Ida Lunde Jørgensen

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

Abstract: In 2018, the National Museum of Denmark opened a highly publicized Viking exhibition co-produced by Jim Lyngvild a Danish designer and well-known practitioner of Asa faith, who had previously been a member of the Danish People’s Party. The exhibition demonstrated a previously unseen (re)integration of pop-cultural representations of archelogy into the Danish national museum setting, dominated by a research-based approach to artefacts and communication. The paper explores the visual and narrative dimension of the exhibition – in relation to the wider institutional context, in which the exhibition was formed. – Viewing the exhibition as a manifestation of the incorporation of a market logic, political populism and entertainment in response to an extremely precarious financial position, an increasingly powerful Peoples Party and a wider movement in the museum sector towards the experience economy, turning national museum visitors, previously viewed as citizens, into cultural consumers. Danish cultural history museums – the very organisations we turn to affirm and understand our national identity are currently seeing a significant increase in visitor numbers coinciding with a strong sense of political uncertainty influenced by a number of crises; waves of migrants and refugees, a volatile US-leadership, BREXIT and uncertainty about the future climate. In this situation, the author finds it relevant to consider what popular semiotic meanings are (re)integrated into the museum, their political use and implications.

2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

Abstract: In this paper, I historicize the corporate construction of race through an everyday symbol from the Danish cultural sphere – the Eskimo ice cream. I specifically address how the Eskimo ice cream played into a larger fabric of symbols and narratives surrounding ‘the Eskimo’ produced by Danes. I am inspired by cultural approaches to business, such as those taken by Ken Lipartito and Per H. Hansen and the work of Cedric Robinson on the relationship between symbols produced by companies and race. Through newspaper articles and advertisements held at the Royal Danish Library, I trace how Danish ice cream companies participated in maintaining the ‘Eskimo’ from the late 1920s until today. A period marked by the inclusion of Greenland as a Danish county in 1953, conferring equal civil rights, and the nations’ increasing self-determination marked by Home Rule in 1979 and Self Government since 2009. As well as, signs of ambivalence with the term in Denmark and importantly, the Greenlandic people’s preference for the terms Inuit or Greenlander. The Eskimo Ice Cream recently came into focus as part of a renewed interest in racial inequality brought forth by the Black Lives Matter movement during the summer of 2020. In response, a small high-end Danish ice cream company, Hansen Is (like Dreyer’s Ice Cream in America), announced they would take term out of use. While other Danish ice cream companies announced they would keep the term or were hesitant to remove it, since the term invoked ‘nostalgia’ to their consumers. In 2021, the two largest ice cream companies announced they would retire the term. The paper seeks to contribute to a growing literature on the symbolic construction of race by organizations. Offering a case from a Nordic country, in which this relationship has largely resisted scrutiny.