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Hoping for five new years of CULCOM

- I must say that I am very glad that I had the chance to work with CULCOM during these past four years. It turned out to be much more fun and academically challenging than I had originally thought. Despite the fact that we are rather physically spread out, I think we have built up a CULCOM-identity, says the research director.

- And some of the greatest pleasure I’ve had in working at CULCOM has been the Master’s students. They have been incredibly talented, engaged, and have produced original research.

Five faculties collaborate in the University of Oslo’s great investment in “multicultural” questions. Since CULCOM was started up in the fall of 2004, eight doctoral projects have gotten underway, and soon nearly 30 Master’s theses will have been completed, three publications in CULCOM’s book series about fundamental questions concerning “Norway in the 21st century” have come out, and many conferences and seminars have been arranged. In particular, CULCOM has linked researchers from different fields of study who perhaps did not know about each other previously.

Good experiences with conveying knowledge to the outside

And CULCOM’s research and contributions have reached the public. From the beginning, CULCOM has put a lot of energy into passing on knowledge to the world outside Blindern.

- We have good experiences with conveying information to the outside world. Many researchers at CULCOM are visible to the public, we participate in debates, hold lectures, some researchers have columns in both local and mass media outlets. We have managed to establish a presence out in public, the anthropologist says.

CULCOM’s webpage plays an important role in the work of passing on information, which is regularly updated with news and interviews with researchers. In addition, publications are available for free on the website.

- Working in a place where most of what is published is electronically available and can be downloaded as a PDF has been a dream of mine for many years, even in the transnational sense: Then people who are in Switzerland and India can get onto our webpages, download texts and use our research in their own work. There is no reason why this should cost money.

Challenges Us-and-Them thinking

When CULCOM was started, the goal was to provide a new description of Norway and the changes Norwegian society has undergone due to migration, increased mobility, and differentiation. CULCOM was not to engage in “immigrant research”, but take on Norwegian society as a whole. Transnational perspectives should substitute methodological nationalism.

- What we are trying to do is shift the analytical gaze in a direction where the nation-state and the ethnic group are not viewed as the most important unit. It is here researchers like Knut Kjeldstadli have been vital in insisting on the significance of class, or Oddbjørn Leirvik, who points out that differences in value-based questions cut across the majority and minority populations.

- In this way, lines of distinction that are somewhat different than those common to immigrant research, in which an us-and-them way-of-thinking is common, with “Norwegians” on the one hand and “immigrants” on the other, get established. And in addition, the transnational perspective leads to a de-centering of the nation-state; it is almost like a small Copernican revolution.

Conventional academic thought

- Still, there are more people who have researched a single ethnic group and little research has been done on typical Norwegians? How do you explain this?

- Yes, what can I say, it simply turned out that way, and personally I wish that there were more people who would study small local communities on the outskirts. There has been too little research on majority Norwegians. Those who are drawn to CULCOM are interested in minorities, but it really didn’t need to be that way.

- But how can this be explained? Well, let me say that it has a lot to do with conventional academic thought. Many people clearly operate from the assumption that Vietnamese people represent cultural complexity, while a Norwegian local community does not.

- But both Sharam Alghasi and Therese Sandrup, to name a few examples, who study specific ethnic groups, provide us with something new: Therese Sandrup, in following the transnational movements of Turkish people back and forth; and Sharam Alghasi, in looking at the use of new media on which there as has been little previous research. In addition, they study groups in relation to other groups, and not as isolated entities in the way it is often done in traditional immigrant research. It is namely not the same to be an Iranian in Norway as it is to be an Iranian in Iran.

- In the fall, we will have a Master’s student who will write about the Christian chapel community in Southwestern Norway. Additionally, Åse Røthing’s research challenges the majority, as does Elisabeth Eide through her media research.

Five new years of CULCOM?

- So I think we’re headed in the right direction - in particular with the great help of students like Ida Hjelde and Hans Erik Næss, who have written Master’s theses in which they explicitly, and in constructive ways, demonstrate how sociology can be reformed in a transnational direction. But we still have a long way to go. It takes a long time to establish a new analytical view of the world. Thus, I am also increasingly considering the possibility of continuing for several more years. But in that case we must indeed specialize a bit more and become more specific.

- And for example say that…

-...someone should travel to an island in Northern Norway when we announce a new stipend, for example. We must look at whatever empirical fields we have not yet covered and that we are interested in.

An important part of CULCOM’s continuation can be collaboration with researchers in countries from which migrants to Norway come.

- It is clear that this should be the next step for CULCOM. We have already collaborated with the University of Punjab in Lahore where Elisabeth Eide has been a great deal.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen already has many ideas for the next five years:

- It would be quite fun if we could see the multiethnic revolution in connection with the electronic revolution. The internet, with Facebook, MySpace, blogs, email, and text messaging has some of the same effect on us as migration and increased mobility. These are two sides of the same issue that contribute toward making the nation-state a less important area for the establishment of community.

