Inhabiting anthropology to engage the world: Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Throughout his career, Thomas Hylland Eriksen has used his anthropological lens to shed light on some of the key questions of our time. He has used the toolkit of ethnographic investigations to discuss ethnicity, nationalism, multiculturalism, globalisation, and climate change. Apart from this, he has also provided some memorable introductions to our discipline and insisted on the need for anthropologists to engage with the public sphere. He has argued that the valuable and rich ethnographic analyses produced in our discipline should play a part in wider debates. His body of work shows a particular style of intellectual involvement with complex problems. In his native Norway, he is a well-known public intellectual. Furthermore, from his vantage point in Scandinavia, he scrutinises the history of our discipline’s main founding schools classified according to the nation states that housed them: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States. In this course, we will read some of Eriksen’s texts to explore how he has combined detailed ethnographic analyses with profound examination of planetary situations.