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PALGRAVE
STUDIES IN
CREATIVIT Y
AND CULTURE

CULTIVATING CREATIVIT Y
IN METHODOLOGY
AND RESEARCH
In Praise of Detours

EDITED BY:
CHARLOT TE WEGENER,
NINNA MEIER AND
ELINA MASLO
Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture

Series editors
Vlad Petre Glăveanu
Department of Communication and Psychology
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark

Brady Wagoner
Department of Communication and Psychology
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Both creativity and culture are areas that have experienced a rapid growth
in interest in recent years. Moreover, there is a growing interest today in
understanding creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon and culture as a
transformative, dynamic process. Creativity has traditionally been con-
sidered an exceptional quality that only a few people (truly) possess, a
cognitive or personality trait ‘residing’ inside the mind of the creative
individual. Conversely, culture has often been seen as ‘outside’ the person
and described as a set of ‘things’ such as norms, beliefs, values, objects,
and so on. The current literature shows a trend towards a different under-
standing, which recognises the psycho-socio-cultural nature of creative
expression and the creative quality of appropriating and participating in
culture. Our new, interdisciplinary series Palgrave Studies in Creativity
and Culture intends to advance our knowledge of both creativity and
cultural studies from the forefront of theory and research within the
emerging cultural psychology of creativity, and the intersection between
psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, business, and cultural
studies. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture is accepting proposals
for monographs, Palgrave Pivots and edited collections that bring together
creativity and culture. The series has a broader focus than simply the cul-
tural approach to creativity, and is unified by a basic set of premises about
creativity and cultural phenomena.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14640
 Charlotte Wegener • Ninna Meier
Elina Maslo
Editors

Cultivating Creativity
in Methodology and
Research
In Praise of Detours
Editors
Charlotte Wegener Ninna Meier
Department of Communication and Department of Sociology and Social Work
Psychology Aalborg University
Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark
Aalborg, Denmark

Elina Maslo
Danish School of Education,
Aarhus University
Copenhagen, Denmark

Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture

ISBN 978-3-319-60215-8    ISBN 978-3-319-60216-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60216-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951770

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
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 Contents

1 Editors’ Introduction: The Power of ‘Showing How It

Happened’  1
Ninna Meier, Charlotte Wegener, and Elina Maslo

Part 1 Different Vantage Points, New Insights   9

2 The Wonder of Things as They Are: Theorizing Obesity

and Family Life with Art 11
Lone Grøn

3 Into the Wild Time: Notes from a Traveller 29

Christina Berg Johansen

4 That’s Responsibility 43
Chris Smissaert

v
vi Contents

Part 2 Research Life: Life and Research 55

5 In Between: Creative Spaces and Detours as Part

of a Researcher’s Life 57
Lene Tanggaard

6 An Unexpected Detour from Ivory Tower to Action

Research 71
Jody Hoffer Gittell

7 Deliberate Detours as Paths to Emergent Knowledge

Creation 79
Karen Ingerslev

8 Worth, Wonder and Worry in the Accelerated Academy 93

Rasmus Hoffmann Birk

9 There Is No Such Thing as a Journal Paper103

Sarah Gilmore and Nancy Harding

Part 3 How We Know: Making Sense of Methods and

Field Work 117

10 The Unanticipated Outcomes of Research: Learning

and Development at Work119
Stephen Billett

11 Knowing Across Time and Place131

Ninna Meier

12 Staying on Topic: Doing Research Between

Improvisation and Systematisation143
Constance de Saint-Laurent
 Contents
   vii

Part 4 Coping with Complexity: Writing to Understand

What We Do 153

13 Metaphorical Structuring of Pattern Analysis155

Camilla Kølsen Petersen

14 Telling Tales of the Unexpected169

Elisabeth Willumsen

15 Writing My Way Home181

Charlotte Wegener

16 Riding the Waves of Collaborative-­Writing-­as-Inquiry:

Some Ontological Creative Detours193
Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt

17 “Give It a Name and It Will Be Yours”: How

Opportunities to Reflect on Essential Questions Can
Create Space for Learning207
Elina Maslo

18 Confessions of a Procrastinator219
Noomi Matthiesen

19 Epilogue or Why Creative Detours (Often) Have

Happy Endings231
Vlad Petre Glăveanu

 ppendix239
A

I ndex241
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 Family and relatedness drawings from
ethnographic fieldwork 20
Fig. 2.4 Conviction 6 by Maria Speyer 22
Fig. 2.5 Adherence 1 by Maria Speyer 23
Fig. 2.6 Red Sky 1 by Maria Speyer 24
Fig. 3.1 Oxygen. Copy of a milestone from a participant
in Traveller’s laboratory 32
Fig. 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 Exploring ruins and goals and milestones in
sensuous ways 38
Fig. 3.5 Time pod. Artistic-sonic device with temporal
sounds, for subtle intervention in interviews
with corporate managers 40
Fig. 4.1 A warm August 2016 afternoon in Amsterdam,
Olivia and I are enjoying cold drinks on the
terrace of the canal-side restaurant close to
our home 46
Fig. 4.2 We decide to go for a little walk, and arrive at
a playground a few minutes later, to conclude
our talk 52
Fig. 7.1 Kristina Louise, founder, chairman of the board
and manager, and Jens, board member and
homeless, ready to recruit new volunteer
students for Social Health 87

ix
x List of Figures

Fig. 13.1 Coaxing 159

Fig. 13.2 Tracking and meandering 161
Fig. 13.3 Trapping 163
Fig. 13.4 Trapping and filling 165
Fig. 13.5 Completed puzzle of the cathedral 166
 List of Tables

Table 9.1 Deviations 104

xi
 1
Editors’ Introduction: The Power
of ‘Showing How It Happened’
Ninna Meier, Charlotte Wegener, and Elina Maslo

Creativity in research is much in demand and always lauded. Every year,

the top creative universities are ranked, and at all career stages, from stu-
dent to experienced professor, academics want to—and are expected
to—be creative. Most researchers have more or less explicit creative prac-
tices, but many do not know exactly how to cultivate creativity, let alone
how to teach it. Based on a view of creativity as a socio-cultural act
(Glăveanu 2014, 2015), with this book we wish to give space to fresh
voices in the discussion of researcher creativity. The book introduces the
idea that ­creativity in research is not a method or a set of techniques we

N. Meier (*)
Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University,
Aalborg, Denmark
C. Wegener
Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University,
Aalborg, Denmark
E. Maslo
Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Wegener et al. (eds.), Cultivating Creativity in Methodology and Research, Palgrave
Studies in Creativity and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60216-5_1
2 N. Meier et al.

apply to our work. Manuals on creativity and innovation often report the
creative processes in terms of stages (Wegener 2016) or as the ability to
perform divergent thinking (Glăveanu et al. 2016). A creative research
practice springs from a curious, sensitive and playful life as a human
being. Plans are fine. However, if we are preoccupied with how things
were supposed to play out, we may not see and take in the inspirational
sources right in front of us (Meier and Wegener 2017). We may think
that we need to clean up the mess, get a grip and get back on track before
we can proceed with the (tidy) research. We may even think that other
researchers are much more successful in this respect. They are not.
Recipes for creativity rarely take into account the learning potential in
other people’s actual practices, messy and unfinished as they may be
(Tanggaard and Wegener 2016). Accordingly, this is not a recipe book but
a book of stories. The book offers a collection of personal, theorised essays
about the unplanned, accidental and even obstructive events that are
often erased from traditional representations of research methods. Reading
over “Method” sections, it seems that epistemological struggle is some-
thing to be solved, with only the outcome worth reporting. To follow the
traditional format for presenting method and analysis, scholars may feel
they have to create a certain type of narrative about the research process in
which some things are included and others left out. A tidy, edited account
feels safer because the story of what ‘really’ happened may seem too intui-
tive, messy or serendipitous and thus at risk of being discarded as unsci-
entific or irrelevant, or too personal. However, as Weick (1995) famously
suggests, sense-making occurs retrospectively and is tied to action:

How can I know what I think until I see what I say?

This often-cited quote is fascinating because it reverses some taken-

for-­granted premises for scientific work. If we need to see what we say in
order to know what we think, then we must act first and then under-
stand. We must do things and then find out what we have been doing—
because the sense we make of what we did (or of what happened) depends
on how we word it. Yet, these utterances will rarely be final, conclusive
and ­exhaustive. As researchers (and as human beings), we are in a con-
tinual process of voicing in order to see our thoughts and find out
 1 Editors’ Introduction: The Power of ‘Showing How It Happened’ 3

more about our research topic (and about life). When we tell this kind
of story, we slightly alter our understanding of what scholarly work may
look like, how this work may be practised and to what end. Therefore,
we need stories of the routes we did not plan, the messy things we did
and the results of it all—which we may not fully understand.
Paraphrasing Weick, this book poses the rhetorical question:

How can I know what I did until I see where I am?

The ‘detour’ metaphor is a spatial expression referring to the iterations

of thinking–acting–wording in academic work. We go somewhere, and
we think of this path as the straight road towards a goal or as a not-so-­
straight road—a detour. We think of ourselves as focused or distracted.
We think of our research as progressing or digressing, or even regressing.
Yet, how can we know, unless we say or write what we did …? If we judge
too soon, we risk missing important information or inspiration from
unanticipated sources. The book zooms in on the creative potential of
detours in academic work and in life: on the potential of not always fol-
lowing a recipe, of giving up what we think we should be doing or of
realising retrospectively that what looked like a detour or even procrasti-
nation might be just the path we came to value.
The kinds of creative detour in academic work that take place in data
analysis are already subject to much attention (Agee 2009). We carry out
our academic work with a ‘guiding research question’, hoping to be sur-
prised, to wonder and to find something we did not even know we were
looking for, as we struggle to make sense of our data. Likewise, within
anthropology, amazement is saluted (Hastrup 1992). This book adds to
this attentiveness to the unanticipated, the detours in academic work that
may originate from or spill over into our lives outside academia.
In times where we are not able to ‘see what we say’ or ‘see where we
are’, a new or expanded notion of mastery may be needed. Barnacle and
Dall’Alba (2014) suggest that mastery is often understood as achieving
command or grasping something so there is no longer uncertainty about
how it is done or what it involves. In times of uncertainty and confusion,
it may seem reasonable to struggle even harder to analyse, categorise and
plan. Speaking about writing, Becker (2007, p. 134) puts it this way:
4 N. Meier et al.

‘What if we cannot, just cannot, make order out of that chaos? I don’t
know about other people, but beginning a new paper gives me anxiety’s
classical physical symptoms’. One supposedly anxiety-reducing strategy is
to try to tidy up (one’s data, one’s knowledge, one’s research plan or even
one’s life) with the goal of being able to do tidy research and write tidy
texts! This strategy can, however, turn out to be unproductive, demotivat-
ing and even restrictive of creativity.
It is often said that we acquire knowledge, gain insight and make new
discoveries (Wegener and Aakjær 2016). Rarely do we hear of scientific
work being discussed in terms of dropping something, letting go or getting
lost, although the creative potential in obstructions of different kinds is
well known across genres. Lather (2007, p. 136) argues that we should
cultivate the ability to engage with ‘not knowing’ and to move towards a
‘vacillation of knowing and not knowing’. Based on Pitt and Britzman
(2003), Lather calls it ‘lovely knowledge’ and ‘difficult knowledge’ (Lather
2007, p. 13). Lovely knowledge reinforces what we think we want, while
difficult knowledge includes breakdowns and not knowing, which
becomes the very force of creative research. Wandering and getting lost
thus become creative methodological practices, although, in an increas-
ingly individualistic and competitive academia, such practices are also
potentially risky strategies if only recognised by individual scholars.
Sharing is crucial if we want to expand the playground of research.
The stories in this book include reflections on the role of space, place,
materiality and the body, and support the idea that where we are physi-
cally in time and space, and mentally in our research process, as well as in
life, matters for the work we do and how we come to make sense of it.
The stories are personal narratives on incidents and processes that inspired
or forced the contributors to act or think differently in research, or
detours that they have taken or are still on, presented with reflections on
what these detours might mean or entail for the author. They are stories
of taking detours and the creative potential therein, but they are also
untidy texts inasmuch as they do not all have ‘happy endings’ where the
researcher, through serendipity, found a new and better method, solved
the problem or ended his or her struggle.
Happy endings or not, it is our hope that these personal records will
provide for resonance (Wikan, 2012) “not by telling how to do it, but by
 1 Editors’ Introduction: The Power of ‘Showing How It Happened’ 5

showing how it happened” (Cerwonka and Malkki 2008, p. 186).

Resonance, as we see it, is an experience that provides the power of cre-
ative production in its light (Meier and Wegener 2016). We hope one or
more of these stories will make you feel like writing. By writing–sharing–
reading–writing, we can inspire a research culture in which ‘accountable’
research methodologies involve adventurousness and not-being-so-sure.
The contributors are a mix of early-career and experienced researchers
in the fields of education, healthcare, business, creativity and social work,
among others. Some are part-time and others full-time researchers; some
have engaged in research late in life and others have embarked on doc-
toral studies right after their master’s degrees. They are all genuinely curi-
ous researchers who interact creatively with life circumstances, obstacles
and opportunities and are bold enough to share. We are grateful to you
all for detouring with us. Thank you for showing how it happened! Last
but not least, special thanks to Vlad Glăveanu and Brady Wagoner, the
series editors, for setting off with us, and to Vlad for rounding off the trip
with some final reflections on detours in methodology and research.

References
Agee, J. (2009). Developing qualitative research questions: A reflective process.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 22(4), 431–447.
Barnacle, R., & Dall’Alba, G. (2014). Beyond skills: Embodying writerly prac-
tices through the doctorate. Studies in Higher Education, 39(7), 1139–1149.
Becker, H. S. (2007). Writing for social scientists: How to start and finish your
thesis, book, or article (2nd ed.). London: University of Chicago Press.
Cerwonka, A., & Malkki, L. H. (2008). Improvising theory: Process and temporal-
ity in ethnographic fieldwork. London: University of Chicago Press.
Glăveanu, V. P. (2014). Distributed creativity: Thinking outside the box of the cre-
ative individual. London: Springer.
Glăveanu, V. P. (2015). Creativity as a sociocultural act. The Journal of Creative
Behavior, e-pub ahea doi: 10.1002/jocb.94
Glăveanu, V. P., Tanggaard, L., & Wegener, C. (Eds.). (2016). Creativity: A new
vocabulary. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hastrup, K. (1992). Det antropologiske projekt – om forbløffelse. Copenhagen:
Gyldendal.
6 N. Meier et al.

Lather, P. A. (2007). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double(d) science.

New York: State University of New York.
Meier, N., & Wegener, C. (2016). Writing with resonance. Journal of Management
Inquiry. Ahead-of-print 1056492616673911.
Meier, N., & Wegener, C. (2017). The open book: Stories of academic life and
writing or where we know things. Boston: Sense Publishers.
Pitt, A., & Britzman, D. (2003). Speculations on qualities of difficult knowl-
edge in teaching and learning: An experiment in psychoanalytic research.
Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(6), 755–776.
Tanggaard, L., & Wegener, C. (2016). A survival kit for doctoral students and their
supervisors: Traveling the landscape of research. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
Wegener, C. (2016). Driving forces of welfare innovation – Explaining interrela-
tions between innovation and professional development. In S. Billett,
D. Stephen, & C. Darryl (Eds.), Supporting learning across working life:
Models, processes and practices. Cham: Springer.
Wegener, C., & Aakjær, M. K. (2016). Kicked out and let down: Breakdown-­
driven organizational research. Qualitative Research in Organizations and
Management: An International Journal, 11(1), 67–83.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Wikan, U. (2012). Resonance. Beyond the words. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Ninna Meier is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology and Social

Work at Aalborg University, Denmark, where she teaches and supervises students
in organisational sociology. She has carried out qualitative field studies of organisa-
tion and management of healthcare work since 2009, first focusing on the mana-
gerial work of clinical managers in the front line of hospital wards and then
focusing on the leadership and coordination practices inherent in making health-
care work coherent across geographical, organizational and professional boundar-
ies. She is particularly interested in how researchers may facilitate impact of their
work in practice, especially the role of writing herein; a topic she has blogged
about on LSE. Her latest book with Charlotte Wegener is called The Open Book:
Stories of Academic Life and Writing or Where We Know Things—a book they did
not know they were writing until one day it was done. Currently, they are develop-
ing both ‘Open Writing’ and ‘resonance’ conceptually and as a field of research, a
method of inquiry and community of academics across disciplines and countries.
 1 Editors’ Introduction: The Power of ‘Showing How It Happened’ 7

Charlotte Wegener is an associate professor at the Department of

Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark. Her work con-
cerns innovation with a specific focus on education, workplace learning and
research methodology. Charlotte runs writing workshops for doctoral and mas-
ter students, faculty and practitioners. She is passionate about writing and has
explored the art and craft of writing in several ways. She seeks to expand aca-
demic writing as both process and product by involving fiction, music, dreams
and everyday life experiences. She has published blog posts on the London
School of Economics Impactblog and Review of Books. She is also the co-author
of The Open Book: Stories of Academic Life and Writing or Where We Know Things.
Together with her long-time writing friend, Ninna Meier, she has developed the
concept of “Open Writing”—a project devoted to the creation of a new research
field and joyful writing practice.

Elina Maslo is an associate professor at the Danish School of Education,

Aarhus University, where she mainly teaches second language learning and
teaching courses at the Masters Programme for teachers of Danish as a second
and foreign language. She conducted her PhD project at the Institute for
Pedagogy and Psychology at the University of Latvia (2003). After almost ten
years in the field of learning languages in and outside the formal educational
system, exploring successful learning spaces in practice, she is now devoting
herself to discovering and theorizing transformative dimensions of learning
spaces. Her main research interests are learning spaces—multiple, diverse,
changing, fluid, complex, always in construction—in and outside the school
and at the workplace. Elina is an active member and European co-coordinator
of the ASEM LLL Hub research network on workplace learning.
 Part 1
Different Vantage Points, New
Insights
 2
The Wonder of Things as They Are:
Theorizing Obesity and Family Life
with Art
Lone Grøn

My impression is that philosophers nowadays tend to associate the experi-

ence of wonder with the explanation of science rather than, as in
Wittgenstein and Austin, with our relationship to things as they are, the
perception of the extraordinariness of what we find ordinary (for example,
beauty) and the ordinariness of what we find extraordinary (for example,
violence). (Cavell 2005, 34)

To me, the attraction of the line has to do with its kinship with pointing.
There is no pretense in the line that it will render anything with optical
correctness. Rather a line allows me to closely examine something, I tend
to use the line almost like a sculptural modeling tool, and when I draw, I
feel like I am running my fingers across the landscape of figures and faces.
(Speyer 2011, 11)

L. Grøn (*)
VIVE The Danish Centre of Applied Social Science,
Copenhagen, Denmark

© The Author(s) 2018 11

C. Wegener et al. (eds.), Cultivating Creativity in Methodology and Research, Palgrave
Studies in Creativity and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60216-5_2
12 L. Grøn

For a long time I did not have a theoretical framework with which to
make sense of my ethnographic fieldwork on the obesity epidemic, ­kinship,
and relatedness. I did have a point of departure, a phenomenological orien-
tation, which guided how I went about the doing of the fieldwork. I also had
a hope that taking an experience-near approach to a large-scale phenome-
non like epidemics would yield something interesting. Yet, for a long time,
I did not know how to put what I found into words or how to find concepts
that could help me single out that which was most important in my data.
But I did have something. I had a novel, The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey
Eugenides. I had drawings by a Sydney-based Danish artist, Maria Speyer.
Both captured, pointed to, and showed, what was the most compelling—
and yet to my academic understanding and language somehow elusive—
aspects of exploring obesity experientially in the context of family life. Since
then I have found my analytical toolkit, but what remains intriguing is the
way the initial story and images—which, for a long time, remained my sole
analytical guiding stars—portray the main insights more directly. One feels
the experiential truth of the image or the story right there and then, at the
very moment the lines or words touch one’s eyes, ears, and heart. The theo-
retical framework that I have since then come to rely on, the German phi-
losopher Bernhard Waldenfels’ Phenomenology of the Alien (Waldenfels
2007, 2011), also captures the aspects that were highlighted in the pictures
and the novel, but it remains abstract and difficult to understand. I have
devoted considerable time and energy to bringing Waldenfels’ concepts like
the alien, responsivity, affect, and time-lag into conversation with the con-
crete everyday settings and events of family homes, kitchen, and relations
(see Grøn 2017a, b, c); yet, I am often met with questions and demands for
clarification by readers, colleagues, and reviewers. Many years ago the
anthropologist Paul Stoller remarked, that “recent writing on the body tends
to be articulated in a curiously disembodied language.” (Stoller 1997, xiv) In
a similar vein, one could say that phenomenological theory tends to be artic-
ulated in a curiously dis-experienced language, while the story and the draw-
ings are not. They speak directly to and from experience. With force. As
Speyer writes there is no pretense that her line will render anything with
optical correctness, yet, when she draws, she feels like she is running her
fingers “across the landscape of figures and faces” (Speyer 2011, 11).
 2 The Wonder of Things as They Are: Theorizing Obesity and... 13

I praise, thus, the opportunity given to me in this chapter of taking a

detour back to the detour: to explore what it is that the drawings and the
novel made possible. Before embarking on this journey back, I want to
clarify that the fact that what we as anthropologists want to express is
often elusive, that the arguments are complicated, is not what I am after
here. Furthermore, I am not reflecting here on art as a way to represent
research findings that might be more evocative or engaging than tradi-
tional academic writings—or on art as empirical examples in the style of
many of my favorite philosophers. Rather, I want to reflect on art, often
perceived as imprecise and elusive when compared to science, as a theo-
retical framework in its own right, as a way of thinking and philosophiz-
ing, which, to paraphrase Cavell, stays close to our “relationship to things
as they are.” I will do this in three steps. First, I will present data from the
ethnographic fieldwork; then I will introduce my use of the novel and the
drawings; finally, I end with some reflections on art as a mode of thinking
about data, that is, as theory.

The Fieldwork
The fieldwork on obesity, kinship, and relatedness was carried out with
four families in 2014–2015, whom I had met initially during my Ph.D.
fieldwork in 2001–2003. I know these families very well, and they appear
in this fieldwork not solely as informants or interlocutors, but as frontline
researchers, helping me reflect on the obesity epidemic from within their
own lived experience. The following conversation is taken from a family
interview. We are sitting around Susanne’s kitchen table: Susanne, her
sister Bente, and Bente’s children Bo, a young man aged 25, and Marie,
his half-sister, aged 15. I ask Bo and Marie what they think caused their
obesity. After a short pause, Bente responds:

Bente: Well, she’s sitting right here (pointing to herself

and following up in an insistent voice): None of
them can be blamed for becoming obese! It can
only be traced back to me!
14 L. Grøn

Susanne: No, there was a father too.

Bente: Yes. Yes. But clearly ... the food that was served and
… what was available in the home. I am saying
that none or my children are culpable of their
overweight
Marie: I don’t think so, because it happened when I was
being bullied and I myself went to …
Bente (interrupts): Marie, if the things hadn’t been there, if you didn’t
serve the brown gravy
Marie (interrupts): But it was my own money!
Bente (in an
insisting voice): But Marie … if you didn’t serve the gravy, if you
didn’t buy the pizza, the coke … it’s not the chil-
dren, you cannot be held responsible for your own
obesity. It lies right here! In the same way, I do not
blame my parents for the obesity, but that is where
I can trace it to. (…) You can say, yes, Bo is grown
up today, he makes his own choices. But the foun-
dation (in Danish “grund stenen,” the foundation
stone) of Bo’s obesity – it’s in the genes, that’s for
sure, I am certain that something comes from your
genes, but it is also the food one has served them!
Bo: Yes. But well my father, he is thin and also my elder
brothers. And well, I feel they have just taken in
whatever (…) I mean, my impression is that we actu-
ally eat the same, or in fact they might eat a bit more.
Bente: You have double genes! Both from your mother
and from your father’s side. Genes from your
paternal grandmother.
Susanne: And your elder brother was big …
Bente: Yes. He also was overweight as …
Susanne: … as a child. But then he got away from home,
you can say. Already after the confirmation at a
boarding school or something.
Lone: Did he lose weight there?
Susanne: Yes.
 2 The Wonder of Things as They Are: Theorizing Obesity and... 15

Bo (interrupts): Well the thinking goes that because it is my mother,

I got it from there. But if I had been the son of one
of the other sisters, then I think that is kind of the
same, and I would have been big there too.

I pause shortly to give you a bit more of the family history. Over the
course of one year, Susanne and her two sisters all had gastric bypass sur-
geries; while all the sisters have lost a lot of weight, between 130 and 160
pounds, Bente has changed the most: she wears tighter clothes, has divorced
Marie’s father and found a new boyfriend. Furthermore—and to me the
most remarkable in the course of events—the sisters’ cutting of their intes-
tines affects Bente’s daughter Marie, who, after a long, painful process of
feeling excluded, having to carry all the too many kilos by herself, starts
losing weight. This is where we re-enter the family conversation.

Marie: It is up to 40 pounds now. It was … the start of the sum-

mer vacation. I don’t know what happened, but I just know
that that was when apparently I got the motivation (…) I
don’t understand it myself. (…) I have tried so many times
saying: “On Monday. I will start on Monday” and then …
Monday night: “Oops” then something happened.

I ask what has brought about the weight loss. After rejecting several
possible causes, Marie replies: Well this sounds crazy, but I use Christoffer.
Everybody laugh. Christoffer is a blond curly hair and blue-eyed pop star
who has teenage girls screaming at his arrival. Wondering about the scope
of her transformation, I ask about cravings, if she sometimes feels like
eating an entire bag of candy.

She replies: No. Not at all. Not at all like before.

Her family chips in:

Bo: There was a time when we locked the cupboards.

Bente: Marie constantly had a hole in her stomach. You had to be
filled up with food.
16 L. Grøn

Marie: Yes. I was … I was always hungry. I would … ten minutes

after supper I would ask for food. Or if we were visiting, I
would go to my mother and ask her: When should we eat,
or …
Bente: Yes it was like it couldn’t be filled. You know, that hole
couldn’t close.

At this point Susanne remarks that Marie has changed in other ways;
previously she was so dependent on her mother. Bente adds that she and
Marie used to be almost like girlfriends, going out to eat and buy similar
clothes. That changed when she was operated. Marie explains how she
felt betrayed and jealous. How she used to think: “I will just eat and eat
and eat until I can get an operation.” She did not think she could lose
weight. “For me it was impossible,” she says. Again, I ask her what had
changed, and, after the laughter caused by Bo’s joking remark “Christoffer
became famous” has silenced, there is a long pause. Finally, Marie says:“
I don’t know.”

The Novel
In the novel The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (1993), five young
girls, five sisters in fact, over a period of one year, kill themselves. One of
the sisters, the youngest one called Cecilie, initiates this “small-scale epi-
demic,” this chain of events by slitting her wrist in the bathtub. She is
rescued, but shortly thereafter—at the end of a “party” organized by the
parents for the five girls and their neighboring boys—throws herself from
the rooftop and is spiked on the fence of the family house. I have written
“party” in quotes because, as the story is brought to us by one of the
neighbor boys who participated in the event, this wasn’t much of a party,
but more like a formalized round of interchanges and movements over-
seen by the parents. It was like something that could have taken place in
the ballrooms of Versailles several hundreds of years before, but without
the luxurious décor. This was just a party in a basement room with plastic
cups and bad aperitifs; nevertheless, the boys present are mesmerized by
 2 The Wonder of Things as They Are: Theorizing Obesity and... 17

this opportunity to enter the house where the girls of their dreams live
and breathe, to be in their immediate presence, use their bathrooms, and
get a peek of the beds where they sleep.
In the grand finale taking place exactly a year after this first suicide, the
remaining four girls commit suicide by different means—Therese by an
overdose of sleeping pills, Bonnie by hanging herself from the basement
roof, Lux by the gas fumes from a car in the garage, and Mary by sticking
her head in the oven. Mary does actually survive for about a month after
this collective suicide event, but by then—this is close to the end of the
novel that is situated between this first and last event – our hopes that she
will stay alive have dimmed. There is a sense of doom or inevitableness
that has, in the year between the first successful suicide to the collective
one, just grown more and more solid.
We follow the events as they unfold, as well as retrospectively, through the
eyes of the neighbor boys. One of them is the actual narrator, but he,
throughout the novel, refers to himself as part of a group of boys, a pack,
collectively fascinated with the girls. This is a novel about adolescent love,
disquiet, and death, as the blurb on the back cover says. The night the major-
ity of the girls kill themselves, the boys believe they are in the house to rescue
them, to elope with them. The excitement is palpable; on and off over the
last year the boys have felt themselves within the vicinities of getting access
to the girls’ magic circle. One of them, Buzz Romano, upon descending into
the basement to look for the girls whom they think are packing suitcases,
makes a little dance that captures the longing and desire of the boys:

Buzz Romano waded out to the card table, and as we all watched, began to
dance, to box-step, as his mother had taught him in the papal splendor of
their living room. He held only air, but we could see her-them-all five,
clasped in his arms. “These girls make me crazy. If I could just feel one of
them up just once,” he said as his shoes filled and emptied with silt. His
dancing kicked up the sewage smell, and after that, stronger than ever, the
smell we could never forget. Because it was then we saw, over Buzz
Romano’s head, the only thing that had changed in the room since we left
it a year before. Hanging down amid the half-deflated balloons were the
two brown-and-white husks of Bonnie’s saddle shoes. She had tied the rope
to the same beam as the decorations. (209)
18 L. Grøn

To paraphrase Cavell, this is a novel that invigorates “the perception of

the extraordinariness of what we find ordinary (for example, beauty) and
the ordinariness of what we find extraordinary (for example, violence).”
The extraordinary and ordinary, the beauty and the violence, all entangle
to form a net of fatal melancholy, that, just like a spider’s web, keeps the
boys hypnotized, intrigued, enamored, enticed, and also—during the
year of events—on the lookout for explanations.
Explanations are there in abundance, starting right after the first
suicide: “Everyone had a theory as to why she had tried to kill her-
self,” Eugenides writes. “She wanted out of the house,” say the two
female neighbors (15). Mr. Buell, the husband of one of the women,
says: “It was like anything else in this sad society. They did not have a
relationship with God.” (16) From there onward, explanations are
offered from many sides, increasingly involving “expert opinions”:
Unrequited love, repressed urges, the contamination of tragedy, emo-
tional need, the freak (one bad sibling corrupts the others) explana-
tion, the theory of repetitive suicide along with ideas of degenerate
youth and times.
For the boys, though, these explanations are seriously lacking. They
make an exhibition in an empty garage of items and testimonies of “things
as they are.” Throughout the book, these numbered items are referred to
as follows. Exhibit number 1: photo of Lisbon family house before sui-
cide attempt. Exhibit number 3: photo of the Lisbon house with all it
shutters open, after first suicide, and after school dance. Exhibit number
4: school photo of Cecilia. Exhibit number 9: the first newspaper article
reporting on the suicide epidemic. Exhibit number 8: newspaper article
with picture of girls embracing the tree. Exhibit number 10: photo of the
girls in their dresses for the homecoming party. Exhibit number 13–15:
two school papers from the girls and a signed exemption from sports.
In working with my fieldwork data like the ones presented in the pre-
vious section, I was struggling to find a path toward a clearing (Jackson
1989) that would allow me to reveal the experiential depth, indetermi-
nacy, and uncertainty that characterized the fieldwork experiences and
exchanges, because the obesity epidemic—like this suicide epidemic—
 2 The Wonder of Things as They Are: Theorizing Obesity and... 19

comes with an overload of explanatory weight (individual lifestyle, the

energy expenditure model, the obesogenic society, genetic dispositions,
inequity, social inheritance). We already know it all. Yet, in hearing fam-
ily members wonder about the affects and effects of brown sauce, pizzas,
contaminated home environments, being bullied at school, having your
own money, holes in the stomach, the cutting of guts and family bonds,
a blue-eyed Danish pop star, and the repeated “I just don’t know,” I
decided to side with the boys in The Virgin Suicides. To carefully collect
and keep to heart the specific ways in which the extraordinary reside in
the ordinary – and vice versa. To stay true to what Lisa Stevenson (2014)
has termed “fieldwork of uncertainty” in which we take “the uncertain,
the confused – that which is not clearly understood – as a legitimate eth-
nographic object,” (ibid., 2) because, from the perspective of the families,
I have followed processes of weight gain, and weight loss remains
­mysterious even if the alienness emerges in the context of the ordinary
and the most intimate settings: the home, the workplace, the family, and
one’s own body and desires.

The Images
Big family and relatedness maps were drawn by family members during
our talks on kinship, obesity, and relatedness (Figs. 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3).
In fact, questions of units of analysis had prompted my experience-­
near approach to the obesity epidemic. Especially in relation to the spread
of conditions that are broadly conceived of as “lifestyle diseases,” it
seemed important to be able to get behind the strong individualism that
comes with the notion of lifestyle. Guided by Maria Speyer’s pictures, I
have radically changed what I find to be the relevant unit of analysis of
this fieldwork (Figs. 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6).
In the book What kinship Is – and Is Not (2013), Sahlins defines kinship
as a “mutuality of being” and describes relatives as people who “live each
other’s lives and die each other’s deaths” (Sahlins 2013). He reflects on
what De Castro has called “the mysterious effectiveness of relationality”
20 L. Grøn

Fig. 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 Family and relatedness drawings from ethnographic
fieldwork
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the Jews were still pursuing the path of knowledge, amassing
learning, and stimulating progress, with the same unflinching
constancy that they manifested in their faith. They were the most
skilful physicians, the ablest financiers, and among the most
profound philosophers; while they were only second to the moderns
in the cultivation of natural science, they were also the chief
256
interpreters to Western Europe of Arabian learning.”
In modern Europe also we have seen how varied and how
beneficial has, since their emancipation, been the activity of the
Jews in other than financial departments. In face of these facts how
ineffably ridiculous seems the anti-Semite’s homily on “A Jew of the
Coheleth type” who “pursues gain with an undivided soul, whereas
the soul of the Christian or the Idealist is divided,” and his calm, self-
sufficient pronouncement that “much of the best Christian and
Idealist intellect is entirely given to objects quite different from gain or
power.” The remark, of course, is true in so far as the two “types” are
concerned. But, unless the writer means to make the astounding
assertion that, other conditions being identical, the one type is
peculiar to the Jews, and the other to the Christians—that the
ordinary Jew is born a materialist, and the ordinary Christian an
Idealist,—his statement is pointless. It becomes worse than pointless
when he proceeds to emphasise the “compact organisation” of
Jewish, as contrasted with the “loose texture” of Christian society,
and to proclaim that “in this respect the Gentile, instead of starting
257
fair, is handicapped in the race.” The only logical inference to be
drawn from these premisses is that the balance must be redressed
by oppressing the Jew. But the author shrinks from drawing that
inference. Mediaeval and Continental anti-Semites have been more
consistent and courageous.
Such was the genesis of English anti-Semitism. However, the
bulk of the public took little or no notice of these utterances. The
English people is not intellectual enough to be moved by literary
theories. Its very slowness in discarding old errors is a guarantee
against precipitancy in embracing new ones. But, when a grievance
is presented to it in the more tangible form of a practical and
mischievous fact, then the English people begins to think.
The persecution of the Jews in Russia, Roumania, Hungary, and
Germany threatened to flood England with a crowd of refugees more
industrious than the English workman, more frugal, and far more
temperate. The consequence would have been a fall in wages. The
danger was too practical to be ignored; fortunately, both for the
English workman and for the Jew, it was temporarily averted by the
Jewish charitable associations, which directed emigration into safer
channels. But, though the immediate cause for alarm disappeared,
the anti-Jewish feeling remained; and was fed by the influx of new
crowds from Eastern Europe at a later period. Again the Board of
Guardians, the Russo-Jewish Committee and other organisations
exerted themselves strenuously to prevent the immigrants from
becoming in any case a burden to the British rate-payer. With that
object in view, measures were taken that those victims of oppression
who remained in England should be enabled without delay to earn
their own bread by that industry for which they might be best fitted;
but, wherever it was possible, a home was found for them in
countries less populous than England and more suitable for
colonisation. At the same time, by means of representations
addressed to Jewish authorities, and published in Jewish papers
abroad, regarding the congested state of the British labour market,
258
efforts were made to stem the tide of further immigration. But
these efforts have not proved entirely successful. So that the
interminable cycle of prejudice and platitude, interrupted for a while,
has again resumed its ancient course. As in the early days of the
nineteenth century, so now, at the commencement of the twentieth,
our libraries are slowly enriched with volumes of exquisite dulness.
We are called upon to fight the old battle over again. The enemy
appears under many colours; but all the legions, though they know it
not, fight for the same cause. And, though their diversity is great,
none of the banners are new.
First comes our ancient friend, the theologian, Bible in hand; as
valiant of heart as ever, and as loud of voice. He is a worthy
descendant of St. Dominic, though perhaps he would be horrified if
he were told so. But History is cruel, and the records of the past
remain indelible. What student of history can fail to catch the note of
familiarity in our modern missionary’s oratory?
“Jesus is the Way”: saith the preacher, “Although the Jews have
the law, they cannot come to God, because Jesus is the Way.
Although they have the Old Testament, they do not know the truth,
because Jesus is the Truth and Life!” and after several sentences
rich in emphasis, fervour, and capital letters, comes the old, old
conclusion: “adoption and true spiritual life there is none, where
Christ has not kindled it. Israel, in its present state, the Christless
Israel, shows this to the whole world. Notwithstanding the great
activity and energy of the religious life of the Jews, they have—we
say it with great sorrow—no life indeed—what they have is all carnal
—and this accounts for the phenomenon that they have not been of
much spiritual use to the world since Christ’s coming. In Christ alone
259
will Israel live again and be a blessing to the world.”
So speaks the advocate of conversion. His hope in the future is
as great as his forgetfulness of the past. “The great God,” he informs
us with touching assurance, “is, in His providence, now rapidly
preparing the way for the final and only possible solution.” Ah, my
good friend, it is very natural in a Christian to believe that “true
spiritual life there is none, where Christ has not kindled it,” it is very
pleasant to point the finger of scorn at “Christless Israel,” it is very
well to prophesy that “in Christ alone will Israel live again and be a
blessing to the world.” But how are we to convince Israel that it is
so? This ancient nation which, having defied the onslaughts of
centuries, has lived so long, seen so much, suffered so much, and
survived so much, is it likely to succumb to our timeworn arguments?
Or would you advise us to bid the Jew once more choose between
baptism and the stake? This argument also has been tried and found
inadequate. Convert the Jews! You might as hopefully attempt to
convert the Pyramids.
Thus far the apostle. Next comes the patriot—a student of
statistics, sad and, so far as religious bias goes, quite sober. In tones
of sepulchral solemnity he warns us that, if England is to escape the
fate of the Continent, namely, “of the Jews becoming stronger, richer,
and vastly more numerous; with the corresponding certainty of the
press being captured” by them, “and the national life stifled by the
substitution of material aims for those which, however faultily, have
formed the unselfish and imperial objects of the Englishmen who
have made the Empire”—if these dire calamities are to be averted,
England must “abandon her secular practice of complacent
acceptance of every human being choosing to settle on these
shores.” Should nothing be done to check the evil, there is bound to
ensue an outbreak against the race “the members of which are
260
always in exile and strangers in the land of their adoption.”
The appeal to the Empire is quite modern, although, if the author
had any intelligent conception of his own case, he might have seen
that Imperialism is the very last thing in the world he should have
summoned to the support of his narrow Nationalism: the two things
differ as widely as the author differs from Julius Caesar. If the British
Empire were confined to Englishmen, it would soon cease to be an
empire. Equally novel is the interpretation of our expansion as due to
an unselfish zeal for somebody else’s good—the author does not
state whose. But the specific charge brought against the Jewish race
as one “the members of which are always in exile and strangers in
the land of their adoption” is hardly worthy of the author’s originality.
The prophet objects to the Jews as not having been “of much
spiritual use to the world.” It is hard to dispute the statement,
because it is impossible to know the particular meaning which the
prophet attaches to the word “spiritual.” His position is unassailable.
The patriot, however, denounces the Jews as the promoters of
“material aims,” and thereby convicts himself either of gross
ignorance or of deliberate distortion of facts. What the world of
thought owes to the Jews has already been described with a fulness
of detail which will probably appear superfluous to most educated
people. As regards the assertion that the Jew still looks upon himself
as one in exile and a stranger in a foreign land, we propose to deal
with it when we come to consider the attitude of the Jews towards
the Zionist movement. Here it is sufficient to point out that the term
“Jew” is far too wide to warrant any sweeping generalisation. There
are Jews and Jews, just as there are Christians and Christians.
History abundantly proves that the Jew in the past retained most of
his clannishness where he was most grievously oppressed. As to
modern Judaism, since the day of Moses Mendelssohn there has set
in a disintegration which renders a comprehensive and confident
pronouncement only possible to those who consider prejudice an
adequate substitute for knowledge. But there is no necessity for such
a universal pronouncement. If we want an answer to the question,
“Can the Jew be a patriot?” we need only glance at the history of
modern Europe. Did not Jews fight with the Germans against the
French in the days of Napoleon, with the Hungarians against the
Austrians in 1848, with the Austrians against the Prussians in 1866,
with the Germans against the French and the French against the
Germans in 1870, with the Roumanians against the Turks in 1877?
Or can man express his devotion to his country in a more
unambiguous manner than by dying for it? Unless, indeed, the
perfidious Jew even in dying is actuated by some ulterior motive.
But why should we look further than home? In 1831 Macaulay
wrote: “If the Jews have not felt towards England like children, it is
because she has treated them like a step-mother.” England has
ceased to treat the Jews like a step-mother. How far has England’s
change of attitude towards the Jew affected the Jew’s attitude
towards England? On Sunday, December 28, 1902, Lord Roberts
attended a special service, at the Central Synagogue in Great
Portland Street, held for Jewish members of the regular and auxiliary
forces who fell in South Africa fighting for England. The day was well
chosen; for on the same day is performed the annual celebration in
remembrance of the warlike exploits of the Maccabees—a
coincidence which disproves in a practical manner the dogmatic
generalisation that “a man’s heart cannot belong to two nations,” and
which shows that the English Jew, at all events, can be both a
Hebrew and an Englishman: he can cherish the ideals of the past
and yet live in the realities of the present. The soldiers in whose
memory the ceremony was held formed a portion of a force counting
more than 1,200 officers and men, who took a creditable part in the
