Portraits TOC NORWEGIANS: COOPERATIVE INDIVIDUALISTS D. Douglas Caulkins

“Do you plan to measure our heads or do you want to study our sex lives?” This mischievous inquiry came from a Norwegian government official to whom I had gone for advice in choosing a site for my doctoral research in anthropology. His question reflected puzzlement at my explanation that I was an anthropologist and that I wanted to live for several years in a rural Norwegian community. To most Europeans in the 1960s, anthropologists did one of two things: either they studied human physical characteristics, such as cranial measurements, or they were Margaret Mead clones investigating the sex lives of exotic peoples. I did neither, so I tried to convey the true nature of my interest in Norwegian society. Why, the official wanted to know, did I want to come to this small country of fewer than five million people, located on the periphery of Northern Europe? The standard of living in this successful welfare state was one of the highest in the world, so obviously I had not come to document the poverty of an underdeveloped country. I wasn’t a Norwegian-American (he had checked early in our conversation), so my project was not motivated by an attempt to recapture something of my heritage. Neither had I come to study the Sami (Lapps), reindeer herders who, along with Gypsies, are Norway’s only indigenous ethnic minorities. I explained that I wanted to study Norwegian community life and particularly the way in which non-governmental voluntary organizations were used in cooperative community activities. In other societies, I continued, anthropologists often studied the ways in which kinship relations structured local community life. In contrast, I wanted to focus on the ways in which people in an individualistic society such as Norway cooperated in non-kinship organizations. The official brightened up when he understood that I wanted to study positive features of his country. Norway is known for the wealth and variety of its local voluntary organizations, including civic, sports, religious, health, cultural, and political groups. Norwegians often point to their rich organizational life in drawing contrasts between themselves and other Europeans. Once he understood my interest, the official suggested that I consider some small communities in the fjord country of the west coast of Norway. Norwegians think of their country as composed of five regions, the East, West, North, South, and Trøndelag, a region that separates the North from the rest of this long, narrow country. Only the most populous regions, the East and West, will concern us here. The East is characterized by forests, broad valleys, and a relatively gentle coastline. It contains half of Norway’s popu

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PORTRAITS OF CULTURE lation, as well as half of its agricultural and forest lands. Oslo, the capital of this highly centralized country, is located in the East, the most urbanized region of Norway. In contrast, the West, separated from the East by a central mountain range, has a rugged coastline, deeply indented fjords, high mountains, and little agricultural land, most of which is restricted to narrow coastal strips. Many of the small farming, fishing, and manufacturing communities perched along the shorelines in the West were good candidates for my field site. I had been told that the people of the West have a lively sense of their own identity, distinct from the East. They consider themselves to be more egalitarian and more genuinely Norwegian than Easterners, who were directly influenced by Danish culture before Norway gained its independence from Denmark in 1814. I had learned a great deal in the interview with the official in Oslo. For one thing, I would have to choose a more meaningful label than “anthropologist.” Eventually I adopted the title of “social researcher,” a more neutral label that avoided some misleading stereotypes associated with anthropology. After spending the summer of 1965 in Norway, taking a language course and touring possible field locations, my wife Lorna and I returned to Cornell University, where we were graduate students. During the following academic year we drew up detailed plans for our return to Norway the following summer, when we would take an advanced language course and then begin more than two years of field work in small communities on the west coast. PEACEFUL NORWAY Norway is a peaceful, stable, parliamentary democracy. That characteristic provided the key practical and theoretical reasons for my choosing Norway as a field location. The practical reason was that I hoped to return to Norway for additional fieldwork later in my career and I saw little danger that mass political upheavals or shifts in government policy would frustrate those hopes. More importantly, I was interested in the sources of stability within the community and state. As a former civil rights activist and a citizen trou

NORWEGIANS bled by the escalating levels of violence and conflict in many parts of the world, the appeal of Norway’s tranquility was irresistible. Among the competing theories of social stability, the one that intrigued me at the time was derived from the ideas of the British anthropologist Max Gluckman.1 Gluckman and his colleagues at the University of Manchester contended that political stability is often an outcome of cross-cutting social ties. People who are opponents in one context might be allies in another. For example, two men might be members of different political parties, but the same local service organization. Gluckman’s notion was that the fabric of local society is strong and stable when people find that their interests are interwoven with those of a variety of other people. According to the theory, local society would be politically unstable, however, if there were pervasive cleavages between interest groups—when opponents on one issue are almost always opponents on other issues as well. In a community with such deep divisions, people on one side of an issue tend to treat the other side as enemies. I was interested in discovering whether Norwegian small towns were characterized by cross-cutting ties, as predicted by the theories of the Manchester anthropologists, or by deep cleavages. To test these ideas I planned to collect extensive information from all the voluntary organizations in a community. By assembling the membership rosters of all the organizations, I could discover whether the groups were knit together by overlapping memberships. If all of the community organizations were tied together, directly or indirectly, the Manchester theory would be vindicated. If the organizations were divided into relatively discrete interest group clusters with few cross-cutting ties, however, I would have to look elsewhere for the sources of Norwegian stability. I decided that it would be best to replicate this study in a second community, for greater confidence in the outcome. We needed to find not one, but two field locations. TALE OF TWO TOWNS After an intensive study of maps and geographical sources, Lorna and I finally concluded that the best locations for our research would be the aluminum factory town of Sunndalsøra and the edu

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE cational, cultural, and market center of Volda. Both towns had populations of approximately eight thousand, but there the resemblance ended. While Volda had grown slowly and steadily around a small set of shops clustered near a small harbor, Sunndalsøra was practically a new town, grown up around the post–World War II aluminum factory that had been located there to take advantage of abundant hydroelectric power and a good port. The town and the factory sprawled across the estuary at the end of a narrow, deep valley where one of Norway’s best salmon fishing rivers emptied into the fjord, and where ships loaded with bauxite ore docked and waited for their cargoes to be brought ashore for processing. In the town, apartment buildings lined the new streets, and occasionally gave way to a traditional farmstead, a relic of an earlier phase of the local economy. The town center boasted a grand hotel and a new shopping complex. According to local lore, the mountain that towers over the town is the tallest in Europe to rise directly from the sea. Sunndalsøra With the expansion of the aluminum factory, the supply of housing in Sunndalsøra lagged behind demand, and local officials struggled to provide accommodations for the workers and their families. The day that Lorna and I arrived in Sunndalsøra, the mayor and the aluminum factory manager were in conference about just that problem. We presented a letter of introduction at the mayor’s office and, to our surprise, were ushered into the conference room. Both the mayor and the manager made us feel welcome in spite of the fact that our presence in town would only exacerbate the housing shortage. With their help we were able to take a room in a house in one of the outlying villages a few miles from the center. Our room had once been part of a village shop, closed and converted to accommodations when the shop could no longer compete with the new shopping center in Sunndalsøra. While the massive changes in the former village of Sunndalsøra were very visible in the new townscape, the changes in the little fjord and mountain communities within commuting distance of the factory were less apparent, but just as significant. The villages usually consisted of a cluster of houses and farms, a community meetinghouse, and perhaps a shop. Some of these settlements had

