_{Department Day - Special Edition}

Celebration of Honorary Doctor 
Thomas Hylland Eriksen

11 November 2021, 15h30 to 17h30
Christian Hansen Auditorium, CSS 34.0.01

PROGRAM
15:30 Welcome by Head of Department, Bjarke Oxlund
15:35 Nomination speech by Professor Susan Whyte
15:45 Honorary Doctor Lecture by Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen
16:30 Vote of thanks by Professor Emeritus Kirsten Hastrup
16:45 Snack and drinks reception

Staff, students and interested parties are invited to this Special Edition of Department Day at the Department of Anthropology.

Abstract
In the space of a few decades, we humans have decimated wildlife, increased productivity in agriculture and aquaculture with technological means leading to potentially catastrophic unintended consequences, expanded logging industries and mining operations exponentially, and inspired the coining of the term Anthropocene as a general designation for the current era, characterised by the presence of human ecological footprints everywhere on the planet. Since the beginning of the fossil fuel revolution, human population has increased eightfold, while energy consumption has grown by a factor of 30. At the same time, the forces of nation-building, state power and global modernity have contributed to cultural standardisation and homogenisation. The same global processes that lead to a loss of biodiversity also contribute to a loss of cultural diversity, and anthropology should now take on this dual challenge: What is going on, what are the forces of resistance, and how do people respond? The perspective is global, but the ethnographic examples are local, just as it should be in anthropology.