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Swedish Anthropology: Past and Present Ulf Hannerz | Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University

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Swedish Anthropology: Past and Present Ulf Hannerz | Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology VOL. 1, NO. 1, 55-68 URN: URN:NBN:SE:UU:DIVA-355995 Swedish Anthropology: Past and Present Ulf Hannerz | Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University I have been in Swedish anthropology, and what went before it, for well over half a century now. What follows is an assemblage of recollections, opinions and attempted overview.1 It was the early 1960s. I was nineteen, an undergraduate newcomer at Stockholm University, and without definite plans for how I would spend my life. But I had become interested in Africa – a “wind of change” was blowing through the continent, as one British prime minister commented when he witnessed a large part of the Empire turning independent. What could I do at the university to satisfy my curiosity? Not much, it seemed. In the early 1960s, the human sciences at Swedish universities were mostly complacently inward-turning, occasionally concerning themselves with European themes, casting a glance toward North America mostly as it related to Swedish emigration as a topic in history, but certainly not paying much attention to the rest of the world. So I decided to spend a term taking the introductory course, and whatever else might be on offer, in the discipline known as General and Comparative Ethnography. (The term “anthropology” was at the time officially connected only to “physical anthropology,” a quaint one-man enterprise in a back alley of Swedish academic life, engaging in skull measurements and self-publishing text books.) I believe there were twelve of us taking the course. Beyond a sort of academic legitimation, however, this did not offer much of a response to my kind of African interests either. The minimal department was really an appendix to the rather sleepy state ethnographic museum, where elderly curators lectured on their specialties and showed the collections. Yet on our first reading lists were items like Ruth Benedict’sPatterns of Culture (1934) and Robert Lowie’s The History of Ethnological Theory(1937). As I was finishing my undergraduate work, it was thus clear to me that there was more anthropology to be had on the other side of the Atlantic. I found my way to a one-year exchange scholarship at Indiana University, where I would be hosted by the rather new African Studies program. Returning from there to Stockholm, it was my turn to teach that introductory course, and do what I could with it. But soon, through the mediation of one of my Indiana mentors, I was offered a position as project anthropologist on a sociolinguistic-cum-educationalist Urban Language Study in Washington, DC. That meant two years of field research in a Black American low- income neighbourhood. It also set me on a longer term of involvement with the emergent subdiscipline of urban anthropology (Hannerz 1969, 1980). The 1960s: years of transition After returning again to Sweden, I found the conditions of the discipline changing. Belatedly, long after I had already committed myself more firmly to the discipline, and browsing in old volumes of the American Anthropologist, I had come across a brief account Contact: Ulf Hannerz [email protected] © 2018 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography 56 ULF HANNERZ | SWEDISH ANTHROPOLOGY: PAST AND PRESENT of Swedish ethnography as it was in the late 1950s (that is, just before I came to it), by the then head of the Ethnographic Museum in Gothenburg, Karl-Gustav Izikowitz.2 He offered a bleak view: there were altogether seven scholarly jobs at the two museums, and his conclusion was that in Sweden, “a professional anthropologist has few opportunities for making a living.” Soon thereafter, the first entirely university-based position had been added at Uppsala University, although on the whole the discipline was still museum-based. It was the perhaps half-serious opinion of the museum research staff that their Uppsala colleague suffered from a scholarly handicap as he knew the artefacts only from the front – having seen them only in pictures.. In the later years of the 1960s, however, Sweden was opening up to the world, and this was reflected in the growing number of students who came to anthropology, sometimes staying on for a lasting engagement. Some had returned from periods as volunteers, in Africa or Latin America. Others were early global backpackers. More of them were simply young people who followed the news, which had Ho Chi-minh, Che Guevara and Julius Nyerere as major figures. (Nelson Mandela was at the time more remote – imprisoned on Robben Island.) This generation of students sought an anthropology speaking to their interests. Yet these were also times of turbulence, not only in a small academic discipline in Sweden, but as it seemed, in universities everywhere. Columbia University in New York and Nanterre in a sordid Paris suburb earned renown as early sites of student protest; at Stockholm University students contributed a size S version by occupying their own union building (prompting the Minister of Education, Olof Palme, to go there to debate them). Such circumstances could to a degree complicate things. The attempt to give the discipline a more up-to-date scholarly profile, and an improved place in the wider academic environment, may have had its feet on the ground more securely, and at the same time sounded a bit less important than changing the world more generally. Some participants and some observers had a certain difficulty in disentangling scholarly, ideological and personal differences. On the whole, in any case, there was a transition led mostly from below, by junior faculty and graduate students, (An inspiring nearby model was the new department of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, under the leadership of Fredrik Barth.) If there was some resistance to this makeover from the senior generation and from neighbouring disciplines, it was half-hearted in some places, and a little more strong-willed in others.3 A rather ill-informed attempt from the top of the national university system to rethink by committee what this discipline should be about figured in the end mostly as a parenthetical distraction. A “wind of change” here, too. Field studies: away By the early 1970s, the transformative period was basically over, signified by a change in labels from “ethnography” to “anthropology.” (And so from then on, at least within the academic community, and in line with international usage, the term “ethnography” became the name of a broad methodological approach rather than of a discipline.) Departments at Stockholm and Gothenburg Universities, with new, younger department heads, had severed their formal links of dependency to museums, and the senior position at Uppsala had been upgraded to a full professorship. Research now became based more in the university KRITISK ETNOGRAFI – SWEDISH JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY 57 departments, less in the museums. A little later, social anthropology was introduced at the University of Lund under the large umbrella of a sociology department. The first larger cohort of graduate students could move on toward field studies and degrees without much organizational uncertainty, and participate in the further consolidation of their discipline. When the time then came for field work, where did that early set of young anthropologists go?4 In those old centres of the discipline (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands) which first had anthropologies because they had empires, it seems that even later generations have been somewhat inclined to head for their respective ex-colonies. In contrast, continuing into the present, Swedish anthropologists have mostly not been guided by any such underlying territorial orientations, but have spread in the global terrain largely on the basis of personal preferences, finding their sites just about anywhere where field research has been practically feasible. However, in that period between the 1960s, with movements toward independence not least in Africa, and the late 1980s, when the Cold War came to an end, the overall world situation certainly influenced choices. Sweden, officially not aligned with either of the world’s two major power blocs, was inclined toward relatively freewheeling international policies, and toward sympathy with the emerging states. Public imagination was attracted by the new nations, “developing countries” – and new linkages were formed for purposes of political support and development assistance. In anthropology, this has resulted, for one thing, in an enduring involvement with African studies. It has been most consistent at Uppsala University, to some degree stimulated by the 1960s creation of an interdisciplinary Nordic Institute of African Studies, collaboratively supported by the governments of the five Nordic countries while located in that city. Anita Jacobson-Widding, who took over the professorial chair in what would become the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University, may be seen as a transitional figure. Retaining an existing African focus, her own work tended toward area overviews (e.g. on bridewealth, and on systems of colour classification [Jacobson-Widding 1967, 1979]), but she drew on new sources of theoretical inspiration, and was strongly supportive of a new generation of field workers spreading over much of the continent. A later departmental program on African conflict and post-conflict field studies also made important contributions to the discipline. Sverker Finnström’s (2008) monograph on the upheavals in Northern Uganda is
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