Returning to the archive in search of everyday practices in fieldwork

Abstract

This article concerns itself with the early twentieth-century documentation of different phenomena in the Swedish countryside considered crucial to an understanding of rural lifestyle in the past. This research was motivated out of a concern for a vanishing peasant culture. Vast quantities of photographs, drawings and descriptions of houses and settlements were compiled into archives and later on, this material was used as the base for the Atlas of Swedish folk culture published in 1957. Inspired by Fleck’s notion of “thought collective” and Latour’s ideas of “craftsmanship”, the article returns to the archives in order to examine the everyday practices of the fieldworkers and the different tools and techniques used to document the vanishing peasant material culture. (Less)