To be a Norwegian

When spending too much time watching status updates on Facebook, you're bound to stumble upon something interesting sooner or later. Today, unfortunately, it was later, but worth the wait indeed.

A friend of mine posted a link to an article in The New York Times about the Norwegians' success in the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, claiming nine gold medals. The article in itself is mediocre, but it had none less than 301 comments (which all make it even more interesting to read) and to me it was a small history lesson about one of the great characters of Norwegian history.

Anyway, this unraveled an endless flow of thoughts and questions about what it means to be a Norwegian, and it brought me back to a discussion we had in class around the same subject. In a class filled with about 40 anthropology students and an Argentinean lecturer, not one of us could put down in a sentence what being Norwegian meant. The lecturer asked if it said something in the original Constitution what being a Norwegian was, and to our recon it did not.

Of course the class ended, but the question and the fact that it seemed indefinable would not stop bothering me and it consumed me the entire day. I finally put it to rest when my sleepiness was unbearable and it hasn't awoken until now. The article started up the machinery, but alas it's time to go to bed to recover from the influenza that's hijacking my body. I'll pick up on this lose end some other time, but in the mean time I hope I gave you something to think about.