Saturday, March 15, 2014
Executive (Omni Shoreham)
In the early 21st century, terrorism is a seemingly ubiquitous, if amorphous, threat in Europe. High-profile attacks in places like London and Madrid—not to mention the plots and plans foiled by ever-creeping state surveillance—have rendered modern urban centers the real and imagined settings for the bloody articulation of political demands in the language of bombs and bullets. And yet, despite the contemporary fixation on terrorism, few foresaw the possibility of such gruesome carnage in Norway—a country viewed popularly, after all, as something of a sociopolitical arcadia of oil wealth and welfare. Drawing on the interpretive anthropological framework of Clifford Geertz and my experiences in Oslo during July 22, 2011 and its aftermath, this paper poses a simple but ceaselessly generative question: What was the “said” of the attack in Norway? I argue that terrorist violence is a symbolic act which constitutes a political claim—often against the state—legible within, and shaped by, the cultural context of its realization. Positing that erstwhile accounts of July 22 have described the attack and its fallout without taking seriously cultural significance, I combine the interpretive approach with ethnographic and historical perspectives toward producing a ‘thicker’ description. To conclude, I offer thoughts on certain symbolic affinities between the Norwegian case and others on the continent toward grasping the meaning of terrorism in contemporary Europe.
