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BY-NC-ND 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2022

Amateur Eugenics: The “Great-Mother in Dalecarlia” Genealogy Project and the Collaboration Between the Swedish Institute for Race Biology and the General Public, 1930‒1935

From the book History of Intellectual Culture 1/2022

  • Måns Ahlstedt Åberg

Abstract

This is a paper about the knowledge-circulation that took place between the Swedish Institute for Race Biology in Uppsala and the general public in Sweden between 1930 and 1935. It focuses on a genealogical survey of the descendants of “Great-Mother in Dalecarlia,” a seventeenth-century woman who was the progenitrix of many prominent families in Swedish history. It argues that a promising line of inquiry within the field of the history of knowledge is a more systematic approach to studying how traditional academically trained elites, like eugenicists, have cooperated with members of the public. The main conclusion is that the “Great-Mother” project was not a question of a simple diffusion of knowledge from institute to society but rather was a reciprocal process of knowledge circulation between centre and periphery.

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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