Anthropology, Humanism and Civic Responsibilities: A Conversation With Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Anthropology, Humanism and Civic Responsibilities: A Conversation With Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Anthropology, Humanism and Civic Responsibilities: A Conversation With Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Revista de Antropologa
Iberoamericana
www.aibr.org
VOLUMEN 8
NMERO 2
Mayo - Agosto 2013
Madrid: Antroplogos
Iberoamericanos en Red.
ISSN: 1695-9752
E-ISSN: 1578-9705
Recepcin: 18.02.2013
Aceptacin: 20.06.2013
DOI: 10.11156/aibr.08020
SUMMARY:
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is amongst the most prolic anthropologists of our days. His
work, however, does not only address specialised audiences; he is also a leading example
of public engagement in Norway and beyond and an author who nds social value in the
popularisation of science. Juggling conventional academic work and active participation in
the public arena is a challenging task, but Eriksens career demonstrates that these activities can not only be compatible, but also complementary. Through his work on the elds
of ethnicity, nationalisms and globalization Eriksen has made substantial contributions to
social theory and cross-disciplinary academic debate; out of his concern with the role of
anthropology in society and his understanding of civic responsibility in the contemporary
polity, he has also shown how anthropological knowledge can positively feed into public
debate. In this conversation we shall learn more about Eriksens anthropological work,
views on current issues and personal experiences as a public academic.
KEY WORDS:
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, anthropology, public engagement, social theory
from the perspective of, you might say, the tension between nationalism
and a more cosmopolitan worldview, which is really where much of the
ideological conict lies in European societies these days. But what I have
found is that writing about multiculturalism, and writing about tolerance,
diversity and similar topics from an anthropological perspective, has become more controversial in the last few years than it was in the 1990s. In
the past, we were written off as nave multiculturalists or, you know,
gullible people, that sort of thing, which is ne. Whereas in the last
few years were increasingly labelled as traitors to the nation, quislings, that kind of thing, which is a very different thing. But the message
from anthropology has always been essentially the same, and it has been
very consistent: we have to understand peoples life worlds before passing
judgement. After that, you must feel free to pass judgement as a political
citizen; but ignorant prejudice is generally bad news.
LFAF: Are those efforts that you articulate along with others rendering positive results? Are you optimistic about the possibility of sending that anthropological message to society in terms that can be understood and used to
inform larger discussions?
THE: Yes, but it has to be done in the right way. As a public anthropologist, it would not be very productive to assume the role of a teacher or
guru who steps down to tell the truth to people. You must engage on an
equal footing, in a democratic debate. And what our primary job is, at
the end of the day, is to provide context and to provide knowledge, to
make it possible for others to draw conclusions on a sounder basis than
before. And one of my disappointments in the last few years has been
the emergence of what you could call a generalised neoliberal view of the
person, that is a strong version of individualism. There is an impatience
now with people with other cultural backgrounds, they should integrate
fast, they should become like us; efcient consumers, and so on. There
is a very poor understanding, for example, of the importance of religion
in many European societies these days; we seem to have forgotten how
important religion used to be in Europe only a generation or two ago.
LFAF: At the same time you have discussed how religion, particularly Islam,
has substituted for race as the main marker of difference in several parts of
Europe (e.g. Eriksen, 2012). Muslims are nowadays at the centre of all these
varied narratives of othering. Why do you think that is so, and what is the
effect that that is having in the Norwegian society?
THE: Of course this is not just a Norwegian issue. Weve got it just like
in other, especially north European societies. Southern Europe has a
slightly different discourse about similarity and difference. Theres also a
geographical and historical proximity between Spain, for example, and
Morocco, which makes for a different situation. But yes, why is it religion, and why Islam? There are several possible explanations for this.
One of them has to do with the aftermath of the Salman Rushdie affair,
LFAF: Rushdies Norwegian editor was shot, wasnt he?
