In the latest installment of blog posts in the wake of the PluRel conference on the concept of religion in January, John Ødemark outlines the backdrop for the nascent research project "Superstitio – Superstition and the Constructions of Religious and Cultural Differences in Denmark-Norway", hosted by The Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) at the University of Oslo.
In this blog post, Ødemark traces the concept of superstitio from Antiquity and up to the present, with a special emphasis on a decisive shift in its application over the course of the 17th century, as the Danish-Norwegian monarchy was at its zenith: increasingly deployed to patrol discursive borders between 'us' and 'them', superstition was instrumentally used to legitimize the subjugation of populations in the periphery of the kingdom, in particular the Sámi population in the High North.
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