This article examines the career narratives of entrepreneurs with migrant background in the Swedish business sector. Statistics show that the proportion of individuals with a migrant background who reach so-called top-positions in Swedish society is in general low. Migrants with Iranian background is an exception as many of them have reached high positions as professionals in business corporations and themselves established high-profile businesses in Sweden. Based on in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and managers with Iranian origin, we will in this article look at how their background is made relevant when reflecting upon professional success and failure. The article is concerned with their exceptional professional achievements and, in particular, the individuals' positioning in relation to their 'society of migration', their society of origin, and the social networks are embedded in as migrants with an Iranian origin. The article shows how narratives of success tend to emphasize the struggles of a 'lonely fighter' while at the same time dismiss discrimination as an explanatory factor. The entrepreneurs' success stories nevertheless focus on how one's career path as innovators and 'agents of social change' is intimately linked with a migrant past and experience.

A core tenet of social work is that clients should be helped to work on themselves so they can improve their lives and their abilities to a point where they are no longer reliant on social services for support. To make this possible, social workers have different models at their disposal. While the clients are ostensibly governed by these techniques, models of social work also shape the subjectivities of the social workers applying them. In this chapter, our focus is on the effect of these models on social workers. Our ethnographic approach allows for a more nuanced exploration of how a technology of governmentality is received by those subjected to it, in this case, the social workers. The study highlights that the effects of the same model on practices and perceptions in the same social context differ between individuals, and allows a nuanced understanding of the effects of governmentality in practice.

There has been a change in the typical setting of detective fiction, from small, closed, tranquil communities to urban contexts of greater opacity and diversity. Its hero/heroine is thus now a recurrent figure in a global genre of urban fiction; and the actual detective story writer is a connoisseur of life in the big city. In this article I point to a certain affinity between detective stories and urban ethnography, and proceed to suggest some contrasts between Swedish writers who have recently achieved international fame and a writer of an earlier generation whom I knew personally. This is a way of demonstrating changes in the urban scene of Stockholm, and transformations in Swedish national society.

This chapter points to the critical role energy and energy infrastructures plays in modern societies. It is argued that the ways in which different sources of energy are extracted, produced, refined, transported and consumed enable or produce certain social arrangements and eventually condition the very structure of society. Power, in other words, is loaded with power. Here I am interested in coal and then the small-scale, unregulated coal mining that takes place on indigenous lands in Northeast India. The story told revolves around the intervention by the National Green Tribunal putting a ban on what is termed as “un-scientific mining”. While this intervention is highly condemned by certain local actors, there are also those that hope this eventually will break the spell of coal.   

The notion of diaspora generally indicates achievements: creating a home outside the homeland, entrepreneurship, the establishment of local and global networks, new organisations, media and spatial as well as social mobility. In studies of Iranian diaspora, a rosy picture of 'super successful' Iranians has often obscured other aspects of the diaspora - failure, conflicts, internal exclusion and fragmentation of the group along various lines, such as ideologies, class, gender, local identification and cause of migration. Through ethnographic vignettes of the Iranian migrants in Sweden, this article demonstrates the segmentation, hybridity and complexity of the experiences of the diaspora. Avoiding the language of generalisation and by focussing instead on particular histories and individual circumstances, it reveals the diversity, disintegration and contradictions within what has been assumed to be a homogeneous and static diaspora.

Arrangements for collaboration in knowledge production across academia, government, non-governmental organisations, and corporations have several names, such as citizen-science, community-based participatory research, engaged research and hybrid forums. The multiplicity of schemes does not lie only in the high number of names for various versions of collaborative knowledge production. Different scholars also use concepts in multiple ways, depending on their individual choices, mother disciplines, and the problem area in which collaboration occurs. At the same time, there is a lack of analytical tools that address the full range of collaborative research schemes and provide a systematic set of questions to learn about the schemes, challenges, and opportunities. Based on our review of academic journal articles highlighting collaborative research schemes, this paper aims to analyse three parameters which it is fair to say that virtually all arrangements of collaborative knowledge production ought to consider when making decisions, parameters that are often partially missed or misunderstood: (A) epistemic-procedural, (B) exclusive-inclusive and (C) aggregative-integrative. By examining the three parameters, their political theory origins, and how they connect to and challenge existing schemes of knowledge collaboration, we provide analytical tools that could facilitate processes of developing and scrutinising arrangements of collaborative research. 

