Ett urval av böcker publicerade av forskare vid institutionen

 

Struggle for Mobility: Risk, hope and community of knowledge in Eritrean and Ethiopian migration pathways towards Sweden

Tekalign Ayalew

On the basis of the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sweden, Italy, Sudan and Ethiopia during 2013–2015, this study examines the motivations, organizations and impact of overland migratory journeys from Ethiopia and Eritrea across the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea to Sweden. The analysis involves the exploring of how migrants strive to prepare, manage and survive the multiple risks and structural barriers they encounter: the exits from Eritrea and Ethiopia, negotiations and contacts with various brokers and facilitators, organized crime and violence, restrictive border controls, passage through the Desert and high Sea and finally, ‘managing the asylum system in Sweden’.

 

Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran

Shahram Khosravi

In Precarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, multiple circumstances of precarity give rise to a sense of hopelessness, shared visions of a futureless tomorrow, widespread home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and a growth of incivilities. On the other, daydreaming and hope, as well as civility and solidarity in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements, continue to persist. Young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in purposelessness and forced to endure endless waiting, and they are also aware that they are perceived as unproductive and a burden on their society.

 

South Asian Activists in the Global Justice Movement

Eva-Maria Hardtmann

This work is a well-researched study of the last decades of the networks in the Global Justice Movement (GJM) and World Social Forums. It offers a novel perspective on the traditions of protest, ethics, organizational forms, and visions among activists than is usually presented in the literature on GJM, which largely focuses on Latin America, the United States of America, and Europe. It is an ethnographically rooted account of the two conflicting discourses-one among activists in GJM and the other emanating from the World Bank-that have become intertwined locally within the same circle of activists.

 

Writing Future Worlds. An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios

Ulf Hannerz

This volume presents a comprehensive analysis of global future scenarios and their impact on a growing, shared culture. Ever since the end of the Cold War, a diverse range of future concepts has emerged in various areas of academia—and even in popular journalism. A number of these key concepts—‘the end of history,’ ‘the clash of civilizations,’ ‘the coming anarchy,’ ‘the world is flat,’ ‘soft power,’ ‘the post-American century’—suggest what could become characteristic of this new, interconnected world. Ulf Hannerz scrutinizes these ideas, considers their legacy, and suggests further dialogue between authors of the ‘American scenario’ and commentators elsewhere.

 

Laboring Through Uncertainty: an ethnography of the Chinese state, labor NGOs, and development

Darcy Pan

This study sets out to understand how international development projects supporting labor activism work in contemporary China. It focuses on the lived experiences of and relationships among a group of grassroots⁠ labor NGOs in the province of Guangdong, South China; intermediary NGOs in Hong Kong; and Western funding agencies that try to bring about social change in postsocialist China where the political climate is still highly restrictive and the limits of the state’s tolerance for activism are ambiguous and uncertain. Foregrounding the notion of uncertainty, this study investigates how state control is exercised by examining a specific logic of practices, discourses, and a mode of existence that constantly mask and unmask the state.

 

Promised Lands: Memory, Politics, and Palestinianness in Santiago de Chile

Siri Schwabe

This study is a comprehensive attempt to grapple with diasporic Palestinianness in Santiago de Chile. Based on long-term fieldwork from 2013 to 2014 within Palestinian-Chilean networks, organizations, and places it explores how an inherently political Palestinianness is constituted, expressed and explored via memory on the one hand and processes related to space and place on the other. Palestinianness is employed here as a concept that captures all that goes into maintaining a Palestinian presence in Santiago. Rather than a fixed category, Palestinianness is something that works and is worked upon in ways that are inseparable from, in this case, the context of lived life in the Chilean capital.

