From Committee to Controversy: An Actor-Network Analysis of the Re-Organization of the Norwegian CHM

Starting in 1986 and ending in 2001, the Norwegian cultural heritage management (CHM) underwent a re-organization. Following the revised Heritage Act of 1978 the protective devise needed revision. The 19 County Councils received increased authority after the Act in 1990, while the five archaeological government museums decreased their authority, and were set to focus solely on traditional cultural historic research. The restructuring changed the expert knowledge systems (i.e. institutionalized scientific knowledge) integrated in the CHM, and the process was met with suspicion in the academic community. By conducting a close reading of two central governance policy documents from the 1980’s, the re-organization is analyzed in accordance with the methodology of ANT. It is argued that as the re-organization can be considered a success with respect to its political goals, it was nonetheless also a destructive event. The relational effects of the re-organization are then analyzed in relation to Bruno Latour’s theory of political ecology. Here it is argued that the democratizing and distributional effects on the involved sciences (i.e. archaeology) can be read as an “ecologizing” event, and eventually, that the academic controversy is further proof of this. In the end, the author argues for the potential of CHM studies to enrich the larger discourse on modernity and the political practice of modernizing.