Movement and Nature: Holiday practices and Norwegian
‘Hytter’.
Simone Abram
Introduction
In this paper I introduce a range of approaches to understanding the significance of
holiday property in Norway. So far, there has been little effort to draw together
studies of holiday homes, domesticity, concepts of nature and nationalism, and my
intention is to begin to show how these could be approached through the study of
particular kinds of holiday practices. Studies of identity and ethnicity in tourism have
tended to be channelled through a prism opposing tradition and modernity,
continuity and change, or to see tourism as a contest between commercial
developers and locals or environmentalists. On the other hand, domesticity has
tended to be seen through everyday, gendered primary homes, and not extended
into the creation of alternative domestic arena such as holiday places. Studies of
holiday places, on the other hand, have focused more on the construction of public
places and sites, on memorialisation or shrines, and on commercial spaces. More
focused studies on domestic spaces have addressed migrant homes, or the
construction of national tropes in cross-national second homes. Little attention has
been paid to the combinations of concepts, practices and ideologies associated with
local holiday homes, and this is perhaps because they rarely present a recognisable
trope at the national scale1.
Norwegian hytter2 offer a paradoxical example of a recognisable domestic sphere
associated with outdoor life, marked by very dominant tropes of interior and exterior
architecture and furnishing, and strongly associated with types of activity and
secular ritual practices. The Norwegian hytte offers an exemplar because of its
central importance to ideas about Norwegian normality, and the changing forms and
uses over the last century. Hytter are important not only because so many people
own or use them, but because they use them in strongly ordered ways. In some
parts of the country, whole neighbourhoods seem to migrate to hytter that may be
within spitting distance of home (Kristenson 2007). In other areas, large areas of
high mountain land are being and have been developed to attract buyers into the
dream of the holiday good life. The property market for these kinds of homes in
fashionable areas has mirrored the escalating urban market with its intensifying
urbanisation and an escalation and increasing differentiation in prices. In some
cases it appears that younger couples, in particular, are buying hytter as security
when they cannot afford to buy property in the intense housing markets of Oslo. It
also appears that the hytter market is on a cusp of change where a new generation
of hytter are shifting out of traditional aesthetic and moralised patterns, and this
moment of change highlights the very strong elements that have defined hytter until
now.
Once at the hytte, activities undertaken are entwined with notions of nature and
wilderness, at once taken for granted and underlying activities engaged in. This
1
An exception may be the Russian dacha which is more thoroughly treated in
literature and art, yet perhaps for obvious reasons there has been little detailed
ethnographic material published.
2 Singuler: hytte; plural: hytter; definite: hytta.
1
paper asks if there is a way of being in nature that is characteristically Norwegian,
or, inversely, how both the nation and nature are performed through movement of
bodies over/through land and landscape. Norwegian bodies are sometimes made
national by being clothed in national costume (Eriksen, 2004), this is not a
phenomenon associated with hytter. Paradoxically, it is while being ‘natural’ at the
hytter that a different kind of national belonging is expressed. This paper thus
argues that Norwegian holiday homes are deeply implicated in the construction of
nation, and questions how concepts of nature contribute to national discourse.
Facts about Hytter
One cannot be in Norway for very long without beginning to appreciate the
significance of holiday homes. Discussion about ‘hytter’ appears frequently in the
news media, there are several magazine dedicated to the subject, and they are
often discussed in everyday conversation. They form a regular subject in local
government debates on planning, and occupy a significant share of property
markets and specialist retailing. There are regular national retailing exhibitions and
regular reports on various aspects of hytter from the national statistics office.
According to Statistics Norway (the Norwegian Statistics Office), there are over four
hundred thousand holiday dwellings in Norway3. They also report that there are
some one and a half million buildings which are for housing, for a population of
around 4.5 million. Very roughly calculated, this suggests that around a third of all
Norwegian households have direct access to a holiday dwelling. Flognfeldt goes as
far as to claim that every other family in Norway has access to some kind of second
home (2004), and Vittersø notes that both the size, value and number of hytter has
increased dramatically in the last decade (2007). Despite its vagueness, the statistic
does indicate the significance of holiday dwelling across Norway, especially when it
becomes clear that many households share access to hytter if not ownership. There
are holiday homes in much of the country, with a significant concentration around
the southern coast, and in the central southern mountains, as well as around
Trondheim (see fig.1 Density of holiday homes by district). It can be difficult to
distinguish what are called leisure-homes from permanent homes, and as Arnesen
and Overvåg suggest, increasing mobility and diversity of lifestyles complicates the
definition of main and secondary residence (2006). Hytter is a fuzzy category, one
which most Norwegians understand, even if the borders with other kinds of building
may at times be unclear.
Although my own research on Hytter is at an early stage, fieldwork in Norway in
2000 as a guest researcher of the Social Anthropology Institute of the University of
3
http://www.ssb.no/emner/10/09/bygningsmasse/
Det er registrert 3 758 532 bygninger i Norge per januar 2007. Av dette er 1 425 209
boligbygninger
1/2.64 = 37.92%
Det er registrert 383 112 hytterr og sommerhus i Norge per januar 2007. Fra og med 2007
har Statistisk sentralbyrå i tillegg valgt å inkludere tall over helårsboliger og våningshus som
benyttes som fritidsbolig, i fylkestabellen over fritidsbygninger. Totalt er det registrert 27 927
slike bygninger. Til sammen gir dette 411 039 bygninger til fritidsformål i Norge per januar
2007.
2
Oslo, and many repeated visits in the last ten years has contributed to my general
knowledge of the field. I have been fortunate to have been invited on many visits to
at least six different hytter at different times of year, and have participated in many
of the activities associated with hytte-life. I have also participated in a research
project entitled ‘Performing Nature at Worlds Ends’ which explores the
conceptualisation of nature and wilderness, comparing Norway and Australia, led by
anthropologist Marianne Lien at the University of Oslo. Much of the material in this
paper is based on materials gained from these experiences.
Fig.1 Density of holiday homes by district.
Hytter - types and trends
There is no direct English translation of the Scandinavian term hytte. There are
overlaps with holiday home, holiday cottage, mountain cabin, etc, but none conveys
the density of meaning and practices attached to hytter. Generally speaking,
categorisations of hytter starts with two main types, the mountain hytte and the
coastal hytte. Although apparently a simple geographic category, this division also
defines the activities pursued as well as the type of dwelling. Coastal hytter,
primarily for summer use, are often associated with sailing, often located in villages,
3
and are generally more urbane than mountain hytter. Mountain hytter, on the other
hand, are strongly associated with national discourses of self-sufficiency,
resourcefulness, simplicity and escape from the urban everyday, and it is these
types of hytter which form the focus of this paper.
Talking about hytter is a complicated business, as even mountain hytter form a very
heterogeneous category. Hytter styles and uses are varied and changing, yet strong
trends are evident, both in the styles of built structures and in the discourses that
surround them. Hytter also form a subject on which many Norwegians assume an
authority, sometimes a very moralistic authority about appropriate and inappropriate
forms and practices, closely tied to the imagination of National consciousness. In
this narrative, mountain hytter became popular post WWII, and particularly in the
1960s, as simple wooden cabins in the high mountains, where families would go in
the winter to ski and in the summer to walk and enjoy the fruits of the mountains,
gathering bilberries and cloudberries and fishing for wild trout in the mountain lakes,
at least partly as a form of food supplementation (‘matauk’) during the lean post-war
years. The simple wooden cabins were often inaccessible, and cars had to be left at
some distance, with all food and provisions being carried to the hytter and any
rubbish carried down again later. A typical 1960s hytte has no connection to any
mains, has a well or water pump, a store for firewood, a simple kitchen, perhaps
with a gas-canister oven, simple wooden furniture, and basic equipment. Such a
hytte has no bathroom, but a composting toilet in a separate wooden shack outside.