THE: Exactly. Incidentally he was my boss at the time, because I was the
editor of a cultural journal published by the same publishing house, so
I knew him well. He was probably shot because he was close to Salman
Rushdie. Salman Rushdie came to Norway many times, and I met him
during the fatwa. It all happened in a sort of secrecy. We didnt have a
clue as to where we were going, we were just taken in a car somewhere,
and driven out of town. Once he was way into the forest, in this kind of
hunting castle like something out of one of his books; Salman Rushdie
stood there, greeting us with security guards. Everything was very secret. And something happened around that time, without doubt, but the
most important single event was clearly 9/11. And one thing about Islam
and Christianity is that these two religions are somehow twin religions,
theyre very similar in some ways but have also been rivals, historically,
for many centuries. And they both are proselytising religions, unlike other religions. It could probably be said that it is not feasible in the long
run to represent a religion which monopolises truth for the entire global
population in this shrinking world where we all have to be considerate
and where tolerance is very important. So this goes both ways, regarding
the situation with Muslims.
But its also a fact that many of the working class immigrants in Northern
Europe are Muslims, maybe the majority of non-European immigrants,
and have increasingly emphasised their Muslim identity. Because its a bit
like what Hannah Arendt said about being a Jew: if someone attacks
me as a Jew, I have to defend myself as a Jew. So when the outside
world makes them collectively more or less responsible for terrorism,
fanaticism, riots and so on, then slowly many begin to see themselves as
Muslims rst. I have friends who are totally secular Muslims who live in
Norway but who identify to some extent with this larger Umma or this
larger community of Muslims because thats the way theyre being identied by society. So there is this situation, which is what we call in anthro-
rary Europe, the Progress Party is known for its growing concern with what
we may call cultural nationalism and for its turning certain immigrants into
scapegoats as soon as there is a social problem.
THE: They have had politicians who have said very irresponsible things,
really stigmatising and denigrating generalisations about minorities, and
it goes on after the attack. Some even presented themselves as the true
victims of the terrorist attack by saying that after Breivik, after the terrorist attack, it is now impossible to say the truth about Muslims, because others will associate you with this mad person. So they tried to
present themselves as the true victims in order to get sympathy. As late as
August this year (2012), a month ago as we are talking, one of the local
politicians of the Progress Party in the west of the country posted on his
Facebook wall the message I hate Muslims. And the Party leadership
didnt really sanction him for this, instead they said something along the
lines of maybe you should phrase it differently next time. There was
just a mild reproach. Perhaps a quarter, maybe a third of the population, feel deeply resentful, feel that things are not going their way, and
that government is actively working against them, and they often portray
themselves as the true bearers of national interests. Some might, along
these lines, argue that we have elites in the country who are secretly selling it out to the Muslim invaders. In this I should confess that I nd
myself in a slightly unpleasant position, since Im one of the main symbols for these people of everything thats gone wrong in Norway. Breivik
himself, the terrorist, cites me several times during his manifesto, and
in his YouTube video, as an example of how bad things are in Norway,
because I had spoken at some point during the Cultural Complexity
[CULCOM] project3, about the need to deconstruct the majority. This
statement was interpreted out there as a form of hate speech. Of course
we werent going to deconstruct anybody! It was about a certain way to
carry out research, not a social reform program.
LFAF: It is striking to hear about how that type of intellectual work is being
targeted as a threat by those who believe in the existence of a plot to collapse Western civilisation. In this political context, what has been the reception in Norway of the recently appointed Minister of Culture, Hadia Tajik,
who is a Muslim woman?
3. Information about the CULCOM research group at the Univertsity of Oslo can be found
at https://www.uio.no/english/research/interfaculty-research-areas/culcom/
THE: You saw that? Its very interesting, and its a very promising development, because Hadia Tajik represents exactly that kind of hybrid, ambiguous individual which is actually quite typical of the migrant second
generation. She grew up in a small place, she speaks a characteristic,
West Norwegian dialect, so she can clearly be identied with a small
place in western Norway. She rarely speaks about religion. Shes more
interested in issues of social equality, thats her main concern, social justice. And she has never seen herself as primarily a minority politician.
This is something that bodes good for the future, because it tends to reduce polarisation. Its difcult for the extreme right wing to say that this
woman is not integrated, because quite clearly in some ways shes better
integrated than they are. She writes beautiful Norwegian, shes a good
speaker, shes intelligent, shes well educated. Theres nothing that can be
picked on by xenophobic people except perhaps the fact that shes critical
of the government of Israel as many people are.
LFAF: Anything you would like to add before we close this part of the conversation?
