What is European about European anthropology?
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3928
L’idea sfuggente e contestata che esista un fenomeno come una antropologia europea, e non ultimo il dibattito in corso su di essa, contribuisce e riflette dibattiti generali, non meno aperti, sull’identità europea, le potenzialità e le carenze dell’Unione e le questioni concernenti i confini e i processi di esclusione e inclusione nel Continente. Tuttavia, questa sezione tematica non ha per oggetto semplicemente, e neanche principalmente, l’idea di Europa. Essa riguarda, forse maggiormente, le caratteristiche dell’antropologia in generale. Sosterrò, infatti, che la discussione in corso su una antropologia europea rispecchi, in modi talvolta sorprendenti, dibattiti teorici e controversie all’interno dell’antropologia stessa. A partire dalla lingua.
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Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Anuac
What is European about European anthropology?
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
8
Commentaries on Changing margins and relations within European anthropology
2019-12-29
2019-12-12
2019-12-29
2019-12-29
213-224
1
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
2019/12/29
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3928
213
University of Oslo, Norway
2239-625X
2
en
224
What is European about European anthropology?
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                                       2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 213-224




What is European about European anthropology?
Thomas Hylland ERIKSEN
University of Oslo




ABSTRACT: The elusive and contested idea that there exists such a phenomenon as a
European anthropology, and not least the ongoing discussion about it, reflects and
contributes to the general, no less ongoing debates about European identity, the
potentials and shortcomings of the European Union and questions concerning the
boundaries and processes of exclusion and inclusion within Europe. However, the
subject of this special section is not merely, or even mainly, the idea of Europe. It also
(and perhaps mainly) concerns the characteristics of anthropology. Indeed, I shall argue
that the ongoing conversation about a European anthropology mirrors theoretical
debates and controversies within anthropology itself, sometimes in surprising ways. Let
us begin with language.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Thomas Hylland Eriksen
What is European about European anthropology?
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 213-224.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3928
214                                                      THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN



How language unites and separates
   The question of language always enters into any reflection over the nature
and character of European anthropology. At the very first EASA conference,
in Coimbra in 1990, a Danish colleague suggested, during the Forum of
Members, that all members should be obliged to speak their second language
at the association’s events, in order to prevent the default dominance of
those whose first language was the hegemonic one.
   Or hegemonic ones: For years, English and French were not only the
association’s official languages, they were both actively used at the biennial
conferences and other events. Gradually, English became the only game in
town, mirroring the situation elsewhere in a rapidly globalising world.
   Power asymmetries, as indicated by our colleague in Coimbra, are
inherent in the linguistic practices of European anthropology. Not only does
the superior command of the hegemonic language enable native English-
speakers to perform better at conferences; by the same token, they also have
privileged access to the major journals and the most prestigious universities.
“International publications”, in non-metropolitan universities, simply
means books and articles published in English. This is well known, but bears
repeating, not least because of the repercussions of linguistic dominance in
the overall knowledge production at the global level. Anglophone
anthropology is read across Europe, either in the original or in translation.
The traffic in signs in the opposite direction is far more modest. This is not
just an issue in anthropology: in every genre, far more translations take
place from English than to English.
   At this point, being a non-metropolitan anthropologist starts to look like
an advantage rather than a handicap, as mentioned already in Hannerz and
Gerholm’s collection on non-metropolitan anthropologies (Hannerz,
Gerholm 1982; see also Boskovic 2008). Majorities need not know anything
about minorities, while minorities are forced to acquire the language and
skills of the majorities in addition to their own. This does not in itself make
them more powerful, but offers the opportunity of a broader outlook. A
familiar insight from anthropological studies of responses to globalisation is
that minorities appropriate foreign influences selectively and creatively,
incorporating them into pre-existing structures of significance rather than
relinquishing their own practices and notions, replacing them with recent
imports. Perhaps this could be said of the reception of metropolitan
anthropologies in the European peripheries as well; they enrich rather than
replace, and are tweaked and digested rather than swallowed wholesale.


