Culture Unbound: Americanization & Everyday Life in Sweden

By Tom O'Dell

Explaining the mechanisms behind the larger processes of globalization, modernization, and cultural imperialism, this book explores the realms of daily life in Sweden and how cultural impulses are actually integrated in the lives of ordinary people. The dreams, opinions, actions, and consumption desires of individuals with different social backgrounds are considered, determining the significance the processes of Americanization have had in shaping and influencing the form and content of everyday life in Sweden.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 1997
• ISBN: 9789187121234

Tom O'Dell

Tom O'Dell is an associate professor and research coordinator in the department of service management at Lund University, Sweden.

Book preview

Introduction

Sweden is the most Americanized country in the world. One of the first times I heard the comment was in Lund. I was sitting in an American-style sports bar and grill called Gloria’s participating in the bachelor party of one of my cousins. I had never previously met the young man who made the statement, but I was impressed by the assured confidence in his voice when making the claim. He reinforced his words by quickly glancing and pointing at the walls around us. I followed his sweeping hand and met the gaze of Carl Yaztremski, saw Larry Bird and Magic Johnson on separate action-shot posters. The walls were cluttered with American license plates, baseball and football pennants, and other odd pieces of Americana. Looking around, I was struck by the thought that it was doubtful that there was any restaurant in the United States which could outwardly appear as American as this. In fact, the only other place I had been that actually seemed this American was a similar restaurant on Södermalm, in Stockholm.

The assertion of Sweden’s Americanization and the scene before me contrasted markedly with my own feelings and experience. Ever since I had first visited Sweden as a child, the country had represented something vastly different from what I was used to from my own home setting in the United States. From a child’s perspective, Sweden was a place in which people wore wooden shoes, the traffic lights ticked, and the soda bottles had special tops which you could just pull off with your fingers. Sweden was different. And even as I grew up and came to Sweden periodically to visit various relatives, I continued to define Sweden in terms of its difference from the United States. Then all of a sudden, here in Gloria’s was someone claiming that they were similar, and as I followed his sweeping gesture his assertion seemed impossible to deny...

Similarity versus difference, this is the essential dichotomy around which the rest of this book is built. It is a dichotomy which is here framed within a discussion of specific types of processes of globalization, commonly referred to as Americanization. In this regard it should be pointed out that deep beneath the theoretical ground upon which this books rest lies a debate – academic as well as popular – over how cultural processes of globalization are to be interpreted. Do they produce cultural diversity in and between local settings – by providing people with a growing wealth of images, items and ideas from which they can form their lives and identities in an increasingly differentiated manner – or do they have a homogenizing effect upon those settings, making them increasingly similar as we all move to our refrigerators for a Coca-Cola during the commercial break half-way through the latest episode of the X-Files, or Wheel of Fortune?

By and large, processes of Americanization have attracted a fair amount of attention from the academic community, particularly over the past thirty years. The work in this field has produced a number well-known genres which will be explored, along with the concept of Americanization itself, in the next chapter. However, in Sweden, with the exception of a few classics,¹ the study of these processes has been rather sparse. Indeed, within my own discipline, Swedish ethnology, the study of transnational cultural processes in general (Americanization included) has received relatively little attention at all – apart from a few recent studies in ethnicity and nation building.²

The Swedish Field…

Within Swedish ethnology, the tendency has rather been to focus inwardly upon specific groups of people whose lives seem to unfold within the parameters of the nation. To a large extent, studies of specifically defined cross-sections of daily life in Sweden have worked to tackle deeper underlying questions concerning such themes as power, gender, identity, and modernity. Here the result has not been radically different from that found within anthropology in general. Local settings and definable groups have served to speak to larger issues. What is moderately different however is the historical linkage which has existed between Swedish ethnology and the national project (O’Dell: in press). Where anthropology has produced people who identify themselves as Africanists, Melanesianists, Polynesianists, and so on, Swedish ethnology has primarily produced people who recognize Sweden as their field of expertise. As such it has been fairly natural for Swedish ethnologists to locate their objects of study within the space of the nation – reifying its significance as an enclosed cultural entity – while spending less time reflecting upon phenomena transgressing the borders of that space.

