, both to be seen but also to see.  So it's opened up to see nature with new glasses, like a view, but it also invites people passing by to see your home expressed and you see also this with the patchwork, the color coming in. You are expressing things much more on the front faŤade of the dwelling than when it was the enclosed courtyard so I would say that that is clearly something also, a shifting mentality and views on the relation between man and nature and the importance of view.  Yes.

Female Speaker:
But surely there's also a difference between how much work one had to do in the older times [inaudible] all the time and so of course we're focused then on what needs to be done around the farm and it is only more recently leisure time has come, and allow people to, oh, there's something else out here to do.

Mats Widbom:
Of course.  Yes, sure, and that's coming at the same time.  You go from the landscape being a production unit into a consumption that you are -- something that you can enjoy and also the farmers could enjoy having a day off and so that is happening at this time, the turn of the last century and in the early 1900s but it's also the same time when the culture of tourism at the end of the 19th century is starting to come up and you had this interesting dialogue and interaction between tourists, artists, scholars like Siegrid Ericsson and others looking on the culture, the Dalarna culture and also how that would also influence the view of their own culture, so you have an awareness that your buildings are looked on and also if you wear the full costume going to church, which still, I mean, people do today and not maybe so much in this part of Dalarna but in like some parts around Lake Celion and Lake Sun for example.  If you go to church there this coming Sunday I can almost assure you that you will see some people coming in full costume so, yeah.

Male Speaker:
Also, this might be part of where the action is [inaudible] community where all the action is in the courtyard [inaudible] you want your house facing inward [inaudible] where the action is on the road [inaudible] could be a fairly new element in the community.[inaudible] I know this from [inaudible] houses used to face the harbor [inaudible] the action [inaudible] once the road came in, houses literally turned around on their foundations and faced the road because that's where the action was.  So it's kind of a matter of changes in society where activity is taking place.

Mats Widbom:
Yeah, I'm sure that many of these, you know, subjects that I'm pointing out here like the rationing inside and outside; you could see exactly the same things going on here in the change in living and building here in the United States, yeah.

Female Speaker:
It's interesting because looking at the photographs of the buildings, they look so Scandinavian and I don't know if you have the same thing going on in Sweden as in Ireland, for instance, where with the economy that bloomed in the 80s and 90s it was really a big problem because with cultural tourism Ireland was not looking like Ireland and you had all these subdivisions going up [inaudible] modern subdivision houses out here and it was really some tension between what looks Irish [inaudible] frozen in time [inaudible] 200 years and I don't know if that's happening [inaudible]

Mats Widbom:
It's happening and the reason why I picked Lima Parish to study was that I've found more interesting examples of continuity and change, as I was pointing out, that in other parts around Lake Celion, for example, you can see more examples of where you really are trying to have the villages look in a particular way because there are so many cultural tourists there and we have-- ethnologists have a term for this called Skansenfication: Skansen, as you know, the famous outdoor Museum in Stockholm [swedish] that was collecting a lot of cultural artifacts and buildings and brought to Stockholm frozen in time, different farms there, and so you talk about Skansenfication at certain areas where -- and also where the locals come together and, you know, I have some examples of that where they were really mad because someone came and put up a red cottage but with a window without the mountings and they come and say, "You cannot have a window like this here because now you are in this village and here we have mountings on our windows," so we really can talk about Skansenfication so, I mean, this is a fascinating subject and I hope in the future, I was saying here before, we've started here that maybe this would be something I would finish when I'm retired to go back to the Lima Parish and to do another observation like 30, 40 years after my first.  That would be interesting.  You had a question too.

Male Speaker:
Yes, would you tell us about your fieldwork methodology?

Mats Widbom:
Yeah, well, I've been doing interviews and using the camera quite a lot because images see things and you see things afterwards that you don't see when you are there.  I have hundreds of photographs but, unfortunately, they were back home on slides and so I was scanning through the material I had here so otherwise I would have presented like hundreds of photos here, but this was pretty limited.  

So I was using images quite a lot.  Also old material; the old first part of the study was really digging into old field notes of research and articles of course and book readings and but then also carefully measuring up buildings to have a sense of the buildings: also living in buildings and spending time there with the locals and, of course, everyone here that has done fieldwork knows that it's not that easy that you suddenly you realize that you are not only there to observe but you also get a role because I was suddenly used as, you know, by the, at that time, the chairman in the local history to - "Look here.  You know, he's interested in this.  We have to protect this now."  And not to mention, when the Swedish folk art book was coming out that, you know, was used much in Lima to say, "We have to get more money into our local history farm here and museum, local history museum and look, this is now traveling in the United States," and it was used for fund-raising of course, you know.  Okay, I think maybe last question.

Female Speaker:  
I was just wondering; you mentioned Henry Glassie and I know in his work in Ireland and in Turkey he found that people started to do things to make more private space for themselves inside the houses: things like adding passageways because I think in the plans you showed I didn't see central passageways. I wondered when people remodeled the interiors were they creating more private space? That's a typical modern thing to do. 

Mats Widbom:
Yeah, that's another lecture really and it's really interesting to see how private and public [unintelligible] have changed over time and there's an old story with also the railings in the ceiling, the krum stone that I was talking about but also it's interesting that it's pretty much at that time when I was there it's an open border between public and private, so, for example, which doesn't make sense maybe today and here that almost all these farms didn't lock the door.  You could just open up the door, enter in into the hall of the building and then if you knew the person there, you could just say, "Hi, I'm coming," you know, and then open and if you didn't know you knocked actually inside the house and think of that in terms of, you know, translating it to today and here.  Never lock the door: just have it open so that's the interesting thing.  It might have changed today.  Okay, thank you so much.

[applause]

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[end of transcript]