Migration and re-migration of economically and socially marginalized Ethiopian women and girls has become a phenomenon. Based on interviews with 12 Ethiopian migrant women returned from the Middle East and the Gulf States, the primary aim of this thesis is to describe and study Ethiopian women migrants’ circular migration to the Middle East. I will mainly focus on how social dynamics in the family, gender relations and economic circumstances are intricate. The process of women’s migration and how the expectations of the family can be gender differentiated are discussed. Further, the migrant women’s power relation when class and ethnicity determine their position is discussed. Relations with the sending family and the issues related to the women who return, as well as problems affecting them at home and in the destination countries, are looked at. Various and complex issues of migration and the women’s roles are discussed with reference to the women’s experiences. Migration provides women with opportunities for social and economic mobility but can also subject them to ethnic discrimination, exploitation, and abuse. The movement is generally seen as voluntary labor migration and it has placed them in a vulnerable position both at home and abroad. Their migration is interconnected to the economic need but also the responsibilities they have towards their family and kin.
This article seeks to move beyond the Euro/North-centrism recurrent in methodological discussions on what we may learn from the COVID-19 pandemic. Such debates often centre on uncertainty and involuntary immobility – aspects which are hardly new for many researchers. In this article, we argue that the pandemic offers an opportunity to rethink research relations between what we term ‘contracting researchers’ in the Global North and ‘facilitating researchers’ in the Global South. Such relations are often marked by rampant inequalities in remuneration, working conditions, and visibility/authorship. Drawing upon experiences in DR Congo, Sierra Leone, and India, we argue that the pandemic increased the dependence on – and highlighted the invaluable contributions and skills of – facilitating researchers, in part slightly refiguring bargaining power. We also propose pathways for change, arguing for a strong collaborative approach and the need for institutional change, without discarding the responsibilities of individual researchers.
In the time period 2012–2013, over 20 national elections and two constitutional referendums are scheduled in Africa. In several of these elections, violence is anticipated to play a prominent role. There is great urgency to support the establishment of effective and legitimate electoral institutions and electoral frameworks; institute reforms aimed at lowering the stakes of elections; encourage the devolution of powers; improve the socio-economic standing of the populace; and devise strategies to prevent and manage electoral violence.
Ethnology is a disciplinary field that is more or less interwoven with anthropology. Its main focus is the analysis of various cultures and cultural expressions, usually within a national context. In practice, ethnologists favor an approach toward culture from the individual perspective, with a key interest in how single ordinary individuals, seen as active cultural beings, think and act in their everyday lives. This implies that they are both shaped by and contributors to the shaping of cultures in their everyday lives. However, within ethnology, culture viewed as a bidirectional phenomenon is not merely regarded as an individual process. Rather, it is regarded as something that occurs in collective social contexts. When analyzing culture, ethnologists usually employ a combined focus on its ideational and folkloric aspects as well as aspects of materiality, locality, and identity. Ethnology's general methodological approaches comprise ethnographic fieldwork as well as studies of artifacts and sociocultural structures.
Since the second half of the 20th century the Philippines have supplied the world with migrant workers. Today, almost one tenth of the population is residing abroad. Labour migration has become an important source of revenue to both state and private actors through remittances, for the Philippines, and a source of cheap labour battling labour shortage, in the receiving countries. Today, the global labour market is a distinct and important part of what we call globalisation. This is portrayed in this thesis through the lens of Philippine-Korean labour migration.
The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate the emergence of migrants as a commodity for export, the institutionalised creation of migrants, the normalisation of labour migration, and containment of migrants through legal and spatial constraints, in Manila and in Seoul.
This thesis look at the ways in which labour migration, as an economic policy, is internalised and transformed into a culture of migration. I argue that the effects of a culture of migration is felt not just by the labour migrants themselves, but also by their families and by the Philippines as a whole. As such, the reliance on remittances as a source of income has transformed domestic and global infrastructures as well as norms and social behaviour. Moreover, this thesis aims to add to the discussion on migration and remittances by exploring social dimensions and consequences of the globalisation of the labour market.