Coastal identities?

- I also very much want to get people to look at coastal identities in Norway, particularly in a historical perspective, because Norwegian nation-building has been based inland. German romanticism made an impact in the 1800s and then it was the farmers represented what was essentially national. There has been a lot of “Blut und Boden” in this country.

 - There is a remarkable paradox there because Norway has also been Fridtjof Nansen who in a way was a reincarnated Viking king. There are people who know an awful lot about this here, but I have not seen anyone who has convincing reasons for why it was the farmer and not the seaman or fisher who became a symbol for what is national. If you look at a map over Norway, there is of course almost solely coastline and people live along the coast.

The anthropologist must be thinking of the town in which he grew up - Tønsberg, and the island community outside, Nøtterøy.

- In 1814, when Norway received its constitution, a typical Nøtterøy family was a sailor family. There were eight to nine shipyards in Nøtterøy. When I grew up, there was one left, and it is gone now. The shipyards built sailing ships and they sailed in all of the oceans of the world. Many seaman had never been to Christiania, but they had perhaps been to Cape Town.

- If the coastal identity had become an official Norwegian identity, then a lot would have been different. It is not that seamen lacked prejudices, but then people would have at least had a certain openness toward the world from the start.

- There is a widespread belief here that you must have a certain degree of isolation in order to feel secure in yourself, and this view was often used as a legitimization of nationalism and exclusion. I think that a person can become at least as secure in him/herself in noticing that s/he masters establishing contact with other people and in discovering that s/he has something in common with people who come from entirely different places.

- Here we touch upon something very civilizing and totally necessary for us to get through this century. At the same time, this is something that is intellectually interesting to research.

New suburbs project?

Independent from extending the program, CULCOM has applied for funds for an interdisciplinary project in Oslo's suburbs (Groruddalen). Along with several CULCOM researchers, there are also researchers from NOVA and SIFO participating.

- What I am hoping to do is study daily life in a suburb of about 100,000 inhabitants. The basis of the study is place, not ethnicity. What is it that creates and counters the production of local identity and affiliation?

- I could imagine going back to the original urban anthropology from the 1950s and 60s from southern Africa by which I have always been inspired. The urban anthropologists studied ethnicity in the new mining cities. Like in Oslo’s suburbs, people were thrown together from all possible areas and suddenly they were all there and had to relate to each other. Max Gluckman distinguished between uniplex (people you know in only one way, and who you often only say “Hi” to) and multiplex relations (people you know in different ways).

- So what types of relations are there, for example, in a housing cooperative? Who is it that participates or not in local society? Perhaps the most poorly integrated are not Somalian woman, but ethnic Norwegians – single men who sit in and drink beer and play World of Warcraft?

A pilot project in a housing cooperative under the leadership of Thomas Hylland Eriksen is already underway.

- Master’s student Lykke Stavnes has moved in with a Vietnamese family, and among other things will attempt to figure out how people greet each other. She will also attend a general gathering in the housing cooperative.

- Housing cooperatives are not studied enough. They have a lot of power. In many suburbs, most of the inhabitants are people of non-European origins, while the board of the housing cooperative is totally white. Some of these housing cooperatives consist of several hundred units, they manage a lot of money and make rules.

“We have to deconstruct the majority”

- Standard question: What is cultural complexity?

- For me, this has to with something that is irreducible, a symbolic universe that does not cohere in a simple way, where there are many fissures and layers that that are only partially articulated with each other. This can be due to the fact that a person speaks a different language, has different values, or likes different food. You get a system that is rather unpredictable and open because a reconfiguration is constantly happening. You can say that this is a system-theoretical way of talking about diversity.

- Blank spots? Topics that ought to be researched more thoroughly?

- The most important blank spot exists now in deconstructing the majority so thoroughly that it can never be called the majority again, to follow up on some of Marianne Gullestad’s research from the last ten years. Something like this could contribute to both understanding and liberation. And to see the global in the local, that we once and for all really learn that social scientific analyses must not take the nation-state as the a priori point of departure, but that connections and mobility are just as essential as integration and society.

- You said once that someone should study what holds society together?

- Yes. I have often said that now we have taken up hundreds of years – in any case in social anthropology - focusing on differences, and lost the ability to talk about similarities and that which is common to humanity. This century has begun very badly with 9/11. Since then, it has gone from bad to worse when we think about the wars of the US, and continually more aggressive situations around the world where globalization is considered to be a threat. Still, we have 92 years left to change the situation.

- What are the greatest challenges in research about culturally complex relations?

- The greatest challenge is to accept that no final solution exists. We must find out that life and politics and living together is a balancing act, that we “make the rules as we go along”. The dream of something stable and finished is widespread, but society will never be finished.

 

The interview was translated by Amanda Dominguez