These kinds of hytter very rarely have fences or other boundaries. While the law
provides a freedom to roam, it protects private areas such as gardens and
farmyards, and specifies that picnicking and setting up tents must not come within
150 yards of occupied housing. Land around a hytte is thus semi-private, but
boundaries are marked by distance, not by fences, raising interesting questions
about appropriation of space and symbolic boundaries.
The interiors of these hytter can be astonishingly similar. As the market in hytter
escalates, many hytter are sold via internet estate agencies, and hence many
hundreds of images of hytte-interiors are available online. A collection of such
images indicates the strong architectural and decorative norms found among hytter,
norms which, although not inescapable, can be summarised into a characteristic
appearance. A charming rusticity marks the décor, with a preponderance of wooden
panelling, always a long pine table with simple chairs, a wood-fired stove or
fireplace, often a woven rug hanging on the wall, preferably made by a female
member of the household, oil lamps or simple gas lamps, plenty of candles and
simple wooden furniture. Bedrooms are simple small rooms and are most often
equipped with bunk-beds, ideally home-made by a male member of the household
who may, indeed, have built the cabin. Sarah Pink (2004) notes the changing
gender roles related to housework, yet research on housework is almost exclusively
related to the home. Research on second-homes, in contrast, tends to ignore
questions of servicing or maintenance, focusing on broader socio-economic
characteristics and impacts of home-owners, for example (e.g. Hall and Müller
2004). It is a standard Norwegian seasonal joke that summer is the male hytterenovation season, where urban manfolk revive their joinery skills and get to work
on additions and refinements to the family holiday residence. Devising and building
ingenious solutions to technical problems can be an area where men, in particular,
may be expected to excel, and many hytter have complex Heath-Robinson style
devices for pumping water, solar-charging batteries or monitoring gas-supplies,
which require intimate familiarity with the building. Often complex routines are in
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place to ensure that the hytte is maintained in good condition, especially in harsh
winter conditions when the hytter is unoccupied over sometimes longer periods.
Despite the work associated with living in rustic conditions, hytter previously defined
a radical alterity from everyday working life. Hytter life was, and still may be,
associated with outdoor activities, engagement with wilderness defined in contrast
with urban green spaces, and distance in both time and space from everyday life. In
post-war rustic hytter, there were no telephones, and contact with everyday life
might only occur if neighbours had neighbouring hytter. During prolonged holiday
periods at the hytte, the pace of life altered from the strict everyday punctuality that
marks Norwegian urban life, and activities are characterised by both pleasure,
movement, and basic needs of food and warmth. Work carried out at the hytte can
still be categorised as leisure.
A recent postal survey of 1000 people’s hytter activities concluded that the most
significant activity carried out at a hytte was ‘friluftsliv’ (Kaltenborn et al 2005).
Friluftsliv is another central Norwegian concept which I will gloss here as ‘outdoor
recreation’ and indicates movement: hiking, skiing, and related activities of
gathering, hunting and fishing (see below). The next most important activities were
recreation and relaxation, experiencing change from the everyday and contact with
nature. Respondents also reported predominantly feeling happy, satisfied, and
inspired while at their hytter despite reporting increased challenge, drama and
difficulties in comparison with being at work.
This kind of cabin performs an archetypal role in debates about hytter in Norway. It
is the hytter of the austere beginnings of wealth and urbanisation in post-war
Norway, a symbol of lack of pretension and solidarity, of the essential hostility to
ostentation that often characterised Norwegianness in this era. For many of my
generation and older, this is how a real hytte should be. Yet it also carries an
ambivalence and a lingering need for self-justification for those who choose to equip
their hytter with modern convenience, or have a hytte linked to the mains. For
today’s younger generation, these lingering moral qualms appear to be faded, and
an explosion of hytte-building in popular holiday areas includes – to the horror of an
certain older generation – fully equipped apartments which would be difficult to
distinguish from urban dwellings. Many modern hytte-districts are having wifi
installed, and thus mark a continuity with everyday and working life, rather than a
radical break from it. Work life, one might argue, is thus invading leisure, and the
archetypal away-from-it-all hytte of earlier years is being overtaken by properties
that can more accurately be described as second homes.
