(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
I remember once throwing out the dregs from a small boat out between the outer reefs. The water was deeper than anywhere I had tried to anchor before, and the rope flowed out over the rip at an increasingly wild speed. While I nervously looked at the coils of rope, which were getting smaller and smaller, the stump of rope suddenly disappeared with the dregs into the depths. The rope in the bucket had two parts, and no one had spliced them together. The feeling of grasping for that piece of rope in the air reminds me of the feeling when I heard that Thoms Hylland Eriksen had died. We were in the middle of a sentence, so to speak, in the middle of a correspondence – in the middle of a long train of thought. So do a thousand other of his friends, and the long list of thanks and references at the end of just published The Inalienable witness to all the conversations.
Beneath a book like this lies a multitude of threads of thought, a lifetime of research, observations, intuitions and considerations that make it something superpersonal and almost universal. At the same time, it bears his unique stamp. Thomas Hylland Eriksen's life's work becomes a perfect illustration of the principle of 'individuation', as the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon understood it. You can only become yourself by relating to a 'we', by interacting with the collective. It's about negotiating with history, interacting with the world of nature, breaking with language and its limitations – everything that has shaped you and that you can help shape. The book is about nature and culture, about semiotics and global history, and everything is simultaneously treated both as world problems and personal, almost intimate issues. The book is a source of wonder and further investigation.
ambivalence
As I am sure many others have done, I have gone back to old emails and recapitulated the contact with Thomas, who was generous in all his correspondence. Letters from the Seychelles and Mauritius, from Blindern and interdisciplinary conferences around Europe – and occasionally and finally, from the hospital. Read together with the book, I see how it has come to be and has gradually grown over the last few years. The feeling of despairingly losing a stump of rope and grasping at empty air is, in the re-reading of books and letters, replaced by a rich interweaving of living threads of thought: some of them loose, as it should be. But many threads are woven into the text, In the 400 pages i The inalienable – From global alignment to new diversity.
If we fail the issue itself, it ends up as a form of play, an academic sandbox where everyone finds their safe place in the 'cultural metabolism'.
There is tension in this subtitle, a kind of commitment to offer a positive vision of the future. I remember that I once submitted an essay that had a rather unambiguously pessimistic outcome, how one of the editors commented a bit snidely "but... you always tend to come up with a hopeful perspective at the end!" Concluding something promising, and doing so in a credible way, is a challenge that presses forward for anyone who writes about the state of the earth and nature today. The challenge will not be easier for those who – as Hylland Eriksen did – also want to thematise the cultural flattening and alignment on a worldwide basis. If there is something that characterizes our time, it is ambivalence, he writes. And such mixed feelings are precisely what must be worked through in a life that is also an individuation – that dares to be active not only in the debates of the time, but in the conflicts of culture. That which is unclear and contradictory – and therefore alive and full of creative potential.
Clarity and obscurity
Sticking something to paper does not mean that it is final, that the answer has been found, although it can often feel that way. But when you make a statement about a topic – in this book's case, the loss of biological and cultural diversity in the overheated phase of globalization – you also have to try to take a stand. One of the discussions from the e-mail exchange concerned clarity and ambiguity. Against floating and metaphor-rich environmental thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway stand the critics, who defend scientific criteria of clarity – such as Jon Elster and the Swedish anthropologist Alf Hornborg, who was a close collaborator of Hylland Eriksen.
Thomas sent me Hornborg's scathing critique of the environmental humanities Dithering while the world burns: Anthropologists’ approaches to the Anthropocene (2017) – and admitted that he was ambivalent. Because do we risk ending up with floating utopias, poetic hunches, unclear analogies and speculation when we make ecology a topic for free essays? If we fail the cause itself, it ends up with a form of play, an academic sandbox where everyone finds their safe place in the 'cultural metabolism' to paraphrase the philosopher Peter Wessel Zappfe – a metabolism in which acute world problems are digested and turned into entertaining non-fiction for fairies? It is an important criticism, but throwing out both the bathwater and the baby can end up with a rejection of the role of creativity, which becomes absurd all the time the battle for the future of nature takes place in the active transformation process of culture. The contradiction is apt to create further ambivalence and, in the worst case, more unproductive academic bickering. 'Dithering': Bewilderment, caving and hesitation. So what to say?