Clearly, the nation’s borders are important to the understanding of daily life in Sweden, and it is impossible to understand the national setting without paying close attention to the role of such things as Swedish politics, the goals of the Social Democratic Party (which has steered the country for most of the post-war era), and the interactions of individuals in local settings. But the assertion that Sweden is the most Americanized country in the world speaks to the fact that Swedish daily life is also interconnected with, and affected by, a larger context than just that of the Swedish setting.

…and Beyond

This became especially clear in the nineties as Sweden approached, and then joined the European Union, and as debates about immigration exploded in the press as tens of thousands of people sought refuge in the country – fleeing from wars, political oppression, and various natural disasters in other parts of the world. From the editorial pages of the daily newspapers came a steady stream of concerned voices asking about the fate of Swedish culture. Here, the contexts, the situations, and the peoples involved were new, but against the background of my initial work on Americanization, the concerns which were expressed seemed strangely reminiscent of those which had been vented throughout much of the twentieth century in connection with America’s influence upon the Swedish setting. There were parallels here, and they centered around the fact that not only is Sweden currently part of a larger transnational context, but it always has been.

From the start, it should be pointed out that my own interest – and the reason for which I originally came to Sweden to conduct research – lies in developing a better understanding of the patterns of daily life in Sweden. And in this sense, the following book is intimately entwined with the previously mentioned ethnologic tradition of study in Sweden. Sweden lies at the center of this study, and is ever present. However, as much as this book is about daily life in Sweden, it is also a consideration of the phenomenon called Americanization, and an ethnographically anchored inquiry into the study of specific kinds of transnational cultural processes.

The study of transnational cultural processes has grown in interest over the course of the last decade. The literature now abounds with references to flows and hybrids, borders and glocalities, systems and networks. But at the same time, this literature tends to operate at a high level of abstraction. It is an academic area rich in theory, but surprisingly low on concrete examples upon which to test them. Too often, anecdotes serve as evidence, as we learn in passing about a family in Africa who watches Dallas, or that Elvis impersonators stand in line to perform in London. But the question which these anecdotes beg concerns meaning and interpretation. Exactly how can we interpret a desire to impersonate Elvis in London? Who in Kenya is watching Dallas, and why? Are we to understand these sightings of Elvis and Dallas as evidence of cultural flows, and if so, what exactly happens when they flow?

The intention of this book is to more concretely explore these types of questions – and others like them which concern the workings of the transnational – by examining them through a limited series of interstices aligned along the American – Swedish cultural axis. Processes of Americanization are here framed within the Swedish context, and used to consider the manner in which the face of daily life is formed not only as a result of events unfolding within Sweden, but even in connection with phenomena deriving from beyond the country’s borders.

This being said, it should be made clear that I am not endeavoring to create any kind of a catalogue of American influences in Sweden. Inevitably questions will arise as to why certain phenomena were or were not included. Coca-Cola, Levi’s, McDonald’s, skateboards, baseball caps, and Hollywood movies are all topics which are noticeably missing from the discussion that follows. To some degree, one has to accept the fact that the creation of a complete inventory of American influences would be impossible. More importantly, history has shown that broader studies working in this vein have tended to suffer from a lack of analytical depth (for one such example, see Marling and Kittel 1993).

Rather than working broadly I have chosen to concentrate the discussion to a limited number of thematic topics (divided into six chapters). This reflects a desire to go to some depth in the investigations of the nuances of Americanization while not going to the other extreme of limiting the study too narrowly to any single aspect of the phenomenon. Any one of these chapters could have been developed into a book in and of itself, but doing so would have occurred at the cost of failing to illuminate the complexity of Americanization in a broader sense. Thus, the book works to find a balance between losing sight of the forest for the trees, and forgetting the empirical evidence in the process of arguing the analytical points in question.

