Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle Class Life

This book is one of the earlier results of a Swedish research project, that up to the present day is still continued. It is an enquiry into the roots of present day middle class culture, as it developed between about 1880 and 1910 in Sweden. As their starting point the authors have taken the middle class virtues that are recognizable in the stereotype of the typical Swede: the nature-loving and conflict-avoiding person, obsessed with self-discipline, punctuality, orderliness and the importance of living a rational life. From this stereotype, the industrial and professional middle classes are easily recognizable as the ones who have defined the dominant ideas about the good and proper life. In summary, this book describes 'the process through which middle-class culture building moved from the position of counter-culture to dominant culture and then to national culture, and finally became invisible as ideas about human nature' (Löfgren 198 :81). This process however, is not typical for Sweden alone (which may have been the reason why the authors do not refer to Sweden in their title), but since the book deals with Sweden only, the title is somewhat misleading. The question as to what is typically Swedish, their national character or identity, is not seriously raised, because any comparison with developments in other countries is absent. This means that it is impossible to get an impression or estimation, however rough, of the ways or degrees in which the typical Swede differs, for instance in conflict-avoidance, from other national identities or stereotypes

• Author
• Jonas Frykman, Orvar Löfgren

• Format
• paperback

• Pages
• 334

• Publisher
• Rutgers University Press

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9780813512396

• Genres
• anthropology, history

• Release date
• 1987