Transcript
Introduction:
Mette: “So, the fact that people, who don’t have anywhere to live, also don’t have a lot of privacy, that’s something we can also recognize from our own time. If you are to receive benefits from the state, then you also have to give up some privacy. So that’s something we see in our own historic period: it is possible to get some help, but that then requires of you to give people access to all information about yourself.”
Anja: Do you know about the wild the discoveries, Danish researchers make, while the rest of us are working, playing badminton or showering? That’s what we unveil in Science for Wild Minds. My name is Anja C. Andersen, and I’m a professor astrophysics and the public’s understanding of the natural sciences. In this podcast, I introduce listeners like you to some of the exciting projects, researchers are working on right now – and not only in the natural sciences. My co-host is editor Mette Holbæk. Her job is to make sure that the discussion remains understandable and accessible, when putting two nerds in the same room. Welcome to Science for Wild Minds.
Today we’ll be speaking with Mette Birkedal Bruun, professor of Church History at the Faculty of Theology at The University of Copenhagen. She is the director of the Danish National Research Centre for Privacy Studies. What really surprised me, when talking to Mette, was how Mette’s research in monks from the 17th century can shed a light on the way we talk about and define ourselves as private and public people today.
Introduction end.
Interview start.
Anja: Mette, you do research on people, who withdraw. How do you do that?
Mette: Yes, I do research on people who withdraw from the world to be closer to God. What I’ve really been focused on is monks. I’ve worked with monks from the Middle Ages, and then I’ve worked a lot with French monks under the reign of Louis the 14th. So that’s in the 17th century – you know, the time of The Three Musketeers and all that.
Anja: But these monks, they’re not there anymore, and they’ve withdrawn, so how do you collect information about them?
Mette: What I’ve really been interested in, are the texts that the prominent monks have written. So that’s abbots and head monks, who have written texts of different sorts. They’ve written rules for how to behave in the abbey, but also letters going out of the abbey. And that’s the sort of thing that’s both a little paradoxical and very, very interesting. You withdraw from the world– and especially my 17th century –monks who are trappists, you know, the ones with the beer – they are very, very isolated. At the same time, the abbot whom I’ve written my doctoral dissertation on, has an extensive correspondence with men and women outside of the abbey. So we can think that’s very paradoxical. But for him, it’s about spreading the idea of withdrawal outside of the abbey.
Anja: What are you looking for in this material?
Mette: What I’ve been preoccupied with is trying to understand: how does this make sense for him? Why does he think it’s important to withdraw from the world? Why does he find it important to get other people to withdraw as well? How does he organize his abbey, so that the community, which that is made out of men from various different backgrounds, can work? Because we know that when many people are contained within a small space, it creates friction, and it does so in the abbey as well. So he creates a lot of rules for how to make it work. At the same time, he is restricted by some historic conditions. The monastic movement goes way back; all the way back to the first years of the Christian religion – that is, if we’re looking at Christian monastic movements. This guy is what is called a Cistercian-monk, which is a specific branch of the monastic movement, starting in the Middle Ages. So he is obligated to respect and follow the historic structures, and at the same time he is obligated to react to what is happening in his own time. And it’s this intersection that is very interesting for a historian.
Anja: What are you hoping to find in this?
Mette: I’ve actually been particularly interested in trying to understand the connection in this. For me, the monastic movement is so bizarre. I cannot understand why they’re doing this and what drives them. And it’s especially difficult to understand this tension between withdrawal from the world and engagement in the world. I can see that many of the historians working on the 17th century in France and on this specific monk – he’s a bit famous, you see – just dismiss him, saying that: “He’s very extreme and a little bit of a hypocrite, because we see that he withdraws from the world, but at the same time he has the correspondence, and that’s just hypocritical.” But that’s where I’ve been more interested in trying to take apart our idea of hypocrisy and trying to think: “Well, it must have made sense for him. Why did he do it?” Because, me being maybe one of the two people in the world who know the most about this abbey, doesn’t really matter in and of itself. But what’s valuable is being able to activate this knowledge when interacting with other researchers who work on other aspects of monastic life or other sides of French society in the 17th century.
Anja: But the fact that he was so communicative must mean that you have a lot more data than otherwise? That must be an advantage?
Mette: It’s a great advantage. He’s even published a lot of texts. Many of the people working with this kind of stuff, they’re working with handwritten documents, which I don’t have to do. I work with published texts. That also means that it’s not necessarily new material. So it’s not about discovering new material, because it’s already there, but it’s about reading it thoroughly, connecting his texts and going that extra mile to try to understand what is really happening in this correspondence.
