Social engineering and cultural policy – theoretical and empirical reflexions from Swedish cultural policy in a historical perspective

This article explores the influence of social engineering in various forms within Swedish cultural policy, seen in a historical perspective. In social engineering cultural policy measures, reforms and projects are justified by scientifically based research rather than party based ideological arguments. Karl Popper’s classification of the utopian and the step-by-step engineering make up the starting point, redefined as paternalistic engineering, welfare state engineering and utilitarian engineering in order to apply these ideas to cultural policy. Social engineering was predominant in Swedish cultural policy mainly during the post war period. In the 1950s as well as in the 1970s this engineering takes on a paternalistic character, in the struggle against injurious culture, such as video violence. Current practice of paternalistic engineering is directed at revealing and identifying invisibles structures in the field of cultural heritage. The welfare state engineering had its highlights in the planning era of the 1960s and the 1970s, and today culture as a beneficial factor for both citizens and society is labelled utilitarian engineering.     

Festschrift

By working largely unaware of the huge literature in anthropology and certain other social sciences on ethnogenesis, Western cultural/historical and ethnic geographers remain aside from the mainstream in this inquiry and in fact do not address the topic as often as one might expect. Anthropologists have dominated ethnogenetic research for decades in North America. We further marginalize our work on ethnogenesis by ignoring completely the work of the Russian Leo Gumilev, a fellow geographer who devoted his career to the study of this subject. I le remains virtually unknown in the West in spite of English translations of a number of his works. This neglect of the works of anthropologists and Gumilev leads Western geographers to deal with ethnogenesis infrequently and somewhat naively. Hie authors suggest that by becoming familiar with these valuable sources and by applying existing, well-developed cultural geographical themes and concepts, such as homeland, diffusion, landscape, preadaptation, and incremental change, Western cultural geographers can more abundantly and significantly join the debate on ethnogenesis, building upon Gumilev's foundation and offering a humanistic, particularistic, and holistic alternative perspective largely absent in anthropological and other nongeographical studies.     

Geographical Research on International and Domestic Tourism

Tourism is a worldwide industry which has become important at all levels of economic development. Although tourism was considered by academicians for decades to be primarily an economic activity, geographers and non-geographers in the 1970s turned largely to analyzing its impact upon cultures and the physical environments of the destination areas. The common goal is careful planning of future touristic developments. In addition, an increasing number of studies is on imagery created by the tourist industry and its impact on the decision-making processes of the tourists. Despite the increasing research efforts of geographers, their findings are usually not published in the major geographical journals nor in geography textbooks. Tourism is a form of spatial behavior and its many aspects need further investigation.     

‘Shew Yourselves as Men’: Gender,Citizenship and Political Propaganda in the 1773 and 1774 Worcester Election Contests

This case study of the 1773 and 1774 election contests in the city of Worcester investigates how members of the local oligarchy, and the political opposition to that oligarchy, drew on contemporary discourses on citizenship to convince the electorate that their candidate would become a worthy representative of their city in parliament, and to refute the claims of their opponents. Since independence was absolutely essential to the voters’ identities as male householder citizens, this became the main issue of conflict. The candidate of the opposition interest, Sir Watkin Lewes, sought to establish himself as the guardian of the independence of the citizens of Worcester against the corrupt corporation. The candidates of the corporation, Thomas Bates Rous and his successor, Colonel Nicholas Lechmere, instead claimed that Lewes was the real threat, as his anti‐corruption campaign deprived the voters of the usual fruits of the election. While such claims also entailed an appeal by the local elite to the financial interest of the voters, the need to justify this incentive ideologically, and the high portion of voters who turned their backs on their patrons, does suggest the power embedded in the concept of citizenship in the political life at the level of the localities. Gendered and classed conceptions of citizenship, furthermore, were employed as offensive weapons in the political propaganda surrounding the elections, as each faction sought to discredit the other by claiming that they were neither manly enough, nor of the proper social status, to qualify as worthy political subjects. Thus, citizenship was not only fundamentally gendered in the masculine, but also highly hierarchical and equally intertwined with contemporary notions of class.