Risk Perception through Exemplarity: Hurricanes as Climate Change Examples and Counterexamples in Norwegian News Media

This article explores how hurricanes are used in news media to exemplify the consequences of climate change. This is done by a close reading of Norwegian newspaper articles on the hurricanes Katrina (2005), Sandy (2012), Harvey and Irma (both 2017). The geographical distance between the disaster areas and the media audience enables an exploration of how these weather events are made meaningful across long distances, as global concerns. The article shows how these hurricanes are textualized and turned into signs in nature that are pointing towards a climate-changed future, and how they work as modelling examples for imagining the possible disastrous state of such a future. It further argues that reasoning with hurricane examples is a certain kind of risk perception involving a temporal and spatial entwining of the future and the present, that represents a notion of cultural catastrophization by calling upon a fear of an uncontrollable disastrous future. The uses of the hurricane example in news media imply an epistemological shift from probability to exemplarity. This shift provides an argumentative space for climate change skeptics to perform counterarguments that juggle between probability and exemplarity. The article explores how this is done, and how statistics and mentioning of other hurricanes are used to argue that hurricanes Sandy, Harvey and Irma were not extraordinary events in terms of intensity, and thus that they cannot possibly be fueled by climate change. The climate change skeptics’ attempts to claim these hurricanes to be local and normal phenomena, independent of human action, may be regarded as attempts to de-catastrophize contemporary society.publishedVersio

Ach! Hvilken Domme-Dag, min GUD! Ach! Hvilken Dag!

In 1755 Lisbon was hit by an earthquake that almost completely leveled the city. The news of the catastrophe spread rapidly and the earthquake was soon discussed throughout Europe. Today the Lisbon earthquake is first and foremost known through the works of Voltaire and his discussions on the theodicy. However, the dominating European understanding was that the quake was caused by the wrath of God. The catastrophe was described in terms of exemplarity, and was interpreted as a god-given token. By a close reading of one the Danish poems about the quake, Christian Henric Bierings poetiske Tanker Over Lissabons Ãdeleggelse ved det uhørlige Jordskiælv paa Alle helgens Dag 1755, the article examines how the earthquake was framed as an example. By the use of examples, the poem argues for an understanding of the catastrophe as an omen predicting an imminent doomsday. By reading Bieringâs poem, the article explores the relationship between the early modern way of thought by the usage of examples and the readings and interpretations of omens

«Je suis sick of this shit»: Terrorangrep, memetisk kultur og digitale sorgriter

This paper discusses the performativity and spreadability of digital slogans and visual expressions after the terrorist attacks in Oslo and Utøya in Norway in 2011 and Paris in November 2015. The analysis is based on online fieldwork and is first and foremost focusing upon the uses of Facebook from the point of view of a Norwegian social media user. While there has been a tendency in folkloristic work on digital visual forms to emphasize humorous expressions, this paper discusses expressions that are far from funny. After both these terrorist attacks photoshopped images and slogans such as «Oslove» and «Je suis Paris» circulated widely in social media. Drawing on media scholar Henry Jenkins’ work, the paper examines the spreadability of such expressive forms and discusses some cultural implications of the intertwining of digital networks and everyday life. It argues that the transnational spreadablility of such digital forms brings the terrorist attacks closer to the everyday lives of media audiences far away. Drawing on disaster scholar Adi Ophir’s term catastrophization, it concludes that that rapid and wide circulation of such digital forms contributes to a process of cultural catastrophization, adding a sense of a seemingly constant state of emergency to the everyday life of a transnational media audience.publishedVersio

Inger Christiansen 1937–2017

Inger Christiansen døde 1. mars 2017. Hun ble 79 år gammel. Med Ingers bortgang har norsk folkloristikk mistet en sentral skikkelse

Redaksjonelt

Dette nummeret av Tidsskrift for kulturfors­king er det siste som blir gitt ut av den nåværende redaksjonen. Jeg benytter anledningen til å takke for meg, og takke mine supre medredaktører Tone Hellesund, Tove Fjell, Gry Heggli og Janne Werner Olsrud. Takk også til alle artikkelforfattere, anmeldere og fagfeller som har bidratt gjennom disse fire årene. Dette nummeret er et temanummer med tittelen «Fra industri til industriarv». Jeg overlater ordet til temaredaktørene Inger Birkeland, Steffen F. Johannessen og Ellen Schrumpf og redaktørroret til Line Esborg. God lesning! Kyrre Kverndokk Redaktø

The Past as a Mirror: Deep Time Climate Change Exemplarity in the Anthropocene

During the past decades, notions of Earth dynamics and climate change have changed drastically, as anthropogenic CO2-emissions are linked to measurable Earth system changes. At the same time, Earth scientists have discovered deep time climate changes triggered by large scale and natural release of CO2. As the understanding of past climatic changes improved, they were used to envision what might happen in the near future. This article explores the use of deep time climate examples by analyzing publications on a 56-million-year-old greenhouse gas-driven rapid global warming event, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). We explore how the PETM is framed and used as an example of “extreme climatic warming” in four cases across different scientific genres. The scientific knowledge about the PETM is considered too uncertain to draw conclusions from, but our analysis shows that, by being presented as an example, the PETM may still contribute to the scientific understanding of ongoing climate change. Although the PETM is regarded as too uncertain to guide present day climate change modeling, it is still considered morally significant, and is allowed to influence public opinion and policy making. We argue that the PETM is used as an example in ways that have formal similarities with the early modern historia magistra vitae topos. The PETM example highlights the ambivalence that characterizes the Anthropocene as a temporal conception. The Anthropocene is “completely different”, but at the same time pointing to the similarity between the present and the deep past, thereby allowing for comparison to past geological events. Thus, the Anthropocene is not so “completely different” after all. Just a little bigger, a lot faster, and a lot scarier to humans.publishedVersio

Redaksjonelt

Den 3. juni i år fylte professor Bjarne Rogan 70 år. Vi markerer jubileet og Rogans store innsats for fagene våre med å gjøre dette nummeret av Tidsskrift for Kulturforskning til et festskrift til ham.Rogan har bak seg en førti år lang forskerkarriere. Han ble Cand. Philol. ved Universitetet i Oslo i 1975 med hovedfag i fransk, og med historie og engelsk i sin fagkrets. Hovedoppgaven handlet om fransk språkhistorie, og i årene som fulgte underviste han i fransk språk og språkhistorie ved samme universitet. Samtidig studerte han videre. I 1982 ble han forskningsstipendiat NAVF i etnologi, og fire år senere disputerte han som dr.philos. Samme år, i 1986, ble han ansatt som førsteamanuensis i etnologi ved Universitetet i Oslo, og han har vært professor fra 1993

Sjanger

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Metodikkens skål!

Moltke Moe, Norway’s first professor of folklore, was an accomplished collector and he worked systematically with developing his collection techniques. Still, in-depth studies of Moe’s fieldwork methodology have not been done. While previous studies of his collecting journeys have focused on the narrators and narratives, this article will shift the focus to the practical and ethical aspects of fieldwork. Our approach is to discuss Moe’s efforts in light of one of the classic books of fieldwork methodology, Kenneth Goldstein’s A Guide for field workers in folklore (1964).The article springs from an ongoing project about Moltke Moe’s journeys for collecting medieval ballads in Western-Telemark in 1889–1891. The materials preserved from these journeys lie mainly in the Norwegian Folklore Archives. In addition to notebooks and journals, there are also letters and photographs. The aim here is primarily to use Goldstein’s description of fieldwork methodology to structure and interpret the various archival remains from Moltke Moe’s collection activities

Klimakrisens tid

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