Far from perfect: Michael Booth's The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth About the Nordic Miracle

 

Maybe, if you’re like me and have spent a far amount of time in Scandinavia, you’re used to stereotypes about the Nordic lands held by people who’ve often never been there, but who take their images from popular culture. Before the arrival of Noma and Nordic Noir, I often found impressions of Scandinavia revolved around a handful of pictures: Fjords, snow and skiing, Olympic athletes or other tall blond people, lutefisk, and Ingmar Bergman films. Seattle has many Scandinavian-Americans and a thriving heritage culture (the big 17^th of May parade, Swedish pancake breakfasts, Norwegian language classes). Yet detailed knowledge of modern Scandinavian societies is often lacking, even as curiosity seems to grow.

Now, instead of Olympic skiers, the Nordic countries would seem to be populated by serial killers and depressed, often alcoholic detectives. On the other hand, the food is thought to be much better than it was: fewer meatballs and more birch sap and lichen crackers.

In vain, when asked about my visits to Sweden, land of the murderous and melancholy, do I try to paint a more complex picture, one that includes a lot of multicultural billboards and young men, often accompanied by their friends or fathers, pushing perambulators on the street.

In London a couple of weeks ago I picked up The Almost Nearly Perfect People, a new book that purports to tell the “truth behind the Nordic miracle,” by travel writer and humorist Michael Booth, a Brit who lives in Denmark with his wife and family. It’s a little unclear what he thinks this miracle is; I  had the feeling he and his publishers were taking advantage of more extensive media coverage in Europe of Scandinavia, mostly owing to the popularity of several Danish TV series: The Killing, Borgen, and most recently The Bridge. Nevertheless the various straw dogs Booth assembles from each of the five countries allows him to offer opinions ranging from the hilarious to the puerile to the purely dyspeptic, with a good dose of sensible criticism of Denmark’s denial of its financial outlook, Sweden’s faltering welfare system, Iceland’s spectacular meltdown and recovery, Norway’s smug oil wealth, and finally Finland—which mostly does things right.

Posing as a naif at times, a brash travel writer looking for trouble, Booth is actually well-read when it comes to politics and a cool-eyed journalist, adept at getting interviews with the movers and shakers of each country. I read most of this longish book at one sitting (granted, on a flight from London to Seattle there’s a great incentive to sit), and found myself smiling at times and often nodding in agreement. I’ve been to each of the five countries, and know Norway particularly well from having lived there and visited numerous times. In the last ten years I’ve also spent lots of time in Sweden and Denmark, and many things he wrote either jibed with some of my own observations or discussed some aspect of the political scene that illuminated something I’d had never fully grasped, particularly about the ways in which the five countries, in areas of welfare, education, and economic policy differ so greatly, in spite of having many shared values.

Yet ultimately, for all the facts cited and the impressive number of interviews with policy makers, newspaper editors, bureaucrats, and a few relatives and friends for the personal touch, Booth’s book seems to me to skate too much on the surface, often generalizing and reinforcing stereotypes and maximizing divisions. He talks, for instance, about the social problems that occur with trying to fold immigrants, particularly from Islamic countries, into the more homogeneous Nordic populations. But he rarely allows an immigrant to speak and certainly doesn’t celebrate some of the interesting initiatives at work, for instance, in Copenhagen, in the women’s organization Kvinfo, which has expanded its mission to include mentoring for refugee and immigrant women and a greater emphasis on ethnicity and equality along with gender issues.

Less reliance on his professional network, more innovative reporting, and especially giving new citizens of the different countries a voice, would have uncovered varied and creative responses to immigration, many government supported. Booth’s mention of the Sami who live in Sweden, Norway, and Finland is brief and uninformative; just one paragraph (p186-7) is devoted to this indigenous people with an important history in Scandinavia, a vibrant contemporary culture, and an ongoing political role to play in stopping destructive development in the north. No book can cover everything, but a book that claims to tell the truth about the Nordic people should make a greater effort to include many more voices. The Nordic countries, individually and as states, are far from as homogenous as Booth makes out. They may well be conformist in some ways, but Nordic people also travel widely and read voraciously, so their world is wider than Booth gives them credit for.

While the book made my flight speed by, I was plagued throughout my reading by a curious sense of emptiness at the heart of The Almost Nearly Perfect People. What was missing was the poetry of the North, the compelling light and darkness, the wild landscapes of the Norwegian coast, and rolling farmlands and forests of Sweden and Finland, not to mention the extraordinary volcanic, otherworldly geography that is Iceland’s. I felt sometimes I was sitting in an office block in Stockholm listening to one more talking head on the subject of the Swedish economy when I wanted to be walking along the Baltic shore on a bright summer’s day.

