Anthropology of Scandinavia

9/1/2014 Scandinavia - Anthropology - Oxford Bibliographies -

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ScandinaviaAlison Cool

Introduction

Scandinavia, a region of Northern Europe, includes Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In English, the termScandinavia is often used to refer to a broader geographic area that also encompasses Iceland, Finland, and the Faroe Islands,although this larger group is perhaps more accurately referred to as the Nordic countries, following usage of the terms in NorthernEurope. To avoid repetition, the two terms will be used interchangeably in this article, according to the common English usage.Historically and culturally, Scandinavia proper—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—is closely linked, and Swedish, Norwegian, andDanish are mutually intelligible. Icelandic and Faroese—like Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish—are North Germanic languages,while Finnish along with Sámi—the group of languages spoken by the indigenous Northern European Sámi peoples—are Uraliclanguages. The Nordic countries share important political and economic characteristics, sometimes referred to internationally asthe “Nordic model,” including traditionally powerful Social Democratic political parties, universalist welfare states, expansive socialsafety nets, strong labor unions as well as policy emphases on gender, socioeconomic, and other forms of equality. Early empiricalresearch in the Nordic countries, which has historically been conducted within the fields of ethnology and folklife studies, oftenfocused on indigenous Sámi peoples or was situated in small maritime or agricultural villages. Nordic anthropologists, in contrast,traditionally conducted their fieldwork abroad. However, these older distinctions between these two disciplines have become lessrelevant over time (see also Anthropology, Ethnology, and Folklife). Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, anthropologists andethnologists of the Nordic region have increasingly expanded the purview of their research to include urban communities,institutional and bureaucratic settings, medical encounters, and financial markets, to name just a few areas of inquiry.Anthropologists have also addressed cultural and demographic changes corresponding to urbanization and increased rates ofimmigration to the Scandinavian countries, particularly since the 1970s, examining articulations and transformations ofunderstandings of race and ethnicity in relation to cultural logics of gender, sexuality, and national belonging. Scholarship onglobalization has also highlighted the changing place of Nordic national and regional imaginaries as transnational movements ofpersons, objects, and values map out new connections between the local and the global.

General Overviews

There are important similarities and shared histories linking the Nordic countries, and anthropologists working in this geographicalregion have long been in conversation, both with other Scandinavian scholars and with transnational developments in the socialsciences. However, there are also divergences and differences in the specific theoretical directions and institutional structures thathave developed in the anthropologies of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland. Nicolaisen 1980 provides insight intosome of these national intellectual histories. As noted in Gullestad 1989—probably the most ambitious work that collects andreviews work in the anthropology of Scandinavia—anthropological communities in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have beenparticularly well connected, partly due to the mutual intelligibility and readability of their national languages, and partly for culturaland political reasons. Byron 2002 helpfully situates Nordic anthropology within the larger field of European anthropology andincludes a discussion of the most Influential Early Works in this field. Although Bruun, et al. 2011 draws most heavily onscholarship about Denmark, it also uses Marianne Gullestad’s work on “equality as sameness” in Norway as a window into themesof egalitarianism and hierarchy that connect a widereaching body of anthropological work on Scandinavia. Durrenberger andPálsson 1995, an edited volume, surveys some of the major themes and preoccupations animating Icelandic anthropology,including special attention to kinship, gender, and national identity. In comparison to American and British anthropologists, Nordic

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anthropologists are generally more active participants in public intellectual life. Norwegian anthropologists in particular have playeda prominent part in their national intellectual community, frequently contributing to popular media and participating in publicdebates. Eriksen 2008 describes some of the factors contributing to the development of this robust form of public anthropology inNorway.

Bruun, Maja Hojer, Gry Skrædderdal Jakobsen, and Stine Krøijer. 2011. Introduction: The concern for socialitypracticingequality and hierarchy in Denmark. Social Analysis 55.2: 1–19.

Editors’ introduction to a special issue of Social Analysis, titled “The concern for sociality: Practicing Equality and Hierarchy inDenmark,” which is in critical conversation with influential Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad’s work on Nordicegalitarianism and sociality. Includes a comprehensive genealogy of major works in Scandinavian anthropology, particularly thosedealing with ideas of equality.

Byron, Reginald. 2002. The anthropology of Northern Europe. In Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology. Editedby Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, 208–209. London: Routledge.

Situates the development of Scandinavian anthropology in the context of European anthropology more broadly, and gives a usefulcompendium of important early works in the anthropology of Northern Europe.

Durrenberger, Edward Paul, and Gísli Pálsson. 1995. The anthropology of Iceland. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press.

Divided into four thematic sections, this edited volume contains a cross section of anthropological work in Iceland across topics ofideology and action; kinship and gender; culture, class, and ethnicity; and the historical commonwealth period.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2008. The otherness of Norwegian anthropology. In Other people’s anthropologies:Ethnographic practice on the margins. Edited by Aleksandar Bošković, 169–185. New York: Berghahn.

This chapter explores the influence of British social anthropology on Norwegian anthropology, and describes some of thetrajectories leading to the unusually prominent position of many contemporary Norwegian anthropologists as public intellectuals.

Gullestad, Marianne. 1989. Small facts and large issues: The anthropology of contemporary Scandinavian society. AnnualReview of Anthropology 18.1: 71–93.

This review article offers an exhaustive overview of the most important anthropological scholarship of Scandinavia through the late1980s, and is an essential resource in this field.

Nicolaisen, Johannes. 1980. Scandinavia: All approaches are fruitful. In Anthropology: Ancestors and heirs. Edited byStanley Diamond, 259–273. The Hague: Walter de Gruyter.

Gives an overview of the historical development of the field of anthropology in the Scandinavian countries, and is particularly strongon Danish anthropology.

Journals



Anthropological research on Scandinavia is published in a number of peerreviewed international journals. In addition to thegeneral and international anthropology journals, ethnographic research on Scandinavia appears in regional and specializedjournals as well. Reflecting the divergent historical development of ethnology and anthropology within the Nordic countries,ethnological journals, such as Ethnologia Scandinavica: A Journal of Nordic Ethnology, have traditionally published research aboutScandinavia, while anthropological journals—such as the Norwegian Anthropological Association’s Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift,Suomen Antropologi of the Finnish Anthropological Society, and the Danish Tidsskriftet antropologi—have featured scholarly workby Scandinavian anthropologists, irrespective of geographical specialization. However, in more recent years, these geographicaland disciplinary distinctions have become somewhat blurred with some Nordic anthropologists conducting fieldwork “at home,”while some ethnologists have adopted a more international perspective, including comparative studies. This shift is exemplified bythe wellknown anthropological journal Ethnos that was founded in 1936 by the Swedish Ethnographical Museum with the aim ofprimarily covering extraEuropean ethnology and archaeology, and was published in Scandinavia until 1998. The editorial officeremains in Scandinavia, but over the years the focus of the journal has expanded to include the full range of contemporaryresearch in sociocultural anthropology internationally. Two other journals—Acta Borealia: A Nordic Journal of CircumpolarSocieties and Arctic Anthropology—delineate their geographical specialization somewhat differently, publishing a range ofethnographic, historical, and archaeological scholarship emphasizing ecological, sociopolitical, and cultural aspects of life abovethe Arctic Circle. Anthropological work that specifically addresses migration, integration, and intercultural relations is oftenpublished in the multidisciplinary Nordic Journal of Migration Research, which prioritizes disseminating research focused on theNordic countries.

Acta Borealia: A Nordic Journal of Circumpolar Societies. 1984–.

This is a multidisciplinary, peerreviewed cultural studies journal published by Taylor and Francis Group and edited by researchersat the University of Tromsø. Acta Borealia is biannually published and in English.

