Norwegian Cultural Research Articles

The Art of Navigating a White Upper-Class Gaze: Exploring Visible Minorities’ Negotiations of Belonging in the Norwegian Cultural Field

In this article, I explore how 32 Norwegian artists who are visible minorities perceive interacting with gatekeepers in the cultural field of production. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field, along with Ahmed’s phenomenological approach to whiteness, I empirically demonstrate the prevalence of institutional whiteness within the field. I argue that gatekeepers’ classed and racialized subjectivities, expressed through their white cultural upper-class gaze, are perceived as creating institutional barriers for visible minorities. This shapes artists’ opportunities and challenges their sense of belonging to the field. To maintain a sense of belonging, they utilize their double consciousness, engaging in an ambiguous process of contesting the gaze while adhering to institutional norms. These findings provide valuable insight into an under-researched interaction between whiteness and the cultural upper class, revealing institutional barriers that may promote homogeneity in western cultural fields.

Inspiring Repertoire for Enrichment

One of the enduring challenges for piano teachers is selecting appropriate repertoire to enrich a student’s piano education, which has foundations in leveled books. A response to the challenge is to select a collection from a composer’s works to immerse the student in the style and technical demands of that specific composer. In this study, Edvard Grieg’s Lyric Pieces Opus 12 were investigated for their effectiveness as pedagogical tools for intermediate piano students. The analysis included: (1) contextualizing the collectionhistorically through related literature; (2) identifying primary technical elements to determine an effective pedagogical approach for introducing the specific elements to students; and (3) identifying stylistic features and Norwegian cultural connections to provide meaningful insights for students’ interpretation of the pieces and lead to a set of guiding questions to pose to students. Historically, Grieg’s Lyric Pieces capture the Norwegian spirit by incorporating folkloric elements into classical compositions, and his intention in the compositions was to supply his music school with short, digestible instructional material. The Lyric Pieces are accessible piano pieces that allow students to discover complex technical elements such as melodic nature, varied approaches to the keys (touch), complex rhythms, and ornamentation. They also provide opportunities for students to grow their understanding of stylistic features through the titles and descriptive phrases, as well as connections to Norwegian culture, which allow them to develop their interpretation of the pieces. This study contributes to the professional learning of studio piano teachers and the application of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces in teaching intermediate students.

Kulturminnelovens terskel: Klassifisering av kontekstløse ringformede spenner fra middelalder og nyere tid

The annular brooch makes up one of the most prevalent brooch types from the medieval period in Europe. Moreover, its use and production in Norway last well into the modern period. This has resulted in a quandary. The Norwegian Cultural Heritage Act labels all artefacts older than AD 1537 as state property (1650 for coins). With a few exceptions, everything younger may be acquired by the finder. But how is this to be decided for stray finds of annular brooches? How can these be dated? 
 While their morphology remains consistent throughout the almost 1000 years of production, two points of departure for future study are suggested: decorative features and alloy compositions. Charting these will provide crucial baselines. However, the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Act only applying to artefacts from before AD 1537, and the division’s ramifications on cultural heritage management, continue to strain the study of enduring artefact types.

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

The Cartesian Paradox in Norwegian Cultural Policy

The Cartesian Paradox in Norwegian Cultural Policy

Exercises in intra-acting: A zone of potential

This article is about the participatory performance event Speak for yourself (Snakk for deg sjøl) performed mainly for teenagers at schools through the Norwegian Cultural Schoolbag program (Den kulturelle skolesekken), but also for an open audience at Hålogaland Theatre and the Arctic Arts Festival. The center of the discussion concerns what has agency to initiate various ways of participation and produce a zone of potential in this performance event. The author is one of the artists of the performance and thus the diffractive analysis is informed by her role as artist-researcher. The study’s theoretical framework is inspired by the theory of agential realism from physician and feminist theorist Karen Barad.
 The analysis suggests that the initiation of participation is a complex process influenced by both human and non-human performative agents in intra-action with each other. This study will especially focus on the formulation of exercises, performance objects, social media, multiplicity and affect t as performative agents in this performance event. The study indicates that being attentive to the performative agents at play and the kind of participation they produce can potentially create a space where there is room for inclusion, diversity, and unpredictability. This kind of zone of potential also has value for other participatory projects in the intersection between pedagogy and art.

Gamle steinsamlingar; gravminne, ryddingsrøyser – eller kva?

This article discusses how to better unlock the information potential of unremarkable, though complex, prehistoric stone-built structures, by integrating the past 30 years worth of Nordic archaeological research results into aspects of the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Management processes. Traditionally, it has been rather commonplace to interpret such manmade collections of rocks as remains of either clearance of fields for agricultural purposes or as containers for burials, but this dichotomy should now be regarded as an oversimplification. The site of Orstad in the county of Rogaland, SW Norway, excavated in 2014, serves as a case study. This paper demonstrates how difficult it can be to put updated theories and methods into proper use in the field. Since these new research results call for changes in the approach to the subject were not sufficiently considered in the planning process, neither time nor budget allowed for an adequate examination of the individual structures and their context. This is likely to cause information loss, which creates challenges for both the excavation and post-excavation phases of an archaeological investigation. This paper stresses the need to update and improve how excavations of such sites are handled within Norwegian cultural heritage management. By applying new approaches, such localities can yield more information about the past than previously assumed.