Already in 2000, arguments were raging over the energy required to sustain luxury
celebrity hytter with heated swimming pools whose electricity demands forced local
authorities to install new power stations. Pop star Kurt Nilsen has reputedly
commissioned a giant guitar-shaped hytter in Hardanger not far from Bergen (bt.no
21-5-07), and the news media regularly report shockingly high prices for particularly
luxurious or well-placed hytter. Plots on the islands in the Oslo fjord, for example,
may fetch into the millions of pounds, and even tiny shacks on the nearer islands
have sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds.
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Friluftsliv
Despite these changes, hytter are still strongly associated with Friluftsliv. The
concept of ‘Friluftsliv’ has a significant history in the development of the Norwegian
nation-state. The early national hero, Fridtjof Nansen was a key promoter of outdoor
recreation and pioneer in Norwegian polar expeditions, being the first to ski across
Greenland and inspiration to Amundsen, indeed lending him his ice-hardy ship Fram
for Amundsen’s later renowned polar expeditions. Nansen himself preferred outdoor
movement as solitary reflection, a release from what he called ‘unnatural’ urban life
(1994:7). For him, ‘frliluftsliv’ meant,
‘to be able to get away from the crowd, away from the perpetual race, the
confusing clamour in which we conduct our lives to far too great an extent –
to get out into nature, into the open’ (Ibid.).
Even cabins, for him, were something of an anathema, and skiing should be done
strictly for solitary pleasure rather than sporting success. Already in 1921, Nansen
had to admit that sporting pastimes were changing, and although there were more
people skiing generally, Nansen disapproved of the general gregariousness
associated with sporting pastimes, emphasising instead the need for spiritual as well
as bodily health. For Nansen, urban life was unnatural and it was important for
people to get away from it (Ibid.).
By 1957 the Norwegian government had issued an Outdoor Recreation Act
(friluftslivsloven), which formalised the basis of outdoor recreation for future
discussion. Key to the act are the right to roam over open land, alongside a
responsibility not to damage the environment or private property. The law’s
paragraph of intention states in the charmingly straight forward language of
Norwegian legal documents, that:
‘The purpose of the Act is to protect the natural basis for outdoor recreation
and to safeguard the public right of access and passage through the
countryside and the rights to spend time there, etc. , so that opportunities for
outdoor recreation as a leisure activity that is healthy, environmentally sound
and gives a sense of well-being are maintained and promoted.’
(Ministry of the Environment 1999)
The law also explicitly considers the right of organisations to provide way-marking,
implicitly recognising the activities of DNT (the Norwegian Trekking Association) and
the concerns of farmers to protect crops and pastures. We should note, though, that
there is no reference to the practices of Sami herders or settlements, an issue
discussed in more detail by Ween (?).
A definition of Friluftsliv was further refined in the governmental circular on Friluftsliv
(St.Meld. nr. 40 1986-87 ‘Om Friluftsliv’) as ‘Sojourn or physical activity outdoors in
leisure-time with a view to change of environment and experience of nature’ (my
translation). The link to nature was here very explicit and reinforces the idea of
nature as a healer of souls and of physical activity as a healer of bodies. The
department of environment’s circular on Friluftsliv of 2000-2001 (St.meld. nr 39,
2000-2001 ‘Friluftsliv, ein veg til høgare livskvalitet’) was indeed prefaced by a
citation from Kierkegaard, as follows:
Don’t lose your desire to walk, whatever happens. I walk to daily well-being
every day and walk from all illness; I walk to my best thoughts, and I know of
6
no thought so terrible that one cannot walk from it. If only you can keep
walking, then all is well. (my translation)
Although the translation loses the pun involved in the Norwegian/Danish word for
walking (to go), it nevertheless illustrates the centrality of walking as the physical
activity of preference in friluftsliv. Walking is thus seen as the most natural
movement, an activity closely tied to well-being defined in the document as quality
of life, which in winter is easily substituted by cross-country skiing (known literally as
ski-walking).
