Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnographic case study of the Danish policy of redistributing state jobs from Copenhagen to the provinces, the paper shows how the local encounter of a relocated government workplace and a rural town community interacts with local and regional imaginaries of past centres and peripheries

Paper long abstract:

Based on an anthropological study of the Danish national policy initiative of redistributing state jobs from Copenhagen to the provinces, the paper draws on an ethnographic case study of the everyday encounter of the government workplace, Nota, and the local town community, Nakskov, on the Danish rural island of Lolland, where Nota has taken up residence in the former town hall at Nakskov’s central town square. Through a focus on materiality and time, in the paper I illuminate and discuss the various socio-cultural implications of this exact placing, seen from the two-fold perspective of the relocated workplace and established local inhabitants. As regards the former town hall and especially its council chamber, first, the analysis unpacks how, in practice, a dual ownership between the State and local townspeople comes into being, within which as a workplace Nota must now operate and maneuver in everyday life. Next, it is argued how, furthermore, Nota’s placement in the town’s cultural-historical “inner sanctuary” comes to interact with and revitalize larger historical contexts outside of the former town hall building; namely the Danish national amalgamation of municipalities in 2007, whereby Nakskov’s status as independent municipality for nearly 140 years ended. It is concluded how, fundamentally, the local encounter between the relocated government workplace and the established town community do not begin with Nota’s arrival, but that its specific layers of meaning and terms of interaction are already entrenched in local collective self-understandings and regional imaginaries and memory about past centres and peripheries.