NORWEGIANS small industries, such as a soft-drink bottling plant, but most were primarily farming communities that specialized in raising livestock. With the coming of the factory in Sunndalsøra, many men became part-time farmers, commuting to work in the factory during the day and returning to the farm to care for the sheep or cattle during the evening. Gradually, the women of the households took increasing responsibility for the animal husbandry, signaling a shift in gender roles. We began our study of organizational life by doing a systematic census or inventory of all of the organizations in each of the outlying settlements. We soon learned that each of these settlements had approximately the same population of organizations. A community was not complete without a youth group, sports club, health organization, one or two Lutheran missionary associations, and perhaps a farmers’ association and an organization that supported coastal rescue services. Larger villages had a more extensive inventory of organizations. Virtually all the households in a settlement were tied into the organizational network. “In a small community like this one,” our landlord explained, “everyone is expected to join at least a couple of groups.” Anyone not wishing to join an organization risked being considered uncooperative. Groups might meet as frequently as every second week, either at the local community center or in rotation at homes of members. Many organizations had seasonal festivals or parties, which were attended by most of the people in the community. Because of potential scheduling conflicts, organizations had to coordinate their activities. Thus, leaders expected cooperation between organizations, as well as within them. The meeting program for many organizations was a variation on one basic pattern: singing a song or hymn, reciting a prayer, reading from the organization or club magazine, discussing current business, collecting dues, planning the next seasonal activities, and pausing for coffee, cakes, and socializing. Different persons might have responsibility for different parts of the program. At special meetings, particularly for larger organizations, there might be an outside speaker or a slide presentation. Some groups, such as sports clubs and political parties, had other kinds of meetings as well. One or more elements of the pattern, such as the prayer, might be omitted, but once a participant had mastered this basic pattern, the meetings held few surprises, and joining a new organization or taking over the leadership of one would not be intimidating.

Everyone learns how to be a cooperative organizational mem

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE ber. After we finished the census of organizations in surrounding settlements we started work on the town itself. Within Sunndalsøra we found a large number of groups, such as labor unions, related to the needs of the many factory workers, some of whom were immigrants from other parts of Norway. Some groups aimed to provide social support for the immigrants. For example, workers from the region of Trøndelag formed a Trøndelag Association to provide a time and place for people from that region to get together, speak their distinctive dialect, and reaffirm their regional identity. Political parties were very active locally, and the Labor Party, with its close ties to the unionized workers, was numerically dominant. Sports organizations were especially important in most neighborhoods. Because of the tight housing market, when the lease on our room expired we moved to Volda earlier in our research period than we had planned. We took occasional trips back to Sunndalsøra to finish collecting the information in that community. Fortunately, while living there, we became friends with a native of Volda who had an apartment to rent on the main street of his hometown. We moved to Volda, happy to have the additional space. Our front window had a view of the fjord and the mountain that towered above the town. We liked the town, with its patina of age and none of the raw newness of Sunndalsøra. We felt we could live there forever. Volda in History The municipality of Volda is in the southern part of the district of Sunnmøre, a few hours drive south of Sunndalsøra, in the western province of Møre and Romsdal. Sunnmøre has two distinct zones of settlement, one coastal and one on the inner fjords, where the mountainsides often descend steeply to the shore, leaving only scattered patches of land suitable for house sites or cattle grazing. The Volda municipality encompasses the territory on either side of Voldafjord and its extension, Dalsfjord. Opposite sides of the fjord are connected by frequent car ferry service. With an area of 216 square miles, Volda municipality is composed of a central town, adjacent neighborhoods, and small outlying settlements, with a total population of 7,262 in 1968. Sunnmøre’s only city, Aalesund, with 37,287 people in 1965, is a fishing port located on a peninsula

NORWEGIANS and an adjacent island in the coastal zone. Here, as throughout the province, the fjords and waterways connect rather than divide settlements. Transportation by boat or ferry across the fjord or to the next island is easier than traveling over the mountain ridges inland. While the province of Møre and Romsdal as a whole was one of the least industrialized in Norway at the middle of the nineteenth century, it developed rapidly at the turn of the century. During the period 1897–1915, the industrial growth of Norway as a whole was 109 percent, but it exceeded 228 percent for Møre and Romsdal.2 The city of Aalesund was a major center of industrialization in Sunnmøre, but others, like Volda, also developed along the fjords. Volda, with a long tradition of commercial boat building, expanded its production in the early nineteenth century. Several neighborhoods in the municipality also provided most of the labor for the state harbor and lighthouse authority, which developed shipping facilities all over Norway. Remittances from these laborers in other parts of the country provided capital for local development. In both Volda and the neighboring municipality of Ørsta, small-scale cottage industries were started, using such traditional skills as carpentry and weaving. In addition, barrels, shoes, nets, organs, clothes, and furniture were manufactured in the two municipalities. By 1900 about one third of the 1,209 household heads in Volda were engaged in trade or industry, with the remainder in farming, forestry, and fishing.3 The critical development of energy sources, which allowed for the expansion of these industries, began in 1900 with the construction of a municipal electric works. In the industrializing areas of the inner fjords, the traditional joint occupation of farmer-fisherman was transformed into that of farmer-factory worker or laborer. By the turn of the century, Volda and Ørsta were separate municipalities, each with its town center and satellite communities. As neighbors they developed complementary economic functions. Ørsta gradually became the industrial center of southern Sunnmøre, with forty-five percent of its wage earners in industry in 1960, while Volda became the educational and cultural center of the area, with the service sector of the economy accounting for nearly forty percent of its employment in 1960.4 With its teachers’

college, established in 1883, State Grammar School (1910), and Commercial College (1938), Volda had approximately 1,100