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   As in majority–minority relations generally, power discrepancies cannot
be disregarded here either. Seen from a bird’s-eye perspective, the diversity
of languages on the European continent is enriching, but this is not
necessarily the way it is experienced on the ground, for reasons indicated
above. Local anthropologies published in domestic languages need not be
inferior in any way to those published in English, but they tend to stay under
the radar outside of their countries of origin. When they are translated, and
adapted to an Anglophone readership, which happens far too rarely,
something is lost, and this is often precisely that which makes ethnography
shine, namely the local flavour and unique ambience of the locality.
   There is nevertheless no good alternative to translation, even if the Italian
adage Tradurre è tradire – translating is treacherous – has some truth to it.
Funding and institutional arrangements should be established enabling the
traffic in signs to go both ways to a greater extent than what is presently the
case.

European anthropology and its Other
   Anthropological identity politics often emphasise the peculiarity and
uniqueness of anthropology as compared to other academic disciplines such
as economics or sociology. The identity politics within European
anthropology often contrasts the sprawling and diverse practices in this
continent with the mighty chorus of American anthropology. The distinction
between social and cultural anthropology has historically been invoked to
this effect, as has the contrast between social anthropology and the
American four-field approach institutionalised by Boas. The splitters among
us continue to emphasise these differences, while the lumpers argue that the
variation within European anthropology is in fact more substantial than the
systematic differences across the Atlantic Ocean – a familiar line of
reasoning to anthropologists, be they cultural or social, who study race or
ethnicity.
   Lumpers argue, moreover, that Transatlantic connections have grown
steadily in significance since the early meeting of the tribes that came about
in a post-war spirit of reconciliation and bridging, through the agency of
Raymond Firth and Sol Tax. Incidentally, Firth once abandoned a planned
collaborative effort on kinship with David Schneider, owing to differences in
approach (Kuper 1999: 150). Schneider was intent on restricting himself to
studying symbols and meaning, avoiding research on who did what with
whom, while Firth’s methods were founded in micro-sociology. Nowadays,
the general animosity expressed against American cultural anthropology
which was quite widespread, not least in certain British departments, in the
mid 20th century, is rare to come by.

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216                                                       THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN


   Yet differences between the ways anthropology is practised on the two
continents continue to exist, though perhaps in other places than often
assumed. The diversity caused by distinctive national histories and
languages remains a defining trait of European anthropology, unlike in the
USA, where diversity is expressed through specialisation instead. At a
European conference in the early 1990s, I once asked a senior colleague what
he thought of the event. He responded that it was really interesting, and
commented on the great wealth of variation and diversity, also qualitatively,
where papers ranged from outstanding to dismal. Well, I said, isn’t this
always the case? Not in the US, he responded; there, he claimed, everything
presented was professional in a particular, almost streamlined way.
   Scale also enters any comparison of this kind. The AAA has always been
the world’s largest national association by far, and it also has a much larger
membership, more financial muscle and a better infrastructure than the
EASA. All national and indeed transnational anthropologies are dwarfed by
the Americans. This has implications for employment – US academic world
is more fiercely competitive, but also offers a greater variety of opportunities
– than what is the case in European countries. Yet the linguistic uniformity
and common job market characterising American anthropology may also, as
noted, lead to a reduced diversity compared to what is the case within
Europe.
   Much of the theoretical work in anthropology takes as its point of
departure the relationship between the unique and the universal, or the
locally defined and the standardised, and discussions in European
anthropology about its relationship to American anthropology follow similar
lines of reasoning. If we were to widen the scope further and look at other
anthropologies, for example in Brazil or India (see e.g. Lins Ribeiro, Escobar
2006), I would guess that the relationship between bridging and dividing,
parsing and fusing, lumping and splitting, separating and amalgamating
would provide the friction necessary to ignite the spark of a fruitful
intellectual exchange, while the focus and substance would differ from the
relationship between European and American anthropologies. In other
words: To be continued.

