Thomas Hylland Eriksen Quotes

The single most important human insight to be gained from this way of comparing societies is perhaps the realization that everything could have been different in our own society – that the way we live is only one among innumerable ways of life which humans have adopted. If we glance sideways and backwards, we will quickly discover that modern society, with its many possibilities and seducing offers, its dizzying complexity and its impressive technological advances, is a way of life which has not been tried out for long. Perhaps, psychologically speaking, we have just left the cave: in terms of the history of our species, we have but spent a moment in modern societies. (..) Anthropology may not provide the answer to the question of the meaning of life, but at least it can tell us that there are many ways in which to make a life meaningful.

Az etnicitás legfontosabb jellemzője a szisztematikus különbségtétel a kívülállók és a hozzánk tartozók, azaz a mi és az ők között. Ha ezt az elvet figyelmen kívül hagyjuk, nem lehet etnicitásról beszélni, hiszen az etnicitás intézményesített kapcsolatot feltételez olyan emberek között, akik kulturálisan különbözőnek tartják egymást. Ebből az alapelvből az következik, hogy két vagy több csoport, amelyek egymástól eltérőnek tartják magukat, a kölcsönös érintkezések gyakorisága folytán egyre jobban hasonlítanak egymásra, miközben egyre inkább meg vannak győződve a különbözőségükről.

A final point is the fact that discrimination based on presumed inborn and immutable characteristics (race) tends to be stronger and more inflexible than ethnic discrimination which is not based on ‘racial’ differences. Members of a presumed race cannot change their assumed inherited traits, while ethnic groups can change their culture and, ultimately,

The North American situation, while different from the Brazilian one, reflects a similar complexity and ambiguity in the relationship between race and ethnicity. Whereas Brazilians have a great number of terms used to designate people of varying pigmentation, the ‘one-drop principle’ prevalent in the USA entails that people are either black or white, and that ‘a single drop of black blood’ (sic) contaminates an otherwise pale person and makes him or her black. Conversely, ethnic identity in the USA

The North American situation, while different from the Brazilian one, reflects a similar complexity and ambiguity in the relationship between race and ethnicity. Whereas Brazilians have a great number of terms used to designate people of varying pigmentation, the ‘one-drop principle’ prevalent in the USA entails that people are either black or white, and that ‘a single drop of black blood’ (sic) contaminates an otherwise pale person and makes him or her black. Conversely, ethnic identity in the USA is, as mentioned above, not necessarily correlated with ‘race’. At the same time, African- American identities are associated

The term ‘race’ has deliberately been placed within inverted commas in order to stress that it is not a scientific term. Whereas it was for some time fashionable to divide humanity into four main races, and racial labels are still used to classify people in some countries (such as the USA), modern genetics tends not to speak of races. There are two principal reasons for this. First, there has always been so much interbreeding between human populations that it would be meaningless to talk of fixed boundaries between races. Second, the distribution of hereditary physical traits does not follow clear boundaries (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994). In other

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, [Thomas Hylland Eriksen] said, our economies have been built around a new and radical idea - economic growth. This is the belief that every year, the economy - and each individual company in it - should get bigger and bigger. That's how we now define success. If a country's economy grows, its politicians are likely to get reelected. ...If a country or a company's share price shrinks, politicians or CEOs face a greater risk of being booted out. Economic growth is the central organising principle of our society. It is at the heart of how we see the world. Thomas explained that growth can happen in one of two ways. The first is that a corporation can find new markets - by inventing something new, or exporting something to a part of the world that doesn't have it yet. The second is that a corporation can persuade existing consumers to consume more. If you can get people to eat more, or to sleep less, then you have found a source of economic growth. Mostly, he believes, we achieve growth today primarily through this second option. Corporations are constantly finding ways to cram more stuff into the same amount of time. To give one example: they want you to watch TV and follow the show on social media. Then you see twice as many ads. This inevitably speeds up life. If the economy has to grow every year, in the absence of new markets it has to get you and me to do more in the same amount of time. As I read Thomas' work more deeply, I realised this is one of the crucial reasons why life has accelerated every decade since the 1880s: we are living in an economic machine that requires greater speed to keep going - and that inevitably degrades our attention over time. If fact, when I reflected on it, this need for economic growth seemed to be the underlying force that was driving so many of the causes of poor attention that I had learned about - our increasing stress, our swelling work hours, our more invasive technologies, our lack of sleep, our bad diets.

