Ingvar Svanberg

Uppsala University | UU · Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies

Hunting mushrooms for food is a recent activity in Scandinavia (Norway and Sweden). No mushroom species were used by the peasantry for food in pre-industrial times. In fact, the rural population had a deep-rooted distrust of fungi. Although mushrooms were visible in the landscape (forests, meadows) which were used for other purposes by peasants, hu...

Dried and fermented mutton has been an essential storable protein source in an economy where weather conditions and seasonal fluctuations affect the availability of food. For generations, the Faroe islanders have prepared ræstkjøt (fermented and semidried mutton) and skerpikjøt (dried mutton) as an efficient and valuable cultural strategy for prese...

Wild edible plants, particularly berries, are relevant nutritional elements in the Nordic countries. In contrast to decreasing global trends, approximately 60% of the Finnish population is actively involved in (berry) foraging. We conducted 67 interviews with Finns and Karelians living in Finnish Karelia to: (a) detect the use of wild edible plants...

Masterwort, Peucedanum ostruthium (L.) Koch, is an Apiaceae species originally native to the mountain areas of central and southern Europe. Written sources show that it was used in northern Europe. This study explores the cultivation history of masterwort and its past use in Sweden. Although only few details are known about the history of this taxo...

t This study presents a brief inquiry into the human-canine relationship among the Tyvan pastoralists in the Altai�Sayan Mountainous region of Inner Asia. Their co-evolution is intimately bound together, and the inter-species relationship includes several aspects and roles. The authors investigate especially the dogs’ responsibilities in taiga and...

Fishing is one of humankind’s oldest economic activities. Bare-hand fishing is possibly the oldest method and was also used by early hominids. The technique is still practised today, especially by children and young people. During the 19th and 20th centuries, bare-hand fishing was mainly used to catch spawning roach and trout swimming up streams an...

De samer vilka genom centraldirigering kom att bofastgöras i södra Norrland, senare också i Dalarna och nordvästra Uppland, kom att kallas ”sockenlappar” i kyrkoarkivalier, en beteckning som skapades i analogi med beteckningar för andra sockenhantverkare. Från 1680-talet hade socknarna rätt att anta skomakare och skräddare och det kom under 1700-ta...

In this chapter, we have attempted to highlight diverse aspects of the canids in Eastern Turkestan. We have focused especially on healing and various life-cycle rituals where these animals play an important role. Besides healing, which we have discussed at length here, the canids, in particular the dog, served multiple purposes in the day-to-d...

Large graminoid species, which often dominate wetland ecosystems with extensive and dense formations, are among the most indicative plants from the first human settlements, where they have been used (even transformed) for various functions ranging from food, cordage, weaving and other utilities. Wetland large graminoid foraging today represents one...

Human interest in certain plants can vary considerably over time. At the end of the twentieth century, the orange-yellow fruits of sea buckthorn, Hippophae rhamnoides Linnaeus, became a trendy addition to the diet in some Nordic countries, especially in Sweden and Finland. The soft and juicy fruits are very rich in vitamin B12, C and E, and this fa...

Introduction Modern sports equipment is nowadays manufactured industrially according to globally accepted and standardized models, but traditionally tools for play and games were prepared from materials found in the local environment. The objective of this article is to investigate various aspects of Sámi local knowledge about organisms used for th...

Background While the utilitarian crops grown in vicarage gardens in pre-industrial Sweden have been fairly well documented, our knowledge of plants cultivated for food among the peasants and crofters is limited. Nevertheless, garden vegetables and herbs played a much more important role in the diet of the rural population from a nutritional point o...

Artikel i Dragomanen 2021: Fredrik Hasselquist (1722–1752) var en av flera begåvade Uppsalastudenter som läromästaren Linné sände ut från Sverige i vetenskapligt syfte. Hasselquists uppgift var att kartlägga, beskriva och namnge hela världens växt- och djurarter, men också att notera geologisk, hydrologisk, geografisk, etnografisk, demografisk och...