Anja: That sounds really interesting. So we know a lot about the 17th century – what can we use that knowledge for?
Mette: Yes, that’s very interesting. Because this is where it starts becoming academically creative. And by creative I don’t mean making up things or creating new things, but putting things in relation to new things. And in a way, that’s what I see as my most important research contribution. I’ve done all this work on monks, but then I’ve also created the Danish National Research Centre for Privacy Studies, which was launched in 2017, and is a center where we work on the concept of privacy. So it’s the idea of withdrawal, in a broader sense, in what we call the “early modern period”. So, in relation to my research, we’ve branched out to cover the entire period between year 1500 and year 1800, and we’ve also branched out to create an interdisciplinary field, where we’ve got architecture, law, social conditions, political ideas and religion under the same roof. So we have this interdisciplinary center with a broad scientific outlook, where we’re occupied with the idea of privacy. So that’s all the ways in which individuals and groups draw boundaries between themselves and society. That could be by using walls, doors and locks, but it could also be less material boundaries. So for example it could be the question of who can enter a house without an invitation. Who has to have an invitation? Or it could be a question of which possibilities you have of safeguarding your own information. And what is the motivation for safeguarding information about yourself? Which interests do the authorities – be that the state or the church – have in knowing as much as possible about the individual citizen? So all these questions and problems that we have in current privacy-discussions, we try to find and analyze them in the early modern period.
Anja: So what kind of data points would that be? I imagine you have a long list – can you tell us about them?
Mette: Yes of course! We have a lot of different disciplines at the center. Each discipline has its own kind of data points. So an architectural historian is interested in walls, doors and ground plans, and how they change over time. So for instance, it could be the question of when corridors were introduced into our buildings, because that tells us something about the way space is distributed and shared in a building – whether or not people had their own rooms, for example. If you constantly have to walk through different rooms, it’s not possible to have separate, private rooms. So the corridor becomes really important in building privacy.
Anja: Can we put a date on this?
Mette: We can see that this development happens over the course of the entire period [1500-1800]. We can also see which social classes have had the opportunity to build corridors. Who can enter which rooms?
Anja: So that’s what you would call a [distributive] hallway in my apartment in Vesterbro?
Mette: Exactly! It distributes people, it distributes space and it distributes access. So that’s the kind of stuff architects could be working on. Attorneys and legal historians work with entirely different data points. That’s more about what kinds legislation there was, and when was it changed. But it’s also about what court cases there were, how people attack each other in court and what expectations are were for privacy in court cases. So for instance, if you have a case where one part says: “My neighbor has been making an excessive amount of noise.” That tells us that there is an expectation of a right to have silence. Silence is also a kind of privacy – not being disturbed by someone else’s noise. So all these different demarcations and all these different disciplines have each their type of data points and each their method of analyzing them. Each their own type, you could say, of scientific work. So that means that when you connect all these fields in a way where they have to work together on a daily basis, there is a lot of scientific negotiation. You have to teach each other about data points and data analysis, and try to even perhaps take a critical look at your own methods and ask: “What am I taking for granted? What is it that we don’t discuss in my field, because we all know that that’s how it has always been, and that’s how it is?” So the thing about interdisciplinary studies – everyone who’s done interdisciplinary research knows this – it’s that it requires an enormous pedagogical effort in regards to your own scientific process.
Anja: Is there something specifically Danish about this? I have this idea that in Denmark we’ve for many years had systems of writing down and archiving information in church books, as well as a library system, and maybe even some kings, who have been very meticulous, or maybe just interested in archiving information. I’m thinking that must be an advantage for your studies? Or is that maybe just the way it’s always been in Europe?
Mette: No, Denmark is very special in regards to preserving data – both in past and present time, you could say. There are researchers doing some excellent work on precisely the way, data has been collected – also in a historic sense. We work specifically with Europe, so that’s across Germany, England, The Netherlands, Denmark and France. Now we’ve also started working on the Caribbean and the enslaved people there, and what kind of collection of data there was at that time and place. So we’re always expanding our geographical field. Both our disciplinary and our geographical field, you could say.
Anja: We’ve had several guests on the podcast who are also directors of National Research Centers – also interdisciplinary centers. For those who don’t work with research at all, can you tell us a bit about how it’s organized and how it works? You get some money, and then you hire some legal historians and architectural historians into your project? Or? Can you spell it out for those who don’t work on a National Research Centers?
Mette: It’s exactly how you described it. There is a director, and then maybe some senior researchers, and then they hire a team of younger researchers. What’s special for the fields in my center is that none them are usually collaborative. In these disciplines, you almost always work alone. PhD’s – this might come as a surprise to those who are not in the humanities or similar fields – they normally work entirely alone with their own project. If they publish something with their supervisor, it can turn out to be a huge problem for them later. So we’re all very accustomed to working alone.
