About
125
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Introduction
Social anthropologist, Research Professor at KIFO in Oslo and Associate Researcher at Plattform/Arkivet in Kristiansand, Norway. 2022-23 Stanley J. Kelley Professor in the Teaching of Anthropology at Princeton University, USA. Author of 'Anthropology of Our Times' (2017) 'The Politics of Mediated Presence' (2015), and 'Anders Breivik and The Rise of Islamophobia' (2014). Winner of the 2019 Anthropology in the Media Award (AIME) from the American Anthropological Association (AAA).
Additional affiliations
August 2021 - August 2023
Arkivet Peace And Human Right Centre
Position
- Associate Researcher
Description
- As an Associate Researcher at Arkivet/Plattform in Kristiansand, Norway, in a 20% post, I have since August 2021 been involved in a research and documentation project on the history of anti-racism and opposition to immigration in the Agder Region of Norway from 1960 to 2020. The research will be presented in the form of museum exhibitions as well as publications in leading international journals. For my Arkivet pages, see: https://arkivet.no/ansatte/sindre-bangstad
August 2022 - June 2023
Position
- Distinguished Visiting Professor
Description
- As the Stanley Kelley Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Teaching of Anthropology, I will be teaching a self-designed course on 'Liberalism, Racism and Free Speech' in the fall of 2022, and a self-designed course on 'Theory from the Margins' in the spring of 2023 at the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University in the USA. For my Princeton faculty pages: https://anthropology.princeton.edu/people/visiting-faculty/sindre-bangstad
Publications
Publications (125)
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have in recent years seen a wave of Qur’an burnings, a subset of Qur’an desecration, involving largely non-religious fringe actors. Desecrations of the Qur’an are nothing new, but their mode of articulation in the present requires attention to both context and the actors involved. In this article we examine the Qur’an-bu...
Recent terrorist attacks from Christchurch, New Zealand via Bærum, Norway, and onto El Paso, Texas have brought to the fore the intersections between far-right replacement theory and ecofascism. In this chapter, we explore the discourse of the most prominent and violent ecofascist, neo-Nazi organization in the Nordic countries in the past decade; t...
Commissioned essay for edited volume on 'The Politics of Replacement' by Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar forthcoming from Routledge on Oct 22 2023.
Comissioned book chapter for edited volume by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo (eds.)
Second fully revised edition of a standard introduction to racism in Norwegian first published in 2015.
My article offers commentary about Jacques Berlinerblau's new book Secularism: The Basics .
TRANSLATED BOOK:
Achille Mbembe (f. 1957) er en kamerunsk filosof som har gitt viktige bidrag til utvikling av politisk filosofi og postkolonial teori. Han er utdannet ved Sorbonne i Paris, og har forsket ved en rekke prestisjeuniversiteter i USA. Han arbeider for tiden ved Universitetet ved Witwaterstrand i Johannesburg, Sør-Afrika. De tre essayen...
Chosing the late Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and Achille Mbembe among his intellectual ancestors, Sivamohan Valluvan has with “The Clamour of Nationalism: Race And Nation in Twenty-First Century Britain” written one of the most lucid and informative analyses available to date of the multiple and intertwined ideological strands that make up contemporar...
Few actors have had a greater impact on the “framing of Muslims” as a social and political “problem” in Norway since 2001 than Hege Storhaug of the government- and corporate billionaire funded civil society organization Human Rights Service (HRS). Using the methodological tools of the “rhetorical branch” of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and ap...
This chapter discusses the life and work of Bat Ye’or (Gisèle Littman), who is widely seen as the doyenne of “Eurabia”-literature. This comes in different varieties and formulations, but in Bat Ye’or’s rendering refers to an ongoing secretive conspiracy which involves both the European Union and Muslim-majority countries in North Africa and the Mid...
This article is based on the transcript of a roundtable on the rise of the far-right and right-wing populism held at the AAA Annual Meeting in 2017. The contributors explore this rise in the context of the role of affect in politics, rising socio-economic inequalities, racism and neoliberalism, and with reference to their own ethnographic research...
Described as one of the most intellectually formidable cultural and social theorists of our time, Paul Gilroy has reshaped debates on racism, nationalism and multiculturalism. In April 2018, Prof. Paul Gilroy returned to Norway for the first time in over a decade for a series of public and academic events in Oslo and Bergen. Gilroy appeared at even...
This chapter analyses how the “new nationalism” in Norway contributes to set or alter national and nationalist boundaries through actively “othering” Muslims, who have come to feature as threats to a whole range of issues including the sustainability of the Norwegian welfare state, gender equality, LGBT rights, liberalism and secularism and freedom...
In his introduction to this volume, Associate Researcher Sindre Bangstad at KIFO (Institute For Church, Religion and Worldview Research) takes the widespread contemporary notion of a rise and decline of public anthropology as his starting point. The chapter introduces the concept of public anthropology, as well as the alternative term of public ant...
Based on a transcript from the AAA 2016 roundtable on “anthropological publics, public anthropology,” organized by Sindre Bangstad, held at the AAA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 18, 2016, and edited, referenced, and footnoted by Sindre Bangstad, this forum explores prominent anthropologists’ experiences of doing “public anth...
Institutt for kirke-, religions-og livssynsforskning sindre.bangstad@kifo.no SAMMENDRAG Det er en etablert sannhet i de fleste samfunnsvitenskapelige kretser at begrepet 'rase' er forankret i sosiale konstrukter. Like fullt synes det problematiske begrepet 'rase' med relativ regelmessighet å vende tilbake i offentlige diskurser også i en norsk og e...
Covering Developments relating to Islam and Muslims in Norway in the year 2015.
http://www.brill.com/products/book/yearbook-muslims-europe-volume-8
Sindre Bangstad interviews Prof Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University, USA). Introduction by AE editor Prof Niko Besnier
The term Islamophobia is not of recent vintage. However, while its origins date back to the 1910s, its current usage is relatively new, and dates back to the 1990s. It is also a heavily contested term, not only in far-right circles in the West, but also among liberal elites, and even within academia itself. In its current usage, it has a genealogy...
Since the terror attacks in Oslo and at Utøya in Norway in which 77 civilians lost their lives on 22 July 2011 there have been a number of attempts to provide explanations for the atrocities committed by Anders Behring Breivik. This chapter contends they cannot be understood without reference to the ideology with which he legitimated his actions. I...
Paper presented at an Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS)/Princeton Institute for International And Regional Studies (PIIRS) Conference on 'Xenophobia and Social Integration' at Princeton University, Oct 1-3 2015.
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/22117954/advance
This article examines the emergence of Salafism in Norway, a relatively new phenomenon in the country that manifests itself mainly through two Muslim organisations, namely IslamNet and the Prophet’s Ummah. Recent research has emphasised that the activism of IslamNet may be characterised as being haraki, or “politically” orientated—a categorisation...
Intersections. EEJSP 1(1): 49-65. Abstract In contemporary Norway, the mere referral to the term racism has for all practical purposes become a taboo in the public sphere. This is both the result of a strategic far-right distancing from classical forms of racism and a conscious effort by numerous Norwegian academics and public intellectuals to rest...
In contemporary Norway, the mere referral to the term racism has for all practical purposes become a taboo in the public sphere. This is both the result of a strategic far-right distancing from classical forms of racism and a conscious effort by numerous Norwegian academics and public intellectuals to restrict its meaning and reference in the cours...
http://www.spartacus.no/index.php?ID=Bok&ID2=806
A confluence of interests and forces among Norwegian political, media and legal elites since the Rushdie affair and the 'Mohammed cartoon crisis' have created conditions in which minority protections against racist and discriminatory speech as guaranteed by Norwegian law, and Norwegian obligations under international law, have been rendered all but...
In recent years, Norway has regularly been criticised by international anti-discrimination and anti-racism monitoring bodies for failing to curtail hate speech of a racist and/or discriminatory nature. The so-called ‘racism paragraph’ of the Norwegian General Penal Code, introduced in 1970, made such speech liable to criminal prosecution. Furthermo...
In contemporary Europe, Islam and Muslims are rightly or wrongly often perceived as the ‘other’. Among the central foci of concern in many Western European countries with a significant presence of Muslims, the law has featured prominently in recent years. What can anthropology tell us about the multiple ways in which European Muslims engage with li...
Norway has in recent years been rated as one of the most democratic societies in the world. But how open and democratic are Norway's mediated public spheres when it comes to minority individuals? This article is based on in‐depth interviews with a number of individuals of Muslim background in Norway who in recent years have been active in debates i...
Andres Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 22/7/11 terrorist attacks in Norway, was profoundly inspired by what has become known as the Eurabia genre. Behring Breivik's 1516-page cut-and-paste tract, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, makes extensive reference to Eurabia authors, and most prominently to the blog essays of the Norwegi...
Review (Norwegian) of Talal Asad et. al. (2013) 'Is critique secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech' (Fordham University Press).
In 2010, South Africa hosted the first World Cup in soccer ever to take place on the African continent. Twenty years after the fall of Apartheid, South Africa presents a series of fractured and contradictory images to the outside world. It is, on the one hand, an economic powerhouse in sub-Saharan Africa, but on the other hand a society in which so...
http://fagbokforlaget.no/?isbn=9788274775367
On a recent visit to Norway, the legal philosopher Professor Ronald Dworkin, a known prominent advocate of what I will refer here to as ‘free speech absolutism’ or the idea that there should – on the basis of an attempt to universalise US First Amendment understandings which Dworkin can be associated with – be minimal legal regulations of freedom o...
In early 2010, a series of reports appeared in the influential liberal-conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten drawing attention to what appeared to reporters to be a self-appointed, de facto Muslim ‘morality police’ attempting to use harassment to exert social control over non-hijab-wearing women of immigrant background and gay men in the dis...
This article explores the work of the influential poststructuralist and postcolonial anthropologist Saba Mahmood (UC Berkeley, USA). Mahmood’s work in anthropology adopts an Asadian and Butlerian approach, particularly in the seminal Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. In this work, Mahmood critically interpellates the...