That this definition of friluftsliv is closely tied to the certain forms of nationalism is
evident in the comments made by participants to a national summit organised by
the Ministry of the Environment on friluftsliv held in Bergen in 1995 (DN-notat 199511). Although the Environment Minister avoids explicitly discussing the nation, the
representative of the Nature Conservation Directorate is explicit that Norwegian
outdoor recreation is special, not least because it is anchored in legislation, as well
as its popularity, and sets the agenda for a discussion about Norwegian outdoor
recreation in particular. Interestingly, the report of the conference also included a
foreword by a Danish author, in the form of a poem by Piet Hein on Danish love of
Norway, as if to mark the nation-ness of Norway through the recognition of the postcolonial relationship between the two states.
The summit, entitled ‘Friluftsliv for all’ gathered authorities, agencies and
organisations with interests in friluftsliv, with the stated intention:
‘to create an environment for contact and cooperation between the different
participants, to forward the exchange of experience and knowledge, and thus
give some inspiration and impulses to those working within the field’ (Ibid. 2).
Environment minister at the time, Thorbjørn Berntsen stated that recent studies
showed friluftsliv to be dominated by the more restrained activities of going for a
walk, sunbathing and hiking in the woods. These more restrained activities persist
despite the overwhelming dominance of images of extreme sports, particularly in
advertising to young people (Pedersen 2001). Pedersen argues that friluftsliv is
remarkably persistent, reproduced through family socialisation, and reinforced
through the network of non-formal colleges (‘folkhøyskoler’) which increasingly
specialise in friluftsliv. Vorkinn indicates that although time-series data on friluftsliv in
Norway are severely restricted, they do show key changes, such as what she calls a
‘forest’ of alpine skiing facilities and the rise of specialist forms, such as Telemark
skiing and snowboarding. From 1977 to 1997, data show the number of people
going walking in the mountains increased from 25% to 57%, but berry-picking has
steadily declined (Vorkinn 2001). Despite changes in activities, with increased
cycling, jogging, and downhill skiing and decreased berry-picking and hunting,
though, going walking and cross-country skiing remain central to both the idea and
the practice of Norwegian life.
Hytter and motion
What this indicates is a significant connection between hytter and movement. My
own experiences of hytter involve strenuous hiking and cross-country skiing.
Norwegians joke about stereotypes of Norwegian children being born with skis on,
but children are typically first encouraged to put on skis at the age of 3 or 4. Before
that age, children are sometimes carried in sledges which their parents attach to
waist-harnesses and pull along behind them. Particularly among what might be
7
called the comfortable classes of the Oslo region, skiing is a favoured activity also
practiced in the evenings and weekends in the forest areas around the city, where
paths through the woods are lit by overhead lamps to allow for touring during the
dark mornings and evenings. There is significant regional variation. Towards the
West coast, where the weather is often milder, and definitions of Norwegianness
more associated with fishing than farming, skiing is notably less popular. One form
of resistance to Norwegian nationalism is expressed in the refusal to ski, or the
denial that one is able to ski, but that the resistance takes this form indicates how
central skiing is to defining the nation.
While discourses about skiing are important, skiing itself is a form of embodied
knowledge, and discourse analysis is not a sufficient approach to appreciate this. As
children learn to ski, they internalise a form of movement which, for adult foreigners,
can be extremely challenging. A common trope of foreigner-discourse is the
experience of being humiliated by falling down more than native small children.
However, despite the technical difficulties of mastering cross-country skis, skiing is a
pragmatic way of touring outdoors in winter, when walking is not possible. Of
course, it is much more than that, but it is movement through nature which defines
skiing as much as mountain-walking. The nature through which one moves is
conceptualised in Norwegian as cultural landscape which recognises both the
landscapes that result from human activities such as agriculture and forestry, but
also the landscapes which have cultural significance in folk-memory and art.
