Erik Ljunberg Making Taxonomies of Supernatural Fauna A cultural-historical investigation of the construction of the dwarf in Ord og sed Bachelor’s Thesis in Culture History 2018 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Knowledge is Culture 2 Traditionalization 4 The Source Material: Historical and Institutional Context 5 Questionnaires in Cultural Research 7 Questionnaire Nr. 22 - The Dwarf 8 Locating the Dwarf in the Replies 9 Constructing the Supernatural Beings as Characters in the Tradition 11 Conclusion 14 References: 15 Introduction “The flames, the flames are burning high in the ethnographic world!” This quote appears in Nils Lid’s foreword to his work on Christmas spirits and vegetation-demons (Lid 1933). It was first made in 1881 by Adolf Bastian, a major figure in German ethnography during the last half of the 19th century and a man who completed several trips around the world. His statement was made to lament the loss of the world’s ethnic cultures were undergoing rapid change in the face of colonization1. Norway in the early 20th century was not exactly a pre- industrial colony, but still a fundamental shift was occurring. As opposed to many other European countries, Norway was slow to industrialize its agricultural sector. Thus, in parallel with the unfolding ethnographic careers of Lid and his fellows, the commoditization of agriculture, bringing with it the powerful force of a cash-based market economy, was rapidly reshaping the contours of the Norwegian rural landscape. An old world was dying and a new one coming to take its place. Norwegian ethnographers heeded Bastian’s words and sent out a battle call urging people to salvage the last remains before they disappeared. Soon a rescue- operation came into effect. One small chapter in the history of this rescue-operation is the publication of Ord og sed, which I will say more about later. They were part of an attempt to 1 The exact quote found in Bastian’s work is slightly different: “Its burning in every nook and cranny of the ethnographic world; burning bright, fiercely, with full flame, it burns everywhere, a huge fire! And no one lifts a hand.”(Bastian 1881: 180, my translation). 1 collect as much as possible from the old way of life that was perishing. This also meant collecting information about folk-beliefs regarding supernatural beings. But merely collecting the information would not suffice; it also had to be put into a system. Organizing principles needed to be put in place which distinguished different supernatural beings from each other. Just like the animal realm had its taxonomies of different faunas, so too there had to be taxonomies of supernatural fauna. However, supernatural beings are not like other beings. They only exist in the imagination. Ways of classifying the animal realm may not function in the supernatural realm. Furthermore, classificatory systems come into being through human activity. The construction of the categories by which the world acquires coherence is an inherently social endeavor. It is subject to human needs, such as the need to prove a certain theory, or impose order and meaning on the world. We can demonstrate this by looking at the scientific treatment of the supernatural beings of folk-belief. A being whose outline was especially hard to delimit was the dwarf. By doing a close reading of questionnaire nr. 22 we can get a better idea of how the dwarf was constructed as a coherent and distinct being. The question, then, that needs to be asked is by what strategies was the dwarf constructed as a character in the folk-tradition?2 Knowledge is Culture In Plato’s Phaedo, he compares the skills of a dialectician to the skills of a butcher (Plato & Hackforth 2001: 133). A good butcher knows the animals’ anatomy well and makes his cuts right at the joints. This way he doesn’t use more energy than he needs. A good dialectician too, knows the anatomy of reality well, and when he puts his analytical scalpel to a phenomenon, he carves it right along its natural joints. Plato saw categorizing nature as a matter of discovering pre-existing divisions and naming them thereafter. The idea of a natural order which simply needs to be mapped out has remained a persistent idea in Western thought. We find the same idea embedded in Linné’s taxonomic system. However, it can be looked at in a different way. In the field of sociology of knowledge, classificatory systems are seen as inherently social products. As the sociologist Doyle McCarthy has noted; “Surely one of the singular insights of the sociology of knowledge for social scientific inquiry is to be found in its claim that social life does not stop at the “doors” of our being”(McCarthy 1996: 116). Rather, social life provides the space which structures what can be said, what is 2 Translation has been an issue in writing this thesis. There are many words in the Norwegian material that simply have no good correlate in the English language. If an approximate English phrase was available, I generally used it and noted the Norwegian term in the footnotes. Where a translation wasn’t possible, I used the Norwegian term in italics. The Norwegian word folkelivsgransking has been translated to “ethnology”. 