Este libro ofrece un panorama de la religión tradicional y pentecostal 'weenhayek, y la transición entre las dos. En la tradicional el elemento de chamanismo juega un rol importante. Sin embargo, existe también una serie de actividades que corresponde al individuo, por ejemplo la negociación con los guardianes de la naturaleza. En el pentecostalismo esta relación entre el individuo y la dimensión esotérica se desarrolla aún más. Los testimonios incluidos en este volumen refieren a ambas tradiciones y sugieren una continuidad religiosa más que una ruptura.
This article is an updated version in Swedish of my article on the emergence and history of the Scandinavian Pentecostal Movement published as "The Development of Pentecostalism in Scandinavian Countries" (in:) William K. Kay & Anne E. Dyer (editors), 2011, European Pentecostalism. In rough outlines, it presents the history of the Pentecostal movements in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland, concentrating on common trends, cooperation, similarities and differences.
Artikeln ger en komparativ översikt av pentekostalismens etablering i Norden med start 1906 och fram till 2014. Den visar på utbyten, idéers spridning, gemensamma initiativ över nationsgränserna, på konflikter, och anpassning av strategier och verksamheter på grund av förändringar i omvärlden.
Huvudsyftet med denna artikel är att studera den svenska Pingströrelsens ledningsstruktur, hur den har varit konstruerad och hur den har förändrats. Just under 1950-talet skedde en gradvis, men omvälvande kursändring i ledningsstrukturen. Detta decennium används därför här som ett prisma för att skildra och analysera denna maktstruktur över tid, från pingstväckelsens genombrott i början av 1900-talet och fram till våra dagar. På basis av det material vi har tillgängligt i dag, föreslås i artikeln att Pingströrelsens organisationsstruktur under dess första hundra år kan indelas i fyra ganska särpräglade faser: a) “Förstadiet” eller “Den överkonfessionella fasen” (1906–1918); b) “Filadelfia som Pingströrelsens kommandobrygga” (1919–1958); c) “De gemensamma företagen” (1959–1991) och: d) “Pingst FFS-fasen” (från 1991). Artikeln skildrar dessa fasers olika karaktär och analyserar bakomliggande strukturer och strategier.
Pingströrelsen i Sverige är en drygt sekelgammal folkrörelse som haft ett påtagligt inflytande nationellt och internationellt. Vid millennieskiftet utsåg tidningen Expressen dess informelle ledare, Lewi Pethrus, till den femte viktigaste personen i svenskt samhällsliv under 1900-talet, viktigare än Olof Palme och mera betydelsefull än Raoul Wallenberg. Pethrus startade nämligen tidskrifter, bokförlag, en bank, en dagstidning och ett politiskt parti. Pingströrelsen var först i Sverige med piratradio, med storskalig privat missbrukarvård och med internationell tv-produktion. Den amerikanske kyrkohistorikern David Bundy hävdar att den svenska pingstmissionen haft “ett oproportionerligt inflytande” på pentekostalismen i världen. Bland annat har svenskar grundat den största pentekostala rörelsen i världen, Assambléia de Deus i Brasilien, som räknar med betydligt fler medlemmar än det finns invånare i Sverige. Svensk pingstmission har funnits i över hundra länder och hade på 1980-talet närmare tusen missionärer spridda över alla befolkade världsdelar. I den här boken har Jan-Åke Alvarsson samlat ett antal av de artiklar han under årens lopp skrivit om denna rörelse. Genom att göra så vill han bidra till mera kunskap om detta säregna fenomen. I sitt förord hävdar han att ambitionen “inte är att ge en helhetsbild av den svenska Pingströrelsen. För det är den alltför komplex och mångfasetterad. I stället blir det ett ofullbordat lapptäcke, en samling fragment av ett vidsträckt ‘religioskap’”. Efter en inledning följer tolv längre artiklar som behandlar allt från pingstväckelsens historia till dess namnbruk, spiritualitet och teologi. Varje artikel föregås av en kort metatext och följs av ett postskriptum där forskare på det speciella området kommenterar bidraget.
