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Out in the wild

We humans
Forfatter: Fredrik Barth
Forlag: Gyldendal
A social anthropologist summarizes his work in an interesting and surprisingly easy-to-understand way.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Fredrik Barth is one of the world's best-known social anthropologists, and he can thank him for the University of Oslo. That's where he got his doctoral dissertation rejected, so he had to deliver it in Cambridge instead. He has filled his anthropological work with field studies because he has for years believed that encounters with people of other cultures tell more about both people and cultures than the dogmas of structuralism or Marxism.

Emphasizes the empiricism

Barth has an unofficial world record in the number of field studies, and that is linked to his longstanding insistence on empiricism, before possibly presenting a theory. Therefore, he was not very popular with anthropologists who insisted on a structuralist or Marxist understanding of society as such. Barth has distanced himself from both general and specific determinations of what characterizes society. According to Barth, society is a consequence of the fact that several individuals who all have different specific wills and projects come into contact with each other.

Just as anthropology abandoned the notion that race and physiology were determinants of behavior, Barth wants social anthropology to abandon dogmatic desk theories on how various characteristics of one (or more or all) culture (s) determine behavior: People have different opinions and projects in Norway, and everywhere else!

With open mind

Boken We humans summarizes in an interesting and surprisingly easy way what Barth's motivation, principles, and not least what he has learned, during his field trips in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Oman, Sudan, the Middle East, Bali, Bhutan and New Guinea. Without getting involved in the insoluble theoretical dilemma of whether horizon fusion is actually possible, Barth has ventured into the non-Western world with as open-mindedness as possible.

At last year's Skjervheim seminar, Barth pointed out that if one in the West is committed to creating justice elsewhere in the world, one must first get to know how people think and act in these places. What is needed is knowledge, not tolerance (!). According to Barth, the Taliban would have been exterminated long ago if the United States had not interfered in supporting President Karzai. The consequence of this has been that Afghans who do not value the invasion are again flocking to this tyrannical Muslim organization.

So. It is not always the forced introduction of Western human rights and adjoining glories is the optimal medicine.

Personally, I took a great interest in the book's third sentence. It begins like this: "Physically and mentally we humans are about equally equipped…". I would like to know what these differences consist of, but then I may have to go over to the Department of Psychology, or possibly all the way to Denmark?

Kjetil Korslund
Kjetil Korslund
Historian of ideas and critic.

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