Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the role of social media ‘bragging posts’ (skryteposter) in the negotiation of status and position in rural Norway, a place often considered the locus of the Nordic cultural value of ‘equality as sameness’.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the place of social media ‘bragging posts’ (skryteposter) in the everyday production of status and hierarchy in rural Norway. Nordic rural communities are often assumed to be the locus of the cultural idea of ‘equality as sameness’. This is an idea where ‘being equal’ is signified by ‘being similar’; difference is under-communicated in order to balance and possibly resolve tensions between individual/society, independence/community and equality/hierarchy. Equality as sameness is a dominant social form in the everyday life of Valdres, Norway, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in 2020-21. However, bragging posts, particularly those portraying the person as an active, knowledgeable user of the outdoors, is a context where my interlocutors frequently negotiated status and position in social hierarchies. This, I suggest, must be seen in relation to cultural values as well as the social forms enabled by digital technology: the combination of being physically fit and mastering the outdoors is cultural capital in Valdres. Yet, everyday social forms allow only for subtle expressions of possession of this capital. However, social media appears as a ritual space with different social rules and limits for what is considered ‘showing off’. In my discussion of bragging posts in Valdres, I draw on more recent commentaries on Gullestad’s work, particularly Hojer Bruun, Jakobsen and Krøijer’s work from Denmark showing how egalitarianism is only one of several valued forms of sociality in the Nordics - and that hierarchies can emerge also from people’s concerns with other forms of sociality.