Private Metal Detecting and Archaeology in Norway

AbstractMetal detecting has become a popular hobby in Norway. The use of metal detectors is legal, as long as one has the landowner‘s permission, and complies with the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Act. As in other countries, the relationship between private metal detecting and archaeology is complex. The perspectives and experiences of archaeologists and heritage management representatives in regard to what challenges and positive effects that arise from private metal detecting varies greatly. With this article we wish to address various sides of the relationship openly.

Elitist Egalitarianism: Negotiating Identity in the Norwegian Cultural Elite

The cultural elite are believed to be under siege due to significant changes in the ‘workings’ of cultural capital. Despite such changes, there is very little information about the class subjectivities of the ‘cultural elite’ themselves. The present article seeks to contribute to this shortcoming by taking advantage of in-depth qualitative interviews with individuals possessing great levels of cultural capital in a highly egalitarian country, Norway. This study shows that while the interviewees experience lack of recognition and honour from ‘the people’, they are far from passively descending. The main demarcation to other groups seems not to be cultural taste, but instead the orientation towards culture, broadly defined. While egalitarian sentiments are voiced, this does not hinder cultural elite awareness, but rather dampens how this can be expressed in public – merged into a form of elitist egalitarianism.

Ship Finds and Their Management as Actor Network

Ship finds in Norwegian waters that are more than 100 years old came under the jurisdiction of the Cultural Heritage Management (CHM) in 1963, when section 12a of the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Act was implemented. As a consequence, a functional division between land and sea was created where management objects receive different values depending on whether or not they belong to a ship. The objective of this paper is to review Norwegian CHM underwater policy, and discuss the creation of a new management object and its borders with the introduction of a section on ship finds specifically focusing on Actor Network Theory. It is argued that the understanding of the ship find and its belongings can not be understood as something based on inherent qualities to the management object. Instead this paper proposes to comprehend the ship find as a phenomenon held together within a heterogeneous network.

Identifying ‘friends with benefits’ Scripts Among Young Adults in the Norwegian Cultural Context

‘Friends with benefits’ (FWB) is defined as friends having sexual relations without commitment or romantic feeling towards each other. The purpose of this study was to explore the FWB phenomenon among young adults from a Norwegian, heterosexual perspective. Using the underlying theory of sexual scripts, and phenomenology as a research method, semi-structural interviews were conducted with twelve heterosexual women, aged 21–28 years, with experience in FWB relationships. Various elements of the relationship were explored: motives and function, definition of an FWB relationship, emotions, intimacy, and social influences. Results revealed that the main function of the FWB relationship appears to be the fulfilment of physical need in a safe context. Furthermore, the majority of subjects did not explicitly define the relationship, or have explicit rules to regulate it. Three types of FWB relationships emerged: the good friends, the lovers, and those who are on the hook. The study showed that people in FWB relationships ‘borrow’ elements from friendship scripts and love scripts, and combine them to form an FWB script. In the public sphere, behaviour is guided solely by this friendship script. It is only in the private sphere that the love script is present in addition to the friendship script.

Maritime Cultural Landscapes, Maritimity and Quasi Objects

Does the concept of maritime cultural landscapes bridge a division between land and sea, or does it maintain a gap that perhaps doesn’t even exist? This paper discusses maritime and maritime cultural landscapes as phenomena in the light of Actor Network Theory, where maritimity is given attention as a derivation of the modern metaphysics as described by Bruno Latour. The paper makes use of a case study from Norwegian Cultural Heritage Management (CHM), where land and sea archaeologists meet each other in a joint venture project at the island of Smola, More & Romsdal County.

Archaeology and the Norwegian Cultural Landscape

Previous articleNext article No AccessReportsArchaeology and the Norwegian Cultural LandscapeTimothy F. TaylorTimothy F. Taylor Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 28, Number 2Apr., 1987 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/203523 Views: 2Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1987 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological ResearchPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jaleh Kamalizad The Landscape Archaeology in Lanjān Plain of Iṣfahān, Iran, During the Islamic Period (650–1722 A.D.) (Preliminary Report), Archaeologies 12, no.11 (Apr 2016): 91–109.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11759-016-9287-1

Private and Public Funding and Management on National, Regional, and Local Levels: Norwegian Cultural Policy for the 1980s

Private and Public Funding and Management on National, Regional, and Local Levels: Norwegian Cultural Policy for the 1980s

In the Market's Place: Cultural Policy in Norway

The arts in Norway are considered a public good and are therefore heavily subsidized, in order to make them available to the greatest number of people, to maintain Norway's national cultural standard on a par with neighboring countries, and to keep cultural traditions unbroken by preventing sudden ruptures in cultural production. The criterion for state support is art and its position in the market. The state comes in whenever the market proves insufficient, partly through direct subsidies covering production costs and partly by buying a certain amount of the cultural product. Norway advocates a policy of strong cultural decentralization. Cultural budgets are channeled through the Norwegian Cultural Fund, and individual artists' incomes tend to be a mixture of collective funds and individual royalty incomes, with a gradual shift toward individual incomes, even if still state-derived. State spending on culture has increased since the 1960s, and it has played an essential role in maintaining continuity in the quantity of cultural production, if not always the quality.