Everyday Life Philosophers, Modernity, Morality, and Autobiography in Norway
Gullestad, Marianne:There is an increasing popular interest in reading and writing autobiographies. Social anthropologist Marianne Gullestad argues that there is no fundamental gap between the narrative reflections of ordinary people, "everyday-life philosophers", and the reflections of the literary critic or social scientist. Writing one's autobiography is a way of constructing images of self and society through the creative and reflexive narrative construction of the experiences of a life.
Contemporary Norway is characterized by new ways of accepting and even celebrating cultural variety, as well as by an intensified emphasis on traditionalism, nationalism, and equality conceived as sameness. At the same time as the author presents a diagnosis of value changes in present-day Norway, she also convincingly argues that autobiography is increasingly becoming a global practice for the construction of cultural difference.
The everyday-life philosophers of this book - Einar, the "closet Sami" from northern Norway; Kari, the working-class housewife from Oslo; Áivind, the ageing businessman from the middle-sized city of Trondheim; and Cecilia, the young student from the small city - are all present through the innovative analyses of their autobiographies.
About the author: Marianne Gullestad is Norway's leading social anthropologist on Norwegian society. Her many publications in English, including the books Kitchen-Table Society (1984) (which was chosen "one of the favorite books of the last 25 years" by the journal Contemporary Sociology in 1996), The Art of Social Relations (1992) and Imagined Childhoods (1996). At present she is a senior researcher at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo.
Publisher: Scandinavian University Press 1996
ISBN: 82-00-22605-0
309 pages, hardback
Published in English
