Fredrik Svanberg

2009-2014

The core research questions of the project regarded the detailed study and the building of a bases of facts about the old anatomical collection of Uppsala university, its collecting history and research use over time and to use this information to further the understanding of the contexts of early scientific anatomy and race research in Sweden before 1950 and also to investigate wider museological questions regarding the nature and social dynamics of museum collecting. The project had three initial main purposes that has guided it:

1. To map the basic facts about this collection as well as the nature, motives and contexts of the collection activities (the headhunt) and how this collection was used over time (what displays, what research).

2. To investigate how knowledge of these circumstances may complement the knowledge of race research c. 1850-1950 in Sweden and possibly northern Europe.

3. To analyze the collection in a museological perspective focusing what it represents and how it, in an Actor-Network perspective, may be seen and studied as a network of relations between a museum and a range of source communities in other parts of the world. What kind of relations? What embedded social dynamics? What future?


The three most important results of the project

1. The project is the first in-depth study in Sweden having returned to one of the four major, older anatomical collections in the country. These were the collections of the anatomical institutions in Uppsala, Lund, the Karolinska institutet medical university in Stockholm and of the previous ethnographic division of the Natural History Museum in Stockholm. These collections ceased to be a source material for anatomy (and anatomical ethnography) in the post-WWII period in connection with the break with the older race-research tradition within anatomy in that time. The collections were then placed in the archives of various museums, forgotten and in connection with this much of the knowledge of the collections as such, their collection history and connection to earlier research of various kinds were also deliberately forgotten. When the collections have gained attention in recent years it has mostly been in connection to repatriation issues or in limited studies by historians of ideas or medical historians into the anthropometric race research done based in these collections in the period c 1840-1950. The current project has based on the history of collecting and the different contexts of the Uppsala collection been able to draw up a much wider and at the same time deeper understanding of the collecting of human remains in this period. A detailed understanding of the acquisition of corpses, dissection practices and the collecting of specimens at the anatomical institutions have now been enabled as well as of how this was connected to museum collecting and museum exhibitions at the institution. The most interesting result in this context is that most of the thousands of people dissected and often collected in Uppsala had died at the poor- and work-houses in Stockholm and was taken to Uppsala for dissection without their consent or (probably) pre-death knowledge, which was previously unknown.

2. Secondly, the project has been able to situate the older race-research in Sweden in the anatomical, institutional context. Previous investigations related to the history of ideas has had a thorough focus on the historical development of ideas within race research and the singular core race researchers (such as Anders and Gustaf Retzius and Herman Lundborg in the Swedish case), insufficiently giving attention to the actual institutional context of race research and its connection to practices in the anatomical institutions (such as collecting and museum practices). A significant part of the more than 2 000 skulls collected in Uppsala for anthropometric race research, for example, come from the dissected individuals of the Stockholm poor-houses. The investigation of race research in the present project, seeing it from the point of the gradual enlargement of the skull collection and the research made based on it enables a new perspective on this kind of research in Sweden in which it becomes a much more socially and scientifically connected and institutionalized social phenomena rather than a set of ideas of a few core researchers.

3. Thirdly, the project has furthered a more complex understanding of the social dimensions of museum collecting. Based on collecting and museum exhibiting at the anatomical institution, the social positions of both collectors (anatomy professors) and collected (for example the poor) were shaped. Collecting was an important part of the networking with other researchers and with society at large of the professors. The investigation of the network of the Uppsala collection and its relations to different sorts of people and institutions involved points to a wide social sphere in which ordinary doctors, diplomats, explorers, businessmen, the royal court and, of course, a wide range of researchers were involved in above all the collection of skulls for comparative anatomical race research. The collection was a node and a medium in this network. In a collection system, not just the objects get collected, but in a social sense all kinds of involved people as well.


New research questions generated by the project

Initially, it was assumed that rather similar circumstances were probably at hand regarding the four older, anatomical collections in Sweden (see above). The quite limited comparative investigations done in the project concerning the sources available, the histories of collecting, their exhibition histories, what kinds of research have been done based in the collections and what kind of histories they have after the fall of the older anatomical concept after WWII, instead demonstrates very significant differences between Uppsala, Stockholm and Lund. Further comparative research would be very interesting.