In this chapter, I describe and discuss access as an ongoing situational and relational process of ethnographic fieldwork. I have two interrelated goals for this chapter, both concerning processual aspects of accessibility. Based on various research projects on the performativity of policy in such diverse fields as national social insurance politics and the financial market, I begin by proposing a contextualised view of access. I argue that a culture of accessibility has evolved within the Swedish public administration system, such that access has become the norm and that access policies are organising principles that shape the way ‘we live, act and think’ (Shore & Wright 1997:i) – and not least do they affect the civil servants working within government authorities. I then discuss how a problematising perspective on access processes can help shed light on methodological aspects concerning forms of engagement with and within formal organisations. In doing this, I hope to contribute to a more complex and nuanced conceptualisation of access, a key concern of any ethnographic inquiry. After describing accessibility as a culture and organising principle, I stop to ask four questions. Access of what? Where? To whom? For what purpose? As we all know, access is not merely a matter of getting through the door. 

Thinking along conviviality at the crossroads (Hemer et al 2020), this paper explores worldmaking through African women’s literature. Scholars have highlighted that African women “write the crossroads,” their literature capturing the ambiguities and paradoxes of “this and that” rather than “this or that” of cultural entanglement (Nnaemekea 1995, 109). The crossroads can be theorised as a site of creolisation, a cultural location of exceptional creativity and historically formed social inequality. Using the concept creolised aesthetics to describe the creative agency and structural constraints of African women writers, this paper discusses conviviality in terms of worldmaking. Worldmaking is currently approached from different disciplinary angles, in world literature (Cheah 2014, Hayot 2011) and anthropology of the pluriverse (Escobar 2018, Ingold 2018). This paper approaches literature as a form of worldmaking that can help us rethink gender complementarity in postcolonial globality (Ogunyemi 1996, Thiong’o 2012), thus heeding the call for more critical perspectives on conviviality through “postcolonial and cosmopolitan synthesis” (Gilroy 2015, 242). To broaden anthropological horizons on worldmaking, the paper explores the creolisation of dominant theory, here exemplified by a cross-breeding of literary and anthropological theory with African womanist theory. While welcoming the scholarly effort to think through current challenges to democracy in Europe and beyond through conviviality, cosmopolitanism and creolisation (Hemer et al 2020), especially the decolonial ethics of creolised conviviality (Rodriguez 2020), this paper recognizes how anthropology can contribute to the decolonisation of cosmopolitanism (Uimonen 2019), to advance decolonial worldmaking, in theory and practice.

This book review article probes present anthropological engagement with the environment through the prism of political ecology, placing political ecology in conversation with newer work in environmnetal anthropology. In situating this conversation, the reviewer draws on four recent anthropological monographs that, in one way or another, deal with aspects of nature'. The four monographs are Tania Murray Li's (2014) Land's end: Capitalist relations on an indigenous frontier; Marianne Elisabeth Lien's (2015) Becoming salmon: Aquaculture and the domestication of fish; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruin; and, lastly, Marisol de la Cadena's (2015) Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. As I suggest, political ecology requires a radical remake, perhaps a political ecology 2.0, which brings in nature in a new way and makes the category of the political more inclusive.

A discussion of historical forerunners of the contemporary wave of multi-site, or translocal, field studies in anthropology

The Lord’s Resistance Army/Movement (LRA/M) in Uganda is now world infamous for its violence. As most observers, including academics, have dismissed the LRA/M on moral grounds, they have disqualified the movement as nonpolitical, rebels without a cause other than their allegedly bizarre syncretic beliefs. This article indicates an alternative or perhaps complementary direction. In presenting something of a rarity in the academic literature on the war in Northern Uganda, the article examines actual LRA/M documents, arguing that there is a continuity in the claims and political grievances put forward by the LRA/M throughout the years.

This article examines how migrant ‘illegality’ is experienced in the Swedish context. How do ‘illegal’ migrants manage work, housing, healthcare, safety and a family life in the absence of access to formal provisions? What are their survival strategies? I use direct quotations from undocumented migrants themselves to build a multifaceted picture of migrant ‘illegality’. Following Willen's (2007) call for a ‘critical phenomenology of illegality’, I move beyond the socio-political situation of undocumented migrants to their embodied experiences of being ‘illegal’. I conclude that undocumented migrants are not excluded but are excepted; they have not been thrown out, but neither are they considered participants. Undocumented migrants are included in society without being recognised as members.

This chapter answers the question of how the World Economic Fourm (WEF) constructs authority for itself in the global arena by studying the form of political action that the WEF draws upon. We argue that it constructs authority beyond itself through turning some participants from its many events into a form of members, thus partially organizing its environment. Participants at WEF activities, as well as WEF staff, would call this order a ‘network’. We acknowledge the network aspects of this order, but argue that it is foremost based on organization; it is a decided order, based on decisions taken within the WEF. Empirically, the chapter builds on interview data within Geneva staff and participants at WEF activities.

