Samdok - Nordiska museet

connecting collecting: jensen & walle
change. We find it important to document and get a better
understanding of how migration affects both sending
and receiving countries as well as their respective
populations. We are therefore currently planning to do
fieldwork among Pakistanis living in Norway and follow
up their relatives in Pakistan. This follow-up project will
be run in cooperation between Norsk Folkemuseum and
Lok Virsa in Islamabad, Pakistan.
There are strong connections between the Pakistanis
living in Norway and their families in their country of
origin, but we also register that bonds are changing.
Thus we want to study the symbolic and emotional impact
of transnational links in both Pakistan and Norway.
Important aspects of this research will be:
• Continuity and change in gender patterns
• Relations between generations, which may be transnationally
dispersed or reside within the same locality
We wish to conduct the project as joint fieldwork in both
Norway and Pakistan, following kin networks across the
borders. The team will consist of researchers and trainees
both from Norway and Pakistan, including both women
and men.
Life story interviews and documentation of people’s
homes and domestic interiors through observations,
descriptions and collection of key objects will be our
chosen methods. Not only do we hope to obtain valuable
information and further increase our knowledge
within this field, we also hope to gain experience from
the collaboration with Lok Virsa in working on a bilateral
project.
We will continue to train interviewers, in the manner
that was developed during the above-mentioned project
period. We will train personnel of immigrant background,
both first- and second-generation immigrants, by offering
training courses in interview techniques. To improve
these interviews, we plan to spread the seminars over
several days. The introduction course will be followed up
by courses where we comment on the interviews held,
before they conduct follow-up interviews. Our aim is to
build competence within designated groups, and subsequently
engage them in future projects. Considering the
changing interests of museums and in culture politics, it
is important to have competent personnel available for
different projects. On a longer time scale, this will also
improve the possibilities to recruit people with minority
backgrounds for regular positions in museums.
During the initial project described above, we saw
that it was difficult to collect objects to be included in the
museum’s collection. There were various reasons for this,
but partly because the initial project emphasised immaterial
culture when obtaining information as a basis for
future analysis. A second impediment was deciding what
kind of objects to select and collect, and whether suitable
objects were available. During the upcoming project we
will take measures to enable the collection of objects, by
focusing on key objects that are ascribed symbolic importance
by the people being interviewed.
This will be a continuing focus on similar future
projects, and on systematic documentation of the material
realities of people’s lives through photography and
film, an approach used by both Norsk Folkemuseum and
IKM. There are also plans for both indoor and outdoor
exhibitions.
While the project Norsk i går, i dag, i morgen? originated
from the governmental call to include new groups
of people in the undertakings of culture institutions and
acknowledge the emergence of a multicultural society
(NOU 1996:7), demographic developments during the
last decade have resulted in a stronger emphasis on cultural
diversity as a whole. Based on this, we chose to redefine
Norsk Folkemuseum as a multicultural museum.
Rather than merely focusing on immigrant and ethnic
minorities as particular segments of society in opposition
to a ‘general’ Norwegian population, which tends to
emphasise discrete divisions between relatively homogeneous
groups, we should now consider contemporary
society as a meeting place between individuals. These
individuals may differ along a number of variables, such
as gender, ethnicity, class, age etc, but will also share experiences
and values. Cultural diversity at the museum
thus needs to have an intersectional perspective on contemporary
society.
A further challenge will be to include cultural diversity
in all aspects of the museum’s activities, and not only
regard multicultural society as a theme for the museum’s
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