Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Thomas Hylland Eriksen interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 13th June 2019

0:00:00 Born in Oslo, Norway, in 1962; in Norway we have cognatic kinship so have ancestors on mother's and father's side; the Hylland bit is on my mother's side; Hylland is a farm in central-southern Norway, in Telemark county, in the very heart of what you might say would become Norwegian national romanticism which many might say is a bit of an irony and I have written critically about this particular strain of Norwegian nationalism; they were farmers in a mountain farm but they migrated, so my grandfather on my mother's side was an engineer; he migrated to Canada in the 1930's with his wife and young daughter, who would eventually become my mother, and he worked in Canada for a little while before returning to Europe, just in time for the Second World War; he was in the Resistance, going back and forth to Sweden, and being an accomplice in some of the sabotage actions against the Nazi Germans; he died before I was born but I grew up with stories about my maternal grandfather who was clearly a man of some significance, a big personality, founder of an engineering company which is still very healthy in Norway; so my mother came from, what was by then an urban, bourgeois, middle-class family from Oslo, very much anchored in this Norwegian farming culture; my father's side had a completely different story and itinerary because he was a bit of a creole from northern Norway; he grew up as a working-class boy in the city of Tromso; the northernmost university in the world, they say, is in Tromso; it is really very far north but thanks to the Gulf Stream it is liveable, you can survive there; he had a working-class background, mixed Norwegian and Saami and probably something else; he was very tall and very dark and looked a bit like an Italian Mafioso; he was very much a self-made man, coming from a very modest background and turning himself into at first a journalist, then a newspaper editor, and eventually became a UNESCO expert in Africa on rural press, so he had quite an eventful life; I would say that my father, who died when I was at school, I was seventeen when he died of cancer, was a major influence on me; his curiosity, his love of everything that was different, his love of hot tropical climates and different foods and people, he really liked it and fell in love with Africa; he was a voracious reader because at that time in the working-class household in a country like Norway typically they would have a handful of books; they would have a Bible, a copy of the Royal Sagas written by Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic author of the late Middle-Ages, which was an important contributor to modern Norwegian nationalism and national identity - the Viking Kings - and maybe a few other books; so when he could finally afford to buy books he never stopped, so our house was filled with books, all kinds of books; he read; everything he could get his hands on; my mother, who died only last year, was a schoolteacher; she was also an intellectually engaged person, active in politics, at first in the Liberal party; then she realized she had more in common with the Social Democrats and became a Labour politician and sat on the Municipal Council where we grew up, for several years for the Labour Party; both my parents were very generous and encouraging people; my older brother and I had a modern liberal upbringing - he is a Professor of Biology - so when we grew up we could do pretty much as we liked and we were encouraged no matter what we did; we were taken on trips; other Norwegians might go to the mountains to go skiing when there was a school break in winter, whereas my parents took us to London because they were infatuated with some aspects of British culture, notably theatre, but also musicals, so we went there every year; so I would say that I had a happy childhood, brought up by caring, loving, parents with considerable interest in the outside world, so we had good conversations about what was going on in the United States and Africa over Sunday dinner

0:06:12 We were a completely secular family; my brother and I were Baptised in church but that was probably because of tradition; that was in the 1960s and was perhaps done in consideration for elderly relatives; but we were very secular, I don't think that anybody in my close kin network had any strong religious inclinations; organized religion had not played any part in my life but I have been curious about it; obviously later on when I became an anthropologist it is a source of wonder; what is going on, what is it that they have understood, and later in life I have befriended a number of theologians and am impressed by their erudition, humane intelligence, so I'm not at all dismissive of religion as I was in my teens, but it never played a part in my childhood; we never went to church, not even on Christmas Eve when many Norwegians go to church because of tradition; I might describe myself as a borderline agnostic-atheist; Gregory Bateson's father, the geneticist William Bateson, it is said read the Bible to his children every Sunday at breakfast, so they would not grow up in ignorance but know what they were leaving behind

0:08:08 On first memory, I have two; we lived in Oslo only until I was about two, then we moved up north because my father got a job with a Labour newspaper in the city of Bodø in northern Norway where we lived for four years; we returned to southern Norway just in time for me to start school, and we went to a Catholic kindergarten which was apparently the best in town; one of my memories from there - I must have been about four and I'd just learnt to read and was reading Donald Duck comics, sitting on the steps in front of the kindergarten, dressed up in winter clothes, next to a friend of mine who's name was Knut, and I was reading aloud from this comic to him, and I have this very distinct concrete memory of this so that must be true; the other memory from around the same time was when I was accompanying my mum to the grocery shop on my way home from kindergarten, and was made to wait outside while she went in to get her groceries, and it was bitterly cold and there was an Arctic gale blowing; I have often thought later in life that maybe it was that kind of experience that inoculated me against the cold winter activities that many Norwegians engage in and which I have difficulties with

