The Danish cultural world of unbridgeable differences

Abstract

This article looks at the contestation of foreign presence in Denmark from the perspective of popular consciousness. I infer the cultural world of Danish host and non-Danish guests from a pool of 55 in-depth interviews about multicultural issues. In this culturally figured world the guests are constructed as widely different cultural bearers who refuse to downplay their cultural markers, therefore upsetting the guests. According to this reasoning, the racial outburst of the hosts is caused solely by the unruly guests. Blaming the guests for creating racist responses, I contend, can best be understood as a naturalization of racism. This denial of racism in the popular sphere builds on the same culturalist construction of unbridgeable differences between a ‘we-group’ of ‘alike’ (or invisible) Danes and a visible ‘out group’ that dominates both popular and political understandings of immigrants and refugees in Denmark in the end of the 1990s.

Keywords:

• Denmark
• new racism
• figured worlds
• tolerance

Acknowledgments

This article was originally presented at the 6th EASA conference in Krakow, 2000.Parts of the paper have also been presented at the 100th Annual Meeting of theAmerican Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., 2001, at the Univer-sity of Bergen, University of Oslo, University of Stockholm, and the Universityof Copenhagen. I wish to thank the audiences for questions and comments. Inparticular I would like to thank Don Kulick, Louise Lamphere, Marianne Gulle-stad, Ulla Fadel, Rikke Egaa Jørgensen, Dorothy Holland, two anonymous re-viewers, and John Rouse for language revision.

Notes

The Turks make up the largest group with 50,000, followed by Bosnians 20,000, Lebanese 19,000, Pakistani 19,000, Iraqis 18,000, Ex-Yugoslavians 17,000, and Somalis 16,000 (Ministry of Interior 2001).

The material for analysis for both this article and the earlier work comes from a 2 1/2-year research project funded by the Danish Social Science Research Council bearing the title ‘Structuring Diversity: Danish Responses to Emerging Multiculturalism’ and carried out from August 1996 until December 1999. In the project, among other research tasks, we (twelve research assistants and anthropology students) interviewed 55 people from 1 to 3 hours in the form of ‘naturalized conversations.’ We also studied how nationally circulating Danish newspaperschose to present multicultural groups and the issue of emerging multiculturalism in Denmark.

For him, a discourse is a way of constituting and constructing areas of knowledge, social subjects, forms of self', social relations and conceptual frameworks (Foucault 1972; Fairclough 1992)

Social claims about Denmark's tolerance arise whenever issues of racial discrimination come into the public sphere. However, the discourse of neo-racism is strong and dominant, whereas the talk of tolerance appears as what is supposed to be said or what one wishes were true (see Hervik forthcoming).

Problems caused by the Somali presence appear as natural, but actually this isthe result of a process of emotional appeals by mayors in the Social Democratic Party. Four of these were quoted in four similar stories in the newspapers about the ‘annoying’ Somalis (Fadel, Hervik, & Vestergaard 1999).

Figured worlds are much like Bourdieu's concept of habitus, they tend to change at different speeds and follow different principles than discourses, although Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain have convincingly shown that people do have a capacity for self-objectification, and can change part of it. On the other hand, it is important to see understandings not as motivating the actor in any one direction, but rather, as Marshall Sahlins has pointed out, as raw material from which to act.

This progression is not to be misunderstood as a standard that dictates rules for behavior but rather the result of experiencing regularities that then become first clues to understanding a given situation.

A discussion of social categories used for the ethnic minorities is omitted here, but see Hervik (1999a).

The concept of home refers to the private, intimate sphere where people eat and sleep, but is extended to the nation as a home or homeland; in nationalist rhetoric the home used for the nation, stresses who belongs and who does not (see also Gullestad 1997 who is carrying out her research in Norway).

In the 1970s ‘guest’ was even part of the categorization used, i.e., guestworker.

This type of reasoning was also used in shaping the policy for housing refugees and for the Integration Act.

The asymmetric relationship between residents and newcomers rests on what Katherine Nelson called an event schema or script (Nelson 1981). Such schemas are ‘scripts, which specify the appropriate people who participate in an event, the social roles they play, the objects that are used, and the sequences of actions and causal relations that apply’ (Holland & Cole 1995:479).