Arrangement

The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) has the pleasure of inviting you to a theory seminar with Thomas Hylland Eriksen:

Accelerated change and the need for a global anthropology
The present era is often characterised by references to global crises or challenges facing humanity as a whole today. Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues that the metaphor of overheating
 can be a useful common denominator to the main crises of globalisation, as it calls attention to accelerated change and a heightened level of activity in the realms of economy and communication. One may similarly speak of the quest for shared traffic rules
 on a global roadmap where traffic is growing by the minute. At the level of transnational policy making, such concerns are at the forefront of three problem areas to be discussed: Finance/economics, climate/the environment, and culture/identity. These are, arguably, the central defining challenges in a globalised world, with poverty and war seen, in this contextualisation, as effects of each of them.

In this seminar, Hylland Eriksen proposes a way of studying these global crises and their interrelations, with an emphasis on local life-worlds and diverse responses to the crises, drawing on examples from countries which are very differently positioned in relation to the global crises. 

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. He has published widely on subjects such as identity, nationalism and globalisation. He is currently working on the research project "Overheating" which involves an investigation of three crises of globalisation and how societies respond to them.