The project has demonstrated the potential of archival research for identifying individuals in the collections and also to recollect parts of the life-histories of these individuals. These are individuals that were de-identified and objectified by the anatomists. Objectification was necessary for the kind of science and museum practices applied in early anatomy but may be questioned in a number of ways based on present ethical standpoints and not the least since it was done without the consent of those involved. When names and life histories are rediscovered, in any case, it provokes reactions and changes the whole view of what these collections are. When no longer objectified specimens, a whole range of questions on handling and representation arises concerning collected human remains. Similar investigations of collections such as the present one, focusing the re-identification of the people from whom the specimens were taken and the questions arising out of this rediscovery is not known to the author. In the present project only a limited such investigation was made but this issue has great potential for further work.


International connections

The project and its preliminary results were presented to an international audience of researchers at several major, international conferences: at the conference of the American Anthropological Associations (AAA) in New Orleans 2011, at the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS) conference in Norrköping 2011 and at the project European National Museums (EUNAMUS) conference on contested heritage in Brussels in 2012. The articles in Nordic Museology and in the EUNAMUS publication has also reached an international audience. Networking contacts with medical history researchers mainly in Britain have been upheld through the project.


Research information outside the scientific community

Presentations of the project has been made at the Swedish history museum and at Mångkulturellt centrum (the multicultural centre) in Botkyrka. Several new presentations are planned based on the acquired results of the project.


The two most important publications and the dissemination strategy

The two most important publications of the project is the EUNAMUS article (Svanberg 2012) and the coming book (autumn 2014) Människosamlarna. Anatomiska samlingar, museer och rasforskning i Sverige ca 1850-1950 (in prep). The book contains chapters on the collection itself and the anatomical institution in Uppsala, on the anatomical museums, on race research and on the structuring role of collecting in society through its effects on the individuals involved.

The dissemination strategy of the project was to publish peer-reviewed articles in international contexts and to publish an English-language book on the collection. Several peer-reviewed texts have been accomplished (Svanberg 2012, in print a, Gustafsson Reinius, Silvén & Svanberg 2012) but concerning the monograph, a decision was made to publish this in Swedish. This since the discussion and research on these collections in Sweden is still so rudimentary and thus a text in Swedish would be more important at the moment. An English version of the book concentrating on the issues most interesting to an international audience may be produced later on, using the primary research published in Swedish.
The book will be published so that it will be available open access. Most articles have been published open access but in the two cases in which that was not possible, this has been accepted due to the important contexts and their potential to get the results out.

Publications

Svanberg, F. in prep. Människosamlarna. Anatomiska samlingar, museer och rasforskning i Sverige ca 1850–1950. The Swedish History Museum, Studies. Stockholm. (to be published autumn 2014)

Svanberg, F. in print a. Människosamlingen, kapitel 7. In Forssberg, A. M. & Sennefelt, K. (eds.). Fråga föremålen. Studentlitteratur. Lund

Svanberg, F. in print b. The world as collected. Or museum collections as situated materialities. In The International Handbook of Museum Studies, Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy (general eds). Volume: Museum Theory, Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message (volume eds). Wiley. (about half the text generated in the present project)

Svanberg, F. 2013. Ethics of Collecting. In The Oxford Companion to Archaeology (2 ed.). Edited by Neil Asher Silberman. Oxford University Press. Oxford

Svanberg, F. 2012. Anatomy at the museum. Bodies represented, collected and contested. In Dominique Poulot, José María Lanzarote Guiral & Felicity Bodenstein (eds.). National Museums and the Negotiation of Difficult Pasts. Conference Proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Brussels 26–27 January 2012. EuNaMus Report No. 8. Available on-line at http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/082/ecp12082.pdf

Gustafsson Reinius, L., Silvén, E. & Svanberg, F. 2012. The sociomaterial dynamics of museum collections. Nordisk museologi 2012:2. Available on-line at http://www.nordiskmuseologi.org/English/Svanberg.pdf