| Summary: | This paper analyses – via a case study of Gabriel Djurklou’s Ur Nerikes folkspråk och folklif – the late 19th century regional Swedish cultural heritage discourse, which in the context of nationalism aimed to define an identity and evoke a sense of national kinship. The study focuses on how the use of history served to establish a conception of Swedishness based upon a specific, symbolic idea about the landscape; an idea that included aspects of both culture and nature. Michel Foucault’s theory of power and archaeological method is used to illustrate how the discourse selectively composed an idealistic national image by including certain objects and excluding others, how it determined which relational positions its subject could take in regards to other subjects and the discursive objects, and how subjects were created through a process of objectification. The idea of national identity embraced the rural landscape and peasantry, and it was spread via textual descriptions of the regional landscapes. The paper concludes that the discourse gained and exerted power through its texts, and the analysis illustrate specific ways in which history was used to evoke the sense of kinship by creating an idea about national identity.
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