THE: Yes. There are many ways of being a public anthropologist, one
doesnt have to be in the media. There are other ways of working, as it
were, in society. But, by exposing yourself through the media, you also
have to be a bit thick skinned. When you present something in a seminar
room, even if the people in the room think youre basically wrong, they
would be polite, they would say hmm, this was very interesting, but I
have a question, something along those lines. Whereas if you write the
same thing in the newspaper, you may soon nd yourself at the receiving end of considerable aggression. And in this era of commentaries on
the Net, and Facebook, and all these new media, you may even receive
an avalanche of hatred. Academic colleagues who have experienced that
without being prepared tend to be shocked, because the only thing they
wanted to do in the rst place was to present some of their research.
For example, there was a young colleague who wrote recently an article
about the fact that Oslo doesnt have any ghettos. His point was that
even those suburbs that are dominated by minorities are very mixed, you
have people from all over the world, and a few Norwegians, and they are
part of greater society. Their inhabitants integrated in the city, they take
the tube to go to work; they go to school, and so on. So its not like some
of those marginal suburbs in Paris, for example. So the only thing he
wanted to do was to present his work, maybe with a touch of humanism,
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new project, about the role of the Chinese in all our diverse eld locations. Because the Chinese are now present, and make their presence felt,
in most societies in the world, in one way or another, because of their
expanding economy. And thats an empirical thing, and its the kind of
thing thats interesting to explore anthropologically and which tells us
something about the differences and similarities between different communities and life worlds. So Im all for trying out as many comparative
concepts as possible and see how far they get you.
LFAF: Youve also been keen to develop theoretical discussion in our discipline, about which you have written a remarkable history (Eriksen, 2001). In
my view, something salient in your approach these theoretical discussions
is that you analyse social theory in general and anthropological theory in
particular as interconnected with a larger social frame. And I think it is
most important to identify how there are shifts in the production of social
theory that relate to shifts in the forms of globalisation in which we live.
For instance, you just mentioned the way in which neoliberalism pervades
notions of personhood, for instance, but of course it is possible to go further
and argue that it pervades entire epistemes. In this regard, and in the eld
where you have actually conducted a large part of your work, the eld of
ethnicity, you have noted how there was at some stage in the history of our
discipline a total shift towards emphasising mobility of boundaries, things
in ux, movement; everything seemed then to be somewhat malleable and
situational regarding ethnicity. That shift was succeeding essentialist and
primordial notions of ethnicity, and pervaded the social sciences in general.
THE: Yes, and this is fascinating. Not least because were interested in
the history of our own discipline and in the history of social thought. It
is very easy to see, with hindsight, that concepts emerge, and particular
ways of looking at the world emerge, not in a vacuum: they emerge as a
response to a particular historical situation. A good share of social theory
grew out of, initially, the transition from agrarian society to industrial
society, and the problems of urbanisation and industrialisation and what
they did to people. The Marxian concept of alienation was there, and it
was also applied by other social scientists; the Durkheimian notion of
anomie, for example, came as well, along with Tnnies Gemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft and so on. In anthropology, the idea of primitive society the more or less isolated, traditional, non-literate, stateless society
became central to the development of the discipline.
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LFAF: And that idea of primitive societies had concrete epistemological basis and consequences, didnt it? That island metaphor that you wrote about
(see Eriksen, 1993)
THE: Exactly. The island metaphor seemed to work really well for a while
because it showed how the different bits of a society t together; whether
you were a structural functionalist or not, you could see the totality of a
society. But very soon the limitations of this approach also became apparent, because one began to see the connections, and one began to see how
internal diversity was generated, both by internalised and external forces.
But we still need to work on what we may call a post- Durkheimian vocabulary for talking about the social, which is not anchored in the transition to industrial society in Europe. I mean, a vocabulary for talking
about the transition to the global information society. And we are getting
there, we have a number of concepts such as the ones you mentioned that
have to do with ow, ux and so on, but they always have to be thought
of dialectically. I always tell my students: when you think youve found
something, look for the opposite, because youll nd that as well. There
is tension, and there are conicting tendencies everywhere.
