Culture, Health, and Religion at the Millennium

Sweden Unparadised

M. Demker, Y. Leffler, O. Sigurdson, M. Demker, Y. Leffler, O. Sigurdson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137472236
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The book presents interpretations of culture, health, politics, and religion in Sweden today, Sweden transforms from the well-functioning but existentially bland economic wonder to a more fragmented and gloomy society. Contributors include scholars from film studies, literary studies, political science, religious studies and theology

Chapter 1

Hygiene as Metaphor

On Metaphorization, Racial Hygiene, and the Swedish Ideals of Modernity

Ola Sigurdson

In his autobiographical account of growing up in the working-class neighborhoods of Gothenburg on the Swedish west coast, Ronny Ambjörnsson, a professor of the history of ideas, makes the following observation: “Mother fulfilled the commands of hygiene through frantic cleaning. Everything was polished and rubbed to surfaces so shiny that the germs slipped and swirled out through windows that were almost always open for airing. Light, air, and cleanliness became during the 1930s metaphors for enlightenment and rationality. Mother’s cleaning and father’s studies could be said to belong to the same sphere, two versions of the credo of modernism.”1 This observation is telling in more ways than one. First, Ambjörnsson establishes a connection between seemingly disparate but very mundane activities (such as cleaning and studying) and a certain cultural condition characterized by versions of enlightenment and rationality. Second, this juxtaposition is not incidental or provisional, but actually illustrates “the credo of modernism”—or in other words, a distinguishing belief of a certain period of Swedish modern history. This interrelationship between a domestic duty and a formative belief characterizing an age poses a question that is simultaneously philosophical and historical: how does hygiene work as a metaphor for the version of Swedish modernity that characterized the 1930s and beyond? If Ambjörnsson is correct in his characterization of the Swedish “credo of modernism”—and indeed, I think there is reason to believe he is—this would provide an important background to the image of Sweden presented and presumed in popular fiction (both then and now), promoted and implied in public policy, and disseminated as a norm in Swedish culture at large. Even when expressions of art, popular culture, policies, or religion wish to question this norm, its hegemonic status will more or less force any interrogations of its status to define themselves in terms of its scope. In relation to the aim of this book, then, this chapter will present an idea about the relation between hygiene and rationality that has been formative for the (self-)image of Sweden in recent history, in policies as well as public perceptions, and in modernist film as well as bestselling novels.

In what follows, I will take a critical look at Swedish self-understanding during the particular historical period of the 1930s and beyond through the lens of its use of hygiene as metaphor. This means that I will not only describe an influential historical idea but also critically discuss the ethical and political shortcomings of that idea. In other words, I will investigate a general question of how our terminology for health and disease takes on a more-than-literal meaning with a Swedish example. Swedish modernity, I think, amply shows some of the hazards involved in such a praxis. But first, let me turn to how Susan Sontag framed a similar question.

Hygiene as Metaphor: The Sontag Question

The distinction between illness and disease, even if it is sometimes helpful, is not absolute. Between the subjective experience of being ill and the biomedical symptoms of disease, there is almost always traffic—at least on the existential level. This is especially true if we consider the cultural representations of illness/disease as a third node in this spectrum of ill health. There are always (and almost always conflicting) cultural understandings of what good or ill health consists of, what kind of ill health deserves to be diagnosed, and also the relative cultural “value” of certain forms of ill health—not all diseases are considered equal. These cultural understandings of good and ill health are mediated to the public through advertisements, literature, movies, music, television series, and so on. Although not the topic of this chapter or this book, it would be interesting to ask what impact a medical drama, such as the American television series ER or House (both televised in Sweden), might have on the public perception of what to expect when treated for a medical condition at a hospital. The inquiry into how fictional narratives represent ill health is growing, and it is of great interest to medical students looking for case studies as well as anyone curious about where our perceptions of particular diseases come from.2 Just to mention one example from literature, consider how the German author Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain is an epic of tuberculosis: TB is placed as perhaps the romantic disease of the nineteenth century as well as a kind of diagnosis of modern society as a whole. TB in Magic Mountain becomes “metaphorized”: it is not just a diagnosis of a particular disease but an existential and societal condition. Today, this inevitably contextualizes Mann’s 1924 novel as a historical novel: after World War II, effective antibacterial treatments emerged, although people in many parts of the world still suffer from TB. Sanatorial treatments for TB, such as those described in Mann’s novel, are a thing of the past.

That there is traffic between different dimensions of the meaning of a particular disease also becomes a prominent phenomenon if one considers its social dimensions. The British anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her classic work Purity and Danger, has shown how the human body has historically functioned (and still does today) as a kind of symbolic system for the body politic and how threats against the social body are often described through metaphors coming from the medical vocabulary.3 In antiquity as well as in modern times, there exist plenty of conceptions of how personal health, cleanliness, and ill health influence society and vice versa. Not only the physical body of an individual but also the social body can be ill and demand resolute surgical interventions. The connection between individual and social health has to do, among other things, with the fact that the individual body is not as demarcated from the social body as we usually think it is, at least for those of us who have grown up in Western, individualistic societies with a strong emphasis on the autonomy of the person as well as the body. Consequently, it is not very surprising that there is a metaphorical interchange between personal and social levels of existence. For example, we could associate a flu that has struck us with a foreign army “invading” our body, or we can speak about how almost all of the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, was affected by “soccer fever” before the final game when IFK Göteborg won the Swedish football league on October 28, 2007. Such metaphors could be more or less morally or politically troubling—more so, for example, when a certain ethnic group is considered to be responsible for civic unrest and therefore is described as a “disease” spreading in the body politic. However, that there is a necessary and urgent critique of such metaphorizations should not blind us to the fact that such metaphorical traffic most likely always occurs on some level (sometimes in a more benign way, as I hope my soccer example shows), as it is not always possible to determine which sphere contains the legitimate literal meaning and which the more problematic transferred meaning.