Arctic Anthropology. 1962–.

Published by the University of Wisconsin Press, Arctic Anthropology is a peerreviewed biannual journal with a fourfield approachto the cultures and peoples of the arctic, subarctic, and contiguous regions.

Ethnologia Scandinavica: A Journal of Nordic Ethnology. 1971–.

Based in Sweden, this peerreviewed journal publishes Nordic ethnological research articles. Published annually, EthnologiaScandinavica includes scholarship examining life and culture throughout Scandinavia. In English, and aimed at an internationalaudience.

Ethnos. 1936–.

A peerreviewed journal of sociocultural anthropology that is editorially based in Scandinavia. Founded in 1936 by the SwedishEthnographical Museum and published four times a year. In English.

Jordens Folk: Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society.

Jordens Folk, the peerreviewed journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society, publishes ethnographic studies with an accessible,popularscientific orientation. Articles are primarily in Danish.

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Nordic Journal of Migration Research. 2011–.

Founded in 2011, this openaccess multidisciplinary journal publishes empirical research on migration, integration, and ethnic andintercultural relations. While not exclusively focused on the Nordic region, greater emphasis is placed on the publication ofresearch in the Nordic context. In English.

Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift.

This is the Norwegian Anthropological Association’s peerreviewed quarterly journal. The primarily Norwegianlanguage journalpublishes empirical and theoretical work in social anthropology as well as book reviews and debate pieces.

Scandinavian Studies. 1911–.

This peerreviewed journal is published by the USbased Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies, and acceptsscholarly work examining Scandinavian languages and literatures as well as historical, social, and cultural research focused on theNordic region.

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society. 1997–.

This is the (primarily) Englishlanguage, peerreviewed journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society. Published quarterly, SuomenAntropologi accepts ethnographic articles, reviews, critical essays, conference reports, and interviews.

Tidsskriftet antropologi. 1977–.

The biannually published, peerreviewed journal of the Danish Anthropological Association. Each issue is organized around atopical theme, with research articles in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian.

Influential Early Works

From the 1950s to the 1970s, several significant ethnographic studies of Scandinavia were published. These early works, many ofwhich take a structuralist perspective, have had an enduring influence on the development of Nordic anthropology and ethnology—even as theoretical directions have changed—and can be considered classic works in this field. Daun 1969, a study of socialtension and labor disputes surrounding the closure of a sawmill in Northern Sweden; Daun 1974, describing social and economicchange in a suburban town; and Yngvesson 1978, an analysis of decisionmaking processes in a small fishing village community,are foundational ethnographies of Sweden. Swedish ethnographers in this period remained indebted to Berg and Svensson 1934,a classic ethnological survey of Swedish peasant culture. In Norway, Barth 1952—a cultural ecological study based on fieldwork ina mountain farming community, and Barnes 1954—a social network analysis of the social relations and organization of an islandcommunity, are noteworthy midcentury applications of ethnographic methods to Norwegian society. Social change and conflict—dominant themes in anthropological work in this era—are also central questions in Anderson and Anderson 1964, an ethnographicstudy of a transformative period in a Danish maritime village.

Anderson, Robert Thomas, and Barbara Gallatin Anderson. 1964. The vanishing village: A Danish maritime community.Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a small Danish island community, this study analyzes the seeming absence of conflict duringprocesses of social change in a village.

Barnes, John A. 1954. Class and committees in a Norwegian island parish. Human Relations 7:39–58.

This analysis of the social relations and organization of a small Norwegian village and its occupants offers an important earlyconceptualization of social network theory.

Barth, Fredrik. 1952. Subsistence and institutional system in a Norwegian mountain valley. Rural Sociology 17.1: 28–38.

A classic ethnography of a small mountain community of farmers in Norway that takes a cultural ecological approach to thecommunity’s adaptation to their environment, taking into account kinship, social structure, labor, and economy.

Berg, Gösta, and Sigfrid Svensson. 1934. Svensk bondekultur. Stockholm: Bonnier.

A foundational ethnological study of Swedish peasant culture, focusing on religious beliefs, customs, and material culture. InSwedish.

Daun, Åke. 1969. Upp till kamp i Båtskärsnäs! En etnologisk studie av ett samhälle inför industrinedläggelse. Stockholm:Bokfrlaget Prisma.

An ethnological examination of the labor dispute surrounding the closure of a sawmill in northern Sweden in the 1960s, whichremains a classic in the field. In Swedish.

Daun, Åke. 1974. Förortsliv: En etnologisk studie av kulturell forändring. Lund, Sweden: Bokförlaget Prisma.

Focuses on individual and group consequences of economic and social change in Vårberg, a Swedish suburb. In Swedish.

Yngvesson, Barbara. 1978. Leadership and consensus: Decisionmaking in an egalitarian community. Ethnos 43.1–2: 73–90.

Drawing on ethnographic research in a Swedish fishing community in the late 1960s, this article offers a pragmatic view of theprocess by which groups arrive at consensus through distributing responsibility for controversial decisions.

Anthropology, Ethnology, and Folklife

In Scandinavia, as in Europe more generally, the fields of ethnology and folklife studies have historically been distinguished fromthe discipline of anthropology. Traditionally, European ethnologists, including Nordic ethnologists, were known for their focus on thecultures and lifeways of their own countries as well as for a more historical approach. In contrast, Nordic anthropologists conductedfieldwork further afield, often studying nonEuropean societies. However, in more recent years, these geographical and disciplinarydistinctions have become somewhat blurred, with some Nordic anthropologists conducting fieldwork “at home,” while someethnologists have adopted a more international perspective, including comparative studies. Frykman 2012 offers a thoroughoverview of the relationship between ethnology and anthropology in Europe, with a particular emphasis on the Scandinavianperspective, while Eriksen 2011 gives a careful comparison of the emergence of the study of folk culture, openair museums,



ethnology, and, later, the field of cultural history in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Hannerz 1985 introduces a special issue ofEthnos reviewing developments in the history, ethnology, and anthropology of Scandinavia. Klein 2000 and Klein 2006 discuss thetrajectory of folklife and ethnological research in the Swedish context, and the way these fields have been caught up in nationalistprojects in different periods. For a comprehensive discussion of the development of Finnish ethnology, folklore, and anthropology,see Siikala 2006 and Salmi 2011. Pálsson and Guðbjörnsson 2011 describes the historical construction of “the Icelanders” withinphysical and biological anthropological scholarship over the 20th century, and explains some of the ways that biological materialsand texts have been used to support particular visions of the Icelandic past and present.

Eriksen, Anne. 2011. From ethnology and folklore studies to cultural history in Scandinavia. In Cultural history in Europe:Institutions—themes—perspectives. Edited by Jörg Rogge, 31–44. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag.

Compares the emergence of the study of folk culture, openair museums, ethnology, and the field of cultural history in Denmark,Norway, and Sweden.

Frykman, Jonas. 2012. A tale of two disciplines: European ethnology and the anthropology of Europe. In A companion tothe anthropology of Europe. Edited by Jonas Frykman, Ullrich Kockel, and Mairead Nic Craith, 572–589. Malden, MA:WileyBlackwell.

A thorough overview of the relationship between ethnology and anthropology in Europe, with a particular emphasis on theScandinavian perspective.

Hannerz, Ulf. 1985. History and anthropology in Scandinavia: An introduction. Ethnos 50.3–4: 165–167.

A concise introduction to a special issue reviewing major themes in history, ethnology, and anthropology in Scandinavia. Alsodescribes the development of Nordic historical anthropology in the 1980s.