'Pluriversity'
I The Inalienable Hylland Eriksen ends up fictionalizing what we must assume are his own mixed feelings towards creative environmental philosophy. In one of the book's small fictional parts, it is about academic colleagues who meet at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Research in South Africa. Here a heated discussion arises between the more rationalistic anthropologist Tommy, a thinly disguised alter ego, and the literary scholar Serenity. The dispute concerns Anna Tsing's original environmental book The Mushroom at the End of The World. Tommy is fascinated and impressed, but also irritated and ambivalent about the book's sprawling chains of associations. Serenity loves it, and finds all opposition to the free West Coast prose from her Santa Cruz university bigoted. Tsing cheers for 'pluriversity', a new and radical interdisciplinarity.
In the Anthropocene, the age in which man has become a global natural force, anthropology is of course also changing. An important part of Hylland Eriksen's creative break with cultural heritage was the vision that anthropology could be – if not a universal subject – then an interdisciplinary meeting place. When it comes to metaphorical thinking, part of Hylland Eriksen's solution is to let metaphors be metaphors, and make use of figurative thinking in a pronouncedly playful, even joking way. But the theme simultaneously requires sobriety and down-to-earthness. Sticking your finger in the ground scientifically means dealing with empirical evidence and partly also with common sense. Is all diversity good? No, because sewage discharges provide bacterial diversity, for example, which need not be a good thing. And importing quantities of new species and new culture can lead to ecological and cultural disturbances and loss of diversity in the next round. Consider the introduction of rabbits and foxes into Australia.
But is importing new cultural elements and new species often harmful? Far from it, because it can also lead to enrichment and both nature and culture are changing. Over-protecting cultures and natural areas can lead to stagnation. This dialectic also provides a healthy resistance to the most pessimistic future perspectives, descriptions of situations we know all too well – where all tendencies point towards monocultures, cultural flattening, erosion and impoverishment. If all cultural and biological diversity is lost, we also lose possible futures – and decay becomes identical to the future. Where everything that stands out or is outstanding and unique collapses, withers and crumbles away.
It was about approaching an expanded understanding of the present that extends into the past and future – in that long now.
Hylland Eriksen was a truly global thinker, and apropos the ever-larger forest fires he could wearily sigh at the Norwegian media and their "no Norwegians were harmed" perspective on various climate disasters. The tendency to narrow the perspective is very human, and the reasons for blocking the view of more distant places and times can be many. But for him it meant approaching an expanded understanding of the present that extends into the past and future – in that long now. The time dimension is not a present moment, but a time horizon.
Since Hylland Eriksen precisely not content to write a one-sided misery report, the book's final section is decisive. Here he shows that being ambivalent about the future means at least being half-hopeful. Between all the examples of decay and leveling, he looks for places where a new diversity sprouts. Something promising. It is worth noting that "making a promise" has the same origin as the upward movement of giving something a lift. The promise is uplifting and to find, cultivate and breed such tendencies is to enter into an unspoken agreement with future people, perhaps also animals, that we do not know. The taming of natural areas, i.e. places where we go from over-management and development to a nature that freely grows and renews itself, is one such tendency. Since "rewilding" first became a widespread slogan at the beginning of our millennium, the initiatives have grown and become precisely a promising and uplifting movement that may come to characterize the rest of the third millennium.