0:10:14 By the time I started school [in 1968] we had moved south, to Tønsberg, which is the oldest town in Norway, located about 100km south of Oslo, along the Oslo Fjord, a very good place to grow up, where my dad got another job as the editor of an eventually doomed Labour newspaper; I started school at six; I was a little bit ahead of the others because I really wanted to start school, so I had to pass a test to be able to start a year before everybody else because at that time Norwegian children started school at seven; we had a primary school at the time which only contained the three first classes, in other words only 1st, 2nd and 3rd primary, then we had to move to another school for the 4th, 5th and 6th; it was very intimate and gemeinschaftlich; we were not on first names with the teachers but we knew where they lived, and sometimes we knew their children; it was very localized and at the time Norway was very white, very homogeneous; but in terms of class, and that has struck me later in life reflecting on my own childhood, in term of class outside the big cities like Oslo and Bergen, everybody goes to school with everybody else; this mean that among my school mates you had the son of an unemployed welder who used to work before he was laid off, at the local shipyard; there was also the daughter of a local ship-owner - this was a shipping town so obviously they were incredibly wealthy and had several cars even in the 1960s; that exposed you to a certain kind of diversity but within a sort of enclosed conformist world; the world was much less diverse in the early sixties and seventies than it would later become, both in terms of ethnicity and other things

0:12:40 At that age I read comics and continued to do so for a number of years; I think there are certain kinds of children, and I was one of them, who early on develop a passion for astronomy and dinosaurs, that sort of thing, so I did have that which would soon lead to an interest in science fiction literature; among the comics I read between seven and eight years was 'Superman', so that kind of world that transcends the tedium of the everyday, had a great attraction for me at that time; we did explore, I didn't stay at home just reading comics; I did have friends, and we did go out and as I grew up along the coast, and at the time, parents, certainly mine, had a relaxed relationship and were much less worried about their children than parents nowadays, certainly much less worried than when I had kids; so we were just left to our own devices much of the time at a very early age; we got on our bikes and went out, and in Summer we went swimming and in Winter we might go into the forest and look for some way of performing some mischievous act; the most important thing about that part of Norway is that people have boats, it's a boating culture, it was a whaling town, it was shipping, not so much fishing in that part of the country; that is mostly in the west and north; we also had a small boat; at first just a rowing boat in which we could go out from the shore to some little island and swim; those are some of my fondest memories; in Winter there was a bit of ice-skating; in that part of Norway we didn't get much snow or it didn't settle as it was too mild, so skiing was never an important part of my life, but ice-skating, yes; I should add that child-labour was less taboo than it is now; I grew up a bit outside the town where there were farms nearby, and we could from the age of nine or ten, earn a bit of pocket money by picking strawberries or harvesting onions, which was considered perfectly legitimate

0:15:48 I didn't take much part in [junior] secondary school in Norway as we moved to Kenya; my dad had projects for UNESCO, trying to build rural newspapers; somehow it resonates a bit with the anthropological way of thinking because rural Kenyans at the time, in the mid-1970s, many of them learnt how to read, at least in a rudimentary way, but they didn't have much to read; books were too expensive and didn't seem relevant to them; the newspapers were published in Nairobi and were everywhere and in English, but they didn't really speak to rural people's concerns; so the idea was to produce newspapers which were sold really cheaply, to engage with people's local concerns, such as how to clean your drinking water, who has sold goats to whom, what's happening in the church this coming Sunday, very basic stuff; so he developed a newspaper in Murang'a, a bit north of Nairobi in a Kikuyu-speaking area, and also a project in Ghana in West Africa; so we lived in Nairobi for a couple of years and went to school there, which I have since visited on a couple of occasions when I have been in Nairobi, and it is still there and still looks pretty-much the same; I was very excited by going to Africa and full of anticipation; the odd thing was that we left Norway at the height of Summer in July, and it was very hot; I remember my dad saying to the taxi-driver that we were going on a long journey all the way to Africa, and the taxi-driver said we'd get even hotter weather there; coming to Nairobi, it was the middle of the cold season, and Nairobi is quite high at 1600 m, so it was 19° and overcast; that was a bit different from what we'd expected, but regarding culture-shock, I can't really remember any, only a lot of excitement about being in a different place where people looked different, and spoke a different language, and also going to a school which was quite different from the one I was used to because Norwegian schools were already then, in the 1970s, quite liberal and quite concerned with making children feel safe and happy and that kind of attitude towards education, whereas St Mary's, run by Irish monks, so also a Catholic school, in Nairobi, was quite authoritarian, quite strict, with physical punishment and very severe sanctions; there was also ruthless ranking of students; after every major test there was a list that was displayed publicly of every student, ranked from 1 to 33; so everybody could go and have a look and see somebody was doing very badly this term; in fact that was more of a shock than being exposed to Africa, at least the way I remember it; I reacted negatively to the system but it also encouraged a competitive spirit in myself; I wanted to do well; after all I was about thirteen-fourteen and you are receptive to this kind of influence; but we did talk about it at home, noting differences and feeling sorry for those that always came at the bottom of the tables; there was real competition; in my class at St Mary's at that time we had one third Europeans, a third Africans, a third Indians due to the large Indian population in East Africa; as I remember it the hierarchy in school in terms of grades and so on, did not follow ethnic lines at all; [some] African students were doing really well and there were some Europeans who were doing really badly, so at least there the colonial spirit was not being reproduced; but this was just a decade or so after Independence for countries like Kenya; twelve years after Independence it was still very fresh and there was a lot of optimism, and people really believed in development and progress; it was a very good time to be in Africa; in the 1980s a lot of things would turn sour and many would stop believing in progress and development, but at that time there was still a strong feeling and our teachers also told us so; we had both Indian and European teachers, but no Africans; the Indians were Catholics from Goa who taught us maths and so on, and they also told us that Kenya was getting there, we are not quite there yet, but wait a few decades and then we'll be up there with the Europeans; I had a very good French teacher, and she saw you as an individual; some of us had special needs in a positive sense, and we needed challenges; whereas some of the other teachers were a bit more aloof and would speak to all of us as one sort of blob, which was common at the time; we did engage in games after school on a couple of days a week; I was never very good at hockey, football was OK because we played that at home, cricket I could never get my head around as it is complicated for an outsider, but both my brother and I were on the swimming team, though he was a bit better than me; one of the things I started to do in Kenya at St Mary's was to play squash and I have continued to do that; so squash is my preference but I also played a bit of tennis in adult life; I have played squash regularly with an anthropologist friend of mine until very recently, and because I fell ill I had to stop doing that sort of thing a couple of years ago

