Thomas Hylland Eriksen is an anthropologist based at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway. His work is motivated by a double concern: to understand the present world, and to understand what it means to be human. Much of his work is comparative and interdisciplinary. His research has involved fieldwork in several ethnically and culturally complex societies, and he is currently directing a research project based in a suburb of Oslo. He has written extensively about ethnicity and the dynamics of culture and identity, nationalism and the politics of identity, cosmopolitanism and human rights, globalisation and its implications for the study of culture and society. He has also published several textbooks in anthropology and related subjects. Apart from his academic publications, Eriksen also writes essays and miscellaneous nonfiction intended for the general reader, and occasionally contributes to the press with a book review or a polemical intervention.
In his spare time, Eriksen plays a bit of music, potters around in the garden and collects unintentional consequences of modernity. So far, he has collected three (the paradoxes of new information technology, identity and affluence) and is these days placing the lid on the bin containing the fourth one (waste).
A fairly recent interview with Eriksen, written by Monika Palmberger (MPI-Göttingen), is available here.
An interview from Mauritius Times, about ethnicity and politics in Mauritius, can be downloaded here.
A full, searchable list of publications can be accessed on CRISTIN.
This website contains some of my academic work, but also some of my non-academic writings on topics such as happiness, new technology, waste, minority issues and university politics. There are three indexes. The first is alphabetical. The second is topical. The third is a chronological list of downloadable pdf files. All indexes, and all content on this site, is being updated irregularly. Finally, as a bonus, the subsite ‘Et langt, kaldt land’ contains a hypertext version of my 1999 novel ‘Siste dagers heldige’.
The site, which has existed in various formats since 1996, is bilingual in English and Norwegian. Engaging with the world is the English-language subsite, which is largely but not exclusively academic.
A Norwegian-language subsite, devoted to Eriksen's miscellaneous writings inside and outside of the academy, has been named, for some reason, ‘Et langt, kaldt land’ (‘A long, cold country’). Den norskspråklige forfatteren og akademikeren Thomas Hylland Eriksen treffes på ‘Et langt, kaldt land’.
From 2004 until the end of June 2010, I spent most of my working hours as research director of an interdisciplinary research programme, Cultural Complexity in the New Norway, Culcom. At present, I am pursuing three lines of enquiry:
• Inclusion and exclusion in the suburb
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A collective,
multidisciplinary effort based on research in a suburb in eastern Oslo, and partly an admittedly underfunded descendant of Culcom, this
project aims to explore the significance of place for identity and belonging.
The project has its own website and will eventually appear elsewhere in cyberspace as well.
• An anthropological history of the early
21st century.
Partly in an
effort to weave together a few loose strands emerging from my work over the
last decade, but mostly to add something qualitatively different to the
admittedly huge literature on 21st century globalisation, I have begun to take
notes for a rather ambitious piece of work. If it is successful, it will show
the mutual relevance of large-scale and small-scale analysis, highlighting the
advantages of an ethnographic approach even when the object of study is the
global system.
• Rubbish.
An old idea
which is finally about to be realised, a book in Norwegian is being published in March 2011. Drawing equally on Mary Douglas’ seminal work on
purity/impurity (and later contributions to the anthropology of waste), history
and environmental perspectives, the book has the form of an
exploratory essay, and the intended readership includes anyone who is fascinated and revolted by waste (and, well, for the time being, who reads Norwegian). The book is now (March 2011) out in Norwegian.
Defunct but not obsolete, Culcom's website still contains dozens of
interviews, feature articles and downloadable publications from the 2004–10 strategic
research programme of the University of Oslo. It continues to be updated as long as there is still some petrol left, but – alas – no fuel is being added to the tank now.
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Some translations
of Eriksen's books with occasional links to publishers' websites
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The Human Economy
Edited by Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani, this book develops a broadly conceived, radical and innovative framework for thinking along alternative lines about the economy. It is interdisciplinary, open-minded and international and a great read. My contribution is a chapter on globalisation. Get yours here.
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Not exactly The Ramones
This is certainly about pluralism and a cosmopolitan worldview, but far removed from academic research: The short-lived Norwegian record company Compendium released ten albums in the mid-1970s, among them some classics and hidden gems of progressive rock. I wrote a short essay for liner notes of the memorial disc. Highly recommended!
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The Open Anthropology Cooperative, founded by Keith Hart in 2008, represents an ecological approach to the growth of knowledge.
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Linguistic
McDonaldisation or universal cosmopolitanism?
What are the cultural
implications of English as a universal academic language?
Norsk versjon i antologien Hva skal vi med vitenskap?
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Divided by a shared destiny
The climate crisis discourse makes it necessary to rethink the dominant metaphors of contemporary ideology. This is a bid for the notion of overheating as a master narrative of the near future.
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The perilous identity politics of anthropology
Strangely,
anthropologists, who specialise in translation between cultural worlds,
are often inept when it comes to translating their own activities to
a language accessible and interesting to others. However, it didn't
have to be that way. A version of the article appears in Making Sense of the Global.
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Probably the best anthropological group blog, Savage Minds is subtitled -- with impeccable historical reflexivity -- ‘Notes and queries in anthropology’.
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Stories about Somalis
Somalis are arguably the most stigmatized ethnic minority group in Norway, and are routinely depicted as poorly integrated immigrants. There are nonetheless other stories which could be told about Somali emigrants to Europe, beyond the limiting perspective of methodological nationalism.
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Tunnel vision
God knows we all live in our goldfish bowls. But some have muddier water than others. I read Steven Pinker's Blank Slate years ago, and I'm still vaguely annoyed: he writes well, knows his Darwin from his Chomsky, and nearly makes a number of relevant observations about the human condition. But then he falls in love with his toolkit, loses all inhibition and, at the end of the day, comes across as loud, confident and wrong. The essay, from Social Anthropology, is available as a  .
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Other People's Anthropologies explores trends and traditions marginal to the hegemonic regions, and includes chapters on Japanese, Bulgarian, Cameroonian and Russian anthropologies, plus some more. My chapter is on the otherness of Norwegian anthropology.
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The Sophie Prize is an annual environmental prize named after the main character in Jostein Gaarder's novel Sophie's World. The prize aims to raise ecological consciousness and stimulate political action. In 2011, the prize was awarded to the author and activist Tristam Stuart, whose book Waste: Uncovering th Global Food Scandal is just incredible -- readable, entertaining, provocative and important.
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Farewell
to the gift economy?
All
good parents try to teach their children that the important things in
life are free. This is also how it ought to be in the academic world,
but after fifteen years of mounting student numbers, activity planning,
auditing, efficiency-enhancing measures and reforms, it no longer appears
thus.
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What is complexity?
The article from Ethnic and Racial Studies, downloadable as a , approaches the question from the perspective of social anthropology, system theory and minority studies. Not much chaos physics here, in other words.
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Keeping
the recipe: Norwegian folk costumes and cultural capital
The
concept of cultural property rights is a recent one and one which raises
several sets of analytical problems. Some of them concern issues of
copyright protection and royalties from cultural production; some concern
the delineation of the object, namely what kinds of culture can be ‘owned’;
and some are to do with the assignment of specified forms of cultural
property to particular groups or individuals — who ‘owns’
a certain tradition, the right to define it, to protect it from infringement
and to benefit from its possible commercialization? Published in Focaal.
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Alan MacFarlane's site
The social anthropologist and cultural historian Alan MacFarlane has a wonderful website packed with texts, videos, links and snippets from his wide-ranging work. Recommended!
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Of Negro kings and Hottentots
This is about "Negro kings" and "Hottentots"
in Scandinavian children's stories, featuring the iconic authors Astrid Lindgren and Thorbjørn Egner. It turns out that many are outraged
because it has been suggested to amend a couple of texts because of their
racist/pejorative connotations, and concerned defenders of human rights
accordingly make thought-provoking comparisons with Orwell's 1984... This article is unpublished; it was just before Christmas, and I badly wanted my bit of peace and quiet.
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Mind
the gap: Flexibility, epistemology and the rhetoric of new work
The
article explores Bateson’s definition of flexibility as “uncommitted
potential for change”, relating it to contemporary issues and
scientific controversies and thereby showing the huge, largely untapped
potential of the concept. From Cybernetics and Human Knowledge.
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Gregory
Bateson and the North Sea ethnicity paradigm
The
influence of Bateson's relational thinking on vintage ethnicity theory
is often neglected, commonly ignored, but known and recognised by the
people behind the theory. A French version was published in Ethnologie Française in 2009.
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:: antropologi.info ::
Edited
by Lorenz Khazaleh, this trilingual site is one of the best virtual magazines covering news and
more on anthropologically related topics.
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Creolization in anthropological theory and
in Mauritius
A chapter in Charles Stewart's Creolization, this is a comparison between different conceptualisations of ‘creole’ and ‘creolization’, from local uses in Mauritius (and elsewhere) to linguistic and anthropological usages.
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Diversity
versus difference:
Neo-liberalism in the minority debate
‘Diversity
is good; difference is bad.’ This is the common view in European
minority debates. As a result, the class component disappears, and an
unacceptably vague catch-all concept of culture is allowed to predominate,
even in much of the research literature.
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Globalization: Introduction
The preface and introductory chapter to my 2007 book on globalization are now available on the site. (But as usual, if you want to know how the story ends, you have to buy the book.
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Eriksen's
Newsletter, the closest I came to writing a blog back in the early 2000s, was discontinued years ago, but back issues (1-17) are available here.
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For more articles and book samples, search the indexes.
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Originally published in 1993, this third edition has been revised and updated, and in a few places, I've even changed my mind. The book covers ethnicity and nationalism studies from a social anthropological perspective. This link leads to the first edition, while this link leads to a presentation of the third (2010) edition.
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When I was drafting the first edition of this book in 1992, I had no idea that I'd still be working on the same book eighteen years on. Third, revised and updated editions of both the Norwegian and English editions were publised simultaneously in May 2010. This link leads to an earlier edition – updating will take place.
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Security is a complex and ambiguous word in English. In this book, edited with Ellen Bal and Oscar Salemink at VU University Amsterdam, we explore its comparative usefulness in anthropology. There is a bit about the book here, and a sample chapter has also been dug out for your discreet perusal.
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Globalization
– The Key Concepts is an interdisciplinary ‘primer’
covering a lot of ground, but focusing on eight concepts, from
disembedding and standardisation to vulnerability and mixing.
The publisher's blurb can be read here,
and a sample chapter is available here.
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Although
flags are often mentioned by scholars of nationalism, there
are few studies of the significance of flags for national identities.
This collection offers case studies and comparisons of flag
history, uses and controversies. See the publisher's
presentation or download the table
of contents and the first chapter.
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Paradoxes of Cultural Recognition discusses central issues regarding multiculturalism in today's Europe, based chiefly on studies of Norway and the Netherlands. It presents empirical case studies which offer insights into the dynamics of majority/minority relationships, whilst raising theoretical questions relevant for further comparisons. More on the book here and here.
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Engaging
Anthropology asks why it is that anthropology has not yet
conquered the world (which it should have), but instead seems
content to stay within the cosy (but somewhat musty) walls of
academia.
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This is
a short introduction to anthropology, written both for students
and curious onlookers (of which there are hopefully a few). A sample chapter is available online.
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Rather
than publishing yet another book about globalisation and anthropology
in general, we decided to focus on method. How do people who have been trained
to do fieldwork in small communities manage the shift to large-scale
societies where people and ideas even have the cheek to move about
at will, sometimes crossing oceans and continents while getting
on with their business? Read the Introduction here.
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Tyranny of the Moment, a book about technology, acceleration and slow time -- was published in English a few months after the Norwegian edition, and was subsequently translated into many other languages. A summary and sample chapter are available here.
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My other
books are presented here and here-- with links
to their homepages.
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