Femtiotalet innebar ett vägskäl för den svenska Pingströrelsen. Den rörelse som byggts på ett starkt informellt ledarskap fick plötsligt problem när ledaren Lewi Pethrus 1958, efter nästan ett halvsekel, lämnade sin formella position som föreståndare i Filadelfiaförsamlingen i Stockholm. Frustrationen som uppstod när Pethrus inte längre hade tillgång till och kontroll över tidskrifter, förlag och konferenser drabbade inte bara honom utan hela rörelsen. Hur skulle den nu organiseras? Dessutom var femtiotalet en tid av andlig förnyelse i Pingströrelsen. Efter ett fyrtiotal på tomgång kom nu “helandeväckelsen”, “särlaregnsväckelsen” och “förnyelseväckelsen” att på olika sätt prägla och i vissa fall splittra rörelsen. I kalla krigets skugga kom dessa väckelsevågor, tillsammans med ett stigande intresse för eskatologi, att förnya och förändra rörelsen på olika sätt. Den här boken handlar om detta avgörande decennium i svensk pingströrelse. Den ger oss en bakgrund till kursändringen genom att skildra de dåtida samhällsförändringarna i Sverige. Den sätter också in händelserna i ett internationellt perspektiv. Särskilt skildras kontakterna mellan Sverige och USA. Den förser oss med speciella skildringar av de olika väckelsevågorna och vi får även en jämförelse mellan den teologi som predikades på femtiotalet och den som framfördes vid pingstväckelsens början. Slutligen sätts det dåtida maktskiftet i Pingströrelsen in i ett historiskt perspektiv. Artiklarna har fötts ur seminariearbetet vid Institutet för Pentekostala Studier i Uppsala. Författarna är, eller har varit, knutna till Uppsala universitet i ämnena kyrkohistoria eller kulturantropologi.
This ethnography aims to identify the role of the Pentecostal beliefs that peasants in South Brazil use in justifying their life situations. Anthropological data were collected in the Sertão region of Jaguariaíva, in the Brazilian State of Paraná. An interpretative approach was used with concepts including the moral order of peasantness, moral economy, and multiple livelihood strategies. The core results indicated that Pentecostals in the countryside are not monolithic in terms of religion and have varying degrees of engagement with a variety of churches as well as their relations with the wider capitalism. Their economic and life-changing decisions are articulated by a moral order of peasantness expressed by dependence on Providence and the interpretation of events as a revelation of Divine will. The moral order is significant for maintaining viable peasant communities, orienting their relations to land, kinship, work, and consumption in a way that sets them apart from the “world.” Such findings question the Weberian explanations for the role of Pentecostalism in Latin American capitalism and confirm the repeasantization theory concerning the persistence of a distinctive peasant way of life.
Increasingly, many people in democracies are turning to a strongarm politics for reassurance against globalization, uncertainty and precarity. In countries ranging from the US and the UK to Brazil, India and Turkey, support has grown for a nativist politics attacking migrants, minorities, liberals and elites as enemies of the nation. Is there a politics of belonging that progressive forces could mobilize to counteract these trends?
After Nativism takes up this question, arguing that disarming nativism will require more than improving the security and wellbeing of the ‘left-behind’. The lines drawn by nativism are of an affective nature about imagined community, with meanings of belonging and voice lying at the heart of popular perceptions of just dues. This, argues Ash Amin, is the territory that progressive forces – liberal, social democratic, socialist – need to reclaim in order to shift public sentiment away from xenophobic intolerance towards one of commonality amid difference as a basis for facing existential risk and uncertainty. The book proposes a relational politics of belonging premised on the encounter, fugitive aesthetics, public interest politics, collaboration over common existential threats, and daily collectives and infrastructures of wellbeing. There is ground for progressives to mount a counter-aesthetics of belonging that will convince the discontents of neoliberal globalization that there is a better alternative to nativism.
Uppsatsen studerar hur det talas om den gängkriminaliteten som pågått i Sverige under hösten 2023 på sociala medier, specifikt på TikTok. I takt med att våldsvågen trappats upp har också spridningen av skämtsamt och förminskande material kring Kurdiska räven som har en central roll i den pågående situationen ökat. Studien studerar netnografiskt hur humor får uttryck i memer som sprids kring en person som anses vara farlig. Intresset för kontrasten mellan den farliga person han målas upp som i massmedia och hur han framställs på ett förlöjligande sätt på Tiktok ligger till grund för studien. Dessa memer får så stor spridning som tiotusentals gilla-markeringar och vissa över en miljon visningar per video. Studien utforskar således på vilka sätt humor uttrycks i förhållande till brottslighet genom angreppssättet hur det framställs och diskuteras på TikTok. Det görs genom att genom en riktad innehållsanalys där begrepp och teman kategoriseras inom de teoretiska begreppen humor och imagined communities för att möjliggöra analyser vad gäller om det förekommer någon röd tråd för humorn.
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.
This essay explores the mysterious disappearance of Olle Högbom from an anthropological perspective. It uses theories of hauntology, ruinology, and simulacra to examine how Olle's absence continues to affect society. The study involves a thematic analysis of online forums and qualitative interviews with Olle’s sister, contrasting public speculation with family narratives, and highlights the enduring presence of Olle in collective memory, illustrating how unresolved disappearances influence society, memory, and everyday life. This anthropological investigation into missing persons provides insights into how spectral presences shape cultural and social dynamics. Employing a blend of ethnographic interviews, content analysis, pictures, and autoethnography, this study paints an intimate portrait of relationships with the absent and examines the liminality of Olle’s existence. Autoethnography in combination with multimodality carries the potential to unearth the unknown and paint an intimate understanding of absence. Olle’s absence is depicted in the first chapter and partially in the third chapter, by presenting an autoethnographic account of the experience of forming relationships with the absent.
Länge har den nationella idén varit representerad och dominerande i Baskien tillsammans med den nationella identiteten. Baskerna håller fortfarande fast vid en gammal romantiserad bild av att vara en enad och självständig nation och föreställningen om en etnisk särskildhet förstärks av etniska och kulturella markörer såsom ett gemensamt språk, tillhörighetkänsla till plats, historiska anor, gemensamma traditioner och samhörighetskänsla mellan spanska och franska basker. I denna studie belyses och analyseras dessa markörer samt sätts i samband med några av de diskurser som råder i spanska Baskien då de är den symboliska basen för hur basker uttrycker, upprätthåller och skapar föreställningar kring baskisk identitet och nationalism. I takt med en alltmer globaliserad värld utmanas dock den nationella idén och en kulturell förändring sker i Baskien som påverkar åtminstone den yngre generationen spanska baskers sätt att uttrycka sin identitet och nationalism. Ett växlande mellan två identiteter väcker ambivalenta känslor då framtiden diskuteras. Å ena sidan vill man fortsätta vara världsmedborgare, leva i ett gränslöst EU och vara en del av den inre marknaden. Å andra sidan vill man vara en del av ett lokalt kollektiv och samhälle. Den nationella idén, myten och stereotypen av baskerna som tidigare beskrivits som något homogent och endimensionellt är i själva verket heterogent och mångdimensionellt.
The Weberian paradigm's ascription of a legitimate state's provision of security and justice overlooks the role played by non-state actors in the post-colonial world. Adopting a hybridity framework enables scholars and practitioners to re-centre the focus from a state-centric view of states as fragile or failed to recognise the strength and resilience of alternative socio-political formations of order. Existing evidence on hybrid political orders demonstrates that community resilience and customary institutions should not be perceived as spoilers but understood as assets for constructive engagements between the customary and modern states. The cases of Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone highlight how the complex and interdependent interaction between modern and traditional systems of governance, through a combination of conflict and cooperation, can explain state resilience.
Syftet med denna uppsats är att analysera hur människors val av boplats påverkar segregationen i Stockholm ur ett antropolgiskt perspektiv. Jag har valt att använda den välkänt fashionabla Stockholmsförorten Djursholm som exempel. Vad utgör exklusiviteten? Hur ser Djursholmarna på sig själva? Jag har använt mig av antropologisk litteratur och exempel från intervjuer ur professor Mikael Holmqvists bok Djursholm: Sveriges ledarsamhälle. I samband med detta har jag gjort egna observationer och fotograferat. Djursholm bygger på tradition, förutsägbarhet och en symbolisk gemenskap. Många villor har stora parkliknande trädgårdar omgärdade av häckar, staket och grindar. Min tes är att Djursholm kan betraktas som ett grindsamhälle – en översättning från det kända engelska begreppet "Gated Community" – och bidrar på så vis till segregationen vilket jag kommer att utforska.
The contributors to Grammars of the Urban Ground develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for capturing the complex, ever-shifting, and interactive processes that shape contemporary cities. Building on Marxist, feminist, queer, and critical race theory as well as the ontological turn in urban studies, they propose a mode of analysis that resists the staple of siloed categories such as urban “economy,” “society,” and “politics.” In addition to addressing key concepts of urban studies such as dispossession and scale, the contributors examine the infrastructures of plutocratic life in London, reconfigure notions of gentrification as a process of racial banishment, and seek out alternative archives for knowledge about urban density. They also present case studies of city life in the margins and peripheries of São Paulo, Kinshasa, Nairobi, and Jakarta. In so doing, they offer a foundation for better understanding the connective and aggregative forces of city-making and the entanglements and relations that constitute cities and their everyday politics.
Op-ed, 9 August 2006:
While wars elsewhere have grabbed the headlines - most recently in Lebanon and Israel - Africa's longest-running war has been ravaging northern Uganda for 20 years. The conflict has mainly pitted the Ugandan government against a rebel movement called the Lord's Resistance Army...
The collapse of the Spanish real-estate market in 2007-8, and the colossal destruction of jobs it provoked, put an abrupt end to a decade-long model of growth, which was based on the construction and tourism industries as its primary motors as well as on the massive indebtedness of the labouring masses. In the severe economic downturn that ensued, a social conflict appeared: on the one side, the many indebted people forming the movement of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) and, on the other side, the financial industry. This study offers an ethnographic account of the aforementioned conflict as it unfolds in the precarious reality of Barcelona and Santa Coloma de Gramenet, with a particular emphasis on the experience and struggle of the affected persons. The argument advanced is that the main predicament of the debt conflict is the subordination of life processes to the imperatives of financial accumulation; a situation enabled by a specific constellation of forces, involving the successive governments of Spain, the financial elite, the police, and the courts.
La inundación de 2003 que afectó la ciudad de Santa Fe tuvo profundas repercusiones en la comunidad urbana. En 2005, las personas afectadas todavía estaban tratando de reconstruir sus vidas, tanto materialmente como afectivamente. Los recuerdos de los momentos previos, simultáneos y posteriores a la inundación marcaron su vida diaria. Este artículo analiza de qué manera los recuerdos de la inundación estaban intrínsecamente impregnados en la vida cotidiana y posdesastre de los barrios en el oeste de la ciudad y en particular cómo se tejían estas memorias en las relaciones de la economía solidaria de los habitantes. El estudio se basa en trabajo de campo etnográfico en dicha ciudad entre los años 2005–2011.
On April 29, 2003, a catastrophic flood occurred in the Argentina city of Santa Fe de la Vera Cruz. Soon, the disaster became a political issue, as they had made serious accusations against the authorities and decision makers regarding negligence, corruption and lack of disaster preparedness. A local protest movement emerged, claiming both the allocation of responsibilities and financial compensation for the losses suffered by the victims. This article analyses the role of material memory and oblivion on the post disaster scene, more specifically, how different social actors in Santa Fe used places and objects in the contentious making of a disaster memoryscape. The analysis is based on ethnography from transtemporal translocal and field research conducted in Santa Fe between 2004 and 2011, and applies anthropological and sociological theories of memory to analyse these processes.
This special issue focuses on the phenomena of disasters and crises, and how such extraordinary and disruptive events can be understood from the perspective of social anthropology. Critical events are not unique to Latin America, yet the impact of hydro-meteorological and geological disasters have dramatically increased in the region in the last century (IDB 2010, UNISDR and Corporation OSSO 2013) and many countries have historical and recent experience of profound social, political and economic crises. They are complex challenges for societies to manage, mitigate and reduce, which is why social science has a major contribution to make in understanding both the causes and the effects, and forward sustainable solutions. This special issue presents four articles based on empirical cases from Latin America, with an emphasis on Argentina and Brazil, which demonstrate the anthropological contribution to the understanding of critical events. The authors make no claim to provide a complete view of the anthropology of disasters and crises in Latin America, but rather to account for a growing research field in the region, which is already making important contributions to multidisciplinary studies of critical events, and to the policy development of disaster risk reduction and crisis management.