Klein, Barbro. 2000. The moral content of tradition: Homecraft, ethnology, and Swedish life in the twentieth century.Western Folklore 59.2: 171–195.

Focuses on the development of an anthropologically and sociologically influenced discipline of ethnology in Sweden, and theambivalent relationship between the increasingly theoretically oriented field of ethnology and the popular Swedish homecraftmovement.

Klein, Barbro. 2006. Cultural heritage, the Swedish folklife sphere, and the others. Cultural Analysis 5:57–80.

Describes some of the distinctions between the fields of culture heritage, folk life studies, and related disciplines in Sweden.

Pálsson, Gísli, and Sigurður Örn Guðbjörnsson. 2011. Make no bones about it: The invention of Homo islandicus. ActaBorealia 28.2: 119–141.

A theoretical discussion of various anthropological uses of Icelandic history and biological materials in relation to ideas of thenation and memory, drawing on Ludwik Fleck’s concept of “thought styles.”

Salmi, Hannu. 2011. Traditions of cultural history in Finland, 1900–2000. In Cultural history in Europe: Institutions—



themes—perspectives. Edited by Jörg Rogge, 45–61. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag.

A history of the study of culture in Finland, with thorough attention to connections between individuals and institutions over time.

Siikala, Jukka. 2006. The ethnography of Finland. Annual Review of Anthropology 35.1: 153–170.

A detailed overview of the institutional and theoretical relationships between ethnology, folklore, and anthropology in Finland aswell as their entanglements with nationalist discourses. Also discusses political and epistemological questions surrounding thedevelopment of Finnish and FinnoUgric studies.

Sámi

The Sámi are an indigenous people of Northern Europe, with a population of around 80,000. Many Sámi live in the territory knownas Sápmi, which stretches across the upper regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. While missionaries, travelers, andscholars have written earlier accounts of the Sámi (once referred to as “Lapps,” an etic term that is now considered derogatory),comprehensive, empirically based reports generally date to the early to mid20th century. Ethnologists, folklorists, andanthropologists in the Nordic region took an early interest in the customs, beliefs, and practices of the Sámi. While many of theseinitial studies can be considered examples of salvage ethnography, the collaborative work of Johan Turi, a Sámi man, and EmilieDemant Hatt, a Danish artist, offers an interesting example of early participatory ethnography in the region. The works describedunder the heading of Early Research offer important documentation of the history of Scandinavian anthropology and ethnology aswell as the historical relationship between the Sámi and their Nordic neighbors. Contemporary Perspectives reviews more recentwork on Sámi concerns, such as repatriation claims, cultural heritage, political movements, and climate change.

EARLY RESEARCH

Reuterskiöld 1912 and Solem 1933 are two influential early studies of Sámi communities. Reuterskiöld, a Swedish religioushistorian and theologian, wrote a wellknown work on Sámi religion and mythology, while Solem, a Norwegian lawyer, produced anexhaustive report on Sámi systems of law and justice. By the 1940s and 1950s, a large number of anthropological accounts of theNordic Sámi had been published, appearing in English, German, Russian, and the Scandinavian languages. Lowie 1945 providesan overview of some of the earliest of these works, and can be seen as indicative of the growing international interest in Sámicultural forms. In the 1950s and 1960s, several ethnographic monographs of the Sámi were written. Gjessing 1954 and Paine 1965are prominent works from this period, written by a Norwegian anthropologist and an English anthropologist, respectively. Bothethnographies examine the significant transformations in Sámi societies (primarily in Norway) in the postwar era, a periodassociated with an increased presence of the state in Sámi lives and communities. The first Sámilanguage text about Sámi lifeand culture was Turi 2011 (originally published 1910), which presented a fascinating personal and ethnographic account oftradition and change in northern Sweden, written by Johan Turi—a Sámi man. Turi worked on the book with Emilie Demant Hatt, aDanish artist who translated his text, a process that Kuutma 2011 analyzes as an interesting early example of collaborativeethnography.

Gjessing, Gutorm. 1954. Changing Lapps: A study of culture relations in northernmost Europe. London: London Schoolof Economics and Political Science.

An early monograph surveying the history, culture, and religion of the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia.

Kuutma, Kristin. 2011. The making of Sami ethnography: Contested authorities and negotiated representations. Journalof Ethnology and Folkloristics 2.1: 55–65.



Analyzes the collaborative relationship of Johan Turi, the Sámi author of An Account of the Sami, and Emilie Demant Hatt, aDanish artist who worked with Turi on the project and translated his text into Danish.

Lowie, Robert H. 1945. A note on Lapp culture history. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 1:447–454.

Synthesizes a selection of historical and contemporary scholarship on the Sámi and calls for a more comprehensive workcombining the insights of existing Sámi scholarship.

Paine, Robert. 1965. A coast Lapp society II: A study of economic development and social values. Tromsø, Norway:Tromsøs Museum Skrifter.

An ethnographic monograph of coastal Sámi communities in northern Norway, with a particular focus on economic and socialchange in the community after the Second World War, and on the communities’ interactions with the Norwegian state.

Reuterskiöld, Edgar. 1912. De nordiske Lapparnas religion. Stockholm: Cederquists Grafiska Aktiebolag.

Examines the religious beliefs and practices of the Nordic Sámi. In Swedish.

Solem, Erik. 1933. Lappiske rettstudier. Oslo, Norway: H. Aschehoug.

A comprehensive survey of the legal, juridical, and political structures of Sámi, including comparative materials. In Norwegian.

Turi, Johan. 2011. An account of the Sami. Translated by Tomas A. duBois. Chicago: Nordic Studies.

An English translation of the first secular book published in a Sámi language. An ethnography of the Mountain Sámi written by aSámi author. Originally published in 1910 as Muitalus sámiid birra.

Whitaker, Ian. 1955. Social relations in a nomadic Lappish community. Oslo, Norway: Norsk Folkemuseum.

An empirically based study of a nomadic indigenous community in northern Sweden, describing the group’s religion, kinshipsystem, economic relations, and social relations with neighboring peasant villages.

CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

Lantto 2010 gives detailed descriptions of the historical complexities of Sámi negotiations concerning indigenous rights, citizenshiprights, and transnational movement, while Hansen and Olsen 2004 covers earlier Sámi history and archaeology. Especiallybecause reindeer husbandry and herding have been traditional livelihoods of the Sámi people, the partitioning of Sápmi throughthe institution and enforcement of borders between the Scandinavian nationstates has been an ongoing source of conflict in theregion. The relationship between these states and Sámi populations has varied considerably across the Nordic region. Falch andSkandfer 2004 provides an indepth overview of Sámi interactions with the Norwegian state, and Jomppanen 2002 offersperspective on issues relevant to Finnish Sámi. Lantto and Mörkenstam 2008 explicates conflicts within contemporary SwedishSámi politics by tracing their development for over a century. In recent years, debates about repatriation, representation, andcultural heritage have been central to Sámi political movements, and have become important issues for Nordic museums toaddress. Levy 2006 examines the treatment of Sámi prehistory and archaeological materials in museum displays in Sweden,Norway, and Finland, revealing the politicization of these forms of representation. Mulk 2009 gives a thoughtful account of the



tensions between the Swedish state, museums, and the Swedish Sámi population over repatriation of cultural objects and skeletalremains in Sweden. Climate change is also a major concern, as most of Sápmi lies north of the Arctic Circle. As Beach 2012explains, for indigenous Sámi, Sápmi is a site of both material and cultural resources, and as environmental changes open newpossibilities for mineral extraction and shipping routes, the rights to these resources are subject to new forms of contestation.