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE non-resident students, who contributed significantly to the local economy. The long-standing enterprise of providing room and board for students has led to the wry local saying that to make a living in Volda all a householder needs is a couple of pigs and a student or two. The town proper is located on the north side of Voldafjord. Three intermediate neighborhoods on the north side are directly connected by road to the center, and two other communities are connected by car ferry. Most of the intermediate communities, with an average population of 338, have a rich social life of their own, but they have the added advantage of easy access to the town, where many intermediate residents have their jobs, do much of their shopping and attend meetings of organizations. Beyond the intermediate communities, down smaller fjords that feed into Voldafjord, are moderately peripheral neighborhoods that are generally smaller, averaging two hundred residents, and less economically differentiated. Many of these settlements are experiencing some depopulation as the young people move to the town for further education or better jobs. Even further from town, at the ends of one-lane roads, are five peripheral settlements. With an average population of only 142, these settlements are unfavorably placed for access to jobs, services, and amenities. According to the 1960 census approximately twenty-two percent of the labor force in Volda was engaged primarily in agriculture and forestry, five percent in fishing, thirty-four percent in industry, and, as we have seen, forty percent in the service sector of the economy. In 1968 there were 495 local firms in the municipality, ranging from single-person operations such as the beautician and the painter, to such substantial enterprises as a clothing factory, a yarn factory, an engineering shop, and a dairy. The municipality was not dominated by one or two large businesses or factories, as was Sunndalsøra, but had a number of locally owned small- and medium-sized firms employing ten to forty workers. THE ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIETY

NORWEGIANS Once again we began the schedule of research that we had adopted in Sunndal, and compiled a census of the organizations in Volda, working our way from one peripheral community to another. We also drew a random sample of residents to interview, regardless of their connection with organizations, so that we would have a better understanding of the diversity within the municipality. Meanwhile, we participated fully in the life of the town center, where we lived. We attended church, films, concerts, and school programs, gave talks at the college, hiked and skied cross-country, purchased goods from most of the local merchants, socialized with new friends, and watched television with neighboring families. We introduced pizza to the local cuisine. We carefully read and clipped newspaper reports of meetings and other organizational activities in order to have some familiarity with groups even before contacting them. Whenever a meeting was open to the public, we went to it, whether it was a garden club, a hobby club, or a political party meeting. During the national elections, we attended campaign meetings of all of the parties. When we told people of our interest we were often invited to meetings that were not otherwise open to the public. Wherever we went we introduced ourselves and explained our interest and were met with hospitality. Visitors, including social researchers, can expect to be offered good, strong coffee and one or more kinds of baked goods for which the Norwegians are famous. Fueled by cake and coffee we spent many hours in long interviews about organizations, their activities, their membership, and their histories. We learned that the origin of much of the organizational life in the community could be traced to the religious movements of the last century. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, southern Sunnmøre experienced a number of pietistic religious movements inspired by Hans Nielsen Hauge, a charismatic evangelist from the south. The Hauge movement, which opposed the power of the state Lutheran Church, was national in scope; however, in southern Sunnmøre, as in most areas, it failed to capture more than a fraction of the members of the community. Locally, the Pietists often came into contention with the clergy and segments of the local community that adhered to the orthodox center of Lutheranism. This promoted the development of a bicentric local society, one center affiliated with the State Church, and the other affiliated with the Pietists. In Volda and Ørsta the Pietists gained more adherents during the 1820s,

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE when the representatives of the State Church opted for a strategy of accommodation rather than confrontation. Nationally, Hauge’s layman’s movement scored a number of triumphs, including the repeal of legislation under which the Pietists had been persecuted. In Volda the bicentric tendencies within the religious domain were bridged by the growth of the foreign mission movement in the 1840s. The membership in local branches of the Norwegian Mission Society included more than one third of the adult residents and most of the prominent community leaders. In the 1860s and 1870s the solidarity of Sunnmøre declined as the bicentric tendencies reemerged, once again dividing the religious subcultures. The community cleavages became more complex in the last two decades of the century. The old center was challenged not only by another fundamentalist revival but also by a new liberal nationalist movement. Most of the younger leaders in the communities of southern Sunnmøre affiliated with one or the other of these movements. Representatives of the old center were swept out of office. The mediating symbol claimed by both the fundamentalist laymen and the liberal nationalists was Nynorsk (“New Norwegian”), a language based on peasant dialects, which became Norway’s second official language. Ivar Aasen, the brilliant nineteenth- century linguist born on a farm near Volda, literally constructed the first version of Nynorsk out of those dialects. His goal was to provide the country with a genuinely Norwegian language to replace the Danish-influenced dialect used by the Danish-educated urban officials in the nineteenth century. Nynorsk had in some ways served as a mediating symbol between the opposing world views of the liberals and the Pietists in Volda. Although they disagreed with one another, at least they argued in the same language, a language of nationalism and, depending on the context, of regionalism. The ideological ferment generated a local literature of largely ephemeral value but with considerable importance at the time. Local youth associations produced hand-written newspapers and wrote poetry and plays in Nynorsk. Pietists from Volda translated hymns into Nynorsk and sang them at regional revival meetings.5 As with any practice that intensifies subcultural identity, the use of Nynorsk sharpened the boundaries between the identity group and others. After Norway achieved complete independence from Sweden in 1905, Nynorsk became less important as a national symbol and more important as

a regional or sectional symbol. Associated at different times with national romanticism, the peasant movement, the working class,

NORWEGIANS the periphery, the Liberal Party, the layman’s movement, and the Labor Party, Nynorsk was a multivocal symbol in Norwegian cultural politics. Other regions exhibited different configurations of solidarity movements and subcultural development. The labor movement, which had little impact on Volda, was an important force in many mining and lumbering communities in other regions. The layman’s movement that was so important in Volda was unimportant elsewhere. The configuration of social movements varied by region and by economic specialization within regions. These regional and economic differences were reflected in the variety of voluntary associations that crystallized out of the social movements. Nearly a quarter of the voluntary organizations in operation in 1968 were established before the First World War, but organizations have become increasingly important with the emergence of an industrial society from the nineteenth century agricultural and fishing communities. The following table shows the distribution of voluntary organizations by type at the time of the research. Approximately half of the organizations in the municipality were based in the outlying settlements and drew their membership only from their home communities. The remainder were either based in the central town or served the entire municipality. VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATIONS IN VOLDA MUNICIPALITY, 1968 1. Occupational Organizations 6.1 percent (12) 2. Religious Organizations 36.6 percent (72) 3. Political Organizations 8.6 percent (17) 4. Sports Organizations 7.6 percent (15) 5. Charitable and Humanitarian 26.9 percent (53) 6. Special Interest Groups 14.2 percent (28) Total 100 percent (197) The high proportion of religious organizations (36.6 percent) in Volda is typical for the west coast but would be unusual in other regions in Norway. While this table shows the concentration of religious and charitable organizations, it conceals the important

