Sverker Finnström
Associate Professor and Teacher
E-mail: sverker.finnstrom@socant.su.se
Sverker Finnström was born in Umeå in 1970, but grew up in Linköping. He moved to Uppsala in 1992 to study anthropology. Besides anthropology, he has studied The History of Religions, Logic and Metaphysics/Theoretical Philosophy, Science of Religions, Human Ecology, Modernism/Post Modernism, and Method, Practice and Theory in the Humanities. He defended his PhD in 2003. He has taught courses in Investigative Anthropological Methodology, The History of Anthropological Theory, African Studies, Civil Society, and Culture in Armed Conflicts. He has also been the team coordinator of the Living Beyond Conflict Seminar, a Sida funded research environment at Uppsala University. He joined Stockholm University in 2007.
The 2009 Margaret Mead Award
Sverker Finnström has been awarded with The Margaret Mead Award for his book Living with Bad Surroundings. The award will be distributed by American Anthropological Association in cooperation with Society for Applied Anthropology. The prize-giving ceremony will take place at Merida, Mexico, in March 2010.
Research: Developing Africa and Europe: Pan-Africanist reorientations and the brave new world
The project investigates Pan-Africanist reorientations among Africa’s young intellectuals, exemplifying how today’s young Africans seek inspiration and societal hope as the contemporary world develops toward increased global inequalities and different democratic and political standards for the West and the Rest. In the assessment of European development partnerships and young Africans’ responses from the margins, the project investigates and theorizes complex phenomena like diaspora community, transmigration and transnationalism, and how these phenomena may express Pan-African belongings. Young African intellectuals voice a biting critique of Europe’s role in Africa – not as an altruistic aid and development provider, but as deeply entangled with Africa’s contemporary political problems. The reorientations among young Africans are innovative experience-based efforts to strengthen Africa’s position on the global arena. The past is invoked in the making of a future. And these makings, this research proposes, deserve further investigation. The method of data collection is anthropological participant reflection rather than participant observation, combined with repeated interviews, informal conversations and extensive literature studies. One central source of data is literature studies into the origin and development of negritude, Pan-Africanist philosophical thought, and their bearings on contemporary critique of Western aid policies and practices.
Publications (selection)
2009
Gendered war and rumors of Saddam Hussein in Uganda. Anthropology and Humanism, vol 34, no 1, pp 61-70.
Fear of the midnight knock: State sovereignty and internal enemies in Uganda. Bruce Kapferer and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen (eds.). Crisis of the state: War and social upheaval. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
2008
An African hell of colonial imagination? The Lord’s Resistance Army/Movement in Uganda, another story. Politique Africaine, no 112, pp 119-139.
Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda. Duke University Press: Durham (see http://www.dukeupress.edu/)
2006
Wars of the past and war in the present: The Lord’s Resistance Movement/Army in Uganda. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, vol 76, no 2, pp. 200-220.
Survival in war-torn Uganda. Anthropology Today, vol 22, no. 2, pp. 12-15.
Meaningful rebels? Young adult perceptions on the Lord’s Resistance Movement/Army in Uganda. Catrine Christiansen, Mats Utas and Henrik Vigh (eds.). Navigating youth, generating adulthood: Social becoming in an African context. Uppsala: The Nordic Africa Institute.
2005
“For God and my life”: War and cosmology in northern Uganda. Paul Richards (ed.) No peace, no war: An anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts. Oxford and Ohio: James Currey and Ohio University Press
2001
In and out of culture: Fieldwork in war-torn Uganda. Critique of Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 247-258.
Editor: Nicole Thorén
Source: Sverker Finnström
Updated: 01/14/10