Paper short abstract:

The paper sheds light on Latvia’s contribution to the pan-European devotion to folk culture mapping during the interwar period. The national cultural political mission of the atlas project conflicted with the fact that that Swedish ethnologist Dag Trotzig was trusted the leading role in its implementation.

Paper long abstract:

This article sheds light on Latvia's "extensive and promising" (Erixon 1955) yet internationally still little known, contribution to the pan-European devotion to folk culture mapping of the interwar period - the "golden age" of ethnocartography (Schippers 2004). The project Latvju kultūras atlants (Atlas of Latvian Culture) had a short life: it was launched in November, 1939, announced to an international audience in 1940, interrupted in June of 1940 by the Soviet occupation for a year and resumed afterwards just for a couple of the WWII years when Latvia was under the Nazi rule. Yet, it has left a trace in the history of Latvian scholarship that is to be assessed not only in terms of practical accomplishments , but also with an eye to its political overtones and context of international scholarly exchange. Undertaken by an institution of the authoritarian regime - Rakstu un mākslas kamera (The Chamber of Letters and Art), the project had a cultural political mission that did not comply unproblematically with the fact that Dag Trotzig, a Swedish ethnologist working for the University of Latvia, was trusted the leading role that in turn implied the appropriation of a foreign model and basic working principles, those of Erixon's Atlas över svensk folkkultur.