Tragédie lidstva spočívá v tom, že lidé byli vybaveni přirozenou potřebou, kterou nelze uspokojit, aniž bychom sami sebe nepodváděli: potřebou nezávisle existujícího smyslu bytí. Stejně jako ostatní zvířata má člověk celou řadu potřeb – jídlo a pití, spánek, bezpečí a sex, možná jedna či dvě další věci – ovšem kromě toho máme trýznivou potřebu smyslu. Tuto potřebu lze naplnit pouze pomocí sebeklamu, který na sebe obvykle bere formu náboženství. Pokud sebeklam prohlédneme, zjistíme, že jsme chyceni v bezvýchodném dilematu: Život nemá smysl, ale my jsme předurčeni k tomu neustále smysl života hledat, i když neexistuje.

Disiplin, araştırmacının normalde bir yıl ya da daha fazla bir süreyle orada bulunmasını gerektiren belirli bir sosyal ve kültürel çevrenin etraflı bir şekilde yakından çalışılması demek olan, alan çalışmasının önemi üzerinde durur.

İçinde yaşadığımız toplumda 'iyi yaşam' olarak algılanan şey, çok farklı bir açıdan bakıldığında hiçbir şekilde çekici görülmeyebilir. Bu nedenle, insanların yaşamlarını anlayabilmek için onların deneyimledikleri dünyayı bütün halinde yakalamaya çalışmak gereklidir.

Anthropology is sometimes described as the art of 'making the familiar exotic and the exotic familiar'. It has also been described as 'the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities'.

Evans-Pritchard (1956) once found that his studies of witchcraft among the Azande in Central Africa made it easier for him to understand the Soviet Union under Stalinism. In both societies the fear of being accused of a violation of vaguely defined norms induced most people to follow the norms slavishly.

The map is always simpler than the territory.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) once described a field trip to the interior of Brazil, where he met natives who were so close he could touch them, and yet they seemed infinitely far away; he could not understand them (Lévi-Strauss 1976 [1955]).

Geertz (1973) describes how his wife and he were unable to establish a sensible relationship with the villagers in Bali because they were suspected of being government spies.

Døving (2001), has similarly shown, in a study based on fieldwork in south-eastern Norway, that it may be extraordinarily impolite to ask for ‘just a glass of water’ when one is visiting. In his example, the hosts do everything they can to make the guest accept beer, a soft drink, coffee, tea, even herbal tea, to avoid the horror of having her sit there drinking tap water. As Mauss could have commented; refusing to receive a gift may be the ultimate offence. It is tantamount to refusing sociality.

... the smallest unit we study in anthropology is not the single person, but the relationship between two. It is not the innermost thoughts of the individual that constitute our object of study, but the social dynamics between people and their products; where the innermost thoughts of the person, incidentally, are often expressed.

Faithful to the logic of the gift, Lévi-Strauss offered a return gift that was just as lavish as his mentor's [i.e. Marcel Mauss's], namely the most spectacular theoretical edifice in the anthropology of the last century, structuralism.

In [Karl Polanyi's] view, reciprocity and redistribution are just natural, and more humane, forms of economic interaction than the raw competitive market.

In fact, there is no such thing as 'purely economic' in economic anthropology. All economies have a local, moral, cultural element.

In Samoa, ... children were given love and encouragement, and they were subjected to few prohibitions. They therefore grew up to be more harmonious and happy than the cowed, disciplined and sexually frustrated American adolescents.

Although it raises spectacularly abstract questions sometimes, anthropology is not a subject for abstract speculation.

In Samoa, [Margaret Mead] argued, children were given love and encouragement, and they were subjected to few prohibitions. They therefore grew up to be more harmonious and happy than the cowed, disciplined and sexually frustrated American adolescents.

Shortly before his death in 1955, Radcliffe-Brown confessed in a letter to Lévi-Strauss that he would never understand the Frenchman's use of the term structure.

Whereas Radcliffe-Brown's structure is a social one, Lévi-Strauss's structure is mental or cognitive; ... Shortly before his death in 1955, Radcliffe-Brown confessed in a letter to Lévi-Strauss that he would never understand the Frenchman's use of the term structure.