Farewell Anru, welcome Thomas!

There was a little bit of confusion with our last guest blogger Anru Lee, who ended up publishing a single post. We’d like to thank her for her posting, and move on to our next guest blogger, who we anticipate will not have such problems with portion control. Please welcome Thomas Hylland Eriksen.

Thomas is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and the Free University of Amsterdam, and is also currently research director of the program “Cultural complexity in the new Norway.” He’s published widely on nationalism, ethnicity, globalization, and even the internet and new information technologies, and he works in a variety of genres including textbooks, monographs, collections of essays and a novel. We’re excited to have Thomas blog not only because of his eminence in the field, but because he is our first European guest blogger — and about time too, given the contingent of European readers we have on this blog. We are even more excited because Thomas is particularly interested in engaging with the world and making anthropology accessible for a general audience, particularly over the internet. Consider, for example, his website “Engaging the World”:http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/ and his latest book “Engaging anthropology: The case for a public presence”:http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/Engaging_Anthropology.html. During his week or so as a guest blogger he’ll propose some ways in which anthropologists could influence politics and public opinion more effectively through the media. We look forward to hearing what he has to say and hope he is looking forward to receiving our feedback. Welcome, Thomas!

Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org