Talentoso, curioso, empenhado, generoso, intelectual público, académico dedicado, escritor prolixo, mente criativa, amigo, interlocutor, e muitas mais qualidades: Thomas Hylland Eriksen era único e deixa saudade. A APA associa-se à comunidade internacional na homenagem a este colega e acolhe depoimentos de quem assim quiser manifestar-se (secretariado@apantropologia.org).
Thomas Hylland Eriksen faleceu há poucos dias com 62 de anos de idade.
A morte dele estava anunciada há muito, sempre esteve, teria dito ele, mas foi acelerada pela doença, diríamos nós. Só mais um passo num mundo em permanente mudança, acrescentaria ele.
Thomas deixou uma obra quase infindável e, acima de tudo, saudade. Saudade, com certeza, dos livros que ficaram por escrever, porém é o exemplo de homem bom que recordamos.
Os livros de Thomas Hylland Eriksen deixam transparecer o modo como ele encarava a vida e também a sua personalidade, sempre acessível, aberta à diferença, ao diálogo, a outros olhares, raramente categorizadora, nada classificatória, sempre optimista, sedutora, escrupulosa e deferente, avessa a fechamentos conceptuais e a afastamentos afectivos, evocativa, respeitadora, modesta e humilde. Conviver com Thomas era testemunhar a possibilidade da excepcionalidade ser algo, afinal, comum. Sem vedetismos.
Recordá-lo não será difícil. A sua obra está aí, as memórias que deixou em todos que com ele conviveram são indeléveis. Nos últimos anos debruçou-se, principalmente, sobres questões relacionadas com o aquecimento global. Fez da noção de fricção pedra de toque para nos lembrar que o mundo está sobreaquecido em múltiplas dimensões, e que não temos de inventar nada para sair da encruzilhada em que nos encontramos: basta desacelerar. “Cool down, slow down, scale down”, todos merecemos uma oportunidade, como nunca se cansou de repetir.
Thomas sabia não ser a melhor manifestação da sua própria proposta. Viveu depressa, muito e em múltiplas dimensões: antropólogo prolífico, músico, comentador público, conferencista, amigo sempre presente, ecologista, marido e pai dedicado, humanista, guionista, ciclista, anarquista convertido aos ideias da social-democracia nórdica e, no entanto, nunca o vimos acelerado (irrequieto sim, nas suas ideias e ideais). Sempre com tempo para mais um dedo de conversa, uma nova ideia, uma nova perspectiva, uma nova amizade… sempre fascinado por novas possibilidades de pensar a vida e o mundo. Thomas tinha a energia que só cabe no fascínio duma criança a cada coisa nova que toca, vê, descobre, ouve, sente. Essa sua capacidade aliada à notória ausência de soberba fazia dele um homem bom, um homem bom que fará falta ao mundo. Obviamente é uma perda inquestionável para a antropologia. Precisaremos, contudo, de muitos anos para bem aproveitar o que deixou escrito e gravado para quem quiser ver, ouvir, pensar e aprender. Já o homem bom e amigo deixou-nos demasiado cedo.
Paulo Mendes
I sat for maybe an hour, maybe two, doing nothing but looking out the window. I was filled with an unanticipated feeling of gratitude and humility for being allowed to be a speck of dust embedded in this meshwork of signs and connections. I did not fall asleep while sitting there.
(Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, “Turtle Life” in Etnofoor, 2024, Vol. 36, No. 1)
Obituary: Thomas Hylland Eriksen
The 27th of November we received the sad news that our dear colleague Thomas Hylland Eriksen has passed away.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, one of Europe’s most distinguished and cited social anthropologists, left us on November 27. He leaves behind a legacy of scholarly excellence and a tireless commitment to making anthropological research socially relevant and accessible to the widest possible public.
From his first fieldwork in Mauritius in the mid-1980s to his very last days, Hylland Eriksen was a dedicated, hard-working scholar and an insistent participant in social dialogue. His enthusiasm was contagious and seemed as limitless as his curiosity and desire to acquire new knowledge and uncover new connections between ostensibly disparate fields.
Through roughly 60 books, translated into more than 30 languages, and 800 academic publications, he has contributed greatly to theoretical developments in social anthropology over more than three decades. Researching some of the most pressing concerns of our times, he was a vocal advocate for socially conscious scholarship and for the role of the public intellectual. His large number of publications on identity issues and cultural dynamics remain crucial to the understanding of cultural complexity in Europe and elsewhere.
His last major project, “Overheating,” addressed global environmental, cultural, and economic crises and the challenge of negotiating the dilemmas between growth, migration, and ecological sustainability. Thomas Hylland Eriksen was not afraid to remind us of what was at stake when facing the challenges climate change has brought and will bring.
Hylland Eriksen was a gifted and inspiring lecturer, supervisor, and author of textbooks, and he continued to influence new generations of scholars. His unique intellectual capacity was fueled by a voracious appetite for literature, making him a champion of radical interdisciplinarity.
Hylland Eriksen was also known for his contributions to public debates and policy issues such as multiculturalism, migration, and climate change, firmly placing the academic field of anthropology in the public realm. His dedication and commitment made him a household name and academic celebrity like few others in Norwegian history.
His impressive contributions were recognized through a number of honors and awards, including the Research Council of Norway’s prize for dissemination of science in 2002, the UiO prize for dissemination of science in 2000 and 2010, the UiO research prize in 2017, and his appointment as member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Humanities in 2013. In 2022 he was awarded the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography’s Vega Gold medal for his wide-ranging contribution to anthropology. He also held honorary doctorates at the universities of Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Karlova in Prague.
In a recent book, “Seven Meanings of Life”, Hylland Eriksen reflects on existence. Having lived for years with very serious illness made him look at life slightly differently. He seems to have concluded that the many meanings of life are found in the small things. We cannot be whole human beings without committing ourselves to others, while time is a scarce resource and we should spend it wisely. In what should be his last book, “Det umistelige” (“The indispensable”), published two months before he passed away, he wrote with a similar sense of urgency about losses that cannot be undone. The fact that the loss of him counts among these irreversibilities is starting to dawn on us.
We are thankful for his dedication and commitment, as well as his warmth, kindness and generosity, and we will miss him profoundly.
In loving memory, on behalf of grateful colleagues and friends at the Department of social anthropology,
Thorgeir Kolshus, head of Department of social anthropology, and Svein Stølen, rector, University of Oslo
publicado originalmente em https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/om/aktuelt/aktuelle-saker/2024/nekrolog-thomas-hylland-eriksen.html