T H Eriksen
Biographic Data
| ID | 22579 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T H Eriksen |
| GIVEN NAMES | T H |
| FAMILY NAME | Eriksen |
| SIGNATURE | ERIKSEN T H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5662-757X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 170 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1044 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 169 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Three Methodological Ruptures in the History of Anthropology
Acceleration and Cultural Change: Dialogues from an Overheated World (excerpt)
2000 . ( 2007 .) ( )
The Creole Option: A Future For Diversity in Nature and Culture
In the face of dramatically reduced diversity, an outcome of accelerated globalised capitalism and state power, some respond by attempting to recover pre-modern ways of life. This intervention argues that such a solution is neither desirable nor possible. Instead, it looks to impurities, mixing, hybridity, and creolisation as a template for reconciling modernity with diversity both as regards culture and nature. A premise is that perpetual econom…
Rumo a um novo regime de conhecimento no Antropoceno - A contribuição da antropologia
O mundo está sobreaquecido, a civilização global entrou num beco sem saída e negocia um duplo vínculo desconfortável entre os imperativos do crescimento e a necessidade urgente de encontrar soluções sustentáveis. Hoje existe um amplo consenso sobre a necessidade urgente de levar a sério estes desafios na investigação, na mobilização política e na elaboração de políticas. A questão é que tipo de conhecimento é necessário para tomar as medidas apro…
Post-apartheid diversification through Afrikaaps: Language, power and superdiversity in the Western Cape
Hacia un nuevo régimen del conocimiento en el Antropoceno. La contribución de la antropología
El mundo está sobrecalentado, la civilización global se ha arrinconado y negocia un incómodo doble dilema entre los imperativos del crecimiento y la urgente necesidad de soluciones sostenibles. Hoy en día existe un amplio consenso sobre la necesidad urgente de tomar en serio estos retos en la investigación, la movilización política y la elaboración de políticas. La cuestión es qué tipo de conocimiento se necesita para dar los pasos adecuados. La …
Comparing the situations of anthropologists around the world as to publication and evaluation criteria
In January 2022, the World Council of Anthropological Associations Task Force "Making Anthropology Global" was formed, consisting of Gonzalo Díaz Crovetto, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, P.-j. Ezeh, Shannon Morreira, Yasmeen Arif, Chen Gang, Gordon Mathews (chairperson), and Takami Kuwayama, reporting on Chile, Norway, Nigeria, South Africa. India, China, Hong Kong, and Japan. The task force met via Zoom once a month during 2022 and early 2023, with ass…
Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
Sélection thématique de livres
Repres Events & books Slection thmatique de livresCette rubrique signale des ouvrages rcemment parus.Ils sont classs en trois catgories : les ouvrages thmatiques par objet d'tude ; les ouvrages sur la science et ses rapports avec la socit ; les ouvrages de rflexion sur les sciences.Pour une description plus dtaille, cliquez sur le titre
Continental Encampment: Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East and Europe
During the past decade, Syria’s displacement crisis has made the Middle East one of the world’s premier refugee-hosting regions. The measures to prevent refugees and migrants from leaving the region, and returning those who do, has made the region a zone of containment where millions remain displaced. The volume explores responses to mass migration and traces the genealogy of humanitarian containment from the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of t…
Threats to diversity in the shadow of Anthropocene overheating: A biosemiotic perspective
There is currently a growing concern with the ways in which globalisation leads to a reduction in diversity. Biodiversity is declining in many areas, and the standardising forces of states and markets lead to perceptible cultural loss. This effect is evident not least in the accelerated disappearance of languages in our century. Moreover, biocultural worlds comprising people living with their environments in sustainable ways are threatened by inf…
Clashing Scales and Accelerated Change: Two Cases from Norway
Sometimes attempts to reduce volatility have the opposite effect. A naturally flexible system which is regimented and disciplined to a fixed shape loses its ability to adjust to shifting circumstances. This is a recurrent theme in the anthropology of globalisation, where the dynamics between the fixed and the fluid are no less important than the more commonplace local-global contrast. Modernity produces infrastructures, institutions and practices…
Inhabiting Volatile Worlds
This article proposes volatility as a term with which to approach some of the challenges that shape the current world. We develop this term as an analytical concept and perspective by thinking with people and ecologies from the margins, where uncertainty and rapid transformations have long been the order of the day. An approach focusing on volatility as a social and ecological condition provides an opportunity to consider what life in a radically…
A manifesto against property: Anthropological anger in an era of greed and destruction
The term polycrisis, coined by Edgar Morin at the turn of the millennium (Morin and Kern 1999), has been picked up by a handful of commentators recently, and it was also recently the topic of a special issue of Anthropology Today (Henig and Knight 2023, see also Kalb 2023). Ranging from biodiversity loss and climate change to mounting inequalities both globally and domestically, a widespread sense of powerlessness spreads even in countries consid…
Perennial crisis and the loss of flexibility
Crisis interrupts routine in unwelcome ways with an uncertain outcome. The Greek wordkrisis(κρíσις), which is etymologically close to criterion and criticism, was occasionally used in relation to social ailments. However, more often, it was used to refer to a medical condition characterized by a high fever. A critical condition in English and other European languages refers to a similar situation. Two possible outcomes were envisioned in ancient …
Transformations, Complexity, and Rapid Change
The diversification of diversity signaled through the concept of superdiversity can be contextualized through a broader, global approach emphasizing the acceleration of acceleration since around 1990, owing mainly to economic deregulation and the globalization of neoliberalism, but also to technological developments, notably, the Internet and mobile telephony, and phenomena such as the containerization of shipping. Fast change limits people’s opt…
Introduction. Scaling Down in Order to Cool Down
Postcolonialism as a Possibility: A Dialogue That Never Happened
Chapter 1 Divided by a Shared Destiny: An Anthropologist’s Notes from an Overheated World
Chapter 10 WHAT Everybody SHOULD KNOW About Nature-Culture Anthropology in the Public Sphere and “The Two Cultures”
Resource Extraction and Arctic Communities: The New Extractivist Paradigm
For decades, a post-Cold War narrative heralded a 'new Arctic', with melting ice and snow and accessible resources that would build sustainable communities. Today, large parts of the Arctic are still trapped in the path dependencies of past resource extraction. At the same time, the impetus for green transitions and a 'new industrialism' spell opportunities to shift the development model and build new futures for Arctic residents and Indigenous p…
Axel Sommerfelt in the history of social anthropology
An unsung alumnus of the Manchester School, Axel Sommerfelt (b. 1926) published little during his career, but has nevertheless had a major impact on contemporary Norwegian anthropology. Following six years as a lecturer in Salisbury, he taught at the University of Oslo from 1966 until his retirement in 1996. This article traces his intellectual itinerary. Beginning with a re-study of Fortes's Tallensi material, Sommerfelt later carried out fieldw…
Toward Engaged Anthropology
By working with underserved communities, anthropologists may play a larger role in democratizing society. The growth of disparities challenges anthropology to be used for social justice. This engaged stance moves the application of anthropological theory, methods, and practice toward action and activism. However, this engagement also moves anthropologists away from traditional roles of observation toward participatory roles that become increasing…
Thomas Hylland Eriksen Replies
The problem of power: Partial electrification in Northern Uganda
This article considers the relation between infrastructural development and precarious work in the context of the electrification of a village in Northern Uganda. The case of a welder illustrates how partial electrification creates precarious conditions for work and how flexibility and creativity are used to mitigate its effects. In looking beyond precarity at the strategies employed by small-scale business owners in Northern Uganda, this article…
Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives
'As a introduction to the study of ethnicity, [this] book will do excellently.' Ethnologia Scandinavica Ethnicity and nationalism are pervasive features of the contemporary world, but how far is ethnicity a result of cultural differences, and how much is it in fact dependent on the practical use of, and belief in, such differences? In this book, Thomas Hylland Eriksen demonstrates that far from being an immutable property of groups, ethnicity is …
The Cultural Contexts of Ethnic Differences
Discarding simplistic conceptions of 'cultures' as bounded entities for research, recent social anthropological studies have descnbed ethnicity as those aspects of social relationships and processes in which cultural difference is communicated. This approach is endorsed here, but it is argued that it is also necessary to understand vanrations in the forms of cultural difference communicated through ethnicity. Thus, variations in the significance …
Nationalism and the Internet
The territorial integrity of nations is often taken as the premise for a functioning, unifying national identity. Yet, the economic and technological developments of recent decades have made it necessary to question this assumption. It can no longer be taken for granted that the people who identify with a given nation inhabit the same space, nor can it be assumed that cultural homogenisation takes place at the level of the nation through mass med…
Formal and informal nationalism
This article argues that nationalism is an essentially dual phenomenon with its crucial loci in the formal organization of the state on the one hand, and in civil society on the other. Formal nationalism is connected with the demands of the modern nation-state, including bureaucratic organization and meritocratic ideology, cultural uniformity and political consensus among the inhabitants. Informal nationalism is identified in collective events, s…
Place, kinship and the case for non-ethnic nations
One of A. D. Smith's most controversial contributions to the theory of nationalism is his view of the role of the ethnie in the historical emergence of nationhood. He sees the ethnie , its shared memories, myths and territorial belonging as important conditions for stable national identities based on deep emotional commitments, thereby arguing against radical modernist and constructivist views of nationhood. While Smith's view has much to recomme…
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century
The following discussion developed from a debate held on the motion: ‘The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century’, held at the 2012 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) at the University of Manchester. The debate was organized and edited for publication by Soumhya Venkatesan. A full transcription of the debate is hosted on the JRAI website: http…
Producing power: Ethnicity, gender and class in a Caribbean workplace
Complexity in social and cultural integration: Some analytical dimensions
Although the term complexityFootnote1 is often drawn into debates and research on migration and ethnicity, it is rarely examined - unlike the term culture, which has been scrutinised extensively. This article, which is theoretical rather than empirical, sets out to do two things: To distinguish between different meanings of complexity, and to show how complexity - a seemingly fuzzy term - can be operationalised in research on contemporary majorit…
Overheating: The World Since 1991
This special issue, which includes articles on Sierra Leone, Peru, Estonia, Hungary, Norway, the Philippines, Britain and Melanesia, presents some of the salient features of the accelerated post-1991 world. We emphasize the importance of comparison for theoretical development in anthropology and the relevance of contemporary history for anthropological research on globalization. We also demonstrate the importance of taking ethnography seriously i…
Linguistic diversity and the quest for national identity: The case of Mauritius
The subject of the article is the tension between nationalism and ethnicity as rival ideologies in a changing society, viewed through the cultural idiom of language. Drawing on fieldwork in Mauritius, the author sets out to elucidate consequences of language use and language policies for ethnic relations and nationalist ideology. The first part is a description and analysis of the language situation in Mauritius, a multi-ethnic society where diff…
Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives
Do people everywhere have the same, or even compatible, ideas about multiculturalism, indigenous rights or women's rights? The authors of this book move beyond the traditional terms of the universalism versus cultural relativism debate. Through detailed case-studies from around the world (Hawaii, France, Thailand, Botswana, Greece, Nepal and Canada) they explore the concrete effects of rights talk and rights institutions on people's lives
We and Us: Two Modes of Group Identification
This essentially theoretical essay is intended as a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the relationship between social identification and enemy images. Empirical material from Mauritius is used to illuminate various dimensions of identification, and a number of general points are made: First, identification shifts circumstantially and is contingent on symbolic legitimation as well as personal experiences. Second, and perhaps less evidently…
Ethnicity versus Nationalism
The aim of this article is to identify some conditions for peaceful coexistence between the state and populations in multi-cultural societies. Initially, the concepts of ideology, nationalism and ethnicity are examined briefly. It is argued that a successful ideology, such as a nationalist or an ethnic one, must simultaneously legitimize a social order, i.e. a power structure, and provide a meaningful frame for the articulation of important, perc…
Us and Them in Modern Societies: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Trinidad, Mauritius and Beyond
Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence
Anthropology ought to have changed the world. What went wrong? Engaging Anthropology takes an unflinching look at why the discipline has not gained the popularity and respect it deserves in the twenty-first century. From identity to multicultural society, new technologies to work, globalization to marginalization, anthropology has a vital contribution to make. While showcasing the intellectual power of the discipline, Eriksen takes the anthropolo…
Scales of Environmental Engagement in an Industrial Town: Glocal Perspectives from Gladstone, Queensland
Gladstone, Queensland, is one of Australia's largest coal ports and the site of many industries. Few of the 65,000 residents of the region are socially and economically independent of the fossil fuel industry. Environmental engagement is fragmented. The city epitomises, in a striking way, the double bind of growth and sustainability. The Australian environmental movement is generally seen as distant and irrelevant to local concerns. The article a…
Creolization and creativity
A bit of this and a bit of that; that is how newness enters the world', according to Salman Rushdie. In Ulf Hannerz's varied and voluminous work on cultural creolization, creativity and cultural 'newness' are often described. Examining this view of creativity, the essay contrasts processual and hybrid aspects of culture with its stable and structural aspects, showing how each implies a particular view of creativity. The contrast is developed thro…
Nationalism, Mauritian Style: Cultural Unity and Ethnic Diversity
Nationalism is a kind of ideology (or secular religion) which holds that there should be congruence between cultural boundaries and political ones (Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991 [1983]). This essay discusses what such congruence should entail; notably, whether or not it necessarily means that the members of a nation ought to belong to the same ethnic group for the concept of nationhood to be meaningful. The empirical material to be discussed in som…
Linguistic Hegemony and Minority Resistance
On the one hand, cultural differences in the contemporary world seem to vanish rapidly. This is effected through homogenizing processes of economic and political integration into nation-states and into the global system, as well as the globalization of culture brought about through modern means of mass communication. On the other hand, recent decades have seen the widespread resurgence of ethnic sentiments and the revitalization of local cultural…
Economies of Growth or Ecologies of Survival
The article presents the analytical framework, notably Bateson's concepts of the double-bind and flexibility, in the context of a discussion of the Anthropocene, and outlines the subsequent articles and their internal relationships
Sex, violence and nationalism
This article is a commentary on Joane Nagel's "Masculinity and nationalism", which discusses differing cultural conceptualizations of gender and masculinity, critically interrogating essentialist conceptualizations of maleness, and - in the most empirical and engaged section of the article - relates conceptualizations of maleness to war. This commentary elaborates on and develops Nagel's analysis by introducing new empirical examples and through …
Rebuilding the ship at sea: Super-diversity, person and conduct in eastern Oslo
Researchers on transnationalism and migration in contemporary Europe often insufficiently communicate or even neglect the major shift between the first and second generation. Using empirical material from eastern Oslo, I argue that the dominant conceptualization of the self, of personhood, has shifted from a chiefly sociocentric to a chiefly egocentric form of selfhood, with important consequences for the process of integration into Norwegian soc…
Reworking Modernity: Capitalism and Symbolic Discontent
A Broad Concept that Encourages Interdisciplinary Thinking
Linguistic diversity and the quest for national identity: The case of Mauritius
The subject of the article is the tension between nationalism and ethnicity as rival ideologies in a changing society, viewed through the cultural idiom of language. Drawing on fieldwork in Mauritius, the author sets out to elucidate consequences of language use and language policies for ethnic relations and nationalist ideology. The first part is a description and analysis of the language situation in Mauritius, a multi-ethnic society where diff…
Book Notes
A Community of European Social Anthropologists
Book Notes
Ethnicity versus Nationalism
The aim of this article is to identify some conditions for peaceful coexistence between the state and populations in multi-cultural societies. Initially, the concepts of ideology, nationalism and ethnicity are examined briefly. It is argued that a successful ideology, such as a nationalist or an ethnic one, must simultaneously legitimize a social order, i.e. a power structure, and provide a meaningful frame for the articulation of important, perc…
The Cultural Contexts of Ethnic Differences
Discarding simplistic conceptions of 'cultures' as bounded entities for research, recent social anthropological studies have descnbed ethnicity as those aspects of social relationships and processes in which cultural difference is communicated. This approach is endorsed here, but it is argued that it is also necessary to understand vanrations in the forms of cultural difference communicated through ethnicity. Thus, variations in the significance …
Book Notes
Book Notes
Book Notes
Linguistic Hegemony and Minority Resistance
On the one hand, cultural differences in the contemporary world seem to vanish rapidly. This is effected through homogenizing processes of economic and political integration into nation-states and into the global system, as well as the globalization of culture brought about through modern means of mass communication. On the other hand, recent decades have seen the widespread resurgence of ethnic sentiments and the revitalization of local cultural…
Multiple traditions and the question of cultural integration
Several current problems in social anthropology are confronted in this essay. The main theoretical and epistemological issue raised is the relationship between agency and structure, or between holist and individualist orientations in social analysis. The main empirical and methodological problem is the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to conceptualise society and culture as units of study when we study systems which are in importan…
Book Notes
Book Notes
International Relations as a Cultural System: An Agenda for Research
The article presents a comprehensive agenda for research, where models of thought and research methods originating from social anthropology are applied to the field of international relations, which has traditionally been the domain mainly of political scientists. We suggest a number of possible anthropological approaches to the investigation of cultural aspects of international relations in the contemporary world. The aim is, on the one hand, to…
Formal and informal nationalism
This article argues that nationalism is an essentially dual phenomenon with its crucial loci in the formal organization of the state on the one hand, and in civil society on the other. Formal nationalism is connected with the demands of the modern nation-state, including bureaucratic organization and meritocratic ideology, cultural uniformity and political consensus among the inhabitants. Informal nationalism is identified in collective events, s…
A future-oriented, non-ethnic nationalism? Mauritius as an exemplary case
This article consists of a critical application of recent theory of nationalism to the unusual case of Mauritius. It is a poly-ethnic and poly-religious society whose inhabitants neither share a mythical distant past nor consider themselves culturally identical, but where nation-building has nevertheless been moderately successful since the late 1960s. Through an examination of the processes of institutional and cultural nation-building in the is…
Nationalism, Mauritian Style: Cultural Unity and Ethnic Diversity
Nationalism is a kind of ideology (or secular religion) which holds that there should be congruence between cultural boundaries and political ones (Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991 [1983]). This essay discusses what such congruence should entail; notably, whether or not it necessarily means that the members of a nation ought to belong to the same ethnic group for the concept of nationhood to be meaningful. The empirical material to be discussed in som…
Us and Them in Modern Societies: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Trinidad, Mauritius and Beyond
Reworking Modernity: Capitalism and Symbolic Discontent
John Liep og Karen Fog Olwig (red.): Komplekse liv: Kulturel mangfoldighed i Danmark
Komplekse liv: Kulturel mangfoldighed i Danmark. Anmeldes af Thomas Hylland Eriksen
We and Us: Two Modes of Group Identification
This essentially theoretical essay is intended as a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the relationship between social identification and enemy images. Empirical material from Mauritius is used to illuminate various dimensions of identification, and a number of general points are made: First, identification shifts circumstantially and is contingent on symbolic legitimation as well as personal experiences. Second, and perhaps less evidently…
Modernity-an Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad
Trinidad and modernity modernity as a general property Christmas, carnival and temporal consciousness household as cultural idiom mass consumption - origins and articulations modernity as a specific condition
Producing power: Ethnicity, gender and class in a Caribbean workplace
Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places
This work provides an account of culture in an age of globalization. Ulf Hannerz argues that, in an ever-more interconnected world, national understandings of culture have become insufficient. He explores implications of boundary-crossings and long-distance cultural flows for established notions of the local, community, nation and modernity Hannerz not only engages with theoretical debates about culture and globalization but raises issues of how …
Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach
Sociology (109 works) · Political science (87 works) · Anthropology (64 works) · Law (63 works) · Philosophy (58 works) · History (46 works) · Computer Science (40 works) · Politics (38 works) · Law (36 works) · Epistemology (33 works)