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- Wedel, Johan, 1962
(författare)
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Healing and spirit possession in the Caribbean
- 2009
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Ingår i: Stockholm Review of Latin American Studies. - 1654-0204. ; :4, s. 49-60
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article takes a comparative look at spiritual healing and its implications among followers of Afro-Cuban Santería and among the Miskitu people of Nicaragua. It shows how illness and suffering is located in a sacred domain allowing transformations on social, psychological, and physiological levels. Healing is achieved by creating a sacred reality by means of powerful symbols and spirit possession. In this process, spiritual beings are representations of people’s conditions. At the same time, spirits also represent a model for healing.
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| 2. |
- Berg, Linda, 1974-
(författare)
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InterNacionalistas : identifikation och främlingskap i svenska solidaritetsarbetares berättelser från Nicaragua
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to explore what solidarity workers from Sweden narrate about and from activities in Nicaragua. I focus on how identities reflect nationalising, racialising and gendering imaginations, and how these are being handled within the context of an international solidarity movement – with the ambition to strive for global justice. My search for answers takes its point of departure in a wide gender-oriented postcolonial perspective. With an understanding of identities and places as relational and plastic, postcolonial theory attempts to see the inevitable dilemmas of colonialism, to visualise people who have been sacrificed in the name of colonialism and nationalism. It is a theoretical field concerned with the struggle for the word, values and actions categorised by a (post)colonial order. The dissertation is divided into six chapters. After the introductory chapter, chapter 2 contains a discussion of the concept solidarity as a valuable designation for these activities, connected to a national self-image and as a determining factor for the informants' understanding of their identities. One fundamental theme in this study is the tension concerning “white”, “western”, “Swedish” solidarity workers speaking for and working with people in Nicaragua. In Chapter 3, “To make oneself trustworthy”, I take a closer look at this and discusses how the interviewees verbalised strategies to handle possible positions and the paradoxes of their employment. In chapter 4 “Nationalising gender”, I examine the speech of women, men, machismo and gender equality – and how they interrelate with other factors within the stories from the period in Nicaragua. The difficulties to intervene as a Swedish volunteer or coordinator in Nicaragua were well known among the interviewees/narrators and their organisations. How and what activities for change could be in different parts of the world were, and are, repeated questions within (at least this part of) the Swedish international solidarity movement. This is one reason why the solidarity organisations emphasised the importance of creating space for social change via information and moulding of public opinion. In Chapter five, “Describe Nicaragua”, I analyse the written stories by solidarity workers. I take departure in a few of the dominating themes and clarify how Nicaragua was mediated to a Swedish speaking reader. I argue that the stories of the solidarity workers are captured between recognising difference and creating stereotypes and exotic projections. Even though their object is the opposite, they tend to produce representations which demand the Other to stay in the place of difference. In the very last part I discuss some problems with being the “voice of the poor”. The dissertation concludes with a short summary of some of the most central themes. Here I refer to the narrated liminality and inherited boundaries of the employment. I discuss the anti-imperialist and feminist work with a national dead weight and the efforts to create alternative images and translocal subject positions. I end the study by reflecting on the difficulties of an internationalist “we” and with reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, I call for “unlearning our privileges as our loss”.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Berg, Linda, 1974-
(författare)
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Solidaritet och representation : En analys av artiklar om utsatta arbeterskor i nicaraguanska frihandelszoner
- 2005
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- NICARAGUANSKA PÅ SVENSKA – EN REPRESENTATION AV UTSATTHET?I svensk allmänmedia finns ingen fördjupad bevakning av händelser i kontinenter som Latinamerika och Afrika. Katastrof eller exotism utgör regel snarare än undantag i bilderna från många delar av världen, däribland Nicaragua. När svenska biståndsarbetare tjänstgör i Nicaragua förväntas de förmedla kunskap om landet till Sverige. I artiklar och resebrev artikuleras berättelser om regionen.Biståndsarbetares skildringar av landet handlar i stor utsträckning om att teckna ”fattigdomens ansikten”, ofta i kontrast till Sverige. Att synliggöra och skapa intresse för världens orättvisor är en del av organisationernas mål med informationsarbetet. Men representationer av utsatthet repeterar samtidigt gränser för föreställningar om liv i denna region. I efterföljande paper har jag för avsikt att undersöka (o)möjligheten att skapa alternativa bilder av Nicaragua. En central fråga kommer att vara: Är det görligt att informera om landet till svenska läsare utan att reproducera stereotyper? Texten knyter an till teorier om översättning, identitet och postkolonialitet.
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| 6. |
- Stein, Alfredo, et al.
(författare)
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Innovative financing for low-income housing improvement: lessons from programmes in Central America
- 2005
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Ingår i: Environment & Urbanization. - : SAGE Publications. - 1746-0301 .- 0956-2478. ; 17:1, s. 47-66
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper discusses what has been learnt from housing and local development programmes in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua supported and funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) during the last 15 years. It identifies common financial mechanisms that have proven to be effective and affordable by the urban poor in their search for better housing. It also discusses the different policies and interventions by national and sub-national governments and the "non-market incentives" that were required to make low-income housing programmes feasible and affordable, and what these imply for the financial and institutional sustainability of such programmes. It ends with recommendations for other international donors and national institutions that are seeking to design new financial services for housing for low-income groups.
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| 7. |
- Berg, Linda, 1974-
(författare)
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Testimonio and representation : An analysis of articles about women workers in Nicaraguan free trade zones
- 2005
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Ingår i: Politics conference.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The following presentation discusses representation and testimonio in Swedish information on Nicaraguan women workers that has been produced by so called ‘development workers’. In Spanish the word testimonio is literally translated as ‘testimony’, as in the act of testifying or bearing witness in a legal or religious sense. In articles such as “The slave market in Nicaragua is growing” and “Karla – an ordinary robot” the journalist and development worker, Victoria Myrén, translates and mediates stories by women workers in Nicaraguan free trade zones for Swedish speaking readers. The articles express a sense of urgency to communicate experiences of repression and a desire to represent the way marginalized positions are used to legitimate capitalist recolonizing. In an attempt to demonstrate the suffering of women within the free trade zones, the articles position the reader as a jury in a courtroom listening to close descriptions of violations. The story of Karla Manzanares (translated and mediated by Myrén) depicts colonial domination, economic exploitation, sexism and racism.In this paper I argue that by speaking out, re-establishing a ‘voice’, Karla is also re-inscribing a subordinate position in society. The contradictions inherent in the project of representing the subaltern and simultaneously deconstructing the discourses that constitute the subaltern are evident. As Gayatri Spivak has pointed out, the recovery of the ‘voice’ of the subaltern also entails its erasure, since the mode of representation given in testimonio is no longer located in the space of subalternity but is instead more like a ‘ventriloquist’s dummy’.Karla’s written destiny stand for something inhuman happening in a country far away. The image of the tragic woman worker capture our fears. Like a safe place to contain horrible things in the world, she becomes a projection of desire for the solution of insoluble conflicts. These stories about Karla and other women workers are emancipatory actions yet they also act as surfaces of projection for desire, disgust and anger. This paper therefore explores the fine balance between mediating testimonios and reconstructing an image of Nicaraguan woman as the Other, as a negative mirror to the idea of white, western (Swedish) women.
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