Introduction to '110 Volts at Home: The American Lista' by Siv Ringdal

Abstract

The following extract from the book Det Amerikanske Lista: Med 110 volt i huset (Pax Forlag, Oslo, 2002) by the ethnologist Siv Ringdal is the second instalment of the Design History Society and Journal of Design History’s new initiative to publish translations of selected pieces of scholarship with a significant potential interest beyond their original native language readership. The book explores how American culture, especially material culture, has had an extraordinary influence on everyday life in the rural community of Lista, a small peninsula in the south-west of Norway. Whereas most emigration from Norway to the USA, substantial in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, took the form of permanent settlement on farmland, particularly in the American Mid-West, the movements between Lista and the USA that Ringdal traces are reciprocal. From about 1890 to about 1970, what Ringdal terms ‘work migrations’ became the norm in this local community, where young girls and boys, couples, and even family fathers, would go America, normally to New York, to work—sometimes for years on end, sometimes in multiple stints—before eventually settling down for good back home in Norway. The goal was of course to accumulate money and material goods for the present or future family life back home.