 

Favela Funk – Ways of Being Young in the Urban Peripheries of Rio de Janeiro

Hannah Pollack Sarnecki

During the last decades, funk music produced in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro has been travelling the world as a genre of contemporary cool. Construed as both hip and authentic and consumed globally, it has become a political and commercial asset in the nation’s rise to economic dominance and in Rio’s campaign to become a global city. In Brazil, however, favela funk draws the boundaries between the shanty towns of the urban margins, where it remains a social practice, and the state, by which it is condemned and sometimes prohibited for lyrics that allude to violence in an alleged glorification of gang power. This dissertation is an ethnographic inquiry into social life and power relations in one of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

 

The Republic of Difference: Feminism and anti-racism in the Parisian banlieues

Johanna Gullberg

The thesis is an ethnographic study of three political groups in the Parisian banlieues: Ni putes ni soumises, AFRICA and Mouvement des indigènes de la République. These groups espouse both feminist and antiracist politics in theory, yet in practice tend to privilege either a feminist or  antiracist position and end up in opposition to each other. To explain why, the thesis locates their respective politics within French colonial heritage, French secularism (laïcité), and current politics surrounding Muslims in France, especially Muslim women in the banlieues. The thesis draws on anthropological theory, feminist theory, intersectionality, and post-colonial studies.

 

The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Helena Wulff

Writing is crucial to anthropology, but which genres are anthropologists expected to master in the 21st century? This book explores how anthropological writing shapes the intellectual content of the discipline and academic careers. First, chapters identify the different writing genres and contexts anthropologists actually engage with. Second, this book argues for the usefulness and necessity of taking seriously the idea of writing as a craft and of writing across and within genres in new ways. Although academic writing is an anthropologist’s primary genre, they also write in many others, from drafting administrative texts and filing reports to composing ethnographically inspired journalism and fiction.

 

Reform and Responsibility in the Remaking of the Swedish National Pension System

Anette Nyqvist

The book is a detailed study through Sweden’s national pension system. With Sweden’s recently reformed national pension system as the illustrative example, Nyqvist shows how new forms of governance effectively shift responsibility from state level to an individual level. She sheds light on how politicians, technocrats, and bureaucrats work to educate and mold the general public into responsible, hardworking, and financially literate citizens. Providing an ethnographic example of how contemporary power works by way of new forms of governance, this book is an exploration into the art of governing.

 

Lives on Wheels: Caravan Homes in Contemporary Europe

Hege Høyer Leivestad

In the public imaginary the caravan has time and again been associated with stigmatised groups in society. Nevertheless, this vehicle-home has held a visible position in Western Europe’s leisure landscape in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a potent symbol of working-class tourism. But what happens when presumably mobile caravans are used for long-term and full-time ‘static’ housing? Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on campsites in Spain and Sweden, as well as within the camping industry, this study depicts how the caravan and the campsite’s ambiguous material qualities both come to fit and to challenge conventional domestic ideals.

 

Makt utan mandat: de policyprofessionella i svensk politik

Christina Garsten, Bo Rothstein, Stefan Svallfors

Denna bok är resultatet av ett samhällsvetenskapligt forskningsprojekt om de policyprofessionella i svensk politik. Med detta avses aktörer inom den politiska sfären som inte är förtroendevalda utan som är anställda för att bedriva politik, t ex som politiskt sakkunniga, politiska sekreterare, pressekreterare, PR-konsulter och utredare på fackförbund och tankesmedjor. Detta är en kategori som har ökat kraftigt i antal under de senaste decennierna och vars inflytande också har ökat markant. Bokens titel - Makt utan mandat - syftar på att det är mycket oklart på vilka grunder som denna grupp utövar politisk makt och inflytande.

 

Makeshift Work In A Changing Labour Market
The Swedish Model in the Post-Financial Crisis Era

Edited by Christina Garsten, Jessica Lindvert, Renita Thedvall

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, people who had never before had cause to worry about losing their jobs entered the ranks of the unemployed for the first time. In Sweden, the welfare state has been radically challenged and mass unemployment has become a reality in what used to be viewed as a model case for a full employment society. With an emphasis on Sweden in the context of transnational regulatory change, the book discusses how the market mediates employment and moves on to explore the ways in which employees adjust to a new labour market.

