By Freek Colombijn *
“Yes, I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying,
Crying,
Crying!”
(King Crimson, Epitaph, 1969)
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, one of the greatest anthropologists of our time, died on 27 November 2024, at the age of 62 years. Many cohorts of anthropology students at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam were introduced into the field through his text book Small places, large issues and often also read one of his many other works such as Ethnicity and nationalism: Anthropological perspectives, A history of anthropology (co-authored with Finn Sivert Nielsen), A world of insecurity: Anthropological perspectives on human security (co-edited with Ellen Bal and Oscar Salemink), and Overheating: An anthropology of accelerated change. Most of his work is more of a theoretical, comparative nature, but inhis writings he also dwelled on his fieldwork in Mauritius and Trinidad. While I cannot imagine he cared about citation scores and H-indices, at the time I am writing this obituary, his citation is score is 3 short of exactly 30,000, which is for the relatively small citation circles of anthropology a dazzling figure. Thomas Hylland Eriksen was affiliated with the University of Oslo, but for many years he was also a professor by special appointment at our department and regularly visited us in Amsterdam.
For years I have been teaching the introduction to social and cultural anthropology to first year students with the help of Small places, large issuesand the book has become both notorious and famous among students. Notorious because of the –in the eyes of students– almost frightening density of information, but famous because of its richness. Many of the topics of one chapter are developed into full courses later in the degree programme (incourses on methodology, historical paradigms, ethnicity, globalization, religion and more), and if you had truly mastered the chapter concerned, you already knew a lot about the subsequent course. This text book was based on Thomas’ command of an enormous amount of literature, which helped him to make his point that anthropology must be the comparativestudy of people and not limited to case studies.
Small places, large issues has helped students to define their identity as anthropologists. A recurrent theme inSmall places, large issues, which has given students hope, was his belief inthe agency of humans to create their own lives, also in the face of overwhelmingly strong institutions and firmly established traditions. He also advocated the relevance of anthropology and the potential of engaged anthropologists to make a positive impact on the world. He emphasized that ‘The smallest entity studied by social anthropologists is not an individual, but a relationship between the two, which distinguishes the discipline from survey-based social sciences and seemed to make doing participant observation a logical choice.
One of Thomas’ important ideas is the metaphor of the inverted refrigerator. The metaphor builds on Fredrik Barth’s work Ethnic groups and boundaries and the idea that social groups overcommunicate social differences to build their identity. If refrigerators radiate warmth at the back to create coldness inside, some groups act like inverted refrigerators: they radiate coldness vis-à-vis outsiders to get a warm atmosphere inside their group. The relevance of this insight has only become bigger with the rise of populist politicians like Donald Trump and Geert Wilders who demonize groups (people with a migrant background, Muslims, refugees, et cetera) who in their view do not belong to “Us”.
Partly because of his advocacy of diversity, respect and cultural relativism, he was a public intellectual in Norway. His Wikipedia page mentions that Norwegian right-wing terrorist and mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik cited Eriksen critically in his manifesto before he shot 77 persons and during his trial. Breivik, of course, embodied. But also confirmed, Thomas’ idea of the inverted refrigerator in the most gruesome manner. A more positive testimony of his celebrity status comes from a colleague of mine, who was sitting in a park in Oslo telling to a stranger she was about to attend a seminar at the anthropology department. ‘Ah! Thomas Hylland Eriksen!’, was the reply from the stranger. I cannot imagine that any other contemporary anthropologist can evoke such a reaction (Margaret Mead may have been the last one.)
His enormous importance for the field already justifies an obituary, but what makes it even more imperative is the fact that he was a regular visitor of our department in the 2000s. He helped developing our then research programme, CONSEC, on ‘human security’, resulting among others in the above cited collective volume A world of insecurity. At the time ‘human security’ of people had been embraced by the UN as an important addition to political-military security at the state level. A seminal insight of the CONSEC programme was that, in contrast to the UN view, it could not be assumed everybody is always striving for the highest degree of human security. Thomas argued that not everybody aimed at more security and the opposite of security is not in the first place, or not only, insecurity, but freedom. Those who aim at freedom, must be willing to give up some security and Thomas liked to quote Ibsen’s character of Peer Gynt as an example in this respect.
Thomas’ regular visits to our department gave us the opportunity to get to know him well, also at a more personal level. I remember our former colleague, and Thomas’ close friend, Oscar Salemink, who was also an eminent anthropologist, say of him: ‘Thomas is really out of my league’. Nevertheless, Thomas stayed very modest, and showed sincere interest inour work (testified by many references to VU anthropologists in Small places, large issues) and would also remember details of earlier discussions or one’s personal life when he returned to Amsterdam for later visits. His public lectures, for which we had to reserve extra large rooms to accommodate the audience, were famous. He often showed his surprise about the world and we were accustomed to his loud laughs. Sometimes he was unintentionally hilarious, for instance when he was speaking about the increasing pace of social life; in his hands, such a topic became funny if only because he used to speak at almost double the speed of others (but still his tongue could not keep up with the speed of his thoughts).
Thomas was not only a renowned scholar ‘out of our league’, but also simply a very nice person who could easily make people enthusiastic for his ideas. Until shortly before his death, he continued working. Not to run away from his illness, but simply because he loved anthropology so much. In what is possibly his last publication he analysed his medical treatment as a liminal phase between life and death. However, he was not only passionate about anthropology and amazed about the world.
I recall how he once confessed with sparkling eyes of excitement to have booked a flight from Oslo to London, to attend a concert of one of his favourite bands, King Crimson. Anthropology has lost a brilliant mind and warm personality.
* Freek Colombijn is an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, VU Amsterdam