The poetry was missing in a literal sense, as well. Where was Nobel prize-winner, Tomas Transtömer? Or Rolf Jakobsen? Or the Sami joikers and  poets? Or the new crop of writers with immigrant parents who now write in Swedish or Danish? Where were exciting and popular Scandinavian writers like the Icelander Sjön or Norwegian Per Pettersen? Nordic Noir aside, Scandinavia and Finland have a wealth of literature, much of it translated, that far from reinforcing stereotypes, are more likely to illuminate the truth(s) of the Nordic imagination.

This book was published in the U.K. and its audience is more geared to a European readership. Here are a handful of reviews that give a flavor of the response to Booth's information as well as his humor. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10622754/The-Almost-Nearly-Perfect-People-the-Truth-about-the-Nordic-Miracle-by-Michael-Booth-review.html

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/22/nearly-perfect-people-nordic-miracle-review

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-review-the-almost-nearly-perfect-people-by-michael-booth-9144478.html

The Exhibit “Memories of Lapland” at the Nordiska Museet, Stockholm

Sami Working with Reindeer, 1943. Emilie Demant Hatt, Nordiska Museet

It was about ten years ago that I first saw Emilie Demant Hatt’s paintings of Sápmi, over a dozen of which are now on display at a new exhibit at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm. I’d been interested in this artist, writer, and ethnographer for a couple of years by then and had begun researching her life. I’d also sought out what I could of her artwork.

Mette Dyrberg at the Skive Art Museum in Denmark was one of the first to welcome me to the world of this relatively unknown artist. This museum, near where Demant Hatt (1873-1958) had grown up by the Limfjord, had been given a number of oil paintings from Demant Hatt’s own collection, as well as watercolors and sketchbooks. I understood from an illustrated catalog, published in 1983 by the Skive Art Museum, that Demant Hatt’s style changed radically in the mid-1920s and that most of the finely painted but more realistic work owned by Skive didn’t always represent her mature, Expressionist style, which was more dramatic and whose subject was often landscapes of the far north. Some of these Sápmi landscapes, privately owned in Denmark, were reproduced in the catalog. Others were said to belong to the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm.

Nordiska Museet, Stockholm

The story went that, near the end of her life, finding no public institution in Denmark that would take her many paintings of Sápmi, Demant Hatt sent around fifty of them to the relatively new “Lapp Department” of Nordiska Museet. I was tantalized by the thought of those paintings which, according to all accounts, had only been displayed once at the Swedish museum, in 1953, along with those of six other Swedish painters who also used Sápmi as a motif.  After this exhibit the paintings went into storage and there, apparently, they’d remained ever since. 

The Nordiska has Sweden’s largest collection of Swedish cultural-historical artifacts. Designed to look like a Danish Renaissance palace, one of the museum’s most striking features is the massive interior hall, with a marble floor and many marble columns. It was finished in 1907, the same year that Emilie Demant Hatt began her long stay among the Swedish Sami at Lake Tornesträsk. Artur Hazelius, its founder, began collecting everything to do with Sweden’s pre-industrial, vanishing culture—from handmade furniture to folk art, from regional dress to actual buildings––back in the 1870s. The popular open-air museum near the Nordiska, Skansen, is where many of the buildings were reassembled.

The Sami Exhibit, Lapparna, opened 1947. Nordiska Museet

Before the Nordiska was built, Hazelius had displayed some of his treasures in the Scandinavian Ethnographic Collection in the city center. This included many objects from Sápmi—sleds, tents, and all things to do with reindeer, as well as domestic utensils and sacred drums. The Sami collection has had a long, fascinating, and sometimes contentious history at the Nordiska, with the permanent Sami exhibits reflecting the fashions and prejudices of the time. The current exhibit is short on objects and uses more multimedia to allow the Sami themselves to speak about their varied lives and memories. Some of the Nordiska’s artifacts have been transferred to Áttje, the Sami museum in Jokkmokk, Sweden.

           

In 1939 the anthropologist, journalist, and photographer Ernst Manker became the director of the museum’s first attempt at a more scholarly and organized “Lapp Department. ” A strong proponent of the Sami, Manker wrote a number of books about the herding culture, edited an academic imprint, Acta Lapponia, continued to collect artefacts, and rearranged the Sami permanent exhibit into what was, for the time, a more progressive display. Manker invited  Emilie Demant Hatt to Stockholm in 1940 to receive the Hazelius Award for her work with the Sami and particularly for her collaborative translation of Muitalus sámiid birra/An Account of the Sami by Johan Turi. The original event, an ambitious “Lappish Evening” at the museum, which would include a speech by Demant Hatt, was scheduled for April of 1940­­—but had to be postponed, when the Germans invaded Denmark. Later that year Emilie Demant Hatt did manage to get to the Nordiska, to give a much admired speech in praise of Johan Turi. Karl Tirén, who had collected Sami joiks on wax cylinders early in the century, and Israel Ruong, a Sami ethnographer and linguist, who was also a joiker, appeared with her that evening.

           

From this evening, a friendship between Manker and Demant Hatt grew up, and it was Manker who invited her to donate photographs, unpublished manuscripts, letters, and field notebooks about her Sami ethnography to the Nordiska. He also welcomed the gift of the paintings, though the Nordiska was not properly an art museum, but one of cultural history. The paintings, while preserved as part of the substantial Sami collection at the museum, were likely destined never to be exhibited after that first show in 1953.

           

Some ten years ago, I was doing some journalism and working on my book The Palace of the Snow Queen and had various occasions to be in Stockholm. I decided to see if one of the curators at the Nordiska would let me have a look at Demant Hatt’s paintings. I was invited to meet an art curator, Maria Maxen, at the entrance hall; she led me downstairs and along a corridor. Through the doors of cage-like storage rooms I glimpsed swords and pewter tankards and painted chairs, multitudes of objects from Swedish culture that had come to rest here. One of these small storage rooms held the paintings of Emilie Demant Hatt. They were upright in storage shelves and we took them out one by one and leaned them against the walls and shelving so that I could take digital photographs.

I loved the paintings from the start. They were much larger than I expected, most of them, and the colors hadn’t faded, but glowed through a light dust of time in hues of vivid scarlet, warm topaz, and an icy northern palette of blues and grays and greens. I tried to grasp the immensity of what I was seeing: over fifty landscapes of jagged mountains with the swirling Northern Lights behind and women in red koftes boating around a deep blue, glacier-powdered mountain lake. Firelight spilled like molten lava from tents shaped like small brown volcanos and reindeer herders stood around bonfires warming their hands during a coffee break in the middle of a vast winter wilderness. Reindeer trudged over ice bridges and grazed in the midst of snowfields. And in many paintings were small scruffy dogs, sometimes staring up at the sky, witnesses and working companions.

           

Later I was glad I had spent more time photographing than simply staring, open-mouthed, at the unexpected riches in storage. The digital pictures I took that day have long been friends to me and I’ve called them up regularly on my computer screen to admire them and to describe them in my writing about Demant Hatt. 

Emilie Demant Hatt, 1910

I remember saying to Maria Maxen that day, wouldn’t it be wonderful if these paintings could be displayed? It was a question I was to put with some wistful regularity to curators at the Nordiska in years to come. I was able to visit the physical paintings twice more; by 2013 when I was there last, Emilie Demant Hatt’s paintings, along with thousands of other objects, had been moved to a vast state-of-the-art, off-site building in a Stockholm suburb. All the canvases had been mounted on huge, heavy screens, so it was possible to see them all and all at once. I had an hour or more of communion with the work I’d come to know so well over the years and it was heaven.

On February 6, the Nordiska opened an exhibit titled Minnen av Lapland, “The Memory of Lapland,” which shows fifteen of these paintings. I’m honored that I’ve been asked to come to Stockholm and speak at the museum March19 about Emilie Demant Hatt’s life as an artist and ethnographer among the Sami of northern Sweden. My old friend Hugh Beach, a professor of anthropology at the University of Uppsala, will introduce me and say a few words in Swedish about Demant Hatt’s importance as an early woman anthropologist, and curator Cecilia Hammarslund-Larsen will speak about the exhibit. I’ll show slides, too, and give thanks. It is always an occasion for joy and gratitude when something you wish for—in my case the chance for a larger public to see some these marvelous, vivid paintings—actually comes true.

Most of the links in this post are to Swedish language sites, but Google Translate (on the Nordiska's site) will give an approximation of the content. A version of this blog post, along with more reproductions of Emilie Demant Hatt’s art, appears on the website emiliedemanthatt.com.

I’ll also be giving a talk about Emilie Demant Hatt at Kvinfo, the women’s library, in Copenhagen, March 24. Both my talks will include slides of Demant Hatt's photographs and paintings.