 

Anthropology Now and Next. Essays in Honor of Ulf Hannerz

Edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Christina Garsten and Shalini Randeria

The scholarship of Ulf Hannerz is characterized by its extraordinary breadth and visionary nature. He has contributed to the understanding of urban life and transnational networks, and the role of media, paradoxes of identity and new forms of community, suggesting to see culture in terms of flows rather than as bounded entities. Contributions honor Hannerz’ legacy by addressing theoretical, epistemological, ethical and methodological challenges facing anthropological inquiry on topics from cultural diversity policies in Europe to transnational networks in Yemen, and from pottery and literature to multinational corporations.

 

Ombudskapitalisterna. Institutionella ägares röst och roll

Anette Nyqvist

Vår tids kapitalister är organisationer – inte individer. De är fondbolag, livförsäkringsbolag och pensionsfonder världen över och de kallas ofta institutionella ägare. Deras uppdrag är att vara ombud för sina kunder och investera kundernas kapital på ”bästa sätt”. Allt fler av dessa ombud vill framstå som aktiva och ansvarsfulla ägare. De hävdar att det är möjligt att både tjäna pengar och göra gott. Boken bygger på en etnografisk undersökning av hur och var institutionella ägare tar sitt ansvar. Vilka möjligheter har de institutionella ägarna att förvalta våra pengar på ett ansvarsfullt sätt?

 

Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory

Mark Graham

Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory offers a wide ranging fusion of queer theory with anthropological theory, shifting away from the discussion of gender categories and identities that have often constituted a central concern of queer theory and instead exploring the queer elements of contexts in which they are not normally apparent. Engaging with a number of apparently 'non-sexual' topics, including embodiment and fieldwork, regimes of value, gifts and commodities, diversity discourses, biological essentialisms, intersectionality, the philosophy of Bergson and Deleuze, and the representation of heterosexuality in popular culture, this book moves to discuss central concerns of contemporary anthropology, drawing on both the latest anthropological research as well as classic theories.

 

Transnationalität und Öffentlichkeit. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven

Edited by Caroline Schmitt and Asta Vonderau

Wie können transnationale Öffentlichkeiten untersucht werden? Ob in Zusammenhang mit der globalen AIDS-Epidemie, in migrantischen Organisationen, im Umfeld der pentekostalen Kirche oder im Zuge der neuen sozialen Bewegungen: Weltweit entstehen diskursive Arenen und Formen zivilgesellschaftlichen Engagements, deren Handlungsspektrum und politische Wirksamkeit die Grenzen von Nationalstaaten überschreiten und das traditionelle Verständnis von Öffentlichkeit in Bewegung bringen. Solche empirisch beobachtbaren Knotenpunkte transnationalen Kommunizierens und Handelns werden in diesem Band von einer multidisziplinären Beiträgerschaft als situative und temporäre Öffentlichkeiten betrachtet und analysiert.

 

Illegality, Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe

Ruben Andersson

In this groundbreaking ethnography, Ruben Andersson, a gifted anthropologist and journalist, travels along the clandestine migration trail from Senegal and Mali to the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Through the voices of his informants, Andersson explores, viscerally and emphatically, how Europe’s increasingly powerful border regime meets and interacts with its target–the clandestine migrant. This vivid, rich work examines the subterranean migration flow from Africa to Europe, and shifts the focus from the “illegal immigrants” themselves to the vast industry built around their movements. This fascinating and accessible book is a must-read for anyone interested in the politics of international migration and the changing texture of global culture.

 

The Therapeutization of Work: The Psychological Toolbox as Rationalization Device during the Third Industrial Revolution in Sweden

Hans Tunestad

The organization of work in the Western welfare states has made use of psychological know-how since the early twentieth century, for instance by making the practices of ‘psychotechnics’ and ‘human relations’ a part of the production apparatus. The last decades, however, have seen the development of a new economy based on information and communication technologies and with a related shift in organizational ideals from large hierarchical structures to networks of self-governing units – a change sometimes labelled the third industrial revolution. This development has meant new possibilities for the deployment of psychological knowledge in organizational management.