In 2006 I conducted a very brief experiment, exploring with Marianne Lien the joke
about Eskimos having numerous words for snow. Very quickly, we listed Norwegian
words for 15 types of snow, half of which described the quality of travel on skis
according to the character of the snow. More interestingly, perhaps, we also
discovered that there is knowledge about snow which has no corresponding
vocabulary. The sound that the skier’s sticks make as they are levered in and out of
the snow gives an indication of the changing temperature of the snow and the
effects this will have on the passage of the skis, but these sounds are not named.
Were one to take an ear-led approach to ethnography (see Rice, 2007), the sounds
of snow would feature large in winter hytter life, and the significance of communal
singing would emerge as an important form of sociality. In comparison, we found
only a very tiny vocabulary relating to taxonomies of flora and fauna. Marianne Lien
has highlighted this focus in contrast with an overwhelming emphasis on speciesidentification in Tasmania (2007), where nature is conceptualised through
categorisation of species into native versus alien. With the exception of specialists,
few of the Norwegians I have been walking with have been able to name more than
a handful of species of wildflower, yet I have witnessed many lengthy discussions
about places where different types of edible berry are found. Years after the event,
friends reminisce about surprise discoveries of cloudberries, for example, although
as Lien indicates, cloudberry collecting in some parts of Norway relies on secret
knowledge and picking rights, and berries may be implicated in complex exchange
rituals and relations (Lien 2006). Different kinds of berries entail different relations of
exchange, with very common bilberries, for example, generally implicated in less
complex relations than cloudberries. The value of berries is also reinforced by
Scandinavian scientific research on dietary and medical benefits of berries. What
berry-collecting itself requires is walking, and sometimes very long walks may be
involved in seeking out the most plentiful crops and the most rare berries. Berrypicking is thus a practice of movement, both in finding berries and in picking them.
As with most of the outdoor practices associated with hytter life, berry-picking has its
8
associated equipment, preparation and follow-up, not just in eating the berries
picked, but in preparing and preserving them for later use.
Hytter may also be the base for hunting expeditions, to shoot grouse, elk, hares or
other game. Hunting is a much more expert practice than berry collecting and is
dominated by men. Hunting with dogs is mostly carried out in formal and informal
clubs and requires special licences, and there are various different forms of hunting
in relation to different game. Some forms of hunting were popularised by British
visitors in the 19th century, such as hare-coursing which, Ramslien suggests,
underwent a shift in class identification, so that hare coursing clubs are now more
working-class associations, who paradoxically define their activities in relation to
knowledge of landscape and nature, rather than in relation to food-supplementing
(2006). Ramslein reports that, perhaps not surprisingly, hare hunters spend more
time sitting round the campfire, drinking coffee and talking about hunting than
actually shooting at animals, in contrast to elk hunters who are more concerned with
modes of distribution of meat. Fishing, too, is a regulated activity associated with
hytter-life, and also often involves hikes to fishing lakes and long periods of time
spent in the mountains observing natural phenomena and conditions. Fishing and
hunting both represent the social construction of natural activities, not merely
through discursive reproduction of understandings about the world, but in the setting
out of game to be caught later, and in the licensing and regulation of the catch or
haul. Both are also constructed around notions of the natural world which require
particular forms of human input and rely on strong moral codes tied to refined
techniques.
One significant aspect of motion which is rarely discussed explicitly in research or
literature on hytter practices is the traffic which takes people to their hytter. Oslo
drivers know that traffic towards Hemsedal is busy on a Friday, especially at the
start and end of the holidays, just as Kristiansand-dwellers are aware of holiday
traffic to Setesdal. As hytter become more habitable and more everyday in their
form, they become more accessible, and as the number built per year continues to
increase (to around 20-30,000) traffic levels increase. Concerns about
environmental issues associated with hytter have focused on energy use in
buildings themselves, evidenced by the Environment Minister’s statement on
environmental issues and national policy on hytter (Bjørnøy, 2006). The speech
exclusively concerns quality and density of building in sensitive sites, and has no
comment on transport issues that may be associated with them.
[hunting. Dogs. DNT and waymarking. Sensitivity to climate and weather. Commonsense in relation to landscapes. Landscape knowledge and familiarity.]
