. National identity is under scrutiny in Europe. A new non‐ethnic conception of the nation to replace the traditional ethnic one is needed. National identity is therefore undergoing a public reconstruction. This article is based on narratives of “Norwegianness” that emerged in a qualitative interview study of white majority Norwegians who live in multicultural suburbs in Oslo. I respond to an overlooked need to analytically untangle different components of “Norwegianness” as phenomenological knowledge, to decouple its different constituents from each other. In order to analyse qualitative data where notions of “Norwegianness” and “non‐Norwegianness” are at play, their different aspects must be clarified. I identify multiple discursive oppositions that researchers ought to keep apart, and distinguish between civic aspects (citizenship), cultural aspects, and ethnic/racial aspects. I suggest that everyday notions of the national are fruitfully studied as discursive space constituted by a series of overlapping, but sometimes mutually contradicting, oppositions.

In this article, we engage with the theory of cultural capital, which was originally outlined in Pierre Bourdieu’s magnum opus Distinction. We start from a study of lifestyles in Stavanger, Norway, and qualitative interviews with 39 people dispersed in the social space. We find that interviewees with less education are largely indifferent to cultural capital, and secure about their own lifestyles. This diverges from Bourdieu’s depiction of the working-class ‘sense of place’. Yet cultural capital has social consequences. To university graduates, taste and education often matter for self-definition and social networks. Cultural capital thus contributes to social closure. Importantly, though, the highly educated are careful to de-emphasize their cultural capital when appropriate, especially in inter-class social encounters. They keep cultural distinctions hidden. In accounting for why our findings diverge from Bourdieu’s, possible explanations pertain to national cultural repertoires (Nordic egalitarianism) as well as broader (even transnational) changes in morality. Crucially, though, we engage with social interaction, which has been more neglected in previous research. For that purpose, we build on Erving Goffman’s theories. For cultural capital studies, we propose the concept of a ‘discursive gap’, and suggest more emphasis on social encounters.

This article revisits Goffman's stigma theory from the perspective of housing studies. We elaborate on Goffman's approach by exploring how housing tenure can work as a proxy for moral character. We interviewed twenty-seven people who are excluded from access to homeownership in two cities in Norway, which is a ''homeowner nation.'' These individuals are unable to enter the dominant ''homeowner class'' for different reasons, including drug-dependency, mental illness, refugee background, low socioeconomic status; thus, they must access housing through other tenures; private renting or social housing. To many of them, housing becomes a stigma, in Goffman terms, an ''undesired differentness.'' Social housing is known to carry stigma in Norway. It was thus a paradox, that those with the softest differentness-private rental-were most likely to practice (Goffman:) ''information control'' over their housing situation. Goffman's theoretical apparatus, and his distinction between the discreditable and the discredited in particular, helped us make this paradox comprehensible. Through this analysis, refinements to Goffman's theory were discovered. We suggest that ''multiple stigmas,'' which was not seen clearly by Goffman himself, should be a key notion in stigma studies. We use this notion to distinguish between possible sub-types to the discredited-discreditable distinction.

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