Preliminary Programme

Wed 11 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 12 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.00 - 18.30

Fri 13 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 14 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 11 April 2012 14.00 - 16.00
Z-3 THE03 Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Nordic Historiography
Wolfson Medical Building: Seminar room 3
Network: Theory Chair: Ragnar Björk
Organizers: - Discussant: Ragnar Björk
Marja Jalava : The Nordic Countries as a Historical and Historiographical Regime
In recent years, interest has grown in cultural transfers and transnational history, encouraged by the global integration and skepticism on the nation-state as the chief organizing category of history. The passage from the national framework to a trans-national sphere has prodded scholars to formulate heuristic regional typologies and to make ... (Show more)
In recent years, interest has grown in cultural transfers and transnational history, encouraged by the global integration and skepticism on the nation-state as the chief organizing category of history. The passage from the national framework to a trans-national sphere has prodded scholars to formulate heuristic regional typologies and to make comparisons across historical regions. Despite the wide-spread discussion about the “Nordic” model in social sciences, the typical attempts to write a Nordic history of historiography have been “anthology comparisons,” where historians contribute from their distinctively nationalist perspectives and the comparison is, in practice, left to the reader. This paper aims at overcoming methodological nationalism and the attribution of the nation-state to the self-evident spatial unit of the professional historians through an explicitly cross-national and comparative framework. Given the common heritage (e.g. the centralized, territorial “composite states” in Scandinavia, the Lutheran state church, the strong historical position of peasantry), and the roughly coincidental transformation to modernity, “the North” (Norden) will be examined as a historical region, defined by the historian Stefan Troebst to stand for the construction of a meso-region which is characterized by a cluster of social, economic, cultural, and political structures and which is larger than a state yet smaller than a continent. Based on this viewpoint, using the emergence of social history in the end of the nineteenth century as an example, this paper will discuss to what extent “the North” has also been a historiographical region; for instance, whether the Nordic historians shared same theories, conceptions or similar social experiences, or whether there are remarkable differences in the way by which the past was translated into their own time. (Show less)

Claus Møller Jørgensen : Scandinavian National History Writing in the Interwar Period
The paper will present a comparative analysis of national history wrinting in Norway, Sweeden, and Denmark.

Petteri Suominen : Social Property Regimes and the 20th Century Nordic Historiography
Besides nationalistic and local explanations there must be something else in the history of historiography that has explanatory potency. This paper discusses the role of modern property concept as a part of the essentials in historical argumentation and knowledge production. The presentation examines the 20th century Nordic historiography and particularly ... (Show more)
Besides nationalistic and local explanations there must be something else in the history of historiography that has explanatory potency. This paper discusses the role of modern property concept as a part of the essentials in historical argumentation and knowledge production. The presentation examines the 20th century Nordic historiography and particularly historical works dealing with the 17th century economical power and property relations. The aim is to discuss the myth of the free peasant as one of the most essential master narratives in Nordic historiography connecting the pre-modern past and the modern society.

I discuss how the myth of free peasantry and the modern system of private property combined with the idea of Nordic welfare state have interacted together and affected the knowledge production of the 17th century history. The main focus of the paper will be in Finnish and Swedish historiography with some extensions to Danish and Norwegian historical traditions. By analyzing the writings of two prominent Nordic historians, Swedish Eli F. Heckscher (1879–1952) and Finnish Eino Jutikkala (1907–2006), the paper discusses the historiographical interpretations of feudal conditional ownership, socioeconomic power and the conflicts that stemmed from propriety and land. The historians interacted with each other and together created a certain Nordic historiographical regime in the early 20th century that shaped for example the fundamental concepts of historical progress and power relations.

This historiographical reconstruction can be done by studying historical writings in a transnational context. The usual local explanations are made broader with the focus being in historical social property regimes and their significance in historiographical imagery. It seems that the ideas of property and possession had a strong role in historical understanding among the Nordic academics, especially in the process of translating the past into their own time. With the modern ideas of property and views on economical power relations, it was possible for 20th century historians to write relevant history for their own society and interact with the academic community. The interplay between the contemporary societal power and the scientific knowledge production affected the concepts and theoretical devices used by Nordic historians. This presentation aims to point out that while competing with other scientists to have their voices heard in the society historians accommodated their knowledge production of the past within the power structures and implicit doxa in their own spatio-temporal context (Show less)



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