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Thomas Hylland Eriksen Quotes

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a Norwegian anthropologist. He is currently a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, as well as the 2015–2016 president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Wikipedia  

✵ 6. February 1962
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Thomas Hylland Eriksen: 18 quotes0 likes

Famous Thomas Hylland Eriksen Quotes

“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.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 7 : Nature

“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.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 6 : Kinship

“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.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 9 : Social Identity

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

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 8 : Thought

“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.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 5 : Reciprocity

“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.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 4 : Theories

Thomas Hylland Eriksen Quotes about life

“Although it is necessary to be conscious of variation, the problem of boundaries, political misuse, change, flows and conceptual inaccuracy, it would be tantamount to intellectual suicide for anthropology if it were to discard a concept that tells us that people with different backgrounds, who have been raised in very different environments, live – to a greater or lesser extent – in different life-worlds and see the world in different ways. Thus, it seems necessary to keep the culture concept, but in an ideal world, it would be locked securely in a cupboard and taken out only when it was needed. In most cases where the culture concept is used cursorily today – inside and outside of anthropology – it would prove unnecessary to unlock the cupboard.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

“The world is far too complex, and variation between societal types is too vast, for a categorisation dividing it into two mutually exclusive kinds of society to be meaningful. In addition, as argued above, one cannot once and for all draw the boundaries of a society. For this reason, it is more accurate to state that anthropologists study social life rather than saying that they study societies.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

“The great enigma of anthropology can be phrased like this: All over the world, humans are born with the same cognitive and physical apparatus, and yet they grow into distinctly different persons and groups, with different societal types, beliefs, technologies, languages and notions about the good life. Differences in innate endowments vary within each group and not between them, so that musicality, intelligence, intuition and other qualities that vary from person to person are quite evenly distributed globally.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 1 : Why Anthropology?

“It is the goal of anthropology to establish as detailed a knowledge as possible about human life in its mind-boggling diversity, and to develop a conceptual apparatus that makes it possible to compare life-worlds and societies. This in turn enables us to understand both differences and similarities between the many different ways of being human.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 1 : Why Anthropology?

“To simplify somewhat, one may say that anthropology primarily offers two kinds of insight. First, its practitioners produce knowledge about the actual cultural variation in the world; studies may deal with, say, the role of caste and wealth in Indian village life, technology among highland people in New Guinea, religion in southern Africa, life on the Wall Street stock exchange, the political importance of kinship in the Middle East, or concepts about life and the cosmos in the Amazon basin. Although most anthropologists are specialists in one or two regions, it is necessary to be knowledgeable about global cultural variation, and about humanity as such, in order to be able to say anything interesting about one’s region, topic or people.
Second, anthropology offers methods and theoretical perspectives enabling the practitioner to explore, compare and understand these varied expressions of the human condition. In other words, the subject offers both things to think about and things to think with.
But anthropology is not just a toolbox; it is also a craft which teaches the novice how to obtain a certain kind of knowledge and what this knowledge might say something about.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 1 : Why Anthropology?

“Anthropology is an intellectually challenging, theoretically ambitious subject which tries to achieve an understanding of culture, society and humanity through detailed studies of local life, made sense of through comparison and contextualisation. But it is also a form of storytelling about the lives that you and I could have led, but didn’t because we were busy living our own lives.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 1 : Why Anthropology?

Thomas Hylland Eriksen Quotes

“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.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 9 : Social Identity

“All cultural translation necessitates some interpretation and simplification. No sane reader would be able to make sense of a text which consisted exclusively of directly translated, unmediated quotations from informants. Compression and editing are therefore necessary elements of cultural translation. Moreover, no matter how outstanding an anthropologist is, as a fieldworker, as a writer and as an analyst, the text always represents a selection, and it will always to a greater or lesser extent be marked by the subjectivity of the translator.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

“In spite of the lack of clarity in the concept of society, the word is doubtless necessary. In everyday language, words denoting local communities, large-scale society and global society exist, and all refer to actually existing entities, existing at different systemic levels. Humans are integrated in (that is, they participate in and contribute to) several social systems, some operating at a large scale, others at a small scale. When anthropologists delineate their field of study, the level of scale is determined by the issues at hand.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

“Many social scientists, including anthropologists, have been interested in the power inherent in gender relations, often described through the idiom of female oppression. It can be argued that men usually tend to exert more power over women than vice versa. In most societies, men generally hold the most important political and religious positions, and very often men control the formal economy. In some societies, it may even be prescribed for women to cover their body and face when they appear in the public sphere, and, paradoxically, these practices sometimes become more common as their societies become more modern. On the other hand, women are often capable of exerting considerable informal power, not least in the domestic sphere. Anthropologists cannot state unequivocally that women are oppressed before they have investigated all aspects of their society, including how the women (and men) themselves perceive their situation. One cannot dismiss the possibility that certain women in western Asia (the Middle East) see the ‘liberated’ western woman as more oppressed – by professional career pressure, demands to look good and other expectations – than themselves.
When studying societies undergoing change, which perhaps most anthropologists do today, it is important to look at the value conflicts and tensions between different interest groups that are particularly central. Often these conflicts are expressed through gender relations.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

“The world, as it is perceived by human beings, is to a certain extent shaped by language. However, there is no agreement as to just what the relationship between language and non-linguistic reality is.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

“The art of cultural translation consists in oscillating between distance and nearness, between one’s own concepts and the native ones, or – to put it differently – making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

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