Research Areas at the Department of Social Anthropology

This thematic area has been devoted considerable attention for several years and is today represented by a variety of academic activities by some members of staff (for example a literature seminar, a fellowship, conferences and workshops). The area encompasses a broad range of theoretical questions, e.g. (a) people’s adaptation to and engagement with their physical environment, (b) representations and understandings of nature and the natural (including the relationship to kinship, the body, health, food and identity), (c) the management of natural resources, (d) environmental protection and environmental discourses, and (e) people’s understanding of causal relationships.

This area of interest represents an anchoring as well as continuation of “The forum for Nordic ethnography”, which was founded in 1996. Attention is directed at Norden as an ethnographic region, and explores the methodological and epistemological challenges associated with anthropological research in one’s own society. Comparison and ethnographic method play a central role. Our ambition is to strengthen the quality of anthropological research on Norway and Norden more generally, to clarify ethnography’s contribution vis-à-vis other disciplines, and to profile and cultivate SAI’s competence in this area. Norden as a field of interest represents a rich tradition in the Department which this research group will develop further.

Anthropological and ethnographic studies of the ties between political life, cultural processes, and the creation and re-creation of collective and individual identities, including religious, ethnic and national identities, represent a broad academic field deeply rooted in anthropology.

Attention is directed to six central questions: (1) How are we to best understand the relationship between political life, including forms of state-building, and cultural processes? (2) How is one to understand the production and transformation of identities (religious, ethnic and national)? (3) How are cultural forms and practices – as well as identities – created and modified through state activities? (4) What is the relationship between the construction of identities and forms of political activism and collective action at the grassroots level? (5) What is the relationship between the production of identity, state activity, and forms of transnational flows such as international migration, global trade and tourism? (6) In what ways do forms of political violence – such as repression, war, torture and terror – influence the production and reproduction of identities?

This field – or the interest in ties between politics, culture and identity – has long been important in the Department’s research and teaching practices. Several staff members work within this field. This research area represents a continuation of this tradition.

Dramatic changes have occurred in the world’s most marginal societies in the last 25-30 years; many of these have become minorities in their own countries. These societies have been pulled into global processes while simultaneously being cut off from participating fully in these same processes.

Several of the staff in the Department have witnessed the effects of global processes in marginal societies in among other places, Africa, Latin America, southeast Asia and Melanesia. As a result of Christian evangelical work, Western education and medicine, forest and mining operations and other economic activities initiated externally, together with thoroughgoing state-sponsored bureaucratic organization, many social and cultural relationships have been effected: gender and generational relations are being renegotiated, local political systems are being challenged and people’s understanding of their own identity as individuals and as social groups are continually changing.

One ambition is to use the staff’s anthropological understanding of the pressed situation minorities find themselves in in order to establish a research program focused on continuity and change, as well as the methodological and theoretical questions that are raised by long-term fieldwork. This entails among other things a focus on central anthropological concepts such as “fieldwork”, “culture”, “gender”, “social change” and “development”. This research area will attract an international anthropological milieu as well as master students.