ABSTRACT
In multi-ethnic Austria-Hungary, social and economic policies were inseparable from identity politics, and museums of design were entangled in the intricate web of interests and counter-interests driving these enterprises. Peasants in the Empire were subordinate as a social class and had very limited political rights, but they were unquestionably citizens; they were not stripped of their humanity by racist policies. The idea of a multi-national state was deeply rooted in Habsburg political thinking, from the early nineteenth-century idea of ‘imperial patriotism’ to the attitude expressed in the multi-volume survey of the Monarchy’s crownlands, Austria-Hungary in Word and Image published between 1886 and 1902. The ethnographic collection operated on the same premise: that peasant culture differs fundamentally from the culture and history of the elites, and therefore belongs to a separate institution and scholarly discipline. Essentially, the division between applied art and ethnography relied on a class distinction.