If it is possible to argue that movement through nature is part of the embodiment of
the discourse of the nation, then how can changing practices be accounted for? If it
is becoming less popular to ski cross-country in favour of snow-boarding, which is a
more internationally popular youth-focused sport, and if berries around Oslo are left
on the bushes as fewer people gather them, what is left of the narratives of the
nature-near Norwegian nation founded in the national-romantic era on an ethos of
self-sufficiency and environmental considerateness? Do changing outdoor naturepractices suggest a weakening of the nation, or merely a changing form of
embodiment? Nation is not only based on symbolic objects and activities, but is
explicitly identified with kinship, and Gullestad has argued that Norwegian nationbuilding is often explicitly recounted through idioms of descent and affinity (2006).
9
Hence, hasty assertions about the weakening of the idea of the nation should not be
made solely on the basis of changing hytter practices.
Ownership and kinship
A key element of the reproduction of friluftsliv, as noted by Pederson, is the
connection with family. The hytter is primarily a family place, where family must be
understood as a loose definition. There are hytter owned by companies which are
rented out to employees, and there are categories of hytter for public or social use,
but the great majority of hytter are family-owned or rented and family-occupied. The
building may be static, but the flow of persons coming to, staying at, and leaving the
hytter reflects the structure of family life, in its changing phases and generations.
Most clearly, the ownership of hytter parallels Norwegian kinship through a system
of partible inheritance which links otherwise distant generations of cousins. Partible
inheritance always opens the possibility of some kin purchasing a share of property
from others, and hence capital becomes closely tied into kinship and descent. The
legal and common structures associated with partible inheritance are practiced
through an idiom of equality and fairness, and create a site of moral transactions
that often cause emotional pain and uncertainty.
In addition, there are varied sets of rights associated with hytter which distinguish
between the user- right and ownership. Use-rights, for example, may extend to
affines or divorcees, although ownership extends only to direct inheritees. Patterns
of ownership and use can thus be traced as a picture of kinship patterns, including
regional variation, systems of exchange and narratives of negotiation, where kin and
descent are tied in to capital and property. Hytter ownership also reflects social and
cultural change. As more are built, routines of visiting change, to the point where
guests no longer compete for invitations to friends’ hytter, but owners compete to
tempt guests to visit. And as family structures become complex with increasing rates
of re-partnership and step-siblings, inter-related families may have a series of hytter
which compete for attention and maintenance. I anticipate, therefore, that a detailed
study of hytter ownership, use and sharing will provide useful insights into kinship
ideals and practices. It will be vital in this research to examine the legal structures
and practices relating to ownership, and one site for the investigation ought to be
the offices of solicitors who specialise in resolving relevant conflicts.
Ownership is thus important in the legal sense of property ownership, but there are
emotional forms of ownership related both in terms of what geographers call ‘place
attachment’, but also in terms of feelings of possession of location and objects
associated with the hytter. Hytter interiors often include objects with memorial
significance, inherited objects of domestic production, about which family narratives
may be woven. In addition, many families keep hytter-books, journals with
reminiscences, anecdotes, sketches or pictures, which offer a unique insight into
activities and discourses associated with hytter. Not surprisingly, these books are
now being reproduced in the form of blogs, and these provide an available resource
for research on the mediation of hytter-life.
Lund has written about the central Norwegian concept of hjemmekos as an emic
concept referring to an experience-rich activity of sharing reflective time within the
home and in particular temporal rhythms (2003). Hjemmekos as a shared social
concept is a site of promotion of family relations, specifically family who live
together, but also those who gather together in the home. Gullestad has argued that
10
the home and interior decoration are highly prioritised by Norwegian families, and
the frequent abundance of decorative items reflects a desire for warmth and shelter
from the outside world (1989). Given Gullestad’s breadth of work on Norwegian
domesticity, it is perhaps surprising how little attention she has given to hytter,
although much of her work on Norwegian discourses of identity is also relevant to
hytter-life. The primacy of ‘peace and quiet’, emphasis on individualism in a context
of sameness and the under-representation of significant difference are all themes
which Gullestad has identified as important traits in practices Norwegian nationality,
and it will be interesting to consider whether these are equally present in leisurecontexts, or whether these provide an opportunity for liminal behaviours. It is my
preliminary suspicion that hytter provide more examples of the production of
archetypal practices of Norwegian-ness over oppositional practices, but I suspect
this is also subject to significant regional and class variation.
