ABSTRACT

The construction of cultural identity is always an intellectual enterprise. Ordinary folks normally don’t care very much. Intellectuals as a rule have a hard time convincing people about the relevance of these identity constructions. In this article, I will look into a particular historical instance, and discuss the factors that were involved in the development of a Norwegian ‘Identity Project’, its limited success and actual failure. I will, not least, focus on the intellectual(s) who were active in the project and ask what rewards were in it for them. This Norwegian case can in my view in many ways be read as a parallel to, an allegory of, many similar relations between (certain kinds of) intellectuals and the people they claim to represent in one way or another. Some of these allegorical aspects will be explicitly pointed out, others will be left to the sociological imagination of readers.