Gästföreläsning: “Refracted Roots: Swedish-American Heritage in a Polarized Society”

Uppsala Forum Guest Lecture with Adam Kaul, Professor of Anthropology at Augustana College, Illinois, USA.

The United States is being socially torn apart through a pernicious process of polarization. In addition to political gridlock in Washington and threats to representative democracy itself, partisan identities and animosities are increasingly defining Americans’ sense of self and their cultural worldviews. In Refracted Roots, Adam Kaul and Adam Hjorthén explore how, and with what consequences, these developments also affect Americans’ thoughts and feelings about their ethnic heritages. Focusing on interviews and fieldwork with Swedish Americans in Minnesota, the authors offer a qualitative and grassroots perspective on how partisan identity is shaping perceptions of Swedish-American heritage institutions, of contemporary Sweden, and of white ethnic belonging in an era equally defined by calls for racial justice on the one hand and “anti-woke” politics on the other. The study illustrates that just as Americans are living in separate sociopolitical realities, they appear to be living in increasingly divergent ethnic realities as well.

Adam Kaul is Professor of Anthropology at Augustana College in Illinois. He teaches and writes about tourism, ethnomusicology, heritage, Ireland, Swedish America, and the American Midwest. He is the author of Turning the Tune: Traditional Music, Tourism & Social Change in an Irish Village, co-editor of Tourists & Tourism, and Leisure & Death: An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death & Dying, and coauthor of Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage & Sustainability in the American Midwest. He is currently working on a book with Adam Hjorthén titled Refracted Roots about the intersection of political identities and Swedish American heritage.