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE finding that over sixty percent of these groups are exclusively women’s organizations. This result raises an important question that only emerged after we had completed the inventory of Volda organizations. WHY SO MANY WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS? Before we completed our work there were no exhaustive lists of organizations in Volda and no one, not even the most avid organization leader, knew how many organizations existed in the municipality. Our inventory of organizations grew rapidly and with an unexpected twist: there were many more women’s organizations than I had anticipated. These included groups pursuing a wide variety of purposes: religious and missionary, the temperance movement, public health work, domestic arts and crafts, farm women’s issues, and political activity. None of the previous studies of Norway that I had read in preparation for my research gave much attention to women’s organizations. As I looked back over my reading list, I could discern several different patterns in the earlier literature. Many of the community studies in Norway during the last forty years either ignored women’s organizations or conveyed a trivializing image of these groups as merely unimportant social clubs or guardians of minor civic rituals. Each of these images is based on an implicit assumption of the primacy of men’s organizations. I suspected that the most important reason for the neglect and trivialization of women’s organizations in the social science literature could be traced to our earlier male-centered assumptions about women, their organizational capacities, and their goals. In two studies that deal prominently with organizations and their role in community life, women’s organizations received only a fleeting mention.6 Similarly, in a study of politics in a northern Norwegian community, there is no indication of the existence of women’s political organizations or women’s political activity.7 The implication of these studies is that women’s organizational activities are either nonexistent or so unimportant as to be unworthy of mention. While all of these studies deal with the organizational life

NORWEGIANS of communities, none recognized that Norwegian women participated even more extensively in formal voluntary organizations than Norwegian men. Other studies in the 1960s began to modify this impression. While women’s organizations were no longer invisible, they were still denied any real significance. The image of women’s organizations as little more than recreational, coffee-and-conversation groups emerged from Fredrik Barth’s study of a Norwegian mountain community.8 Barth listed the local women’s organizations but cautioned that although these groups claimed to be oriented toward practical goals, their main function was recreational.9 Furthermore, Barth contended, the groups were of little consequence because informal social networks played a greater role than organizations in the life of the community. As we will see, formal organizations and informal social networks were not mutually exclusive but could be mutually supportive. A third interpretation is a partial corrective to the social club image, but has its own weakness. In Hollos’s study of an isolated rural community in central Norway, women’s organizations were presented as guardians of minor civic rituals.10 Unlike Barth, Hollos contended that women joined organizations out of a real interest in the instrumental and pragmatic goals of the groups, rather than for recreational purposes. Hollos’s description evoked the image of a collectivity of women gathering frequently for impersonal rituals that celebrated the identity and solidarity of the community. In her view, friendships within the group would threaten this solidarity.11 As we will see in our case studies of Volda residents, however, men and women often joined organizations with their friends or made friends in the organizations that they joined. Our findings, then, ran counter to the older ethnographic literature. Locally, there were more women’s organizations than men’s organizations, women’s organizations met more frequently, and more women than men belonged to organizations. Women’s organizations carried out work considered important by members of the community. They promoted mental and physical health, child welfare, third world development, religious faith, charity, domestic arts, fine arts, disaster relief, historical and literary traditions, and local identity. The activities of many of the women’s organizations incorporated thousands of hours of unpaid labor, without which the standards of community life would have been much lower.

Finally, as members of organizations, women combined their social life and their community work. Contrary to the previous social science images, they were not strange half-persons, neither frivolous

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE socializers nor sober drudges. PERSONAL PROFILES To understand more about how women and men experience their organizational society, consider the lives of seven residents of Volda municipality, as they were in 1968. Ragnhild Ragnhild has lived in Volda for eighteen of her twenty years. A clerk in a local clothing shop in the town center, she is pleased to have gotten a good job after completing a business school course. In high school she was an average student and felt very secure in her accomplishments. Students are not pushed to excel as individuals. As most of the other people educated locally, she is an adherent of Nynorsk. Ragnhild belongs to the Liberal Youth Association, one of the organizations that continues to venerate the memory of Ivar Aasen, the founder of Nynorsk. Two of her best friends, a nurse and a cafe waitress, are also members of the Liberal Youth Association. Two other close friends, a college student and a seaman, have not joined that organization. Ragnhild belonged to the Volda Sports and Athletics Association when she was a student but hasn’t been active recently because her interests are developing in other directions. She is thinking about joining the Labor Party Youth Group, since her parents are members of the Labor Party. Many high school and college students belong to youth branches of political parties, which tend to be more radical than their parent organizations. All the local parties, including the Conservatives, the Christian People’s Party, the Liberals, the Center Party, the Labor Party, and the Socialist People’s Party, have youth branches. Ragnhild, in common with most of the locals, prefers small-town life and has a very negative view of city life. She is secure in her social network, with eleven family members and relatives in Volda, in addition to her friends. She has a wide social circle and feels that she could just drop in and chat with at least twenty families in the

NORWEGIANS 17 town. Bjarne Bjarne is a forty-six-year-old truck driver and farmer who lives with his wife and four children across the fjord from Volda in the village where he was born. The small farm that he inherited is not prosperous enough to support the family, but he is able to earn an average income with his local haulage firm. (Each household’s taxable income is published in the local newspaper annually since Norwegians don’t regard income as private information.) Astrid, his wife, helps with the farm, and the oldest children have some responsibilities for caring for the animals. Bjarne loves the farm and the sense of identity and continuity of heritage that it gives him. He is very attached to his way of life and thinks that his small community is an ideal place to raise children. Astrid comes from the next fjord south, worked in an office before she married, and is content with her job as a housewife and farmer. As most of the people born in this area, Bjarne and Astrid prefer to read and write in Nynorsk rather than the urban language. Bjarne is an officer of the local Nynorsk Society, a branch of the national organization that is dedicated to the advancement of the second and less used of Norway’s two official languages. He has leadership roles in two other organizations, the local Farmer’s Union and the cooperative food store. While his participation in the activities of the local Sports Association has dropped off recently, he makes a point of attending the Motorists’ Temperance League. Volda municipality is dry, not allowing any local sales of beer or alcohol, and Bjarne hopes to keep it that way. While Astrid is not active in any organizations now, earlier she was a member of two groups, including a youth temperance group. Four of Bjarne’s cousins, who also live in the municipality, are members of the same organizations. His best friends include two part-time farmers, like himself, one full-time farmer, and a plumber. The latter two are also related to Bjarne, and one of the others is a neighbor. All but one of his friends are members of at least two of the organizations to which he belongs. Bjarne and his family are embedded in a complex, overlapping social network of relatives, neighbors, work colleagues, and fellow

