On Parade
Making Heritage in Lindsborg, Kansas

By Lizette Graden
December 2003
Uppsala University Press
ISBN: 91-554-5724-X
260 pages, Illustrated, 6 ¼" x 9 ¼"
$52.50 Paper Original

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This book highlights Swedish cultural heritage in Lindsborg, a small town in Kansas with rural surroundings. The area around Lindsborg was a target for Swedish immigrants in the nineteenth century and developed to a center Swedish churches and organizations. In the United States, Lindsborg is widely known for its Svensk Hyllningsfest, a celebration of ethnic belonging that takes place every two years and engages large numbers of community members. The high peak of the festivities is the Svensk Hyllningfest Parade, a meticulously prepared public event that in recent years involved more than a hundred participating units marching through city center. The Hyllningfest Parade puts on display a variety of notions of Swedishness - also contradictory and subversive ones - to the large numbers of spectators, the majority of whom are visitors from out of town. In this study, based on ethnographic fieldwork, Lizette Graden of Stockholm University examines the enactment of the parade and how individuals living in the United States select and affirm concepts and phenomena as particularly Swedish. This is Graden's doctoral dissertation in ethnology.

Anthropology
Studia Multiethnica Upsaliensia No. 15

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