Velkommen til oss”. Ritualisering av livets begynnelse

• Main Author: Høeg, Ida Marie
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: Norwegian

Velkommen til oss is a dissertation in the discipline of Sociology of religion that illuminates the pluralisation of Norwegian culture, with a point of departure in traditional and more recent ritualisations of the beginning of life. It is the analysis of the actors themselves as opposed to the ritual structures that constitutes my contribution to an understanding of the traditional christening service and more recent ritual actions. The analytical focus is on the parents’ concrete creation of the ritual actions, their experiences from carrying out the actions, and the parents’ understanding of what a ritual is and what the actions signify in both a religious/life stance and social sense. The title of the dissertation, Ritualisation of the beginning of life, refers to rituals that are mutually exclusive and that take place only once in a lifetime – as a rule in the course of the first years of a person’s life. The approach to the christening and naming ceremonies that I have chosen is that of in-depth interviews with nine sets of parents who have christened their child, four sets of parents who had a Humanist naming ceremony under the auspices of the Norwegian Humanist Association for children, three sets of parents who have created naming ceremonies in the alternative religion community and three sets of parents who have created private naming ceremonies. The parents were all new parents who had held a christening or naming ceremony for their child. The parents comprised a broad spectrum in terms of social background, civil status, and religious affiliation and life stance. The interviews were done in the autumn of 2003 and the spring of 2004. In the analysis of the actors’ respective relations to the christening service and the naming ceremony, I have chosen a practice-oriented and embodied perspective. As a means of stressing that my focus is on the actors, I employ the concept ritualisation instead of ritual. The term ritualisation has been developed on the basis of the social anthropologists Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw’s views on what constitutes a ritual action, and the sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of action approach to society. The intention behind this combination of a structural approach (Bourdieu) and actor-based approach (Humphrey & Laidlaw) is to illustrate that ritualisation is a part of society’s social and cultural structures and that ritualisation has a cognitive dimension. From Bourdieu I have also taken