Public seminar with Professor Eriksen

Environmental Humanities South (EHS) is excited to host Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who will give a public seminar titled "Beyond Boundary: Creole Identities from Mauritius to the Cape".

Professor Eriksen is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Olso, Norway. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, an Honorary Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. His textbooks in anthropology are widely used and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Eriksen’s research mainly concerns social and cultural dimensions of globalisation, from nationalism and identity politics to the information revolution, accelerated change and the crises of climate and nature. He has carried out fieldwork in Mauritius, Seychelles, Trinidad, Australia and Norway. His recent books in English include Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography (2015), Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (2016), Boomtown: Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast (2018), the co-edited (with Marek Jakoubek) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: A Legacy of Fifty Years (2019), Acceleration and Cultural Change: Dialogues from an Overheated World (2023, with Martina Visentin) and the fifth, revised and expanded edition of Small Places, Large Issues (2023/1995). He is now writing about the threat of globalisation to biological and cultural diversity, and how communities to save diversity and defend their autonomy.

At EHS, Professor Eriksen will discuss a paper which forms part of his long tradition of anthropological work, some of which, in the past, he has carried out in the Creole islands of the Indian Ocean, in the Caribbean, Australia and Norway.

DATE: 09 May 2024

TIME: 10H00 AM - 12H00 PM

VENUE: HUMA Seminar Room, Level 4, Humanities Building, UCT Upper campus 

RSVP to zainab.adams@uct.ac.za 

Please find the abstract below: