Sjæklen 2017

49 Litteraturliste • Drechsel, C.F.: Oversigt over vore Saltvandsfiskerier, Kbh. 1890. • Hjorth Rasmussen, Alan: Mens græsset gror… Handels- og Søfartsmuseets årbog 1981, s. 241-250 • Hjorth Rasmussen, Alan: Drivvod i Danmark – Dansk fiskeri i stilstand og mobilitet I & II, Fiskeri- og Søfartsmuseet i Esbjerg 1988. • Højrup, Thomas: Dannelsens dialektik , Museum Tusculanums Forlag 2002. • Stoklund, Bjarne: Etnologiske lokalstudier. Fortid og Nutid XXVIII 1979. • Stoklund, Bjarne: Tingenes kulturhistorie . Museum Tusculanums Forlag 2003. • Bjarne Stoklund: Etnologiske lokalstudier. Fortid og Nutid XXVIII 1979, s. 26-34. • Witt, Torben: Hvad med Museerne, Forlaget Wormianum 1977. • Wohlfahrt, Eske: Pennalhuset – fartøj og fiskeri på Limfjorden , Esbjerg 1987. Summary Constructivism, drag seining for eel – and love This article is inspired by the author’s conversation with an old fisherman who was a mine of information. He could recount full details of the conflict between fishermen and fisheries control that dominated the Limfjord in the first decades of the 20th cen- tury – a conflict that confirmed the author’s thesis of an under- lying structure that is crucial to our understanding of fishing on the Limfjord. It was therefore a very satisfied author (who was then the newly appointed head of the Limfjord Museum) who, after the interview, remembered to ask the important question about whether the fisherman had himself experienced what he described. No, was the disappointing answer – he had read it in a book from the Fisheries and Maritime Museum! For the author this experience remains an important eye- opener. Thanks to the Fisheries and Maritime Museum in Es- bjerg, he realised that museums do not only disseminate object- ive information about history. They also create history – history understood as reports of a bygone past, but shaped to cater for today’s needs. The article goes on to discuss a survey of the introduction of drag seining for eel conducted by the Director of the Fisheries and Maritime Museum, Alan Hjorth Rasmussen, in 1975. The survey illustrates how at that time ethnological museums in Denmark abandoned the previous cultural history paradigm, which involved thorough analysis of an object in order to arrive at a general understanding of the development of culture over time and/or space. In the new Anglo-Saxon-inspired paradigm, the professional focus shifted from the object as a separate en- tity to the social context (of which the object was a part). Thus object studies were replaced in the 1970s by numerous local studies. At the same time the number of newly collected objects in the museums was falling. It was also during this period that the Danish museums began to shift from object registration to case documentation. The aim of this museum history is to highlight the problem faced by the museums of today – including the Fisheries and Maritime Museum. On the one hand, they are tied to the ob- ject, since it is precisely the three-dimensional materiality of the object that distinguishes museums from libraries and archives. On the other hand, the theoretical approach that justifies and legitimises museum collections has moved on from the object, which is now largely used by the ethnological and historical mu- seums simply for illustrative purposes. The article concludes with some words of the now deceased director of the Old Town open air museum in Aarhus, Erik Kjersgaard, who said “Museums are like children – they are both born out of love”. Or at least, Kjersgaard might have explained, museums are the result of a passionate belief in the relevance of a story that should be told. The good museum is the museum that aims to tell an important story and uses the museum as a means of telling it. But the good museum is also popular, so that over time it becomes an attraction in which aim and means are easily confused: the continued survival of the attraction be- comes the aim, the important story the means. The art – and one that is so finely mastered by the Fisheries and Maritime Mu- seum – involves finding the right balance between museum and attraction without ever losing sight of the good story.