0:23:52 After two years in Kenya we moved back to Norway; my dad continued to work in Africa but he commuted, staying a month or two and then coming back; he had a project, and when he fell ill and later died, he was working on the freedom of the press in South Africa, and was briefly arrested by the Apartheid State so we were very proud of him; I was then seventeen and starting to understand a bit about what was going on in the world, but unfortunately he never completed that project and he died at just forty-five; he died of lung cancer; it was very significant as it is that kind of sadness that never leaves you, when it's someone you have been very close to and you have admired; I have often thought that so many of the things I have done later in life I have done for him because he left us just at the time that my brother and I were becoming adults; but as he said, he knew that he was going to die, but he told my aunt that he knew he had had a good life and he had two boys who were going to be alright, because you can sometimes see this in adolescent teenagers, and he reckoned that we would stay out of trouble and do well, so at least he could reconcile himself with that

0:25:47 Back at school in Norway, I think probably the experience in Africa - it's hard to tell, the causalities are always complicated, people sometime tell me that the reason I became an anthropologist was because I lived in Africa as a teenager, but it is not as simple as that; I had an interest in exploring the world as a child, long before we went to Africa, and there were other influences; in secondary school after returning from Africa I developed a strong interest in global issues which would eventually attract me to anthropology - global injustice, environmentalism, that sort of thing, anarchism, existentialism; I was also just like my dad, fairly critical and a voracious reader, so I read all kinds of stuff which I hardly understood as a teenager - Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialists, lots of English literature - Huxley, Orwell, the usual suspects, but also Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul, and eventually Salman Rushdie; I did not specialize in the sciences when I had to make that choice but did languages and social science; I am reasonably good at languages and have a passing knowledge of quite a number in the sense that I can read them - Swedish, Danish, English, French, Mauritian Creole, Spanish, German, Italian; I can read most of the main West European languages, but I am reluctant to speak most of them unless I have to, in which case I do; we did not automatically go to university and we were the first generation; there is a nice concept in Scandinavia introduced a few years ago by a Swedish historian of ideas called Ronny Ambjörnsson, and Ronny is a name in Swedish and Norwegian that has certain class connotations; if your name in Ronny you are not upper-class, you are more likely to be an unemployed mechanic or something; his book was called 'My Name is Ronny', and everybody knows what this means; and he speaks about the class journey which was something that took place all over the West after the Second World War, in the sense that the children were better-educated than their parents; so at the time when I completed secondary school in 1980 about half of the Norwegian nineteen-year-olds took that particular exam, others took vocational training or something else which was theoretically oriented; ten years later about half the Norwegian population went to university; so there has been this enormously fast development of higher-education in the country which is often not commented on because it has serious implications for the kind of society we have; so it was not automatic that I should go to university but it was expected by my parents, eventually by my mum, that I probably will; my parents did not have much by way of formal education; my dad had one year of something called the Journalist Academy, a kind of polytechnic one-year training as a journalist, and then was just sent out into the world to make his career; my mother [and father met at that Academy and she eventually] had three years of teacher's college, and that was it; but both my brother and I went to university and he did informatics, biology, mathematics and physics and I did sociology, philosophy and anthropology; at the time you took one year of each subject and you did get to read quite a bit when you took philosophy as you had a full year of just that subject; I took sociology first, then anthropology, they I cheated a bit because I took the first year anthropology in just one semester, a bit rushed as I wanted to finish, and then philosophy afterwards before returning to anthropology; but it had not really been my ambition to become an academic, I had never thought I would be one; I went to Oslo University, I did everything there, we didn't have any exchange programs