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A Botanical UN: Gardening in a Multiethnic Swedish Town
| Article
# : |
19828 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
4,035 Words |
| Author
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Barbro Klein
Barbro Klein is associate professor of ethnology at Stockholm
University. She is the author of several works on Swedish and
American folklife, among them Legends and Folk Beliefs in a
Swedish-American Community: A Study of Folklore and
Acculturation (1980). Karin Becker teaches at Stockholm
University and is a specialist in mass communication and
folklife. She is the author of Dorothea Lange and the
Documentary Tradition (1980). Research for this article is
drawn from a larger project, funded by the Swedish Council on
the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSFR), involving several
topics and researchers, investigating everyday life in
multiethnic Sweden. |
Large-scale immigration is a relatively new phenomenon in Sweden. Since the 1960s, immigrants from 160 nations have transformed this previously homogeneous nation into an ethnically diverse and multicultural society. During the 1970s and 1980s, official policies turned away from an assumption of assimilation to an encouragement of cultural diversity. And by the late 1980s, one million of Sweden's eight and a half million population were first- or second-generation immigrants.
To understand how ethnic complexity reveals itself in this prosperous welfare state, it is useful to examine official policies and statements. But it is perhaps just as important to study the ways in which the many cultures and groups interact in the common arenas of everyday life; in, for example, settings such as municipal garden allotments.
What happens when Vietnamese, Swedes, Anatolian Muslims, Finns, and people from other nationalities work side by side on garden lots? How are intercultural relationships shaped in this setting? Which gardening practices and aesthetic ideals cross ethnic boundaries and which do not? What happens to Southeast Asian and Mediterranean traditions when they are transplanted into a country in the faraway reaches of the Northern Hemisphere? And does the activity of working in close physical proximity create a sense of common purpose that can transcend ethnic differences?
Our study will concentrate on gardens located in a suburb of Stockholm, a town typical of many that were constructed to meet the housing shortages of the 1960s and 1970s and that subsequently became home to many immigrants. Around one third of the six thousand people who live there today are Swedes, another third consists of immigrant and second-generation Turks, and the remainder are drawn from forty other nations.
Local people may call the visitor's attention to the town's ethnic complexity, but the physical environment hides non-Swedish ethnicity from public view. The surrounding landscape is quintessentially Swedish, featuring a ski slope, a small lake, and a pine forest. The town itself gives little external indication of its cosmopolitan population. Immigrants from the Middle East may own or manage stores, but their shop signs are in Swedish, many painted in a patriotic blue and yellow like the Swedish flag. Few vernacular imprints of any kind are to be found on the buildings, in contrast to many North American urban neighborhoods. On viewing the center of the town, one visiting American anthropologist noted with disappointment: "There is nothing
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