Arne Lie Christensen
Arne Lie Christensen is a Norwegian ethnologist and cultural historian, and a writer on landscape, building traditions and the keeping of the past. He is the brother of the painter Lise Stigen.
The ethnological eye
Born in 1943, Arne Lie Christensen took a magistergrad in ethnology - cultural history - with Nordic archaeology and sociology alongside it. His working life moved between heritage practice and the university: the Riksantikvaren and the Ministry of the Environment, the Institute for Folk Life Research, and Akershus fylkesmuseum, before a long teaching career at the University of Oslo from 1992 until his retirement in 2011.
His subject has been the ordinary made visible - how houses are built and lived in, how a landscape comes to look the way it does, and why some things are kept and others let go. Den norske byggeskikken (1995) and Det norske landskapet (2002) read the physical surroundings of Norway as cultural history, and Kunsten å bevare (2011) turns the same attention on preservation itself.
He has edited the magazine Fremtid for fortiden and has long been active in Fortidsminneforeningen, the Norwegian heritage preservation society, writing and lecturing for a general readership as much as an academic one.
He is the brother of Lise Stigen, the painter whose work the Foundation holds.
Selected works
- 1995Den norske byggeskikken
- 2002Det norske landskapet
- 2007Karl Johans fasader
- 2011Kunsten å bevare
Biographical details from Wikipedia and the University of Oslo. Photograph credit to follow.