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE members of voluntary organizations. Bjarne’s lifestyle and organizational memberships exemplify a frequent cluster of values, oriented toward traditional agriculture and Nynorsk as key symbols of regional identity. Often associated with these values are the secular temperance organizations (there are religious temperance organizations as well). For people like Bjarne, big-city lifestyles are seen as a major threat to the rural life that they cherish. Anna Anna, who is sixty-one, is a widow with three grown children, one of whom lives in Volda. For many years she has been an office worker for the public utility administration housed in the Municipal Building in the town center. Neither she nor her late husband was born in Volda, but moved from an isolated island settlement when the local fishing industry declined. Many of the remote islands along the coast have experienced depopulation as the herring stocks have dwindled. In recent years some of these island communities have been revitalized by the innovation of domestic salmon farming, where thousands of fish are raised to maturity in floating, offshore pens. Overproduction and competition from Scottish salmon farms, however, have brought new difficulties to this industry. In any case, this development came much too late to stem the flow of immigration from the islands by people of Anna’s generation. Anna has a cousin in Volda, but her best friends are neighbors who also work in shops in Volda center. Like them, she is a member of the Inner Mission, an organization for fundamentalist Christians. She has been a member for thirty-six years and has become the president of the organization. It is very important to her, as is the White Ribbon, a Christian temperance organization that she supports financially but seldom attends. She also is a non-participating member of the local Public Health Association, which has a small core of very active members and a large number of passive supporters. Their work is important in helping with preventive medicine and welfare for the elderly and handicapped, but Anna’s major interest is in Christian missions. Previously she belonged to another missionary organization that was theologically closer to the state Lutheran Church in which more than ninety per

NORWEGIANS cent of Norwegians claim nominal membership. Most of the small communities have two to four of these Lutheran missionary organizations, which raise large amounts of money for mission and medical work in developing nations. Anna prefers, however, the stricter biblical interpretation of the Inner Mission, which is the legacy of the Pietistic religious movements that swept through Norway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anna’s social network is more tightly focused than Bjarne and Astrid’s. As a newcomer, not educated in Volda, she was denied the advantage of having friends for life among her schoolmates. When asked whom she spends her spare time with, she named only two people, both neighbors and fellow members of the Inner Mission. While, like Bjarne, she is suspicious of the potential immorality of urban lifestyles, Anna is also convinced that there are dangers closer to home, in the Liberal Youth Associations and similar organizations. Ivar Ivar has been a member of the Liberal Youth Association for over eleven years and has served in several leadership positions, including president of the theater group. Back at the turn of the century, a Volda native who had risen to national prominence was among the founders of the first Liberal Youth Association, which was soon followed by many local branches. Historically, the Association has been dedicated to the celebration of Norwegian identity and creativity through sponsoring theater, dance, and folk music—pursuits that were rejected by the fundamentalist Christian organizations. As a community that prides itself on its cultural heritage, Volda has a number of native playwrights who, naturally, wrote in Nynorsk. Ivar, a twenty-six-year-old manager at a local garage, headed the Volda theater group for a year. He has been a member of the Sports and Athletics Association since he was ten years old, and rarely misses a meeting. Both Ivar and his wife Birgit are active in music associations too. As her mother and father before her, Birgit was a member of the Youth Choir in the neighboring municipality of Ørsta, where she grew up. Continuity of organizational memberships within families is relatively widespread. In smaller communities, daughters sometimes “inherit” the leadership of organizations that have been headed by their mothers for many

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE years. Many of the relatives on both sides of Ivar’s family live locally, including brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Ivar spends most of his spare time with friends who are not relatives, however. Of his four best friends, three are neighbors and one is a workmate. His friends include teachers, a skilled worker, and another office worker. One of the teachers is also a fellow member of the Sports Association. Ingrid and Harald Ingrid and Harald, age fifty-three, work in two of the major industries in Volda—education and furniture making. She is an artist and a design teacher and he builds furniture. As most Norwegians with skilled occupations, both have specialized training at the equivalent of a junior college. They have one child, who no longer lives in Volda. Ingrid belongs to an array of ten organizations. Three are women’s organizations: the Domestic Arts Society, which promotes aesthetics as well as efficiency in home management and decoration, the Housewife Association, and a moderately-religious temperance organization. Along with Harald, Ingrid belongs to the two cultural organizations, the Art Society and the Concert Association, and she belongs to a reading club and the Amateur Painters Association that takes group study tours to art museums. Both Harald and Ingrid belong to the Garden Club as well. She has been a member of the Liberal Party for more than thirty years while Harald has belonged to the Labor Party, a moderately left-wing political party, since he finished his apprenticeship in carpentry. He served as president of the local party for seven years. Of his four brothers living in Volda, three are also members of the Labor Party. Party membership usually implies activity and participation in local government. Harald has served on the city council and other municipal boards. Ingrid has served on several municipal committees, including one that regulates building permits for the construction of new houses and businesses. Each municipality has dozens of committees to help carry out the responsibilities of local government, and capable people are expected to do their civic duty by serving on these committees. Learning to cooperate in non-governmental organizations is good training for serving on governmental committees.

