 You got this 1996 constitution, which is a sort of multiracial constitution, whereby all citizens, regardless of their faith or ethnic background, are in principle equal citizens, right? But South Africa still remains one of the most unequal societies on earth. In the context of of Muslims in Cape Town, the transition to post-apartist society also entailed a lot of new freedoms. There was a process towards the gradual recognition of Muslim marriages became, in a lot of respect, easier for Muslims to express their religious identity in public and so forth. Under apartheid, of course, certain urban and suburban areas of Cape Town were declared as whites only, right? So you couldn't legally live there if you weren't classified by the system as white. In the post-apartist context, this residential segregation still remains, but now it has more to do with issues of class and socioeconomic marginalisation. So people who are not white generally can't afford to move into historically white neighborhoods, from which some of them were quite a substantial number were forcibly removed under apartheid when these areas were declared white, right? Fears about Muslim immigration are often become completely overblown, right? If you look at media and political discourses, there's not a single day and there hasn't been since I was a teenager in the 1980s in which there is in some debate about integration, and immigration which involves Muslims as the proverbial other. So much so that we have data from a national representative survey conducted by the Holocaust Centre in Norway in 2017. Which suggested that some 34% I think of Norwegian respondents in that survey can send to the idea that Muslims are in Norway and Europe to take over. 34%? Yeah. Wow. So that's a very high percentage and quite a frightening percentage, right? Because that obviously also has consequences for how people perceive their neighbors if they happen to be of Muslim background. We know for a fact that Muslims experience hate speech and hate crimes in Norway to a greater extent than most other minority groups, right? But in such a situation there's always countervailing tendencies and what I find in my work with youth in multicultural and multi-religious neighborhoods in Oslo, particularly in Oslo East, is of course what you would expect, the situation you describe. You have neighbors that may be Muslim and you have children getting to know one another across these boundaries, right? So someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? Five, four, three, two. What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sokian. We're on site at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia for our second partnership with them. We are now going to be speaking with Dr. Sindre Bungstad. Hi, Sindre. Hi. Thanks for inviting me on the show. I'm very excited to talk to you. This is going to be a lot of fun. Sindre's background is very interesting. He's a Norwegian social anthropologist. He's author of seven books, associate researcher at KIFO, Institute for Church Religion and World View Research in Oslo. All right, let's jump into things. You know that I like these big picture conversations about, are we really all one? Yeah, I mean obviously from an anthropological point of view, one of the sort of fundamental ideas in anthropology is that, you know, in spite of all particularities, you know, there's but one human race. And if we go even further back than that, and we look at whatever you want to call it, the Big Bang or creation or source or all that is, everything comes from one. Does it feel that way? I'm an anthropologist, so I'm not really qualified to go into, you know, those kind of issues that that's obviously not my qualifications, right? And then what about this most upstream issue that society faces? So this part of the reason that we do the show is because we get to kind of like work with different fields on stretching what conversations are normally only had in like a, like in a, that people may not have in a certain, in a given setting and try and like see if we can add like philosophy or some sort of other insights into the conversation. So, okay, let's take a look at this most upstream issue that society faces. Do you think that it's our feelings of separation from each other, from nature, sort of these indigenous principles that are being lacked in modernity? Well, there's obviously, and I think in a lot of societies, on both sides of the Atlantic and many other parts of the world, there's a sense of crisis. At the moment, there's issues relating to, you know, the lack of legitimacy for the political, liberal political systems that have, you know, been quite successful since the Second World War in terms of ensuring, you know, welfare and stability and peace and prosperity in Europe in particular. There's a profound sense that, you know, of a crisis. And that has also obviously a lot of repercussions for how people, you know, perceive their immediate will and their surroundings, right? So one of the articulations of this in the European context would be, you know, the rise of anti-immigration politics, which we've seen across the board. And also a sense in which, you know, climate change has become a salient issue for a lot of people. Is this such a strange thing to have, you know, your answer to the first question be that we are all one, and then that the, this idea of having some sort of a bias against other people or treating them like that they're not human or we dehumanize or that we're disconnected from other people in some way or their different skin color, different religion or what have you, different socioeconomic status. And then just all these ways of trying to separate each other rather than see each other as those brothers and sisters of the one. I mean, absolutely. I mean, there is a sort of politics of bordering, which one sees globally. And of course, in the European context, one of the foremost expressions of this new politics of bordering, whereby, you know, racialized minorities are excluded is, you know, the extensive frontiers that are sort of built around Europe. You have the EU's Frontex project, which surveils, you know, the sort of border zones of Europe with and in the Mediterranean, for example. What's the EU surveillance program called again on the borders? It's called Frontex, right? Frontex. Yeah. So what does that stand for? Yeah, no. This is not my sort of field of research, right? But this is an entity that the EU in particular has pumped billions of euros into. Okay. And the overall aim of that is to sort of curtail migration, especially from African countries, but also from Middle Eastern countries into Europe, right? Is this like similar thing around the world? Like there's this border conflict between Mexico and the United States and immigration. We have the undocumented migration project that Jason Delano is showcasing. You know, is this a similar thing happening in the Mediterranean with people trying to cross into Europe? Is it, you know, people, why are people migrating? Is it what's the main issue towards economic prosperity? What is it the reason, you know? Well, I mean, there are a lot of different issues. Obviously, I mean, the main push factor in recent years has been this horrendous conflict in Syria. It's a war. Yeah. So four reasons relating to war and persecution. But also, I think, you know, in the foreseeable future, we're also looking at increasing flows of economic migrants, but also refugees fleeing the consequences of global climate change, which by way of a paradox, right? It's Western countries that contribute the most if you accept China to global climate change. But the repercussions, you know, in terms of raising temperatures and increasing desertification as experienced in the global south, right? Okay. So war, moving towards economic prosperity, yeah, being completely having causes that cause you to flee from your home, all these different types of scenarios lead to this. So then was it then this ethnographic field work that has been done by you has, it's ranged across different countries and different religions, different reasons for migration, all these different, give us some give us some of the taste of the social okay, so I I'm basically not a scholar as an anthropological scholar of migration. My research focus and my ethnographic field work, the first field work I did was in among Muslims in Cape Town, South Africa in the early 2000s. And then I've done ethnographic field work among youth of Muslim minority background in my native Norway. And I've also written a book about this Norwegian white supremacist and right-wing extremist mass murderer Anders Bering Brayvik who committed these appalling atrocities on an island outside of Oslo, the capital of Norway at Utea on July 22nd 2011 and also placed a bomb under government headquarters in Oslo on the very same date. Okay, let's break into all three of these. I'm so excited. Okay, so the first one is Muslims in South Africa. Yeah. Okay, so what was going on? You said specifically Cape Town? In Cape Town, yeah. Okay, and so what's what's happening? Because there's obviously a apartheid that happened. There's still some really, what is it, African National Congress and the Democratic Alliance. There's some very interesting politics still happening and also healing that needs to happen in many ways for what happened since like the middle of the 1600s until now. Yeah, but I mean, though South Africa apartheid as a political system might have disappeared, of course, the sort of the long shadows cast by apartheids after life is still very much salient in the everyday lives of South Africans. So my ethnographic field work there was on Muslims who in Cape Town constitute probably 10% of the population. These are descendants of political prisoners, but also slaves brought from all across the Indian Ocean basin under Dutch colonialism, right? So from basically 1658 until 1808, I think, is this sort of cut out of period. But most of these Muslims were under the apartheid racial classification categorized as belonging to the so-called collared subgroup, which basically meant that, you know, they were part of a group that the apartheid regime used as kind of a buffer to maintain ideas about white supremacy, right? So a collared South Africans under apartheid where in a lot of senses told that they were, you know, they were better than the majority black population, but they could never be whites, right? And so in the post-apartheid context, it also has to be mentioned in this context that underpinning the apartheid system was a particularly conservative version of, you know, Christianity, Calvinist Christianity. So you saw in politics and legislation that Muslims were obviously also by virtue of they're having a