| 1. |
- Alvarsson, Jan-Åke, 1952-
(författare)
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La historia de la Misión Sueca Libre en Bolivia : Una iniciativa nórdica pentecostal para evangelizar a los pueblos de Bolivia
- 2021
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- En el proyecto interdisciplinario e internacional, “Misiones religiosas desde una perspectiva antropológica”, dirigida desde el Departamento de Antropología Cultural y Etnología de la Universidad de Uppsala, Bolivia se convirtió en un país de interés central del grupo de investigadores. Al líder del proyecto, Jan-Åke Alvarsson, cayó la responsabilidad de resumir la información disponible sobre las misiones extranjeras en Bolivia, y en particular sobre la Misión Sueca Libre en Bolivia (MSLB) – el caso de estudio. El resultado fue una historia breve de la misión MSLB que dentro del lapso del proyecto se aumentó a un capítulo en inglés. Luego, Alvarsson se ha profundizado en el tema, usando material y experiencias de más de cuarenta años de contacto con Bolivia, de los cuales ha residido seis en el sur del país. Basándose en entrevistas, participación, estudios de archivos oficiales y privados, artículos y obras escritas sobre el tema, el autor ha compilado una etnografía espesa sobre esta iniciativa nórdica. El resultado no es una hagiografía sino un relato franco y abierto, enfocando especialmente en la agencia de los misioneros. Relata la historia desde el tiempo pionero en 1921 hasta las últimas iniciativas de cerrar la misión en 2021.
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| 2. |
- Alvarsson, Jan-Åke, 1952-
(författare)
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Un tesoro cultural : La literatura oral
- 2012. - 1
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- En este volumen se representa la variedad enorme de las narraciones ‘weenhayek. En contraste a Vol. 8, esta obra contiene cuentos de siete colaboradores ‘weenhayek, hombres y mujeres, jóvenes y ancianos. Además no se restringe a solamente los cuentos de pícaros o heroes culturales, aunque ellos también han sido representados, sino que incluye narraciones sobre orígenes, relaciones cosmológicas, historias de animales y historias fantásticas. En total, demuestra con certeza, la riqueza enorme del tesoro cultural y literario ‘weenhayek.
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| 3. |
- Caballero, Adelaida, 1986-
(författare)
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Shortchanged : Elderly Women Street Vendors in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Normative assumptions regarding reciprocity between adult children and elderly parents continue to dominate narratives on later life in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet strenuous socioeconomic conditions make it difficult for families to meet expectations of care and support. In Malabo, elderly women commonly engage in economic activities such as street vending for survival. Separation from male partners and high unemployment among men and youths often turn senior women into sole providers in multi-generational households. The cultural script of self-sacrificial motherhood, however, leads people to believe that these senior women are hardly entitled to demand reciprocal support – that as proper mothers and grandmothers, they are merely fulfilling a duty. Gender-based forms of exploitation and feelings of desertion characterize family life for many older Equatoguinean women. Elderly women street vendors who live and work in Malabo are also mistreated outside their homes. Harassment, humiliation, and physical invisibilization are some of the means by which ‘patriotic citizens’ and representatives of state authorities protect the government’s narrative of ‘unprecedented development.’The thesis explores how elderly women street vendors try to counter the routinized types of violence to which they are exposed and how they strive to assert themselves as persons. I approach the women’s articulations of personhood through the concept of moral economy and discuss them with regard to normative African relationality. The empirical basis of the work is fourteen months of uninterrupted ethnographic field research in Malabo between 2017 and 2018. The analyses rely on social gerontological theories on dependency, intergenerational tensions, prosocial behaviors, gender identity, sexuality, and autonomy, as well as on anthropological theories on the category of the person, everyday violence, morality, gossip, and older women’s sexuality in Africa. The thesis aims to contribute to humanistic gerontological literature by highlighting the meanings that autonomy can take for seniors who live in conditions of no institutional support, normalized violence at home, gender prejudice, and the kind of ageism that arises from narratives that equate social advancement with development, hence identifying old age with anti-values such as ignorance and backwardness. Findings suggest that, among elderly women street vendors in Malabo, striving toward a sense of autonomous personhood is not only a means for coping with the challenges of aging in a difficult socioeconomic milieu, but also a more encompassing rejection of ‘retraditionalized’ national politics and authoritarianism.
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| 4. |
- Helgesson, Kristina, 1974-
(författare)
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"Walking in the Spirit" : The Complexity of Belonging in Two Pentecostal Churches in Durban, South Africa
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Drawing on anthropological fieldwork carried out in the two Pentecostal congregations Red Hill and Olive Tree in Durban, South Africa, this dissertation discusses the complexity of the experience of belonging among the members. Red Hill is a ‘coloured’ congregation, while Olive Tree is ‘white’; a fact that in present-day South Africa still is of significance for the experience of belonging. With a phenomenological perspective on belonging, the dissertation discusses the aspects of home-making, balance and control, and emphasises how the experience of belonging includes both a temporal and a spatial dimension, as well as experiences of fear and hope. The following aspects of belonging are discussed: the experience of living in apartheid South Africa as a ‘coloured’ and ‘white’ and how these experiences continue to affect individuals; the conversion experience as an experience of ‘coming home’, existentially and socially through the belonging to a congregation; gendered aspects of the belonging experience in the context of the two congregations; different ways that the Pentecostal conviction are manifested in local and global social work and outreach; how the interpretation of ‘Israel’ works as a symbol of home-coming and belonging, though invoked in different ways in the two congregations. Inherent to these various experiences of belonging are power dynamics at different levels. These aspects point to the experience of belonging as an intersubjective experience that empowers both the individual and the collective. While the future is often stressed in the Pentecostal discourse and in much of the literature on Pentecostalism, this dissertation suggests the importance of taking past experiences into account when trying to understand how Pentecostalism manifests itself.
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| 5. |
- Hellmark Lindgren, Birgitta, 1965-
(författare)
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Pregnoscape : Den gravida kroppen som arena för motstridiga perspektiv på risk, kön och medicinsk teknik
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Pregnancy and birth are not only physiological processes but also socially and culturally organized events. Pregnancy is an individual experience as well as the focus of collective concerns and values. In this dissertation the pregnant body is understood as an arena of social truths and contesting perspectives: a public stage where different perspectives on medical technology, risk and gender are acted out. Swedish maternity care dominates the arena, and women have to adjust to the authority of medical knowledge. This, however, does not mean that women comply without questions. As the study shows they struggle for voice and agency which is reflected in pregnant women’s differing views and uses of biomedical knowledge and technology. Although the discourse on pregnancy and birth is highly ideological and marked by strong opinions, pregnant women in practice tend to be motivated by pragmatics rather than ideology. In order to understand the complexities and nuances of reproductive culture in Sweden, we need to move beyond distinctions such as the one between technology and the body, and instead focus on the experiential world of pregnant women in which technology is an integral part in everyday life and therefore taken for granted rather than problematised. The thesis is based on fieldwork at a maternity care center and interviews with pregnant women. Furthermore, discussion groups on the Internet and debates in mass media have been valuable sources of information.