“The Art of Recalling,” an article about the influence of Johan Turi and Sápmi on Emilie Demant Hatt’s art will appear in Feminist Studies, summer 2014.

Sami National Day

Today, February 6, is Sami National Day, celebrated mostly in northern Norway and Sweden, but important to the Sami wherever they live. In the Northwest, Pacific Lutheran University is hosting some events today from 4 pm on at their Scandinavian Cultural Center. 

In several Nordic cities and towns, it's Sami Week all week long. Tromsø, Norway has a busy weekend coming up: an outdoor market, reindeer racing, and lasso throwing championships in the main street. On Saturday night is a concert with world musician  Mari Boine and Norrbotten Big  Band.

The Nordiska Museet in Stockholm chose Sami National day to open their exhibit of fifteen paintings of Lapland by Emilie Demant Hatt: Memory of Lapland: Minnen av Lappland.

Look for more about this exhibit and a talk I'll be giving at the museum March 19 in the next posts.

Sami Shorts at the Nordic Lights Film Festival

Marja Bål Nango

Last weekend in Seattle the Nordic Lights Film Festival showed a great array of films from the Nordic countries. My friend Julie Whitehorn has posted detailed reviews of four Sami shorts on her blog Seattle Sami. 

All were fascinating in their different ways, and it was encouraging to see that three of them were student films made by Marja Bål Nango, a young Sami filmmaker. In reading about her afterwards I saw that she's been getting a good deal of attention in Norway and in Sapmi for her work. You can read more about her here.  I also read that she's doing a residency at the former home of the great poet, joiker, and multi-media artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää. Read more about him and his foundation here.

I'm reminded that Skabmagovat, the extraordinary Sami and indigenous people's film festival in Inari, Finland, is just ending today. Their focus this year, the 16th winter it's taken place, was Arctic people's films.

As described in the program's introduction by artistic director Jorma Lehtola:

For the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, film has become an important tool both in strengthening the identity and communicating with other peoples. The circumstances of production and the resources available vary, but the field keeps expanding. Therefore, Skábmagovat wants to have a broader look at the area.

Our special theme of the Arctic peoples covers Chukchi nomadism from the eastern corner of Russia, Inupiat drama in a Berlinare-awarded film from Alaska, the wisdom
of Inuit women from Nunavut, terror narration from Greenland, as well as Sámi stories on reindeer, bear men and mining.

I attended this film festival in 2002, in its early days, and wrote about Jorma Lehtola and the festival in The Palace of the Snow Queen. I always meant to go back, but it's not easy getting up to Inari every year. I remember the experience of sitting outside watching films projected on an icy screen in temperatures of minus 20 c. That year the focus was, as always, Sami films, and those made by filmmakers from the Brazilian Amazon. I recall how much I learned in just three days about worlds that would have otherwise been closed to me. Such is the amazing power of film.

Emilie Demant Hatt reading and slideshow in Portland January 10, 2014

 

 

 

 

The Friday Night Lecture Series

WHEN:  Friday, January 10, 2014, 7:30pm

WHERE:  Portland State University, Cramer Hall 171, 1721 SW Broadway, Portland, Oregon, 97201

TITLE:  Talk and slideshow of the work of Danish artist and early ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt

PRESENTER:  Barbara Sjoholm

Emilie Demant Hatt (1873-1958) lived with the nomadic Sami in 1907-8 and later became a prominent artist in Denmark.  She helped Johan Turi write and publish his book, An Account of the Sami, which appeared in 1910 in an innovative bilingual Sami/Danish edition.  Her own book, With the Lapps in the High Mountains, is both an exciting travel narrative and an early example of participant anthropology.  Translated into English for the first time, it tells the story of her year with the Swedish Sami, and includes her own photographs.

Barbara Sjoholm is an award-winning novelist, nonfiction writer, and Danish and Norwegian translator.  Her other books include The Snow Queen:  Winter Travels in Lapland.  Ms. Sjoholm's translation, With the Lapps in the High Mountains, will be available for sale after the lecture.

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The Friday Night Lecture Series is sponsored by the Scandinavian Heritage Foundation (SHF) and Portland State University, Department of World Languages and Literatures.  Lectures are held in 171 Cramer Hall, at PSU, 1721 SW Broadway.  The lectures are free and open to the public.  Refreshments are served next door in the PSU Finnish Room (Room 124, Cramer Hall) after the lecture.

For further information regarding the Friday Night Lecture Series or the Scandinavian Heritage Foundation, please contact SHF at 503-977-0275 or see SHF's website:  www.scanheritage.org.