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Skärmar i alla ära, men det är svårt att slå läsupplevelsen med en bok i ena handen och en blyertspenna i den andra. I bokhögens tillfälligheter ser man ibland oväntade historier och paralleller. Ibland närvarar våra antropologiska förfäder, som osynliga medläsare, vakandes över våra axlar. Krönika, februari 27, 2023.

Om antropologi, deltagande observation och krig. Essä, 11 mars, 2020

With the help of Erin Baines’s careful and knowledgeable editing and pertinent contextualization, Evelyn Amony has written a remarkable memoir entitled I Am Evelyn Amony: reclaiming my life from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Throughout the book there is a forceful narrative agency that is rare among works where outsiders present and edit the life histories of former child soldiers. The account is as painful as it is revealing. Amony’s story is one of “choiceless choices,” to borrow an illustrious phrase from Holocaust researcher Lawrence L. Langer: of bare life and brutal death; of being abducted into rebel ranks and forced, at a very young age, to become the wife of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army....

In this paper I revisit the so-called Malinowskian legacy in the light of my efforts to raise funds for my own anthropological endeavors. Today’s almost habitual dismissal of this legacy as parochial risks missing the fact that the anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski’s days was not simply a colonialist enterprise working under faulty premises. Even if epistemologically ethnocentric, Malinowski and those following his lead paved the way for an engaged, open-minded, reflexive, and indeed global anthropology. I will sketch some possibilities and potentials for ethnographic writing, but more, forces that tend to corrode the anthropological mind, a kind of control and restriction of the anthropological and academic freedom that I guess Malinowski never had to deal with in his life. As one of those ancestors who still interfere with our daily anthropological lives, I suspect him to be somehow troubled with today’s predicament.

In defining war, this article explores the origin and historical development of armed aggression from the earliest human societies to the present. The fact that war is a relatively recent invention in the span of human existence, arising with complex societies, suggests war is neither a biological imperative nor integral to the human condition. The many forms war takes, from ethnic conflict through conventional militaries to guerrilla warfare are considered in order to understand the nature and culture of war. The twentieth century has been the bloodiest in history, and this piece examines the relationships between violence, society, and the exercise of power that help explain this. The changing philosophies and practices of war over time and society show war to be a complex constellation of economic, cultural, and existential, as well as political factors. The various theoretical approaches to war, from those characterizing premodern societies and the rise of the modern state to the present are discussed. In concluding, the future of war, and the new directions theory might take in best understanding war in the aftermath of the 2001 September 11 attacks, are considered.

Many aspects of war are deliberately kept secret, but some are so mundane that they simply are not reflected upon. In the face of the brutal mass violence of most wars today, these mundane secrets are not spectacular enough to capture media attention or the observers’ imaginations. They are, in a sense, the unmarked secrets of everyday war. In this article, I address such unmarked secrets of war. Focusing on war-torn northern Uganda, I follow two parallel threads. One is the anthropology of life histories, or my journey into anthropology in conjunction with the stories of a few Ugandan key informants. The second thread exposes the conditions that influence a researcher’s tendency to craft and edit data and experience. In acknowledging the entanglements of the two threads, I focus on storytelling and listening in situations that initially may remain unmarked – and thus silent and even secret – to the outside participant observer. In addition, rather than presenting any straightforward story of the war in northern Uganda, I extend a conversation on methodology.