For the last ten years, Unni Wikan has publicly campaigned to convince the Norwegian government to reform its welfare policies and multiculturalist practices directed at immigrant populations. She has written newspaper editorials, served as an expert witness in court proceedings, and testified before various government commissions. In 1995 she sent shock waves through polite Norwegian society by publishing a book-length study that concluded that the state's policies of cultural respect and financial generosity toward the country’s immigrant and refugee inhabitants were effectively betraying the latter, abetting ethnic ghettoization, creating welfare dependence, and destroying self-respect. Generous Betrayal is both a translation of this argument for an international audience and a travelogue of the author's odyssey in becoming a public intellectual.

The empathic attention to voices of those who often fall through the cracks of policy and scholarly representation characteristic of Wikan's earlier ethnographic work shines through in this account. Wikan recounts the tragic life histories of young Norwegian citizens of immigrant background who are victimized by their families and by state agencies chartered to help them. The heartrending tales of the pseudonymous Aisha and Nadia—Norwegian–Middle Eastern girls kidnapped by their parents and "deported" abroad for forced marriages—serve as recurrent props for Wikan's political and theoretical conclusions. They illustrate how Norwegian state immigration policies, along with powerful spokesmen within the immigrant community who reify normative interpretations of cultural and religious practice for personal gain can destroy those less capable of making themselves heard. They poignantly exemplify the imbrications of culture and power that anthropologists have been theorizing for 20 years and that Wikan concisely presents here to a larger public (pp. 75–88).

In criticizing how culture has become a "new concept of race" (p. 79) and the object of a violent identity politics in Norway, Wikan follows certain liberal European intellectuals in positing antinomies between community and individual, cultural respect and human rights, tolerance and humanism, and ethnic diversity and liberal democracy (pp. 139–170). Viewing these oppositions as zero-sum rather than as standing in dynamic and productive tension, she argues that prioritizing cultural difference destroys individual dignity, equality, and freedom. Citing the ways Aisha and Nadia's pleas were ignored by child welfare agencies who favored family reunification on grounds of cultural compatibility, she accuses the Norwegian state of "engaging in a modern form of sacrifice, this one being performed on the altar of culture" (p. 24).

But if Wikan unpacks the "culture" of state multicultural policies—demonstrating how it totalizes internal diversity and masks hegemonic relations (pp. 83–88)—she does not extend the same deconstruction to the "human" of humanism or the "individual" in the Enlightenment categories of freedom and equality she prioritizes. Humans become human only insofar as they live within social worlds. Their individuality is a social project, the result not just of singular life experiences but also of processes of subjectification that create racialized European nations, that, regardless of official state discourse, contribute to the exclusions and durable inequalities faced by immigrant populations. Not recognizing these structural conditions of exclusion slants Wikan's arguments against the very immigrant community whose members are marginalized for not being white, Protestant Norwegians.

Unsympathetic readers might reasonably accuse Wikan of engaging in a racist polemic, of being an apologist for anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim politics. Overall, the book tends to portray immigrants as lazy, criminally inclined, mostly illiterate men who steal welfare benefits and violently repress their daughters' and sisters' life chances. To criticize the book in this way, however, would be, according to Wikan, to participate in a "conspiracy of silence" (p. 11 and passim) that victimizes young women and abets the creation of an ethnic underclass. Researchers’ fears of being accused of racism, Wikan recounts, have impeded the qualitative and quantitative studies necessary to evaluate and reform state policy.

Certain immigrants have successfully learned to navigate through Norway's welfare and refugee admittance bureaucracy. To portray this as "reap[ing] the fruits of a welfare system to which [they] had contributed nothing" (p. 21) is to misrepresent the struggles most immigrants and refugees engage in to survive. For U.S. readers, Wikan's demands to overhaul "welfare colonialism" (p. 7) recall Reagan-era reforms that augmented homelessness, drug dependency, and the prison population, making the truly disadvantaged even more so.

Wikan's use of tragic cases of young victims of immigration regimes as morality tales is ultimately no more valid as an analytical methodology than citing success stories. Both are partial truths in a far more complex social reality. In using these cases to question the unintended personal and political consequences of a reified anthropological notion of "culture," Wikan does a service to the field. In using them politically, she engages in a further form of exploitation.