Abstract
This article is mainly of a methodological nature. It hails, unconditionally, the anthropological virtue of conducting full-fledged fieldwork among the people we study, even among those with disquieting discourses — or maybe especially them — and never to settle with discursive data alone. Seen from the angle of a scholar of indigeneity, this point is illustrated by analysing different roles of culture in political rhetoric in a comparison of immigrants in Denmark with indigenous peoples. It is argued that culture plays inverted roles in immigrants’ and indigenous peoples’ respective relationships with states, i.e. immigrants are requested to tone down their culture for the benefit of integration into the state, while, conversely, indigenous peoples are expected to demonstrate at least some cultural authenticity in order to gain special rights within the state. It is then argued that political culture in these settings is often characterized by a marked conflation of nation with state and, consequently, by a conflation of the corresponding concepts of people: ethnos with demos. The political implications of this conflation are discussed, leading to the argument that some Danes (13.8 % judging from votes) seemingly conceive of themselves as an indigenous people whose unique and territorialized natural culture is threatened from the outside by a foreign, aggressive culture. Finally, the paper criticizes the general deconstructive attitude with which academics commonly meet such vernacular essentialisms. Instead, a challenge is outlined for anthropologists to move beyond constructivism and take a real scholarly interest in the vitality of the culture concept among vernaculars in order to accumulate anthropological knowledge of these people’s lives. This requires thorough fieldwork in the alleged backwaters of any rigid cultural rhetoric, and, finally, a clarification of the politico-societal scaling of anthropological insights.
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