Mårup Church and the Politics of Hybridization: On Complexities of Choice

Mårup Church, on the northwest coast of Jutland in Denmark, is facing a predicament. Every year, the sea eats further into the dune on top of which it stands, and soon the church will tumble into the sea. This has generated a heated debate on whether or not the church should be saved.
In this paper we explore the arguments various actors bring to bear on this controversy. How are the complexities of change in nature and culture articulated in the context of Mårup Church? The context of this discussion is markedly hybrid; argumentative resources span modern categories such as nature and culture, politics, economics, history, geography and geology. We observe the work of particular agents in constructing ontological narratives that support specific versions of reality that would allow the church either to stand or to fall. Following Geoffrey Bowker, we refer to these as configurations of time and space.
A discourse of nature management, which defines changes in relationships between nature and culture as matters of choice, has gained momentum within Danish administrative agencies. Reflexively, however, it would seem as if change or becoming is undermining the ability to realize such choices. In this situation, our challenge is to renew conceptual work in order to construct an imagery for coping with the swirl of ever-changing relationships between entities we used to call `natural' or `cultural'. We sketch this challenge under the heading of `the politics of hybridization'.