His Enemy Be Made His Footstool. Visionary Uprising on an Urban Scene – a Case from Mid-Nineteenth Century Norway

Amudsen, Arne Bugeg (2000) His Enemy Be Made His Footstool. Visionary Uprising on an Urban Scene – a Case from Mid-Nineteenth Century Norway. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 45 (1-2). pp. 183-204. ISSN 1216-9803

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Abstract

The article focuses on a series of events in the little town Fredrikstad in south-eastern Norway in the year 1852. A small group of proto-methodists, who later on were influenced by Mormonism and emigrated to Utah, made serious efforts to dominate the public urban spheres: the church, the court room, the harbour and the streets. Their actions were, partly, inspired and legitimized by religious visions and hallucinations but their message included both religious and social reformation. They were charged with accusations of blasphemy, crimen laesae majestatis, disturbing public order and insulting His Majesty's servants, and they eventually ended up with legal sentences. One of the rebels, the shipmaster Tobias Jacobsen, was also accused of being insane and made the object of a thorough psychiatric investigation.The author presents four main points of interpretation of these events: 1) The events can be analyzed in terms of "systems in conflict", that is as a confrontation between radically different cultural values and symbols, 2) The conflict had rhetorical implications for both groups of participants: the group in revolt and the established public authority, 3) The rhetorical implications include different conceptions of time and history, and 4) As a contribution to the study of cultural history, a close examination of the visionar-ies' rebellious narratives may show the close interaction between speech and action, event and narrative.

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