Kidnapped Cultural Heritage?: A Cultural Analysis on the Conflict about Cultural Heritage Among Cultural and Political Actors

Abstract: The Sweden Democrats have, like many right-wing populist parties all over Europe, had an increased success. Frequently they have been accused for thriving cultural policies as an excuse to raise nationalistic and anti-immigrational issues. The Sweden Democrat’s presence in the cultural heritage sector triggers the question whether and how culture is used for instrumentalizing purposes and disturbs the balance in the field. This thesis assumes instrumentalization of cultural heritage being a given. This investigation analyses the cultural heritage sector in Skåne, a region in SouthSweden as a political field. The focus is on the cultural actors in the field, which includes museums, cultural heritage associations, sites, networks and the political actors, which in this context are party members of the Sweden Democrats in Skåne. The aim is to analyse how the cultural and political actors use cultural heritage as a political tool and how a conflict between the actors appears and becomes visible in their discourse. The investigation is based on eight ethnographic interviews and several official documents. Theoretical tools for the analysis are among others; Bourdieu’s field theory, Foucault’s discourse analysis, Smith’s concept of an Authorized Heritage Discourse, Zizek’s concept of national identity and Anderson’s concept of imagined communities. The results of the thesis show that the overall goals of cultural and political actors are no contradiction, but that the individual components of the goals differ. These disagreements lead to a conflict in the field. The results suggest that all actors see each other as intruders in the field. This leads to a forced renegotiation of all positions, which is a struggle but also an asset. All actors benefit from the conflict, since it gives them more attention. This makes the conflict itself a dominant political tool of cultural heritage.