Top 15 Thomas Hylland Eriksen Quotes

In our day and age, the perspectives from anthropology are just as indispensable as those from philosophy. Anthropology can teach important lessons about the world and the global whirl of cultural mixing, contact and contestation – but it can also teach us about ourselves. Goethe once said that ‘he who speaks no foreign language knows nothing about his own’. And although anthropology is about ‘the other’, it is ultimately also about ‘the self’. For it can tell us that almost unimaginably different lives from our own are meaningful and valuable, that everything could have been different, that a different world is possible, and that even people who seem very different from you and me are, ultimately, like ourselves. Anthropology takes part in the long conversation about what it is to be human, and gives flesh and blood to these fundamental questions. It is a genuinely cosmopolitan discipline in that it does not privilege certain ways of life above others, but charts and compares the full range of solutions to the perennial human challenges. In this respect, anthropology is uniquely a knowledge for the twenty-first century, crucial in our attempts to come to terms with a globalised world, essential for building understanding and respect across real or imagined cultural divides.
And make no mistake, anthropology holds out the keys to a world which has the potential of changing the lives of those who choose to enter it.

Identification is created both from the inside and the outside, in the encounter between one’s own presentation of self and the perceptions of others.

Above all, there is no simple one-to-one relationship between culture and ethnic identity, despite what many still believe. There are ethnic groups with great internal cultural variation, and there are clear boundaries between ethnic groups whose mutual cultural differences are difficult to spot. Often, the variation within the group is greater on key indicators than the systematic differences between the groups.

One reason for the increased interest in studies of identity in anthropology may be the fact that issues to do with the nature of groups have become hugely important in politics worldwide in the last decades.

The broad standardisation of culture represented in nationalism would not have been possible without a modern mass medium such as the printed book (and, later, the newspaper). Thus it may be said that writing has not only influenced thought about the world, but also thought about who we are. It has made it technologically possible to imagine that you belong to the same people as millions of other persons whom you will never meet.

It should be noted here that a research area which has grown rapidly since the 1980s is the aforementioned STS field, that is, the sociological study of technology and science. Here, western science and technology are studied as cultural products, and many of its practitioners adhere to the so-called symmetry principle proposed by the French sociologist Bruno Latour, which entails that the same terminology and the same methods of analysis should be used for failures as for successes; in other words, that what we are doing is looking at science as a social fact, not as truth or falsity. Similarly, most anthropologists would argue that our task consists of making sense of ‘the others’, not judging whether they are right or wrong.

Studies of thought and modes of reasoning have been central in the history of anthropology from the nineteenth century to the present day.

In my view, there are many exciting possibilities for cooperation between social and cultural anthropologists on the one hand, and scholars with a biological perspective on the other, but they are often lost in aggressive academic turf wars and a failure to engage seriously with each other’s points of view.

The relation between the social sciences and the natural sciences has long been fraught with difficulties. A minority of social scientists (including some anthropologists) regard their activity as an extension, or a branch, of biological research. Others argue that the social sciences ought to be sciences of the same kind as the natural sciences; that they should strive after the same kind of precision and the same kind of parsimonious clarity that can be achieved for instance in chemistry.

The relationships between mother, father and children, family trees and genealogies, preferential treatment of relatives and alliances through marriage furnish us with some of the few really good and useful comparative concepts we have in anthropology. They exist everywhere in one form or another, and they differ in interesting ways. If the ultimate goal is to discover the unity of humanity through its manifold appearances, the profession cannot afford to let go of the still rich gold mine of kinship.

Kinship builds upon two complementary principles: descent and marriage. But both can be manipulated and fiddled with, by natives as well as by anthropologists. There exists a considerable critical literature about kinship; some of it was mentioned briefly at the beginning of this chapter, and we now turn to a slightly more detailed examination.

As mentioned, no society has a prescriptive practice. The rules are always adjusted to fit the bumpy and contradictory world of experience. It must nevertheless be admitted that absolute rules exist everywhere. The incest prohibition exists in all societies, even if it has often been pointed out that it varies in its significance and compass; in some societies, it is limited to the kin we might call close family, that is, people with the same biological mother and father and their relatives in direct lines of descent; but usually half-siblings are included in the incest prohibition, and often the prohibition is extended to include what we might call more remote relatives.

Both evolutionary scientists and anthropologists, who approach the phenomena from very discrepant points of view, have, in other words, reached the conclusion that reciprocity, which creates enduring social bonds based on trust and mutual obligations, is a fundamental aspect of human life.

Mauss, Polanyi and Sahlins took issue with a view of humans which assumed that they were individualistic, maximising and fundamentally selfish creatures. They associated this view with libertarianism and mainstream economics, but, in other contexts, a similar view of ‘man’ as a fiercely competitive individualist has been associated with that of Darwin’s adherents, who claim that social and cultural phenomena must be understood within the framework of evolutionary theory. The slogans ‘the struggle for survival’ and ‘the survival of the fittest’, and the often uncritical use of the word ‘competition’ used to designate the dynamics of procreation and many other human activities, have been typical of Darwinist interpretations of humanity for decades. Against this background, it is astonishing that a growing number of evolutionary scholars now emphasise that cooperation, mutual trust and long-term reciprocity relations are evolutionarily adaptive.

What characterises anthropological research today more than anything is the recognition of complexity; the world is complex, cultures are complex, communities are complex, and analytical strategies must acknowledge complexity.