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| 6. |
- Hole, Elizabeth Åsa, 1958-
(författare)
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Neither Here - Nor There : An Anthropological Study of Gujarati Hindu Women in the diaspora
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the 1950s, a wave of migrants left India to find work in the West. Many never returned, but instead settled in the West. There were also many Asians who left to live in East African countries. In the beginning of the 1970s, Idi Amin decided to finalise the Africanisation of Uganda. Other East African nations were also part of this trend. At that time, several thousand Asians were expelled. Among these people were many Gujarati Hindus, all with their roots in Gujarat in the north-western part of India. By various routes and in different waves of relocation, some of these people came to find new homes, for example in Britain and Sweden. With respect to Gujarati Hindu diaspora groups in Coventry, Britain, and Mariestad, Sweden, the author aims to answer the questions: Which factors affected what, how, or why they decided to keep or abandon some of their culture and religious traditions? How much of this process happened by choice, and how much was based on necessity due to time and circumstance? How has the size of the group of settlers, in relation to the majority living in those places, affected their choices? How might the size of the local diasporic community itself come to influence their cultural maintenance? In this thesis the author focuses mainly on the aspects of identity that are found in gender discourse (women’s roles) and the diaspora discourse among Gujarati Hindu women. This is done in relation to cosmology addressed to a gender discourse on how gender roles are changing in diaspora when confronted with the modern world. The main contribution is therefore not to ethnicity and identity theory in general, but in demonstrating the different determiners affecting the lives of Gujarati Hindu women in the diaspora.
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| 7. |
- Jernsletten, Johnny-Leo Ludviksen, 1967-
(författare)
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"Med rett til å gjete..." : Utfordringer og muligheter i Liehittäjä konsesjonssameby
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Denne avhandlingen fokuserer på den unike formen for reindrift som vi finner i Kalix og Torne elvedaler i Nord-Sverige – den såkalte konsesjonsreindriften. Konsesjonsreindriften er interessant på flere måter. Den har en interessant historisk utvikling som er forskjellig fra den utviklingen som har vært i Lappmarken. Videre er det en interessant juridisk utvikling som har funnet sted og det tradisjonelle «vérdde-forholdet» har blitt revitalisert og modernisert gjennom sytingsreinsystemet. Det lovmessige utgangspunktet for konsesjonsreindriften er knyttet opp mot den samiske renskötselsrätt gjennom konsesjonsinnehaver mens bruksrettigheter, spesielt til sommerbeite, er knyttet til skötesrenegarna private eiendomsrett. Konsesjonsreindriften må derfor forstås som en kulturbærer og næring som er fundamentert på både en samisk og lokal sedvane samt privat eiendomsrett. Konsesjonen er en tidsbegrenset avtale (1-10 år) mellom den svenske stat, private markeiere og en eller flere samiske konsesjonsinnehavere. Konsesjonsreindriften, slik vi kjenner den i dag, ble første gang lovregulert av svenske myndigheter i 1928 års reindriftslov. Konsesjonsreindriften skiller seg fra den samiske reindriften gjennom sytingsreineiernes aktive deltakelse i samebyen gjennom sin status som renskötende medlem. Avhandlingen tar opp hvordan deler av lokalbefolkningen, gjennom sine sytingsrein, blir en aktiv del av reindriften og hvordan regelverket knyttet til medlemskap i samebyen genererer noen interessante forvaltningsmessige prinsipper for forvaltning av denne næringen,. En slik lokalt forankret forvaltning er med på å dempe klassiske konflikter mellom reindriften på den ene siden og jord- og skogsbruket på den andre siden.
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| 8. |
- Lacbawan, Macario
(författare)
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The Burden of Responsibility : Predicaments of Environmental Life in the Caraballo Mountains, Northern Philippines
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Indigenous people are not obviously, or naturally, stewards of the environment. But when the idea that they are such custodians gains legal traction, and when indigenous land-use practices are codified to reflect environmental principles, they become a burden of responsibility that has significant consequences for the lives and the livelihoods of indigenous communities.This thesis is about Ikalahan people of the Caraballo Mountains in Northern Philippines and the vicissitudes of their obligation to the environment. Based on twelve months’ ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis explores what happens when the legal recognition of Ikalahan people as an indigenous group demands that they re-fashion their ancestral land from a place where they practice swidden agriculture into a space where they are supposed to ensure environmental conservation. It explores how the Philippine state utilizes scientific knowledge such as cartography and forestry to facilitate the expulsion and estrangement of Ikalahan people from their land even as it relies on those people to maintain their ancestral land as an exclusive ecological sanctuary.How do Ikalahan communities enact this environmental responsibility, and how do they contest it? The different chapters explore how villagers deploy the cultural power of shame to impose ecological obligations, how they also create tactics to evade and subvert such obligations, and how they use the rhetoric that the land should not be monetized to, precisely, monetize it. The chapters also discuss how traditional moral principles provide a means for Ikalahan people to both understand and facilitate the economic inequalities that have emerged since their land was transformed into an ecological zone. By addressing how Ikalahan communities negotiate the consequences of their legal recognition as indigenous people, the thesis contributes to the expanding literature that shows how indigeneity is not a neutral label, but is, rather, a potentially burdensome positionality whose attachment to the environment is anything but straightforward.
