Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Norwegian anthropologist

Geir Thomas Hylland Eriksen (born February 6, 1962) is a Norwegian anthropologist known for his scholarly and popular writing on globalization, identity, ethnicity, and nationalism. He is currently Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. He has previously served as the President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2015 2016), as well as the Editor of Samtiden (1993 2001), Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift (1993 1997), the Journal of Peace Research, and Ethnos. Eriksen is among the most prolific and highly cited anthropologists of his generation, and has been recognized for his remarkable success in bringing an anthropological perspective to a broader, non academic audience. In Norway, Eriksen is a well known public intellectual whose advocacy of diversity and cultural pluralism has earned both praise and scorn. Right wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, cited Eriksen critically in his manifesto and during his 2012 trial. In the academy and beyond, Eriksen has been highly decorated for his scholarship. He is the recipient of honorary degrees from Stockholm University (2011), the University of Copenhagen (2021), and Charles University in Prague (2021), as well as one of anthropology's most prestigious honors, the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography's Gold Medal (2022). He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Eriksen was born on 6 February 1962 in Oslo. His parents were Ole Eriksen (1934 1979), a journalist, and Gerd Elisabeth Hylland (1935 2018), a teacher. The family moved to Nøtterøy when Ole Eriksen took a job in Tønsberg. Eriksen grew up in an intellectual environment, though he found Nøtterøy to be a conformist place and felt that he never had deep roots there. He was exposed to the wider world in part through traveling to Africa in connection with his father's work with UNESCO. Eriksen later remembered that as a young teenager his heroes were Alice Cooper and Charles Darwin. In anticipation of pursuing higher education, he took the examen artium in 1980. In 1989, Eriksen completed additional fieldwork in Trinidad. Eriksen was promoted to Professor in 1995. During that time, CULCOM would bring together 120 people from five of the University of Oslo's faculties, and lead directly to the completion of 9 PhDs and 42 MAs, as well as several books—Eriksen himself was directly involved with five of these CULCOM was awarded the University of Oslo's Research Communication Prize in 2010. Though CULCOM ended in 2010, it continued in a sense through a research project it helped launch—The Alna Project—in 2009. Funded by the Research Council of Norway, Eriksen and the Alna Project's interdisciplinary team, including journalist Elisabeth Eide, studied integration and belonging in Alna, a highly diverse "satellite city" in Oslo's Grorud Valley. The project concluded in 2013. Focusing on environmental, economic, and cultural crises, Eriksen and his team conducted ethnographic fieldwork in various countries, including Australia, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, Sierra Leone, Canada, the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Norway. In 2017, Eriksen received the University of Oslo Research Prize for his work on Overheating.

Eriksen has been a minor political candidate for the Norwegian Liberal Party. In the local election of 2011, he was a minor candidate for the Norwegian Green Party in Oslo. He was also a minor candidate for the Norwegian Green Party in the 2013 general election.