war. This number assumes new significance, when we consider that
the total Hebrew population of Great Britain that year did not exceed
 261
180,000, and that with us every soldier is a volunteer. The Jew
has done as much for the English mother as any of her Christian
sons: he has laid down his life in defence of her cause. Moreover, to
join the army, the Jew must necessarily sacrifice something besides
life—something that he holds higher than life—some of his religion,
and particularly the ceremonial rites, such as the dietary laws and
the Sabbath. But foremost English Rabbis, like the late Simeon
Singer, maintained that duty to England justified and even
consecrated this sacrifice.
Nor was this most unequivocal proof of patriotism a solitary
instance. For the last ten years the Feast of Dedication has been
associated with a celebration for the men serving in the Regular and
Auxiliary Forces. On December 13, 1903, the Rev. Francis L. Cohen,
to whose initiative the custom is due, inaugurated the second
decade of these celebrations at the New West-end synagogue in the
presence of 38 officers and 167 men, and also a number of new
Jewish officers, including a Major-General and a General. The
preacher dwelt on the promptitude with which Jewish Britons
responded to the call during the last war. He referred to the 127
Jews who then “gave their lives for the flag they all honoured and
loved,” and announced that, as a testimony “to the pride and joy
wherewith the Jews hail their privilege of sharing in the voluntary
burden of their common country’s defence,” they sought to endow a
trophy “to be competed for from year to year at the great annual
meeting of the National Rifle Association, such as might stimulate
others of their fellow-citizens to perfect themselves in the military use
of that weapon which might at any moment again be required to
262
protect the immunity of their Sovereign’s territories.” The truth is
that religion has long ceased to be the principal force in the
composition of nations. In the present stage of the world’s
development sympathy with one’s co-religionists does not exclude
loyalty to one’s country, any more than loyalty to one’s country
prevents hatred of one’s co-religionists in other countries.
The continuance of oppression and persecution in Eastern
Europe has kept the stream of emigration flowing. As was natural,
great numbers of the hunted race turned to England as to the one
European country where liberty has not yet been seriously
endangered by the revival of intolerance. But the welcome which
they met with in this sanctuary of freedom has not been unanimous.
The “Alien Invasion,” as it is termed, has roused considerable
anxiety and apprehension in certain bosoms. We are told by the
melancholic patriot, in a more recent and more popular
263
publication, that it is a menace to the nation, that “British right of
asylum hitherto has been as profitable to the Empire as to the
immigrants,” but that “it is otherwise to-day.” We are exhorted to
reconsider our position, and to ask ourselves whether we are right in
“permitting free import of the sweepings of foreign cities to
contaminate our English life, to raise rents, and lower the standard of
existence.” We are, lastly, advised to shut our doors to “undesirable
aliens.” The question thus put admits of but one answer. If these
aliens are undesirable, we ought not to desire them. No one would
cavil with our advisers were it not that under the mask of a
movement for the exclusion of “undesirable” individuals there seems
to lurk in some quarters a retrogressive animosity against the Jewish
race as a whole, or a wish to stir up such an animosity. The
melancholic patriot opportunely reminds us that “the foreigners who
settle in England are almost entirely of the Jewish race, and it is
therefore impossible to discuss the question of foreign immigration
without raising the Jewish question.” Thus, having thrown off the
mask, he proceeds to give utterance to candid and undisguised anti-
Semitism:
“The peculiarity of this race is that they refuse assimilation by
intermarriage, equally with Russians in Russia, with Arabs in Tunis,
or with the English in England, just as rigidly as did their ancestors
refuse intermarriage with Gentiles in the days of Nehemiah.” The
matter presented in this form offers the interesting point of being not
new. The aloofness of the Jew has already been shown to have
been the fundamental cause of his sufferings. Had the Jews not
formed a “peculiar people” they would not have been made the
milch-cows and the scapegoats of the nations through the ages. But
it can also be shown that at the present day this is only partially true
in the countries which have genuinely adopted the Jews. It is
estimated that there occur far more marriages in England between
Jews and Christians than between Protestants and Catholics. By the
Jewish law marriage between a Jew and a proselyte is perfectly
lawful. The barrier is thus, after all, one of religion rather than of
race. Naturally an inclination towards such intermarriage would not
prevail on either side except in comparatively rare cases. Yet the
strange fact remains that such mixed marriages are at least as
common in the lower as in the upper classes of Jewish society.
Besides, though the clannishness of the race in the past explains
its persecution, does it excuse it? Is it an argument that a modern
statesman in a free country should accept as justifying exclusion?
Moreover, if the Jews really are so black as the author paints them,
is it not rather unpatriotic of him to wish to see them intermarrying
with us, and thus contriving “to contaminate our English life” far more
effectively than they will be able to do if they continue to be a people
apart? However, consistency in reasoning is not, as has already
been remarked, the anti-Semite’s forte.
The oracle supplies us with seven reasons—mystic and ominous
number—why “the immigration of the poorest Jews from Russia and
Poland is a national evil.”
1. “They lower the Englishman’s standard of comfort, and are
unduly addicted to the calling of usury.”
2. The competition is injurious to the Englishman because it is
“not to determine the survival of the fittest, but to determine the
survival of the fittest to exist on a herring and a piece of black bread.”
3. “They subsist contentedly on a diet which is insufficient to
sustain the meat-eating Anglo-Saxon.”
4. “Their habits of huddling together under circumstances of
unmentionable filth destroy the possibility of dealing with the housing
question, and set at naught our municipal sanitary laws.”
5. “They lower the wages of unskilled women and unskilled
labourers.”
6. “They raise rent.”
 7. “They enlarge the area of the sweating system.”
The usury charge has been answered by experience and
Economic Science ages ago. But the patriot contributes to the
discussion quite a fresh element when he describes the Jewish
immigrants as paupers and, in the same breath, as usurers. He does
not deign to explain how men who, as he later asserts, are induced
to leave their homes by destitution and are drawn to London by the
“magnetism” of the Jewish charities, how these penniless beggars
can “adopt money-lending as a means of livelihood.” If they are
paupers they cannot be money-lenders, and if they are money-
lenders they cannot be paupers. To starve and to lend at the same
time is a feat that even a Jew is hardly capable of.
As to sweating and sanitation, these are matters for which
legislation, if it is worth the name, ought to be able to devise far less
drastic remedies than that proposed by statistical patriotism. The
remaining reasons, when pruned of repetition and reduced to their
logical dimensions, resolve themselves into this: We do not want the
Jew, because he can work harder than we, for less wages than we,
and can live more frugally than we. In other words, because for the
purposes of the struggle for existence he is better equipped than we.
He is too formidable a rival.
But on this point also the enemies of the Jew are at fatal
variance. Another writer pronounces the explanation of the Jewish
immigrant’s success as due to his lower standard of living and
greater capacity for labouring, paradoxical. “It is,” he says, “as
though one were to maintain that of two pieces of machinery the
worse did most work and required less fuel.” He seeks and finds the
true reason of the displacement of the English craftsman, not in the
“alleged frugality of the foreign comer” or in “his readiness to do
more for his money,” but in “the Jewish system of out-door poor relief
... which makes rivalry and successful competition an impossibility.”
As an instance, he quotes the fact that poor children who attend the
Jews’ Free School in Bell-lane are partially fed and clothed by a
charitable Hebrew family. The writer, though apparently resenting
even competition in philanthropy as something monstrous and
dishonest, yet is charitable enough to admit that “it may be good, it
 264
may be bad; fair or unfair to other schools.” One would think that
schools were shops competing with one another as to which of them
will attract the greatest number of customers and not disinterested
institutions for the education of the community. Furthermore, one
would think that the fact quoted alone ought to move good Christians
to an emulation of the Jewish rival and thank him for the example of
beneficence which he sets them, instead of turning that very
example into a new reproach and adducing it as a reason for
excluding him from the country. Finally, one would think that, instead
of reviling the Jew for assisting his less fortunate co-religionists, a
true patriot might be induced, in sheer rivalry, to assist his own. But
what actually happens is this. We tell the Jew, “We let our own
unemployed starve, and you don’t. This is not fair to our poor
unemployed.” Verily, the ethics of anti-Semitism are as wonderful as
its logic.
The same narrow-minded dread of the alien competitor is at the
present day exhibited in South Africa. At a meeting in Cape Town on
Sept. 23rd, 1904, the speakers began by denouncing the Indians as
Asiatics, but they soon extended their objections to Jews, Greeks,
and Italians. The Jews were accused of working on Sundays, the
Greeks of keeping their shops open later than the natives, the
Italians of sending large sums of money (their hardly earned
savings) out of the Colony to their homes. A writer commenting on
this report sensibly remarks: “Against stupidity of this sort argument
265
fights in vain.” And his opinion will be shared by most sane people
in England. Yet many of these people will probably be ready to
approve the exclusion of the Jewish immigrant, not seeing that what
is rightly condemned as stupid intolerance in one country can hardly
be justified as enlightened statesmanship in another.
Time was when thrift, extreme frugality, success in life, and
clannishness were the causes of the Englishman’s hatred for the
Scotch competitor, when the latter after the Union began to emigrate
to the South. Those aliens were, like the Jews, accused of “herding
together” and of living on little, were envied for getting on in the
world, and were denounced for pushing one another on. The
clamour has passed away, and no sober Englishman of to-day would
dream of reviving it. Patriotic bigots in those days advised the
exclusion of the Scotch “undesirable,” and had a goodly following
among people who, having failed in life themselves, could not forgive
