Cultural encounters between the rural and urban at the dawn of the 20th century

Postdoctoral project by Kristian Aarup, Junior Investigator.

Kristian Aarup’s postdoctoral project brings historical depth to one of today’s most discussed issues in Denmark – the divide between city and countryside. Around the year 1900, Denmark experienced an intense wave of urbanization that brought people and cultures from different parts of the country into contact as never before. Kristian examines these encounters, focusing on the ways urban–rural dynamics shaped people’s experiences and perceptions of each other.

For Kristian, the starting point of research is a curiosity about how to understand the past.

“A central driving force in my professional work is the desire and effort to form images and understandings of people in the past—of what they thought, believed, and experienced.”

 While he acknowledges that we can never fully know what people in earlier times felt, the fascination of getting as close as the sources allow is what drives his work.

He asks how people in this period encountered other lifestyles and ways of being in the world, and how these meetings influenced perceptions across the urban–rural divide. The current debate in Denmark is often framed in stark, ideological terms — signified by expressions that provoke strong symbolism, stereotypes, and prejudices. Examples include “de københavnske saloner” (a term used by politician Inger Støjberg to describe what she portrays as a metropolitan elite far removed from everyday life outside the Danish capital), “udkantsdanmark” (a term for rural regions seen as remote or struggling), and “den rådne banan” (a nickname for the banana-shaped stretch of rural Denmark from north-west Jutland through Funen to southern Zealand, often linked to depopulation and economic decline). Kristian’s project seeks to provide this debate with historical context by exploring how such divisions were experienced more than a century ago.

To do so, he works mainly with two major archival collections at the National Museum of Denmark: the National Museum’s Ethnological Surveys (NEU) and the National Museum’s Collection of Industrialists, Artisans and Workers Memoirs (NIHA). These sources contain questionnaire responses covering all aspects of everyday life, offering a rich and varied portrait of the past. Together, they allow Kristian to explore how Danes encountered and understood each other at a time when urban–rural connections were being reshaped.