Rampenissen i barnehagen: Formidling og forhandling av ikke-empiriske figurers ontologiske status i adventstiden.

The study analyses how questions of truth associated with fantastic and religious figures are negotiated and established in a kindergarten during Advent. The researcher investigates how the employees' staging of Rampenissen’s mischievous acts become a central element in the kindergarten's Christmas preparations, and how Rampenissen gradually emerges as a character the children firmly believe in. The article then compares the portrayal of Rampenissen with the staff’s ontological framing work of various figures from fiction and religion, and the consequences that framing work seems to have on the children's understanding of them.

The results show that Rampenissen seems to function as a community-building, engaging and joyful project that children can participate in on almost an equal footing, regardless of religious and cultural background. Through the staging, however, Rampenissen partly changed ontological status and gradually appeared alive and capable of influencing the everyday lives of the vast majority of the group of children. From the children's perspective, the relatively recent popular culture character acquired religion-like features. This was partly in contrast to how Jesus, whom the adults met with different frames of understanding, but who ‘counts’ as religion, acquired a more obscure status. While questions of doctrine are largely taboo to talk about among kindergarten employees, the notion of the living Rampenissen appeared to be completely unproblematic to convey. The researcher behind the study believes that the staging of Rampenissen depends on a fundamental inequality in the encounter between adults and children, where the adults relate to the phenomenon within the framework of fiction. In this way, the adults can direct and fabricate Rampenissen's existence without experiencing it as a contrast to the kindergarten's mandate.

The data material was collected through field observations and interviews in three departments involving a total of 57 children aged three to six years old in a kindergarten in Eastern Norway. The group of children was culturally and religiously diverse, with children whose parents had different forms of Christian, Muslim, Hindu or non-religious backgrounds. The first part of the data material consists of written recorded observations conducted through 37 days of fieldwork, most of which were made during the Advent period. The second part consists of audio recordings of eleven group interviews involving a total of 30 of the children.

Iversen, R. L. (2021). "Rampenissen i barnehagen: Formidling og forhandling av ikke-empiriske figurers ontologiske status i adventstiden". DIN-Tidsskrift for religion og kultur, (1):9-40.