Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on how "culture" became an important argument in political and public debate in Switzerland between 1930 and 1960 and argues for historical research on the production context and their close relatedness to political developments of these still today used "reservoirs of knowledge".

Paper long abstract:

All over Europe, scientific interest in every-day culture and traditions gained not only increasing interest but also government funding during the 1930s. This resulted in various - mostly national - attempts of researching and collecting "culture" in tradition archives.

The paper takes the research material of Richard Weiss (1907-1962), first professor for Volkskunde at the University of Zürich, and the collections of the Atlas der schweizerischen Volkskunde, started in the middle of 1930s as a counter-project to the German Volkskunde-Atlas, to show how "culture" became an important argument in political and public debate in Switzerland. It was through the collected knowledge in these archives, that Volkskunde gained an enhanced status in the 1930s and could serve the demand for a defense against the foreign political threats of Nazism and fascism and even briefly became a "minor" Leitwissenschaft as a legitimizing authority for cultural diversity in Switzerland against chauvinistic racial ideologies. It still is this close relatedness to political developments that today transforms the tradition archives into reservoirs of knowledge for current political attempts of collecting "culture" - now in the wake of "intangible cultural heritage" by UNESCO.

The paper argues for increased historical research on the production context of these "reservoirs of knowledge". It is only in this way, that we can meet the challenges of political usability of tradition archives and of the immanent power in these collected knowledge.