Materializing Kinship: Cycles of life at the Norwegian hytte

Nearly half of all Norwegians have access to at least one cabin or holiday home (Norwegian: hytte) which are often inherited through the family. The aim of this project is to understand more about the significance of kinship in Norway today, and to gain insight into the relation between materiality, belonging and family relations. Hytte can gather family and kin, but they can also divide through conflicts over investment or maintenance, or in negotiations about the relative importance placed upon agnatic ties between descendants versus the importance of the relation between the couple in the nuclear family unit. In this project we ask how and why hytte matter so much for Norwegian families and for kinship relations? What can a study of the hytte tell us about contemporary kinship? To answer these questions we have studied a wide variety of hytte in different relations of ownership. Our focus is on the cabins and their biographies. Since neither hytte nor people are immortal, and because the hytte often lives longer than their owners, we can follow the history of the hytte through successive family relations and over time. We have visited hytte in different parts of Norway, including cabins that are in stable ownership and those whose future is uncertain. We have seen how the history of the hytte and its materials are woven together with the biography of family and kin, and we have seen how the perception of what a hytte is varies. We have used interviews, participant observation at the hytte as well as guestbooks and legal protocols. Our study showed that a hytte can give rise to strong and often ambivalent emotions, not only joy but also disappointment and loss. For some, this is because the hytte and the landscape that surrounds it has been an important arena for socialization in early childhood. We propose the term ?kinning? to denote the processes through which children and youth are incorporated into a kinship collective. We see how kinning is performed at the cabin, not only in relation to children, but also vis-a-vis sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, new partners and stepchildren. When several siblings are kinned in relation to the same hytte, while they each have more than one child, it may give rise to a classic inheritance dilemma, especially if the hytte is perceived as too small to accommodate everyone. In these situations, letting go of the hytte (transferring ownership to one of the siblings only) may involve a loss not only of the hytte as such, but also a sense of family belonging. There is considerable variation in the ways in which hytte are inherited and shared. Many families apply principles that do not reflect legal regulations, but rather shared family norms about fairness. Equality is a strong value, but treating children equally cannot always be realized in practice. Our material shows that some hytte are shared amongst several owners, and that many models for solving conflicts of interest are applied, making shared ownership a robust and sustainable alternative to private ownership. The project is a collaboration between the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Folk Museum. The project is disseminated to a broad audience in a popular book in Norwegian with photo illustrations (Hytta- fire vegger rundt en drøm, Kagge 2019). The project also includes a photo exhibition at the Norwegian Folk (2019), at Maihaugen, Lillehammer (2020) and at Valdres Museum (2022).

Prosjektet har blitt bredt formidlet og bidratt til offentlig debatt om et forholdsvis privat tema. Vi har vist at både hytter og familier er dynamiske, og at arvekonflikter ikke kan forebygges gjennom individuelt eierskap. En virkning av prosjektet er dermed at hytteeiere har fått større bevissthet om ulike modeller for samarbeid og sameie, noe som er viktig i en tid da økt hyttebygging setter både fjell- og kystlandskap under press. Selv om slike virkninger er vanskelig å måle, har prosjektet hatt en dagsordenfunksjon, og bidratt til at også andre perspektiver enn de rent juridiske får forme debatten. I tillegg har vi satt søkelyset på hytta som beredskap i krisetider. I forhold til teoretisk utvikling innen faget. har prosjektet vist at slektskap stadig er viktig i antatt moderne samfunn som det norske, og at det er noe som gjøres snarere enn noe som bare er. Videre har vi sett hvordan arv ikke er noe som skjer kun ved dødsfall, men er en langvarig prosess.

This is an original basic research project with an unconventional approach to the anthropological study of kinship and family, focusing on the Norwegian country cabin (hytte) as a site of convergence of contradicting logics and obligations in relation to kinship and the family. The project brings socio-material cycles of Norwegian domestic life at the cabin into conversation with current theoretical debates on European kinship and family, households, material studies and performativity. Particular emphasis is placed on property, inheritance and ownership, as they are constituted legally and morally. By examining the role of property in constituting and reproducing kinship relations, the project adds a significant dimension to the understanding of kinship and family and thus to our understanding of contemporary Norwegian society. The project starts from the theoretical premise that Norway might be described as a hytte society, based on the enduring significance of hytte-ownership, its passage between kin, and the role of the hytte in constituting family life. The project asks what this might tell us about tensions and dilemmas in relation to practices of kinning, conflicting dynamics of kin and family, as well as sense of place and national belonging. An ethnographic approach to the empirical research will include field studies in diverse geographic sites and with a range of families of different socio-economic class and stages of life. The project is designed as international collaborative anthropological research, building on the two PI's long-standing experience of research on nature practices, tourism and domestication in Norway. It facilitates the recruitment of young anthropologists through a three-year doctoral position, and is a co-operation between UiO (Department of Social Anthropology, SAI) and the Norwegian Folk Museum.