Having earlier conducted some research on mental health issues, I was solicited in 2008 by the health minister, Roselyne Bachelot, to chair the natio… - Didier Fassin

Commentators, when they exist, whether on paper, on waves, or increasingly online, are not representative or even indicative of the public, although they can be influential.

Speaking truth to power, as the motto goes – whether this power is academic or political – may be a perilous exercise.

There is no doubt for me that making anthropology enter the public sphere and participate in democratic conversations is desirable and even crucial, especially in the hard times contemporary societies are experiencing. To be clear in this respect, I consider that the threat that they face comes less from crime, terrorist attacks, the influx of refugees and migrants, or other real issues to which they are confronted and which I certainly do not want to lessen, than from the responses they offer to these issues as they are dictated by both fear and the political exploitation of fear – which serve to justify the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States, the oppression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the persecution of Shias in Saudi Arabia, the pogroms against Zimbabweans in South Africa, the repression of Muslim minorities in East Asia, or the rejection of migrants and refugees in Europe – Sweden being, along with Germany, a notable exception to this disgraceful trend of recent years. “A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear,” wrote Clifford Geertz, whom I had the honour to succeed at the Institute for Advanced Study. The aphorism is especially relevant if we substitute “fear” with “politics of fear” – although to destroy it unreasonably exceeds the anthropologists’ power.