Beach, Hugh. 2012. Nordic reflections on northern social research. In A companion to the anthropology of Europe. Editedby Ullrich Kockel, Mairead Nic Craith, and Jonas Frykman, 32–49. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell.

Reviews major social scientific questions about colonialism, ethnicity, and political ecology as pertaining to northern indigenouspeoples, drawing on anthropological case studies and fieldwork.

Falch, Torvald, and Marianne Skandfer. 2004. Sámi cultural heritage in Norway: Between local knowledge and the powerof the state. In Northern ethnographic landscapes: Perspectives from circumpolar nations. Edited by Igor Krupnik, RachelMason, and Tonia W. Horton, 356–375. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

Gives an overview of the relationship between Norway’s Sámi population and the state, with a particular focus on questionsrelating to archaeological materials and the evaluation of epistemological claims.

Hansen, Lars Ivar, and Bjørnar Olsen. 2004. Samenes historie fram til 1750. Oslo, Norway: Cappelen.

An exhaustive survey of archaeological and historical research on the lives of the Sámi from the earliest records up through themid18th century, tracing the origins of concepts of Sámi ethnicity, rights, and resources. In Norwegian.

Jomppanen, Tarmo. 2002. Current situation of the Sámi heritage in Finland. In Vem äger kulturarvet? Anföranden vidkonferens om återföringsfrågor vid Ájtte, Svenskt fjäll och samemuseum 6–8 juni 2000. Edited by IngaMaria Mulk, 35–39.Rapportserie Duoddaris 20. Lapland, Sweden: Ájtte.

A report describing challenges for Sámi cultural heritage projects in Finland, compiled as part of a conference on repatriationquestions held at the Ájtte museum in Sweden. Copies of the full conference report can be ordered from the museum.

Lantto, Patrik. 2010. Borders, citizenship and change: The case of the Sami people, 1751–2008. Citizenship Studies 14.5:543–556.

Analyzes ongoing conflicts between indigenous rights and citizenship rights affecting Sámi people, tracing these issues historicallyfor the past 250 years.

Lantto, Patrik, and Ulf Mörkenstam. 2008. Sami rights and Sami challenges: The modernization process and the SwedishSami movement, 1886–2006. Scandinavian Journal of History 33.1: 26–51.

Relates contemporary Sámi political efforts and public debates to the historical development of an established policy approach to“the Sámi” in Sweden.

Levy, Janet E. 2006. Prehistory, identity, and archaeological representation in Nordic museums. American Anthropologist108.1: 135–147.



Through an ethnographic analysis of museum displays about Sámi prehistory and archaeology in Swedish, Finnish, andNorwegian museums, this article looks at the cultural politics of representation and indigeneity in the Nordic context.

Mulk, IngaMaria. 2009. Conflicts over the repatriation of Sami cultural heritage in Sweden. Acta Borealia 26.2: 194–215.

This article places current tensions between Sámi people and the Swedish state—particularly conflicts about cultural objects andskeletal remains—in the context of international scholarship on colonialism and assimilation policy.

Ethnographies of Everyday Life

Scandinavian ethnographers have produced a rich body of scholarship exploring everyday life and ordinary situations asanthropological routes into the profundities of lived experience. This work has revealed the complex ways that seemingly mundanemoments and gestures both reflect and partake in the construction of individual identities, hopes, aspirations, and dreams, as wellas forming the substance of social relations, friendships, and communities—even nations. Anthropological interest in the everydayfirst flourished in the 1980s in the Nordic countries. Gullestad 1983—a moving ethnography of workingclass women’s dailyexperiences in Bergen, Norway—is one of the most wellknown works in this area, demonstrating that anthropologists interested incore disciplinary questions such as the configuration of kinship or the maintenance of group morality can—and should—lookclosely at people’s quotidian activities, from getting together with close friends or decorating the house, to going out for a drink inthe evening. Frykman and Löfgren 1987 traces ordinary Swedish preoccupations—walking in nature, cleaning the home—back intime, using this cultural history to shed light on the production of the idea of the Swedish nation. O’Dell 1997 also looks to theeveryday to illuminate larger transformations in Sweden, in this case, the rising influence of American culture. Roberts 1989 looksto the past to illuminate the present, using the ubiquitous daily ritual of the coffee ceremony to examine ongoing rifts betweencultural ideologies of individual autonomy and egalitarianism in Finland. More recently, the everyday has reemerged as an area ofanthropological concern in Scandinavia. Ehn and Löfgren 2010 attends to the significance of inbetween spaces and times,pointing out that understandings and experiences of not only productive activity, but also downtime, are culturally constituted.Haldrup, et al. 2006; Jenkins 2011; and Linnet 2011 scrutinize microlevels of Danish identity formation, showing how divisionsbetween self and other are demonstrated, reproduced, or challenged through subtle signifiers and embodied practices, includingconversation styles, social interactions, body movements, and habits. As the authors of these works point out, in the politicalcontext of an uneasy Scandinavian “multiculturalism,” the effects of such distinctions are far from mundane.

Ehn, Billy, and Orvar Löfgren. 2010. The secret world of doing nothing. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Analyzes the oftenoverlooked cultural significance of inbetween moments and situations, examining the meaning of activities likewaiting and daydreaming. English translation of När ingenting särskilt händer, published in Swedish in 2007 by Brutus ÖstlingsBokförlag Symposion.

Frykman, Jonas, and Orvar Löfgren. 1987. Culture builders: A historical anthropology of middleclass life. NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.

This classic ethnography of Swedish middleclass culture discusses the historical origins of Swedish cultural fixations, from ideasabout hygiene to the meaning of nature. Originally published in Swedish in 1979 as Den kultiverade människan.

Gullestad, Marianne. 1983. Kitchentable society: A case study of the family life and friendships of young workingclassmothers in urban Norway. Oslo, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.

An important and very influential ethnographic study of social relations and daily practices among young workingclass Norwegian



women, considered a hallmark in the development of “anthropology at home.”

Haldrup, Michael, Lasse Koefoed, and Kirsten Simonsen. 2006. Practical orientalism—Bodies, everyday life and theconstruction of otherness. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88.2: 173–184.

Offers an analysis of the construction of national and cultural identities through seemingly mundane bodily practices and gesturesin the context of the increasingly multicultural Danish society.

Jenkins, Richard. 2011. Being Danish: Paradoxes of identity in everyday life. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.

Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, this book explores transformations in the meaning of Danish identity in the 1990sthrough the present, including discussions of the Muhammad cartoon controversy and Denmark’s relation to the European Union.

Linnet, Jeppe Trolle. 2011. Money can’t buy me hygge: Danish middleclass consumption, egalitarianism, and the sanctityof inner space. Social Analysis 55.2: 21–44.

Analyzes the ubiquitous Danish notion of hygge, sometimes translated into English as coziness, as emblematic and expressive ofcultural values about egalitarianism and inner space, and how this notion contributes to both cohesiveness and exclusion.

O’Dell, Tom. 1997. Culture unbound: Americanization and everyday life in Sweden. Lund, Norway: Nordic Academic.

Uses ethnographic examples to illustrate some of the ways that American cultural forms have been adopted, appropriated, andtransformed in Swedish society, and offers a theory of how transnational and globalizing processes are encountered at aneveryday level.

Roberts, Fredric M. 1989. The Finnish coffee ceremony and notions of self. Arctic Anthropology 26.1: 20–33.

Takes the coffee ceremony, a widespread Finnish ritual of hospitality, as a point of entry in order to analyze cultural conflictsbetween autonomy and community, and egalitarianism and hierarchy.

