CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDY SENTER FOR GRUNNFORSKNING IMPRESSIONS 1 | 2009 Content The utility value of basic research 1 Editorial by Willy Østreng The North Calotte was a world without borders 2 Interview, Professors Lars Forsberg and Lars-Gunnar Larsson Hands across the water 4 Interview, Professors Debora Amadori and Nina Witoszek Interdisciplinary continuity in the CAS administration 7 Interview, Professors Willy Østreng and Gro Steinsland Structural ignorance aggravates confl ict 10 Interview, Professors Graham Chapman and Nils Henrik Risebro The Norwegian School of Management BI is a new partner 13 CAS researcher wins prize 13 Facts about the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) 14 Research groups 2008/2009 – Participants spring 2009 15 The CAS Board of Directors 16 The utility value of basic research The goal of basic research is to create new knowledge. It is curiosity-driven, time-consuming, experimental, theoretical, and has no explicitly expressed application. The physicist and science philosopher John Ziman put it this way: “Basic research is what you are doing when you don’t know what you are doing it for!” It aims at understanding phenomena and interrelationships no one has understood before. In basic research, the researcher is the fi rst mate, the skipper and the navigator. The spheres of study are theirs, and that must be respected. Basic research is independent. Bureaucrats, politicians and industrial magnates are best served by staying at arm’s length. Meanwhile, basic research is a high-risk activity, where the chances of winning or losing are equal. The road leads into the unknown, and there are no guarantees about the outcome. In the light of this, some might question whether it is society’s responsibility to support basic researchers who spend their working days culti- vating their own personal passions and hobbies. Working hours should be devoted to work, not play. At the superfi cial level, this reaction is understandable but it is fundamentally wrong. It rests on a lack of insight into the connections that exist in research. The utility value of applied research is based on a scientifi c knowledge base built up over time as the sum total of all research. The contributions made by basic research to this common platform are substantial, even pre-dominant. Accordingly, applied research would be incon- ceivable without basic research. From this perspective, basic research is an integral part of applied research, i.e. it constitutes the fi rst step towards applications. Making defi nitive distinctions between the two science traditions means introducing artifi cial walls between activities which, in actual practice, overlap. To the extent there are differences between the two observations, applied research seeks solutions for short-term problems, while basic research usually, but not always, helps provide solutions in the longer term. The gradual transitions and the mutual dependence between the two research traditions have led the presi- dent of the UK’s Royal Society, Lord Martin Rees, to distinguish between two types science: Applied and not yet applied science (read basic research). Here, science is defi ned along a time axis, rather than in relation to which function it has in the short term, who runs it and which direction it takes. In Lord Rees’ defi nition, the utility value is time-dependent, not essentially different. We need all the researcher-driven curiosity and unlimited development we can get, in addition to targetted research to resolve short-term problems affecting society. Both serve the needs of society. This acknowledge- ment has long since been embodied in the research profi les of some of the world’s most widely recognised applied research centres, e.g. the Max Planck Institutes, IBM, Microsoft and Bell Laboratories, all of which contribute actively to basic research on its own terms. In their view, basic research is useful research! They pay their basic researchers to continue the innovative “think tank”. That is good economy. Willy Østreng Scientifi c Director, CAS 1 The North Calotte was a world without borders Some 8000 years ago, the hunting and fi shing societies of the North Calotte were more extroverted and advanced than previously believed. The communities had indirect con- tact far to the east in the areas around the Urals, they were quick to adopt new tech- nology, and it was common to speak several languages. “The oldest communities on the North Calotte intimately and to jointly investigate the tenacious were not as cut off as previously believed. A picture structures of earlier communities”, expounds is now emerging of a society consisting of small Larsson. communities of about 100 people, and the groups had at least some individuals who travelled about Larsson and Forsberg agree that there were no bor- extensively and forged contact with neighbouring ders in