different religion, second-class citizens under apartheid. In the post-apartheid context, you got this 1996 constitution, which is a sort of multiracial constitution whereby all citizens regardless of their faith or ethnic background are in principle equal citizens, right? But South Africa still remains one of the most unequal societies on earth. And so in the context of Muslims in Cape Town, the transition to post-apartheid society also entails a lot of new freedoms. You know, there was a process towards the gradual recognition of Muslim marriages. It became in a lot of respect easier for Muslims to express their religious identity in public and so forth. Okay, so this is one of the big findings of the first one is that post around 1996, after all of that complexity, it had become easier for Muslims to express themselves freely in public and marry, have the marriages be recognized, and still about 10% of the population or so. In Cape Town, yes. As to be said, that in South Africa, it's only 1.4%, right? Approximately, right? And why do you pick, you know, there's going to be two more we'll get to, but I'm just curious, like there's so many different things to study as an anthropologist, you know, how do you pick such a niche Muslims in Cape Town? Yeah, I mean, I basically came to Cape Town in South Africa with the idea that I would do ethnographic fieldwork on integration in formally white residential neighborhoods in Cape Town. But under apartheid, of course, certain urban and suburban areas of Cape Town were declared as whites only, right? So you couldn't legally live there if you weren't classified by the system as white. In the post-apartheid context, this residential segregation still remains, but now it has more to do with issues of class and socioeconomic marginalization. So people who are not white generally can't afford to move into historically white neighborhoods, from which some of them were quite a substantial number were forcibly removed under apartheid when these areas were declared white, right? So I quickly realized that this was not, it was not viable for me to do research on that. And I discovered that you know, there hadn't been, for example, a doctorate on Muslims in Cape Town since the late 1970s. And I was also introduced to... Okay, so there's this feeling of catching up on a niche that hadn't had good research done in it for 30 years. No, there was definitely a sort of lacuna in ethnographic field work on Muslims in Cape Town. So that seemed like a viable option. And I also, I gradually, gradually I was introduced to and became friends with Muslim families in a township community south of Cape Town. So that was really the start of my career as an anthropologist, which I'm still profoundly grateful for, because you know, without that experience, and when you're a young anthropologist, that is, you know, profoundly important to sort of realize that you can actually do this, you know, and get along with people who, in some respects, are quite different from you, but in other respects, you know, share the kind of qualities and what the makeup that makes us all human, right? Yeah. This is a very important point. I like this. So then, actually, this is a big part of doing field work is that in many ways there is something that happens that usually there has to be some sort of a behavior change of sorts. You have to repattern maybe some of the processes that, you know, you weren't used to like inquiring into, is this like asking questions to Muslim families in Cape Town and like learning about their traditions and where things were a decade ago, where they are now, and taking it like that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So this is very interesting. When you do field work like this, it really requires, you know, it requires openness. It requires a shift towards knowing how to, you know, be polite and ask good questions and be respectful of the culture that's maybe slightly different, like you were describing. Okay. So the second one was you said young Muslims in your home country in Norway. Yep. Okay. So now, what's going on with that? Okay. So Norway is quite a small country, right? The population is now estimated at 5.3 million people in Norway. And in the Norwegian context. That's about the size of Vancouver, I think, in population. Yeah. Unlike in the South African context, where there's been a Muslim present, continuous Muslim present for 300 years, right? Muslim migration to Norway is quite a recent phenomenon, right? So when did it start? Well, we have historical records suggesting that the first Muslim Da'i or missionary arrived in Norway in the 1920s. He never settled. The first settled Muslim in Norway was an Ahmadi proselytizer. Ahmadi is, you know, Muslims from a Muslim sect from the India-Pakistani subcontinent, right? And quite engaged in proselytizing or missionary activities, known as Dawah, in various parts of the world. So there was a small community of Ahmadi Muslims in Oslo. And sometimes missionaries come and proselytize, sometimes, and sometimes they come and settle without proselytizing. This is very interesting. But there was an Ahmadi of Pakistani background who settled in Oslo West in the 1950s, and around them there emerged a small congregation consisting of Ahmadi and some Norwegian converts, right? But the main wave of Muslim migration in Norway starts in the late 1960s with Muslim