Being Danish: Paradoxes of Identity in Everyday Life - Second Edition

by Richard Jenkins

Overview

In Being Danish, Richard Jenkins offers a comprehensive, up-to-date look at modern Danish culture. Looking first at a small Danish town in the 1990s, he tracks how the idea of what it means to be Danish has evolved, moving through the 1990s to the 2005 controversy regarding the depiction of Muhammed in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten to the 2011 parliamentary election. Drawing on extensive archival material alongside ethnographic fieldwork, Jenkins explores topics such as the country’s relationship to the European Union, cultural symbolism, the role of Christianity, and the impact of a recent arrival of largely Islamic immigrants. Not a Dane himself, Jenkins offers an outsider’s look at a relatively small but otherwise hugely visible and sociopolitically fascinating country.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788763538411
Publisher:	Museum Tusculanum Press
Publication date:	05/15/2012
Edition description:	2nd Edition
Pages:	361
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Richard Jenkins is professor of sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
On Translation, Language and Quotation

1. Ethnicity in everyday life
2. A small town in Denmark
3. 'Where the crows turn': Darkest Jutland
4. 'Bicycle talk': Local idioms of identification
5. 'A dwarf on the giant's knee': The question of Europe
6. 'Just how it is': The sacred and the profane
Photo Essay: One Flag, Many Flags
7. 'Actually, everything': The state of Denmark
8. 'Holding the hand of every child': Civil enculturation
9. 'Roast pork and lasagne': Modern danskhed
10. 'A person first, then a Christian': Religion and the folk
11. 'Those we call Danes': Insiders and outsiders
Photo Essay: May Day and 'Skive by Night', 2008
12. Being Danish in the twenty-first century

Notes
Bibliography
Index