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- Andersson Trovalla, Ulrika, 1972-
(författare)
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Medicine for Uncertain Futures : A Nigerian City in the Wake of a Crisis
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Nigerian city of Jos used to be seen as a peaceful place, but in 2001 it was struck by clashes that arose from what was largely understood as issues of ethnic and religious belonging. The event, which would become known as ‘the crisis’, was experienced as a rupture and a loss of what the city had once been, and as the starting point of a spiral of violence that has continued up to today. With the crisis, Jos changed. Former friends became enemies, and places that had been felt to be safe no longer were so. Previous truths were thrown into confusion, and Jos’s inhabitants found themselves more and more having to manoeuvre in an unstable world coloured by fear and anger. Life in Jos became increasingly hard to predict, and people searched for different ways forward, constantly trying out new interpretations of the world. This book, which is inspired by pragmatism, analyses the processes that were shaping the emergent city of Jos and its inhabitants in the aftermath of the crisis. At its core are some of Jos’s practitioners of traditional medicine. As healers, diviners, and providers of spells to protect from enemies or solve conflicts, they had special skills to influence futures that were becoming more and more unpredictable. Still, the medical practitioners were as vulnerable to the changing circumstances as everyone else. Their everyday lives and struggles to find their footing and ways forward under the changing circumstances are used as a point of departure to explore larger wholes: life during times characterised by feelings of uncertainty, fragmentation, fear, and conflict – in Jos as a city and Nigeria as a nation.
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- Baral, Anna, 1984-
(författare)
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Bad Guys, Good Life : An Ethnography of Morality and Change in Kisekka Market (Kampala, Uganda)
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Based on ethnographic data gathered over a period of almost three years, this dissertation scrutinizes the everyday lives of informal workers selling auto parts in Kisekka Market, central Kampala. Its ambition is to understand how the workers navigated a highly moralized environment in today’s Uganda, where the supposed moral deterioration of society is passionately discussed in public and in private.Analytically the dissertation focuses on three “moral landscapes,” or moral discourses of different geographical scales, that intersected in the workers’ lives: first, the Ugandan nation or the country; second, the Buganda kingdom with its cultural institutions to which the majority of the workers professed allegiance; and third, the capital city Kampala. Materializing in Kisekka Market, each landscape posed moral demands that the workers navigated daily as they struggled to balance norms with lived practices.The workers were perceived by external observers as morally ambiguous for their supposed instrumentality in riots and violent crimes in Kampala. Their notoriousness increased for the fact that they were men, often uneducated, and therefore, in public discourse, potentially threatening. Consequently, they were referred to as bayaaye, translated as hooligans or bad guys, and this label defined their relations with customers from all parts of Kampala and Uganda.In exploring the implications of the three moral landscapes, particular attention is paid to the in-between. Rather than focusing on mediatized events like riots and crimes, the dissertation investigates and locates the workers’ agency in the mundane processes of care and getting by and the tentative paths to a good life that unfolded daily in Kisekka Market, regardless of larger political tensions in Kampala and beyond. The city’s development plan to replace Kisekka Market with a fancy shopping mall rendered the workers’ situation increasingly exposed and their lives increasingly vulnerable. In the workers’ quest for some degree of control and self-worth, the label of bayaaye refracted into its multiple dimensions – proudly appropriated or painfully rejected by the workers themselves – attesting to the complexities of everyday ethics, in Kampala as elsewhere. Consequently, the ethnography of this dissertation problematizes the dominant yet fraught narrative around young men in urban Africa.
