The purpose of the project is to understand hierarchy and difference in early modern Sweden in a new, richer way. We proposed to do this by emphasizing enactments, visuality and the everyday practices of difference, and by incorporating new issues to do with gender and other categories of difference that cross-cut those of status and estate. The project’s goals were to elaborate the view of social structure that dominates the historiography of early modern Sweden; present a more complex understanding of the ‘society of estates’; to bridge the gap between academic historians and museum professionals; to bring multidisciplinary methods of research into the classroom; and to present early modern Swedish social order as a system which is comparable with, and has relevance for the study of, other early modern societies, but also bring forth its unique traits and singular developments. The purpose of the project has not changed underway and our main goals have been achieved, although some case studies have been expanded largely to do several prject members securing permanent academic positions, and therefore also having more time for research.
The project’s main results are as follows:
1. Language and social practice
The Swedish ’society of estates’ can both be called a reality and a rhetorical device created by later generation.s It was a reality in that peopel were divided into estates and estate-like groups and were well aware of this at the time. But it was a construction in that the social make-up of society was much more complex than the discussion of the four estates might convey. Social delination was blurry and negotiable. In the everyday, it seemed more important to stratify people hierarchically, than to organise them into categories.
The project has studied social hierarhy in the everyday and on a discursive level. These systems were interlinked and influenced one another, but they worked in different ways. One was used to navigate immediate reality, the other was used to reduce that reality so that it was controllable, legible and possible to categorize. Stratification and categorization were not merely projects for the social elites and the state, rather we have found that hierarhcical order was produced by the ’ordered’ themselves creating complex and sometimes contradictory hierarchies. Social interactino therefore, can be understood as a situated visuality with the purpose of handling a nuanced hierarchical order in the everyday.
2. Order
Seeing and enactment of order in many wasy happened on a discursive level, in statements about a order. There were fo instance very clear ideals about how clothing ought to reflect social order, whil in practice this was a very complex relationship in which clothes were mobilized to assert social status and identity as well as to reproduce and reflect them. Ideas about order weer clearly linked to ideas about how society ought to function. In debates, writers were keen to deliniate what order actually entailed, but the meny variations of how this order was to be constructed shows how complex, and dynamic early modern social order actually was. Colour was an important aspect of creatng meaning, and was an essential element of ideas of a national dress in the late eighteenth century-here colour was more important than previous research has shown it to be. However, colour was also an inconstant factor in that its value and meaning was predicated upon the supply of colonial dyes and dyed products.
3. Banalities of everyday life
Banal, mundane behaviour was central to creating hierarchical order. One example is the use of colour in make-up in which the colouring of a face was an important enactment of hierarchy build on age, gender and class. Another example is titles. Particularly interesting from the project’s point of view are titles that were used to show respect. They were orderd according to three principles, based on reputation, estate and surprisingly, profession. Profession-based titles came into use as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century and was just as significant as the corporate forms of stratification. Throughout the rest of the century, use of titles became more and more lax to a degree that exceeded social and econimic differences. Here, also, private citizen, rather than government officials or normative texts were at the forefront.
How people looked at one another was another mundane yet powerful behaviour throguh which people regulated social stratification. This was a process in which ordingary people were highly involved, and not something that was directed from social elites or the state. ’Knowing one’s place’ was a complex operation that made use of visual regimes and embodied practice and that was highly engaged with objects and place. Visual regimes were however far from automatic. The relationship between person, object and place in hiearchical order was malleable and interpretations varied from person to person.
The project has also led to a group of new questions and new projects. Runefelt and Senenfelt have in different projects (approved by the Swedish research council and Ridderstadsstiftelse för grafisk forskning) built upon the realisation that the surface also has depth and have in different ways attempted to continue work on issues of social ordering in concrete and mundane situations, related to the body and to consumption. The project has also riased issues firstly, relating to the significance of semi-public situations and their generative potential in relation to everyday practice and technical, economic and administrative developments. Secondly, the project has alerted us to the significance of professions (as opposed to work in general) for how society is ordered and for social mobility, which has been quite unexpected for early modern Swedish society.
The project presented its work at a series of conferences, among others the Swedish Historian’s meeting, ESSHC. We also organised two conferences, one of which had an open call for papers and took place at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. One of the project’s aims has been to cooperate with museums in teaching and research and this has been done in a series of ways. Apart from the above mentioned conference project members have taught a course on advanced level at the Department of History at Uppsala University in collaboration with Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala. The course has attacted about 20 students a year. To this members of the project have supervised master’s theses on topics such as public order in the streets in late eighteenth-century Stockholm, the policing of sumpturay laws and the significance of violence for the creation of order and hierarchy in the everyday.