male, predominantly male, labor migration from various countries, but predominantly Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco. And so by 1975, this had generated a sort of moral panic in the Norwegian political system. So there was a cross political consensus and majority support in parliament for what was known as an immigration stop. And the aim of that immigration stop was to curb immigration from so-called third world countries. But by that time, you know, there were already hundreds of predominantly male labor migrants from Muslim countries who had rights to family reunification, which meant that, you know, many of them brought their families over from their home countries. And through the 1970s and 80s and the 1990s, there were quite a number of asylum claimants, people who sought refuge in Norway from various majority Muslim countries. So for example, refugees from Iran, where refugees coming from the wars in the Balkans, Somalia, and after 2000 also Iraq in recent years, refugees from the Syrian civil war. Well, okay, so there's this interesting feeling where you kind of have like a homogenous tribe of let's say five million people, but in a homogenous tribe, you can even scale it down to just the Dunbar 150 if you want for the example, but then a so-called other of a different skin color or religion or socioeconomic status or whatever comes and is seeking to maybe become integrated with the tribe or to settle their proselytize there's so many different options. But then this idea of maybe like a fear can kick in where you do something like want an immigration stop and not allow any of that to happen. Sometimes you try and open up the door and try and make sure that people are, you know, mentally healthy and that they will not cause harm in that tribe where they are trying to enter. There are so many different approaches to this process, but also this is very important to understand that the whole planet is our collective home and that these borders when you're orbiting in the International Space Station or looking for Mars, etc., do not exist. And so there is also that to keep in mind while also wanting to be a place of security and to a place of prosperity and of enabling people to enter when they have had war or other conflict or seeking economic prosperity or all these different types of things. This is a very complicated mixing of all these different variables that have to be analyzed in situations like this. No, absolutely. It has to be said that the Muslim population of Norway now stands at an estimated 4.2% of the population. So that's quite a jump from several hundred. Yeah, no, no, sure. And I mean, there's been by all means significant demographic change in Norway since the late 1960s, right? So if we look at the official statistics, it's estimated that 17.4% of the Norwegian population now have an immigrant background or is descended from immigrants. In the capital of Oslo, that percentage raises to some 36.8%. And obviously, that's not always a smooth process. But I think if you look at indicators such as labor market participation and levels of education, this is certainly a slow process. But Norway is a case in point if you want to make the case that fears about Muslim immigration often become completely overblown. If you look at media and political discourses, there's not a single day and there hasn't been since I was a teenager in the 1980s in which there is in some debate about integration and immigration which involves Muslims as the proverbial other. And part of the challenge in the Norwegian context is not only that this has happened relatively fast, it's also as the late Norwegian social anthropologist Mariana Gullister remarked in one of her books. It's also related to the fact that Norwegians tended to think of themselves as being quite a homogeneous population, right? Which if you look at this historically, there's certainly truth in that perception, but with quite strong qualifications because Norway has this indigenous Sami population which has been present in Norway for centuries, you know, in northern Norway. There were the indigenous population. What is the indigenous population of Norway called? The Sami's. And you had, you know, Jews and Roma and Roma speaking peoples in Norway. So it was not the case that Norwegian society was always homogeneous, right? Yes. Wow. This is such an interesting combinatoric that is flowering on the planet because when you look at what, you know, used to be, you were, you know, describing if at the very beginning, like South Africa and like the year 1600, and then what happened and where it is now, the United States in 1600, and then what happened and where it is now. I mean, look at what city we're in right now, Vancouver, you know, the indigenous here, then very white and then very, now there's lots of Chinese people, lots of Indian people, lots of Persian people, lots of, you know, boom, now this becomes its own melting pot of cultures in a sense as well. But the percentages are actually super interesting that you were listening because a country like the United States that has 330 million people and then like, I don't even know, probably only half of them now are white. I don't know what the number is. China, which has a 1.4 billion people, but probably 1.3 billion of them are Chinese. You know, so this is very interesting. Norway, which has 5 million, 5.3 million, but