2 considered worth investigating, and what categories knowledge shall be formulated within. McCarthy claims that knowledge is inseparable from culture, indeed, as she says, knowledge is culture. “To assert that knowledge is culture”, she elaborates, “[...] is to insist that various bodies of knowledge, such as those of the natural sciences or the social sciences, operate within culture—that they contain and transmit and create cultural dispositions, meanings, and categories”(McCarthy 1996: 116). Universities and research institutes play a special role in the creation of cultural categories, because categorization is such a fundamental part of what they do. Thus Arnfinn Pettersen says: “University subjects are a good way to understand the world, but they are also part of creating it by constructing terms and categories by which we make it meaningful” (Pettersen 1999: 74). This idea is repeated by the anthropologist Charles L. Briggs, who says: The notion that scholarly formulations are abstract analytical tools occupying a special epistemological realm that stands apart from the phenomenal world they analyze has come under increasing attack. Theories and methodologies, rather, are coming to be regarded as cultural products that are deeply embedded in the social, political and historical circumstances of their production and reception. (Briggs 1993: 387) This insight provides a good theoretical foundation to look at the questionnaires in Ord og sed, and how they attempt to approach the confusing array of entities in the fauna of folk- belief. Folklorists and ethnologists in the past had the challenging task of creating a system out of a sometimes bewildering complexity of beliefs. Kverndokk explains that “while traditional tales about the gnome, hulder, neck3 [...] and other beings are multitudinous and at times contradictory, folkloristics has developed a categorizing apparatus in order to create clear and discrete categories.” (Kverndokk 2011: 76). This especially applies to the beings in the questionnaires. More so than other aspects of folk-culture, the supernatural beings are examples of constructed categories. Ole Marius Hylland explains that the study of spirits and ghosts4 in Norwegian folkloristics has been a “character-constructing [...] enterprise” (Hylland 2011: 113). Hylland argues the folk-belief beings only appeared as characters to the degree they were constructed as such. This same problem occurred to Jochum Stattin in his doctoral work on the Swedish neck-tradition. He set out to investigate the neck-tradition, but 3 Translated from nissen, huldra and nøkken. 4 Translated from vette and gjengangere 3 was unable to subsume the material within a coherent category without distorting it. For some people, the neck was just a catch-all term for supernatural beings in general (Stattin 1984: 19). “After a while”, he says, “the neck-tradition, as well as other kinds of traditions, seemed to evaporate as soon as I put them under my magnifying glass” (ibid.)5. The neck did not appear as a differentiated and discrete being because it had a real existence in the world, but because it had been processed by the folkloristic categorizing apparatus. Science plays a part in creating the objects it studies, perhaps especially so in the cultural sciences. This is a basic premise in sociology of knowledge, and also the premise behind the claim that knowledge is culture, which we got from McCarthy6. It serves as the theoretical orientation for what will follow. Traditionalization The term tradition stood at the centre of the questionnaires. In questionnaire nr. 22 about the dwarf, tradition is used in the singular form; the tradition. Phrasing tradition in singular form implies homogeneity. One gets the idea the tradition is something stable and monolithic. Indeed, folklorists and ethnologists operated under this assumption for decades. For Herder, the spoken poetic expressions of the people defied the passing of time. Their durability through the ages made them a stable rhythm. Their unchanging endurance allowed them to become like a song that could “be sung again for as long as men wanted to sing it” (Herder 1969: 85, cited in Bauman 2004). Considering the dwarf as part of the tradition endowed it with an authority that only tradition could impose. But if, as implied earlier, knowledge is culture, then also tradition must be culture. Tradition exists within the context of social life and thus embodies its fundamental meanings and categories. This moves us away from seeing tradition as something static to something dynamic. On this topic Bauman says: “In recent years [...] there has been an emergent reorientation among students of tradition, away from this reified view of tradition and toward an understanding of tradition as a discursive and interpretive achievement[...]”(Bauman 2004: 147).