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- Barrett, Michael, 1969-
(författare)
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Paths to Adulthood: Freedom, Belonging, and Temporalities in Mbunda Biographies from Western Zambia
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this study, Michael Barrett explores the relationship between adulthood and historical processes in a rural district of Western Zambia. Approaching the life cycle from a perspective of social practice, the potential and limits of conditioning is illuminated through ethnography and life histories of Mbunda people in Kalabo District of Western Province. Situated between the Zambezi River and the Angolan border, the district suffered harsh economic decline during the last decades of the 20th century, creating a demanding social environment for young people in need of its resources for livelihood, household formation, and marriage. The study traces young people’s life paths in time and space, between urban and rural areas and through the ebb and flow of social relationships. Concerns like male and female initiation, marriage, style, and livelihood are examined and put in the context of longstanding idioms of sociality as well as global influences. Through an historical perspective on social cohorts, the dissertation throws light on the temporal conditions of adulthood facing people in rural Zambia. With a theoretical framework grounded in regional social landscapes and attuned to the realities of particular persons, broader issues like historicity, power, gender and creativity are examined through the prism of adulthood.
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- Bernhardsdotter, Ann-Britt
(författare)
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The Power of Being : A Study of Poverty, Fertility and Sexuality among the Kuria in Kenya and Tanzania
- 2021
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The study is concerned with power based on ‘being’, which is the thread run-ning through the entire thesis. The extended family is the focal point, and three themes, interrelated in Kuria society, are explored, namely, poverty, sexuality and fertility. Poverty, one of the focuses, involves drawing atten-tion to local perceptions of destitution and prosperity, grappling with issues about access to, and control of, resources, pointing out impoverishing mech-anisms inherent in traditional socioeconomic systems and exemplifying criti-cal strategies to overcome poverty. In addition to displaying mechanisms of impoverishment, the thesis specifies vulnerable categories of individuals and explores contemporary strategies to overcome destitution. Since Kuria has been recognized as being a patriarchal society, which has led to a depiction of reality entailing a de-emphasizing of principles mediating male domi-nance, the study sheds light upon principles restraining male power and on compelling female recourses in situations of transgressions of cultural codes. The study provides empirical examples demonstrating formal cursing as a powerful female recourse in contexts of male abuse of power. “Power of being’ is dramatically manifested when women curse in their capacity as married daughters and sisters. The Kuria woman marriage has been investi-gated, and the author concludes that besides being a strategy by women who are excluded from privileged categories to overcome poverty and humilia-tion, the woman marriage reveals female aspirations to male spheres of power and status. Through the woman marriage it might be possible for women to own homesteads and to become lineage founders. Sexuality and fertility form intriguing parts of male and female being. In order to expose values at the heart of society with regard to male and female sexuality, the study explores symbols articulated by metaphors.
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- Bjarnesen, Jesper, 1977-
(författare)
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Diaspora at Home? : Wartime Mobilities in the Burkina Faso-Côte d'Ivoire Transnational Space
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the period 1999-2007, more than half a million Burkinabe returned to Burkina Faso due to the persecution of immigrant labourers in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. Ultranationalist debates about the criteria for Ivorian citizenship had intensified during the 1990s and led to the scapegoating of immigrants in a political rhetoric centred on notions of autochthony and xenophobia. Having been actively encouraged to immigrate by the Ivorian state for generations, Burkinabe migrant labourers were now forced to leave their homes and livelihoods behind and return to a country they had left in their youth or, as second-generation immigrants in Côte d’Ivoire, had never seen.Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, the thesis explores the narratives and everyday practices of returning labour migrants in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second-largest city, in order to understand the subjective experiences of displacement that the forced return to Burkina Faso engendered. The analysis questions the appropriateness of the very notion of “return” in this context and suggests that people’s senses of home are multiplex and tend to rely more on the ability to pursue active processes of emplacement in everyday life than on abstract notions of belonging, e.g. relating to citizenship or ethnicity.The study analyses intergenerational interactions within and across migrant families in the city and on transformations of intra-familial relations in the context of forced displace-ment. A particular emphasis is placed on the experiences of young adults who were born and raised in Côte d’Ivoire and arrived in Burkina Faso for the first time during the Ivorian crisis. These young men and women were received with scepticism in Burkina Faso because of their perceived “Ivorian” upbringing, language, and behaviour and were forced to face new forms of stigmatisation and exclusion. At the same time, young migrants were able to exploit their labelling as outsiders and turn their difference into an advantage in the competition for scarce employment opportunities and social connections.
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