then now maybe a couple hundred thousand are actually not Norwegian. And that's also very interesting how these things flower as its own unique, like combinatoric, and what, you know, what economic and societal pressures funnel people into countries and war pressures, et cetera, colonization pressures, all different types of things happening. And it's also interesting thinking about like, after even a couple of generations of migrating into a land like, let's say, Norway, that then, let's say that if I'm Muslim, my children, whether I'm from, maybe let's say I'm from Somalia or Syria, that whatever it may be that my children play with your children and the other children that are Norwegian children, and then they become friends, which is great. But maybe even some of them decide to get married and have children. And then that's that statistic that you were talking about where it's, I think, over 30% of backgrounds in Oslo specifically are from other places. No, so, I mean, Norway's obviously in a sort of transitional phase, but it, you know, we have to also recall that, you know, if we look at this in broad historical sweeps, right, the sort of natural human condition has been movement of people and has been mixing, right? Yeah. Movement and mixing. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, look at the work of this famous geneticist David Reich, right? So the, you know, we like to swirl our genes with those. No, but who sort of demonstrates that there's been much more mixing and geographical movement across the centuries than what we tend to and are capable of imagining, right? So in the Norwegian context, and we have this populist right-wing party in government, which has introduced, you know, more restrictions on immigration than any Norwegian government since World War II. And it's a specific targeting of Muslims in that policy, in that, you know, it's, though you can't do that on an international law, it's quite obvious that it's, the particular target is Muslim immigration to Norway. But in such a situation, there's always countervailing tendencies. And what I find in my work with youth in, you know, multicultural and multi-religious neighborhoods in Oslo, particularly in Oslo East, is, of course, what you would expect, you know, the situation you describe. You have neighbors that may be Muslim, and you have children getting to know one another across these boundaries, right? So where I live in a suburban community outside of Oslo, I have a neighbor who... You guys still use bobsleds up there, right? Yeah, who's a Muslim background, right? And I mean, he's highly educated, and his children play with all the other children in the neighborhood, right? Yes. And I think, you know, there's movement and mixing. Yeah. And so to the extent that I, you know, see hope, it is often in the younger generation that learn to, and I'm not saying that it's always and inevitably unproblematic, but there is a sense of what my friend Paul Gilroy refers to as conviviality, right? Conviviality, yeah, which is a way of referring to this every day, and quite, you know, regular interaction. Yes. Conviviality like with, living with, life with, and by having life with on the playgrounds from early days of life, it becomes normal to see a mixing and movement of people that are so-called different, whereas older people that may have never seen that. Yeah, that's so interesting. We were talking about that in some of the previous interviews during the annual meeting where it's almost as though this young consciousness of like stewardship of the planet and desire for interconnectedness with each other and nature in our ecosystems is slowly coming and overthrowing the archaic systems of not giving about the nature and about the ecosystems. And it's very interesting that that young consciousness is moving. Yeah, and also if we look at this sort of mobilization against climate change and environmental mobilization over environmental issues in Norway, it's often as in, you know, many other countries driven by youth. Yeah, we're building the next world. Young people, we believe in you to build the next world and solve the greatest challenges that our society faces and become the most enlightened that the world's passed along to. Okay, last one. Okay, so Anders Brevik. Yeah. Okay, what is your argument is that Breviks beliefs were not simply the result of a deranged mind, but rather they are the result of the political mainstreaming of pernicious racist and Islamophobic discourses. Give us the background on what this is and how one can even calculate such multivariability of impact on one's choices. Okay, right. So I mean, there's a risk of sort of reducing the actions of Brevik to a question of social psychology, right? So we know that this was a character with who had a troubled family background, right? A father who'd basically left the family when he was still a child. That's a big traumatic factor. Yeah, absolutely. And he also had a mother who wasn't, from the look of it, very functional. And so the psychiatric evolution in the context of the court case found, for example, that he had a severe lack of empathy and narcissistic impulses, right? Yes. But my book on the Brevik affair is an attempt to take, you know, his ideological motivations seriously, without necessarily reducing his actions to a sort of causal relationship where exposure to a right-wing extremist