or anything like that at the time; I had not really intended to stay at university, I had no idea what I was going to do; I was a kind of late hippy with ecological and anarchist inclinations; I thought maybe I would be a writer or a development worker, so going to university was something I had just planned to do for a little while before sorting out what I really wanted to do in the world; here we are, forty years on, in the same university and the same building, so there must have been something right about it; the teachers were part of the reason; in sociology we had some fabulous teachers like Vilhelm Aubert, one of the leading sociologists of law in the country, and a very good micro-sociologist who taught us Goffman and interaction theory and that sort of thing; we had Dag Østerberg who was the main interpreter of Sartre and of continental philosophy in the country, who taught us Max Weber, Durkheim and the classics in ways that probably nobody else would have be capable of doing at the time; a third teacher in sociology was a man who is still with us, a man called Stein Bråten who does some very innovative work in the interface between development psychology and sociology, where he argues against theories of people like Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget about child development in a very fascinating way; so we had these three fabulous teachers in sociology; in anthropology I also had teachers who mattered much to me, several of whom later became my colleagues; since I later worked with ethnicity and nationalism it is often assumed that I was one of Fredrik Barth's students, but he didn't have any students as such in Oslo; Fredrik Barth was in Bergen in the 1960s until the early 70s when he developed the Bergen school of social anthropology, but in Oslo he had the Chair at the Ethnographic Museum not at the Department of Social Anthropology; it is just down the road, four stops on the tram, very near physically but very distant in other ways; he had no teaching obligations at the department and relationships between Fredrik Barth and the Department of Social Anthropology were not very good, there were some tensions there; so we didn't really know him well, but when the students asked him, which we did sometimes, to come and give a lecture he always obliged, and was brilliant, charismatic, mesmerising, but he was not a major influence on me; the thing is that when I was an undergraduate I was highly critical of Fredrik Barth; I had already been shaped or influenced by continental social philosophy which was a very different way of approaching the world; I felt much closer intellectually to people like Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas, the structural-functionalists, the structuralists, the people who reckon that persons were the products of society and not the other way around, whereas Fredrik's methodological individualism, his transactionalism seemed to us not the right way of approaching things, the rational actor approach for which he was still famous; one major influence on me at the time was Eduardo Archetti who died some years ago, originally from Argentina who taught us structural Marxism, structuralism; he had studied with Godelier in Paris so he brought that strain of anthropology into Oslo in a very significant way; Eduardo Archetti was also very imaginative, he was good with metaphors, so he was a liberating force to think with; another important teacher for me was Axel Sommerfelt who had been a student of Max Gluckman, he had worked in Southern Africa, he had worked at the University of Salisbury in the 1960s before being thrown out by Ian Smith in 1966 because he sided with the students during the Unilateral Declaration of Independence for white Rhodesia; so Axel Sommerfelt was an Africanist and he was my supervisor, both for my M.Phil. and later for my Ph.D.; he was very reasoned, he didn't publish much apart from book reviews, but he was very learned; he knew everything, he had read everything, and he followed the recent developments in Africanist anthropology; a third teacher who was also a lasting influence on me was Harald Eidheim who was probably one of the people who influenced Frederik Barth's thinking on ethnicity; Harald Eidheim had worked in the far north of Norway on Saami-Norweigian ethnic relations; one of the things he discovered was that there doesn't need to be much by way of cultural difference for there to be ethnicity; everybody in this village, in this northern fjord knew who was Saami and who was Norwegian, but to an outsider they were indistinguishable; they spoke the same dialect, they looked the same and they worked with the same things, and applied for the same jobs, but everybody knew who was what; so he taught me something about the semiotics of ethnicity, ethnicity as the exchange of science, that kind of thing; so I had some good teachers who have been a lasting influence

