#dane duloc

[wehaveacat]

Okay, long form time!

This springs from this conversation with @bizarrelittlemew about the "Danish" village Solvang in California and them serving æbleskiver and medisterpølse for breakfast, and the question of "how did they even come up with that?" tickles my historian brain.

Places like Solvang and Elk Horn (see also the Spise Med Price episodes from Elk Horn) give me such an uncanny valley vibe and I think it's worth examining why and how stuff like this happens.

For some light context, both Solvang and Elk Horn are examples of places in the United States that were founded by danish immigrants in the beginning of the 1900-hundreds (we'll go with "roughly 100 years ago"). While Solvang is a tourist attraction now, Elk Horn is a pretty standard small town and home to the Museum of Danish America.

I think the reason why these places seem kinda off to Danes is due to the fact that these places "split off" from Danish culture more than a century ago, and has since slowly evolved in one direction while Denmark (and thus Danish culture) has evolved in a different direction. Sort of two finches getting separated on different islands.

To me, a Dane living in Denmark, places like these are WEIRD! It feels like those paintings and drawings of lions from the middle ages made by people who had never actually seen a lion. Sure, æbleskiver and medisterpølse are still culturally significant in Denmark today, but they're not breakfast foods (æbleskiver are a christmas thing, and medisterpølse is for dinner or the occasional christmas-/easter lunch). But do you know what IS breakfast foods in the US? Sausages and doughnuts. And medisterpølse is indeed a sausage while an æbleskive does sort of fit in the category of "fried dough".

What has happened is this: the culture in Solvang and Elk Horn has picked up pieced of US culture while keeping parts of the Danish culture from around 1900. Some of the original context has been lost, and this results in the US cultural context filling in some of the gaps, since the places are located in and surrounded by that culture.

It feels sort of like the Whalers On The Moon episode of Futurama.

In the end I think the people of Solvang and Elk Horn adore Danmark and Danish culture. They seem proud of their cultural heritage and I can't imagine that they mean harm in any way, even if looking at pictures from Solvang reminds me more of the city of Duloc from Shrek, than anything you'd encounter in Denmark.

This is a very surface level take, and someone with a degree in social sciences or something similar might be able to write something a lot more cohesive and in dept.

But my point is: this happens, it feels weird, but it's how culture (and language and people) evolve and develope. Does it feel weird when something so far removed from Danish culture purportes to be Danish? Absolutely. But as a former (some would argue still...) colonizing country I don't think it would be appropriate to call it cultural appropriation. The founders of these places were Danes, and besides that Denmark has been forcing it's culture on other countries for way too long for us to complain about cultural appropriation. That ship sailed in 994.

@bizarrelittlemew, I'm so sorry I wrote this wall of text at you. My ADHD-meds kicked in and it just sort of fell out of my brain. I've made you this as compensation:

[notwerewolf-art]

we held an sguide panel

september 5, 2020

[notwerewolf-art]

topical

july 15, 2020

[notwerewolf-art]

HA. HOMOS

may 6, 2020