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Refiguring the Public, Political, and Personal in Current Danish Exclusionary Reasoning

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Political Sentiments and Social Movements

Part of the book series: Culture, Mind, and Society ((CMAS))

Abstract

Hervik uses the new concept of “fractal logic” as a way to explain how scaling takes place in Danish exclusionary reasoning, in news articles, web commentaries, blogs, and Facebook posts about Muslims. Through two incidents in Denmark, an amusement park controversy and a missing handshake panic, he shows how participants and other commentators move from small-scale particularity to a generalizable pattern that is understood to give it strength from scaling up to higher levels where the stakes are higher. This leads to the argument that the reproduction of a specific fractal logic called “the nation in danger” works as an exclusionary reasoning that reinforces the political subjectivity of Danish neonationalism. In addition, the argument opens up for a refiguring of the public–private in both psychological and political anthropology.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Peter Hervik

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  1. Peter Hervik
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Pitzer College, Claremont, California, USA

    Claudia Strauss

  2. Center for Applied Social Research, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA

    Jack R. Friedman

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Hervik, P. (2018). Refiguring the Public, Political, and Personal in Current Danish Exclusionary Reasoning. In: Strauss, C., Friedman, J. (eds) Political Sentiments and Social Movements. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72341-9_4

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