NORWEGIANS Harald has been a member of a secular temperance organization for thirty-nine years and, in addition to the cultural organizations previously mentioned, also belongs to leisure and public service groups, including the Sports and Fishing Association, the Red Cross, the Public Health Association, and the Cooperative Grocery Association. Two of Harald’s brothers and two of his sisters are also members of the local Red Cross, which he directed for three years. The family’s best friends include teachers and office personnel who live in their neighborhood. Except for one teacher, all of these friends are members of at least one of the organizations to which Harald and Ingrid belong. While this couple, with ten memberships each, are atypical in the degree of their participation in the “organization society,” they illustrate a relatively frequent pattern of membership in a political party and several diverse cultural and public service organizations. Marit Marit’s family owns one of the small factories in Volda. With fewer than fifty employees, the factory is typical of the scale of the manufacturing firms in Norway. Marit, age forty-eight, spends part of her time helping her husband Olav with the management of the factory. Now that her two children are living and working away from home she has additional time for her work in local politics. She is on the city council and also serves as the chair of the Conservative Women’s League, the women’s organization for the Conservative Party. (The first woman was elected to the Volda town council in the mid-1930s, but not until five decades later would a woman become Prime Minister of the country.) While she loves her tasteful but unostentatious home in Volda, Marit does not share the vociferous antiurbanism of many of the locals. A person of cosmopolitan interests, Marit travels a great deal in connection with her business and her politics. She is well-connected with politicians in Oslo. Some of her friends are moderate drinkers but they take care not to advertise their indulgence. One orders his liquor from the State Liquor Monopoly to be mailed to general delivery at the post office in the next town, where he is unlikely to be recognized. While Marit focuses her attention most strongly on her political activities, she is a passive member of the Public Health

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE Association and belongs to several cultural organizations such as the Concert Society and the Garden Club. CROSS-CUTTING TIES OR DEEP CLEAVAGES? In the profiles of seven persons from our random sample of Volda residents in 1968 I mentioned twenty-one different organizations by name and alluded to several others. This shows a diversity of interests and experiences among the people we consulted. However, all seven had ties to others in the sample, by virtue of their common membership in particular organizations. Some of these were cross-cutting ties, such as the memberships in the Concert Society by Marit, Harald, and Ingrid, who belong to different political parties. These were weak ties, however, since none of the three persons was very active in the Concert Society. Other cross-cutting ties were just as weak, such as the passive memberships in the Public Health Association by Anna, Harald, and Marit, three people with radically different political views. Some ties, such as the membership in the Liberal Youth Association by Ragnhild and Ivar, were not cross-cutting since they occur within a cluster of ideologically compatible organizations. These are internal ties—internal to the ideologically compatible cluster—and should be distinguished from cross-cutting ties within the organizational network. In the last decade these issues have been translated into new concepts of “social capital.” Social ties among members of ideologically homogeneous groups are “bonding social capital,” while cross-cutting social ties between heterogeneous groups are “bridging social capital.” The personal profiles also revealed changes in the organizational network as individuals’ interests developed and changed. Ragnhild was dropping out of the sports association but Ivar never missed a meeting. If Ragnhild finally joined the Labor Party Youth Group, she would see Harald at Labor Party events. Anna had decided to give up her membership in a missionary association. In these ways the organizational network was in constant flux. As we have just seen, the network patterns can be rather complicated with just seven people and twenty-one named organizations. Eventually, we were able to collect information about 5,444 memberships in 160 local organizations. Needless to say, it took a

great deal of hard work and computer time to arrive at an understanding of the patterns of ties and cleavages. The evidence gives

NORWEGIANS little support for the Manchester theory of the local importance of cross-cutting ties, or bridging social capital among organizations. Many of the bridging ties in mass- membership organizations, such as the Concert Society, or the Public Health Association, in which most members were passive, paying their dues and attending an occasional public event. Those organizations with ideologically committed members and more frequent meetings rarely had cross-cutting ties with ideologically opposed groups. As in the bicentric society of nineteenth-century Volda, polarized between the Pietists and the State Church, twentieth- century Volda has several different ideological centers or clusters in the organizational network. The first cluster, consisting of the Inner Mission, the Christian People’s Party, and the religious temperance organizations, is a continuation of the nineteenth century Pietistic center. People like Anna and her friends were in this cluster. In the outlying rural settlements, the Center (Farmers’) Party, with its strong connection with agricultural and rural organizations, was the core of a second cluster. Bjarne and his friends and relatives were adherents of that cluster, even though Bjarne was not an official member of the Center Party. To be identified with an ideological center one need not belong to all of the organizations in a cluster, just some of them. The two political parties of the Left constituted a third ideological center, with their associated youth groups. Harald and Ragnhild are representatives of that cluster. The Liberal Party or the Conservative Party along with some of the service and cultural organizations constitute a fourth ideological center, where Marit, Ivar, and Ingrid feel at home. As in the nineteenth century, much of the dynamic of Norwegian life comes from the tension of shifting alliances among the various ideological centers. In each of the smallest, most peripheral settlements in Volda municipality, one ideological center—either fundamentalist or farmer—was dominant, with no local organizations from competing clusters. Residents of these small communities who had different interests than the majority had to join compatible organizations in neighboring communities, rather than in their home communities. The intermediate settlements in Volda were large enough to support two opposing centers bonding social capital, usually the fundamentalist cluster and either a farmer or Liberal Party cluster. The secular temperance organizations, the Liberal Youth Association and the State Church missionary organizations in different settlements were often linked to the second, third, or fourth ideological centers

but never to the first, the fundamentalist Christian cluster. In the

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE town of Volda the population was large enough to support all four centers, which were loosely tied to each other by mass-membership, low-participation organizations. The organizational network in the town was polarized, with the left-wing and the fundamentalist Christian clusters at the opposite extremes, with very few connections between. Thus, the organizational network was more accurately described in terms of bonding social capital rather than bridging social capital or cross-cutting ties. Rather than linking people with different perspectives, the organizational network tended to reinforce within- group homogeneity. This finding helps to illuminate another claim about Norwegian society. In his monumental book The Moral Order cross-cultural researcher Raoul Naroll showed that countries can be rated according to their success in realizing the goals of peace, social order, human decency, health, economic progress and wisdom. 12 Norway, according to Naroll’s statistics, rates higher in those qualities than any other country. Certainly, Norway stands far ahead of the United States on many measures of the quality of life. While he acknowledged that every society makes trade-offs that are not necessarily the best, Naroll suggested that Norway could stand as an example to other nations. The key to the strength of an exemplary society, he argued, is a strong social support network of family, friends, and work colleagues, all of whom have similar values.13 The weaker and less homogeneous the social networks in a society, the more prone people will be to alcoholism, suicide, family breakdown, child abuse, stress, poor mental health, and other problems. While Naroll’s cross-cultural statistics make this argument plausible, he did no field study to demonstrate the existence of homogeneous social networks in Norway, his model society. We can help to fill out the picture. As we have seen from the brief profiles of individuals in Volda, there is a strong tendency for overlap among friends, relatives, work colleagues, and co-members of organizations. The test of the Manchester hypothesis points in the same direction: the cleavages between different ideological centers reinforce within-group homogeneity. Individuals’ social networks tend to be homogeneous, just as Naroll suggested. Regardless of whether one agrees with Naroll about the beneficial consequences of tightly-knit and homogeneous social networks, it is clear that Norwegians have difficulty in dealing with diversity. One researcher argues that Norwegians assert their equality by emphasizing their homogeneity,14 while another con

