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Norwegian Anthropologists Study Minorities at Home: Political and Academic Agendas

Norwegian Anthropologists Study Minorities at Home: Political and Academic Agendas Norwegian Anthropologists Study Minorities at Home: Political and Academic Agendas Thomas Hylland Eriksen ABSTRACT: Since the early 1960s, Scandinavian anthropologists have made considerable contributions to the study of ethnicity, an early high point having been reached with the 1967 Wenner-Gren conference leading to the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries in 1969. Later Scandinavian research on ethnicity and social identifi ca- tion more generally has been varied and rich, covering all continents and many kinds of majority/minority relations. However, over the last twenty years, anthropologists have increasingly focused on the study of the relationship between immigrant mi- norities and the majorities in their own countries. There are some signifi cant general diff erences between ethnicity research overseas and at home, shedding light on the theoretical constructions of anthropology as well as the ‘double hermeneutics’ be- tween social research and society. It can be argued that anthropology at home shares characteristics with both European ethnology (with its traditional nation-building agenda) and with sociology (which, in Scandinavia, is almost tantamount to the sym- pathetic study of the welfare state), adding a diluted normative relativism associated with the political views of the academic middle class (to which the anthropologists themselves, incidentally, belong). http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Anthropology in Action Berghahn Books

Norwegian Anthropologists Study Minorities at Home: Political and Academic Agendas

Anthropology in Action , Volume 16 (2) – Jun 1, 2009

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Publisher
Berghahn Books
Copyright
© 2022 Berghahn Books
DOI
10.3167/aia.2009.160203
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Norwegian Anthropologists Study Minorities at Home: Political and Academic Agendas Thomas Hylland Eriksen ABSTRACT: Since the early 1960s, Scandinavian anthropologists have made considerable contributions to the study of ethnicity, an early high point having been reached with the 1967 Wenner-Gren conference leading to the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries in 1969. Later Scandinavian research on ethnicity and social identifi ca- tion more generally has been varied and rich, covering all continents and many kinds of majority/minority relations. However, over the last twenty years, anthropologists have increasingly focused on the study of the relationship between immigrant mi- norities and the majorities in their own countries. There are some signifi cant general diff erences between ethnicity research overseas and at home, shedding light on the theoretical constructions of anthropology as well as the ‘double hermeneutics’ be- tween social research and society. It can be argued that anthropology at home shares characteristics with both European ethnology (with its traditional nation-building agenda) and with sociology (which, in Scandinavia, is almost tantamount to the sym- pathetic study of the welfare state), adding a diluted normative relativism associated with the political views of the academic middle class (to which the anthropologists themselves, incidentally, belong).

Journal

Anthropology in ActionBerghahn Books

Published: Jun 1, 2009

Keywords: ethnicity; history of anthropology; immigration; minorities; Norway; Sami

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