ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the inception and remaking of museums dedicated to Nordic culture in the United States. Nordic culture produces material culture, and material culture framed as Nordic produces Nordic culture outside the Nordic countries themselves. In the United States, a Scandinavian or Nordic museum, on the basis of gifts, presents a background of group in its home country and tells a story about emigration to the specific area where museum is located. While each Scandinavian museum focuses on heritage of one particular group in its everyday permanent exhibitions, Nordic spaces emerge at Christmas, as evident at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis in December 2011. Due to malleability of Nordic culture, gifts and volunteerism open up shifting networks of relations. For many years within folklore as well as ethnology studies, the vernacular has meant something handcrafted, with a history diverging from the academic and formal, made of local resources and shaped by local knowledge as well as practices.