NORWEGIANS tends that they underscore individuality by stressing their differences. 15 Both are correct, but in different contexts: Norwegians tend to overemphasize similarities within their own social networks or reference groups, while emphasizing the differences between their groups and others. Thus one of the leaders of a fundamentalist Christian association asked me how I could possibly study her organization and the Liberal Youth Group in the same project, so vast were the differences between these two organizations. PERVASIVE THEMES IN NORWEGIAN ORIENTATION Antiurban, Pronature Orientation For many Norwegians, a successful life encompasses three domains: (1) home; (2) a social circle including work associates; and (3) nature. City life is thought to create difficulties for managing these three domains. The notion that city life is potentially destructive to human values is not confined to rural people. Access to nature is needed to minimize the problems of urban life, to escape stress and conflict. Even large cities, such as Oslo and Trondheim, incorporate within their boundaries large tracts of relatively undeveloped woodland accessible by public transportation. On weekends these forests may be crowded with skiers or hikers of all ages. Regular communion with nature—through skiing, walking, or boating—is considered virtually necessary for well-being. One starry winter night in Volda, Lorna and I came to an emotional understanding of the Norwegians’ attachment to nature. Friends invited us to spend the weekend at their ski hut, located a few miles up the valley, on the south-facing slope of a mountain. Many people own ski huts, usually one-room sparsely furnished log or board cabins without modern conveniences, often far from the nearest road. Ten minutes after the lights of Volda disappeared behind our car late on a Saturday evening, we arrived at a wide spot in the road, where our friends parked against a snowbank. We clambered to the top and strapped on our cross-country skis. Our friends set off, leading us through the trees toward an unseen cluster of huts several miles from the road. We inexpertly followed the

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE trail of our friends through the moonlit landscape until we reached the hut. After a simple meal cooked on a wood stove that also heated the cabin, we enjoyed coffee boiled from melted snow and talked about the pleasures of nature. Our friends explained that even wealthy Norwegians with elaborate and well-furnished homes prefer simple ski huts for recreation. It is assumed that most Norwegians value a spartan respite in the woods or on the seashore almost as a requirement for a well-balanced life. Individualism and Cooperation How is individual identity managed in a society in which organizations are the training grounds and the arenas for cooperation? Individuals are not submerged within the group, but neither are they encouraged to stand out. People may deal with this dialogue between individualism and cooperation in a variety of ways, but one key device for managing these tensions is the Norwegian sense of personal dignity. A comparison with the United States may help to clarify the point. In the widely discussed book Habits of the Heart Robert Bellah and his co-authors assert that the United States has moved away from earlier forms of American individualism that combined individual responsibility with concern for the public good.16 Instead, they argue, American culture has come to emphasize self-indulgent forms of individualism centered on either self- realization (“expressive individualism”) or maximization of material benefits and power (“utilitarian individualism”). The result, according to Bellah, is a regrettable decline in Americans’ commitment to the welfare of others.17 Expressive individualism encourages self-absorption while utilitarian individualism encourages competition, producing winners and losers in a zero-sum game (“your loss is my gain”). Norwegian individualism, in contrast, underscores the importance of individual integrity and dignity, in a non–zero-sum environment. One incident gave me a personal understanding of the Norwegian concern for preserving each individual’s sense of dignity. We were out one winter Saturday with Tor, one of our good friends and consultants, who took us on a tour of the outdoor sports facilities in his community. He showed us a training slope for slalom skiing, which I admired so much that I wanted to try it. A total neophyte, I put on my skis, climbed halfway up the slope

NORWEGIANS and optimistically plunged down. Lorna photographed my progress down the slope, documenting the abrupt ending as I veered off the trail and collapsed in a tangle at the foot of the hill. Unhurt, I broke into amused laughter, and Lorna joined me. Tor said nothing and gave no sign of having registered any event of note. He quietly rolled a cigarette and surveyed the distant hills across the fjord, waiting for me to regain my feet. It would have been disrespectful for him to show that he had noticed my fall. Among my circle of friends at home I would expect that such a harmless failure would be the source of gentle amusement, perhaps an incident to be recalled and savored. For my Norwegian acquaintances, this would have been painful and threatening. Just how painful I discovered a few weeks later when I was again with Tor, watching his youngest son, Bjørn, experiment with his new skis. I lapsed into my American mode and laughed affectionately when Bjørn took a harmless but amusing tumble. Bjørn was clearly insulted and shot me a look that left me with no doubt that I had been very offensive. Clearly, respect for individual dignity was not reserved just for foreigners or adults. I confirmed this interpretation with observations in many different settings throughout the remainder of my field work. This episode also illustrates one of the uncomfortable truths about anthropological field work: we often learn by making mistakes. While competition is valued in the United States, it is discouraged in Norway, because competition threatens individual dignity. Virtually the only domain in which Norwegians encourage competition is in sports, and even there the focus is on improvement rather than on winning at all costs. Norwegians, who hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics, were somewhat apologetic for having won so many medals compared with other countries. In politics as well, competition in elections is underplayed. Losers are always noted to have “done better than expected,” or “improved their position relative to the last election.” Collectively and individually, everyone, even political opponents, should be able to maintain their dignity and integrity. After a national election one of our consultants, an officer in the local Conservative Party, noted with regret that the one remaining Communist member of parliament had lost his seat. “The Communists need political representation, just as the rest of us.” If American utilitarian individualism encourages competition, Norwegian individualism fosters cooperation, at least with

those who are perceived to be much like one’s self. The rich organizational life of Norwegian communities provides a model for

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE solving problems cooperatively and an environment for constructing one’s individuality. For example, the Volda Town Council was once approached by two local motorcycle enthusiasts who petitioned the council for use of municipal garage space where they could work on their motorcycles. The Council decided that they could not grant the request from two individuals, but if the bikers joined together to start a motorcycle club, the municipality would allocate space for the club’s use.