LFAF: Dont you think that this emphasis on mobility, ux, ow and so on, and
on situationalism and intersectionality, which became essential to understand identities nowadays, may have detached anthropologists in particular
and many social scientists in general from looking for causalities? It seems
to me that very often we accept that something exists in the world, but we
are not really asking anymore where is it coming from? What is your view
on that?
THE: I agree, I think we should probably be more theoretically ambitious in terms of looking for explanations. And not forgetting some of
the virtues that anthropology used to have in an earlier period, before
the interpretive turn held sway. I was all for the interpretive turn, but
maybe it was taken too far. When I started to study anthropology in the
early 1980s we were still interested in economic systems, kinship systems,
politics. At a certain point during the 1990s, suddenly everybody was
studying identity and I probably encouraged that among my students,
but it went too far. For example, in order to understand whats going on
in north Africa and the Middle East, we have to realise that the economic
system is still one based on a kind of feudalism. They havent really made
the transition to what Jack Goody calls national capitalism, as we did in
Europe, and that goes a long way to explain whats happening. Libyan
society is fundamentally based on kinship, that is where people have their
rights and obligations, their social capital, and the people they can trust.
In our part of the world, it tends to be a what rather than a who
when it comes to trust, and the difference is crucial. Yet alas it tends
to be ignored by policy analysts.
And we mustnt forget this when we make comparisons, that everything is not becoming the same, the entire world is not neoliberal. And
this is another area where anthropological understanding is crucial, both
in terms of the broader discourse about society and scientically, as a
corrective to, for example, quantitative sociologists, who tend to concentrate on that which can be measured. It is no coincidence that it was an
anthropologist Keith Hart who discovered the informal sector in
the economy, which is so important to people everywhere in the world.
LFAF: Along these lines, and concretely with regards to the explosion of
scholarly and political focus on identities that took place in the 1990s, there
are a good few authors who recognise there the inuence of the contextual
forces that pervaded the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the subsequent heyday of neoliberalism. And that was all there
indeed. In addition, if we just look backwards a little bit, whenever social
scientists started to talk about ethnicity, there was another historical context. After the Second World War in particular concepts such as race, an
even that which we may call the tribal world started to vanish from academic jargon and theories, and the supposed empirical realities that those
concepts named started to be approached through new conceptual lenses.
Though causalities behind the Second World War laid elsewhere, race
had an articulating role on its drama and certainly on the persecution of
the Jews, who were racialised and criminally targeted by Nazism. After that,
twentieth century anthropological ideas about culture seemed to gradually
take over the realm of the social sciences when it came to explain human
difference. In that context we see that, for instance, ethnicity also gradually starts to take shape as a concept for public records such as national
censuses. So we see that particular political contexts certainly inuence
the emergence of new concepts and theories. If we bring these ideas into
the analysis of the contemporary period, many questions raise. Now that, as
you have pointed out, globalisation brings, to some degree at least, common
cultural features to a lot of people, everyone seems to pursue being different, and social scientists seek to conceptualise that. In your opinion, what
is behind this phenomenon of identity differentiation? Do you think that there
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is a thing such a thing as a human need behind the current concern with
individual and collective differentiation?
THE: I think thats a crucial question. I feel that if we renew anthropology in the right way, it could continue to play an essential, and probably an even more important role nowadays, than it did in the 1930s
and 40s when anthropology sort of just came back from the eld with
fresh stories about remote peoples whom nobody else had visited. Now
we have informants who speak back, you need informed consent. Think
about it Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard could just print photos of
anybody, and say anything about anybody, without asking for permission, a practice that would now be condemned as ethically indefensible
and also practically impossible. So were all part of the same world in
a sense, and were getting to a point where we need to have a global
conversation about what it means to be human, which incorporates difference but also similarity. And why is it that there is currently this craze
for difference? Well, I think it has a lot to do with a need for autonomy
at the individual level, really: who am I? and what does the word we
mean?. It is the most fundamental question of social philosophy, what
is the meaning of the word we? And as you and I know, its situational,
there are concrete wes and there are abstract wes and so the response shifts contextually and situationally. And why does everybody,
apparently, want to be different? Well, because of the need to have a feeling of autonomy and self-determination: I want to decide who I am, I
dont want anybody from outside to tell me who I am. So in the 1980s
when the hijab became widespread in the Muslim middle classes as a result of urbanisation and education, people became highly self-conscious
about who they were, because they were confronted with difference and
felt the pressure to adjust, which they resisted. Around the same time,
folk dresses became common in Norway, which is something Ive written
about. No coincidence. When I grew up in the 1970s people in Norway
generally wanted to be modern, we wanted to be like the Swedes and
the Americans, you know. So you wanted to have a nice dress, a modern
dress, when you went out to celebrate the national feast of Constitution
Day, and suddenly in the space of a decade they all seemed to have
been replaced by traditionalist folk dresses. And its about, well nowadays we are postmodern people, we use computers, we eat at McDonalds
and we watch the same American TV series as everybody else, but we
havent forgotten who we are and where were coming from; thats the
essential message.
