Book review

Seafood of South‐East Asia: an illustrated catalogue of the edible marine fish, crustaceans, molluscs and other sea creatures of the region, with their names in the various languages followed by a collection of recipes from each of the countries with additional information for cooks, by Alan Davidson. London: Macmillan, 1978. pp. 366, £9.95.     

Book reviews

Bouwstoffen voor de sociaal‐economische geschiedenis van Indonesië van ca. 1800 tot 1940; een beschrijvende bibliographie: Koloniale Studiën 1916–1941, Koloniaal Tijdschrift 1912–1941, by Gerard J Telkamp. Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, 1977. 89pp. D.F1. 15.

Tetum Ghosts and Kin — fieldwork in an Indonesian community, by David Hicks. Explorations in World Ethnology, General Editors, Robert B Edgerton and L L Langness. Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing Co 1976, 143 pp, 24 p1, 13 figs. IBSNO‐87484–368–5.

Southeast Asian Materials in the Australian National University Library: A Programme for Development and Use, by Cecil Hobbs. Canberra: Australian National University Library, 1975. iv, 180pp.     

Between human capital and human worth

This study concerns the history of Swedish public everyday discourse about knowledge and its benefits for the individual, c. 1920–1974. We examine the value(s) ascribed to knowledge – in economic and/or idealistic terms – using private correspondence institutes as our point of departure. These were immensely popular, yet have hitherto been overlooked by historians. First, we argue that commercially driven correspondence education, which was a mass phenomenon in early and mid-20^th-century Sweden, blurred the demarcation lines between general and vocational education, and more importantly between formal and so-called popular education (folkbildning). Second, we examine how knowledge and education were promoted and justified in the widely circulated advertisements for Hermods Korrespondensinstitut, the largest of the Swedish correspondence schools. By analysing and contextualizing advertisements over six decades, we find a strong dominance of individualistic economic valuations from the beginning, a successive increase in idealistic valuations over the decades, and an increasing amalgamation of idealistic and economic justifications for knowledge. We argue that the extensive scale of Hermods’ and similar institutes’ educational activities offers an important key for understanding the social context in which the overall marketization and capitalization of knowledge in the latest decades was able to take root.