The Peasant Movement in Norway: A Study in Class and Culture

Abstract

rN ALL parts of the Western World, indeed wherever Western civilization is making its influence felt, the increasing mechanization in technical culture, i iparticularly in means of transportation and communication, has brought about a radical change in the ecological situation of the rural locality group. From a rather stable condition of relative isolation and economic, social, and cultural self-dependence, the rural community has been thrown into a highly labile situation of inter-communal and inter-regional contact and interdependence. In this situation, it became part and parcel of a large-scale society which is highly domislated by industrial production, commercial trade, and the urban way of life. This radical change in the ecological situation has had the most profound influence on the whole character of the rural community and rural society, affecting its social patterns and its basic norms and values no less than its more conspicuous technical culture. Not only was the constant flow of culture traits from the urban centres out into the rural hinterlands highly increased through rapid transportation and other mechanic means of communication. Becoming an integral part of a major social system, the rural community passed, ill the words of Ferdinand Tonnies, from a predominantly Gemeinschaft type of society to a society where interaction and its underlying norms are more prevailingly of the Gesellschaft nature. The necessary adjustment of the rural community to this new situation is still in progress over the greater part of the Western World. The resistance to change offered by the well-established and, for the most part, highly-refined and integrated rural cultures, particularly in the Old World, has everywhere created conflicts of norms and values as well as of loyalties. Not infrequently were these conflicts crystallized into diNerentiations and segregations of groups, the patterns, norms, and values of each culture type serving as sytthols of group identification for larger or smaller fractions of the population. In this way, the urbanization process in many instances gave rise to a social situation which shows striking similarities to the inter-group culture contact situation and even to the dominant minority group relationship, where likewise 63