Interest Dominance and Motive Attraction
Form and Content in Albert Eskeröd’s Årets äring
This article discusses goals and aims as well as ideas about meaning, form and content in Swedish ethnology. The central question concerns whether artefacts, objects, forms should be treated as primary objects of study or as secondary, signs or symbols of an underlying level of content or meaning. A common understanding among Swedish ethnologists is that while earlier ethnologists were mainly occupied with “form” at a “surface level”, modern ethnology, from around 1970 onwards, became more occupied with “content” and “meaning”, at a deeper underlying level. In a similar vein earlier ethnology is described as positivistic, concerned with the world as an objective outer phenomenon, while contemporary ethnology is described as phenomenological, concerned more with the world as an inner phenomenon.
Questioning this figure of thought, the author goes on to discuss Albert Eskeröd’s Årets äring. This dissertation from 1947 is surprisingly “modern”, neither positivistic, nor occupied with form at a surface level. Eskeröd strongly criticizes earlier ethnological practices and notions, especially that of survival, and clearly heralds “modern ethnology”, by his strong focus on meaning, and in his ambition to anchor meaning in perspectives borrowed from social psychology and structural functionalism.
