Culture Builders
Den kultiverade människan (Culture Builders) was first published in 1979 and its impact on Swedish, perhaps even European ethnology, can hardly be exaggerated. In this article Fredrik Nilsson examines how Den kultiverade människan came to be a part of a specific habitus, a habitus that some scholars, such as Nilsson himself, still struggles to understand and thus create some kind of intellectual distance to. The article is in that sense an autoethnographic/autobiographic reflection on how Den kultiverade människan colonized, and still colonies, the everyday life of an ethnologist.
The story starts when Nilsson, as a young student, comes in contact with the text for the first time. He recollects how he and his fellow students reacted with admiration having read the book. Den kultiverade människan seemed to explain everything that needed explaining, at least when it comes to explaining class and class formation. In a rather naïve way the analysis of class were seen as a representation of truth.
The days of admiration naturally had to come to an end as Nilsson became “older and wiser”, a PhD-candidate that is. Struggling to emancipate himself from the text he realizes that the futile attempt to create distance is only an expression of the same processes once analyzed in Den kultiverade människan. In other words, there is no escape from Den kultiverade människan and that must be hallmark of a classic.