ideology and Islamophobia leads to those kinds of actions. Because, you know, first of all, there's a lot of this hatred against Muslims and other minorities, not the least online, also in Norway. And vice versa happening as well. Yeah. So I mean, it's not new and most people in most countries would have a sort of inner threshold where exposure to that kind of rhetoric of vicious hatred wouldn't lead to violence and terroristic actions, right? So that has to be said. But, you know, to my mind, Brevik was also profoundly inspired by what is known as the counter-Jihadist genre, in which there's a lot of dehumanization of Muslims. There's an undercurrent of this conspiratorial Arabia idea whereby the basic idea here is that, you know, European governments and the EU, in particular, are sort of secretly involved in a conspiracy with Muslims to take over Europe in the name of Islam and to establish an Islamic state or a caliphate. That's called Eurabia. The Eurabia. And that, you know, if you look at this in the context of conspiracy theories, it's something akin to the anti-Semitic forgery, the protocols of the elders of Zion, only with Muslims' cost as the villains in the play, if you like. There's a lot of Saudi Arabian money going to different places in the world, though, and that's very interesting to study and follow the money trails. I don't know, certainly. But, I mean, if you look at the Norwegian context, this way of thinking about a relatively small, and to many extent and purposes, quite marginalized minority has become surprisingly mainstream and widespread, so much so that we have data from a national representative survey conducted by the Holocaust Center in Norway in 2017, which suggested that some 34 percent, I think, of Norwegian respondents in that survey consent to the idea that Muslims are in Norway and Europe to take over. 34 percent? Wow. So that's a very high percentage and quite a frightening percentage, right? Because that obviously also has consequences for how people perceive their neighbors if they happen to be of Muslim background. We know for a fact that Muslims experience hate speech and hate crimes in Norway to a greater extent than most other minority groups, right? Wow. Damn. So Bravik was also a product of the mainstreaming of these ideas. What year were Bravik's atrocities and what were the numbers, what were his atrocities? Okay, right. So this happened on, and these were the worst terrorist attacks in modern Norwegian history. And they occurred on July 22, 2011, and the number of casualties, I think, was 77. And most of his victims were teenagers attending a youth camp for the then governing social democratic Labour Party's youth organization at Utea, which is a small island 60 kilometers from Oslo. There were also some casualties relating from the bomb that created significant damage in government headquarters in central Oslo prior to the massacres at Utea. So at Utea there's now quite a moving memorial to the victims of Bravik's terrorist attacks because these were, you know, innocent teenagers killed in cold blood and completely defenseless, right? And so this is very difficult, trying to understand what were, you know, you started us off with the traumatic, even at the most young age of a father leaving, mother maybe not raising the child that well and then having all these other... Yeah, but the current argument here is always and is important to emphasize that, you know, even in a prosperous country with an advanced welfare state such as Norway, quite a number of children experience trauma during their youth, right? Dysfunctional parents, whatnot, but it very rarely leads to those kind of consequences, right? So yeah, there's so many variables. We've heard about tumors pressing against people's amygdala. We've heard about buying guns on black markets where there's no background checks, no ID checks. We've heard about conspiracy theories and what that leads to, propaganda and phobia of others. There's all different types of variables that go into these types of analyses and wow. I'm curious your thoughts on this because, you know, given the context of us moving into a 8 billion person globalized world where artificial intelligence and robotics is permeating into every single industry, we have this, we kind of talked about this a little bit at the beginning, but we have this, in a sense, we're kind of in many ways also those kind of different, at least I haven't been yet, but I've here and I've seen when I see Google Maps and all this type of stuff, just this much more 5 million people in a massive country and a little bit more focus on not choking out the natural environment in a sense, whereas here it's just just stacking people on top of each other, choking out natural environment, less parks, less tree, etc. So like in many ways it's like looking at indigenous principles of interconnectedness, immediate return hunter-gatherers, all this type of stuff, sacredness of the land in each other and trying to embed those into metropolises as we move forward into that crazy AI age. How do you feel about that big mixing pot with the amount of people's globalization, artificial intelligence, trying to bring principles of indigeneity and move them into modernity? How do you feel about all that? That's admittedly a challenging question given that this is not part of my anthropological competencies, but I do think that in a