John Barnes was the first anthropologist to carry out Malinowskian fieldwork in Norway, in the early 1950s, in the island parish of Bremnes on the west coast. Barnes (1954) identified “committees and [social] class” as salient features of the local world he observed. According to Barnes , Bremnes and other peripheral areas of Norway were characterized by an absence of conventional state apparatus as a result of Norway’s separation from Denmark (in 1814) and Sweden (in 1905). Instead, various forms of local politics were gradually filling this political void: committees , for example, represented “a common pattern of organization … in every instance of formal social life” (Barnes 1954, 50). Thus, Barnes noted, there was a committee for each association, elected at an annual meeting, with an executive council, a chairman, treasurer, and a secretary—with all positions filled on the basis of a simple majority vote. Furthermore, Barnes speculated about what type of social class system Bremnes would have in the future. He saw the social process he was observing, with its “gradual emergence of part-time peasants in key positions of government”, as necessarily transitional. In the future, he expected increasing class differences to undermine the current role of part-time peasants, as well as that of the committees. In Bremnes, at the time of Barnes’s fieldwork , social inequality was clearly present, but a strongly egalitarian code of behavior seemed to make this largely irrelevant. Barnes’s assumption was that this situation would change as inequality increased.
Today, as far as class relations are concerned, Barnes was partly right. Norway and the other Scandinavian countries have indeed been profoundly shaped by social class. As Barnes noted, the “part-time peasants” in the coastal areas in Bremnes were involved from the start in the commercial fish trade, in much the same way as peasants in other parts of the country were involved in the timber trade. At the time of his fieldwork, the fishing industry was expanding, establishing what Barnes saw as a more “modern” system of hierarchical relations than the ones he observed in politics and social networks in the community.
As indicated by Barnes’s description of “part-time peasants ”, the “equality” that many observers (as well as many Scandinavians themselves) have regarded as a characteristic feature of Scandinavia has not come about because penetration of Europe’s northern periphery by capitalism —in commercial, industrial, and financial forms—has been incomplete in any way.1 Rather, Barnes’s observation of political activity among part-time peasants noted an egalitarian social relationship, operating within a specific institutional and historical context. His anthropological informants were members of formally organized committees that overlapped with informal networks of kin, neighbors, friends, and workmates. In Bremnes, egalitarianism emerged as a combination of a particular worldview, certain universal citizen rights, a style of interaction, and—perhaps above all—an institutional mechanism for dealing with political conflict. Barnes emphasized that political conflicts, when channeled through committee discussions and the municipal assembly, mostly ended in unanimous votes.
Around the same time as Barnes was writing his seminal article on class and committees in Bremnes, anthropology was becoming established as an academic discipline in Scandinavia. Interest in the field grew quickly over the following decades, although relatively few anthropologists exhibit ethnographic interest in this region. The majority have concentrated on other parts of the world, aiming to contribute to the discipline’s ambition to map disappearing worlds and compare cultures on a global scale. To the extent that anthropologists representing the dominant research environments in Britain and the USA have been interested in Scandinavian ethnography, and in carrying out fieldwork in the region, the focus has mainly been on the Sami people in the North. To date, the ethnographic study of Scandinavia has been fragmented, and hardly constitutes a coherent research tradition or agenda. The exceptions to this are the fields of ethnic relations and minority studies, which have grown considerably since the 1990s, partly inspired by an interest in majority–minority relations emerging from the initial focus on the Sami.
A quarter of a century after Barnes’s study of Bremnes, Swedish ethnologists Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren published the influential Cultured Man (in Swedish, Den kultiverade människan 1979) on Swedish modernization . They argued that the old bourgeois and the new middle classes had been so successful in using the state as a means for influencing the lower strata of the population in the twentieth century that most people seemed to have forgotten how to perceive of categorical differences relating to social class . All types of difference were reduced to versions of individual deviation in relation to a hegemonic notion of “normality”. The aspiration to become socially mobile had penetrated the agrarian population and the working classes so thoroughly that they had enthusiastically embraced middle-class culture and made it their own, assisted by the institutions of the state, through which the means of discipline were also disseminated (Sejersted 2005).
Frykman and Löfgren came from an intellectual tradition inspired by German Volkskunde, and they remained committed to studying historical folk traditions. They were also strongly influenced by social anthropology, neo-Marxism, and by the work of Michel Foucault (Löfgren 1987). Their own influence on later Scandinavian scholars was considerable. Indeed, the importance they placed on historical aspects and perspectives is no less significant today, and this focus has been an inspirational source for the present research, which is an interdisciplinary venture among anthropologists, historians, and one ethnologist.
A decade after Frykman and Löfgren, Marianne Gullestad, a Norwegian anthropologist educated in (what was then known as) the Bergen School (under the direction of Fredrik Barth), brought anthropology “home” in yet another sense. Gullestad became interested in the everyday life of urban people, particularly the working class, and explored patterns of interaction in detail. Drawing on the scholarship of Dumont, Gullestad (1984) explored the concept of “egalitarian individualism ”, which became highly influential in studies of Scandinavian culture. She emphasized that the dominant code of behavior she had observed in a variety of social contexts, where equality in status was ritually emphasized, was a pragmatic one. As Gullestad saw it, it was more about partners making each other similar over the course of interactions than about an objective form of equality.
Taken together, these three approaches encapsulate much of what the authors of this Introduction regard as analytically significant when studying egalitarianism in Scandinavia. Barnes investigated political activity through the lens of actors’ membership in voluntary associations and municipal decision-making bodies. Frykman and Löfgren explored the historical trajectory of the disciplining state and the capacity of public institutions to generate new worldviews and ideas. The rise of bourgeois ideals that spread and became almost universal instituted particular forms of individual aesthetics, materiality, and bodily manners. Lastly, Gullestad demonstrated how the cultural ethos of equality as sameness is socially embedded in Scandinavia, in specific interactional patterns and styles.
These three analytical perspectives are complementary and together indicate a specific dynamic; they cover different aspects of social reality and represent different analytical levels—all of which are necessary tools for constructing a more thorough, relevant model of Scandinavian egalitarianism. Over the course of the present volume, we present a fuller understanding of the phenomenon of egalitarianism in Scandinavia, in which endeavor we draw on the political institutionalization that Barnes explored, the historical perspectives developed by Frykman and Löfgren, and Gullestad’s exploration of egalitarianism as a pragmatic value.
Gullestad’s analytical term “equality as sameness” may be applicable to many different social contexts outside Scandinavia. However, in light of Barnes’s study of municipal politics, in our present context, it may be hypothesized that Gullestad’s forms of social interaction, which she associates with life in informal contexts in Scandinavia, may in fact have penetrated “the state” via associations and municipal governance. Lastly, Frykman and Löfgren describe perceptions of the national community and the grand visions that guide state policies, which largely mirror municipal policies. The municipal political life described by Barnes was neither authoritarian nor very powerful, yet the institutional strength of Scandinavian municipalities has proved to be considerable. From the early nineteenth century onwards, they have been based on broad participation, have had important representative functions, and in tandem with the local clergy and local courts, they have had a significant disciplining capacity. Pragmatically motivated policies developed locally by municipalities—for example, in the fields of poverty relief, education, elder car...