The Funny Scientist

by Line Rosenvinge

Inside text for book "avoir l'air " .A nifca publication 2002


As scientist, Colonel collects grass samples, measures cultural distance using a ruler, does statistical studies of identities, and creates a perfume, a distillate of Danishness - all with smooth professionalism, convinced of the validity of his methods.

When embarking on the investigation of phenomena such as small clusters of people in a Copenhagen park, a popular venue for family picnics and alfresco birthday parties, Colonel adopts a scientific approach. The groups settle on the grass in a circle marked out by Danish flags. Colonel, uninvited, proceeds to crop grass from within the circle and from outside it. Each sample is placed in a specimen envelope and appropriately labelled. The researcher commands evidence! This is serious science, then! For these are prélèvements, samples - no less.

Colonel takes his researches further by choosing a spot on which to hem himself in with Danish flags, letting the 'fenced-in' area extend across a path where joggers and other visitors regularly pass. Both groups depart briefly from the path so as not to intrude upon the fenced area. But when Colonel replaces the Danish flags with the Greenlandic counterparts (also red and white) the territorial markings are no longer respected.

Ruler in hand, Colonel set out to measure the cultural distances separating people at a public event. How great is the distance between the African performers and the Danes in the audience? Several metres? Is that a lot? Shoppers and traders draw close together, exchanging information, negotiating a price, parleying an interest into a deal. Two friends go into a huddle: Colonel records a cultural distance of barely ten centimetres.
The event features an Internet facility: standing shoulder to shoulder, visitors use the opportunity to surf the Web. A couple of men thus preoccupied are physically in close proximity, but each funnels his attention on the monitor before him, on his own particular Web contact. Affinities render every distance minimal while neighbours remain strangers to each other.

We are close to ourselves and believe to know our nationality constitution, as if one could be 100% Danish. Colonel asks people in the street what sort of percentage figure they would put on their degree of Danishness. Some say 100%. But is that in terms of mindset or descent - and are such things even measurable? A man asks if it is in blood, but you are free to decide, and no one hesitates when to put their Danish roots in to percentage.




Du Duchamp Entertainant


funny sociologue