0:38:03 One of the aspects of being a mass university and not an elite university is that you have far larger numbers of students; at the time we were about 50 who took the undergraduate program in social anthropology, which is not a terrible lot; the first year I taught in 1990 at this level there were 300; we had lectures and seminar groups that were led by advanced students, but informally we got to know the teachers quite well, even during the first year; we organized our own little seminar groups, we could invite them out for coffee and they could sit down with us; they had more time, they didn't go to conferences all the time, they didn't have to publish fifteen papers a year, so they had more time to devote to students; so we got to know them quite well even though not through formal arrangement of tutorials like at the best British universities; on Marxism, by the time I became a student of anthropology - talking about the early 80s - some of the steam had gone, but in the 1970s it led to deep friction and tensions at our department, as in many other places, because you had these die-hard, sometimes very dogmatic Marxists who really came to lectures well-prepared to take down the lecturer who was a liberal, bourgeois intellectual, that sort of thing; some of the teachers never fully recovered from that onslaught from clever, uncompromising, hostile students; by the time I became a student this had abated somewhat; there was structural Marxism, we read Godelier and Meillassoux and so on, and learnt from them, but it was no longer, in a sense, obligatory to relate to them; by the early 80s, Post-Modernism had somehow managed to seep into anthropology in a way, and Geertzian hermeneutics, that kind of thing; we read Geertz, that is one of the advantages of being located in the semi-periphery is that you don't belong, are not intellectually committed to one particular intellectual tradition, you can be more eclectic, which can be an advantage, and in our case it meant that we read just as much - we were still somehow a branch of British social anthropology, I guess, with Fredrik Barth as a "mother's brother" in the lineage system, but we did read a lot of American anthropology, Geertz, Sahlins; one of the books that really mattered to me as an undergraduate was Sahlin's 'Culture and Practical Reason' which was not an easy read, but he was trying to move on and there was a sense that he was trying to make things clear for himself regarding the relationship between the material and the symbolic and the autonomy of culture; that was a powerful influence on me at the time; we read Geertz and Sahlins, and eventually people like Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz, but the main tradition was British social anthropology; but we also had French, not much German though; Evans-Pritchard - definitely, everything by him, and of course Malinowski - the entire canon, Victor Turner, and I've already mentioned Mary Douglas - all of these people were considered pillars of the anthropological enterprise, the children of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and Jack Goody - absolutely, 'Production and Reproduction'; I also, early as an undergraduate became interested in the kind of thing that somehow I have returned to now, namely information and communication technology; Marshall Mcluhan, not quite anthropology, but he reviewed Margaret Mead's books, but Jack Goody's work on literacy and the state; one of the things that impressed me at the time was that Goody was able and willing to work on a rather grandiose, ambitious, comparative project, unlike many anthropologists who were talking about comparison but never actually carried them out; he did, he tried to say something substantial about literacy in different kinds of society; Lewis Mumford has an intellectual relationship to Mcluhan; Mcluhan wrote mainly about media and Mumford wrote mainly about cities, but they are arguing pretty much the same kinds of thing, something about diversification in [increasingly complex societies]

0:44:11 After my undergraduate degree I decided to continue with anthropology; I did flirt for a while with doing a post-graduate degree in philosophy and started very briefly, but found I had already fallen in love with anthropology; one reason was that in anthropology you could raise interesting philosophical questions but engaging with people out there instead of just discussing it amongst intellectuals which I found a bit unsatisfactory; one other reason was that anthropology was the only subject that I knew about that was not Eurocentric, at least in theory in the sense that you see Europe as the centre of the world; sociology was very much about studying industrial society, philosophy was mainly the lineage from the Greeks onward in Europe, which is fine by itself but I wanted something more; in anthropology what we try to teach, and what we learnt at the time, was that all human lives are interesting; people in a village in New Guinea are just as interesting, and their lives are just as valuable, as stock brokers in Manhattan, neither more nor less; there was a sort of symmetry which accorded everybody a place in the sun which I found very attractive; the third thing is that in the anthropology department there was always someone who had just returned from the field and had stories to tell that could tell you something about the world, about the human condition, and I found all of this very attractive; so I decided to continue on my academic career but in parallel I was doing other things; I was writing, journalism, for a monthly anarchist, libertarian paper called Gateavisa, which means 'The Street Paper', which had a fairly good circulation at the time, 10-15,000; I wrote a lot about ecology, eventually I wrote about some anthropologists like Gregory Bateson, and about music and literature, and had a good time doing this on the side while I was also studying; I also had a part-time job as a night-watchman in a hotel; it was a good job if you were able to stay awake because nothing happened during the night and they actually paid you just to sit there and read anthropology or other things; so I had several interests, went to concerts, was very much into certain forms of music; I have always liked classical music, but there's rock, jazz and progressive rock; I soon got into things like groups like 'Soft Machine' and 'King Crimson' and 'Genesis' from the early 1970s; I do play a bit of sax still, and I played in a prog-rock band for a few years with mainly men of my own age; I also continued my studies in anthropology and after a time had to decide what to do for my M.Phil.; we had a system at the time that entailed a full year of fieldwork and a dissertation of c250pp, almost like a doctoral thesis; I had to decide on a place to go; my first idea was Kenya, to look at the relationship between the modern and traditional sector in the economy, the way in which people migrated from the countryside into Nairobi to work in the formal economy, to perform wage work, and at the same time they would have a shamba, a small farm somewhere in the countryside which was tended by their wife or wives and children; I wanted to look at the relationship, not just in economic terms but also in cultural terms of this movement back and forth between something that was industrial, modern, individual, based on labour contract and something that was based on a completely different set of cultural and economic premises; just as I was about to finalize my plans for the fieldwork there was a crisis between Norway and Kenya; this happens very rarely, and all the Norwegian aid workers etc. moved from Nairobi to Harare because Zimbabwe was a still a place that was feasible for them to be; so it was not possible for me to get the kinds of permit that I needed so I really quickly had to find a new place to do fieldwork; I then stumbled across a book by V.S. Naipaul which I hadn't read, a collection of essays, called 'The Overcrowded Barracoon' which was about Mauritius where he had been briefly in the 1970s; he described it as a sort of absurd place where people from all over the world are thrown together for no purpose, and it is over-populated, there are ethnic tensions and everybody just wants to get out; typically, Naipaul's view of the world, he always sees the glass as half empty; there was also an interesting resonance that I would later exploit in my later work in Trinidad between the Caribbean history, Trinidadian history, and Mauritian history; there were several things about Mauritius that titillated me and worked my curiosity, not least the fact that it seemed it hadn't been explored or studied much by anthropologists in the past; it is located on the wrong side of the Atlantic and is not really part of the Caribbean because it is in the Indian Ocean; it is in a sense a Caribbean island located in the Indian Ocean in some ways; it is both French and English so neither French nor English anthropologists had somehow laid claim to it; the only major anthropologist to have worked on Mauritius at the time, in the 1980s, was Burton Benedict who wrote mainly about Indians and economic anthropology; so this seemed to be a good alternative so I ended up going to Mauritius for my first proper fieldwork