Presently, collecting data through citizen science (CS) is increasingly being used in botanical , zoological and other studies. However, until now, ethnobotanical studies have underused CS data collection methods. This study analyses the results of the appeal organized by the physician Dr. Mihkel Ostrov (1863-1940), which can be considered the firs...

In this article, which should be seen as a contribution to knowledge and research in the �eld of ethnoichthyology, the authors attempt to shed light on the cultural and linguistic dimensions as�sociated with the catching of smelt, Osmerus eperlanus (L., 1758). The folk terminology used in this context helps enhance our understanding of how the spec...

Abstract: Documentation of the utilization of trees among Turkic-speaking communities in Eastern Turkestan is sparse. This article explores the Elaeagnus angustifolia L. which historically had numerous functions and uses among Eastern Turkestani sedentary Muslims and which still plays an important role in the day-to-day life of Uyghurs. This tree,...

A Barbary lion lived in the University of Uppsala Botanical Garden, administered by Carl Peter Thunberg, at the beginning of the 1800s. Barbary lions are now extinct. “Thunberg’s” lion was stuffed and is today found in the Museum of Evolution collections in Uppsala.

European dewberry, Rubus caesius L. (fam. Rosaceae), played an insignificant role as local food in Sweden before the twentieth century. It is known as salmbär 'Solomon berries' in the severely endangered regional language Gutnish, spoken in the Baltic Sea islands Gotland and Fårö. From a largely ignored food product with limited regional use, Euro-...

The southern Siberian Turkic groups were mostly unknown to outsiders when the Swedish scientist Johan Peter Falck (1732–1774) visited their settlements in the early 1770s. Falck led one of the expeditions dispatched between 1768 and 1774 by the Russian Academy of Sciences to different parts of the Russian Empire. As a botanist, zoologist, ethnograp...

Insects as food show a large variation in traditional use over the world. This high variation between countries in combination with current ideas of insects as part of a solution to feed a growing global population raises interesting questions. The aim of this paper is to investigate what has been perceived as food historically and how this changes...

Since ecological and climatic conditions limit the possibilities for cereal production, the old-established Faroese traditional food system is principally based on the utilization of animal protein and fat. The diet of the islanders has thus been adapted to the specific environmental circumstances of the area. Historically, fat has provided a high...

Cattle are one of human’s most important and common domesticated production animals. Today they are distributed all over the world. At present it is estimated that there exists more than 1.5 billion cows globally. Livestock farming with cows is conducted in a number of different climate and ecological zones. Cattle and agricultural culture was intr...

A postcard, showing a parakeet in Uppsala from 1750, is a watercolour pencil drawing by Otto Fredric Richman. The article discusses the painting and exotic birds, especially parakeets, in Sweden and Europe since the 1500s.

Linnean disciple Frederick Hasselquist's journey to the Ottoman Empire around 170. The richly illustrated essays in Turcologica Upsaliensia tell the stories of scholars, travellers, diplomats and collectors who made discoveries in the Turkic-speaking world while affiliated with Sweden’s oldest university, at Uppsala.

Bu makale 19. yüzyılın sonları, 20. yüzyılın başları ve günümüzde Doğu Türkistan'da balıkların önemi ve birçok kullanım alanı hakkında bazı bilgiler sunmaktadır. Birkaç akademik makale dışında, çoğunlukla Loplik ve Dolan dışında Türk dili konuşan Doğu Türkistan Müslümanları arasında balıkla ilgi çok az yayın yapılmıştır. Orta Asya'daki yabancı araş...

Background Many freshwater fish species that were earlier appreciated by consumers have disappeared in the central, north and west European foodways. Although they were regarded as healthy and tasty, commercially captured marine species and highly processed products have nowadays replaced these fishes. The global transformations of the food system...

Hippophagy is still unthinkable in many European countries, but in the Mishär Tatar culinary tradition, horsemeat products play an important role. Part of the Mishär Tatars, originally from Nizhny Novgorod province (Russia), migrated to the eastern Baltic Sea region in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They continued to slaughter horses a...