Then again, that the traffic between literal and figurative meanings of disease might be inevitable, as I have already suggested, does not suggest that it is impossible to distinguish between their meanings. The American novelist and writer Susan Sontag, in her influential 1978 essay “Illness as Metaphor,” has emphatically criticized confusing metaphorical levels with each other, since it entails a metaphorization of ill health, as in the examples I just have mentioned—disease or illness as an expression of not only a biological but also a cultural or a spiritual condition—which can lead to the idea that we personally bear the responsibility for our ill health and therefore deserve our destiny.4 It would be better to limit the use of ill-health terminology to the biological and physical, thus avoiding placing the blame on sick people and causing them to feel guilty about their condition. Sontag’s prime examples are TB from the nineteenth century and cancer from the twentieth century, both diseases that have to a large extent been associated with personal traits of character (as Mann shows, self-consciously, in The Magic Mountain), thus creating a correspondence between the biological and the personal. “The most striking similarity between the myths of TB and cancer,” Sontag writes, “is that both are, or were, understood as diseases of passion.”5 She gives numerous examples from literature of how this correspondence has been expressed in writing, but despite the prominence of literature, it is not only in fiction that this attitude is common but also among people in general: “Sickness was a way of making people ‘interesting’—which is how ‘romantic’ was originally defined.”6 Cancer might not be as romantic as TB, but the disease is still associated with certain traits of character, mainly loneliness and discontent. It is, in this new mythology, negative feelings on the part of the sick that are associated with cancer. Cancer is also described in a terminology that suggests a “war” against the disease. What Sontag calls for, then, is a “demythologization” of disease. The reason for such a move is that, according to Sontag, “nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.”7 The metaphorization of disease or ill health—especially TB and cancer—leads, according to Sontag, to silence as well as shame on the part of patients, making them more reluctant to seek health care. If diseases, especially metaphorically highly charged diseases such as those mentioned, were allowed to be “just” diseases, then much would be won—the temptation of fatalism or fanaticism would be removed, along with the blame and guilt distributed to persons suffering from the diseases in question. Or as she put it on a later occasion, “metaphors and myths . . . kill.”8

As I have already implied, I think the reform suggested by Sontag is in practice impossible, and I must confess that I am a bit surprised that such a sensitive writer as Sontag does not have a more extended discussion on how metaphors work and how difficult it is, from a philosophical or a literary perspective, to draw a clear distinction between literal and figural uses of a term.9 It has been suggested that the historical evidence belies Sontag’s thesis: experiences of cancer were neither silenced nor particularly shameful compared to other lethal diseases.10 My objection is of another kind, as I want to suggest that it is hardly possible or desirable to get rid of metaphors as such, even in the medical field, as these are how we symbolically make sense of our illnesses. Nevertheless, the overall aim of Sontag’s book is of continuing importance—namely, to avoid blaming sick people for their diseases. Diseases are seldom self-induced, and it is a fact that we suffer diseases beyond our control. Thus there is a need to avoid any stigmatization of disease. Further, that the traffic between the literal and figurative sense can be hard to police in any absolute or final sense does not mean that distinctions cannot be drawn. For instance, the World Health Organization, in its definition of health, implicitly distinguishes between at least two dimensions—health as the absence of disease and health as well-being—and although these two dimensions belong together (not least in our personal experience), this does not mean that they are the same thing or cannot be separated, however provisionally. To achieve Sontag’s legitimate aim, then, we need a critical vigilance of the use of metaphors associated with ill health, but perhaps we also need to be a little more nuanced in our perception of the inevitable need for metaphors.

In this chapter, I will tweak the use of Sontag’s legitimate aim for slightly different purposes: I wish to take a closer look at different dimensions of the term hygiene as it figures in some seminal works of Swedish modernity. The term hygiene comes from the Greek hygies, which has rich connotations, one of these being “healthy.” In Greek mythology, Hygieia was the daughter of Asclepius, the god of medicine and healing, and she herself was the personification of health, cleanliness, and sanitation. There is, then, a clear relation between the metaphors of illness and disease and hygiene as a metaphor. The reason for choosing to focus on hygiene in this chapter is that this term has been central for the self-understanding of Swedish modernity, which I alluded to in the introduction and which I hope to demonstrate further. In a way, then, my investigation turns Sontag’s on its head: it is the social and cultural phenomenon of metaphorization that is at the center of this chapter, not the physical, even though my interest lies in the traffic between these different dimensions of human existence. Before I deal with two important Swedish works from the 1930s, one reportage and one more scientific text, I shall give a short background of the modernization of Sweden...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: How Gloomy Is Sweden at the Millennium?
• Chapter 1: Hygiene as Metaphor: On Metaphorization, Racial Hygiene, and the Swedish Ideals of Modernity
• Chapter 2: From Shared Resources to Shared Values
• Chapter 3: “It’s Not about Religion, but about Manipulation”: Polemical Discourse against Sects and Cults in Sweden
• Chapter 4: Something Happened, but What?: On Roy Andersson’s Cinematic Critique of the Development of the Welfare State
• Chapter 5: Sex and Sin in a Multicultural Sweden
• Chapter 6: Chick Lit as Healing and Self-Help Manual?
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors