Anthropological Notebooks, XXI/2, 2015
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, Christina Garsten and shalini Randeria (eds.) 2014. Anthropology Now and Next: Essays in Honor of Ulf Hannerz. New York, oxford: Berghahn Books. viii + 316 pp. Hb.: $110.00/£68.00. isbn: 9781782384496.
This volume is a celebration of the anthropological career of one of the most prolific, interesting and original world anthropologists in the last five decades. From his first field-work in an inner-city environment of Washington, DC in 1966, Ulf Hannerz, Professor emeritus of social anthropology at the University of Stockholm, has been pushing the boundaries of ethnographic research: from the study of a minority's "culture of poverty", to issues dealing with transnationalism and cosmopolitan studies. His influence in recent decades has been enormous, and Hannerz managed to produce innovative and thought-provoking books and articles, drawing upon his fieldwork experience that included the Caribbean, West Africa, as well as an example of what will later be called "multi-sited ethnography" ("among the foreign correspondents"). Several years ago, at a conference in Durham, he jokingly referred to his own work as being derived from "chance and serendipity", but there is more to it, as can be seen from the present volume.
The book brings together fourteen scholars from different countries and different anthropological traditions, all of whom have been influenced by different aspects of Hannerz's work. In recent years, some of them had been instrumental in developing important research projects in their own countries (Eriksen in Norway, as well as globally; Gingrich in Austria, etc.). In the Introduction, the editors set out to map trajectories of Hannerz's impressive scholarship, from the fact that he was bilingual from the beginning of his career, to the key question that can be derived from his concept of anthropology, '"Who are we?" or rather, "What does the word we mean?"' (p. 5).
In the first chapter, Divided by a Shared Destiny, Thomas Hylland Eriksen nicely connects his current research project (on "Overheating") with Hannerz's insights, especially when it comes to the fruitfulness of using conflicting views in the processes of constructing and appropriating cultural values. After all, Eriksen has himself been influenced by the idea of "cultural complexity" (the title of Hannerz's highly important 1992 book), and his current research project provides a quite solid ground for exploring intercon-nectedness of people's adaptive strategies with regard to their environment. In the second chapter, Juxtapositions, Brian Moeran shows how conflicting elements are used to produce a fabric of social cohesion in a Japanese community. Chapters 3-5 (written by Andre Gingrich, Christina Garsten, and Dominic Boyer) gradually move the focus of the book from the local (Gingrich masterfully revisiting his fieldwork in Yemen), to more global aspects of anthropology (as exemplified by Boyer's take on reflexivity in conjunction with Hannerz's idea of "studying sideways"). In subsequent chapters, this is picked up well by Thomas Blom Hansen, writing on anthropologists as cultural interpreters (with a subtle criticism of some recent trends, such as the "ontological turn" (pp. 122-123)), and Thomas Fillitz, who explores different knowledge practices. Helena Wulff re-visits the "studying sideways" approach, connecting it with her current research on Irish literature. The topic of migrations and aspects of transnationalism are dealt with by Gudrun Dahl, Ayse Caglar, and Ronald Stade, while Joao de Pina-Cabral revisits historical expressions
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Book reviews
of the Portuguese as "the middle of the world". Finally, the book concludes with an interview with Hannerz (conducted by Boyer in September 2012), and with a list of his publications.
As far as Festschrifts go, this is a very good book. It is a timely celebration of the work of one of the most prolific and original anthropologists of the last few decades. However, this volume and its contributors also manage to push the limits of anthropological understanding: what is it that the future of our discipline brings? Moreover, who is going to interpret this future? In that sense, the structure of the book provides fertile grounds for a dialogue about the future of anthropology.
Among other things, Ulf Hannerz was able to see the importance of sharing knowledge and information between different anthropological traditions. He was the anthropology editor for the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences in 2001. He accepted my invitation to write an Afterword for the book on "world anthropologies" that this reviewer edited seven years ago (Boskovic, ed., Other People's Anthropologies: Ethnographic Practice on the Margins, Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2008). Approximately at the same time, he even proposed establishing an international journal that would present works of colleagues from "peripheral" (i.e., non-central) languages into English, thus making them accessible to wider (global) audiences, and providing for a much more meaningful market for the exchange of ideas. Although this last idea did not materialize (perhaps it will, as the need for better communication becomes more obvious on a daily basis), it shows a grasp of what we need at the moment. It is also nicely summarized in the title of the present volume: Anthropology Now and Next is primarily a set of general directions for dealing with fundamental questions of our globalising world in the years to come. These directions are informed suggestions - not fixed rules, as they cannot be used to interpret actual living human beings - and they will certainly depend on the context in which anthropologists find themselves. However, it is the only way in which anthropology can make itself relevant for the time to come.
ALEKSANDAR BOSKOVIC
University of Belgrade and Institute of Social Sciences (Serbia)
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