Above all Artur Hazelius gained international recognition for the open-air museum Skansen, founded in 1891. But already his 1872 launched “Skandinavisk-etnografisksamling” (Scandinavian-Ethnographic collection), which has been later renamed “Nordiska Museet” (Nordic Museum), attracted wide public interest not only in Sweden but also across national borders. An eloquent testimony to the reception of these folkloric-ethnographic exhibitions is a collection of international reports of various authors that were republished in 1888 together with an exhibition guide under the title “Voices from Abroad”. Based on considerations of the museum as a meeting place of the “foreign” and the “familiar” this article uses on the one hand contemporary representations of the displays in the Nordic Museum as resources to apprehend new presentation techniques. On the other hand, these “voices from abroad” may not only serve as an expression of encounters with historically, geographically or socially distant worlds, but do also offer access to forms of media popularization of images of the self and the other.

Schlagworte
museum display, exhibition techniques, images of the self and the other, Nordiska Museet, Stockholm