Anja: ‘We’ being…?
Mette: People who come from these historical fields. So that would be all the fields that are involved in my center, in architectural history, history of ideas, legal history and church history. We’ve been trained to work alone. We’re used to everyone, we’ve admired professionally, working alone. So putting people together… We’ve created some different research teams who work with specific places in Europe in specific time periods. So for example, that could be the little German town Helmstedt, which houses a university, in the timeframe 1630 to 1830. There will then be a team of younger church historians, legal historians, architectural historians and social historians, who work together on Helmstedt. They will look at the professors at the university, for instance. What are they writing on privacy? What is the law professor or the philosophy professor writing? How are they occupying their houses? Are they building corridors – for example – and how? Helmstedt becomes the case for this little team. That means that they have to learn to collaborate and work on the same material together – and that’s not something they’re used to or trained in doing. So at our center, research-education is actually a big part of it.
Anja: Who decides what to ‘run after’ in the specific case? Do they meet at the coffee machine in the morning and say “I really think I’ve got something here, come on everyone, we’re going to look at this”? Or do you decide every Friday afternoon what the text topic to focus on will be?
Mette: No, on these cases, they decide themselves. And that’s actually quite special, because they’re young researchers – many of the cases don’t have any senior researchers associated. So it’s PhD-students and Post-Docs who study Helmstedt together. And then they agree on something – maybe in pairs of two. So there’s an architect and a social historian working on the professor accommodation, for example, because they’ve agreed that there’s something interesting there. And then the theologian and the legal historian work on legislation. So they kind of meet each other in some specific questions, and then they exchange ideas and findings once a week or once every two weeks. And that’s the joy of collaboration. So, I’ve said that we’re not used to or trained to work together, but I’ll also say that I think we often miss out on the joys of exchanging knowledge with colleagues, and that’s a great, wonderful thing.
Anja: And also the joy that comes with someone coming and asking some – sometimes really dumb – questions like: “Why don’t you just do it like this?” Where you’ll think: we’ve never done it like that, and there’s a reason for that. But then sometimes they’ll ask some questions where you think afterwards: “Yes, actually, why not?” That’s a perspective you would otherwise never have had.
Mette: Yes, and then knowledge is accumulated very quickly. It speeds up some of the processes. Now I’ve spoken of my own research: I spent fourteen years writing my doctoral dissertation – and then I did other things on the side. But here [at the center], that accumulation of knowledge is really sped up on some levels. You still have to do deep research, and it still takes a long time, but there’s another kind of drive in this type of research.
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Anja: You focus on the time between year 1500 and 1800, but today we still use phrases such as: “the peace of private life” [direct translation of Danish expression] or “invasion of privacy”. What is the connection between the centuries you are working on, and life today? What can you use this knowledge for – as you would say?
Mette: That’s a really good question. A part of my motivation for creating the National Research Center, and one of the thing we wrote in our application, was that we wanted to show how historical research could be a resource for current discussions and problems. At the time we wrote it, I think that we thought that it sounded grand. But then we’ve actually committed ourselves to doing it. And there’s two aspects of that. On the one hand, history is the “ancestor” to everything that exists today. So it’s the root to how everything developed later on. So that’s the one reason that historical research is important: it helps to show us why things turned out the way they did. But then on the other hand, historical research also contributes to asking questions about the way we do things today. Because when you look through a historic lens at things, some factors are very clear to you. I’m a church historian, so what I work on is the religious factors. You could say: “Wow, they really believed in God a whole lot in the 17th century, and it’s crazy how much they did to make sure he was happy with them!” But the question that this poses is then: what do we believe in today? It’s not necessarily religion, it could be that we believe in democracy or all kinds of other things, that determine the way we act. Sometimes these systems of belief and values can be difficult to spot, when we look at ourselves today, but they’re very easy to find, when we look at it through a historic lens. So that’s how history can pose some important questions. And that’s what we’ve seen at the center. We’ve collaborated with people, who work with privacy in a current context, both in legislation and policy-making, and implementing privacy-legislation, but also people who do research on our present-day conception of privacy. We can see that the dialogue between research on the past and current discussion poses some questions. We don’t always get the answers – things are always way more nuanced and complicated than we’d like for them to be. But it can contribute with questions like: “Have you thought about…” Kind of like what you were talking about before, Anja, questions like: “Have you considered that it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way? Could things be different? Could they be controlled by other values and beliefs?” And that’s why, when you take, for instance, one specific type of privacy legislation from one context, that has a specific set of values, and apply it to another geographical place, for instance, or context, that has a different set of values, then it can create some problems.
