An Interview with Britt Halvorson and Josh Reno

Abstract

An Interview with Britt Halvorson and Josh Reno Jon K. Lauck JL: Where are you from? BH: I grew up in western Michigan, in Muskegon, a mid-size industrial city along Lake Michigan. But my parents have no multi-generational ties to that area and, in fact, they grew up in Sweden and Madagascar. So I've actually long been curious about the cultural matter of "from-ness" or belonging, of how people form attachments to places, and of how circulating, dominant imagery of places can be linked to projects of race and ethnicity. That is actually the focus of our book. JR: I grew up in western New York, in Walworth, which is a small, rural hamlet south of Lake Ontario and East of the City of Rochester. However, my mother's side of the family, specifically my maternal Great Grandfather, came from Council Bluffs, Iowa originally. I heard stories about his life as a cowboy, herding cattle across the states. I grew up on these stories. So when I later moved with my family to Michigan to go to graduate school in anthropology part of me felt like I was returning to the Midwest, in a sense. And this sense of the Midwestern region, a place that you think you know even if you've never been there, is part of our focus. JL to BH: How did your parents from Sweden and Madagascar end up in Muskegon? BH: They ended up in Muskegon because my father got a job teaching philosophy at Muskegon Community College. He grew up in Tolagnaro/ [End Page 171] Ft. Dauphin, Madagascar, until age 16 as the son of Norwegian-American Lutheran expats. He finished out his final year of high school in the U.S., followed by college at St. Olaf's College in Northfield, Minnesota (a traditional Lutheran school, if there was one). My mother, on the other hand, grew up in Örebro, Sweden, and she was always interested in learning languages and what we would now call cultural immersion experiences. Though she grew up in a working-class family and never had the opportunity to go to college, she was a bit fearless about uprooting herself and coming to the U.S., the only one in her family. She first came to the U.S. aboard a Scandinavian cruise line, because plane fare was too expensive, and eventually settled in northern California in the early 1960s. In the meantime, my father was pursuing a master's degree and working as a firefighter for the National Forest Service in Idaho. My parents were introduced to each other by mutual friends, an unlikely scenario to be sure, even though they had never met. JH to BH: Were your Norwegian-American Lutheran expat grandparents missionaries in Madagascar? Were they from Minnesota? Does that explain the connection to St. Olaf? BH: My paternal grandparents were Lutheran missionaries in southeast Madagascar, with my grandfather having been trained as a minister. They actually weren't from Minnesota, though they had connections there through the Lutheran church. My paternal grandmother's family had only a few generations' ties to Iowa and, before that, came to the U.S. from western Norway. And, on my paternal grandfather's side, he actually grew up in southeast Madagascar as the son of a Norwegian-American Lutheran minister. In that male line, being a clerical missionary or missionary doctor was something of a multi-generational family business, which was not entirely unusual in the broader community of American Lutherans as I later learned. Prior to that, his immediate family had connections to Washington state and Norway, only stopping in Minnesota for religious training at the Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul. JL to BH: I see you went to Albion College in Michigan? What was that like? Did you first study anthropology there? BH: I found Albion College much in the same way Josh found Cornell (though we've never compared notes on this before). I applied to schools [End Page 172] that sent me brochures in the mail, and Albion was one of them. Because of my good grades in high school, I received a substantial scholarship from Albion, the...