ABSTRACT
Studies of Sweden show extensively how ethnic and national categories are used by people in everyday encounters, how identities are negotiated and reorganized. The geographical and intellectual mobility offered by modern society has meant that people have been trained to interact in a multitude of everyday life situations. Every change in society takes on a physical form. Classes, genders, and cultural groups emphasize their distinctness in corporal terms, and exactly the same is true of epochs. In the way of moving the body, guarding its boundaries, observing its functions, and selecting those parts which could be named and circulated in open rhetoric, people give shape to distinctive character of their cultural context. Collective identities in modern society take on specific bodily shapes, or are expressed in the aestheticization of that body’s surface. The period between the two world wars in Sweden was the official watershed for modernism in its functionalistic image.
