Although more museums are opening now than at any time in the past, too little attention has been paid to the concrete ways in which cultural processes of commoditisation affect heritage production. How can collections speak to wider audiences as well as to local communities in ways that are economically sustainable? This is not a question that invites simple solutions. Turning to ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article focuses on The Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle and Skokloster Castle near Stockholm to explore how these institutions negotiate public participation, engage new audiences, and adapt their operations to meet the demands of the cultural economy they operate in. Drawing on critical cultural theory, the article highlights how different cultural and economic contexts affect museums’ potential to develop, expand, and meet their objectives. The study explains how two particular museums struggle to open their collections to broader publics, which can be understood as part of a wider process of democratisation.

This article elaborates on the embodiment of heritage via dressing practices in several rural and urban Nordic communities in the United States. Getting dressed is a shared human practice that we engage in and repeat most days, and for special occasions, traditional dress, or folk costume, comes into particular focus. I approach dressing in folk costume as a "situated embodied practice," a mode of performance that exposes the way value judgments of the body are informed by societal notions of dress, with body and dress understood as socially constructed entities that shape each other. Based on attention to an embodied heritage that women create, make, view, discuss, and wear, I suggest that folk costumes from Sweden and its neighboring countries are increasingly individualized in the United States; that traditional dress is in fashion; and that garments, patterns, materials, and designs are used to illustrate complex family trees, places of belonging, and key experiences in life. and she would tell me how it took several months to make it, and it's, as you can see (touching the woolen embroidery), that would take quite a while, and then when it was all finished, they presented it to her, and she wore it at the next festivity. Well she was much shorter; I'm five [feet] ten [inches] and she was five [feet] two [inches].

This article focuses on two institutions, the American Swedish Institute and the Nordic Heritage Museum that have spent the first part of the twenty-first century thinking and rethinking what the heritage under their auspices can be. In doing this, the text problematizes the manner in which elements of Nordic history and identity are being re-thought and re-framed in the cultural and economic context of the American heritage market. The article asks, how is heritage affected when it is increasingly framed as a marketable commodity? As part of the analysis the article discusses the manner in which these museums are intensively and consciously striving to be cool and chic, but even trend and fashion sensitive as they position themselves in the growing and competitive market of what we call hip heritage.

This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork and applies theories of crafting and performance to explore how living heritage practices are rethought, reframed, and refashioned when traditional dress and individual garments are moved, reorganized, and transformed into a collection following rationales derived from both family tradition and museum standards. By following one woman’s emerging collections, the study sheds light on ways of materializing relationships and shaping curatorial agency through acts of crafting. The study aims to show how deeper understanding of vernacular crafting of collections may inform institutional curatorial practice and heritage-making.

Ever since the emigration from the Nordic countries the Old world and the New world have maintained an exchange of ideas, customs, and material culture. This cultural heritage consists of more than remnants of the past. Drawing on theories of material culture and performance this article highlights the role of gifts in materializing relationships between individuals, families and organizations in the wake of migration. First, I build on a suggested coinage of the term heritage gifts as a way of materializing relationships. Thereafter, I map out the numerous roles which a Swedish bridal crown play in the United States: as museum object, object of display and loaned to families for wedding ceremonies in America. The transfers and transformations of the bridal crown enhances a drama of a migration heritage. This dynamic drama brings together kin in Sweden and America and maps specific locations into a flexible space via the trajectory of crown-clad female bodies.