As mentioned above, there are also hytter in shared ownership, and a series of
homes are owned by the Norwegian Trekking Association, a national members’
organisation which also creates and maintains hiking and skiing trails in the
mountain areas. Ween outlines the history of the DNT and its historical implication in
the nationalism of its founders and the consequent conflicts over land-rights among
both indigenous peoples and farmers (2007). In relation to ownership, however, it
opens up the question of common ownership and the sense in which DNT hytter
stand for a national hytter. DNT encourage people to get out into the mountains to
hike or ski and the hytter is an integral element to this experience. Any member of
the DNT can obtain a key to the various hytter, both serviced and self-serviced, and
thus hytter-life is opened up even to those individuals and families who do not have
access to a private hytter including, of course, foreign tourists.
What Ween also describes is the central role which DNT founders played in the
nation-building period of Norwegian statehood, and their implication in the
oppression of Sami, particularly in southern parts of Norway. Despite Norwegian
ideas of peacefulness and the belief that Norway has not been a colonising nation,
the Norwegian state has been undeniably implicated in the colonisation of Sami
lands. Sami practices of transhumance and nomadic herding are not considered in
this paper, but the location of hytter is a controversial issue in herding areas, and
should be considered in relation to land and property rights, and also in relation to
fencing of property in areas of herding and grazing.
Conclusions
Research on domestic tourism is dominated by visitor surveys and impact studies.
There is little research that acknowledges the role of tourism in bolstering particular
forms of nation-building, and that which does tends to focus on constructions of
heritage. Even a preliminary foray into the field of Norwegian hytter suggests that in
seeking to compare global tourism practices in different countries, generalised
approaches to second-home ownership miss many of the aspects which offer deep
insight into the motivations for, and implications of, particular practices. The current
massive expansion and intensification of the rate of building threatens the value of
neighbouring hytter, both in terms of their economic value and in the pleasure
gained from being at a distance from others. Some commentators see a crisis in the
hytter market from over-supply of buildings, while others suggest that increased
densities bring some mountain areas and the valleys leading to them to the brink of
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environmental crisis. Much of the discourse surrounding changing practices
associated with hytter mirror changes in the ways that being Norwegian is imagined.
Norwegian holiday homes are implicated in various ways in reproducing and
reinforcing particular motifs of the nation, both in the architecture of the buildings
and the ideologies of nature associated with them. They are entwined in a
legislative framework which regulates outdoor activities, on the one hand, and
distinguishes hytter from everyday dwellings on the other, both reinforcing the notion
of social and environmental concern which Norwegian political parties have
promoted. As a symbol of increasing affluence, changing modes of hytter building
and use mirror debates about consumerism which are interpreted in a moralised
way as a threat to self-determination, connection with nature, and appreciation of
work. If a meaningful hytter is one which requires work, both to build, furnish and
use, modern luxury mountain apartments offer the prospect of ready-to-use fullyequipped houses in the mountains. In doing so, they challenge the core ideologies
of 20th century Norwegian nation-building.
Wearing bunad at hytter? (cf marianne’s wedding pictures). See Eriksen in Focaal.
Hytter singing? little attention to ethnographic ear. Relating hytter to nationalism.
Gullestad – nation through descent and kinship; hytter through descent and kinship
plus capital. Hytter as tourism?
NB parallels with Alpine outdoor movement… (see Arnold)
Link with urbanisation. Ideal Norwegian house spatious, land. Real Norwegian
home, small flat in dense urban area. House recreated in countryside.
Also compare with Tress on Danish feriehytte history. Influence?
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