Department seminar: Tom Bratrud

Seminar paper

Fear and hope are feelings that are often seen as contradictory. However, based on ethnographic fieldwork of a startling child-led Christian revival movement in Vanuatu and 17th century perspectives from René Descartes, I argue that fear and hope are complementary sentiments that work together to become a potent driver for change.

In contexts of insecurity and upheaval, an excess of far drives out hope and leave people paralysed. Similarly, an excess of hope drives out uncertainty and make people too confident that things turn out for the good, therefore there is no need to act for change at all. But fear and hope combined becomes a potent generator for ritual action that allow people to break free from the determinations of everyday life.

In the paper, I argue that people’s fear and hope must be understood within the context in which they appear. This implies an open-ended frame for investigating not only what people find to be good, but also what they find to threaten this good in different contexts.

About the lecturer

Tom Bratrud is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology and part of the project Private Lives: Embedding Sociality at Digital 'Kitchen-tables'. His research focuses on values, social life and political dynamics in the South Pacific and Nordics.

Bratrud’s current research examines everyday life with digital technology in rural Norway. Focus areas include (1) how digital technologies enable new forms of urban-rural mobility, (2) farmers’ need to expand and automatise to comply with new demands from the government and market, and (3) reality formation in enmeshed online/offline worlds.

Bratrud's initial research focuses on the intersection of religion, morality and politics of land in Vanuatu. This work, based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork from 2010-2017, has resulted in the monograph Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu (2022, Berghahn Books). The book examines a startling child-led Christian revival movement that developed on Ahamb Island in 2014 as a social and ethical reform in the wake of enduring political disputes. However, the movement had a dramatic turn when two men claimed to be sorcerers and responsible for many of the community’s problems were killed. The book’s main theoretical contribution concerns how fear and hope are powerful sentiments that work together to become a potent driving force for change, but where the outcome can easily escape the initiators' control.

All interested are welcome!