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Paper short abstract

Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s entry onto the Norwegian public stage was as sudden as it was seismic, but it would have been short-lived without content that never ceased to take the audience by surprise. Key to this was unrestrained comparison. What role does comparison play in public anthropology today?

Paper long abstract

Sociocultural anthropology grew out of comparisons. First, highly speculative cherry-picking, then gradually more systematic as the quality of ethnography forced a reorientation from attempts at grand synthesizing to more modest inquiries into the workings of individual societies and the principles of their reproduction and processes of change. Still, comparison retained its potential as a tool for reflexivity.

In the history of Norwegian public anthropology, Fredrik Barth used comparison extensively in the 1979 tv series “The lives of others – and our own”, where the Verfremdungseffekt was used with great effect to emphasize the key message: All things human might have been different. When Thomas Hylland Eriksen burst onto the national stage in the early '90s, it was with an even more distilled version of this message, conveyed with eloquence at improbable speed: Other worlds are not only possible, they are real, and there is a lot to be learned from them. The impact of his free-ranging comparisons was palpable. To those of us who had grown up in a world that had seemed determined by the iron curtain, his approach was liberating, both in the way it radically extended our spheres of perceived relevance and in the creativity these connections triggered.

As one who follows in Barth’s and Eriksen’s public anthropology footsteps, I find that neither broad nor piecemeal comparisons are as admissible as they were to them. Is this merely a sign of our insular times, or does it also say something about anthropology’s relationship with cross-cultural comparisons?