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

The Nordic model of gender equality has long been heralded internationally, with the Scandinavian welfare states often rankinghighest on global lists of “womenfriendly” nations. Political scientists and economists have studied the effects of Nordic genderpolicies on labormarket participation and economic growth, while anthropological investigations have attended to how laws anddiscourses of gender equality may intersect with, or even help to produce, other forms of social difference and exclusion, whetheralong lines of sexuality, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, or religion. In the Nordic region, critical gender studies developed inconversation with contemporary European and AngloAmerican scholarship, but as works such as Kulick and Bjerén 1987 andHirdman 1988 have suggested, Nordic gender issues must be understood and theorized in and through the cultural and politicalcontext of the Nordic welfare states. For a thorough general overview of critical Nordic scholarship on gender and gender equality,see Holli, et al. 2005 and Borchorst and Siim 2008. Scholars of Nordic gender have increasingly adopted an intersectionalapproach, situating gender in relation to other social categories, such as race and ethnicity, as in Keskinen, et al. 2009, and inrelation to ideologies of sexuality and national imaginaries, as in Kulick 2003. If early work in gender studies tended to focus on theexperience of women and the cultural work of notions of femininity, more recent scholarship has also brought attention to thediscursive production of masculinity in Nordic societies. Hearn, et al. 2012 describes the development of masculinity studies as an



academic field in its own right in Sweden, while Vuori 2009 examines Finnish understandings of masculinity and fatherhood.

Borchorst, Anette, and Birte Siim. 2008. Womanfriendly policies and state feminism: Theorizing Scandinavian genderequality. Feminist Theory 9.2: 207–224.

In conversation with Helge M. Hernes’s influential work on Scandinavian “state feminism,” this article critically reassesses notionsof gender equality in light of ongoing and significant changes in the Scandinavian social welfare systems.

Hearn, Jeff, Marie Nordberg, Kjerstin Andersson, et al. 2012. Hegemonic masculinity and beyond 40 years of research inSweden. Men and Masculinities 15.1: 31–55.

A thorough survey of developments in the Swedish field of masculinity studies, which also situates the concept of hegemonicmasculinity in the context of gender relations, public discourse, and policy in Sweden.

Hirdman, Yvonne. 1988. Genussystemet reflexioner kring kvinnors sociala underordning. Kvinnovetenskaplig Tidskrift3:49–63.

Drawing in part on Gayle Rubin’s work on the sex/gender system, this classic essay calls for a more precise conceptual vocabularywithin Swedish gender studies, and also questions the direct translation of terms developed in AngloAmerican feministscholarship. In Swedish.

Holli, Anne Maria, Eva Magnusson, and Malin Rönnblom. 2005. Critical studies of Nordic discourse on gender and genderequality. Nordic Journal for Women’s Studies 13.3: 148–152.

This article analyzes the discursive and ideological uses of Nordic gender equality notions and introduces a special journal issueon the same theme (with the same title), which is a useful overview of critical gender studies scholarship across the region. Thespecial issue is edited by Eva Magnusson and Malin Rönnblom.

Keskinen, Suvi, Salla Tuori, Sari Irni, and Diana Mulinari, eds. 2009. Complying with colonialism: Gender, race andethnicity in the Nordic region. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

This edited volume explores intersections between Nordic models of gender equality, discourses of “European values” andmulticulturalism, and Northern European involvement in colonial and postcolonial projects and logics.

Kulick, Don. 2003. Sex in the new Europe: The criminalization of clients and Swedish fear of penetration. AnthropologicalTheory 3.2: 199.

An analysis of Sweden’s 1998 law criminalizing the purchase of sex as indicative of particularly Swedish cultural anxieties, bothabout the boundaries of “appropriate” sexuality and about Sweden’s status within the European Union.

Kulick, Don, and Gunilla Bjerén, eds. 1987. Från kön till genus: Kvinnligt och manligt i ett kulturellt perspektiv.Stockholm: Carlsson.

An important early contribution to the development of gender and sexuality studies in Sweden, with chapters examining ideologiesof gender, sex, and power in a range of geographical contexts from Papua New Guinea to rural Sweden. In Swedish.



Vuori, Jaana. 2009. Men’s choices and masculine duties: Fathers in expert discussions. Men and Masculinities 12.1: 45–72.

A discussion of public debates about fathering and fatherhood in Finland, with particular attention to the contributions ofprofessionally trained “family experts” in national conversations about the appropriate gendered division of parenting labor.

Nordic Medical Anthropology

Medical anthropology is a relatively new, but growing subfield of anthropology in Scandinavia. As compared with Nordicanthropology more generally, a greater proportion of Nordic medical anthropologists have conducted ethnographic work in theirhome societies. A special issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly on the topic of “Nordic Medical Anthropology” is a usefulresource surveying some of the dominant themes of contemporary work in this area. The introduction to this journal issue, Ingstadand Talle 2009, is particularly helpful in this regard, outlining key directions in the field and offering a brief history of thedevelopment of medical anthropology in the Scandinavian context. In all of the Nordic countries, health care delivery is intimatelyconnected with the infrastructure of the social welfare state, and a significant body of Nordic medical anthropology addressesquestions of power, agency, and subjectivity in interactions between healthcare providers and patients—relationships that areimportantly mediated by the state. For example, Sachs 1983, Lundin 1999, Ingstad and Christie 2001, Einarsdóttir 2009, andFunahashi 2013 describe the negotiation of potentially divergent perspectives, experiences, expectations, roles, andunderstandings in communication and interactions between or among patients, families, medical experts, and authorities. Withadvances in genomic medicine and diagnostic technologies, new ways of calculating risk and living with uncertainty have emerged—not least in the Nordic countries, often early adopters of medical technologies—and medical anthropologist works such as Sachs2004, Svendsen 2006, and Honkasalo 2009 have taken up related questions of the management of contingent health andindeterminate futures.

Einarsdóttir, Jónína. 2009. Emotional experts: Parents’ views on endoflife decisions for preterm infants in Iceland.Medical Anthropology Quarterly 23.1: 34–50.

An ethnographic study of Icelandic parents’ decisionmaking processes about continuing or withdrawing treatment for babies with alow birth weight.

Funahashi, Daena Aki. 2013. Wrapped in plastic: Transformation and alienation in the new Finnish economy. CulturalAnthropology 28.1: 1–21.

Situates the diagnosis and treatment of Finnish workers’ suffering from the mental disorder known as burnout in the larger social,economic, and political context of the neoliberalizing Finnish state.

Honkasalo, MarjaLiisa. 2009. Grips and ties: Agency, uncertainty, and the problem of suffering in North Karelia. MedicalAnthropology Quarterly 23.1: 51–69.

Theorizes questions of suffering and agency through an ethnographic examination of patients’ perspectives and experiences withheart disease in Finnish North Karelia.

Ingstad, Benedicte, and Vigdis Moe Christie. 2001. Encounters with illness: The perspective of the sick doctor.Anthropology & Medicine 8.2–3: 201–210.



A case study of Norwegian doctors suffering from serious illness, looking at how doctors’ experiences of illness affect theirunderstandings and expectations of the role of the doctor.

Ingstad, Benedicte, and Aud Talle. 2009. Introduction to Nordic Medical Anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly23.1: 1–5.

Editors’ introduction to a special issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly titled “Nordic Medical Anthropology.” The editors give anoverview of a group of medical anthropological studies situated in the Nordic region and introduce the main issues explored in thescholarly community of Nordic medical anthropologists.

Lundin, Susanne. 1999. The boundless body: Cultural perspectives on xenotransplantation. Ethnos 64.1: 5–31.

Based on fieldwork with Swedish patients who have received animal cells, a thoughtful analysis of the biological and culturaltransformations entailed in biotechnological innovations, such as xenotransplantation.

