With the passing of Professor Signe Howell (1942-2025) on 26 January, one of Norwegian anthropology's brightest stars ceased to shine. And at the Department of Social Anthropology, we lost a dear colleague and friend, and an influential, committed and inspiring scholar, teacher and supervisor, who has left a deep and lasting mark both in the field of anthropology internationally and with generations of students and staff after she joined us from the University of Edinburgh in 1987.
We have also lost a seemingly ceaseless source of the most wondrous stories. Because Signe's life and work was always adventurous, driven by a remarkable yearning for exploring the full range of human existence.
After early adult years of whim-propelled traveling, she set her sights on anthropology studies at the University of Oxford, where she earned her doctorate in 1980. The thesis was based on two years of fieldwork with a small indigenous group, the Chewong, in the Malaysian rainforest. Three years later, the thesis was published as the monograph Society and Cosmos. Although the book bore the distinct marks of the interests and professional positioning of her supervisor Rodney Needham, it also clearly shows a scholar with the integrity and originality to pursue her own intellectual paths. The book anticipates a number of the key points of what thirty years later would be called The Ontological Turn in anthropology. And some have held that it also showed the way out of the impasse this turn later would lead us into, namely what happens to the anthropological project of panhuman understanding when faced with claims that worldviews are totalities that are mutually incomprehensible.
Another long-term fieldwork, this time in a hierarchically organized society on the Indonesian island of Flores, offered a distinct cultural contrast to her experience with the egalitarian Chewong. In the comparative spirit of anthropology, this became a foundation on which she drew seminal theoretical insights in the coming decades - among other things in her exploration of 'moralities', which is still a standard reference in the discipline.
Her influence was not confined to the ranks of anthropologists, however. Shortly after moving to Oslo, she edited the ground-breaking anthology Societies at Peace (1989), which provides many ethnographic examples of societies characterized by peacefulness and nonviolence, directly at odds with the then-emerging evolutionary psychology's stance that (male) aggression and combativeness were human universals and therefore inevitable facts of society. In our shifting times, the message that aggression is also a cultural product that can be tamed, formed and opted out takes on a particularly hopeful sound. And because Signe always made sure that her points had a rock-solid empirical foundation, based in actual people’s actual lives, this hope has the advantage of being realistic.
Her most recent fieldwork was part of a large research project on kinship in Norway, which she directed together with Marit Melhuus, her friend and colleague over many years. Signe’s topic was transnational adoption, and she connected classic anthropological kinship studies with recent research in nationalism and ethnicity in her usual creative way. Among other things, she conceived the term 'kinning', linking older kinship theory with more dynamic models for creating enduring relations. The adoption project won her the prestigious Research Award at UiO in 2007. And once again, Signe proved to be ahead of her time. Anyone who reads the analyses and arguments from her adoption research today, will see that these are even more relevant now than they were twenty years ago.
Those of us who were fortunate to have her as a teacher and colleague were struck time and time again by her unceasing curiosity for all things human. The fact that it is possible to maintain such a desire for knowledge and novelty throughout a lifetime is as inspiring as it is full of promise. At the Department of Social Anthropology, we want Signe's committed and engaging example to rub off on all our students. And we pray that it has rubbed off on ourselves.
On behalf of deeply saddened and deeply grateful colleagues and friends at the Department of Social Anthropology,
Thorgeir Kolshus