Sverker Finnström

Uppsala University | UU · Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology

Sverker Finnström (and Federica Guglielmo, Brunel) interviewed by Ea Arnoldi for AnthroPod: The SCA Podcast, Cultural Anthropology, on the legal/political, ethical and epistemological dilemmas of doing fieldwork in warzones and having terrorist informants, or informants supporting terrorists. Follow the link to listen.

"Receive a 25% discount [April 2016] on all Anthropology titles found on our website. At checkout, simply enter the discount code SfAA16:" http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=WulffAnthropologist 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’...

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...

Introduction is open access via Scribd and eDuke.: http://www.scribd.com/doc/127980912/Virtual-War-and-Magical-Death-by-Neil-L-Whitehead http://reader.dukeupress.edu/virtual-war-and-magical-death/12 Virtual War and Magical Death is a provocative examination of the relations between anthropology and contemporary global war. Several arguments unite...

Read intrduciton + conclusion via eDuke: http://read.dukeupress.edu/content/living-with-bad-surroundings Since 1986, the Acholi people of northern Uganda have lived in the crossfire of a violent civil war, with the Lord’s Resistance Army and other groups fighting the Ugandan government. Acholi have been murdered, maimed, and driven into displaceme...

This article describes the tension that built up between two European journalists who had teamed up to shoot a documentary on the entanglement of war and humanitarian interventions in Acholiland, northern Uganda, with the fieldworking anthropologist as the local broker of the documentary project. The article also examines a parallel disconnect deve...

See doc for a link to all my publications, registered in the DiVA online data base.

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 as neither a biological imperative nor integral to the human condition. The...

The global success of the film KONY 2012 by Invisible Children, Inc., manifests far greater magical powers than those of Joseph Kony and his ruthless Lord's Resistance Army, which it portrays. The most prominent feature of the Invisible Children lobby is the making and constant remaking of a master narrative that depoliticizes and dehistoricizes a...

With dedications to Laura Nader, David H. Price delivers a powerful anthropological manifesto. From Nader, he acknowledges, we have been taught to study up and confront power. More, as Weaponizing Anthropology proves an example of, Nader tells us that this means that we will have to work harder than those aligned with power. In Price's up-front ana...

The global success of the film KONY 2012 by Invisible Children, Inc., manifests far greater magical powers than those of Joseph Kony and his ruthless Lord's Resistance Army, which it portrays. The most prominent feature of the Invisible Children lobby is the making and constant remaking of a master narrative that depoliticizes and dehistoricizes a...

In 1996, when I was accepted for the Ph.D. program in cultural anthropology at Uppsala University, my intention was to go to the northwestern shores of Lake Victoria and the Kampala area in central Uganda, to study the complex interplay between the cultural and political leadership as it played out in the famous Buganda kingdom. I eventually ended...

This article discusses the role of rumors in everyday Acholi life in war-torn northern Uganda. These rumors concern various health threats such as HIV and Ebola. The rumors are closely associated with the forces of domination that are alleged to destroy female sexuality and women's reproductive health and, by extension, Acholi humanity. Moreover, t...

Child Soldiers in Africa by HonwanaAlcindaPhiladelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. 202, £29.50; £15.00 (pbk.). - Volume 46 Issue 1 - Sverker Finnström

The Lord’s Resistance Army/Movement (LRA/M) in Uganda is now world infamous for its violence. As most observers, including academics, have dismissed the LRA/M on moral grounds, they have disqualified the movement as non-political, rebels without a cause other than their allegedly bizarre syncretic beliefs. This article indicates an alternative or p...

Inside West Nile: violence, history and representation on an African frontier by LeopoldMarkOxford, Santa Fe and Kampala: James Currey, School of American Research Press and Fountain Publishers, 2005. Pp. 180. £45.00; £16.95 (pbk.). - Volume 45 Issue 3 - SVERKER FINNSTRÖM

War has ravaged Acholiland in northern Uganda since 1986. The Ugandan army is fighting the Lord's Resistance Movement/Army (LRM/A) rebels. Based on anthropological fieldwork, the article aims at exemplifying the ways in which non-combatant people's experiences of war and violence are domesticated in cosmological terms as strategies of coping, and i...

Anthropological Quarterly 78.2 (2005) 491-496 "Shape-shifters; people who walk among us we can't see—people say only we Africans practice such things. But don't believe it, there are plenty of shape-shifters in your country, throughout the world. The Europeans say this is witchcraft, but what nonsense. It is power, pure and simple." The words are t...

This article aims at exemplifying war’s violation of cosmologies as well as of people, and the ways in which experiences of war and violence are domesticated in cosmological terms as strategies of coping. I argue that the diverging experiences of the anthropologist, and of her/his assistants and informants, can fruitfully be communicated through an...

This article aims at exemplifying war's violation of cosmologies as well as of people, and the ways in which experiences of war and violence are domesticated in cosmological terms as strategies of coping. I argue that the diverging experiences of the anthropologist, and of her/his assistants and informants, can fruitfully be communicated through an...

I Sverige minns många fortfarande de ohyggliga bilder och vittnesskildringar som nådde oss från Uganda och Idi Amins skräckvälde under sjuttiotalet. Kanske minns en del av oss även rapporteringen från det tidiga åttiotalets blodiga inbördeskrig i landets central delar. Idag framhålls Uganda ofta som ett framgångsland när det gäller AIDS-bekämpning,...