Stacking and temporality

A theme from Tyranny of the Moment -- stacking or ‘multitasking’ -- is developed here in an analysis of a particular aspect of contemporary popular culture.

Diversity in the UK and Norway

"Virtually any comparison
between the UK and
Norway has to begin
with an assessment of
difference. In few domains
do the differences between
our two countries appear
to be more evident than
in the area of cultural and
ethnic diversity." ... Continue reading.

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. Lorenz Khazaleh continues to update it as long as there is still some petrol left, but – alas – no fuel is being added to the tank now.

Partly a legacy of Culcom, the current project ‘Inclusion and exclusion in the suburb’ explores conditions for local belonging in a new, diverse part of Oslo.

Probably the best anthropological group blog, Savage Minds is subtitled -- with impeccable historical reflexivity -- ‘Notes and queries in anthropology’.

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 2012, the award goes to Eva Joly, known for her one-woman war on corruption, but also a leading Green politician in France and member of the European Parliament.

The 2011 prize was awarded to the author and activist Tristam Stuart, whose book Waste: Uncovering th Global Food Scandal is an incredible book -- readable, entertaining, provocative and important.

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!

:: antropologi.info ::

Edited by Lorenz Khazaleh, this trilingual site is one of the best virtual magazines covering news and more on anthropologically related topics.

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.

Gellner and the multicultural mess

A leading theorist of nationalism, Ernest Gellner never looked closely at contemporary European pluralism caused by migration. This is why and what he might have said.

Some translations

of Eriksen's books with occasional links to publishers' websites

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Open Anthropology Cooperative, founded by Keith Hart in 2008, represents an ecological approach to the growth of knowledge.

Everyday cosmopolitanism

A chapter in a book on transnational law, my chapter in this book chiefly looks at that which is outside the law and the conditions for an everyday cosmopolitanism.

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

Xenophobic exclusion and the New Right in Norway

This is an extended comment on Joshua Phelps et al.: "Symbolic boundaries and ideology in the Norwegian multicultural society". That article is also, for the time being, freely downloadable.

Sport and transnationalism

Why did football become a global phenomenon while hurling (above) and orienteering never did? This article looks at the ecology of dissemination and confinement in the global ecumene from the perspective of sport (but the argument is a general one).

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!

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.

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.

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 — notably who ‘owns’ a certain tradition, the right to define it, to protect it from infringement and to benefit from its possible commercialization, are discussed here. Published in Focaal.

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.

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.

For more articles and book samples, search the indexes.