In 2004 the Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan was awarded the Norwegian Freedom of Expression Prize for “her insightful, outspoken and challenging contribution to the debate on value conflicts in the multi-cultural society,” a topic which particularly is present in the last part of this interesting and far-reaching book, since she ventured into a career of doing public anthropology in Scandinavia in 1995. The book, though, is a journey through her unusually rich life as an anthropologist, forty years of study, with an extremely broad fieldwork experience covering poverty in Cairo, veiled women and male transvestites in Oman, rape and childbirth in Bhutan, and honor killings in Scandinavia. From Bali she brings with her the important insight to grasp the heart, thought, and feeling of real people in the world, to “think-feel” or “feel-think,” for Wikan goes beyond the words, she strives for resonance, emphasizing the importance of engaging with shared human experiences and feelings across time and place. In the book Wikan takes us with her on a journey from the island in northern Norway where she grew up (8), across the Middle East and Asia, and back again to Scandinavia, giving of her self while sharing her deep knowledge with us in an unusually generous and honest way.
In addition to the preface, “A Way in the World,” and an introduction, the book is divided into six parts containing eleven chapters as follows (Part I: “Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance”; “Toward an Anthropology of Lived Experience”; Part II: “The Self in a World of Urgency and Necessity”; “Against the Self: For a Person-Oriented Approach”; Part III: “Resilience in the Megacity: Cultural Competence among Cairo’s Poor”; Part IV: “Man becomes Woman: The Xanith as a Key to Gender Roles”; “Shame and Honour: A Contestable Pair”; Part V: “The Nun’s Story: Reflections on an Age-Old Postmodern Dilemma”; “In the Middle Way: Childbirth and Rebirth in Bhutan”; Part VI: “‘My Son a Terrorist? He Was Such a Gentle Boy…’”; “On Evil and Empathy: Remembering Ghazala Khan”); an epilogue, “Resonance and Beyond”; acknowledgements; an appendix, “On Writing”; notes, references, and an index.
With three exceptions (chapters 4, 9, and 11) the chapters consist of articles that have been published previously, most of them in various anthropological journals (in the period 1977-2001), but Wikan wants to show the relevance of anthropology in a globalized world, and with her longtime broad cross-cultural experience she does this extremely well, joining the topics neatly together (although a scholar working in the Greek environment might have wanted more updated material on shame and honor [cf. chapter 7] from that area, the essay suits the book as it stands). According to Wikan: “We must dig into ourselves for something to use as a bridge to others,” and “we need to shed the stifling preconception … that others are essentially different and that their words bespeak different life worlds” (286). “Resonance evokes shared human experience… and in the will to comprehend by digging into the wellsprings of ourselves lies the hope for enhanced human solidarity” (287). These are important words in a world where unfortunately many scholars still cling to the opposite view.
However, in the final chapter, Wikan admits she reaches the limit of her method, resonance: in a courtroom in Copenhagen after the honor killing of young Ghazala Khan, she cannot and will not resonate with the thought-feelings of the killers. In the epilogue she goes beyond resonance while discussing the recent (2011) Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Behring Breivik, who used the samurai moral code to carry out his mission, for Wikan tries to gain a new perspective on honor killings. As she writes, the book is an unfinished journey, ending with many questions. However, in the quest for building an anthropology of lived experience, she has tried to lay a cornerstone in the study of evil and empathy, the main topic of the last part of the book (Part VI), which has brought us to the Scandinavian honor killings via an effort to understand how Mohammed Atta became a terrorist on 11 September 2001, based on her many years of fieldwork trips—from the 1960s to the present day—among the poor in Cairo, in which a young man, Sayyid, becomes Atta’s possible theoretical parallel (cf. chapters 5 and 10). Her remedy to combat extremism is “to create a society that enables people to gain self-respect and social respect by making use of their capabilities” (259), which is highly relevant in the present situation both in Egypt and elsewhere, northern Europe included.
Wikan is an idealist, she is an optimist, and her empathic stance is to distinguish between the act and the person, as she learned among the poor in Cairo (300), combined with her insight from Bali: the essence is to think with one’s heart, for as she writes, “Only when we recognize the distinct humanity of the other, however inhumane or incomprehensible her [or his] actions may seem, can we hope to bridge worlds that are seemingly incommensurable” (26).
Although Wikan wants to show the relevance of anthropology in a globalized world, her present study has great relevance within other disciplines as well, history and gender studies included; not least, it is a timely, highly important, and practical tool for policy makers.
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[Review length: 880 words • Review posted on November 21, 2013]