The magic of anthropology: Interview with Prof. Thomas Hylland Eriksen (University of Oslo)

Abstract

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. He is the author of many books, including widely used and translated textbooks in anthropology including Small Places, Large Issues (4th ed. 2014), Ethnicity and Nationalism (3rd ed. 2010), A History of Anthropology (2nd ed. 2010) and What is Anthropology? (2nd ed. 2017). He has also published extensively on identity politics, creolisation, and globalisation, and has done fieldwork on cultural complexity in Mauritius, Trinidad, and Norway. He has recently completed an ERC AdvGrant project titled Overheating on accelerated change, and has in this context published Overheating; An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (2016), Boomtown: Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast (2018), and the co-edited Identities Destabilised (2016) and Knowledge and Power in an Overheated World (2017, both with Elisabeth Schober), as well as Mining Encounters (2018, with Robert Jan Pijpers). He was President of EASA 2015–2016, Vice-President 2017–2018. In 2017, he was awarded the Research Prize of the University of Oslo.