INTRODUCTION

This chapter is an attempt to tell Scottish readers how another small, peripheral country became a reasonably economically efficient but relatively egalitarian nation – in marked contrast to the kingdom of which Scotland is a part. My contribution is based on a lifelong study of the history of modern Norway, fieldwork in many different local communities – mostly in the northern part of my country, where I grew up – and serious participation in local and national politics. But I have learned a lot about Norway through fieldwork and shorter trips to comparable situations abroad, in Newfoundland, Iceland and Scotland, where I have had the good fortune of having friends and colleagues like the late Robert Storey, his wife the Gaelic scholar Lisa Storey and our common friend, John Bryden.

In April 1964, I spent a week on Vatersay, at the southern tip of the Outer Hebrides. At that time, I worked as a research assistant on the project ‘Human geography studies of North Norway’ at Tromsø Museum. The anthropologists at the University of Edinburgh invited me as a visiting ‘Northern Scholar’ for a month, including a grant for travelling around the country.

I must admit that I, as an agricultural economist with some social anthropology and sociology in my tool chest, was rather unprepared for my North Norway project, which I tried to develop in the direction of finding differences between declining coastal villages and those that seemed to be able to survive – comparing their access to natural resources, ability to raise capital, access to markets, and so on. But my observations and conversations with people on Vatersay and Barra were a very important impulse to expand my set of interacting explanatory categories beyond ecology and local culture. The decisive importance of the politically manipulable rules of the economic game became very easy to discover – like in fields such as fish marketing and subsistence agriculture – and the natural conditions in Vatersay were favourable as compared with many Arctic local communities, where people carrying on subsistence agriculture and seasonal fishing fifty years ago enjoyed a living standard indeed comparable with urban wage labour anywhere.