 

Engaging Violence: Trauma, memory and representation

Edited by Ivana Maček

This volume opens up new ground in the field of social representations research by focusing on contexts involving mass violence, rather than on relatively stable societies. Representations of violence are not only symbolic, but in the first place affective and bodily, especially when it comes to traumatic experiences. Exploring the responses of researchers, educators, students and practitioners to long-term engagement with this emotionally demanding material, the book considers how empathic knowledge can make working in this field more bearable and deepen our understanding of the Holocaust, genocide, war, and mass political violence.

 

Formationen des Politischen. Anthropologie politischer Felder

Edited by Jens Adam and Asta Vonderau

»Alternativlos« ist zu einem Schlagwort in gegenwärtigen politischen Debatten geworden. Der Begriff steht für einen Politikstil, der neoliberale Regierungslogiken mit zunehmend autoritären Argumentationsfiguren verknüpft. Die in diesem Buch versammelten Beiträge bieten eine alternative Perspektive auf aktuelle politische Prozesse und Machtfelder – etwa durch den Fokus auf »Policies« als wirkmächtige Organisationsformen (spät-)moderner Gesellschaften, durch die ethnographische Verfolgung der lokalen, nationalen und transnationalen Effekte von politischen Entscheidungen oder durch das Aufspüren neuartiger (Macht-)Formationen aus Individuen, Institutionen, Ressourcen und Wissensbeständen.

 

Ymer 2013 – Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geografi
Antropologi och tid

Mattias Viktorin & Charlotta Widmark (red.)

Hur kan vi förstå antropologin genom att fokusera på frågor om tid? Vad innebär ett samtida antropologiskt perspektiv på tid? Och hur kan man som antropolog egentligen utforska samtiden och olika företeelser som ”ligger i tiden”? Årets upplaga av Ymer handlar om antropologi och tid, och dessa är några av de frågeställningar som årsbokens kapitel undersöker. Medverkande författare: Fanny Ambjörnsson, Ulf Hannerz, Jörgen Hellman, Alf Hornborg, Anna Krohwinkel Karlsson, Per Ståhlberg, Hans Tunestad, SusannUllberg, Mattias Viktorin och Charlotta Widmark.

 

People on the Move. Experiences of Forced Migration

Edited by Charles Westin, Sadia Hassanen

This volume deals with various issues of forced migration from developing countries, in some cases to neighbouring countries, in others to countries in the developed world. In some cases the migration processes the contributors concentrate on resulted in settlement on a permanent basis in a receiving country; in other cases the outcome is that individual families making up the diasporic cultural community go transnational themselves, living here at times, living there for periods, commuting and transcending national, cultural, political and linguistic boundaries.

 

Organisational Anthropology
Doing Ethnography in and Among Complex Organisations

Edited by Christina Garsten, Anette Nyqvist

Organisational Anthropology is a pioneering analysis of doing ethnographic fieldwork in different types of complex organisations. The book focuses on the process of initiating contact, establishing rapport and gaining the trust of the organisation's members. The contributors work from the premise that doing fieldwork in an organisation shares essential characteristics with fieldwork in more ‘classical’ anthropological environments, but that it also poses some particular challenges to the ethnographer.

 

Watermarks: Urban Flooding and Memoryscape in Argentina

Susann Ullberg

This study analyses the memoryscape that mediates past experiences of disasters. The inquiry is based on ethnographic fieldwork (2004-2011) in Santa Fe, Argentina. The study examines how past flooding is remembered by flood victims in the middle- and low-income districts and by activists of the protest movement that emerged in the wake of the 2003 flood. The study addresses the relationship between memory, morality and social inequality and discusses the implications for questions regarding vulnerability, resilience and adaptation.

 

Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity

Joshua Barker, Erik Harms, Johan Lindquist (Editors)

Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity brings together the fieldwork of over eighty scholars and covers the nine major countries of the region: Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. An introduction outlines important social transformations in Southeast Asia and key theoretical and methodological innovations that result from ethnographic attention to the study of key figures.

