Hierarchical Forms of Belonging in an Egalitarian Society

Abstract

This chapter discusses the mundane activities of non-migrant parents in a diverse Norwegian neighborhood to illuminate processes of social incorporation and the politics of belonging. It shows how attempts to build sociality among parents of different backgrounds simultaneously cultivate new ways of thinking about, and conforming to, values, norms, habits, and forms of sociality in everyday life. Non-migrant parents’ efforts to generate equal access to a particular kind of childhood instantiate hierarchical forms of belonging despite equality’s status as the guiding value of social interaction. The chapter suggests that egalitarianism—when it is played out as sameness, generating efforts to highlighting similarity and under-communicate difference—can impede a process of incorporation in which all parts have a (equal) saying in its making.

Parts of the ethnographic material in this chapter have been presented in previous publications (Bendixsen and Danielsen 2018, Danielsen and Bendixsen 2019).