Anja: So, in reality, historical research can speed up our understanding of our own time? Isn’t that what you are showing? That we don’t have to pose the same questions again – or “repeat the experiment” as you would say in my field – because you kind of find out that it has already been done before. Maybe in another context, but in reality, in an abstract sense, it’s the same. So we can get a move on more quickly and understand ourselves, in a way. Maybe we can be better prepared for the future, if we understand the past.
Mette: Yes, you could say that. I think, in regards to avoiding making the same mistakes, that’s really something where history can teach us something, because it can show us things like, for example, how inequality is written into our structures. That’s where history can really reveal a lot of things. If we take the time to look at it, we can spot some mistakes that we don’t have to make again.
Anja: Can you elaborate on that?
Mette: For example, I’ve said that religious structures are easy to spot in history, but so are status differences, class differences or differences for the genders: what are women and men allowed to do in a specific context? Or now, when we’ve started our project on the Caribbean: differences between enslaved and non-enslaved people. All these things sort of stick out when we study history. So we can aim our gaze at our own time and say that the chances of us avoiding these mistakes just by ourselves, they’re very small. So which mistakes are we making today?
Anja: So, for example, you could point out how we allow some people to have more privacy than others. Is it like that?
Mette: Yes, for example, in history we can see that people who are not rich, don’t have a lot of privacy. Firstly, they don’t have a lot of space. But then there’s also a lot of focus from the side of the authorities. They don’t really like that people, for instance, are without home and just wander from town to town. Because you don’t know where they are, if they’re begging or stealing or whatnot. So, the fact that people, who don’t have anywhere to live, also don’t have a lot of privacy, that’s something we can also recognize from our own time. If you are to receive benefits from the state, then you also have to give up some privacy. So that’s something we see in our own historic period: it is possible to get some help, but that then requires of you to give people access to all information about yourself.
Anja: Is the concept of privacy positive or negative in your context, or does it change throughout history?
Mette: That’s a very good question. That’s the kind of thing that is very interesting to look at. In which situations is privacy understood as a negative thing? In the beginning of our time period, closer to the year 1500, privacy often has negative connotations. Often in the sense that the private is something you can’t control, and so it is dangerous, because all sorts of things can be going on in private, that you can’t control. Then later on, closer to the year 1800, people are more preoccupied with individual freedom, so privacy becomes a good thing, because that’s where you have your freedom. There’s a lot of information to be found when studying in which contexts privacy is seen as something negative, and in which contexts it’s positive. Typically, if you’re afraid of something, you’ll try to figure out if there are threats in the private space, if the private is hiding any threats.
Anja: You mean, if you’re the authorities or the state?
Mette: Yes.
Anja: It’s always about the people in power over the citizens, right?
Mette: Yes, it’s often like that. But privacy is also about how you in a more practical sense delimit yourself from the person sitting next to you. It could be in a bus, for instance, where you in these days can sit and be in a private space. You have the same thing in history, where you can be private in different ways. One of the authors of one of the books, we’ve published, talks – very cleverly, might I add – about giving each other privacy. She writes about ships, and we’re currently working on publishing a book on ‘Privacy at Sea’, which is wonderful. Because, normally you would think that there’s no privacy on ships where people sleep in hammocks next to each other. But what they do is that they give each other privacy by pretending not to hear what’s going on in the neighboring hammock. That’s also what we do when we’re at a restaurant: we give the table next to us privacy by pretending that we can’t hear that they’re discussing their divorce, or whatever they’re talking about. So all these different ways that we interact with the boundaries between ourselves and each other – it’s all about privacy and which means we have at our disposal in different situations.
Anja: I remember at one point, quite a few years ago, IKEA launched a new chair for children. I can’t remember what it’s called, but it resembles a green pea pod. Have you seen it?
Mette: Yes.
Anja: It’s round, kind of like an easter egg that has been sliced at an angle. The kid can sit in the chair – probably not very comfortably – and then you can pull this leaf-cover down to cover yourself. It was made so that children could create a private space. IKEA always works with the overpopulation-premise: less and less square meters, more and more people pressed together – what do we do? And that’s why they have so much cave-like material in IKEA. So that’s also it, right? That’s also a private space.
Mette: Yes, exactly.
Anja: I’m curious, because it sounds like your monks were disliked for withdrawing from the world and the communities, they came from. Today, you could say that it’s the privileged people who have the option of withdrawal: they can go on “10 days in silence” retreats and have a monk-like experience.
Mette: Actually, the monks were quite well-regarded back in the 1600s. They were found to be kind of leatherneck-ish. They were seen as being ‘elite-believers’. Other people came and visited the abbey and participated for a short while – kind of like retreats today where you can join an abbey for a week and kind of soak it up and then go back out into the world. But when I talk about privacy in faith, it is for example about things like meetings outside of the abbey – closed-off, religious meetings, small religious meetings. At one point, what was called the Conventicle Act was introduced in Denmark – it was in 1741. It banned smaller religious gatherings that were not supervised by the local priest, because otherwise they couldn’t know what was going on at these gatherings. Were they developing strange religious ideas when they were sitting there, all alone? It could be political ideas, you could develop when you sit there together, alone, without anyone to take control of the situation, or it could be strange religious ideas. So the monks as an institution in the societies that house these abbeys for men and women, were primarily seen as a good thing. Then there’s the whole thing with the question of whether they are actually as pious as they say they are, but that accusation of hypocrisy, that’s very often present in these kinds of situations, and can always be invoked.
Anja: So in your National Research Center, I imagine you have some kind of elevator-pitch or sentence – something you want to solve. So what is the dream, when the center ends? When can you say “we did this” or “we got closer to this”?
Mette: An insight – and it’s not really an answer to a question – but an insight into how we often think of private-public as robust categories: “Now we’re in the private, now we’re in the public.” But what history shows is that the boundaries are far more porous – far more vague. It’s more like: “Well, now I’ll establish privacy in this moment with the help of my pea pod, and then soon I’ll be public again.” And this conscience of the flexibility of these boundaries, which is in a sense not really anything spectacular or breaking news-worthy, because, I mean, “Breaking News: The boundaries are flexible” – that’s not very sensational. But it really goes to show how people establish themselves in all these different ways, and draw these kinds of boundaries under certain circumstances. So that means that when talking about privacy-legislation today, people’s conception of what privacy is, are very different, very contextually determined and very dependent on what situation, you’re coming from.
Anja: So is GDPR also a part of this?
Mette: GDPR is a part of it in the sense that it’s not a part of our research, and it’s definitely not something I know a lot about. But what I can do is that when I talk to someone who knows a lot about GDPR, I can tell them that the concept of privacy basically comes from latin – privatus is a latin word – which means that it comes from ideas that go all the way back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome about who has the political power, who is ‘political’ and who is the opposite of political – that’s private. So there are a lot of structures around this. In the West we might think that our entire world is structured around this private-public, private-professional, private-common. But if we arrive in other situations, they might be determined by other binaries or other concepts. So that means that if we take GDPR, for instance: I’ve talked to African researchers an African privacy-analysists who say: “For us GDPR doesn’t necessarily make any sense. Privacy is not such a central term in our conception of a society, as it is for you. We’re more interested in communities.” So we could come from the West and say: “Well, you have walls and doors, so you must also be preoccupied with privacy,” but if your own cultural understanding of yourself is centered around something else, it doesn’t make any sense to try to impose it on each other. So we just have to remember in the West that this is what history is capable of: showing us, that we’ve lived with the idea of privacy for many centuries, so it’s a part of our cultural DNA. It’s in our walls, it’s in the entire way we organize our lives. But it’s not necessarily the same in other situations.
Anja: What’s the wildest or most interesting thing, you’ve discovered in your research so far?
Mette: The thing that made the biggest impression on me, it was that these French monks in the 1600’s, they’re known for living very ascetically. We even have lists over the things they could eat; they didn’t eat meat, they didn’t eat fish, they ate soup made from water with a little bit of salt and some cabbage. They ate carrots and stuff like that. And then you could think: “Ooh how ascetic.” But then I read a text by someone who had visited the abbey, who said: “Well yes, but there are many people outside of the abbey who would be overjoyed if they got that food.” Because this was written in 1693, which is one of the worst years for hunger in France. People are laying and eating grass and dying from it because their stomachs became swollen. So it just shows how everything is relative or contextually determined. So you can say “What a horrendously strict diet, they had at La Trappe,” but they got food every day, and a lot of people in France at that time didn’t. You could make a kind of boring point about everything being relative, but it’s really about the question of what the alternative is, what the situation is. I found that really interesting.
Anja: What you’ve said here has really given me something to think about, Mette. Because it’s about being conscious of the fact that privacy is a subjective thing for us living people, but also that there’s always someone defining my privacy and what they can meddle in and what they can’t. And it would be different on a different continent or in a different century.
Mette: Exactly.
Anja: So it’s like so much else, like democracy, it’s not set in stone, it’s something we always have to discuss. Thank you so much for enlightening us.
Mette: Thank you for having me.