My purpose here is to alert you to how culture is loose on the streets of Norway - asindeed in much of the rest of the world. The expression ‘loose on the streets’ is notmine. I take it from the anthropologist Paul Bohannan who thus characterises aphenomenon of our times. ‘Culture’ has run astray. And it is now being used helter-skelterto promote all kinds of special interests.

But can a concept that has gone awry function as a fitting frame for the encounterbetween immigrants and Norwegians? My own answer is no. And I shall propose analternative that can better facilitate mutual respect and understanding.

This special section of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale originates in a symposium organised in December 2003 at Leiden University by the ethnological debating club WDO. As students of cultural anthropology and development sociology at this university, we were ‘facing fieldwork’, both retrospectively, in the task of making sense of our – relatively short – field research required for the Leiden MA thesis, and prospectively as future PhD students hoping for an extended stay.