Sachs, Lisbeth. 1983. Evil eye or bacteria: Turkish migrant women and Swedish health care. Stockholm: University ofStockholm.

Describes a Turkish immigrant women’s experiences with the Swedish health care system, and discusses some of the divergentinterpretations of and strategies for managing the body, health, and illness that emerge in these encounters.

Sachs, Lisbeth. 2004. The new age of the molecular family: An anthropological view on the medicalisation of kinship.Scandinavian Journal of Public Health 32.1: 24–29.

Relates genetic notions of inheritance to popular ideas of family and kinship, drawing on ethnographic research in a Swedish clinic.

Svendsen, Mette Nordahl. 2006. The social life of genetic knowledge: A casestudy of choices and dilemmas in cancergenetic counselling in Denmark. Medical Anthropology 25.2: 139–170.

Examines the social movements and meanings of genetic knowledge and ideas about kinship and risk as they are articulatedthrough cancer genetic counseling in Denmark.

Globalization and Transnationalism

Globalization—and its complex instantiations and transformations at local and national levels—has been an area of stronganthropological interest in the Nordic region. While research projects at several Nordic universities have helped drive this line ofscholarly inquiry, much of this body of literature addresses theoretical problems of globalization in a general way withoutspecifically discussing a Nordic perspective. Influential theoretical works include Friedman 1990, Hannerz and Löfgren 1994, andLöfgren 1996, all of which seek to develop analytical frameworks by which to understand the interplay between global and local,national and transnational cultural processes. Friedman 1990 outlines a general theory of globalization, suggesting the study ofconsumption as a possible point of entry, while the theoretical works in Hannerz and Löfgren 1994 and Löfgren 1996 are groundedin empirical analysis linking Swedish experiences with transnational transformations. If early scholarship on globalization heraldedthe declining significance of national borders in an increasingly interconnected world, anthropologists have pointed to thecontinuing cultural significance of the local and the national, even as meanings and practices appear in new guises or transform inunexpected directions. Hannerz 1992 makes a strong case for attending to “cultural flows,” arguing that globalization has



reconfigured, rather than flattened, the complex linkages between meanings, forms, and interpretations across localities. Amethodological contribution to this body of theoretical work can be found in Eriksen 2003, an excellent edited volume that offers agenealogy of anthropological approaches to globalization and addresses some of the methodological problems of conductingethnography on a transnational scale.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, ed. 2003. Globalisation: Studies in anthropology. London: Pluto.

An edited volume focusing on the methodological challenges of ethnographic studies of globalization, which includes contributionsfrom many leading Nordic anthropologists.

Friedman, Jonathan. 1990. Being in the world: Globalization and localization. Theory, Culture and Society 7.2: 311–328.

Considers the study of consumption as a possible route for anthropology to come to terms with the interactions between global andlocal processes in producing meanings and practices of identity. Draws on a range of ethnographic material from disparategeographic settings.

Hannerz, Ulf. 1992. Cultural complexity: Studies in the social organization of meaning. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

Develops the concept of “cultural flows” as a theoretical framework for analyzing the forms and meanings of culture in a globalizedworld.

Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational connections. New York: Routledge.

This classic book from the major Swedish anthropologist includes a chapter on Stockholm.

Hannerz, Ulf, and Orvar Löfgren. 1994. The nation in the global village. Cultural Studies 8.2: 198–207.

Outlines the development of a collaborative research project linking Swedish anthropologists and ethnologists with the aim ofrethinking national cultures in light of increasing global interconnections, and describes some of the workings of globalization in theSwedish context.

Löfgren, Orvar. 1996. Linking the local, the national and the global. Ethnologia Europaea: Journal of European Ethnology26.2: 157–168.

Gives a historical overview of Swedish and European ethnologists’ various theories of the local, the national, and the global, andmakes a case for examining the multiple ways that these domains are connected, rather than treating them as separate analyticalunits.

Immigration, Ethnicity, and “Integration”

Of the Nordic countries, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have seen the highest rates of immigration in recent decades. Whileimmigration, as measured in absolute terms, has been less extensive in the Nordic countries, there have nevertheless beenstriking demographic changes in their relatively small populations. In Sweden, for example, 15 percent of the total population in2011 was foreign born. The topic of immigration, although it has unfolded quite differently in each of the Nordic countries, has



become a lightning rod for debate across the region. In particular, questions surrounding the cultural, political, and economic“integration” of immigrants and refugees in the Scandinavian countries have been much discussed, both in popular and academicoutlets. Olwig 2011 (part of a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on immigration and social incorporation inScandinavia, a useful introduction to the topic) offers a thoughtful analysis of the relationship between Scandinavian welfaresystems and policies and discourses around immigration and integration, comparing and contrasting the social and politicalclimates in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Andersen and Biseth 2013 is an ethnographic account of the experiences of youngpeople with immigrant backgrounds living in Oslo, Norway, that challenges the notion of “failed integration” of foreignbornNorwegians and provides an important contrast to popular media representations. A more general overview of Norwegian“multiculturalism” can be found in Eriksen and Næss 2011, an edited volume. Immigration debates in Denmark are discussed inHervik 2011, which gives a nuanced and detailed take on the social construction and othering of foreigners within Danish neoracistand neonationalist discourses, and also attends to the role of media in these processes. A number of scholars have written aboutimmigration in the Swedish context in connection with analyses of cultural logics of exclusion, othering, and racialization. Pred2000 is an influential early work in this vein, contrasting Sweden’s selfimage of egalitarianism and progressive values with theproliferation of “cultural racism” toward recently arrived immigrants and refugees in the 1990s. Sawyer 2002 and Norman 2004further explore the racialization of immigration and migration in Sweden, drawing on indepth ethnographic research to highlight theambiguities and contradictions of everyday forms of racism and exclusion. Housing segregation, especially in urban areas, hasalso been a major focus. Ristilaami 1994 is an important study of Rosengård, a neighborhood in Malmö that has come tosymbolize Sweden’s troubled relationship with its foreignborn population. Magnusson 2001, an edited volume and excellentresource on this topic, takes up the spatialization of ethnicity and otherness within Scandinavia’s “divided cities.” Milani andJonsson 2012 takes a linguistic anthropological perspective to the social performance of difference, analyzing standard andnonstandard forms of Swedish in relation to language ideologies.

Andersen, Bengt, and Heidi Biseth. 2013. The myth of failed integration: The case of eastern Oslo. City & Society 25.1: 5–24.

An ethnographic account of the experiences of young people with immigrant backgrounds living in Oslo, Norway, that challengesthe notion of “failed integration” of foreignborn Norwegians and provides an important contrast to popular media representations.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, and Hans Erik Næss, eds. 2011. Kulturell kompleksitet i det nye Norge. Oslo, Norway: Unipub.

An edited volume presenting a range of scholarly perspectives on contemporary Norwegian culture, including several contributionsthat analyze aspects of Norwegian multiculturalism. In Norwegian.

Hervik, Peter. 2011. The annoying difference: The emergence of Danish neonationalism, neoracism, and populism in thepost1989 world. New York: Berghahn.

Describes the social construction and “othering” of foreigners within Danish neoracist and neonationalist discourses, and alsoattends to the role of media in these processes.

Magnusson, Lena, ed. 2001. Den delade staden: Segregation och etnicitet i stadsbygden. Umeå, Sweden: Boréa.

This comprehensive, edited volume analyzes the social processes contributing to housing segregation and the construction ofethnicity in Scandinavia’s “divided cities.” In Swedish.

Milani, Tommaso M., and Rickard Jonsson. 2012. Who’s afraid of Rinkeby Swedish? Stylization, complicity, resistance.Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22.1: 44–63.



A linguistic anthropological examination of the social performance of cultural difference, analyzing standard and nonstandard formsof Swedish in relation to language ideologies and ideas about immigration.

Norman, Karin. 2004. Equality and exclusion: “Racism” in a Swedish town. Ethnos 69.2: 204–228.

Draws on ethnographic research in a small Swedish town to explore the connections between everyday notions of exclusion,racism, equality, belonging, and inclusion, particularly in relation to the establishment of a refugee reception center in the town.

Olwig, Karen Fog. 2011. “Integration”: Migrants and refugees between Scandinavian welfare societies and familyrelations. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37.2: 179–196.

Analyzes the relationship between Scandinavian welfare systems and policies and discourses around immigration and integration,comparing and contrasting the social and political climates in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. This article is an introduction to aspecial issue with the same title, coedited by Karen Fog Olwig, Birgitte Romme Larsen, and Mikkel Rytter.

Pred, Allan. 2000. Even in Sweden: Racisms, racialized spaces and the popular geographical imagination. Berkeley: Univ.of California Press.

An influential early work contrasting Sweden’s selfimage of egalitarianism and progressive values with the proliferation of “culturalracism” toward recently arrived immigrants and refugees in the 1990s.

Ristilaami, PerMarkku. 1994. Rosengård och den svarta poesin: En studie av modern annorlundahet. Stockholm:Symposion.

A classic study of Rosengård, a Swedish “Million Program” neighborhood in the city of Malmö, describing the relationship betweenSwedish notions of modernity and otherness. In Swedish.

Sawyer, Lena. 2002. Routings: “Race,” African diasporas, and Swedish belonging. Transforming Anthropology 11.1: 13–35.

Traces the discursive construction of an African diasporic community in Stockholm in relation to cultural and moral understandingsof racism, the local, and the national in Sweden.

Law, Bureaucracy, and the State

Anthropologists working in the Nordic region have turned an analytical gaze to the creation and reproduction of the state througheveryday practice, examining how the state is brought into being within social relationships and institutional forms and discourses.As this scholarship suggests, the traditional Nordic political model of an expansive, universalist social welfare state—both as apowerful legacy and as a contested object of ongoing transformation—looms large in the everyday lives and imaginations ofcitizens. Questions of power and agency are central to this project, and anthropologists working in this area are attentive to thepossibilities for critical engagement and political transformation, both at the level of ordinary interaction and through moretraditional legal and bureaucratic channels. Ethnographic work situated in governmental and bureaucratic settings, such as Vike2002 and Graham 2002, in Norway and Sweden, respectively, has revealed the instantiation of welfare state ideology throughencounters between civil servants and clients of social services, pointing to the personal and affective dimensions ofbureaucratically mediated relations. Cool 2013 provides an ethnographic examination of the intimate connection between



knowledge production in the life sciences and social sciences and the politics of the Swedish welfare state, with attention totransformations in ideas about data collection, privacy, and trust in the state. Yngvesson 2010 analyzes the powerful role of thefamily as a political institution, showing the construction of both kinship and nation through Swedish families’ experiences withtransnational adoption. Howell 2006, partly based on fieldwork in Norway, similarly examines kinship and transnational adoption,taking up the question of biological and social notions of relatedness. Taken together, these two works offer key insights intonotions of kinship, family, and childhood in Scandinavia. As illustrated in the context of transnational adoption, emotional labor—often divided along gendered lines—is central to the production and reproduction of national identity. The work in Mack 2012 andAmouroux 2009 reveals how the state is materialized spatially, drawing on careful analyses of encounters between Swedish urbanplanners and Syriac immigrant home owners (Mack) and between Danish authorities and residents of Christiania, a Copenhagensquatter community (Amoroux). The materialization of welfare state ideologies is also explored in Murphy 2013, an examination ofthe political work of Swedish design. Although often especially farreaching and potent in the Nordic context, ideologies anddiscourses of state power are by no means static or fully hegemonic. As suggested in Boyer 2013 on the rise of the Icelandic BestParty, emergent political discourses that are both parodic and sincere at the same time can be seen as offering an intriguingpossibility for citizens to critically engage with and transform the state.

Amouroux, Christa. 2009. Normalizing Christiania: Project Clean Sweep and the normalization plan in Copenhagen. City &Society 21.1: 108–132.

An ethnographic study focusing on the Danish state’s efforts to manage and control political activities and alternative lifestylechoices within Christiania, a squatter community in Copenhagen, as well as the oppositional efforts and resistance of communitymembers.

Boyer, Dominic. 2013. Simply the best: Parody and political sincerity in Iceland. American Ethnologist 40.2: 276–287.

Analyzes the rise of Jón Gnarr’s Best Party in Iceland as an example of an emerging form of political performance that challengesdistinctions between parody and sincerity, and offers a means of critically engaging with neoliberal political hegemony.

Cool, Alison. 2013. Translating twins: Twin research and the production of genetic and economic knowledge in theSwedish welfare state. PhD diss., New York University.

Based on ethnographic research in Sweden with economists, geneticists, and other experts in the area of twin studies, thisdissertation describes the complex entanglements of scientific knowledge and the Swedish welfare state, with particular focus onthe role of data, statistics, privacy, and trust.

Graham, Mark. 2002. Emotional bureaucracies: Emotions, civil servants, and immigrants in the Swedish welfare state.Ethos 30.3: 199–226.

This article draws on ethnographic research with Swedish civil servants and their clients, particularly refugee clients, to reveal theemotional and expressive underpinnings of the bureaucratic encounter, and how such interactions contribute to the ideologicalreproduction of the welfare state.

Howell, Signe. 2006. The kinning of foreigners: Transnational adoption in a global perspective. New York: Berghahn.

This book is a significant contribution to the study of transnational adoption as a global phenomenon as well as to the study ofkinship, childhood, and national identity in Norway.



Mack, Jennifer. 2012. Producing the public: Architecture, urban planning, and immigration in a Swedish town, 1965 to thepresent. PhD diss., Harvard University.

An ethnography of the Swedish town of Södertälje, home to a large diasporic Syriac Christian community, exploring the tensionsbetween the community’s architectural projects and the visions of Swedish urban planners.

Murphy, Keith M. 2013. A cultural geometry: Designing political things in Sweden. American Ethnologist 40.1: 118–131.

Ethnographically explores the way that the work of Swedish designers—and designed objects themselves—come to be imbuedwith particular cultural and political significance associated with Swedish social welfare state ideologies.

Vike, Halvard. 2002. Culminations of complexity: Cultural dynamics in Norwegian local government. AnthropologicalTheory 2.1: 57–75.

Offers a theory of bureaucratic work as entailing an “incorporation of complexity,” describing how the everyday work of Norwegiancivil servants requires them to mobilize multiple, contradictory expectations, ideas, and narratives—a particularly challenging taskgiven the idealistic and universalist ambitions of the Norwegian welfare state.

Yngvesson, Barbara. 2010. Belonging in an adopted world: Race, identity, and transnational adoption. Chicago: Univ. ofChicago Press.

Based on a longterm ethnographic study in the United States and Sweden exploring families’ experiences with transnationaladoption, this book analyzes the constitution of kinship and nation within the everyday practices of adoptive families.

