Estonian museums in changing times
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/nm.3721Abstract
The Estonians are a small nation. Therefore, our relationship to our own culture is to a certain extent different from that of the big nations. The peculiarities of ones own culture are mainly perceived through comparison with others. The wave of national awakenings reached Estonia in the middle ofthe 19th century. By that time some Baltic-German organizations of an enlightening character had emerged, mainly focusing their attention on native people - the ones whose ethnic ancestors had lived in Estonia long before the Germans, Danes, Swedes, Poles, andfinally, the Russians had reached here. The main policy of alien authorities was to occupy our strategically and commercially important territory. The best means for achieving this was war: In the course ofthese conquests, attention was mainly focused on towns and churches; the changing of the everyday lives of the local people was not particularly in anybody's sphere of interest. As a result, two relatively different kinds of living conditions and ways of life existed side by side - on the one hand, the traditional culture of Estonian peasants and town craftsmen, and on the other, the European culture characteristic mainly of Baltic-German nobility and bourgeoisie.
If we tried to describe these two different communities in museum categories, we could say that the first one represented a living open-air museum with its ethnographic look and folklore; the other a specimen of manor architecture with its art collections, and town architecture with the relics of a bourgeois way of life.
Downloads
Issue
Section
License
Contents published in editions of The Journal Nordic Museology in volumes predating 2017 are protected by the Norwegian Law of Copyright. This means that text and images published in these volumes can only be shared and republished with written permission from the author and/or photographer. Starting from 2017, the content published in The Journal Nordic Museology is - unless otherwise stated - licensed through Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC-ND.4.0. This means that content can be copied, distributed and disseminated in any medium or format under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- Non-Commercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
- No Derivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
- No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Notices:
- You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.
- No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material. Authors who publish in Nordic museology accept the following conditions:
Authors(s) retains copyright to the article and give Nordic Museology right to first publication while the article is licensed under the Creative Commons Lens CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 This license allows sharing the article for non-commercial purposes, as long as the author and first publishing place (The Journal Nordic Museology) is credited. The license does not allow others to publish processed versions of the article without the author's permission.
The author is free to publish and distribute the work/article after publication in Nordisk Museologi, while referring to the journal as the first place of publication. Submissions that are under consideration for publication or accepted for publication in Nordisk Museology cannot simultaneously be under consideration for publication in other journals, anthologies, monographs or the like. By submitting contributions, the author accepts that the contribution is published in both digital and printed editions of Nordisk Museology. For more about publication, see the Author Guidelines.