Unni Wikan (born 18 November 1944) is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway.
She has argued that far from being a racist, she has significant empathy for the lives of many of the Muslim men she has portrayed in her most recent books.
In a well-known case in Norway (The Anooshe case), she argued that the state had not taken into account the social expectations of immigrant men, and this had led to rootless men whose social expectations were not met or even acknowledged, arguing that violence is a product of immigrant conditions when host country laws conflict with the "unwritten social rules" of immigrant societies.
[1] Wikan has performed field work in a number of countries (Egypt, Oman, Yemen, Indonesia, Bhutan, Scandinavia) and her research has resulted in ten books being published.
Her works have been translated into Japanese, Arabic, Kurdish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, German, and Italian.