Fratrædelsesforelæsning: ANTROPOLOGISKE DILEMMAER: Mellem kulturradikalisme og venstreorientalisme

Resumé

This lecture is in three main parts. The first describes the author’s background in a

provincial middle class family and the leftish values he absorbed from what is now

called “cultural radicalism”. His discontent with his life in urban, capitalist society led

him to study anthropology in the belief that “natural” societies of “happiness” could be

found far out in the world. The second part briefly characterizes cultural radicalism as

a field of progressive intellectual movements in Denmark from the 1920s that fought

for the liberation of women, sexuality and the education of children. Danish cultural

radicals took an interest in anthropology already during the 30s, when Malinowski’s

discovery of free sex in the Trobriands was celebrated, and throughout the 1950s when

books by Benedict and Mead on cultural relativity and child training were translated.

With the great expansion of the middle class from the 50s the ideas of cultural radicalism

deeply changed modern Danish cultural values and institutions. The third part is a

critique of what I call “left-wing orientalism”. Cultural relativism was used as a cultural

critique of our own society in order to call for reforms. In left-wing orientalism this

stance is petrified so that only our society is “wrong” while all the “others” must not be

criticized. I discuss three examples of this in anthropology: the general uncritical

acceptance of the policies of indigenous movements; the post-colonial “retrospective

retouching” of unseemly earlier practices such as cannibalism and, finally, the readiness

of anthropologists in Denmark to put the blame for ethnic tensions in the country on

the Danes only and their reluctance to take a critical stance to the patriarchal suppression

of women and its religious legitimation that young immigrants now themselves speak

out against.