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Yesterday, one of Norway’s most important anthropologists has passed away: Marianne Gullestad. I got to know it just a few hours ago, and MaterialWorld-blogger Daniel Miller has already made a post about her and has re-published the introduction he wrote to Gullestads book Kitchen Table Society:

Indeed, what made this such an important work when it first came out was, rather, that it was in many respects a conventional ethnography - though of the type of population that, on the whole, had not been the subject of conventional ethnographies. The topic was working class women in the town of Bergen on the West coast of Norway.

What made this special was that there was nothing special about these people. They were not being studied because they were a problem that academics were supposed to shed light on, such as drug-takers or the unemployed. They represented the neglected topic of the merely ordinary.

>> read the whole post “Marianne Gullestad (1946-2008)”

I have written severa posts on her work, one in English about her “best of” book Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race. To understand the problems of the world today, we need to “decolonize anthropological knowledge", she writes and lits five major challenges for the discipline of anthropology >> read the whole post “The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology”

Several papers by her are available online:

Marianne Gullestad: Blind Slaves of our Prejudices: Debating ‘Culture’ and ‘Race’ in Norway

Marianne Gullestad: Normalising racial boundaries. The Norwegian dispute about the term ‘neger’

Marianne Gullestad: Fighting for a sustainable self-image: The role of descent in individualized identitification

Marianne Gullestad: Mohammed Atta and I. Identification, discrimination and the formation of sleepers

Marianne Gullestad: Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism

For more information, see her homepage at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo