Telling the forest from the trees: Local images of national change in a Danish town

Abstract

How can ethnographers see the ‘big picture’, while they are busy with everyday minutiae? Awareness of the local impacts of history and globalisation has revived debates about the pragmatics of fieldwork. Arguing that most fieldwork remains, for most practitioners, ‘local’, this paper explores how it is possible to apprehend change ethnographically. Something of how local people understand and experience change, as it happens to them and around them and as they contribute to it, can be grasped in ‘significant local imagery’, in this case, ‘significant people’, ‘significant things’, and ‘significant events’. These images are recognised in local discourse as indicative or ‘telling’ of change, and can be used to summarise analytically, and shed light on, wider vistas of change. This paper presents three local images deriving from fieldwork in a small town in mid-Jutland and uses them to tell a bigger story, a narrative about the modernisation of Danish society.

Keywords:

• Consumerism
• globalisation
• labour movement
• symbolism
• Denmark

Acknowledgments

The University of Sheffield funded most of the research through study leave, 1996–97. This paper has evolved from a public lecture for the Humanities Faculty of the University of Copenhagen, through a contribution to the recent history of Skive (Jenkins 2003), to presentations at the Universities of Oslo, Alberta and Bergen. I am particularly grateful to Nils Bubandt, John Aggergaard Larsen, Sharon Macdonald, Niels Mortensen, Jenny Owen, and Vibeke Steffen for their comments, and to the three, very thorough, reviewers for Ethnos, whose criticisms stimulated a rewrite that made this a much better paper.

Notes

1. The fieldwork lasted eleven months: ten months in 1996 – 97 and one in 1998. All translations from the Danish are mine.

2. Danish tv2 broadcast a documentary on the crowning of the King and Queen at Egeskov fair: Et D⊘gn i Danmark: Stodderkongens Hof, 3 October 1996.

3. In addition to Christian S⊘rensen, Else Theill S⊘rensen, and Erik Theill S⊘rensen, I am grateful to Esther Fihl, Inge Jensen, Benny M⊘ller, Gustav and Jelve M⊘ller, Jan Vester Nielsen, and Palle Toft for their recollections.

4. This is from a documentary about Fritz, made for tv MidVest by Lund Video. I am grateful to Christian S⊘rensen for allowing me to view his copy.

5. Since 1997 the photographic archive has expanded considerably. However, most of the new acquisitions date from recent decades and are unlikely to have implications for my conclusions.

6. These included royal occasions (sba = Skive byhistoriske Arkiv) (sba 908–b.332, King Christian ix and Queen Louise's golden wedding in 1892; sba 806–b.742, King Frederik vii's visit in 1908), or Christmas (sba 908–b.483, dated 1905–10).

7. For example, the 25th anniversary of the grocers Christensen and Olsen, Østergade 6, 1942 (sba 806–b.2150 [81a–883])

8. Such as the opening of Skive's first petrol station, N⊘rregade 42, in 1921 (sba 427a–5) or General Motors' exhibition on Østertorv, c. 1922 (sba 806–b.42, b.345).

9. For example, sba 806–b.98, b.1158 (118a–541), b.1159, b.2382 (81a–275), b.2766; sba 81a–440.

10. For N⊘rregade in 1972 see sba 908–b.203, b.496. For Adelgade in 1985 see sba 909–b.901; sba 1992/26–b.42.

11. sba 908–b.501, b.507, b.514; sba 910–b.1458; sba 1992/26–b.47; sba 994/29–b.426; sba 32a–65, 67 and 68.

12. sba 806–b.366, b.368, b.370, b.371, b.384, b.387; sba 908-b.497, b.505, b.515- 6; sba 919-b.1459.

13. sba 1918/62–b.2, b.3, b.10, b.19, b.21, b.22; sba 909–b.895.

14. sba 1988/56–b.122.

15. In sba 1992/61–b.29, at least fifty union standards are visible. See also sba 1978/ 10–b.2; sba 584–b.35 (118a–436); sba 1978/10–b.1.

16. I use this expression differently to the geographers and others who have looked at the symbolic representation of landscape (e.g. Cosgrove 1998), referring to a material environment that is full of symbols, symbolically indexed and annotated, and part of the ‘symbolic construction of community’ (Cohen 1985; Jenkins 2004: 108 –23).