Perils and Prospects of Going Public: Between Academia and Real Life

The subject Unni Wikan deals with exposes those who study it to difficult ordeals: the relationships between Muslim migrants and their European host communities. She experienced this peril with two of her books, which generated fierce criticisms: one contested the widely celebrated success of multiculturalism in Norway, and the other accounted for an honor killing in a migrant family from Kurdistan. In such cases of polarized moral passions, the efforts to render the complexity of the situation and maintain a critical stance are met with suspicious or even hostile reactions from all sides. It is noteworthy that Norwegian anthropologists have been particularly successful in producing public debates on contemporary social and cultural issues.