All in Norway
Taking a few steps back, I used the invitation to write an essay about anthropology in Norway as a pretext for delving slightly more deeply into the beginnings – from Eilert Sundt to Gutorm Gjessing – than what is usual.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” – says the famous phrase, often attributed to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, and referring to the lack of realistic alternative systems .
This text began as a radio essay on BBC Radio 4 in November 2015, later developed into a web essay at Versopolis. It chronicles the shift from the mid 20th to the early 21st century through a meditation on “The metamorphosis of the Holmenkollen ski jumping hill”.
Last Saturday, I published a post in Norwegian about the populist Progress Party, currently a junior partner in a Conservative-led government around here. It hadn’t occurred to me that it would be widely read (my blog was notoriously ignored and sadly neglected), but to my great surprise, it began to spread epidemically on Facebook within hours.