the foreigner his success. “But,” as a writer on the subject pertinently
asks, “would it have been well for England, even in a purely
commercial point of view, if the Scotch had been legally excluded?
Have not her children reaped benefits from the labours of those
266
whom their forefathers desired to forbid the country?”
To such considerations, however, our modern patriot is nobly
invulnerable. He soon forgets even his seven reasons, feeble and
contradictory as they are, in his Nationalist enthusiasm. The Jewish
millionaire is as hateful to him as the Jewish pauper. He describes
the Jews as a race gifted with indomitable cunning and an
extraordinary capacity for perceiving “with lightning glance the exact
moment to corner a market,” as “a powerful, exclusive and intolerant
race” of experts “in the flotation of companies,” as adepts “in the art
of deluding the public by the inflation of worthless securities with an
artificial and effervescent value,” as a tribe whose “undue economic
predominance” has been promoted by—O ye shades of King John
and Torquemada—“the mild spirit of Christianity!”
To descend from the ludicrously sublime to the sublimely
ludicrous: “Jewish ascendancy at Court is so conspicuous as to be
the subject of incessant lamentation on the part of full-blooded
Englishmen.” Surely the end of the British Empire cannot be very
distant when the King goes to Newmarket “accompanied by a Jewish
financier,” “is the guest of a Jewish financier,” and when, highest
horror of all, “in the published names of the dinner party on the first
night every one was a Jewish financier, or his relation, with the
exception of the King’s aide-de-camp and the Portuguese
Minister”—the latter, if not a Jew, an alien!
The patriot then warns us in tones irresistibly reminiscent of
Lewis Carroll: “The time has come to speak out about this alien
influence. There is danger ahead.... There are ugly rumours to the
effect that wealthy members of the Jewish community have placed
the King of England under undue obligations. If this be true, it is the
duty of the people of England to extricate their Sovereign from the
toils of the modernized version of Isaac of York. If it be untrue, there
is the less reason for Jews occupying their too prominent position at
Court. No sincere lover of his country can contemplate without
anxiety the gradual disappearance of the old families and the
ascendancy of the smart Semites who treat as trenchermen and led
captains what remains of English society. The efficiency of the British
nation requires the ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxon, not the Semitic,
element in it. It is time to restrict the immigration of potential money-
lenders from Eastern Europe.” The Jeremiad concludes with a truly
ominous reminder: “In 1290 the Jews were expelled from England.”
Continental anti-Semitism can show nothing superior to these
lamentations of our “full-blooded” “Anglo-Saxon.” In them we have all
the hereditary features of Jew-hatred exaggerated by insular distrust
of everything foreign and by provincial lack of sense of proportion or
humour. This manifesto, however, despite its limitations, is a fair
specimen of a kind of literature common enough on the Continent,
though still rare in these backward islands. Those interested in the
subject will find in the German anti-Semitic pamphlets and in the
Russian Panslavist newspapers the prototypes of all the arguments,
sentiments and self-contradictions of which those embodied in this
lugubrious production are pale copies. But the pamphlet is more than
a literary curiosity. Like the proverbial straw which, of no importance
in itself, yet deserves notice as indicating the direction of the current,
this product of a provincial mind is worthy of some attention as a sign
of the times. Already there have been found Englishmen illiberal
enough to overlook all the good points in the character of poor
Jewish immigrants—their untiring industry, sobriety and self-sacrifice
—and to ridicule, in supreme bad taste, the pathetic devotion which
impels these wretched wanderers to seek solace for their sufferings
in prayer and in the study of the Book which has been the only
source of comfort to millions of their people for the last twenty
267
centuries and to millions of our own for more than half that time.
From another point of view also the pamphlet is a document,
even more valuable, because more candid, than a less crude
performance would have been. It forms a hyphen of connection
between pure anti-Semitism—a small matter in England as yet—and
another tendency entirely different in origin, far more widely spread,
and shared by persons who, in other respects, have little in common
with the provincial patriot. This is the tendency towards a reaction of
which the anti-alien agitation is one symptom, and the clamour for
protection another; both pointing to a change of sentiment in favour
of the political ideals fashionable before the reign of Queen Victoria.
Until the nineteenth century England was essentially a Tory
country. The few ruled the many, and their rule was based on the
assumption—no doubt largely justified in those days—that the many
were not fit to rule themselves. A seat in the House of Commons was
virtually a family heirloom; patronage filled the Church, and
favouritism controlled the army and the navy. The whole of English
public life—civil, religious, and military—was under the sway of an
oligarchy, and fair competition was a thing unknown. It was the reign
of Protection in the broadest acceptation of the term. Then came the
awakening of the masses—an awakening the first token of which
had already appeared in the transference of a literary man’s homage
from a noble patron to the general public—and gradually the
lethargic acquiescence in the decrees of an aristocratic Providence
was supplanted by healthy discontent. The fruit of this deep and slow
evolution was the series of reforms which, by transferring to public
opinion the power which was formerly vested in a privileged class,
turned England from a pure aristocracy into a moderate kind of
democracy. The rotten boroughs were swept out of existence, and,
by the removal of religious disabilities, the English Parliament and
the English Universities became truly representative institutions.
Along with these changes came the demand for free competition in
another sphere—commerce—and the agitation resulted in the repeal
of the Corn Laws. In every department of life the individual claimed
and, in part, obtained freedom of initiative and action. Laissez-faire
became the motto of the Victorian era, and the free international
exchange of goods promised at last to realise the ideals of
international friendship and reciprocity which the eighteenth century
had preached but proved unable to practise.
 We now seem to be entering on a new chapter in our history. It
looks as though the Liberal current which has carried the nation thus
far has spent its force, and the counter-current is asserting itself. The
House of Commons still is an assembly of popular representatives,
but it has lost much of its power for good or evil, and much of the
respect which was once paid to it. Laissez-faire is only mentioned to
be derided, the principle of free competition is openly assailed,
internationalism is branded as cosmopolitanism and appeals to
humanity as proofs of morbid sentimentality; while protection is
confidently advocated in commerce and industry. How has this
change of sentiment come about? One of its causes may be found in
the growth of the Imperial idea. The history of all nations shows that
national expansion, though often achieved by individual enterprise,
can only be maintained by organised effort, by concentration of
power in a few hands, and by a proportionate diminution of individual
freedom. Democracy and Empire have never flourished together.
That the one may prosper, the other must perish. For this reason we
find the true democrat necessarily what is now called amongst us a
Little Englander; the true Imperialist as necessarily a dictator. The
anti-democratic reaction in England was inevitable, owing partly to
the expansion of Greater Britain itself, and partly to the development
of other countries on Imperialist and despotic lines. For it is now less
possible than ever for England to develop uninfluenced by the
example of her neighbours. And the example set by those
neighbours, as has been shown, is narrow and militant nationalism in
their relations with foreigners, and with regard to domestic matters
despotism and centralisation. But the growth of this inevitable
reaction has in England been accelerated by other and more specific
causes.
For a generation after the establishment of Free Trade England
enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity—an unchallenged commercial
and industrial supremacy. The British flag commanded the seas over
which British fleets carried the products of British labour to the four
corners of the earth, and the British traveller abroad made himself
unpopular and ridiculous by patronising Mont Blanc and by looking
superciliously down upon all who had not the good fortune to be born
British. Those were the proud days in which Lord Palmerston
described Prussia as a country of “d——d professors,” and Matthew
Arnold wrote his parable of the young Englishman and the upset
perambulator.
But this undisputed sovereignty could not last for ever. Europe
recovered from the devastating cataclysm which had left England
alone unscathed. The heaps of ruins with which the Napoleonic wars
had strewn the Continent were replaced by new edifices. Young
states arose out of the ashes of the old ones, and a new life chased
away the shadows of death. All these renovated countries, having
once set their houses in comparative order, began to look abroad for
expansion. Germany proved with marvellous quickness that she
could produce other things than “d——d professors”; France
likewise; not to mention the smaller countries of Belgium, Holland,
Denmark, and Switzerland. On the other side of the Atlantic also the
American Republic emerged from the ordeal of her Civil War with
renewed vigour, which soon displayed itself in commercial and
industrial activity. The upshot of this perfectly natural revolution was
that England found herself degraded from an autocratic mistress of
the world’s trade to the position of one among many competitors. We
saw with surprise and dismay that we were no longer the models
and the despair of others. Then our Olympian complacency gave
place to nervous anxiety, and our arrogant self-sufficiency was
succeeded by serious scepticism concerning the titles on which our
former estimate of ourselves rested. We ceased to brag of our own
“unparalleled progress,” and began to watch more and more
carefully the progress achieved by others. We acquired the habit of
asking ourselves how is it that the monopoly which we had foolishly
regarded as our inalienable birthright was slipping from our hands;
whence sprang this rapid development of countries which until the
last half-century were in their commercial and industrial infancy; how
came it to pass that nations which until yesterday were content to
copy us slavishly or to admire us passively are to-day rivalling us so
successfully? This inquiry led to the discovery that the foreigner’s
progress arose from superior intelligence, better education, greater
adaptability, and other advantages of a similar nature. We came to
the conclusion that, unless we rouse ourselves to strenuous
exertion, we shall be left behind in the race. This conviction has