0:51:00 It was a big adventure, and it changed my life; the kind of cultural identity I came from in my early to mid-twenties was grim, pessimistic, post-industrial habitus, where everybody was very pale and we were always dressed in black, listening to incredibly depressing music, and we read philosophers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and generally agreed that life was probably meaningless, and we came from the most affluent place in the world, Northern Europe in the mid-1980s; then I came to Mauritius and I settled eventually in a fishing village; the people had nothing, they were poor, living hand to mouth basically, and they were positive about their lives, they were optimists, smiling, cheerful, enjoying every little pleasure they could get; after a week there I realized there was no turning back to my former pessimism, you cannot countenance that after that experience; but it also changed my life in different ways because Mauritius is a place where people of very different ethnic and religious identities live together in a confined space without much friction; I'm not saying that they love each other and there aren't any tensions but they have found ways of living together which are viable and compatible with democracy and economic growth and a high level of life satisfaction; so it changed my life in that way as well; the year I spent in 1986 both shaped me intellectually and, I guess, personally; I made friends, some of whom I am still in contact with because I go back to Mauritius now and then, and today with electronic communication you can text-message, be on Facebook, so you can communicate with them in different ways; I had a handful of very close friends, some of whom I have known now for thirty years, and also some new friends because they are now developing social science in very promising ways at the University of Mauritius; there was hardly anything in 1986, and now it's thriving with sociology, economics, and there are skilled people, some of whom have Ph.Ds from South Africa and Europe; so I did get close to people in that period; it is one of the things that people who are not anthropologists perhaps fail to recognise that you develop moral and existential commitments which may be life-long to some of the people you work with in the field, because you get to know them personally and that's part of our methodology; you use yourself in a sense as a research instrument; you don't have anything between you and the people you work with; even before returning from Mauritius I started to correspond with hand-written letters, we didn't have computers as we have today; I wrote to a couple of anthropologists in the UK who I knew had an interest; I had already corresponded with Burton Benedict; he had lost interest in Mauritius, responded politely, but didn't really engage in enduring intellectual exchange, but I contacted Maurice Bloch and Adam Kuper; Maurice Bloch works in Madagascar so he was physically or geographically quite near, though culturally very different from Mauritius; Mauritius is a place of migrants and doesn't have any indigenous groups, but he had had a Ph.D. student who had worked in Rodrigues, which is a dependency of Mauritius, with a creole population; so he very kindly received me in his office at the L.S.E. when I returned, as I was passing through London on my way home; Adam Kuper had a group of M.A. students while he was at Leiden, who did brief stints in Mauritius, just three months each; I contacted Adam Kuper who was by then a big name in anthropology and he generously received me and invited me to his local pub on a Saturday afternoon; we had a long chat about Mauritius and about other things, and I have been in contact with him since then and he has been supportive of my work, so I am immensely grateful to Adam Kuper for this; I came as a young student and nobody knew about me, but he was so generous in every way

0:56:48 I did a Ph.D. in Oslo after finishing my M.Phil. thesis entitled 'Communicating Cultural Difference and Identity' about the relationship between ethnic identities and over-arching national identity in Mauritius in 1987; then I briefly worked as an information officer with NORAD the Norwegian aid agency while applying for a Ph.D. fellowship; then I got it; but I also applied for another job, as I was still not convinced that I would be an academic, with a development agency in Tanzania on integrated village development; the idea was that it is not enough to give a school or to dig a well or to set up a small factory; you have to think holistically about village development, and this idea attracted me; I applied for the job but I didn't get it, they gave it to a local instead who was probably far better; so I then applied for a Ph.D. and got it, but of course, if I had got the job in Tanzania my life might have turned out very differently; I then got the Ph.D. fellowship and went on to do fieldwork in Trinidad; Axel Sommerfelt was still my supervisor but by then I had started to have conversations with other anthropologists as well, both in Norway and elsewhere; I then got to know Fredrik Barth, for example, as I did not really know him as a student; he was by then completing his book from Bali and starting to think about the possibility of doing something in Bhutan, but still very keen to discuss and very open-minded, a very good listener and far more open to diverse intellectual influence than many people think because in his writings he can seem a bit dogmatic, certainly in his earlier writings; but in my experience he read quite a bit; he didn't read everything as thoroughly as he might but he had a really good overview of what was going on and a really strong intuition; he never really did any long fieldwork, usually for a few months; possibly one of his best books 'Nomads of South Persia' in about 1960 was based on three months of fieldwork and he didn't speak the language; yet it is considered by specialists to be a really good book; so it shows that he had great intuition, both as an observer he knew what he was looking for and how to find it, and he had a good overview; so he was the one who recommended Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's 'Laboratory Life'; he said that this was something new which one should look at even if you couldn't use it; he was a good listener as well as being rather a wise man