 

 

Modernities on the Move

Gudrun Dahl, Örjan Bartholdson, Paolo Favero, Shahram Khosravi

The present volume emanates from three studies of youngsters and young adults in three urban contexts in the world: in Tehran in Iran, Delhi in India, and Salvador in Brazil. To them, global as well as local ideas about modernization, traditionalism and authenticity provide frames for interpreting the development of society and evaluating one’s own life.

 

 

Varumärkenas fält: Produktion av erkännande i Stockholms reklamvärld

Raoul Galli

I Varumärkenas fält ställs frågor som: Hur vinner man erkännande i Stockholms reklamvärld? Hur säljer reklamproducenter detta erkännande till sina uppdragsgivare? Vad för slags erkännande är statliga reklamköpare ute efter att vinna genom sitt samarbete med prisbelönta och erkända reklamproducenter? I kontrast till en spridd föreställning att reklamen ”speglar samhället” är grundantagandet i denna studie att reklamen i första hand speglar den värld som skapar den, dvs. reklamvärlden.

 

Il mondo dell'antropologia

Ulf Hannerz

Italiensk översättning av Ulf Hannerz Anthropology's world: life in a twenty-first-century discipline. What, in these times, in is anthropology for? How do anthropologists want to be understood? For whom do they write, and in what language? And can we use anthropology's past as a resource for thinking about challenges past and future? In his new book, Ulf Hannerz cements his reputation as one of anthropology's finest writers, showing how anthropology came to be a central intellectual discipline and why it is vital that it remains so in an increasingly globalized world.

 

Conserving the American Dream: Faith and Politics in the U.S. Heartland

Erik Nilsson

Recent decades have seen substantial changes in the U.S. political landscape. One particularly significant development has been the growing influence of a conservative coalition encompassing evangelical Christianity, interventionist foreign policy and neoliberal reform. This study explores the force and internal dynamics of this political assemblage.

 

 

Digital Drama: Teaching and learning art and media in Tanzania

Paula Uimonen

The aim of this book is to explore digital media and intercultural interaction at an arts college in Tanzania through innovative forms of ethnographic representation. The book and the series website weave together visual and aural narratives, interviews and observations, life stories and video documentaries, art performances and productions. It paints a vivid portrayal of everyday life in East Africa's only institute for practical art training, while tracing the rich cultural history of a state that has mixed tribalism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and cosmopolitanism in astonishingly creative ways.

 

Arbetets marknad: Arbetsmarknadens nya organisering

Christina Garsten, Jessica Lindvert, Renita Thedvall

Den här boken är ett resultat av flera års forskning om de förändringar som har format arbetsmarknaden och som fortfarande pågår. Den beskriver hur arbetsmarknaden blivit just en marknad och lyfter fram centrala tendenser i denna omvandling. Såväl den som söker arbete som den som har ett arbete står inför nya utmaningar: Hur gör jag mig anställningsbar? Vilka förväntningar och krav ställs på mig som arbetssökande? Hur är förmedlingen av arbete organiserad idag?

 

Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India's Northeast

Bengt G. Karlsson The questions that inspired this study are central to contemporary research within environmental anthropology, political ecology, and environmental history: how does the introduction of a modern, capitalist, resource regime affect the livelihood of indigenous peoples? Can sustainable resource management be achieved in a situation of radical commodification of land and other aspects of nature? Focusing on conflicts relating to forest management, mining, and land rights, the author offers an insightful account of present-day challenges for indigenous people to accommodate aspirations for ethnic sovereignty and development.
 

Lesbian Lives: Sexuality, Space and Subculture in Moscow
Katja Sarajeva


This study is an exploration of the lesbian subculture in Russia focusing in particular on the subculture as a unique heterogeneous space of social interaction and cultural production that is not self contained or isolated from mainstream society, but incorporates a variety of cultural flows and traditions that are a part of Russian mainstream culture, other Russian subcultures, or global cultural flows. Some of these cultural flows and traditions are more compatible than other ones.