In a recent iteration of research into animal agency, multiple fields of study now consider empirically and conceptually the ways in which animals subvert orders, actions and representations imposed on them (Colling 2020). Notions of ‘nature strikes back’, trickster wild life, and rebel animals escaping from the slaughterhouse all powerfully  engage anthropologists, wildlife managers, sociologists, cognitive ethologists and above all the public. In the following paper, we examine how animal resistance is manifested in the modern sport hunting context—a perhaps unlikely case given ostensive power imbalances. Indeed, first, the seeming absence of mutual consent in interspecies sports like hunting make it difficult to suggest wild animals may be ‘playing the game’ to the extent they resort to counter-deceptions to fool and misdirect hunters (von Essen, et al. 2020). 

Nevertheless, we show how there are several resistant modalities on the part of wildlife in modern hunting: one of these is a species-level adaptation to capture including camouflage; another is the use of individual wiles to deflect or deceive hunters or their dogs in response to chase; and a third modality, we suggest, is how the technology of wildlife surveillance employed by hunters (trail cams, gps-trackers, and more) can be rendered by animals to tell their own stories, thus resisting subjectification (Verma, et al. 2016). To this end, we show how resistance and emancipation of wild animals becomes an affordance of technology that was originally paradoxically aimed to capture and control wild animals. We conclude by discussing key questions around intentionality around animal agency and ideas of consent in game-playing.

The book many of us have been waiting for somebody to write: anthropology meets contemporary theory, with summaries and overviews ranging from Lacan to process philosophy and more. Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory is helpful for researchers wanting to update themselves, and also for classroom use. Ethnographic discussion of exciting themes such as perfume and species thinking weave in with contributions to current debate, including an excellent critique of intersectionality.

While world literature scholars oscillate between close and distant readings, anthropologists engage in contextual readings, foregrounding the cultural specificities of literary texts. Oftentimes literature is approached as ethnography, read for cultural insights into different social worlds, a method that has been critiqued for its failure to capture the cultural imaginaries of literary fiction. This paper argues that cross breeding anthropology with world literature offers methodological advances for scholarly reading. It uses literary gendering as an example of how a combination of anthropological and world literary readings can offer a more refined understanding of aesthetic worldmaking.  

The discussion on aesthetic worldmaking focuses on a comparison of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966). These pioneering works were written by authors who are considered to be the Father and Mother of modern African literature respectively.  Both novels focus on social change in late colonial Igbo society, with rather different literary representations of gender. This paper uses the concept literary gendering to probe the cultural intricacies of aesthetic worldmaking in these novels, thus exploring transdisciplinary methodologies of world literary reading. 

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. "Anthropology's world" refers, on the one hand, to the discipline as a social world in itself, as a community stretching across national boundaries. It also refers to the wider outside world to which it must relate in various ways. This book deals with the world of anthropology through a broad and revealing historical analysis, questioning the way anthropologists approach their work now, and speculating how they will do so in the future. Turning the toolkit of the anthropologist upon the discipline itself and asking searching questions of the purpose, ethics and future of the subject, Anthropology's World will be required reading for all students and practitioners of anthropology.

Den här studien syftar till ett belysa och problematisera kring antropologins närmande av det militära sammanhanget. 2007 utformade USA:s armé en plattform som skulle koordinera och hantera civil kompetens inom områdena antropologi och statsvetenskap. Ämnen som på olika sätt analyserar den ”mänskliga terrängen”. Konceptet ”Human Terrain System” lanserades där akademiker från samhällsvetenskaperna fick söka sig till den militära kontexten för att hjälpa militära beslutsfattare att förstå kulturen, de socioekonomiska förhållandena och religionens roll mm.

Hur förhåller sig antropologer till Human Terrain System? Vilka perspektiv finns på antropologin som en del i en militär kontext? Genom att svara på dessa frågeställningar belyses olika resonemang på den tillämpbara antropologin i en militär kontext utifrån den rådande etiska debatten som återfinns inom disciplinen.

Implementerandet av antropologiska kunskaper i en den militära kontexten har föranlett till en debatt inom den antropologiska disciplinen. En debatt som lyfter etiska betänkligheter och problematiserar kring vilket antropologins uppdrag är, kan vara och bör vara. Studien granskar det traditionella förhållandet till villkor inom disciplinen, detta illustrerat genom den etiska debatten kring projektet Human Terrin System.

