Professor emeritus University of Oslo, Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Ritual Transformation and Cultural Alterity: Reinterpreting or Continuing Traditional ‘Catholic’ practices within the Lutheran Context
Taking the situation Scandinavia as point of departure, the lecture will focus on different aspects of the cultural processes of change that were the result of the Lutheran Reformation in the 16th century. The new political and theological authorities chose different strategies in order to implement what they regarded as necessary changes in piety and religious practice, but the actual policy changed over time and between different countries. Historians have analysed these processes in different ways – e.g. as modernisation, acculturation, cultural suppression, or alienation. In my lecture, I will follow two lines of argumentation: 1) common people interpreted the changes in their own way, often by keeping notions and memories of what was taken from them, and partly by copying the pre-Reformation rituals, and 2) the political and cultural elites not only created strategies for changing the religious culture, but also developed topologies of ‘superstition’ and ‘historical or religious development’ that became barriers between these elites and the common people.
Arne Bugge Amundsen (b. 1955) defended his PhD thesis at the University of Oslo in 1987, and from 1996 to 2025 he was Professor of Cultural History and Folklore Studies at the same university. He was Head of Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, 2007-2014 and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, 2015-2018. Recent research projects have been European National Museums. Identity politics, the uses of the past and the European citizen, (EuNaMus), a European project on national museums, funded by the European Union’s 7th Frame Program, 2010-2013, Death in Early Protestant Tradition, financed by the Norwegian Research Council 2011-2013, Tracing the Jerusalem Code, financed by the Norwegian Research Council 2018-2021, and The Ambiguous Memory of Nordic Protestantism, financed by the Norwegian Research Council 2014-2019. He is an elected member of The Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Uppsala/Sweden (est. 1932), The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Oslo/Norway (est. 1857), and the Finnish Society of Science and Letters (est. 1838).