LFAF: In your view, the proposals of social biologists who talk about how this
eruption of identities at present ultimately relates to forms of kin selection
is an avenue worth pursuing?
THE: Im one of those anthropologists who have what I would call a
fairly relaxed relationship to social biology and evolutionary psychology,
though they always oversell their ndings and tend to be poor listeners.
I mean, they discover something and they say Ive got this lens through
which Im looking at the world and I can see everything, and everything
else is rubbish, its social constructivism, and postmodernism, and whatnot. I dont buy that. But I can also see that sometimes they have a point.
And we should take into account that, as Bourdieu once said, people
know what theyre doing, and they know something about why theyre
doing it, but they dont necessarily know what what they do does. So
we dont necessarily understand the full causes and the full implications
of our own actions. There are powerful underlying forces that are not
reexive, and are not discursive, and I for one am more convinced by the
evolutionary account than by the psychoanalytical one.
LFAF: Would you like to nalise this conversation with any comment or addition?
THE: Id like to, yes. Since we began to speak about the role of anthropology in the broader world, my feeling is that we should become better
communicators, we should become even more skilled at listening to others, trying to speak a more comprehensible language, leaving the jargon
and tribal language behind. Theres not much to be lost there, I think we
can do that. And if we can do that, anthropology has an important sort
of civilising mission, it is my feeling. In Norway, all university students
have to take a small course in the history of philosophy, and a bit of philosophy of science, before embarking on their study proper. No matter
whether youre going to do engineering or medicine or law, you have to
learn about Plato and Kant and that sort of thing, its the German idea
of Bildung you know, thats a part of your broader education. I think
the term educacin in Spanish is used in a similar way sometimes, by
the way. And nowadays, a similar course in anthropology might actually
have performed a similar task. I think everybody could have taken half a
year of anthropology, and then move on do other things. Its not a realistic proposition, and Im probably not going to propose it seriously. But
the point is that there are certain things that only we seem to be saying
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about human diversity. The need to have some insight into the human
condition, in order to be able to navigate in this complex world without
too much friction, without too many collisions, is absolutely essential in
this overheated world. So its a truly civilising mission in that way.
LFAF: In that regard, by the way, it seems very important to know how to
interact with the outside of the academia, as you have often emphasised.
Here we develop certain codes of discourse and precision in argumentation, but when engaging with other types of discussions one needs to read
and communicate in other codes and generate some sort of media savvy, for
instance. I liked reading your quote from Einstein along the lines that we
need to know how to present things as simply as possible, but not simpler
than that. We can really get it wrong if we make things simpler than they
can possibly be.
THE: We can indeed. And that is what irritates so many of us with the
socio-biologists, who seem to offer very simple answers to exceedingly
complex questions. Sometimes we might be better off simplifying things,
it might be for us a bit bolder in drawing conclusions, but that too
shouldnt be taken too far. As Einstein is reputed to have said: Make it as
simple as possible, but not simpler.
LFAF: We could leave that as a conclusion for the day. Thanks a lot for sharing your ideas and reections, Thomas.
THE: It was a pleasure.
References
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. (2012). Xenophobic Exclusion and the New Right in Norway.
Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 22: 206-209.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. (2006). Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence.
Oxford: Berg.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. (2003). The Young Rebel and the Dusty Professor: A Tale of
Anthropologists and the Media in Norway. Anthropology Today, 19(1): 3-5.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. (2001). A history of anthropology. London: Pluto.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. (1993). In which sense do cultural islands exist?. Social
Anthropology, 1(1b): 133-147.