Like Robert Bellah and his colleagues a decade before, American political scientist Robert Putnam17 contends that the America faces a “collapse of community,” in this case because of Americans’ declining participation in voluntary organizations and other forms of social capital. Putnam and others have launched an effort to re-constitute forms of community-building social capital during the 21st century in order to rescue American civil society from deterioration. Has Norway faced a similar decline in social capital and a consequent threat to Norwegian civil society? This was an important question to be answered when I returned to Volda 30 years after the first field work. VOLDA IN THE 21st CENTURY: When I returned to Volda, first in 1998, I didn’t have to inventory the community organizations myself, as I had done in the 1960s. A complete census of organizations, constantly updated, could be found at a new office in local government, the Office of Cultural Affairs, which works to coordinate and support voluntary organizations and fund worthy projects proposed by those organizations. Rather than declining, the number of organizations had nearly doubled to 300 in the intervening 30 years, yet the population of the county was approximately the same. What accounts for the expansion of organizational life in Volda, rather than contraction as in the U.S.? First of all, most of the organizations from the 1960s are still active. Second, recreation or hobby organizations have multiplied as a consequence of the new emphasis on leisure activities. Third is the proliferation of a group of new “special needs” organizations are devoted to the support of persons with particular maladies or developmental challenges. In the Norwegian view, everyone’s particular needs should be represented and supported. There are two kinds of social capital. First is bonding social capital or ties between individuals who are homogeneous in their values and social characteristics. This is what Naroll meant with his concept of moralnets. The four kinds of clusters of ideologically similar organizations, for example, are each knit together by bonding social capital. The second type is bridging social capital, or linkages among heterogeneous individuals. The Concert Society was a bridging organization. Restating our conclusions from 1968,

Volda was characterized by extensive bonding social capital that divided the organizations into four distinct clusters, with few organizations that bridged over those cleavages. I came to understand that the close relations between the organizations and the Office of Cultural Affairs in the local government. Many of the organizations apply for small grants to support their activities, often focused on preserving local heritage. An annual grant from local government gives the organization public legitimacy as well as resources for their activities. But the organization’s act of applying to the government for a grant is an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the government too. The local bank also annually funds special projects of organizations, also confirming the legitimacy and importance of the organizations. Thus, the local government (public sector), the local bank (private sector) and the voluntary organizations (civil sector) are knit together in a web of legitimating interaction and mutual dependency. These annual rituals of legitimacy help to bridge over some of the cleavages that are produced by bonding social capital among ideologically similar organizations. CONCLUSION Cooperation, individualism, concern with personal dignity, appreciation of nature, and suspicion of cities are not Norwegian “character traits,” that, once acquired, remain unchanging. Instead, these are elements in a cultural repertory that Norwegians use to construct their identities and give meaning to their lives. Individuals improvise a continuous dialogue among these and other cultural elements, constantly recreating and modifying their versions of Norwegian culture. I suspect that the peacefulness and stability of Norwegian society depends much more on the continued salience of these cultural elements than on the mechanical solution of cross-cutting ties. At least, I am confident that cross-cutting ties are not the solution. For any puzzle about culture and society it is easier to show what potential solutions fail than to demonstrate, beyond question, what solution succeeds. For at least a moment in recent history, however, Norway seems to have been a society of cooperative individualists, and a notable venture in the human experiment. NOTES 1. Max Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956); Ronald Frankenberg, Communities in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 272. 2. Odd Vollan, Volda og Ørsta Sparebank, 1854–1954 (Volda: Aarflots Prenteverk, 1953), p. 297.

3. Ibid., p. 266.

NORWEGIANS 4. Torstein Hjellum and Asbjørn Bjørnset, Valghaandbok 1967 (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1967), p. 139. 5. Oscar Handeland, Vaarløysing, vol. 2 (Bergen: A.S. Lunde & Co. S Forlag, 1966), p. 215. 6. Peter A. Munch, “A Study of Cultural Change,” Studia Norvegica 9 (1956): 1–104; J. A. Barnes, “Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish,” Human Relations 7 (1954): 39–58. 7. George K. Park and Lee Soltow, “Politics and Social Structure in a Norwegian Village,” American Journal of Sociology 67 (1961): 152–164. 8. Fredrik Barth, “Family in a Central Norwegian Mountain Community,” in Thomas D. Eliot et al., eds., Norway’s Families: Trends, Problems, Programs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), pp. 81–107. 9. Ibid., p. 93. 10. Marida Hollos, “Community, Family, and Cognitive Development in Rural Norway” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1970), p. 104. 11. Ibid., p. 106. 12. Raoul Naroll, The Moral Order: An Introduction to the Human Situation (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1983), p. 72. 13. Ibid., p. 135. 14. Marianne Gullestad, “Small Facts and Large Issues: The Anthropology of Contemporary Scandinavian Society,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 87. 15. Christen T. Jonassen, Value Systems and Personality in Western Civilization: Norwegians in Europe and America (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 286. 16. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Sidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and

Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 27–51. 17. Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6 (1995), pp. 55-78. Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 18. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Sidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 250–271. SUGGESTED READINGS

PORTRAITS OF CULTURE Gullestad, Marianne. Kitchen-Table Society: A Case Study of Family Life and Friendships of Young Working-Class Mothers in Urban Norway. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984. A readable urban ethnography. ____. “The Transformation of the Norwegian Notion of Everyday Life.” American Ethnologist 18 (1991): 480–499. A useful perspective on contemporary culture. ____. “Small Facts and Large Issues: The Anthropology of Contemporary Scandinavian Society.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 71–93. A good survey of the recent anthropological research on Scandinavia. ____, Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2006). An excellent discussion of individuation in Norwegian culture and emerging images of diversity in the nation.. Jonassen, Christen T. Value Systems and Personality in a Western Civilization: Norwegians in Europe and America. Columbus, OH: University of Ohio Press, 1983. An interesting comparison with Norwegian Americans. Park, George K. “Regional Versions of Norwegian Culture: A Trial Formulation.” Ethnology 11 (1972): 3–24. A comparison of the regional cultures of North and West Norway. Wikan, Unni Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). The experience of immigrant populations in Norway. Portraits TOC