The ‘distant war’ up close and personal: approximating Afghanistan at the Danish Arsenal Museum

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the crafting of trustworthy knowledge about war as tensioned between ideals of distance and proximity. I draw on field material assembled at the Danish Arsenal Museum in Copenhagen over the spring and summer of 2013. In an exhibition entitled The Distant War, set up in close cooperation with the Danish armed forces and with actual involvement of Afghanistan veterans, the museum immersed visitors in a three-dimensional, hands-on experience of ‘being there’ in the midst of the on-going conflict in the troubled Helmand Province, the main area of the Danish military engagement. This ‘approximated Afghanistan’ clearly appealed to visitors and involved them in ways that more conventional exhibitions often fail to do. At the same time, it relied on certain and, I argue, reconfigured renderings of authority, sidelining or even actively hiding academic (‘distanced’) expertise, instead relying on the first-hand accounts and experiences of the war witnesses themselves. Its gripping cinematic communication styles served to underpin particular knowledges and specific kinds of expertise that depend on getting ‘as close’ as possible to the ‘distant war’. The article contextualizes and scrutinizes the crafting of war knowledge in Copenhagen, including its experiential foundation. I argue that in the celebration of (particular forms of) proximity, cultural mediations such as this one may also serve to install new distances and cement a number of existing ones.

KEYWORDS:

• War museums
• distance
• proximity
• experience
• witnessing
• Denmark

Acknowledgements

I thank my research group companions Birgitte Refslund Sørensen, Thomas Randrup Pedersen, and Maj Hedegaard Heiselberg for their continuing engagement and encouragement. I am grateful also to my colleagues Anne Line Dalsgaard and Nina Vohnsen for comments on an earlier draft, and to two anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive critiques and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This article does not include a detailed analysis of visitor movements, perceptions, and appropriations. While the ethnographic fieldwork on which it builds included joining, following, and interviewing visitors and school groups, I restrict myself here to discussing the institutional and contextual forces at play in the making of the exhibition.

2. Macdonald adopts this term, which is originally Martin Heidegger’s, from Timothy Mitchell (1988).

3. All interview quotes are my translations from Danish. I conducted nine recorded interviews with staff and former staff members (of between 30 minutes’ and 2 hours’ duration) on top of numerous informal talks, meetings, and guided tours documented via field notes. I also conducted 25 recorded visitor interviews, each with 1–4 visitors. This was supplemented with material from planning documents, minutes from meetings, media, and web material as well as other files and sources.

4. The interviewee’s references regard two particular Danish institutions, the Workers’ Museum (Arbejdermuseet) in Copenhagen and the Women’s Museum (Kvindemuseet) in Aarhus.

5. I am particularly grateful to these two key discussion partners for their time, reflections, and interest during my fieldwork. I have striven to represent and analyse their roles, views, and positions in a nuanced and fair manner. The selections and interpretations made in this paper are, obviously, my own.

6. Video available at http://natmus.dk/museerne/toejhusmuseet/udstillinger/den-fjerne-krig/ (accessed 15 January 2016).

7. For wider discussions of the museum as a ‘therapeutic’ space, see Wood (2008); Nightingale (2009).

8. See http://www.dfi.dk/faktaomfilm/film/en/76460.aspx?id=76460 (accessed 26 July 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Danish Council for Independent Research [0602-02345B].