Frictions within
   But, as the contributions to this book and other recent debates show,
European anthropology does not need an Other in order to generate the
kinds of differences and similarities necessary to create outlines (Bateson
1972). It may well be the case that a single-minded emphasis on the contrast


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between European and American anthropology may help to create cohesion
inside Europe, but the moment the Other disappears from sight, internal
differences become paramount, as predicted by the classic model of
segmentary oppositions (Evans-Pritchard 1940).
   At least three kinds of internal faultlines and hierarchies can easily be
identified within European anthropology. The centre-periphery dimension
has already been alluded to with reference to language hierarchies. In this
era of international institutional rankings, most European anthropologists in
academic positions are, presumably, at least vaguely aware of the position of
their home department in these hierarchies (and, possibly even their own
rank in the department). These rankings are misleading, but have effects
relevant for people’s work situation, and therefore need to be taken
seriously.
   Secondly, as pointed out by Chris Gregory (2015: 337), these institutional
hierarchies exist not only between, but also within countries, between the
large and prestigious institutions, often located to the capital, and smaller
research units where anthropologists tend to work in applied research and
teach interdisciplinary courses. Again, as with the language hierarchy, being
peripheral can be a blessing in disguise. In a small institution,
anthropologists are often employed in joint or thematic departments, which
enforces interdisciplinarity; and since their strictly anthropological networks
are too small to be intellectually self-sufficient, they often go to seminars
and events organised by other disciplines, thereby widening their horizon in
ways not immediately available in large and complex anthropology
departments. Besides, working in a slower, less prestigious institution may –
paradoxically – make it possible to do some serious intellectual work, since
the pressures of aimless competition are less pronounced.
   The third faultline is not mainly institutional or geographic, but rather
concerns the boundaries, scope and identity of anthropology. Since the
foundation of EASA, a familiar critique has been that the association seems
not only to organise anthropologists working in Europe, but to give priority
to the anthropology of Europe. While this was certainly not the intention –
hardly any of the EASA’s founders could be defined as a Europeanist – in
practice, anthropology in and of Europe are often one and the same thing.
Many European anthropologists carry out their research in their home
country, either out of necessity or desire. Relating to, and in some cases
congruent with, the old contrast between Volkskunde and Völkerkunde,
European ethnology and comparative anthropology, this tension continues
to exist, not least in Central and Eastern Europe (Buchowski, Cervinkova
2015; Čapo 2014). While social anthropology is by far the larger discipline,

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218                                                        THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN


ethnology has the advantage of a historical connection to nation-building
and has been instrumental in creating and shaping national heritages. This
may give ethnology the upper hand in competitions for funding and political
goodwill, not least in countries where ethnic nationalism is on the rise. Yet,
at the end of the day, it is about time that we learn to see European
ethnology and social anthropology as parts of the same intellectual
enterprise. In Argonauts, Malinowski spoke of ethnology being in a
“ludicrous” situation, the French distinction between ethnologie and
anthropologie refers to two of the layers of the anthropological endeavour,
and in many European settings, ethnology-cum-nation-building has
morphed into cultural history or cultural studies. There are more
complementarities than conflicts here, more similarities than differences,
and a part of the uniquely European approach to anthropology consists in
precisely the exchange, going back to the imperialism and nation-building of
the 19th century, between the domestic and the comparative.