Studien slår fast att oavsett hur den enskilde antropologen väljer att förhålla sig till ämnets närmande av det militära så är kontraktet mellan forskare och informant lika centralt som det mellan forskare och uppdragsgivare.

The present dissertation is an ethnographic study of the Erasmus Programme, the European Union’s student exchange programme. This programme has, for the last three decades, resulted in an unprecedented exchange of ideas and people within the European Union, and it has quite radically changed the conditions for, and the appearance of, student life in many European universities. Over the years the community has developed a distinctive lifestyle, replete with partying and travel, and is characterized by a strong social cohesion and exclusive ethos.  Empirically the study is a multi-local field study involving participant observation and interviews in two European capitals, namely Stockholm and Athens. Both present and former Erasmus students have been included in the study and were followed for an extended period of time. The study takes a close look at some of the experiential and social processes of the ‘Erasmus lifestyle’ and tries to understand them in the light of wider cultural and political processes such as the European unification process, cosmopolitanism, youth culture, and tourism. In the process it surveys part of the programme’s political history, local configuration, social dynamics, communication practices and global interfaces. According to the present thesis, the Erasmus Programme can be seen as a learning apprenticeship through which the young students gain entrance to and get valuable training in the reality of living in an increasingly interconnected world. The strong experiences engendered by the programme, both emotionally and cognitively, lead to a transformation in the student’s self-perception, social representations and social identity. For some students the programme leads to a drastic reconfiguring of their social networks and extant allegiances (e.g., towards their nation, culture), prompting them, after the end of their sojourn, to explore new venues in terms of career development, family life, and place of residence. Although the students do not seem to integrate with the host country to any significant degree, their extended experience of transnational mobility and their first-hand acquaintance with cultural diversity within the group encourages them to develop a more cosmopolitan outlook on the world and their place within it.

This paper seeks to describe and explain the social efficacy of art by addressing it as contemporary western infrastructure for social cohesion. Social cohesion refers here not to teleological status quo, but to pluralistic, yet fairly peaceful co-habitation, allowing for gradual change while preserving continuity of the group identity.

Employing Actor-Network Theory, this paper views artistic practice as actor-network assemblage process making connections and vehicles that enable movement of ideas, values, visions and dissents throughout the community. Parallel memberships of the same actors in artistic and non-artistic actor-networks create conditions for artistic meanings to “bleed over” also into other spheres of the social life where they can gain efficacy far beyond the “art world”. Art infrastructure operates under particular “regime of art” that suspends some of the “real world” rules and sanctions ambiguity, facilitating less confrontational reconciliation of diverse and contradictory meanings than is customary in e.g. science, religion, politics, economy, railways, sewage or other infrastructures that also have impact on social cohesion.

Debates about the definitions of “art” or particular objects’ belonging to “art” emerge in this perspective as debates on the scope of applicability of the “regime of art”, as it may have significant social consequences.

By outlining an infrastructural theory of art this paper seeks to fill a theoretical gap in a rather fragmented field of anthropology of art and to propose novel ways to deploy insights from anthropological engagements with infrastructure. Empirical data of this paper come from a five weeks fieldwork in Alaska.

I takt med att pandemins undantagstillstånd övergår i mer normal vardag växer förväntningarna på oss att ta upp tråden igen, i fråga efter fråga som satts på vänt under coronatiden. Agenda 2030, barnperspektivet, arbetsmiljö, utveckling, IT-säkerhet och samverkan tar plats igen tillsammans med så mycket annat. Höga ambitioner, mål och visioner trängs om uppmärksamheten och trots möten från tu till sju är det många som känner sig otillräckliga i detta race. 

I takt med att att-göra-listan fylls på och tempot trissas upp ser vi hur många ledare - till synes reflexmässigt – kavlar upp ärmarna och tar upp jakten på ”det perfekta systemet”, där allt gott på något mirakulöst sätt ska kunna genomsyra alla delar av verksamheten. Det är synd när denna speciella tid borde erbjuda ett gyllene tillfälle att stanna upp och fundera på förutsättningarna för ett mer situationsanpassat och inte minst hållbart ledarskap.

Det finns en otålighet i vår kultur och en övertro på smidiga och enkla lösningar. I Susanna Alexius bok Att leda komplexa uppdrag, synar hon orealistisk förhärskande ledarskapsideal som riskerar att bryta sönder ambitiösa ledare. Med grund i organisationsforskning och genom många exempel från samtida organisationer visar Alexius att allt gott omöjligt kan genomsyra allt, och att vad som är ”rätt” i ledarskap och organisering varierar över tid och rum. Så är det bara och det måste vi acceptera och förhålla oss till.