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| 9. |
- Lutz, Peter A.
(författare)
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Tinkering Care Moves : Senior Home Care in Practice
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation builds on the current anthropological studies of care relations in practice. It draws inspiration from science and technology studies (STS) and postfeminist technoscience. A qualitative ethnographic approach grounds the empirical data collection and analysis. This entails ethnographic fieldwork with senior home care in the United States and Sweden during 2007–2008 and 2011–2012. Analytical attention centers on how movements situate various tensions of senior home care in practice. Four interrelated published works comprise the main thematic chapters. Each article exemplifies how human and nonhuman relations move and mediate care. They develop several heuristic terms that advance ideas about how older people, aging bodies, technologies, spaces, and times that tinker each other through movements of care in practice. The comprehensive summary frames these articles with an overview of the primary thematic orientations and methodological concerns. A discussion of the main contributions and implications of the dissertation concludes the work.
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| 10. |
- Norsted, Kristian Sandbekk, 1991-
(författare)
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Subjects of Feminism : The Production and Practice of Anxiety in a Swedish Activist Community
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Anxiety is a zeitgeist of our time. The range of themes to which anxiety attaches today are truly vast, but anxiety arises and is cultivated in specific ways among different groups of people. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the capital of Sweden, Stockholm, in 2017 and 2018, this thesis explores the role that anxiety plays in contemporary feminist activist culture. The thesis focuses on several salient features of that culture: the cultivation of safe spaces and separatist rooms for women and nonbinary people; the place and role of male feminists in the community; how the activists translated the academic concept of intersectionality into an activist practice; and some of the creative ways in which individual feminist activists dealt with anxiety. Theories emphasizing how safety has become a primary cultural value, as well as how we have collectively unlearnt to live with uncertainty, shed light on the anxiety that proliferated in the feminist activist community I discuss. Contemporary anxiety is also partly explained by theories stressing the ways in which society has become uncertain in novel ways in the wake of neoliberalism. Among the feminist activists I came to know in Stockholm, collectively devised strategies to do good cultivated a particular social dynamic that rendered individual feminist activists anxious. How might they take personal responsibility for the revolutionary ambitions of feminism? How can they avoid excluding any potential subjects of feminism? What happens if they say or do something that upsets or offends other feminist activists? This thesis examines the relationship between collectively devised strategies to do good and the resulting production of anxiety.
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| 11. |
- Pasquini, Mirko, 1991-
(författare)
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The Negotiation of Urgency : Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Urgency in a hospital Emergency Room (ER) is not a self-evident state. Urgency is made, by establishing priorities, distributing attention and material resources, and deciding who and what needs to be attended to first – and, simultaneously, who and what has to wait. The process of determining urgency is known as “triage” (from the French verb, trier, “to choose”). This thesis is about the vicissitudes of triage in an Italian ER. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis explores what happens when urgency is at stake; when it is contested and caught up between different, and frequently conflicting, perspectives. It explores how urgency is determined in practice, and shows how triage always is a vulnerable process of negotiation guided by economies of attention. How is urgency actually shaped in interactions between patients, their families and friends, and the ER staff? The different chapters explore how time in the ER is created through shifting registers of attention, and how attention in the ER is affected by widespread economic and social precarity, and neoliberal national policies of governance. It discusses how triage increasingly is structured by attitudes of mistrust; and also by potential or real outbreaks of violence.Addressing the particular positioning of the ER as a thick space of conjunction between neoliberal state politics and people's increasing need for care and recognition, the thesis aims to contribute to medical anthropology literature by analyzing triage not as a neutral medical way of sorting, but as a practice that actively creates difference. It explores both the limits of triage, and how those limits can spark improvisation and creative reinvention.