Created locally, engaging locally
   Whether handmaidens in the service of nationalism or social critics,
European ethnologists have a longer and stronger tradition of engaging
domestically with greater society than social anthropology does.
Ethnologists are involved in museum work and school curricula, they write
reports to ministries of culture and submissions to real estate developers.
Anthropologists have been less visible. This stands to reason since the
concerned interest in domestic matters is always stronger than engagement
in faraway places. Yet local or domestic engagement among anthropologists
is on the rise, although we still struggle to find tools that may inflict a dent.
Ranting about neoliberalism or racism in our own seminar rooms, blogs and
journals is not sufficient.
   Although there is a great deal of overlap, each European country has its
own controversies, conflicts and channels for communicating and acting
upon perceived injustices. As pointed out by George Marcus (2008),
anthropologies are shaped by their national context. This does not just imply
that national traditions of anthropology differ somewhat from each other,
but also that the mode of engagement with greater society varies. Access to
media and politicians varies, as does the potential effect of petitions,
demonstrations or other calls to arms; moreover, the extent to which
academics are encouraged to be engaged in broader social issues varies. In
India, and to some extent Australia, anthropologists are expected to be
politically engaged advocates for groups or causes; this is not the case in the


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US, or for that matter the UK. There is nevertheless something unique about
the continents current crises which could actually help defining what is
European about European anthropology.
   One may perhaps ask whether anthropologists, representing a globally
comparative discipline, have a moral responsibility to be engaged with the
continents crises or, to scale down, domestic issues. The answer is positive,
partly because the anthropologists themselves and the people they relate to
are affected by changes in society; they are scholars, but also citizens.
Whether or not they work inside or outside academia (Hirvi 2016), are
involved in applied research or what is still known as “anthropology at
home”, anthropologists are in a unique position to analyse and criticise their
own society (Eriksen 2006) and to show how things could be done
differently. This is by default a result of the anthropological epistemology
and the comparative imagination which so often is essential for theoretical
advances in the discipline.
   At the same time, certain societal tendencies are closer to home than
others. In recent debates about European anthropology and its future, a
recurrent cluster of issues concerns changing working conditions. When
things improve, people rarely raise their voice, but in a situation of crisis, we
are quick to point out that the situation is unacceptable. In European
anthropology, the steadily intensifying scramble for scarce research funding
is often commented upon, as is the absurd amount of energy and time
devoted to research projects which are never funded (Blommaert 2016), or in
the slow takeover of universities by bureaucrats; as pointed out by Francisco
Martínez, “20 years ago, when people spoke of ‘the universityʼ, they were
referring to the faculty; nowadays, they are referring to the administration”
(Martínez 2016: 354). The logic of new public management, whereby a
research and teaching institution is dealt with politically as if it were a
textile factory, is also a recurrent theme, and rightly so (see Stein 2017 for a
recent critique). Both these interrelated tendencies strengthen the shared
identity as European anthropologists, not least now that the most attractive
research funding is pan-European.
   Another related social critique with a bearing on both general trends in
society and the situation of anthropological research targets neoliberalism,
as when Papataxiarchis (2015) argues that “neoliberal tendencies are
undermining [the] foundations” of anthropology. In the same issue of Social
Anthropology, Judith Okely (2015) argues that the acceleration of research,
aimed to increase the productivity of knowledge workers, encourages
interviews rather than “deep hanging out”. In this way, the practices of
proper fieldwork, which is time-intensive and slow, is being undermined.

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220                                                      THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN


   These are some of the ways in which intellectual possibilities, the societal
role of the university and the politics of a discipline such as anthropology
converge: Neoliberal policies and various versions of New Public
Management militate against long-term fieldwork involving participant-
observation, thereby directly influencing knowledge production. Precarity
and austerity, increasingly central terms in debates about European
anthropology, are part and parcel not only of academic life, but of society as
such. The same policies and ideological convictions that indirectly shape
methodologies also shape the academic job market, nudge job descriptions
towards the applied and instrumental, and are local expressions of the
hegemonic values of the society in which the anthropologists live. Seen from
this perspective, concerns about the politics of the discipline converge and
ultimately merge with broader societal concerns. Just as the debates about
the character of European anthropology converge with epistemological
questions about the character of anthropology, so do parochial concerns
about the conditions for our particular kind of academic work merge with
comprehensive aspects of contemporary society. This is one potentially
fruitful pathway for narrowing the gap between the ivory tower and the
outside world. Indeed, critique of the neoliberal university on the one hand,
and of xenophobic nationalism on the other, might serve as defining traits of
a European anthropology in the early 21st century.

