Tor Halfdan Aase 1949–2021

It was with great sadness that we received the message that our dear and deeply respected colleague, Professor Emeritus Tor Halfdan Aase, passed away in his sleep on the 29th of July 2021 at the age of 72. First and foremost, when thinking of Tor Halfdan Aase, the many stimulating academic discussions and his professional integrity come to the surface. As an academic, he was merited, committed, anti-authoritarian, and generous.

Tor Halfdan Aase (Photo: Kim E. Andreassen, University of Bergen, February 2009)

Professor Tor Halfdan Aase was trained in social anthropology at the end of the 1970s through the 1980s. He was awarded his PhD (Dr.polit) by the University of Bergen (UiB) in 1991, with the dissertation Punjabi Practices of Migration: Punjabi Life Projects in Pakistan and Norway. His dissertation was in social anthropology, but he soon became a professor in human geography at the Department of Geography, University of Bergen, in 1993. He had studied geography as part of his degree and for many years during the 1980s he had worked on issues and questions of geographical relevance in the Norwegian context in applied research at Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR) and Rogaland Research, which later became the International Research Institute of Stavanger (IRIS) and which is now part of NORCE (Norwegian Research Center). At the Department of Geography, UiB, Aase was an important force in building development geography as a subfield of education and research, which was partly shaped by the many research projects he conducted in Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Numerous master’s and doctoral candidates were educated under Aase’s highly inspiring supervision. He developed several courses and education programmes thematically focusing on development and migration theory, natural resource management, and qualitative methods in field research. Although his research was concentrated on development issues in Asia, particularly the Himalayas, he also conducted research and supervised master’s and doctoral candidates on Norwegian contextual issues, and always with the same contagious enthusiasm, interest, and analytical eye.

Aase claimed that his research mainly focused on the micro-scale in order to understand local actors, their agency, and their culturally contingent rationality (Hansen 2012). The focus on culturally contingent rationality is perhaps one of his main contributions to human geography as a discipline. Based on his Dr.polit dissertation and trial lecture, Aase had an article titled ‘Symbolic space’ published in Geografiska Annaler (Aase 1994). In the article he argues that the geographical discourse on space had reached a dead end because the discipline still discussed which concept of space should be considered the correct one. Instead, he claimed that the discipline should allow for several concepts of space or, as he puts it, ‘multiple spaces in our analysis’ (Aase 1994). Following this line of thought, he argues for an empirical turn (instead of continuing with theoretical speculations) and context-sensitive analyses that see space as a culturally constructed force. At the same time as when he wrote the article that was published in 1994, he also started to develop a semiotic methodology for production and interpretation of qualitative data (Fossåskaret et al. 1997) based on philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s thoughts about language and meaning. This interest led him to cognitive science and experiential realism, particularly that developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980). Thus, when challenged to define his research, Aase often defined it as ‘experiential realism’ (Hansen 2012, 256), pointing to the relation between thinking individuals and objects in the real world (Aase & Fossåskaret 2007; 2014).

In practising ‘experiential realism’, Aase built on the three discovery processes identified by Lakoff & Johnson (1980): (1) reason is bodily, as it is based on senses and bodily experiences with the world; (2) most of our thinking is subconscious; and (3) abstract concepts are often metaphorical. Aase argued that theses processes should be basic in all qualitatively oriented research (Aase & Fossåskaret 2007). Based on these and other reasonings, he developed a context-sensitive methodology to explore place- and value-based rationalities. This resulted in two important and merited volumes on qualitative methodology (Fossåskaret et al. 1997; Aase & Fossåskaret 2007). Along with these publishing activities, Aase designed and developed several methodology courses. The PhD course ‘Production and Interpretation of Qualitative Data’ became a favourite among contemporary PhD students within human geography and in other disciplines. The course addressed geographers and other social scientists who are concerned with society-nature interactions and the study of space and place. Not surprisingly, Aase used the course to educate students to study the production of meaning in everyday life by operating classical and recent methodological tools that are useful for interpreting, for example, field conversations, interviews, and researchers’ own observations.

Aase’s methodological engagement and call for context sensitivity in research also made him critical of well-established assumptions within the social sciences. For instance, he was fundamentally critical of modernization theory and its tendency to generalize and overlook the existence of problematic notions in modern societies. Based on such critiques, he edited the book Tournaments of Power (Aase 2002), in which power phenomena are investigated in a variety of contexts and in which one of the conclusions is that honour is an integral part of modernity itself. This originality in Aase’s theorizing also shines through in his last edited volume, Climate Change and the Future of Himalayan Farming (Aase 2017). In this significant and timely contribution, Aase combines research- and methodological interests while engaging in climate change issues. The focus is on how farming communities in diverse livelihoods in the Himalayas cope with changing climate patterns and to what extent Himalayan farmers and their institutions are prepared to face the future of global warming. In applying a qualitatively oriented research approach, Aase and his co-authors find that by tradition and experience farmers in Himalaya are highly familiar with uncertainties and that this very often results in strong adaptive capacities to future climate change in their farming systems.

The above-mentioned contributions of Professor Emeritus Tor Halfdan Aase, along with many other merits, have been of great importance for the development of human geography within the Department of Geography at UiB. In particular, Aase has left his mark on the subfield of Development Geography and the field that he conceptualized as qualitatively oriented research. On behalf of the Department, the University of Bergen, and colleagues and friends elsewhere, we express the deepest gratitude to Professor Emeritus Tor Halfdan Aase and his valued contributions to the discipline of human geography.