In my article last week, I discussed some aspects regarding “Small Places, Large Issues”, with reference to Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s book with that title, a foundation book in social and cultural anthropology. Hylland Eriksen wrote many books and scores of articles, and he took part in all kinds of important debates at conferences and on radio and TV. He died at a relatively young age of 62 only, and was on Monday this week laid to rest from St. James’s Church, or Kulturkirken Jakob, as it is named in Norwegian, in downtown Oslo when his last journey began, after he had travelled far and wide in his life, as anthropologists do, learning from and comparing small and big issues in many places, helping him in shedding light on multicultural and other issues at home and abroad. Hylland Eriksen was not only a great social scientist, he was a great human being, as so many have said in their obituaries, and the small and near things were as important as the large and structural issues, reminding us that if the small things and the basic universal values at the bottom are right, we can also do the right things at the top. It is rarely the big issues and ideologies that give us our foundations, but they can also help us later on.

About Nelson Mandela, I remember that a woman in an NGO, who had sat down and talked with him, revealed that he was a very ordinary man, yet, indeed also, a very extra ordinary man, she said. And so was also the last apartheid president of South Africa, Frederik Willem de Klerk, with whom Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. I still remember that from TV programmes from the events in Oslo, de Klerk got a lukewarm reception, fair enough, true, but then we should also remember that without he as president releasing Mandela from his 27 years imprisonment, and letting the non-racial elections take place, the apartheid system would not have ended, at least not as soon. I would like to make the point that we are all products of our own time and the organizations we belong to, and also the heritage, family and neighbourhood we grow up in, with all the small (and big) influences we get, from our mother, father, siblings, teachers, and the rest. Americans talk about and admire being ‘self-made’; true, to some extent, but we are always part of our surroundings, too, our religion and philosophy, values and Zeitgeist.

This week is the Nobel Prize Week, and the main day of celebrations was Tuesday 10 December, the World Human Rights Day, when prize laureates were honoured in Stockholm, for their achievements in physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, and economic sciences, alone or in groups of up to three for each prize. In Oslo, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organization consisting of a small group of survivors, who are still alive, after the only time that atom bombs have been used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It is indeed important that the terrible crime against humanity is not forgotten, that those who perished and suffered and could not live normal lives, will be remembered. It is essential, not the least in our time that we recall and say that atom bombs must never again be used. We must go further, namely work for reduction of stockpiles and outright abolition of nuclear weapons, and prevent more countries, or terrorist groups, from obtaining such weapons. This was marked when ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) in 2017 received the Nobel Peace Prize. It is also important that the local and international peace organizations and movements are encouraged to do their work, also including religious and secular pacifist groups. Sadly, we live in a time when NATO and most countries in the West engage in rearmament and increase in their defence expenditures.

And now, a few more words about the importance of focusing on small and ordinary people and issues, and keeping high moral and ethical standards, which each of us is responsible for. From that foundation in the small, we can move to the broader and bigger issues, what Hylland Eriksen talked about in his book about as ‘small places and large issues’.

In her works, the South Korean writer Han Kang, this year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature, has precisely done what I emphasize here, writing about the bottom and top as interwoven. In the justification from the Swedish Academy, it is said that she is awarded the prize “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. She writes about individuals, people in the small places, as Hylland Eriksen would say, so that we can understand better the broad and big issues, too, including the brutal events in her own country and shed some light on why and how they could happen – again, how such things can be avoided in future. We can point fingers and accuse people of what they did, what we do even today, but we don’t know how we ourselves would have acted at the specific times and situations – although we do know that solid foundations lie in the ‘small places’ as a compass for handling better the large issues, too.

Finally today, I would like to draw attention to last year’s impressive Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi. I wrote about her in my article in ‘The Nation’ on 14 December 2023, and I have now read more articles, and I watched a beautiful Norwegian Broadcasting, NRK-TV, interview with her the 17-year old twin son and daughter, Ali and Kiana, and her husband Taghi Rahmani, and her brother, Hamidreza Mohammadi. Her husband and children now live in Paris, France, and her brother has asylum in Oslo, Norway, while Narges Mohammadi herself still serves a long prison term in Iran, for the constant, unselfish work she has done in the her organisation fighting for the rights and dignity of women and men at home and worldwide under the organisation’s motto, ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’.

It was indeed moving to watch and listen to her impressive children on TV. They can indeed be role models for all young people anywhere in the world, and certainly also for old men, like me, who have not been able to create a better world for ourselves and the whole humanity. I believe that the wise and compassionate Ali and Kiana will have to do better than we have done who are getting on in age. The fact is that have developed their values from their mother and father, other relatives and friends from Iran, and from the people in France that they now live and interact with and learn from. In spite of the tremendous sacrifices, I somehow feel that Ali and Kiana are very privileged having been able to see the deep and real values in the small places and the larger issues, again to use Hylland Eriksen’s words. The teenagers have become wise and knowledgeable role models at very young ages. Yet, we must not overlook the sacrifice and suffering, inflicted on them, and on their mother and father, and we must pray for all of us to learn the values to be used in small places and on larger issues, quite a bit easier.

Atle Hetland
The writer is a senior Norwegian social scientist with experience from university, diplomacy and development aid. He can be reached at atlehetland@yahoo.com