wider context, also in the context of debates on climate change and environmentalism, there's this sense that Norway is exceptional and stands apart, but we do have this state-controlled petroleum company known as Equinor, which is listed among the 50 worst polluters in the world. And so even in Norway, which is an advanced economy, I do think there's more Tesla's per capita in Norway than in most other countries. Tesla per capita. So I do think that there are some serious challenges as far as Norway is concerned as well and that we're not as much ahead of the game as far as the struggle against climate change is concerned, as many people in other parts of the world looking at Norway from the outside would like to think. And there are also serious issues relating to conflicts over land rights for the indigenous Sami population in Norway, which historically has also been victims of what we refer to as processes of racialization, where they were historically seen as not Norwegian, in fact experienced centuries of forced assimilation and discriminatory language policies, so much so that Sami children were not permitted to speak their own language in Norwegian schools in their home areas until the late 1960s. And there's obviously, in the current context, there's a lot of things to learn, I think, from indigenous populations, especially in regard to, and I'm saying this, not in order to romanticize this, because that often happens. But there's certainly things to learn about interaction with the natural environment, which urbanized Norwegians may not be as attuned to as they should be. What do you think is next for your interest in social anthropology and where you want to study? Well, that also depends on funding streams, but I have this chance now to go back to South Africa next year for a sort of revisit. We have obtained funding for a project on what we've turned global flows of Islamophobia, so I'm part of the research team. And my idea is to next year hopefully go back to South Africa for a revisit to global flows of Islamophobia. So the underlying idea here is that one often, all too often, one analyzes this in the specific nation-state context. What is then often missed in research on that phenomenon is the ways in which social media flows, for example, means that particular ideas about Islam and Muslims become transnational. You can find them in quite different parts of the world. So you can find some of the same ideas among Hindu nationalists in India, Hindutva people, and among Buddhists in Myanmar. Some of the same ideas about Islam and Muslims, which are sort of stereotypes. But there is a flow in all directions of these particular ideas, and that has to be studied empirically. And this is part of the Qifu? Well, I'm based at Qifu, which is an independent research institute. So we mainly do commissioned research, other kinds of research, but this is one of the key projects that we have obtained funding for for coming years here. And what are the other macro things that Qifu is looking at? Well, we're reasonably small. So we mostly do commissioned research in the field of Christianity and various life stance communities in Norway. Kind of short term projects designed to say something about specific topics related to Christianity, other life stances, other religions in Norway. Cintra, have another question. What do you think is most beautiful? Well, right now, the most beautiful I can think of is Vancouver. I had this wonderful bike ride through Stanley Park some three hours yesterday, which was given weather here right now, quite extraordinary. And it's kind of, you know, that comes from my upbringing also in Norway, where the outdoors has been extremely important for me. So that was absolutely wonderful. And most beautiful. Yeah, this place is so magical. My goodness, just a ridiculously big recommendation to people to check out Vancouver, British Columbia. I mean, wow, there's just there's really just nothing that just pops like what you look at when you look at like North Vancouver across the water and just just feels like the mountains and trees are just talking to you and the water is just talking to you and the sunlight is just so gorgeously shining on it. It was just, yeah, it was so beautiful. Cintra, thank you for joining us on the program. Yeah, this has been an honor. Thank you. And thank you for having me. You're super welcome. I feel like just a bunch of new ways of seeing things is how I feel right now. And thank you for sharing all of those with us. Everyone, thank you for tuning in and checking out the program. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on all the things that Jerome is teaching us. Check out his links in the bio below and support him. Let us know on all these complex topics that he was sharing, what you think. Check out the links in the bio below to the American Anthropological Association. Go and support them and help them grow and flourish as well. You can find our links in the bio below as well at the simulation so you can continue doing cool things like coming on site to the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting and doing cool partnerships with people like them. Support us, PayPal, Patreon, cryptocurrency, all those links are in the bio below. And go and build the future. Everyone, manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon. Peace. Okay. That's it. Yeah. Thank you.