1:00:27 The theme of my work in Trinidad was almost the same as my work in Mauritius because the idea was to produce a comparative anthropology of Mauritius and Trinidad; some things are similar, basically the same waves of migration, first slavery and the sugar industry and then Indian indentureship, and even Chinese traders, in both places, plus a small European elite, with French creoles in Trinidad who don't speak French any more; so the idea was to make a comparison because there are some interesting differences; Trinidad is completely dominated by Afro-Caribbean culture, both in term of numbers, Afro-Caribbeans are the most numerous group, and also in terms of their geographical location in this larger world of the Caribbean, whereas Mauritius is closer to India and far more isolated, and has a larger proportion of its population of Indian origin; so these were some of the variables I was looking at and comparing, and discussing, again, the relationship between different forms of identification and the ways in which people articulate similarity and difference in these complex societies, and to what extent they a capable of creating something resembling a shared identity, notwithstanding the very considerable diversity that defined; what I did find in the end was that the cultural diversity is far less than one might expect; there is ethnic diversity, and again you know the influence from my old teacher Harald Eidheim who had showed that in Northern Norway you could have fairly unequivocal, strict ethnic boundaries without there being much cultural variation; the same thing in a place like Trinidad; people have to a great extent the same culture but different identities; so I problematise some of these categories in anthropology, and try to move from the paradigm posited in 'Ethnic Groups and Boundaries' (1969); one of the things that is lacking from that book, which was a major influence on studies of ethnicities, was a interest or concern with the State which is almost absent, and also concern with the anomalous, people who don't fit in who are neither this nor that; especially in Trinidad there is quite a large group known as douglas who are [a mix of] African and Indian, both this and that at the same time, and what about them in a society which is obsessed with the boundary between the African and the Indian, who are only about 20% of the population; so I was working with this kind of thing for my Ph.D.; the Ph.D. wasn't my finest hour, not my best piece of work; I published a collection of articles around the same time called 'Us and Them in Modern Society', mainly articles which had been published elsewhere, in 1992, which is much better than the dissertation; the dissertation is a bit chaotic, a bit unstructured and I'm not too pleased with it now, but I passed, and my first examiner was Bruce Kapferer and he was very supportive, which was flattering to me of course; he liked it even with all it's obvious shortcomings

1:04:15 I then became a lecturer at Oslo, in the job I have held since, so have been in the same place forever, which is a bit strange in some ways but that's the way things happen; so it has been a good place for me, but I should also say that one reason that I have stayed in Norway is personal, because I got married in 1995; I was settling at the University of Oslo but seriously considering doing other things; I was planning fieldwork in India and had started to learn Hindi and had managed to get the funding; I was going to look at marriage strategies, or rather, practices in an industrial area in India, my hypothesis being that something happens to marriage strategies when women start to work and you get a more individualized labour market as you do in industrial areas; so I had located a place outside Delhi which seemed appropriate; I had been there on a short visit and started to build contacts and started to learn Hindi; but I then met the woman who would become my wife and we are still happily married; she is a publisher and she is not just married to me but also married to the Norwegian language, so we have stayed in Norway; she was the managing director of the largest publishing company in Norway for many years; in fact she has just resigned from her job as she just wanted to do other things; with digitization and the new technologies one finds you can be quite connected, part of the conversation, everywhere, almost no matter where you are; in the 1980s I felt incredibly isolated up there, the far north is cold and dismal, an almost unpopulated place; I was thinking of going somewhere where it might be either pleasant or interesting to be - Brazil, Mauritius, Britain, South Africa - and thinking about these options, but nothing came of it at the time; then by the 1990s we felt that with cheap calls, with the incipient internet coming into the world, and with the increased ease of travelling, you no longer felt isolated; you could pop over somewhere for a conference, go somewhere just to meet someone, and you could be in contact electronically, so I have not felt that as a major obstacle one of the aspects of being in a small place is that you don't get the intellectual impulses that you need to develop; yes and no - there is also less pressure; there is pressure where we are, but probably less so than at Harvard or at Oxford; there may be a case for the small place; in the [US] you have the liberal arts college or the university which is a little bit on the semi-periphery where we have perhaps a little bit more elbow room in some ways; I'm relating this to what I said earlier about being in a small place where you have the freedom to expose yourself to diverse intellectual influences because you are not part of one very strong tradition that there is a great expectation that you should defend and promote