At the same time, the examples which I have chosen to examine, and the order in which they are presented here, is not completely arbitrary. My intention has been to continuously move the discussion from the general to the specific, and from the distant past toward the present (although there is some temporal overlapping between a few of the chapters). This manner of organizing the book has allowed me to continuously refine the discussion and hone the analysis while simultaneously pulling in new themes and examples. At the same time, the chronological ordering of the book was chosen for two reasons. First, it seemed like the most appropriate and accessible means of presenting the Swedish context to readers who may or may not otherwise be familiar with the nation’s history and its patterns of everyday life activity. And secondly, the historic perspective has been largely ignored in discussions of Americanization – which have generally focused upon the post World War II era – and from the beginning, this struck me as a missed opportunity. In order to discuss Americanization, it seemed essential to study it comparatively through time, gaining analytical distance from the phenomenon by viewing it over a longer stretch of history than is otherwise usual.

In terms of the book’s actual thematic organization, the first chapter examines the concept of Americanization, primarily considering the manner in which it has been constructed historically in academia, but moving tangentially also to touch upon its popular representation in the Swedish mass media. The flow metaphor is used here, as a means of highlighting the different ways in which Americanization has been thought of as a transnational cultural process at various points in time.

Chapter two focuses upon the processes through which America has developed its symbolic strength and power in Sweden in the period spanning from 1750 to 1900. The chapter emphasizes the manner in which many of the narratives associated with America – ranging from that of the land of freedom, to tales of the Wild West, to the image of America as a culturally impoverished land – were established early in the relationship between the two countries but have continually shifted and been reloaded with new meaning throughout time. This being said, however, and despite the focus upon the Swedish situation, these narratives are not seen as isolated in time and space, but as an interconnected aspect of a larger European context. In concluding, the final discussion of the chapter centers upon the cultural significance of forgetting as one of the dynamic motors behind the telling of America.

In the third chapter, the discussion addresses the emigration debate which attracted much attention in Sweden shortly after the turn of the century. The discussion centers around the center/periphery metaphor while at the same time demonstrating the variety of ways in which images of America can be invoked, both to allegorically delineate issues at play in the Swedish context, and as dynamic tropes in the construction of widely varying Swedish identities.

The discussion in Chapter 4 focuses upon a single object (actually a set of objects): the American car. Here it is the materiality of America, and the processes involved in the interaction between American-produced commodities and the Swedish local context which are examined. More specifically, it is the cultural biography of the American car and its interpretation as a symbol of modernity which is treated here – and this involves a comparative look at the face of modernity as it was ideally presented in Sweden and the United States. The trajectory of the American car is followed from the Swedish upper classes in the twenties to the working classes in the fifties and sixties. While following the car, however, it is the history of class distinctions, aesthetic values, and social contestations in the Swedish context which are described and delineated for the reader.

In the sixties and seventies the United States came under severe criticism from groups of young middle-class students, and eventually the Swedish government. At the same time, however, the Swedish counter-culture received much of its impetus, in the form of material culture, critical awareness, and social praxes of demonstration, from both the American counter-culture, and the American Civil Rights Movement. Where Chapter 4 followed the American car as it made its way through most of Sweden’s social hierarchy, the last chapters of this book work to focus more specifically upon a smaller segment of the middle class. Here Chapter 5 considers the effects of Americanization upon the anti-war movement and the New Left, while Chapter 6 concentrates upon an even smaller group within the Swedish counter-culture, hippies. In this last chapter a few individuals come into focus as the discussion concentrates upon the particular and different ways in which they were each affected by a mediascape overwhelmingly dominated by American impulses.

In short, this book is about the Swedish encounter with America, but as such it is about something which I have referred to here, and will continue to refer to throughout these pages as the transnational. It will become apparent to the reader that references are also made to another closely related term, globalization. Here it should be pointed out that globalization is an academic genre used to speak about larger cultural processes; the use of the term is intended as a referent to this genre, but also to indicate that the processes being described can perhaps be conceived of as something more than just transnational. In general, however, globalization is referred to more restrictively than references to the transnational. This is in part because globalization seems to be so all encompassing, and indeed few cultural processes are actually global – although they may encompass large segments of the world – and in this sense, it seems more appropriate to define them as transnational. The word international on the other hand conjures forth notions of a one-to-one relationship, often with national political connotations (Hannerz 1996:6). The few times I refer to the international, it is to reflect the specific words used by others, or to mark the tone of a specific period of time.

