Contribution short abstract:

Levi Johansson, one of the great folklife collectors of Sweden, honoured at home in the northern mountains, by The Institute for Language and Folklore Uppsala, PhD h.c. – but detested where he was a schoolmaster, according to records from the 1990s.

Contribution long abstract:

The representativity of the interviewer Levi Johansson calls for more knowledge of the person and his life as a schoolteacher. In summer vacations, a recorder of folklife in writing, he worked for half a century in his home community among the settlers in on the mountain border as well as in extensive parts of northern Sweden. Starting as a shepherd boy at nine around 1890, he was trained to become a schoolteacher in another distant community. Beside his autobiography, little was known, until the librarian Roland Tiger collected memories of him in the 1990s, revealing his double life. As much as the folklife recorder was appreciated in the mountain village and the academy, the teacher was disliked in the school municipality. Researchers before me have been puzzled by his interest in hygiene and sexualia, matters turning the interviewer into an interrogator. Problems to be considered: hunt for inbreeding, maltreatment of children, obsession of hygiene and sexual matters in his fieldwork, whenever opportunity. This led me to discover his hunt for inbreeding damages during the 1920s, when documenting Folk Types in field-notes, like any mainstream researcher in those days. But in 1947, when his book on the settlement and livelihood of his home community, was published, that chapter is fortunately missing, removed – by himself or the editor. At stake is the ethical consideration if there is an avail to reveal his dark side, justified for the purpose of representation knowledge, for the need to know the interviewer as a person.