Rasmus Rask Poulsen

• Presentation
• CV
• Research outputs
• Activities
• Keywords

Current Research: Crisis, Time and Generations

Between 2023 and 2026 I am part of the collaborative research project "Disrupted Temporalities" with ethnological colleagues in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Based on collected testimonies, stories, diaries, and ethnographic interviews we examine how entangled crises (e.g. covid, climate and the Ukraine war) impact orientations, notions and practices of time.

In 2022, the concept of "permacrisis" was launched in order to describe ongoing, related and co-present crises, the concept suggests that we are living in a time of permament exception. In my current research, I examine how these crises shape the daily lives of Danes and destablilize their "normal" order of time; routines, rituals and the ways in which they practice and experience pasts, presents and futures.  

I am especially interested in examining, how research participants in Denmark envision, practice and orient themselves towards the future in light of "permacrisis" and "polycrisis" across different generations.

Primary research: Religious heirs and World Heritage

The majority of my research (e.g. my Ph.d. thesis) deals with the crossroads of religion, cultural heritage and uses of the past in Denmark. How does cultural and World Heritage designations affect religious communities and their uses of their own pasts? World Heritage entails prestige, because it means a significant recognition of a piece of built or living cultural heritage, while it simultaenously becomes an engine of increased government and societal oversight and intervention where state and commercial agents along with tourists take part in the experiences, management and control of these environments, spaces and practices. In my own work I am interested in the exhchanges between local religious conceptions, practices and agendas, on the one hand, and secular-cultural ones, on the other. 

Ethnographically, I have explored these quesitons about religious communities, cultural heritage, and World Heritage through qualitiative, ethnographic methods in Denmark in sites such as Roskilde Cathedral and the Jelling Monuments. However, the bulk of my ethnographic and analytical work concerns the site of Christiansfeld in Southern Denmark, which became a World Heritage Site in 2015. It did so for its well-preserved town center from the 18th century founded by the Moravian Brethren (Herrnhuters) congregation, a community that still lives and worships in town. 

Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Christiansfeld among the local Moravians, I examined how World Heritage recognition and related process shaped the daily religious and social lives of the congregation, how they wanted to keep and share their religious values as spiritual heirs together with a secular public. All of this resulted in my Ph.d. thesis, "Keeping up with the Moravians" (2023).

Fields of interest

Cultural heritage, World Heritage, religious heritage, ethnography, uses of history, memory, Denmark, the Nordics, temporality, future, crisis, ethnography, museums, archives, generations