Trump: Transacting trickster |
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| Authors: | Keir Martin Jakob Krause‐Jensen |
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| Institution: | 1. Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His current research focuses on the changing nature of the corporation in the 21st century and the uses of the ‘culture concept’ in the global spread of psychotherapy.;2. Associate Professor at the Department of Education, Aarhus University. He has conducted field research among HR consultants in Bang & Olufsen and social workers in a Danish municipality. His current research concerns management gurus and their influence. |
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| Abstract: | Donald Trump's recent election victory has been greeted with horror and disbelief by many. In particular, the glaring inconsistencies and open self‐contradictions that marked his campaign should have rendered him unelectable by the standards of conventional reasonable political practice. But rather than being a problem to be explained away, it is Trump's open embrace of contradiction that explains much of his appeal. By holding contradictory trends and opinions simultaneously, he presents himself as being capable of embodying seemingly mutually exclusive social trends, such as an intensification of economic competition on the one hand and a radical denunciation of that competition's effects on some of the losers from that process on the other. By doing so, he presents himself as a powerful figure with charismatic abilities to contain such contradictions within himself – abilities that are not available to ordinary career politicians, but that are strikingly reminiscent of the powers attributed to so‐called ‘trickster’ figures in anthropological literature. |
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