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Abstract: In this article, the style of social interaction known as hygge is analyzed as being related to cultural values that idealize the notion of 'inner space' and to other egalitarian norms of everyday life in Scandinavian societies. While commonly experienced as a pleasurable involvement in a social and spatial interior, hygge is also examined as a mode of withdrawal from alienating conditions of modernity. In spite of its egalitarian features, hygge acts as a vehicle for social control, establishes its own hierarchy of attitudes, and implies a negative stereotyping of social groups who are perceived as unable to create hygge. The idea of hygge as a trait of Scandinavian culture is developed in the course of the interpretation, and its limitations are also discussed against ethnographic evidence that comparable spatial and social dynamics unfold in other cultural contexts.
Keywords: atmosphere, consumption, egalitarianism, family, home, hygge, interiority, sociality
This article is concerned with the social phenomenon of hygge, which in Denmark has an almost iconic status in representing a style of being together that 'ordinary people' often consider to be distinctly Danish. The phenomenon of hygge, described here more comprehensibly than has been done so far, is interpreted as located within central aspects of Scandinavian culture and everyday life, such as egalitarianism, home-centeredness, middle-class life, romantic and religious ideals, and concerns for 'inner spaces'. I also problematize the popular perception of hygge as being a trait that is exclusive to Danish culture, discussing its core analytical aspect of 'interiority' as a cross-cultural recurrence rather than an example of local particularity.
Hygge is interpreted here as a carrier of normative meanings and cultural assumptions by which people can evoke the concept in order to valorize a range of different (mainly inter-) actions, rendering them performatives of this cultural idiom. Analytically, hygge indexes a category of practices that, in various ways, entail the creation of temporary 'shelters' against social stratification, competition, and the market.
Emphasizing how the normative charge of hygge as a cultural concept plays into social distinctions among social classes, the present account of hyggelig sociality might contribute a new angle on the question of what people in Scandinavian societies actually do when they practice egalitarian social patterns in their everyday lives and the...