The bulk of the material upon which this book is based has been derived from library and archival searches. Along these lines I have conducted research and gathered material from the Archives of Stockholm City, the Archives of General Motors Nordiska AB in Huddinge, the Archives of the Editorial Staff of the Swedish Academy’s Dictionary, the University of Lund Student Archives, the Folk Life Archives in Lund, the microfilms department at the Harvard University Library, the University Library in Lund, and the Emigrant Institute in Växjö. Beyond this archival material, the chapters on American cars, the anti-war movement, and hippies have also been complemented by a small a number of interviews which I conducted over the course of my research.³ And the discussion of the Swedish flag (in Chapter 5) has been bolstered by a large amount of printed material which was previously gathered by Mats Rehn-berg.

In addition to this, I have also worked with a large amount of private material. Along these lines, Chapter 2 has benefited from the fact that I have had access to several hundred pages worth of private correspondences sent between the United States and Sweden in the second half of the nineteenth century by the various members of an emigrant family. This material is discussed at some length in that chapter so I will not address it further here. Similarly, the chapter on the anti-war movement has benefited from a large amount of private material. More specifically, I was graciously allowed to borrow over three shopping bags full of printed material from one of my informants. Included in this material were most of the issues of the anti-war movement’s magazine, Vietnam Bulletinen, as well as a wide array of other publications distributed by the anti-war movement. Beyond these publications the material included several three-ring notebooks full of newspaper clippings from the period, and even notes and minutes from the meetings of one of the local chapters of the anti-war movement as well as similar material from larger summer study circles.

Finally, it should be mentioned that I have conducted field work at American car meets in Jönköping and Västerås, complementing these with extensive photo documentation. Indeed, the very idea to include the American car as an aspect of this book derived somewhat accidentally as a result of the fact that I bought an inexpensive ’64 Plymouth Valiant in the fall of 1991 and consequently found myself working with a friend and a colleague in a garage in Malmö – with a group of over twenty other men, many of whom owned American cars – struggling to keep my car in working order. I never conducted any formal field work in the garage in the form of interviewing or note taking, but this situation has worked unintentionally to inform and confirm sections of the discussion presented in Chapter 4. I have also submitted early versions of texts for review by individuals active in the garage, as well as others active in a club in Jönköping.

Behind the Scenes

At various points along the way my research has received financial support from several outside sources. Here I would like to thank Carin och John Papes fond för nordisk och jämförande folklivsforskning, Knut och Alice Wallenbergs stiftelse, Kunglig Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur, and Stiftelsen Lars Hiertas minne. Additionally, this book is also part of the project, National and Transnational Cultural Processes, based at the Department of European Ethnology, University of Lund, and the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Stockholm, and has been supported by the Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

I am indebted to a number of people who have in varying degrees and at different stages in the process commented upon the work contained within the following pages. Here, I am especially thankful to Orvar Löfgren who has always shown great interest in the project at hand and eagerly – from beginning to end – offered his views, comments, and advice. Similarly, I would like to extend my gratitude to everyone within the Department of European Ethnology in Lund. I cannot think of a better or intellectually more invigorating environment in which to have worked over the past few years. Anders, Berit, Birgitta, Carina, Christer, Cilla, Elisabeth, Fredrik, Gunnar, Jonas, Lotta, Marcus, Orvar, Susanne, Wibeke, these are just a few of my colleagues who deserve to be mentioned. Jonas Frykman, Anders Linde-Laursen, and Orvar Löfgren have each read earlier versions of the book and shared their views with me. I thank them for their comments and criticisms, but naturally accept the burden of whatever shortcomings may still exist within this text as my own.

On a more personal note, however, it is difficult for me to imagine this book without the many late nights I have spent with Christer Eldh and Anders Linde-Laursen, discussing and debating everything from the contents of this book, to the state of ethnology (and life) in general. Not only colleagues and critics, they have proven to be the best of friends throughout it all. And even as the life of academia pulls us all in different directions, I look forward to working with each of them in the future. My parents and family have similarly played a special role in the background, encouraging me, and asserting their pride. Even if I have never said it, it has meant a lot to me. Moral support has in this sense proven to be as important for the completion of this project as intellectual exchange, and here no one has given me more support in both regards than Lotta Leoo. It is not always easy to live with someone who can never leave his job behind him, or who rushes up in the middle of the night to jot down a few notes, or who becomes so lost in his own thoughts that he all too often forgets the world around him. Her love and support has always been present. I can’t thank her enough.

Chapter 1

Turbulence in the Flow: Considering Americanization

We can not move without being constantly reminded of the implications which American technological advances have meant for the manner in which we live our lives today.

Tage Erlander 1964:2.

Norway tastes of culture and tradition. America is teeming with speed and excitement, but also with aggression and devastation.

Steinar Bryn 1992a:66.

America is the land of the future; Europe is the land of the present, and the one thing which is distinctive of the present is uncertainty.

Ronny Ambjörnsson 1994:76.

Pick up a journal containing contemporary anthropological articles on transnational cultural processes and you are bound to find references to flows, borders, or hybrids. In topics ranging from the fate of political refugees to MTV, they are the metaphors currently in vogue, diligently invoked on the basis of the descriptive and dynamic qualities they are thought to possess. They are, if nothing else, the tropes of the nineties, and as such reflect the ways in which we visualize and frame rather abstract processes which reach around the world and affect our lives as well as those of others. At the same time, however, when it comes to flows, borders, and hybrids, there is probably no other topic in Sweden – and Europe in general – which has been discussed and debated so much in the past one hundred and fifty years as Americanization. It is a flow with a history, but still, it is a topic which sparks the imagination, and rapidly catalyzes the emotions of both the scholar and the lay-person alike.

Here it can be interesting to pause for a moment to consider why the topic has demonstrated such vitality over time. To be sure, this is not a question with a simple answer, but at least one of the more significant reasons for this continued interest undoubtedly lies in the fact that Americanization is not just about flows, borders, and hybrids, but it is a flow in and of itself. It is an ever shifting global discourse whose boundaries have constantly been realigned and redefined throughout time. But as an academic discourse, it has been a hybrid from the beginning, constructed and reconstructed in disciplines as diverse as political science, sociology, anthropology, and history, as well as comparative literature, popular culture, and youth studies.

Bearing this in mind, it is perhaps appropriate to reflect more carefully upon this discourse. Here I shall move sweepingly, refraining from any sort of a comprehensive review of the literature in the area, opting instead to use this discussion as a means of pointing to a few of the significant, almost paradigmatic, ways in which the transnational, in the guise of Americanization, has been constructed and problematized in the literature. Towards the end I shall conclude by problematizing the phenomenon called Americanization by placing it in relation to recent criticisms which have arisen in culture theory.

Through the Flow of Time

According to the Archives of the Editorial Staff of the Swedish Academy’s Dictionary, the verb Americanize was first recorded in 1852, at which time it was used to describe the rapidity with which emigrated Swedes adopted the customs of the communities they moved into in the United States. The actual noun form of the word, Americanization, does not appear in the archival records until 1883, and is used as a label for these processes. Here, Americanization was an individual phenomenon which occurred in particular instances in local contexts. It was an aspect of emigration which was linked to the émigré and was in this sense not a global process or flow. People were Americanized, after they moved, but this was perceived more in terms of socio-psychological factors than cultural processes. The boundary between Swedishness and Americanness was delineated according to outward praxis, a boundary over which Swedish customs were replaced by American customs.

As one follows the word in the Academy’s archives, it becomes clear that implicit understandings of the strengths and weaknesses of the nation and its ability to imprint itself on the individual were linked to this usage of the word at an early stage. This was an issue which attracted increasing concern in the surging wave of national romanticism which occurred in Sweden toward the end of the century. In an archival record from 1894 it is noted that Swedes adopted the language, rituals and customs in the new homeland, and thus became more quickly Americanized than Germans and Irishmen, for example (Tekn. Tidskr. 1894:71).¹, ² Americanization was in this sense measurable and thereby comparable – some nationalities, Swedes for example, were identified as being more readily Ameri-canizable than others.

This was an interpretation which greatly worried many conservatives and National Romantics such as the poet, Verner von Heidenstam, who lamented in another of the archive’s records that, the economic interest has Americanized and distorted Swedish national sentiments. Far from implying a local affectation of the individual, as was the case with the first usage of the word listed above, Heidenstam identified Americanization on the plane of the transnational, as a macro process in a position to challenge and even