A Tainted Legacy

In the course of the nineteenth century, traditional Christian conceptions of Europe's pre‐Christian paganisms made way for a more favourable image of the ‘noble heathen’, inspired by Romantic primitivism and the quest for national authenticity. Poets and philologists in Scandinavia turned to medieval manuscripts containing the remnants of the worldview of the Vikings (Ásatrú), and cultivated them as a repository of topoi and motifs for patriotic art. In this essay, I investigate how this positive reassessment of paganism tied into the national historiography of Iceland, and how it influenced the idea of an Icelandic ‘Golden Age’. For this purpose, the oeuvre of Jón Jónsson Aðils, Iceland's most prolific historian of the early twentieth century, will be scrutinised. This essay demonstrates how Aðils envisioned Ásatrú's role in the formation of Iceland's national character, and addresses the problem of reconciling a glorified pagan past with the nation's contemporary Christian identity. In so doing, it contributes to our understanding of the complex ways in which processes of national identity formation can affect and transform long‐held ideas on religious and spiritual matters.

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What Social Research Can Learn from Archaeology: Comparison as Juxtaposition and Conduction

Krarup

2024

Theory, Culture & Society

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Methodological inspiration from the discipline of archaeology can spur new developments of logic of inquiry in social research beyond contemporary debates among empiricist, rationalist, and pragmatist positions with their corresponding modes of inference: induction, deduction, and abduction. Archaeological methodology pursues comparison not in terms of similarities and differences among cases but through the juxtaposition of heterogeneous yet coexisting finds. On this basis, it pursues inferences by what I call ‘conduction’ about the relationship among finds, understood as their conditions of coexistence. Archaeological methodology will prove especially useful to studies that face uncertainty about the constituting relationships of a phenomenon, surprising coexistences, or a need to transgress established disciplinary or social demarcations. On this background, I particularly discuss the usefulness of archaeological methodology for the broad literature on problems, problematization, issues, and concerns building on the works of Dewey, Callon, and Foucault.

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A Tainted Legacy

Cited by 4 publications

References 10 publications

On the integrational approach to reading and writing in the works of Roy Harris

On the integrational approach to reading and writing in the works of Roy Harris

Noble heathens: Jón Jónsson Aðils and the problem of Iceland's pagan past

What Social Research Can Learn from Archaeology: Comparison as Juxtaposition and Conduction

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