Anders Burman- Professor
- Professor at University of Gothenburg
Anders Burman
- Professor
- Professor at University of Gothenburg
About
37
Publications
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Introduction
I am a social anthropologist and professor of Human Ecology at the University of Gothenburg. Previously, I was a senior lecturer at Lund University and a postdoc at the Dept. of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Since the early 2000s, I have conducted ethnographic research in the Andes, focusing on social movements, ritual practice, political ontology, environmental conflicts, traditional ecological knowledge, climate change and climate justice, and, more recently, migration.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (37)
This article addresses the coloniality of gender in relation to rearticulated indigenous Aymara gender notions in contemporary Bolivia. While female indigenous activists tend to relate the subordination of women to colonialism and to see an emancipatory potential in the current process of decolonisation, there are middle-class advocates for gender...
This article explores the ever-shifting semantics and semiotics of the concept ‘indígena’ in the Bolivian Andes and argues that ‘indigeneity’ is charged with different meanings by different actors in changing contexts of territorial and social struggles and state governance. The article focuses on the discourse and politics of the indigenous Andean...
Taking Boaventura de Sousa Santos' argument that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice as its starting point, this article suggests that there is no global climate justice without global cognitive justice (implying both ontological justice and epistemological justice). If we take "the ontological turn" in anthropology a...
The article departs from an ethnographic experience involving the kharisiri, a dystopian, fat-stealing monster of the Bolivian Andes that has been analyzed by generations of anthropologists to understand Aymara culture. However, it argues that when Aymara people identify Others, in this case anthropologists, with the kharisiri, they are primarily s...
With the coming to power of Evo Morales and el Movimiento al Socialismo, an indigenized language of resistance became the language of power. In this paper I explore how epistemological and ontological ‘radical difference’ was co-opted and used to legitimize Bolivian state power. I argue that when institutionalized and instrumentalized within the st...
Interdisciplinary research and education on human-environment relations has a natural place in many Anglo-American geography and anthropology departments. In Sweden, however, critical scholarship across the socio-natural divide has largely been outsourced to the interdisciplinary field of human ecology. Since the 1970s, Swedish human ecologists hav...
Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) often represents centuries of empirical observation and adaptation to specific ecological conditions, which is relevant to meaningful nature-human relations. Yet, TEK is rarely taken into account. This study examines the role of TEK-based agriculture in promoting adaptation and resilience to climate change in...
Based on the observation that the Anthropocene narrative signifies a departure from the Cartesian nature/culture division dominant within modernist science, this article explores notions of personhood and agency among Amerindian peoples in the Amazon, the Andes, and Mesoamerica in comparison to the corresponding notions in modernist discourses. We...
Several studies have shown that indigenous peoples are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and attention has been drawn to indigenous knowledge as an important component of climate change adaptation strategies. This paper argues, however, that in order to take indigenous knowledge seriously, indigenous realities and understa...
Reflexivity is a hallmark of good ethnography and many consider it a defining characteristic of anthropology. It is thus surprising that anthropologists have not paid more attention to how we teach students to be reflexive. Many of us learn reflexivity by making mistakes in the field, yet discussions of anthropological faux pas and their potential...
Culture and tradition have long been the domains of social science, particularly social/cultural anthropology and various forms of heritage studies. However, many environmental scientists whose research addresses environmental management, conservation, and restoration are also interested in traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous and local kno...
Which form of governance is required to bridge tensions that stem from the urgent need of climate change adaptation (CCA) on the one hand, and the imperative of upholding peace and social stability in vulnerable areas on the other? This article proposes transformative governance as a framework and methodology for addressing this question. It recogn...
Since at least the mid-20th century, social movements have been key actors in Bolivian society, causing governments to fall and redrawing the cartographies of power. Recently, a new movement emerged, a middle-class movement that articulated its demands in
harsh opposition to the government of former President Evo Morales: an urban environmental mov...
This special issue addresses the connections and crossroads between knowledge and resistance. In the current political landscape, such a research endeavour is both topical and needed. Social media platforms, like Facebook, and the development of new technologies have made it possible to spread disinformation through political channels, which has la...
Burman offers an ethnographically oriented and theoretically informed view on knowledge and knowledge production in the Bolivian Andes as he learns from indigenous Aymara activists and ritual specialists about widening the epistemic community, so that other-than-human persons are included in the social interaction that engenders knowledge. This is...
City–Region Food Systems (CRFS) is a cutting-edge concept and an emerging field of research. As a new analytical lens, it offers an integrated and multi-dimensional perspective on food’s origins, how it is grown and the path it follows to our plates and beyond. Building on this concept, this presentation reflects a prospective research project whic...
En la Bolivia de hoy, el "vivir bien" puede significar todo o nada. Puede ser un horizonte de lucha comunitaria contra el capitalismo depredador y la colonialidad global, una lucha enraizada en y promovida desde la vida comunitaria de los ayllus y en prácticas cotidianas. Sin embargo, el vivir bien también puede ser una visión mística, romanticista...
In December 2005, Evo Morales won a landslide victory in the presidential elections and became the first president of indigenous origin in the history of Bolivia. Ever since, “indigeneity” has been at the core of the “decolonization politics” implemented by the government, and, quite intriguingly, indigenous Aymara ritual specialists (“Maestros”) h...
At the intersections of race/ethnicity, class, and sex/gender, indigenous women are frequently discriminated against because they are indigenous, poor, and women. However, indigenous women's political engagement within their own societies and with national politics is indissolubly intertwined with a broader struggle for indigenous peoples' rights....
AndrewCanessa, Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. xiv+323, £71.00, £17.99 pb. - Volume 46 Issue 1 - ANDERS BURMAN
Daniel M.Goldstein, Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. xi+327, £70.00, £16.99 pb. - Volume 45 Issue 3 - ANDERS BURMAN
Many Aymara men and women claim that human knowledge as transmitted through language is pure ‘siwsawi’, i.e. talk, opinions, views and judgments of particular individuals. As such it is knowledge of a particular kind; it is knowledge concerning the opinions of other humans, nothing else. It is thereby significantly different from the non-linguistic...
Drawing on his anthropological field work in Bolivia in the midst of profound social and political change, the author examines the attitudes of various interlocutors toward knowledge, and in particular the important differences between “hegemonic theories of knowledge and indigenous epistemologies, between propositional and non-propositional knowle...
Resumen En el siglo XVI, el movimiento milenarista Taki Onqoy reivindicó las wak'as (huacas/guacas) y vinculó sus poderes ancestrales con nociones de pachakuti y rebelión indígena. Hoy en día, en los Andes bolivianos, las wak'as están de nuevo en el centro de un activismo radical indígena. Mientras que Luís Millones (1990) y otros han prestado aten...
Indigenous rituals escorted Evo Morales throughout his first years as president of Bolivia. The art and the ritual practices of the yatiri, the Aymara healer and ritual specialist, are going through interesting transformations entering new political spaces of power. But which role does this therapeutic knowledge and ritual practice actually play in...