the old Fennoscandia, at least not the kind communities. We see traces indicating that these of borders we have today. The concept of the nation contacts may have extended east all the way to the state and the romantic notions of different peoples’ Urals, even though it is unlikely that any single in- ‘cradle’ or ‘primordial home’ did not exist until in dividuals travelled that far. Impulses and infl uences the 1800s. Archaeologists and language research- Lars Forsberg, Profes- spread from one community to the next, and it ers alike are to some extent guilty of interpreting sor at the Department may not have taken more than seven or eight such older history in the light of these recent notions. of Archaeology, His- transfers to cover the entire distance from today’s tory, Cultural Studies northern Scandinavia to the Urals”, explains the “We have been much too eager to apply an ethni- and Religion at the archaeologist Lars Forsberg. cally unsullied concept of culture. The archaeolo- University of Bergen. gists identifi ed cultures based on them having (Photo: Maria Sætre) The new picture of the communities on the North certain types of tools and buildings, etc., while Calotte, or Fennoscandia, which is the technical the language researchers believed that everyone term, is emerging through collaboration between in the same culture spoke the same language. We archaeologists, historians and linguists in the re- have now come to realise that it is not that simple. search group Early Networking in Northern If we look at today’s Africa, for example, in many Fennoscandia at the Centre for Advanced Study areas it is not unusual for individuals to have a (CAS). Chaired by Professor Charlotte Damm of command of four or fi ve different languages. This the University of Tromsø, the group has made may possibly be because the African states were it possible for the archaeologist Lars Forsberg to not created on nationalistic grounds in the 1800s, collaborate closely with the language researcher but by colonial powers that divided the Continent Lars-Gunnar Larsson, among others. The basic up with a ruler in the 1900s. In any event, this led hypothesis is that hunting and fi shing societies in to multi-lingualism being common in Africa, and the north were resistant in their encounters with that was probably also the case in Fennoscandia”, other cultures, allowing them to survive fairly un- reports Larsson. disturbed until the 17th and 18th centuries. Lars-Gunnar Larsson, Membranes, not borders Professor at the Scientists cannot be butterfl ies “Maybe we can talk about permeable membranes Finno-Ugric section “Language researchers and archaeologists try to rather than borders in Fennoscandia. People trav- of the Department of form pictures of prehistory from their own perspec- elled around a lot, but there were also areas that Modern Languages at tives. There have been many examples of collabora- people avoided quite simply because they could put Uppsala University. tion. Earlier, it was not uncommon for language their lives at risk by being there. We have found (Photo: Maria Sætre) researchers even to ‘borrow’ dates from archaeolo- traces in language and archaeology of thorough- gists. Archaeological artefacts can, of course, be fares and hubs in some areas, while other areas dated very accurately, while establishing dates is offer nothing but full stops”, explains Forsberg. more diffi cult in the history of language. However, language researchers can no longer act like but- CAS researchers talk about Fennoscandia rather terfl ies and land sporadically on the archaeologi- than the early history of Sweden or Norway because cal fl ower to partake of its nectar before fl uttering Norway and Sweden did not exist at that time. on. Here at CAS, we intend to cooperate more “That was the case almost up to our own time. For 2 example, there has been a great deal of talk about “A linguistic parallel to the archaeological fi nds is Finnish-speaking slash and burn cultivators immi- that the same word for ‘copper’ runs through more grating in the 1500s to parts of today’s Sweden and than 20 different languages across the entire area Norway, but of course they were not immigrants. from Fennoscandia across the Baltic region to the They did not by any means experience moving Urals. Copper is known as ‘vaski’ in Finnish and from country to country, and their migration was ‘veaiki’ in northern Sami, for example, and in that no more dramatic than someone from Småland region, only Mordvinian and Mari use another Hunting and fi shing moving to Västre Götaland today”, says Larsson. word. Using ordinary linguistic methods, such societies in the north widespread dissemination would date the word were highly resistant “During the age of the Swedish empire, the desig- all the way back to the Stone Age, but, of course, in their encounters nation for Sweden’s history between 1611 and 1718, that is not logical.