The Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture 2016
Students, anthropologists and other invited guests had found their way to the University of Bergen for this year’s Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture held by Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen.
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- There are few who meet the criteria better than Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen, said Professor and Head of Department Ståle Knudsen when he introduced this year’s lecturer, whom amongst other things published the biography “Fredrik Barth: an intellectual biography” in 2013.
- As few other anthropologists, Eriksen has demonstrated the strength of anthropology as a comparative project. He has skillfully synthesized wide corpuses of anthropological texts into books that have made him into one of the leading voices on identity and globalization in, and beyond, anthropology, Knudsen said.
The annual Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture was established by the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen in 2015, in connection with the department’s 50th anniversary, and to honour its founder, Professor Fredrik Barth. The invited scholar can be a young, promising researcher or an established academic but should in some way or other be concerned in his or her work with those regions and topics explored by Fredrik Barth.
During this year’s lecture, “Flows and boundaries in the creole world”, Eriksen described the difference between cultural differences and social boundaries through his own field experiences from Mauritius, with great enthusiasm from the audience. Professor Eriksen has made an incomparable effort for anthropology, especially regarding questions concerning ethnicity and nationalism, and he is also an important voice in the Norwegian public.
We are grateful that Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen held The Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture 2016 and for everyone who attended!
Read more about the annual lecture series here.