Consumption, Finance, and Economics

Early anthropological work on consumption looked at spending habits and notions of taste and value as a portal into the livedexperience of capitalism. In the Scandinavian countries, which have historically maintained a particularly strong relationshipbetween the state and the market, scholars have attended to the political and cultural aspects of consumption. Löfgren 1996describes the Swedish state’s role in the realm of consumption, and explains how the academic field of consumption studies inSweden has attended to these kinds of national inflections in everyday practice and in consumerist ideology. Hohnen 2007,drawing on qualitative research with Danish and Swedish households, adds to this body of work by offering a nuanced take on howconsumerism fits into Scandinavian class relations and perpetuates forms of social and financial exclusion, and also gives acomprehensive survey of Nordic consumption research. These kinds of complex intersections between social and financial formsof exchange are further explored in Peebles 2011, which draws parallels between Scandinavian debates about enteringtransnational markets (specifically, whether to adopt the Euro) and debates about establishing transnational spaces (specifically,the SwedishDanish Øresund Region). Economic life in Scandinavia, as elsewhere, often takes place outside of formal channels ofexchange, operating according to logics other than that of pure economic rationality. Larsen 2013 contributes an ethnographicstudy of svart arbete, or underthetable cash employment and barter exchange in Sweden, showing how these forms of economictransaction, although technically illegal, are guided by moral norms and situated within social relationships. The social, moral,political, and emotional valences of Scandinavian capitalism have attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years. Thisbody of work addresses controversial movements to privatize social services, as in the study of Sweden’s pension reform inNyqvist 2011, and responds to the effects of international economic turbulence, as in Røyrvik 2011—a portrait of globalizedcapitalism in crisis through the lens of Norwegianbased transnational corporation Hydro—and the analysis in Loftsdóttir 2010 ofthe aftermath of the financial collapse in Iceland as articulated through discourses of national memory and identity.



Hohnen, Pernille. 2007. Having the wrong kind of money: A qualitative analysis of new forms of financial, social and moralexclusion in consumerist Scandinavia. Sociological Review 55.4: 748–767.

A qualitative study of consumption patterns among lowincome households in Denmark and Sweden that analyzes connectionsbetween social exclusion and new forms of money and finance in Scandinavia.

Larsen, Lotta Björklund. 2013. Buy or barter? Illegal yet licit purchases of work in contemporary Sweden. Focaal 66:75–87.

An ethnographic examination of the Swedish cash labor market that places underthetable employment in the context ofcontemporary economic life and social relations in Sweden more generally.

Löfgren, Orvar. 1996. Konsumtion som vardaglig praktik och ideologiskt slagfält. Socialvetenskaplig Tidskrift 1–2:116–127.

This article describes a larger research project examining consumption in Sweden, and offers a theory of consumption as alearned, socially transmitted behavior that is both an everyday practice and a locus of ideological transmission. In Swedish.

Loftsdóttir, Kristín. 2010. The loss of innocence: The Icelandic financial crisis and colonial past. Anthropology Today26.6: 9–13.

Describes the rise of romanticized interpretations of the banking collapse and contemporary Icelandic identity, revealing how theseinterpretations draw on nationalist representations of the past and particular ways of remembering colonial histories in the region.

Nyqvist, Anette. 2011. Sweden’s national pension system as a political technology. In Policy worlds: Anthropology andthe analysis of contemporary power. Edited by Cris N. Shore, Susan Wright, and Davide Pero. New York: Berghahn.

Gives an overview of how Sweden’s farreaching pension reforms of the 1990s worked to relocate agency and responsibility fromthe state to the citizen, drawing on qualitative research with policymakers and experts involved in the transformation of the pensionsystem.

Peebles, Gustav. 2011. The euro and its rivals: Currency and the construction of a transnational city. Bloomington:Indiana Univ. Press.

Analyzes the construction of the DanishSwedish Øresund region in relation to contemporaneous debates in Denmark and Swedenabout monetary policy, providing an ethnography of competing visions of the future and transnationalism.

Røyrvik, Emil A. 2011. The allure of capitalism: An ethnography of management and the global economy in crisis. NewYork: Berghahn.

An indepth organizational ethnography of Hydro, a Norwegianbased transnational corporation, which analyzes the company’sinternational investment practices in order to shed light on the daytoday workings of globalized capitalism.

Nature, Landscape, and Environment



Ideas about nature and landscape have been central in the construction of individual and national identities throughout the Nordicregion. In this area, Hastrup 1990 and Frykman and Löfgren 1987, cited under Ethnographies of Everyday Life, were influentialworks tracking the historical production of linked concepts of nature and nation in Iceland (Hastrup) and Sweden (Frykman andLöfgren). Olwig 2003 and Jones and Olwig 2008 offer helpful overviews of the multivalent notion of the “Nordic landscape,”productively examining how various ways of imagining Scandinavia—as a place and as a region—have intersected with culturaland political projects over the years. Mels 2002, Vacher 2011, and Ween and Abram 2012 approach abstract questions of space,place, and nation through groundlevel, historically informed analyses of particular geographicalnational phenomena with theauthors’ respective studies of Swedish national parks, Danish seaside cottages, and Norwegian trekking practices. Anthropologicalscholarship on the creation and uses of Nordic nature has also revealed how these cultural logics have informed environmentalmovements, as in Isenhour 2011—an insightful work on the moral and social underpinnings of the pursuit of sustainable living inSweden.

Hastrup, Kirsten. 1990. Nature and policy in Iceland, 1400–1800: An anthropological analysis of history and mentality.Oxford: Clarendon.

A historical anthropological survey of relations between people and the environment in Iceland. An influential work for laterscholarship on nature, culture, and landscape in the Nordic region.

Hjort, Anders, ed. 1983. Svenska livsstilar: Om naturen som resurs och symbol. Stockholm: Liber.

An edited volume describing some of the ways that nature is used as a cultural and symbolic resource in Sweden. In Swedish.

Isenhour, Cindy. 2011. How the grass became greener in the city: On urban imaginings and practices of sustainable livingin Sweden. City & Society 23.2: 117–134.

Compares perspectives of urban and rural Swedes on issues of nature, sustainable living, ecology, and environmentalism, andargues that a concern for equality and social justice animates many Swedes’ decisions to pursue sustainable lifestyles.

Jones, Michael, and Kenneth Olwig, eds. 2008. Nordic landscapes: Region and belonging on the northern edge of Europe.Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

A comprehensive edited collection discussing the Nordic landscape as place, region, concept, and identity. Divided into sectionscovering each of the Nordic countries, as well as a section on the North Atlantic and one on the Nordic region as a whole.

Mels, Tom. 2002. Nature, home, and scenery: The official spatialities of Swedish national parks. Environment andPlanning D 20.2: 135–154.

Analyzes contemporary and historic discourses about national parks in Sweden as indicative of particularly Swedish ideologies ofnation, home, nature, and landscape.

Olwig, Kenneth R. 2003. In search of the Nordic landscape: A personal view. In Voices from the North: New trends inNordic human geography. Edited by Jan Ohman and Kirsten Simonsen, 211–232. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Traces the historical emergence of a Nordic approach to landscape and place as well as surveys major works in Nordic humangeography dealing with the relationship between humans and nature in Scandinavia.



Vacher, Mark. 2011. Consuming leisure time: Landscapes of infinite horizons. Social Analysis 55.2: 45–61.

This article examines the transformation of the Danish seaside from a location of small fishing villages to a holiday destination forthe middle class, drawing on ethnographic research and an analysis of films to map changing perceptions of seaside landscapesand experiences.

Ween, Gro, and Simone Abram. 2012. The Norwegian trekking association: Trekking as constituting the nation.Landscape Research 37.2: 155–171.

Looks at how the Norwegian Trekking Association has produced a way of understanding Norwegian nature through the activity oftrekking (hiking or crosscountry skiing) and explains how these forms of moving through the natural world connect individuals withthe nation, nature, and environmentalism.

LAST MODIFIED: 06/30/2014

DOI: 10.1093/OBO/97801997665670044

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Anthropology of Scandinavia