European anthropology is cosmopolitan or it is nothing
   The original vision for the EASA was emphatically cosmopolitan in the
sense that a main objective was to facilitate communication between
different parts of the continent with different intellectual traditions and
languages. While the axis between Germanic and Romance languages was
initially the most important, a second line was opened suddenly and
unexpectedly with the disappearance of the Iron Curtain just as the first
EASA Executive, under Adam Kuper’s leadership, was planning the first
EASA conference, which would take place in Coimbra in 1990. From the
outset, then, the new association contained in its midst a range of European
anthropologies which was broader than anyone had envisioned. If anything,
the EASA became a cosmopolitan community of social anthropologists –
imperfect, imbalanced, at times hierarchical, yet it soon became the most
important arena for the creation, and contestation, of European
anthropology.
   What should we make of the term cosmopolitanism in this context? The
recent academic literature on cosmopolitanism reveals no shared definition
of the term, notwithstanding its intellectual debts to Kants late writings on


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world society (Hart 2003). While some speak of cosmopolitans as individuals
who are open to diversity and tolerant of difference (Hannerz 1996; Appiah
2006), or – less charitably – as a disembedded elite with a transnational class
habitus (Calhoun 2002; Friedman 1997), others (e.g. Beck 2000) see
cosmopolitanism as a political Weltanschauung competing with, and possibly
ultimately replacing, nationalism. Nigel Rapport posits a contrast between
cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, in an argument with both empirical,
methodological and ontological implications, which claims that
cosmopolitanism as a theoretical perspective “would liberate individuals
from the collective and the categorial ... as ascriptions” (Rapport 2007: 225).
As pointed out by Stade in a comment to Rapport, anthropologists have
“made the cosmopolitan either a defining quality of a particular research
method or an object of study” (Stade 2007: 227). In the former case,
cosmopolitanism becomes a way of looking at the social world as composed
essentially of relationships between individuals rather than bounded groups;
in the latter case, what emerges is an anthropology of cosmopolitanism
rather than a cosmopolitan anthropology (although the two are not
necessarily mutually exclusive).
   In a review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2006),
John Gray states that “[a]s a position in ethical theory, cosmopolitanism is
distinct from relativism and universalism. It affirms the possibility of mutual
understanding between adherents to different moralities but without
holding out the promise of any ultimate consensus” (Gray 2006).
   In other words, fervent missionary activity is not, according to this view,
compatible with cosmopolitanism, nor is an ethical position which assumes
that there is but one good life.
   Both in its research agenda and ethics, and in its internal conversations,
anthropology is ideally, and often in practice, a cosmopolitan project, not
one of convergence, standardisation and uniformity. Nor is it a project
searching for radical difference. within and outside the discipline as such. It
may well be that the oxymoron proposed by Alessandro Testa (2017: 372),
cosmopolitan Eurocentrism, captures what we do better than other attempts
to generalise.




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 Thomas Hylland ERIKSEN is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
 Oslo. His work is motivated by a triple concern: to understand the present world,
 to understand what it means to be human, and to help bring about social and
 environmental change. His research has involved fieldwork in several ethnically
 and culturally complex societies, from Trinidad to eastern Oslo. He has written
 extensively about ethnicity and the dynamics of culture and identity, nationalism,
 cosmopolitanism and human rights, globalisation and its implications for the
 study of culture and society. His latest books are Boomtown. Runaway Globalisation
 on the Queensland Coast (2018); The Mauritian Paradox (2018, ed. with R. Ramtohul);
 Climate, Capitalism and Communities (2019, ed. with Astrid B. Stensrud); and
 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries Today (2019, ed. with M. Jakoubek).
 t.h.eriksen@sai.uio.no




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Thomas Hylland Eriksen
What is European about European anthropology?
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 213-224.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3928
