99© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016T. Bringa, S. Bendixsen (eds.), Engaged Anthropology, Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40484-4_6

CHAPTER 6

Social Anthropology and the Shifting Discourses about Immigrants in Norway

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

T.H. Eriksen (*)Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, PO Box 1091 Blindern, Oslo, Norway

The first Norwegian anthropologist to write analytically about the relationship between Norwegians and immigrants was, by common con-sensus, Reidar Grønhaug (1938–2005), a professor at the University of Bergen whose main ethnographic work was in Turkey and Afghanistan. Writing in the mid- 1970s, Grønhaug distinguished between three typi-cal attitudes toward the new minorities (Grønhaug 1975). He compared the dago shouter (‘degosroperen’), who took a dismissive and condescend-ing view of immigrants, with the tolerant oppressor (‘den tolerante under-trykker’), a benign if somewhat patronizing character who feels sorry for the immigrants and wants to help them, and finally, the cosmopolitan who favors equitable dialogue across acknowledged cultural divides. At the time, non-European immigration into Norway was recent, modest in scale and politically relatively uninteresting. The right-wing populist Anders Langes Parti (founded in 1973), the predecessor of the Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet) barely mentioned immigration in its programs or election campaigns, and its main political causes were tax reduction and less bureaucracy.

Forty years later, the picture has changed significantly. In the inter-vening decades, the number of immigrants has increased from a little over a 100,000 in 1976 (most of whom were Europeans) to more than 800,000 in 2016 (most of whom are non-European). The Progress Party, which has for many years seen a stricter policy on immigration and, on occasion, the battle against ‘Islamicisation by stealth’ (snikislamisering) as its central issue, entered government in coalition with the Conservatives after the General Elections in September 2013. Immigration and the integration of minorities are now among the three or four most impor-tant political issues in every election campaign, and the social science lit-erature on minority questions and immigration has grown exponentially since its modest beginnings in the 1970s. The terms of discourse have also changed significantly since Grønhaug’s early explorations (see also Grønhaug 1979). In this chapter, I will show how the structural position of anthropologists in the Norwegian public sphere, especially in relation to immigration, has changed. This shift must be viewed against a broader backdrop, namely the shift in global discourse about culture, diversity and religion, especially Islam, in the years following the 11 September ter-rorist attack on the USA. I discern three phases. The first, roughly from the 1970s to the late 1980s, was characterized by a mainly sociological interest in ethnic discrimination and the material conditions among immi-grants. The second phase, which ended in the aftermath of 9/11, saw greatly increased research activity and a heightened public interest, and in this period, mainly the 1990s, there was a shift from mainly social to cul-tural concerns, as value systems, conceptualizations of gender and religion came to the fore. In the third phase, which coincides with the period else-where described as ‘the paranoid phase of globalization’ (Eriksen 2001), the public interest in diversity almost exclusively concerns the place of Islam and Muslims in a contemporary European society such as Norway.

It seems appropriate to point out here that for many years, starting in the late 1980s, I have myself been an active contributor to the pub-lic debate over immigration, national identity and cosmopolitanism in Norway, and also in the other Scandinavian countries. I have published books for the general reader, articles in magazines and newspapers, have been interviewed and asked for comments by all kinds of media and have debated regularly on radio and TV. I have also written a book in English about the importance of a public anthropology (Eriksen 2006). Recently, however, I have increasingly found it difficult to contribute meaningfully to the public discourse on these matters, and I believe this shift must

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be seen in the context of the broader change in the terms of discourse about migration and national identity. In the 1990s, people who defended diversity and sought to cool down public emotions around immigration were often met with curiosity and interest, although they were sometimes written off as naïve. In recent years, the word ‘traitor’ has become more widespread. Similarly, deconstructing Norwegian national identity, and satirizing the pomposity and self-righteousness that is so widespread in this small, rich country, was generally taken in a good spirit in the 1990s (Eriksen 1993), whereas such efforts are, today, routinely met with an avalanche of spite and aggression. When it comes to these matters, it is clear that the current ecology of ideas in the Norwegian public sphere is less conducive to playfulness, experiments of thought and an optimis-tic outlook than what was the case in the 1990s. In my own case, I did not lose interest in the current debates because they are unimportant. On the contrary, in a situation with increasing polarization, growing hostility to migrants and their defenders, and a government which contains ele-ments associated with exclusionary forms of nationalism, it may be more important than ever before to produce alternative stories, perspectives and not least knowledges about the world. Incidentally, I wasn’t worried about losing academic standing for being drawn into highly politicized media debates either; had I cared much about this kind of symbolic capi-tal, I would scarcely have entered the unpredictable and often frustrating media world in the first place. In another chapter in this volume, Shahram Khosravi, who had entered the public sphere reluctantly, reports that his colleagues were unenthusiastic about his interventions in the media. The Norwegian situation is different, and some degree of media visibility is considered an asset for an anthropology department; it spreads knowledge about the discipline and contributes to attracting students.

Finally, neither was I scared off or intimidated by threats, trolling and abuse, although it cannot be denied that these kinds of responses have not only become far more widespread but also more difficult to dodge, in an era of universal, instantaneous communication. Rather, what has led to my gradual, possibly temporary withdrawal from the public discourse on national identity and minority issues has been the experience of being increasingly incapable of generating interesting discussions.

I am not alone in having this experience; Norway is not an isolated case, and comparable changes in the terms of discourse have taken place in other European countries as well. The very word multiculturalism has become deeply fraught, and three prominent European leaders—Angela

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Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron—denounced ‘multicultural-ism’ almost simultaneously in 2011. The ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ has been the subject of several scholarly studies (see Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010; Lentin and Titley 2011), and when Prospect’s founder editor David Goodhart asked the question ‘Too diverse?’ in a major 2004 article, he gave voice to a creeping feeling of disquiet that immigration had taken place too fast, that it might be of the wrong kind and that it could entail fragmentation and weakened trust (Goodhart 2004). What is peculiar to Norway is not the way in which minority issues are being addressed, but the prominent role played by social anthropologists as commentators and public intellectuals for many years in the debate over migration and diver-sity, and their reduced visibility in the 2010s.

The Cheerful NiNeTies

A decade and a half after Grønhaug’s early foray into immigrant research, the research literature had grown perceptibly. There existed by now a growing library of fully fledged studies of Pakistani-Norwegians, the larg-est non-European immigrant group, carried out by social scientists, includ-ing anthropologists. Allow me to mention a handful of books from this decade, which may serve as illustrations of the Zeitgeist and the approaches favored by anthropologists addressing a broader readership.

The young social anthropologist Long Litt Woon edited and intro-duced Fellesskap til besvær? (‘Troublesome community?’, Long 1992), which raises questions about discrimination in the labor market, racism and exclusion, with a main focus on questions to do with identity in a society which was becoming diverse in new ways. The editor, herself a Malaysian of Chinese origin, educated in Oslo and living in Norway, contributed a chapter about hyphenated identities and cultural differ-ences. A year earlier, the sociologist Ottar Brox had published Jeg er ikke rasist, men ... (‘I’m not a racist, but …’, Brox 1991), based on a survey of xenophobic attitudes among ethnic Norwegians. His conclusion was that Norwegians were generally positive toward diversity, but that there were real anxieties about unpleasant cultural differences and possible labor market issues. At the same time, my own Veien til et mer eksotisk Norge (‘Towards a more exotic Norway’, Eriksen 1991) appeared, a mainly optimistic essay on the new diversity and the potentials and limitations of cultural relativism in majority–minority relations. In the concluding chapter, the book made a sweeping gesture toward the pejorative term

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ghetto. I argued that this word, used disparagingly about minorities who formed communities instead of mixing with Norwegians, might be given a positive content if one saw the ‘ghettos’ as a kind of local communi-ties, since lokalsamfunn, local community, has strongly positive connota-tions in Norwegian. A few years later, Brox took the bait and invited me to contribute to his collection Tett eller spredt? (‘Concentrated or scat-tered?’ Brox 1997), which looked at the patterns of settlement among immigrants and evaluated them from the perspective of integration into greater society. That book comes across, retrospectively, as an exemplary instance of creative disagreement and shows the ways in which social sci-ence research can improve the knowledge bases of decision-making.

The debate, both inside and outside of anthropology, focused at the time on racism and discrimination on the one hand, and issues of integra-tion—culture, labor market, language and so on—on the other. By the mid-1990s, as new immigrants (mainly refugees, with Sri Lankan Tamils, Somalis and Bosnians as the largest groups) entered the country, pub-lic and academic interest in the issues grew, and the existence of diverse views and perspectives among the anthropologists became apparent. An impatient segment of the population began to demand of the immigrants that they ‘integrate’ as soon as possible; the benign ‘colorful community’ rhetoric of the 1980s was now being condemned as naïve and ‘politically correct’, and issues to do with morally and politically problematic aspects of diversity, such as enforced marriages and Islam, came to the fore.

Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, wrote Mot en ny norsk underklasse? (‘Toward a new Norwegian underclass?’ Wikan 1995), which implied that patriarchal ideologies among immigrants (especially Muslims) were instrumental in curtailing not only the freedom of minority women but also preventing the full inte-gration of immigrants in Norwegian society. Wikan was praised by many for her courage, but she was also criticized, by colleagues and others, for not problematizing, or even discussing, the central concept of ‘Norwegian culture’, and also for allegedly contributing to the stigmatization of minority groups by generalizing about gender oppression and illiberal val-ues among non-European immigrants. Her book and other interventions nevertheless had a perceptible impact on the public discourse and official policy over the ensuing years. Her aim was to contrast the mainstream Norwegian values of gender equality and individualism on the one hand, with complementary gender roles and a collectivist view of the person on the other. At the time, hers was a minority view in the academy, and she received little public support from other anthropologists.

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The same period saw the publication of a diverse range of academic or popular books by anthropologists on minority issues, including Øivind Fuglerud’s erudite and thorough monograph about long-distance nation-alism among Tamils (Fuglerud 1999), Mary Bente Bringslid’s study of refugees in a small Western Norwegian community (Bringslid 1996), Torunn Arntsen Sørheim’s (now Sajjad) work on health and disease among Pakistani- Norwegians (Sørheim 2001) and Inger-Lise Lien’s book on racist attitudes among Norwegians and Pakistanis (Lien 1996). Several of these books, especially those by Wikan and Lien, were subject to con-troversy in the press and in seminar rooms, since they voiced critical views concerning immigrants and immigrant culture. In an earlier article, Lien (1991) had raised critical questions concerning the normative aspects of immigrant research, asking rhetorically if it was the duty of the anthro-pologist to defend practices and attitudes among ‘their people’ even if they were objectionable. One typical answer to this question would be that the work of the anthropologist consists in translating and analyzing social and cultural contexts, not to grade them on a moral scale. As also pointed out by Garbi Schmidt in her contribution to this book, normative questions are difficult not to relate to in this field, explicitly or implicitly. The boundary between the political and the academic is always thin, slip-pery and permeable, and the work of anthropologists in this contested area becomes public almost by default. Social science is never norma-tively neutral, and certainly not when it concerns the society in which the researcher lives. Yet, although all scientific knowledge has a hybrid element—it is produced not only by science but also by society—there is no unequivocal scientific answer to existential or political questions. All we can hope for is to contribute a small drop of complexity, or knowl-edge, to the public discourse. At this time, the 1990s, there was a real sense in which academics not only disagreed among themselves but also engaged constructively with a broader public sphere in which politics was produced, without their research being immediately translated or simpli-fied into political statements.

11 sepTember 2001On 10 September 2001, I spoke at a conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in Copenhagen, on the invitation of the then minister of development in Denmark, Anita Bay Bundegaard. Before becoming a gov-ernment minister, Bundegaard had been an editor at the social democratic

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Politiken newspaper, and we knew each other because I had been a regular contributor to the newspaper for some years. A few months previously, Bundegaard had stirred up controversy in Denmark by intimating that perhaps the world’s poor (estimated at 1.2 billion persons) should be considered legitimate refugees and be allowed to apply for asylum, for example in Denmark. No Scandinavian politician in a leading position has suggested anything remotely resembling Bundegaard’s suggestion since, partly owing to events taking place on the day after the conference.

On 10 September, it was still easy to access the MFA in downtown Copenhagen. There was no security screening, no guards, merely a coun-ter where visitors were asked to register. The meeting concerned global inequality and injustice, and among the speakers was Michael Hardt of Empire fame (with Antonio Negri), who gave a video talk about imperial-ism and the struggling multitudes in the global south.

The events of the next day sent shockwaves through the global ner-vous system, and retrospectively, it may seem as though the upbeat, opti-mistic and curiosity-driven approach to globalization characterizing the 1990s (Clinton’s decade, the Internet as the main metaphor of the global) had now been superseded by a paranoid phase of globalization (Bush II’s decade, deterritorialized terrorism as main metaphor). The date of 11 September represented a watershed in the global politics of identity and relations, broadly conceptualized, between Islam and the West. The effects cannot be measured, but they can be observed.

In Denmark, parliamentary elections were held soon after the terror-ist attack in the USA, and the left-of-center coalition government was replaced by a right-of-center government relying on the support of the right-wing, anti-immigration Dansk Folkeparti (‘The Danish People’s Party’). The new Danish government itself had, during the election cam-paign, promised to implement the strictest immigration policy in Europe (Hervik 2011), and the country soon became known for its shift toward a more severe practice in these matters. (See Garbi Schmidt’s chapter for more details.)

In Norway, strongly anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant voices increas-ingly began to make themselves heard, and they would soon enter the mainstream media. The most influential website devoted to anti-Muslim discourse, document.no, later infamous for being the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s favorite website, was founded in January 2003. The public sphere was becoming perceptibly more polarized than in the previ-ous decade around questions to do with immigration and minority issues.

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The anti- immigrant Progress Party, which received 14.6 % of the votes in 2001 (the general elections were, ironically, held on 10 September), got 22.1 % in 2005 and became the second-largest party in parliament.

Although arguably a watershed event, the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001 did not represent the only change in the public discourse about minority issues. Notably, the numbers of immigrants had grown steadily during the 1990s, and controversial issues such as enforced mar-riages and female circumcision had already come to the fore then. My own book about demonization of Islam, Det nye fiendebildet (‘The new enemy image’, Eriksen 1995), published in 1995, took as its point of departure the ideological vacuum left by the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe as well as the Salman Rushdie affair, which erupted in 1988. For the updated, post-9/11 edition, Bak fiendebildet (‘Behind the enemy image’, Eriksen 2001), I did not have to make any major changes to the substantial chapters, but added a new introduction about deterritorialized warfare, neo-liberalism and the politics of fear.

As regards the anthropologists writing about minority issues, they also soon found themselves in a new ecology of ideas, less conducive to opti-mism about cultural diversity. Some also changed their approach. Ottar Brox, who was a well-known public figure and a former member of par-liament for the Socialist Left (1973–1977), would co-edit a book taking a critical approach to immigration and integration, Gode formål—gale følger? (‘Good intentions—bad results?’, Brox et al. 2003). This book, which contained contributions mostly by academics (no anthropologists, however), but also a chapter written by a controversial anti-immigration activist, scrutinized the situation in the domains of work, integration, crime and the media. The verdict was clear: Something has gone wrong with the integration of immigrants, and it results from naïve, poorly informed and gullible policies enabling the growth of a society which is no longer sustainable. (The validity of this view is questionable; the point is not whether it could be defended empirically or not but the fact that it became part of a narrative supported by social scientists.) One of the contributors writes about ‘ecological limits to human adaptation’ in the context of non-European immigration, while the sociologist Sigurd Skirbekk defends nationalism and argues that the idea of a multicultural (flerkulturelt) society is a contradiction in terms, since a society needs to be held together by what he calls a shared culture. Although the book did not make a very significant impact inside or outside the academy, it

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signaled the consolidation of a new tendency, new terms of discourse in the minority debate. Significantly, several of the chapters use the term arbeidskraftimport (‘labor import’) when talking about labor migration. The implied subject position is that of the settled Norwegians, not of the people who migrate.

Although many cases could have been invoked to show the shift between the late twentieth- and the early twenty-first century concern-ing the discourse about majority–minority relations, I shall limit myself to two: The reception of Marianne Gullestad’s monograph about Norwegian racism (Gullestad 2002b), including the so-called Gullestad–Rehman controversy, and the discourse about racism and nationalism following the Norwegian terrorist attack on 22 July 2011, where Sindre Bangstad’s monograph about Breivik and Islamophobia (Bangstad 2014) is the most substantial contribution so far written by an anthropologist.

mariaNNe GullesTad aNd The publiC sphere

Marianne Gullestad (1946–2008) was the most widely respected anthro-pologist writing about Norway. For many years, she concentrated her efforts on researching everyday life among majority Norwegians, drawing equally on the empiricist social anthropology in which she had been trained in Bergen, and American cognitive anthropology. In her early work, she sought to unpack the central cultural categories in mainstream Norwegian society, such as ‘equality as sameness’ and ‘peace and quiet’ (Gullestad 1984, 1992). By the late 1990s, she had embarked on a new research project, aiming to reveal boundary-making processes in Norwegian discourse, with an empirical focus on ways in which Norwegians classi-fied and described immigrants. The book, Det norske sett med nye øyne (‘Norwegianness from a new perspective’, Gullestad 2002b), was imme-diately controversial, and unlike her previous works, it received mixed reviews in the press. Several public persons, including academics, openly disagreed with her analysis.

To this I shall return, but a significant context for a discussion about Gullestad’s monograph is the ‘Gullestad–Rehman controversy’, which was at the forefront of national public debate for about a month in late summer 2002, and which suggests an incipient shift in the general attitude to anthropologists and their cultural relativist gaze in Norwegian society.

As a matter of fact, the media show began with an attack on me. The controversy started with an angry critique of ‘soft-hearted cultural relativists’

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published in the highbrow weekly Morgenbladet, where the writer claimed that academics had failed to deal with immigrant and minority issues prop-erly in the aftermath of 11 September. Naïve anti-racism, sheepishness and political correctness were invoked in this rather bad-tempered article written by an academically educated man (Nilsen 2002). I responded the following week, pointing out that virtually every claim made in the article was wrong. I pointed out that research and public debate on migration and ethnic relations had for years been characterized by a plurality of views and approaches; and that hardly anybody commenting on 11 September believed, as this writer insinuated, that Osama bin Laden was a spokesman for the weak and oppressed (Eriksen 2002).

Shabana Rehman, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants in Oslo and a feminist activist and stand-up comedian, used her Sunday column the following week to attack ‘the intellectuals’ (with myself as the exemplary case) for being patronizing, arrogant and politically irrelevant (Rehman 2002). During the past few years, Rehman had achieved nationwide fame for her witty and provocative approach to issues to do with cultural traditions and immigration. She had battled religious conservatism and enforced marriages through both conventional and unorthodox means, but her main breakthrough as a national figure had consisted in a feature article in Dagbladet’s Saturday magazine where she was photographed in the nude with a Norwegian flag painted on her body. A brave and provocative gesture, it left no doubt as to where she stood on matters of religion and individuality.

On Thursday, 1 August, Marianne Gullestad, herself a well-known public figure in Norway, published a long response to Rehman in the Oslo broadsheet Aftenposten (Gullestad 2002a), where she questioned Rehman’s role in Norwegian public life, claiming that her media presence ‘overshadowed others’. More substantially, she argued that Rehman’s emphasis, in her regular Dagbladet column, on issues such as sexuality and lifestyle, had contributed to shifting public attention away from ethnic discrimination and social exclusion to less important matters. She also inti-mated that Rehman’s views could easily be appropriated by politicians and others who demanded cultural assimilation from immigrants and denied them the right to define their own identity. Perhaps most provocatively, Gullestad argued that Rehman’s position as a liberal and ‘liberated’ young woman of the second generation confirmed Norwegian stereotypes rather than interrogating them. Finally, Gullestad lamented Rehman’s explicit anti-intellectualism. In her original Sunday article, Rehman had

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argued that intellectuals were only interested in recognition from other intellectuals, not in influencing or changing society.

In the following days, both Aftenposten and Dagbladet published a large number of comments by and interviews with academics, activists and prominent immigrants, who represented a variety of views on the controversy. Online debates were still in their infancy, and unlike what the situation would have been a decade later, the thrust of the debate took place in the Oslo newspapers, Dagbladet representing Rehman, while Aftenposten was Gullestad’s medium. Some said that Rehman’s offensive language (among other things, she had described culturally conservative Muslim women as ‘a herd of cows’) had led to an unhealthy polarization between liberals and conservatives in immigrant circles, where more soft-spoken and compromising positions had become difficult to sustain; some defended her against the onslaught from the ivory tower; some attacked the media for not allowing a greater variation in perspectives; and some confessed ambivalence. Moreover, both newspapers published several new articles by both Gullestad and Rehman (see Eriksen 2003 for sources). Many others also commented on the debate, which quickly spilled over from the columns of Aftenposten and Dagbladet to other media across the country.

Dust settled, there was by and large agreement that Rehman had won the debate, exposing academics as ‘living in goldfish bowls’ and being out of touch with realities, and anthropologists in particular as being irrespon-sible ‘cultural relativists’ who had no empathy for or even understanding of Muslim women and their liberation struggles. There is a deep resonance here, unbeknownst to most of the contributors, with Susan Moller Okin’s influential article, ‘Is multiculturalism bad for women?’ (Okin 1999).

The online debates which accompanied the Rehman–Gullestad con-troversy largely consisted in massive verbal assaults on academics and, in particular, the alleged ‘cultural relativists’ among them. Marianne Gullestad, disappointed by the terms of discourse, would never take part in Norwegian public debates again after this experience, deciding instead to concentrate on her scholarly work.

Gullestad’s book about Norwegian racism and exclusionary language had been published a few months before the controversy with Rehman. It was based on four years of research, and as she writes in the preface, the book was at the proofreading stage when the al-Qaeda attack on the USA happened. Presciently, she muses that the terrorist attack would in all like-lihood change the terms of discourse about the us–them nexus.

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Det norske sett med nye øyne is not a book based on fieldwork (see Gullestad 2006 for a collection of articles in English based on the same material), but on discourse analysis. She looks at newspapers, popular books, statements and writings from fellow academics and other sources, trying to distill a discursive universe within which Norwegians speak of themselves in relation to others. (I was, incidentally, one of the academics she criticized, not for being an unconscious racist, though, but for essen-tializing Norwegian culture; see Eriksen 1997.) Careful to avoid making marginal voices representative of society, she navigates between academic authorities and mainstream media. In one of the chapters, a senior lan-guage professor explains that a ‘minority’ woman can never expect to be regarded as a Norwegian since the term semantically excludes people like her. In the most intensely debated and controversial chapter, Gullestad shows how the word neger (‘negro’) remained widespread and was widely seen as purely descriptive and neutral in its connotations. Although blacks were not slaves in Norway, they were traded by Norwegian ship captains—in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Peer boasts that among other things, he made his fortune by shipping ‘Negroes to Carolina’. At the time of the debate about the book, journalists asked Norwegian blacks if they were comfortable with the term neger, and unsurprisingly, they were, on the whole, not.

Writing about the book precisely in Aftenposten, the senior reviewer Ingunn Økland was unimpressed. The title of her review, ‘Håpløse nord-menn i mistenksom studie’ (‘Hopeless Norwegians in distrustful study’), summarizes its contents. Økland argues that in Gullestad’s world, virtu-ally everything Norwegians do or say in relation to minorities, regardless of their intentions, comes across as expressions of exclusion or conde-scension. In a representative passage, Økland points out that Gullestad ‘severely criticizes the new tendency to present direct criticism of the immigrants and demand a greater societal conscience of them’. In the reviewer’s view, this ‘new tendency’ (the review was published in January 2002) must be a positive thing, since it may prompt an improved ‘societal conscience’ (samfunnsbevissthet) among the newcomers.

It is worth pointing out that the analysis of exclusionary language and practices in Gullestad’s book is consistent with her old teacher Grønhaug’s typology of Norwegian attitudes to immigrants, published as early as 1975. Although her book profits from the theoretical advances of the intervening decades (Edward Said’s Orientalism was published after Grønhaug’s early article, the entire field of postcolonial studies developed subsequently), two main forms of exclusion identified in her book resemble Grønhaug’s

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categories overt racism (‘the dago shouter’) and benign condescension (‘the tolerant oppressor’). By 2002, this form of cultural self-criticism had become less easily tolerated than it had been a quarter of a century earlier. Grønhaug’s early analyses marked the first phase in anthropological analy-ses of the new diversity alluded to earlier. As mentioned, the second phase saw a shift from an interest in the social to a growing concern with culture. The third phase which began in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack was, in the Norwegian context, initiated by the Rehman–Gullestad controversy and the reception of Gullestad’s monograph. It is framed by an obsession with, and negative marking of, Islam and Muslims, and a reduced space for self-criticism on the part of the majority.

In an interview given some time after the release of the book, Gullestad summed up its public reception in the following way:

In many ways, the reception [of Det norske sett med nye øyne] was a kind of confirmation of one of its main points, namely that it is difficult to address topics pertaining to racism and discrimination when they are quo-tidian and institutional and not violent and extremist. At the same time, the resistance also illustrates the fact that we who belong to ‘the chatter-ing classes’ are not used to being examined critically (Gullestad, quoted in Michelet 2008).

It would be futile to argue counterfactually about the reception of Gullestad’s book if it had appeared a decade earlier, but the change in the ideological climate can be substantiated. While conceptualizations of self/other were mainly racially framed before the 1990s, and while research on minority–majority relations tended to focus on labor and racism, the shift toward culturalization was perceptible already in that decade (Eriksen 1995), with religion (meaning, in this context, Islam in all its forms, real and imaginary) being the chief marker of difference in the twenty-first century, ‘multiculturalism’ being glossed as misguided tolerance of Islam, criticism of diversity being largely tantamount to negative views of Islam and Muslims. (An interesting exception is anti-ziganism, which is pow-erful in Norway; see Rosvoll and Bielenberg 2012; Djuve et  al. 2015.) The media scholar Elisabeth Eide has pointed out that the terms ‘Islam/Muslims’ appeared nearly twice as often as the term ‘immigrant’ in the Norwegian media in 2009, and occurred nearly as frequently as the name of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (IMDI 2010).

All other things being equal, culturalization of minority–majority rela-tions should increase the importance of anthropological perspectives since, after all, cultural analysis is one of anthropology’s specialties. However, the

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actual outcome has been the opposite. Anthropologists have come to be associated, not only in mainstream public life but also by some other aca-demics (e.g. Tvedt 2002; Witoszek 2009), with a cultural relativist outlook (and not just a cultural relativist methodology) as well as perspectives which inhibit the integration of minorities by promoting the right to difference. As Aud Talle (1944–2011), a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, discovered in the early 2000s after having been lampooned as a dangerous relativist in the largest newspaper in the country, doing research on female circumcision among Maasai or Somali is unproblematic as far as the wider public is concerned, but identical research on Somali refugees in Norway is fraught with moral implications. She responded with a book, Om kvinneleg omskjering (‘About female circumcision’, Talle 2003), which patiently and carefully explained the circumstances under which circumci-sion became socially necessary and cultural meaningful. In the final chapter, she argues that for campaigns against female circumcision to be efficient, they need to build trust and cooperation with the groups in question. Talle’s book represents, in many ways, public anthropology at its best, and its proposed remedy—patient, cautious work, based on recognition and mutual respect—remains influential among health workers. Nonetheless, its message has not shaped the terms of public discourse on female circum-cision, which has carried on as if Talle’s research did not exist.

As Mikael Kurkiala’s contribution to this book shows, the culturalization of the Norwegian discourse about minorities was not paralleled by a similar development in Sweden at the outset of this century. On the contrary, when the anthropologist Kurkiala argued the necessity to take cultural traditions into account when trying to understand honor killings, he was immediately attacked by influential persons in Swedish society, who saw these incidents instead as expressions of a universal patriarchal logic. Invoking cultural explanations was widely seen as a form of discrimination in the Swedish context, and this was not the case in Norway at the same time.

afTer breivik

The enduring effects of the binary implied in George W.  Bush’s ‘war on terror’ cannot be underestimated, and Norway experienced its own traumatic terrorist attack, based on the same Manichean logic, a decade after the destruction of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. On 22 July 2011, the country experienced its largest humanitarian disaster since the Second World War when a right-wing terrorist killed seventy seven and wounded

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dozens in a bid to purify Norwegian culture and cleanse the country of Muslims. Somewhat counter-intuitively, he did not target Muslims directly, but instead attacked government buildings in the center of Oslo and, a few hours later, a summer camp organized by the youth wing of the Labor Party (AUF), in the belief that it would help reducing the future number of immi-grants to kill future leaders with a positive view of immigration and diversity.

Anthropologists were well aware of the existence of people like Breivik. They have published about European Islamophobia for years (Bangstad and Bunzl 2010; Bowen 2011; Bunzl 2007; Gingrich 2005), but rarely as a security threat from within. Recruitment to contemporary militant nationalist circles follows a very different logic to that of old-fashioned extremist movements. This partly explains why the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) had not viewed the new nationalist extremism as a security threat until the 22 July attack. These militants do not have orga-nizations and membership lists; indeed they do not even share a coherent ideology—they range from libertarians to disappointed social demo-crats. What they have in common is a conviction that their government is betraying the nation by allowing Muslims to settle in Norway, since, in their view, Islam is incompatible with democracy and modernity. The logi-cal implication of this view, propagated via a forest of websites, domestic and European (Strømmen 2011), is that the blight on Europe it identifies cannot be set right through democratic means.

The election results in 2011 (local elections) and 2013 (general elec-tions) suggest that world views resembling Breivik’s has vivid, if limited, support in the Norwegian population. The party of which he had been a member for many years, the populist Progress Party, saw a reduction in their support at both occasions, but was still capable of forming a coalition government with the Conservatives in 2013, despite receiving only 16.4 % of the votes (compared to 22.9 % in 2009). In other words, a comfort-able majority of Norwegians voted for parties which did not blame societal problems chiefly on immigration. At the same time, an opinion poll from autumn 2011 suggested, in spite of the ‘anti-Jihadist’ terrorist attack that had just shaken the country, that a quarter of the Norwegian population saw Islam as a threat to Norwegian culture and felt that there were too many Muslims in the country (Norstat 2011). Moreover, another survey, from 2012, indicates that forty percent were negative to the building of mosques in the country, and roughly the same percentage were negative to persons with Muslim beliefs (IMDI 2012). It is, accordingly, possible to conclude that a substantial minority of the Norwegian population is

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profoundly dissatisfied with Norwegian policy on immigration and inte-gration. The terrorist attack did, in other words, highlight—in a grotesque way—a real ideological division in Norwegian society.

Attributions of blame and bids to explain Breivik have proliferated in Norway since the attack (Eriksen 2014). A widely acclaimed book by Aage Borchgrevink (2012) emphasizes Breivik’s childhood and background as an explanation for his becoming a hateful terrorist, while others have sought to define his massacre as a political crime based on right-wing eth-nic nationalism. Similarly to the negative reactions to Gullestad’s analy-sis of institutional, banal racism, it is not considered good form in the Norwegian public sphere to mention that Breivik had a background in the Progress Party. The mere suggestion that a particular view of minor-ity–majority relations, or of Islam, resembles Breivik’s perspectives, as set out in his voluminous manifesto, is enough to disqualify you from any debate about the present and future of the country. Contrary to what many had anticipated, public opinion over Islam and cultural diversity remains divided and polarized, possibly more so, after the terrorist attack than before it (see Titley 2013).

The most comprehensive study of the terrorist attack and its broader context by an anthropologist is Sindre Bangstad’s Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (Bangstad 2014). By no means a neutral book written in the detached style of the ivory-tower academic, Bangstad’s intervention is engaged and politically normative. It is also an erudite and meticulously researched book with comparative glances to countries such as France and the UK, discussions of moral philosophies dealing with liberal values, tol-erance and the freedom of expression, and delving into the literature that inspired Breivik and his ideological allies in considerable detail, notably the conspiratorial ‘Eurabia’ genre and its relatives. Bangstad, moreover, argues that the culturalization of the minority debate in Norway has tar-geted Muslims as ‘the Other’ since the 1990s, but increasingly in the new century. He shows not only that negative representations of Muslims are commonplace in mainstream media, but that they have also often pre-sented views of Muslims and immigrants which would, in other coun-tries, be considered extreme. He also quotes Progress Party politicians (and others, some from the Labor Party) liberally to show that dismissive and hostile generalizations about Islam and Muslims are widespread not only on dedicated websites or in the occasional op-ed article but also in Parliament.

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The book is critical of mainstream Norwegian media, and Bangstad’s own reflections and conclusions are his own and subject to debate. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that it is an empirically sound and original piece of work. On this background, and given the enduring interest in the terrorist attack in the Norwegian media, some public interest in the book might have been expected upon its publication. Yet, the book has only received one review in the Norwegian press, by the respected journalist Tom Egil Hverven, writing in the left-wing Klassekampen (6 September 2014). In his largely negative evaluation of the book, Hverven argues that Bangstad presents a skewed picture of the Norwegian public sphere, char-acterizing people he disagrees with in uncharitable ways and polemicizing against newspaper editors, activists and journalists whose views differ from his own. Apart from this review, there has been no public reception of the book in Norway, which has nevertheless been positively reviewed in a major Swedish newspaper (Aftonbladet, Arnstad 2014) and in the London Review of Books (Shatz 2014), as well as in some academic journals.

The indifference with which Bangstad’s book has been met may sum up, perhaps a trifle pessimistically, the situation of social anthropology in the Norwegian minority debate a decade and a half after the 11 September terrorist attack. Whereas debates about national identity, minorities and cultural change were pushed forward and engaged with by anthropolo-gists in an exploratory, curiosity-driven way in the 1990s, at a time when their media presence was very considerable, they have in the present cen-tury been met by bemusement, hostility and, increasingly, indifference.

iN searCh of a New laNGuaGe

At the time of writing, the Syrian refugee crisis is growing by the day. Stories of drowned refugees, overcrowded camps in Lebanon and Jordan, and unspeakable human suffering in Syria itself drip into the public con-sciousness in Norway as they do elsewhere. In the summer of 2015, the leader of the Labor Party demanded that Norway accept 10,000 Syrian refugees, while the Conservative–Progress coalition government took a far more restrictive stand. In the course of the public conversation about the issue, both in conventional and online media, a new concept emerged, namely godhetsposør (‘goodness ambassador’, referring to people who parade their moral superiority in ostentatious ways), in a bid to discredit those who argue in favor of accepting a limited number of Syrian refu-gees. Debates over refugee crises, whether in Somalia or Bosnia, were not framed in such terms in the 1990s.

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For many years, academic scholarship on Norwegianness ignored minority issues. Tellingly, the most popular collective work on Norwegian identity from the 1980s, Arne Martin Klausen’s edited volume Den norske væremåten (‘The Norwegian way of being’, Klausen 1984), contains chap-ters about cultural styles, the rural–urban divide, the obsession with equal-ity, gender and nature worship, but just one chapter on minorities (written by the South African immigrant Julian Kramer), and minorities were absent from the analyses of mainstream Norwegian society. Minorities were also absent from the work of Marianne Gullestad before she turned to this topic in the late 1990s. By 2016, the situation is very different. The number of qualified Norwegian social anthropologists who write about majority–minority relations is higher than ever; they are diverse in their specializa-tions and updated in their reading. They know their Adorno from their Zizek and their Leach from their Geertz; they command mountains of field notes, years of ethnographic experience and a theoretical sophistica-tion far exceeding that of the early pioneers. Yet, in the current ideological and intellectual climate, public interest in the perspectives typically pro-moted by anthropologists is, for the time being, reduced. By dint of their irritating tendency to complicate matters, by giving pride of place to the interesting questions rather than straightforward answers and by prefer-ring ambivalence and complexity to unequivocal conclusions, anthropolo-gists represent a form of knowledge for which there seems to be limited use in the public sphere at this moment. Partly stigmatized as cultural relativists and apologists for barbaric customs, partly discarded as dither-ing and irrelevant, it may seem that anthropologists must find new ways of making themselves relevant in the public sphere. Nothing is eternal, and the situation will change, but for the time being, the Norwegian social anthropology of minority–majority relations finds itself ‘in the sadly ludi-crous, not to say tragic, position, that at the very moment when it begins to put its workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task’ (Malinowski 1984 [1922]: xv), public interest in its achievements ‘melts away with hopeless rapidity’ (Malinowski 1984 [1922]: xv). My old teacher Harald Eidheim (1925–2012) once advised me not to enter into debates with entrenched positions, since they always entailed polarization and schismogenesis rather than mutual learning and a genuine intellectual exchange. Accordingly, a major task for anthropolo-gists, in Norway and elsewhere, now consists in finding ways of depicting and visualizing kinds of complexity that may break some vicious circles, expand the space for alternative thinking and create, or rather revitalize, a

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public space where there is room for the shameless promotion of curiosity-driven research, open-ended questions and perhaps even a drop of irre-sponsible, intellectual playfulness. Anthropology may not be able to save the world, but it enhances our capacities at being human, and therefore it is far too important to be the exclusive domain of the anthropologists.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the editors for valuable comments on this chapter. His research is funded by the ERC Advanced Grant ‘Overheating: The three crises of globalisation’, grant number 295843.

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