Background Fishing is probably one of the oldest economic activities in the history of humankind. Lakes, rivers and streams in Europe are important elements in the European landscape with a rich diversity of fish and other aquatic organisms. Artisanal fisheries have therefore been of great importance for the provision of food, but also animal feed,...

Toponyms and hydronyms encode important information about human perceptions of the environment in a specific context. This article discusses the Loptuq, a group of Turkic-speakers, who until the 1950s lived as fishers-foragers at the Lower Tarim River, Eastern Turkestan (contemporary Xinjiang, China), and their use of common reed (Phragmites austra...

Introduction: Southernwood, Artemisia abrotanum L., is a plant that has been cultivated for centuries. Most probable is that it has its origin in the eastern Mediterranean area. It has been kept for its fragrance and has a history of being a medicinal and insect-repellent plant. In earlier centuries, the plant was commonly found in peasants' garde...

Background: The relationship between humans and insects goes long back and is important. Insects provide a multitude of ecosystem services for humans, e g. by pollinating crops and decomposing matter. Our current knowledge about the cultural ecosystem services that insects provide is limited and not much examined. Method: Scattered ethnographica...

Abstract Only a handful freshwater fish species are still commercially sought after in Sweden. Subsistence fishing in lakes and rivers is also rare nowadays and has in general been replaced by recreational fishing. However, fishing for European smelt, Osmerus eperlanus (L.), once popular in many areas of central Sweden, has survived into the twenty...

Ethnomycology is the study of the bio-cultural aspects of human-fungal interactions. This article discusses the involvement of the bracket fungus Fomitopsis betulina within the material culture of traditional games. With a particular focus on the Nordic countries, the aim is to review and analyze the use of simple balls made of bracket fungi. We ar...

Background: The pre-industrial diet of the Swedish peasantry did not include mushrooms. In the 1830s some academic mycologists started information campaigns to teach people about edible mushrooms. This propaganda met with sturdy resistance from rural people. Even at the beginning of the last century, mushrooms were still only being occasionally eat...

This article sets out to discuss the material culture of traditional physical education from an ethnobiological point of view. The focus is on the use of reed, Phragmites australis Trin. ex Steud., club-rush, Schoenoplectus lacustris L., inflated skins and animal bladders when making buoyancy devices used by children and adolescents for learning to...

This interdisciplinary study discusses the vernacular phytonyms and other ethnobiological aspects of vegetation in the Loptuq (Loplik) habitat on the Lower Tarim River. This small Turkic-speaking group lived as fisher-foragers in the Lopnor (Lop Lake) area in East Turkestan, now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. Information about this...

Introduction: White bryony, Bryonia alba L., is a relatively little known plant in the history of folk medicine and folk botany in eastern and northern Europe. The main aim of this article is to bring together data about Bryonia alba and to summarise its cultural history and folk botanical importance in eastern and northern Europe. Nowadays, this...

In the Swedish province of Dalecarlia in the middle of nineteenth century, the practice of eating onions during the church services was still common. The custom was observed by several visitors and was sometimes described as barbaric and the smell hard to bear. Still the women of the region seem to have appreciated the taste and aroma. The authors...

Research in historical ethnobiology can provide us with information about little known and seemingly quite insignificant practices in the past. The utilization of insect products as foodstuff is a rare custom in Europe and data on this are scarce. From the Nordic countries, we have information about producing ant schnapps with the help of the red w...

This article is a review of the historical use of the wolf lichen, Letharia vulpina (L.) Hue, in the Scandinavian Peninsula. Although it is well known in the lichenological literature as a poision for killing wolves and foxes, few ethnographic data are available. However, thanks to Linnaeus's very brief description from 1755, based on data from Nor...

This study focuses on the use of polypores in northern Fennoscandia, especially the now rare Haploporus odorus, which was once used by Sami and Swedish peasantry in the north. However, other taxa that were culturally salient are also discussed. Polypores have been used for health-related, technical and other purposes. The use of some of the taxa, s...

Bird-keeping as pest control, chiefly in Siberia and Central Asia. Volume edited by Ingvar Svanberg and Daniel Möller.

Foraging is regarded as the most ancient human way of living, but it is hardly believable that all contemporary groups identified as hunter-gatherers possess a continuous history as foragers. Cases of former foraging societies who have been forced into marginalized castes or become integrated into the majority population are widely known, yet only...

Central Asian wildmen traditions can be divided into two main lines: Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, which as well as Chinese Central Asia seem to belong to the same tradition. This line is close to Tibetan and Chinese wildmen beliefs. Tajikistan and the Pamir Mountains belong to another cultural area, which is connected to Iranian and Indian...

Leeches and their medicinal applications are well-studied in history. In Scandinavia the use of medicinal leeches for therapy is mentioned already by Olaus Magnus in his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555). Carl Linnaeus named the species Hirudo medicinalis. In the 1760s leeches became widely accepted as a medicament and the demand increa...

Artikeln utgör en bearbetning av mitt föredrag " Ethnoichthyology: a neglected field within European ethnobiology " hållet vid forskningsseminariet " From historical studies to neglected fields in ethnobiology and ethnoecology " den 3–4 december 2016, Polish Ethnological Society , Wrocław, Polen. Citatet i titeln är hämtat ur en vårdikt av Lasse Lu...

In the 18th Century, the domestic goat was still a common animal in Sweden. Goats were modest in their demands and were affordable even by the poor in the society. The peasantry kept goats mainly as dairy animals, but also as a source of meat, blood, fat, horn, bone, hair, skin, urine and manure, all useful Products in rural society. Some products,...

Ethnolinguistic studies are important for understanding an ethnic group's ideas on the world, expressed in its language. Comparing corresponding aspects of such knowledge might help clarify problems of origin for certain concepts and words, e.g. whether they form common heritage, have an independent origin, are borrowings, or calques. The current s...

Under förra hälften av 1900-talet var det bara ett litet antal kvinnor som på en mer avancerad nivå ägnade sig åt akademiska studier i folklivsforskning. En av dem var Märta Hedlund (1913–1944), som ingick i kretsen kring professor Sigurd Erixon och hans seminarium vid Stockholms högskola. Märta Hedlund var en framstående fältforskare och etnolog,...

Feral and wild rabbits were not established in Sweden until the early twentieth century, although some attempts have been made in the second half of the previous century to introduce it as a game animal. Today there are wild rabbits in the southern-most provinces of Skåne, Blekinge, Halland and the island Gotland. Th riving feral city populations h...

How were fishponds introduced, farmed and spread in Scandinavia and the Baltic Region in early modern times? What was their economic, social and religious importance? Which fish species were significant and why? This book uncovers a long, now broken, tradition that barely left traces in the written record or physical environment. Its broad and mult...

This article discusses animals as royal gifts on the basis of an example of a polar bear Swedish King Karl XI received in 1685, which reflected the diplomatic changes in the Swedish-Russian relationship. Polar bears have been used as diplomatic gifts since Medieval times and wild animals in general much longer. Nowadays practices changed and more e...

Background There is scarce information about European folk knowledge of wild invertebrate fauna. We have documented such folk knowledge in three regions, in Romania, Slovakia and Croatia. We provide a list of folk taxa, and discuss folk biological classification and nomenclature, salient features, uses, related proverbs and sayings, and conservatio...

Ett ödesdigert menageribesök i Uppsala 1903 INGVAR SVANBERG Måndagen den 2 november 1903 förberedde Cuneos menageri, som då hade vistats en dryg månad i Uppsala, sin avresa till nästa destination Stockholm från järnvägssta-tionen. I samband med hanteringen och ilastningen av de många djuren inträffade plötsligt en tragisk olycka. Djuren skulle få v...

For the rural population in Sweden, fishing in lakes and rivers was of great importance until recently. Many fish species served as food or animal fodder, or were used to make glue and other useful products. But the receding of lakes in the nineteenth century, and the expansion of hydropower and worsening of water pollution in the twentieth, contri...

In Muslim Tatar Minorities in the Baltic Sea Region, edited by Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund, the contributors introduce the history and contemporary situation of these little known groups of people that for centuries have been part of the religious and ethnic mosaic of this region. The book has a broad and multi-disciplinary scope and cover...

Tatar diaspora in Sweden. Series: Muslim Minorities, Volume: 20. Volume Editors: Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund In Muslim Tatar Minorities in the Baltic Sea Region, edited by Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund, the contributors introduce the history and contemporary situation of these little known groups of people that for centuries have be...

Ayvalık town is a traditional and urban formation that is of the outcome of centuries of optimization of material use, construction techniques and climate considerations, that the traces of the Greek architecture is seen. In this study, traditional building designs having various typology is evaluated. It is concerned with the layout of the buildin...

During the Lapland tour in 1732, Car Linnaeus discovered so-called spittle-bugs outslide PiteåHe in northern Sweden. He also rendered the Swedish folk name of the foam nest made of this smal insect. The article deals with the traditional knowledge of this small creature in Sweden and elsewhere in Scandinavia.

Starting with the seven mounted wolf dog puppies that were inserted into the exhibitions in the Swedish Museum of Natural History in 1903, the article explores how hybrids were exhibited in zoological exhibitions in the period 1900–1930. There was scientific interest among zoologists in hybrids that arose between two different taxa and an interest...

Background Fish has played an important role in the diet of the population of the mid-Atlantic Faroe Islands. Dried and fermented fish in particular have been an essential storable protein source in an economy where weather conditions and seasonal fluctuations affect the availability of food. For generations the islanders have prepared ræstur fisku...

Gulls are one of the most familiar and successful groups of birds, usually found in shorelines and other aquatic habitats across the world. They are rather large birds, usually grey or white, and numbering around 54 species. They have always been of limited interest for private aviculturalists, but in the last century they were still widely kept in...

The article discusses the presence of orangutans in European and Scandinavian captivity. An attempt to import an orangutan to Sweden by Claës Fredrik Hornstedt in 1785 failed – the ape died on the way from Java. Some zoos in Europe kept orangutans in the nineteenth century, but most of them were short-lived in captivity and only during the early tw...

Sweden has known Tatars since the 16th century, but Tatars immigrated from Finland and Estonia mainly in the second half of the 20th century. The Mishär Tatar group is very small, less than a hundred persons, but it took the initiative to form the first Muslim congregation in Sweden in 1949. Today the Tatars have integrated and there is not much ho...

Sweden has known Tatars since the 16th century, but Tatars immigrated from Finland and Estonia mainly in the second half of the 20th century. The Mishär Tatar group is very small, less than a hundred persons, but it took the initiative to form the first Muslim congregation in Sweden in 1949. Today the Tatars have integrated and there is not much ho...

Although once popular prior to the last century, the aquaculture of crucian carp Carassius carassius (L. 1758) in Sweden gradually fell from favour. This is the first genetic comparison of crucian carp from historic man-made ponds in the Scandinavian Peninsula. The aim was to identify old populations without admixture and to compare the relationshi...

Linnean disciple Johan Peter Falck's journeys from an ethnobiological perspective. Volume edited by Ingvar Svanberg and Łukasz Łuczaj.

This essay, which is the fifth in the series “Recollections, Reflections, and Revelations: Personal Experiences in Ethnobiology”, is a personal reminiscence by the researcher on his first field experience in Turkey in the late 1970s, which was a failure from an ethnobiological point of view but a success for a social scientist pursuing Turkic studi...

In 1520 the Bridgettine priest Petrus Magni (1460–1534), wrote a manual on agriculture.The manuscript, in Late Old Swedish, is to a large extent taken from Columella’s De re rustica with many additions. At the end of the manual there is a brief chapter on making and keeping ponds for crucian carp (Carassius carassius) and tench (Tinca tinca). Aquac...