1:09:01 I think we should make anthropology matter in many ways; in most Western countries there are academics who are public intellectuals and I feel more of them should be anthropologists, they don't need to be card-carrying anthropologists but they should at least have an anthropological approach, in the sense that you take the lives of ordinary people seriously, you are committed to making those stories heard that otherwise are invisible and that you have a kind of anthropological approach to the world whereby, in the words of Malinowski, we try to make the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic; I think there is a job to be done there, not least in this time of frictions, tensions, migration and identity politics, and in the debates about human nature which had almost been monopolised by evolutionary people; I think what they say is fine but it is only part of the truth, and we know that and should say so in so many words; so I think we have many discourses, many roles to play in public life, and we are under-selling ourselves a bit by staying too much in our own seminar room, talking amongst ourselves; so we should be more active and out-going and I have done this forever, not least because while I was a student I had already done some journalism, so I am comfortable writing shorter pieces, which many of us are not; it's a different register, a different way of communicating because you talk in a different way to a different set of people; you don't have a lot of time and need to get to the main points, you need to simplify sometimes, but of course, make it as simple as possible but not simpler, as one might say (I believe it was said by Albert Einstein), but don't make is simpler because there is far too much of that around, and we see that also in the popular literature on the human condition, where I often feel that anthropologists or people with an anthropological perspective would have done a better job; that has been one background for my own engagement, and it also came into anthropology through academic studies, not only out of curiosity but out of academic motivation, the idea being that in order to change the world you have to understand it first, as Marx famously said, so using knowledge to make the world a slightly wiser and better place; the way I have gone about it is by taking part and contributing to newspapers, being part of radio programmes - I go on the radio maybe once a week still, and sometimes on TV; in a country like Norway that is also the difference between a country like Britain since, there are so few of us each of us has to wear several hats, in a bid to contribute to population growth you need to have several identities to fill all the vacant niches; as a result some of us who are capable to talking on radio, capable of producing coherent answers lasting no more than a minute or two to a question from a journalist, are being contacted quite often; we sometime have to leave our own comfort zone, so that if you are a specialist on ethnicity in Mauritius and you have written about conflict, as I have in the early '90s, I was suddenly contacted when war broke out in Yugoslavia because they felt that I should be able to comment on this as well; on Yugoslavia, I tried to do a decent job on it, but in a larger country there would have been dozens of experts on the Balkans to ask, but in Norway there weren't at the time; so I strongly feel that there should be a closer connection; we should do both the slow and thorough stuff that we do, we should work with students the way we have always done, but we should also go out a bit and speak to other kinds of audiences; it has been said by a science fiction author who is also a friend of mine in Norway, that the point about science is that it really about a society sending out a probe into space, and it's meant to return after a while and tell us what it has found; far too often, we send out the probe and we have great expectations, but it never returns to tell us; it just stays out there

1:14:33 I began using the web quite early; I set up my first web-site in 1996; it was great fun to put out little articles trying to engage people in discussions; it has transformed quite a bit since then; at the moment my web-site looks far tidier, and I have had some professional help from someone who has redesigned it because I realized it was just too much for me; I have also started to work, not with video, but a pod-cast, mainly in Norwegian but with a few [episodes] in English, called 'Hylland's World' in English; the first twelve episodes were just completed this Spring of 2019 are about the smart phone; I have spoken to twelve different people - some of them extremely knowledgeable, some of them just interesting people who use smart phones - about their relationship to the smart phone, and what it does to us; that has been a new kind of experience; so this sort of poly-media world in which we live, my feeling is strongly that we can think more creatively, more imaginatively, about different ways of disseminating knowledge not to the detriment of producing authoritative scientific knowledge, but there are so many uses that that knowledge can now be put thanks to the new technological possibilities, everything from the blog to the pod-cast to the video interview and to various kinds of writings; it doesn't have to be just an academic article and a book; so I always tell students, if they have done a good M.A. try to write an op-ed for a newspaper based on your own work as there would be one in there that people deserve to know about; one thing about living in Norway, it may be easier to be a public intellectual there than in Britain because in proportion to the population there are far more media outlets; in a city like Oslo with less than a million we have eight or nine newspapers, so you'll find a place where you can put your article, someone will publish it if it's not horrible

1:17:13 I have written so much and I'm never 100% satisfied with anything that I've done; that is probably why I continue because with the next, everything will fall into place; one of the things I have been working on recently is accelerated change in general, the way in which economic change, technological change, cultural change in some domains takes place at an accelerated speed, so I should probably bring to a desert island the book called 'Overheating' from 2016 which I think is representative of many things that I have done over the years; possibly, but I am not sure about this, my most widely read book is probably the introduction to anthropology called 'Small Places, Large Issues' which I have written about seven times now, three Norwegian editions and four English editions; it has been translated and continues to be translated into new languages; initially, the Norwegian edition came first in 1993 and it developed after conversations with a publisher who wanted a new introductory textbook as they [felt they] couldn't use Roger Keesing any more, which we had used when I was a student; it was based partly on lectures that I'd given in lots of courses in the early 1990s, and obviously partly on other things; but part of the structure comes from my undergraduate lectures in anthropology, and then it had to be shortened and tweaked, changed for the first English edition, so it somehow evolved and the [latest, fourth] English edition is the seventh incarnation of that book; so I might actually bring that, though it's not so much a representation of my own thinking as so much of others