The Art of Social Relations: Essays on Culture, Social Action and Everyday Life in Modern Norway. Marianne Gullestad. Scandinavian Library, Vol. 12. Stephen R. Graubard and Oyvind Osterud, eds. Oslo and New York: Scandinavian University Press, 1992. xi + 251 pp.in
American Ethnologist
This is a collection of ten essays published from 1988 to 1991. They form a rather well-integrated whole that extends earlier work by Gullestad on everyday life in Norway by delving in more details on matters that had been left implicit: home decoration, equality and marital love, children's care of children, religion--civil and otherwise--, individualism and other major symbols like "peace and quiet," "nature," etc. Some of the essays are more directly ethnographic focusing on the same working class population Gullestad worked on. Some directly address "Norway" as a whole on the model of Schneider's work on "America." This volume, along with the earlier one, constitutes a significant contribution to what is developing into a form of what Eggan once called "controlled comparison" though the focus her is more on symbolic than social structures: Gullestad is working on the comparison of cultures within the "individualistic" universe framed by Dumontian analyses of France, Germany, the United States, and perhaps even Great Britain--depending on how one reads the work of the Manchester school on popular cultures.
The latter work, it is well known, was not developed in direct relation to the American traditions of cultural (symbolic) analysis that are the most direct antecedents of Gullestad's work. She is however one of those who are bringing the two traditions together at the level where it promises to do the most good, that is at the ethnographic level. Specifically, Gullestad emphasizes her interest in "every day life" as the ultimate locus of anthropological practice, both methodologically and theoretically. The specific concern with it is relatively recent but the underlying principle is an old one related to what some have called local knowledge, practice, agency, dynamic theory, etc. Still, it broadens again the principle that the mundane is the source and validation for the most general statements about social structuration or cultural patterning. Gullestad demonstrates how it can indeed expand and ground the kind of broad stroke cultural analyses that left critics at a loss as to the corpus on which they were based.
The latter is, partially, a methodological issue about anthropologizing as close to home as Gullestad is, given that she was born, raised, and educated in Norway, and that she pursues her career there. In the short autobiography that she includes in a bow to recent critiques, she does not mention any other "foreign" experiences than an extended stay at the University of Chicago as a research associate. One chapter addresses these issues and they are cross- referenced repeatedly. In fact the papers read as if addressed to a general Euro-American professional audience. There is no sense of provincialism in their framework. The analyses of Norwegian issues are conducted for what they can tell us about variation within Euro-America, and this by itself makes the work directly useful. There is nothing particularly "Norwegian" about being concerned theoretically with home decoration or children taking care of children--perhaps the best papers in the collection. There is something universally useful about being reminded of the need to pay attention to such matters. Whether a "non-native" would have been as concerned with "peace and quiet" as she is may depend more on one's theoretical framework than on one's passport. A lot of ink has flowed around these issues, and Gullestad contributions to the methodological discussion may not advance us much.
What does move us forward is the ethnography. It is a significant contribution to the anthropology of Europe certainly, but also, I think, to anthropology in general.