already found a most laudable expression in the earnest efforts
made in every part of England to revise and to improve our
commercial and industrial methods and by special education to
qualify ourselves for the struggle under the new conditions. So far
our loss of the monopoly has proved a blessing in disguise, for it has
aroused that spirit of manly emulation to which undisputed
supremacy is fatal. But, unfortunately, the same consciousness of
our altered position relatively to the rest of the world has also
aroused a spirit of an entirely different kind. Many among us—too
intelligent to ignore the changed state of things, not intelligent
enough to diagnose the real cause of the change—have come to the
conclusion that our competitors owe their success to those very
fiscal and administrative fetters which we had discarded as obsolete,
and that if we wish to save ourselves from ultimate defeat we must
adopt their antiquated systems. Freedom, they say, means anarchy,
and victory is only possible by discipline, organisation, centralisation.
Individualism is hostile to efficiency. The democratic ideal is out of
date. At the same time, the cult of humanitarianism has been driven
out by the cult of nationalism.
As might have been foreseen by anyone who has watched the
march of events with some comprehension of their meaning, the cry
for protection was accompanied by the demand for the exclusion of
alien immigrants. The sequence was logical and unavoidable. If it is
to our profit to exclude the products of foreign labour by prohibitive
duties, it is in the same way to our profit to exclude the foreign
labourer. The two things, whether viewed from the economic point of
view, the political, or the psychological, are indissolubly connected.
They both are one expression of the twofold tendencies towards
despotism and nationalism—control over the individual and hostility
to the foreigner—reaction against free competition on the one hand
and against internationalism on the other. Lukewarm or unintelligent
pleaders for the one policy may oppose the other. But that the two
demands are only two manifestations of one and the same principle
is proved by the fact that, in their most uncompromising form, they
are defended by the same advocates. At a meeting of the members
of an East-end club which the late Home Secretary addressed on
Dec. 7, 1903, a resolution, approving of the new trade policy was
moved by Mr. D. J. Morgan, M.P., and was seconded by Major
Evans Gordon, M.P., both prominent champions of the anti-alien
cause. A protectionist writer on the subject of foreign immigration
into England concludes his study of the problem with the following
illuminating remarks: “Strong rivals, devoid of sentimentality and of
the capacity for being fascinated by magic words—such as the word
‘free’—are striving to thrust us from our position. It is full time for us
to abandon our long-played rôle of philanthropist among nations, and
so to order our affairs, social and economic, that we reap as much
advantage as possible and foreign nations as little. And one of these
268
things to be altered is the free entry of foreigners into England.”
As the numbers of foreign immigrants and the numbers of native
unemployed went on steadily increasing, the outcry against the
former went on steadily gaining in volume and vigour, and at last
cohered into a definite campaign which, as might have been
expected from the nature of the case, included in its ranks not only
the friends of their own country, but the enemies of every other; not
only aggressive Protectionists, but also philosophical Revisionists;
not only the advocates of the British labourer, but also the
adversaries of the Jew.
The first authoritative alarm of the Alien Peril was sounded in
January, 1902, when Mr. Balfour, in the course of the debate on the
Speech from the Throne, pointed out that, owing to America’s
adoption of severer measures against alien immigration, England
would be receiving even more immigrants than before. Not long
afterwards a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the
matter, and, after forty-nine public sittings, in which the evidence of
one hundred and seventy-five witnesses was received, came to the
conclusion that, although “it has not been proved that there is any
serious direct displacement of skilled English labour,” “the
continuous stream of fresh arrivals produces a glut in the unskilled
269
labour market.” Five out of the seven members recommended the
exclusion of certain classes of immigrants, who were pronounced
“undesirable” either on account of their character or owing to the
economic position of the districts in which they settled in great
numbers, and expressed the hope that the legislature would act on
their recommendation.
Both objections—moral and economic—had been anticipated
outside the Commission. On one occasion a London magistrate, in
sentencing a foreign thief to six months’ hard labour, availed himself
of the opportunity for stating that “the case fully illustrated how
desirable and necessary it was to check the unwelcome invasion of
alien criminals. At present,” he said, “the dregs of foreign countries
flowed incessantly into hospitable England, and within a few days
were engaged in committing all sorts of offences. The sooner
Parliament framed laws to prohibit the landing of these undesirables
270
the better.” Such cases, and cases far less serious, accompanied
by similar comments from the bench, became matters of daily
occurrence. So unpopular did foreigners become that their exclusion
would be urged because some of them at times obstructed
thoroughfares with their wheel barrows, thus wasting the valuable
time of the Police Courts and disturbing the equanimity of the
Metropolitan constables. One day, for example, a Russian lad was
brought up at the City Summons Court for causing obstruction with a
barrow of fruit. Sir Henry Knight, the Magistrate, imposed on the
offender a fine of two shillings, and, with admirable sense of
proportion, improved the occasion as follows: “We must have these
people stopped from being dumped down upon us. It is
271
abominable!”
On February 16, 1903, was formed an Immigration Reform
Association, with the object of enlightening the public in general and
legislators in particular on the alien question by means of pamphlets
widely distributed among Members of Parliament and other
speakers, as well as among working-class organisations. The
information thus liberally supplied emphasised the connection of
foreign immigrants with crime and vice, described the economic evils
which result from the inflow of resourceless aliens and from their
competition with the native labourers, and dwelt with especial
minuteness on the overcrowding of certain districts of East London
and the consequent dispossession of the native working population
by the invaders. Towards the end of the same year (Dec. 7, 1903),
Mr. Akers-Douglas, the Home Secretary, addressing the members of
an East-end London Club, discoursed, amid great applause, on “the
dumping of undesirable aliens,” quoting statistics to show how
rapidly their numbers grew, and how the grievances of overcrowding,
of crime and of competition grew with them, and concluding with the
assurance that the Government was seriously contemplating
stringent measures for checking the evil in time. A few months later
(March 29, 1904) the Home Secretary redeemed his promise by
bringing in a Bill “to make provision with respect to the Immigration of
272
Aliens, and other matters incidental thereto.”
In introducing this Bill Mr. Akers-Douglas took pains to persuade
the House that the proposed measures were not directed against
aliens as aliens, but against aliens as undesirables, and then
proceeded to describe the evils, already mentioned, which the Bill
was intended to remedy. Sir Charles Dilke protested against the
measure on the ground that the majority of the aliens who came to
this country, and who would be struck by the Bill, were the helpless
victims of political and religious persecution. He affirmed that the
native tradespeople had no grievance against foreign labourers,
because they were able to absorb the comparatively small number of
the latter by making them into good trade unionists. He disputed the
figures quoted by the Home Secretary, asserting, on the strength of
the Census and of the Royal Commission’s own Report, that the
number of foreigners in this country all told was a mere drop in the
ocean, and infinitely smaller than the number of foreigners resident
in almost every other civilised country—in fact, that many more
destitute Britons emigrated from the United Kingdom than destitute
aliens came into it. The speaker next pointed out that the Bill would
be used to exclude from England people whom afterwards we
should be ashamed to have excluded. This measure, he said, had it
been enforced at the time of the Paris Commune, would certainly
have excluded many of the most distinguished exiles who arrived
here in a state of starvation and whose return was afterwards
welcomed by France with every expression of gratitude to this
country for having maintained them—men like Dalou, one of the
greatest sculptors of modern times, like the brothers Reclus, and
many of the greatest scientists to whom we had been proud to give
hospitality, or men like Prince Peter Kropotkin, who arrived in
England stripped of every particle of his property by the Russian
Government and was welcomed by the people of this country. The
Russian Jews, against whom the heaviest allegations were made,
inhabited Stepney and some portions of the East-end, and there
were some in Manchester and Leeds. Of these some 20,000 were
engaged in the tailoring industry, some 3500 in cabinet-making, and
some 3000 in the boot and shoe trade. These were the whole of the
people against whom this agitation was directed. The speaker had
seen the broken-down prisoners from the “pale” sent for political
reasons across Siberia. Those men were not the dangerous persons
they were represented to be, miserable as might be their condition
when they came here. They were not of a stock inferior to our own;
and their stock, when it mixed with our own in the course of years,
he believed, went rather to improve than to deteriorate the British
race.
Leave was then given to bring in the Bill, which was read a first
time. A month later (April 25, 1904) the Bill stood for second reading
in the House of Commons and gave rise to a long and lively debate
which lasted through the afternoon and evening sittings. In the
course of the debate, the measure was discussed in all its aspects,
was strenuously attacked by one party and defended as strenuously
by the other. Sir Charles Dilke was again foremost in the fray. He
moved an amendment “that this House, holding that the evils of low-
priced alien labour can best be met by legislation to prevent
sweating, desires to assure itself, before assenting to the Aliens Bill,
that sufficient regard is had in the proposed measure to the retention
of the principle of asylum for the victims of persecution.” This
amendment the mover supported by an eloquent speech in which,
having once more traversed the Home Secretary’s statistics, and
once more reminded the House that these immigrants against whom
the measure was directed were the victims of persecution for their
religion—people whose friends had been burnt alive and hunted
from their homes to death—finally expressed his conviction that
behind this measure, not in the House, of course, but in the country,