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| 12. |
- Pasquini, Mirko, 1991
(författare)
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The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Urgency in a hospital Emergency Room (ER) is not a self-evident state. Urgency is made, by establishing priorities, distributing attention and material resources, and deciding who and what needs to be attended to first – and, simultaneously, who and what has to wait. The process of determining urgency is known as “triage” (from the French verb, trier, “to choose”). This thesis is about the vicissitudes of triage in an Italian ER. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis explores what happens when urgency is at stake; when it is contested and caught up between different, and frequently conflicting, perspectives. It explores how urgency is determined in practice, and shows how triage always is a vulnerable process of negotiation guided by economies of attention. How is urgency actually shaped in interactions between patients, their families and friends, and the ER staff? The different chapters explore how time in the ER is created through shifting registers of attention, and how attention in the ER is affected by widespread economic and social precarity, and neoliberal national policies of governance. It discusses how triage increasingly is structured by attitudes of mistrust; and also by potential or real outbreaks of violence. Addressing the particular positioning of the ER as a thick space of conjunction between neoliberal state politics and people's increasing need for care and recognition, the thesis aims to contribute to medical anthropology literature by analyzing triage not as a neutral medical way of sorting, but as a practice that actively creates difference. It explores both the limits of triage, and how those limits can spark improvisation and creative reinvention.
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| 13. |
- Smekal, Peter, 1951-
(författare)
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The Threatened Paradise : Tourism on a Greek Island
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is about attitudes and practices of foreign tourists in Ólymbos, a village in the north of the Greek island of Kárpathos. Based upon several periods of fieldwork from 1999 to 2005, it focuses on the discomfort with tourism and the tourist role which is shared by many holidaymakers, and which also can be found in various types of representations of the area. The fact that these ‘anti-tourist’ notions are so prominent in Ólymbos has partially to do with the special character of the village, and with the development of tourism in itself. Until the end of the 1980s Kárpathos received relatively few, mostly independently travelling tourists, often returning year after year. Especially the secluded north of the island was the more or less exclusive domain of foreign visitors appreciating its ‘off the beaten track’ and ‘traditional’ character. Since then mass tourism has slowly been encroaching, with Ólymbos becoming a sightseeing attraction. The analysis of different tourist activities illustrates, moreover, tourism’s significance as an arena for the confirmation and display of lifestyles, and for the reproduction of ‘social distinctions’ among vacationers and other ‘voluntary strangers’. ‘Anti-tourism’ – trying to demonstrate to oneself and others that one is not a ‘tourist’ by, among other things, overtly criticizing tourism and tourists – is a way of confirming one’s self-image as ‘non-tourist’, and of boosting one’s prestige in the eyes of others. This is not only a matter of verbally displaying attitudes; it is also a question of role-playing. One result of this study is that an important anti-tourist role model in places like Ólymbos is ‘the resident’, rather than ‘the traveller’. Putting the case of ‘anti-tourism’ among the foreign visitors to northern Kárpathos into further theoretical context, the thesis discusses the importance of the strong anti-tourist current in Western culture. It is argued that Romanticism, with its idealized individualism, its rejection of modern mass society, its nostalgic yearning for the past, and its fascination with exotic ‘counterworlds’, is a key to the paradoxes of tourism and the source of its self-contradictory illusions, as well as a vital link between ‘anti-tourism’ and anthropology.
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