Not equality, but complementarity
The fictional character – Hylland Eriksen's alter ego 'Tommy' – in the book's last fiction section ironizes Francis Fukuyama, who ends his reflections on the history of political systems by claiming that everyone dreamed of coming to Denmark, "that is, an orderly, well-organized and healthy society with low level of social conflict, high standard of living', a small population that mainly belonged to one ethnic group, and where most were able to 'come to Denmark'. 'Tommy' dismisses Denmark as a "reckless conformist petty-bourgeois society" and dreams of another story where history's journey leads to Yorubaland in West Africa instead. This rhymes with the main text's conclusion – a reminder "that all places are the center of the world, and that we are part of the fabric, the chorus, the connection that connects everything with everything else. It is not equality that is the goal, but complementarity'. In the language of biology, it is important to make arrangements for as many niches as possible, like in a rainforest. The opposite is a set of standardized modules, assembled in a pseudo-diverse Lego reality, as in a newly built Chinese industrial suburb.
Hylland Eriksen is in favor of opening up a wealth of promising futures – in the majority.
A linear history that starts with Columbus and goes in the direction of global equalization, where all the timelines of history are brought together into one, is a 'supersynchronization' that also leads to disaster (something the planetary philosopher Yuk Hui has also written about). Another alternative world history that Hylland Eriksen advocates will open up a wealth of promising futures – in the majority. Seeing something new sprout from the earth is an opposite experience to the experience of loss, whether it is the loss of nature or the loss of a spirit-loving and inspirational source. Since Hylland Eriksen thought so big and openly, and invited so much of the world into his own project, much of what he worked on lives on. IN The Inalienable there are also loads of thoughts in the bud, waiting to be lifted forward and further. It is not conclusions and capstones – or tombstones – that are decisive, but openings, movements and beginnings – and a destabilization of boundaries that open up a constantly renewed 'we'.
«There Are Many Alternatives»
The title The Inalienable with its pious poetic sound is also a rallying cry for a more resolute rejection of loss: both natural loss and cultural loss which are constantly excused and caused with reference to the inexorable logic of the market and the needs of the state (actually the national economy). The flattening that lies behind all flattenings is perhaps the amalgamation of state and market, articulated in Margaret Thatcher's "There Is No Alternative", a doctrine Hylland Eriksen refers to with the acronym TINA. The opposite principle TAMA – "There Are Many Alternatives" also opens up other value metrics than the monetary value – and other imperatives than those that are written from the economic logic.
Eco-axiological revolution
There is every reason to remind oneself that the globalization that began in earnest with Columbus began with a hunt for gold. We continue today to allow fragile and truly inalienable ecosystems such as river systems in Ghana and Brazil to be razed in various forms of extraction. At the same time, bank vaults around the world are jam-packed with gold bars that primarily have a symbolic exchange value. It is then that we realize that the time has come for what we could call an eco-axiological revolution. Axiology is the doctrine of values, and declaring local diversity as inalienable is a tenet that offers resistance. But the values doctrine still needs to be woven (with a thousand threads) into a concrete political framework and a more self-confident and battle-ready planetary culture of diversity.
Hylland Eriksen's will and ability to think concretely and connect philosophical reflections with down-to-earth examples and objections make Det Umistelige anything but floating. At the same time, there is a philosophical lift in the project. The closeness to the earth also means realism, and realistically speaking, development is still going in the wrong direction. Global warming in particular presents us with completely unknown and overwhelming perspectives – such as a possible collapse of the AMOC (Gulf Stream) system, caused by global warming, as early as ... 2025. Thomas wrote apropos this: "There should be a sign here and there with the inscription "Unexplored beyond this point". By the way, did you read Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian the other day? She warns against fatalism and defeatism, as if we have already lost, as it were. Important correction for up to several of us!" Without alternatives, we become fatalists. If the alternatives are not found, they must be found. There is also hope in ambivalence. IN The Inalienable hope is treated as a concrete political task and at the same time a treasure hunt – a search for new forms that must be tracked down, invented, explored, shared and passed on.
See an article editor Truls Lie previously wrote about Hylland Eriksen.
See 7 articles in MODERN TIMES which affects Hylland Eriksen.
