Forest Cultures - global perspectives

My homepage is here

From 1995 to 1999 I was conducting a nordic project about "Cultural processes in nordic woodland communities". During this project period I collected a lot of sources from different aspects of life in the woodland communities in Trysil and Värmland. Now I am trying to concentrate some of the time I have available for historical research within my job, on investigating this material for new porposes. 

Within the project "Forest Cultures in Global Perspectives" the aim is to investigate how cultural meanings of selected aspects of life have been made, expressed and changed within different contexts characterized by forest and woodland. I want to concentrate the research on three themes who are relevant on different levels to contemporary life and debates:

1. The forest has for a long time been a main subject not only for environmentalists all over the world, using it as an ideal of what should be preserved as ‘nature’, but also for people looking looking for what is ‘natural’ on different levels, from groups searching alternative ways of life, to the use of wood as building material, characterised by its ‘natural’ qualities.

2. In contexts dominated by forest, the concept of 'work'  has often had different meanings than those known from other industrial, post-industrial or rural societies. By analysing what work has meant in different forest contexts, the project aims at broadening our perspectives on work in a time with profound and rapid changes in ways of thinking about work as well as in our working conditions.

3. As identities break up and change, it is important to consider how they have been made and maintained, for example through stories and myths about the relationship between nature and peoples and nations. Forest has often been associated with independence and strength in different ideological contexts.  At the same time, the forests have also been considered a place of freedom and a source of survival for poor people, and as an arena for recreation for modern urban population.

Within this project themes like these will be analysed by interpreting different kinds of materials, from different fields of life, but the main focus in the analyses will concentrate on investigating how narrative aspects of the material can tell something about how cultural meanings connected to the chosen themes have been constituted culturally, and historically.

This page was updated on Oct 12, 2004.
ingar.kaldal@hf.ntnu.no