60 Years of Anthropology in Uppsala: A Roundtable

Introduction

Ana Chiritoiu & Chakad Ojani, Uppsala University

In October 2023, we celebrated 60 years of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University. The institutional timeline is sinuous: anthropology was formalised in Uppsala in 1963, with the establishment of the Department of General and Comparative Ethnography under the Faculty of Arts. In 1976-77, the department changed its name to the Department of Cultural Anthropology. 20 years later, in 1996, it merged with the Department of Ethnology, jointly forming the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology that exists today.

To mark this anniversary, we organised a roundtable meant to unearth, publicise, and streamline Uppsala University’s institutional and intellectual tradition in the place of Swedish social scientific research and in the context of the wider transformations affecting the discipline as a whole, through the reflections of several current and former professors and graduates. The five guests were: Carina Green, Sten Hagberg, Alf Hornborg, Johan Lindquist, and Charlotta Widmark. The roundtable was moderated by Christina Garsten. In the first part of the discussion, we invited the panellists to present their reflections in short preliminary interventions. Then, a discussion ensued, which included not just the panellists and the moderator, but also members of the audience. We hope that the transcript below conveys at least some of the liveliness of the debate.

The questions that the panellists were invited to consider in their interventions referred to the distant and recent past of anthropology as an institutionalised discipline in Uppsala, its present and future, and its intellectual tradition. In light of the infamous tradition of racial biology in Uppsala, we asked whether there were any dark corners in the local anthropological tradition that we should reckon with in the present. And we also peaked into the future: what is the place of Uppsala Anthropology in the context of the wider changes affecting the discipline on the whole? How should Uppsala Anthropology situate itself in the future based on its profile, tradition, and past? What distinguishes Uppsala Anthropology in the Swedish and Scandinavian landscape? And how can we use those strengths to respond to the broader changes that the discipline is encountering, e.g. underfunding, casualization of labour, decolonization, relevance, as well as to recent changes in research topics and methods? As you will see below, the interventions gave compelling answers to each of these issues, and raised other topics for further reflection as the discipline of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University moves into its seventh decade. The profile that results from the discussion below shows a discipline that is strongly rooted in the ethnographic tradition–maybe more so than in other anthropology departments across Sweden–and open to changes coming from below.

Carina Green, Örebro University

I think it was in 1992 that I enrolled as a student at the Anthropology Department. Back then, the department was situated on Trädgårdsgatan opposite to Fågelsången, the famous café. Then, the department moved to Engelska Parken campus in 2004, eight years after we merged with the ethnologists, in 1996. The facilities were better equipped for teaching here but… There was something about those first years as a student at Trädgårdsgatan. The house in itself was exciting with all its nooks and crannies. Not to forget the stories about late night ghostly appearances and unexplainable occurrences. But maybe that is what residing in an old morgue will do to you. Besides, as a student in the Trädgårdsgatan building you would run into the teachers and PhD students on a daily basis. Their offices were not separate from the classrooms or the library. This gave us a sense of inclusion, of being part of an academic setting. From a student’s perspective, this transferred into an identity as an anthropologist that I carry with me still today. I would like to think that some of that identity-making is still part of the students’ interactions with the department today.

Teachers were engaged and pushed us to reflect independently. Bernard Helander, Jan Ovesen, Ingbritt Trankell, Hugh Beach, Jan-Åke Alvarsson—they were all passionate about their research fields, which was contagious to us students. To my mind, that passion for your discipline and for your research is distinctive for anthropology as a discipline. Sometimes colleagues from other disciplines imply that anthropology is somehow “old fashioned,” especially given our emphasis on ethnography, long-term fieldwork, etc., whereas, on the contrary, I find that in today’s polarised world, anthropology is more relevant than ever.

Sten Hagberg, Uppsala University

I would start by mentioning the transformations from General and Comparative Ethnography to Cultural Anthropology via the struggle between ethnography and Marxist social anthropology in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Professor Sture Lagercrantz’s focus on material culture and what today we would see as an odd interest in a diffusionist theoretical framework were countered by a strongly politicised anthropology in the late 1960s and early 1970s in which Associate Professor Kajsa Ekholm was a key figure. In Uppsala, the appointment of Professor Anita Jacobson-Widding was a turning point. She was not really part of either camp, and she returned to the University after a career at Swedish Radio. Anita was the chair for 22 formative years of much of Uppsala Cultural Anthropology, between 1977 and 1999. Yet the move from Ethnography to Cultural Anthropology, or from Lagercrantz to Jacobson-Widding, as it were, was not all that streamlined. In the 1980s, when I started as a student, we had several teachers referring to themselves as “ethnographers” rather than “anthropologists.” Among those it was particularly Docent Lars Sundström and Docent Kerstin Eidlitz Kuoljok who explicitly made the point that they were “ethnographers.”

Second, I’d like to mention that anthropological research in and on Africa has a long tradition at Uppsala University. The interest in social change and development was not Anita’s focus per se: she was much more into understanding African folk models, as evidenced by the important volume that she edited with Walter van Beek, titled Creative Communion: African Folk Models of Fertility and the Regeneration of Life (1990). Jacobson Widding’s own Red-White-Black as a Mode of Thought (1979) outlined an analysis of triadic classification by colours in the ritual symbolism and cognitive thought of the peoples of the lower Congo.

Although Anita did not see “development anthropology” as first-class theoretical and methodological anthropology, PhD students and lecturers at the time were interested in this. The Minority Interest Group, founded by Hugh Beach and a group of students (including myself) in the mid-1980s was an important landmark in that it put the engagement and commitment to communities to the fore. We collected funding, not least by hosting the annual “Antropologiskt smörgåsbord” from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, and sent the funds we collected to an Artisan Cooperative in Huahuapuquio in Peru, thanks to contacts provided by Alf Hornborg. So, in the 1990s, most of us who were PhD students were first and foremost interested in contemporary society, social change, development, conflict and war. The late Dr. Bernhard Helander played a key role in this development; his public engagement started when the Barre regime fell in Somalia in 1991 leading to bloody civil war and international intervention. Bernhard, who was a specialist on Somalia’s clan system, thereby turned his research into societal engagement for Somalia in the midst of the US intervention. Moreover, he initiated what later came to be the Living Beyond Conflict (LBC) group, and early on he gave a PhD course on the anthropology of conflict. At the same time, he was also developing a full-time course in African Studies and thus impacted a generation of students. Several of us working at the department today were part of the LBC group. Sverker Finnström’s award-winning work in northern Uganda (2008) is one example. Mats Utas’ innovative work in the midst of the Liberian war (2003) is another. And I have revisited my earlier work on dispute settlement between farmers and herders in Burkina Faso (2001)—at the time a peaceful country—to address rising insecurity, terrorist violence, and community conflicts. Often the farmer-herder conflicts of the 1990s are today’s conflicts between terrorist movements and self-defence groups (Hagberg 2005). Many members of the LBC published chapters in the volume edited by Paul Richards, a long-term friend of Uppsala Anthropology (Richards 2005).

The creation of Uppsala University’s Forum for Africa Studies in 2011 has meant that Uppsala Anthropology, and particularly its African focus, has evolved into an interdisciplinary research centre with the original mandate to gather and make visible Uppsala research and researchers in, on, and with Africa. Since its inception, we have hosted more than 300 events—seminars, conferences, workshops, guest lectures. Increasingly, we are hosting events in African countries too, developing new networks and contexts. This, I would like to argue, is part of how Anthropology became institutionalized at Uppsala University, and it opens up new ways of approaching research topics and trying to grasp culture and society globally.

Emphasis on ethnography has long been a key approach. Today we might further push for a change in the way fieldwork is done, notably to deconstruct the figure of “the lonesome anthropologist” doing fieldwork in distant places and countries. Instead, I anticipate that in the future we will be working in teams and collaborating much more. And, while the majority of Uppsala anthropologists work abroad, it is not any longer a question of necessarily doing research in “non-European cultures.” Sometimes people think that we always work in “distant places.” In effect, we focus on social and cultural phenomena with a global outreach, independently where in the world they are located. The study of conflict and war, spearheaded by Uppsala anthropologists, is not limited to a specific world region (Richards 2005). Similarly, security/insecurity is part and parcel of our lives, though articulated differently in various contexts. For instance, in 2022 we organised a Fieldwork Seminar in Uppsala and Gotland with participants from eight African countries as part of our ongoing research school project Decolonizing Research Methodologies. The theme of the research was “Security and Safety seen and experienced from below,” a theme that we have conceptually developed from research in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, and that we now sought to carry on in parishes of Gotland eight months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, since the island of Gotland is today a geopolitical hotspot. This “travelling” of concepts and models used in our research is to my mind one of the strengths of our department.

As for dark corners, in 2015, in my capacity as President of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG), I took the initiative to stop the Anders Retzius Medal that had been offered to outstanding anthropologists for a long time. Retzius (1796-1860) was a professor in anatomy at Karolinska Institute. He studied many different skull types from different races; because the skulls were so different, he believed that the races had a separate origin. While not really the ancestor of contemporary anthropology—but rather of anatomy—it is true that anthropology by the end of the 19th century included physical, biological and socio-cultural anthropology. In 2015, the SSAG stopped awarding the Retzius Medal, because we felt that it had become untenable to give a medal to leading anthropologists “in the name of” Anders Retzius. In order to implement the very wise and timely decision of the Board, we dissolved the Retzius Medal Fund and instead added resources to create a new medal that we called SSAG’s Medal in Gold. This, to me, was a valuable and relevant way of handling a dark corner in Swedish anthropology.

Alf Hornborg, Lund University

I’m always happy to come to Uppsala, because it gives me an opportunity to see old friends from the years I studied and worked here, back in the ‘80s. And I also like the idea of reflecting on what anthropology is and can be—not least what it can contribute to urgent discussions on global justice, sustainability, and diversity. I did my undergraduate studies in Social Anthropology in Lund, but as they had no separate doctoral programme—and I didn’t want to become a sociologist—I transferred to Uppsala in 1980. I completed my PhD here in 1986 and was then employed as an Assistant Professor (forskarassistent) from 1986 to 1990. After ten years in the Uppsala Department I transferred to Göteborg, where my Uppsala supervisor Kaj Århem had been installed as professor. Finally, in 1993, I moved back to Lund to establish a division for Human Ecology, basing much of the curriculum on inspiration from anthropology.

It was interesting to read Anita Jacobson-Widding’s text “Från antropologi till kulturantropologi” (“From anthropology to cultural anthropology”), which was distributed to the panellists a few weeks ago, because it provides a “prehistory,” so to speak, of Cultural Anthropology in Uppsala. Anita mentions the role of the so-called student revolt in 1968 in splitting Uppsala anthropology into two departments: the Social Anthropology division, affiliated with the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Cultural Anthropology, which held on to a tradition of comparative ethnography.

When I studied Social Anthropology in Lund as an undergraduate in the 1970s, the perspectives we encountered were rooted in the Uppsala type of social anthropology promoted by Kajsa Ekholm (e.g., 1981). The shift to Uppsala for me highlighted some significant differences between the two kinds of anthropology at that time. Just to briefly mention some of the things that most impressed me about Uppsala anthropology in the 1980s:

1. It emphasised ethnography and ethnographic documentation, informed by sophisticated culture theory.
2. It thoroughly justified the anthropological concept of culture (as distinct from an aesthetic one).
3. It taught us the basics of semiotics: particularly, what distinguishes symbols from other signs.
4. It introduced us to the work of Marshall Sahlins, whose 1976 book Culture and Practical Reason was indispensable for many of us.
5. It made us aware of processes of identity formation, both personal and cultural.
6. (Also, it actually got me to read The Elementary Structures of Kinship from cover to cover…)

Coming from Lund, however, what I missed was:

1. A world-system perspective, interpreting local cultural phenomena as generated by larger systems of social reproduction.
2. A radical political stance, concerned with power, inequalities, and justice.
3. Considerations of what is now known as social metabolism: biophysical flows of matter and energy through society, and how they are conceptualised—the kinds of things studied by transdisciplinary fields like political ecology and American, “four-field” anthropologists such as Roy Rappaport and Eric Wolf.

Looking back, I think the two approaches can be synthesised in various fertile ways, particularly by focusing on the way that the global system and local experience are mutually constituted. Anita Jacobson-Widding mentions how the German “culture area” approach informed her vision of regional comparison in Cultural Anthropology. I don’t need to mention how difficult it is to imagine such regional comparison in the increasingly globalised world of the 2020s. I would add that even when it might seem feasible—as when applied to records of “premodern” societies—such tracing of structural affinities across a region needs to adopt a system perspective. A “culture area” should be understood as representing a niche defined by its position in a larger system, and the kinds of structural transformations that Lévi-Strauss and others have traced in different regions of the world are generated by that larger system. But I realise, of course, that such concerns engage very few anthropologists these days.

How is the anthropological focus on culture relevant today? I like to think, like George Marcus and Mike Fischer did in 1986, that anthropology can be used for what they call “cultural critique”. It is only by defamiliarizing the seemingly self-evident concepts that propel the world economy toward social and ecological disaster that we can imagine alternatives. Anthropology could follow Stephen Gudeman in recognizing “economics as culture”: that is, the worldview of mainstream economics, established in colonial Britain in the 1870s, is not written in stone, but could be renegotiated—to save us from climate disaster and, not least, to try to safeguard some of the cultural diversity that is now rapidly being dissolved by the homogenising logic of globalisation. Both these scenarios, I would argue—climate disaster and cultural homogenisation—are ultimately rooted in the way our modern money is designed. Karl Polanyi taught us anthropologists to distinguish between all-purpose and special-purpose money. Such conceptual tools could prove supremely useful in designing what Arturo Escobar calls a pluriverse—a more sustainable, diverse, and decolonial way of organising world society.

Johan Lindquist, Stockholm University

I am here in part as a representative of the Department of Social Anthropology in Stockholm and in part because I studied as an undergraduate at this department in the early 1990s. For the undergraduate, it is generally the teachers who leave their mark rather than broader research programs. I would like to recall three of them who all passed away early: Bernard Helander was a leading scholar on Somalia who also published the Somalia News Update, a widely distributed Internet newsletter; Jan Ovesen was in many ways the iconic ethnographer, who conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, and Laos; and Peter Bretschneider, who died just last month, published a dissertation titled Polygyny: A Cross-Cultural Study, based on data from the Human Relations Area File, and was able to explain Lévi-Strauss and kinship with great clarity. Although I remember them primarily through their teaching and personal engagements, it also strikes me that they represent the great diversity of research interests and approaches in the department. In fact, in his chapter in Kaj Århem’s edited volume Den antropologiska erfarenheten, “The Anthropological Experience,” Per Brandström described the department in the late 80s as a “breathing room” which accommodated a diversity of research interests.

As an outside observer, I do think that Uppsala has generally had a more diverse research environment than other departments in Sweden. Certainly, there has been and continues to be a strong focus on the African continent following the interests of the earlier Chair Professor, Anita Jakobson-Widding, through the department’s formative years since the late 1970s. At the same time, her particular version of symbolic anthropology was arguably not quite in line with ongoing broader developments in anthropology during the late 1980s and 90s, and it was perhaps that which afforded the diverse theoretical directions in the department that remain to this day.

Finally, one of the questions we were asked to address was: How should Uppsala anthropology situate itself in the future based on its profile, tradition, and past? To be perfectly honest, I am not sure Uppsala or Stockholm, or any department for that matter, should think about this question differently. Certainly, there is a strong focus on Africa that is institutionalised through teaching and research programs, run, for instance, by scholars like Sten Hagberg, and at times funding opportunities appear that are highly consequential. I do think, however, that most innovative research generally emerges through smaller and often individual projects that develop over time. The challenge that we all face–as a department that is–is striking a balance between already existing research programs and developing themes that lead in new directions. Perhaps, then, the “breathing room” in which a diversity of research interests can thrive could continue to be the intellectual guiding light of the department, as a kind of counterpoint to current calls for specialisation.

Charlotta Widmark, Uppsala University

I came to the department as a research student almost exactly 30 years ago after bachelor studies at the Department of Social Anthropology in Stockholm. I was welcomed by Professor Anita Jacobson-Widding and was struck by the difference between the departments in Stockholm and Uppsala, but it took me a while to understand why. One reason was that the department in Uppsala was smaller than the one in Stockholm with a closer relation between students and teachers, and located within the traditional Uppsala University environment.

As Anita Jacobson-Widding writes in her article on the history of anthropology in Sweden from 1982, the department’s own “life history” has been of great importance for the development of its specialisation. The department has been populated by many strong wills, which at times have been in conflict with each other. For example, when I came to the department in 1993, the postcolonial turn had taken place and there was a noticeable tension between its advocates among the doctoral students and the permanently employed teachers. This had been going on for a while. Several distinct research interests have coexisted regionally and thematically, sometimes competing for space.

This relates to what I see as the strength of the department, a regional breadth that covers almost the entire world and several strong research clusters that function in parallel. In the 1990s, the environment was led by Professor Anita Jacobson-Widding, working on cognitive and symbolic anthropology. Her interest in the individual and the strong actor perspective is something several of us former doctoral students have been influenced by—something we noticed after graduation in meetings with colleagues from other universities. Another focus was developed on political ecology and indigenous peoples with Professor Hugh Beach, which generated a lot of research and he was later appointed to lead the department after Anita. A third environment was focusing on war and conflict situations, etc. The Living Beyond Conflict research group, initially led by Dr. Bernard Helander, brought together researchers and doctoral students and was very successful in its outreach. Gradually, studies in medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, development anthropology and urban anthropology were developed. In recent years, the department has been characterised by the multidisciplinary environments Engaging Vulnerability led by Professor Don Kulick and the Forum for Africa Studies led by Professor Sten Hagberg. The fact that there are several strong research clusters is a strength, and makes the research environment of the Department less vulnerable.

In regional terms, when Professor Jacobson-Widding was in charge of the research environment the often-mentioned Africanist orientation dominated with the largest number of researchers and PhD students. The department also had a successful course in African Studies. Since I have not focused my studies on that part of the world, I want to mention that the department also had a course in American Studies and hosted the International Congress of Americanists with thousands of participants, an association where Professor Jan-Åke Alvarsson continued to work, including as chair. In the 2000s, the Africanist specialisation continued but the group of researchers working on the circumpolar area under the leadership of Professor Hugh Beach has also been prominent, as has the focus on Asia through Jan Ovesen and Ing-Britt Trankell. In recent years, we have also succeeded in incorporating researchers with a focus on the Middle East, resulting in a broader range of expertise.

In the 2000s, the department merged with our sister subject, ethnology. I believe the positive effects of the cooperation with ethnology can be reaped above all in the framework of the education led by joint directors of studies. Here we must also mention the merger with the University College of Gotland, which developed more within the framework of digital teaching. In the collaboration that has taken place on courses and programs, we have had to see similarities and differences and what constitutes our common starting point in the study of the human being as a social and cultural being. The focus on ethnography is one of our joint interests and the focus on ethnography is very much a hallmark for the kind of anthropology we produce and are proud of at the department. That and long-term fieldwork may have been more emphasised here compared to other departments in the country. But we anthropologists are not alone working with ethnography: there is a broader interest in ethnography from many different disciplines. The department could take advantage of this experience to develop the methodological tools and adapt them to any object of study in the world.

Discussion

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: Thank you all five so very much. I think we’ve been given a broad picture of what the department has been through, the theoretical development, the methodological specialisations and area studies. And we have a vast repertoire to work from here. So, I’ll start with posing a few questions to the panellists and then we’ll invite the public to join in directing reflections or questions on to the panellists.

I also read Anita Jacobson-Widding’s text with great interest, and one thing among others that she stopped to reflect on was the notion of cultural anthropology and what that means in relation to social anthropology. And, towards the very end of the text, she says something like: “With the notion of cultural anthropology, pretty much everything is permitted.” A lot of things can go under that label, and I think some of you actually alluded to that. So, I’ll start by directing this question to you, Sten. This very broad notion of “the cultural” feeds into the diversity of interests that you have at the department. What good has it done for the department? And what shadows or dark sides has it contributed?

STEN HAGBERG: Thank you. That’s a difficult one because I think we are living this variety and we love it. We have never, over the last twenty years at least, had any regionally-focused announcement or position. And we often don’t want to have a thematic focus on positions either. We are all lecturers or professors of anthropology, regardless of our foci. Of course, anyone who is leading a research group is always interested in having someone working in their field, but I think that in a collegial way we have always tried to give everyone a chance and see who can compete. That allows people to come with new ideas they can link with other research projects. I’d like to add something about collaboration with other departments. I think that a lot has happened in this area over the last ten, fifteen years. The most rewarding collaboration for me has been the launch of kritisk etnografi: Swedish Journal of Anthropology in 2018. The journal is owned by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography and the editors-in-chief are Jörgen Hellman in Göteborg and myself. And on the editorial board we have anthropologists from different universities. So I agree with Johan that sometimes collaboration comes easier when there is a third party bringing us together. Societies like the Swedish Anthropological Association (SANT) and the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG) make it easier to work together.

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: Thank you very much, Sten. I think Johan wanted to come in here on this topic.

JOHAN LINDQUIST: Yeah, I’d like to address the issue of cultural vs. social anthropology. I think it was you, Alf, who talked about this distinction in Sweden and in Uppsala after 1968. There are historical reasons why Uppsala does cultural anthropology compared to other departments in Sweden but, beyond those, this distinction has always been mysterious to me. What is the difference? No one can really explain it, except with reference to debates within British anthropology. And the further we move along, the more anachronistic it becomes. Actually, at Stockholm now I can announce that we are discussing changing the name of our department to the Department of Anthropology to avoid that confusion. I’m not suggesting that you do that here too but in general I think we can all agree that that dichotomy between, sort of, American and British anthropology collapsed long ago, right?

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: And Alf, I’m going to borrow a phrase from Sten. Friction is good, I think you said, Sten. And you actually spoke about that, Alf, that here in Uppsala you missed the focus on world systems and power and inequality. So, could you say something more about that? How do you see that being articulated, possibly, now and in the future?

ALF HORNBORG: I just retired from thirty years of teaching Human Ecology, and very few of our students actually have a background in anthropology. I realise what a challenge it is to get people to understand what we anthropologists mean by culture if they don’t have that background. It would be conservative to continue looking for culture areas and for similarities in certain areas. I understand that anthropology has left that behind, but I still think the concept of culture is extremely important to understand to what extent the symbolic cultural dimension permeates everything we say, think, and do. I think most people don’t have a clue about what we mean by “culture”—and I say this to you as anthropologists. There’s a real challenge for anthropology to maintain the concept of culture, especially as an analytical tool. I mean, we were taught that culture was something that was socially negotiable, that it’s a matter of social conventions. Like language itself, which has served as a template for culture theory for so many. And maybe this sounds conservative to new generations of anthropologists, but I like to hold on to the concept of culture as a critical tool.

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: Right. And so, the concept of culture and the discipline itself are relevant today more than ever, you said, Carina. We all agree on this, but how exactly do you see it being relevant now? You mentioned the polarisation in the world, inequalities, vulnerabilities, we can add to that long list. But if you were to expand a little bit on what you implied here, what would you point to?

CARINA GREEN: Precisely to those things. A polarised world, a growing critique of multiculturalism, the climate change threat that we face—all these societal issues that are so fundamental for us today. Anthropology can have an important part to play here. I think we are the best equipped to bring out that complexity that is always there, the messiness of things. Maybe the friction of things, you know? The in-betweens, the grey zones. The challenge for us, of course, is to be able to convey this in what we often think is a simplistic way on the TV news, for instance, or in media, where we have to be short and fast. We should train ourselves in doing that more and more. But I think in this polarised world, with all the challenges that we face as humanity, anthropology is needed to scrape the surface and do thick description.

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: Charlotta, you gave us a rich picture of some trajectories in the department. I would like to ask you one of the more difficult questions, actually. But maybe each and every one can chip in here. Over the decades, now 60 years at least, that anthropology has been around here, what are the key turning points as you see it in the history of the department? It could be points of friction, points of agreement or, you know, a big lump sum of money that gave you the opportunity to do this and that, or the emergence of that “breathing space.” What do you see as some of the key points in the history of the department?

CHARLOTTA WIDMARK: There are several such points. The first that comes to my mind has to do with what Carina mentioned, the move from Trädgårdsgatan to this Humanities Centre in Engelska Parken: before, the department used to be more isolated, and coming here we met other disciplines within the Faculty of Arts. That was also the time when we merged or deepened our collaboration with the ethnologists. After a while we also got more new staff. I was the Head of Department for a while and worked with recruitment, and I remember thinking that actually almost everyone working at the department had done their PhD at Uppsala. But after a while, not only because of us, but because of university policies, the recruitment processes changed and we got more people from other places, and now there is a little bit more variety within the department.

HUGH BEACH: I’d like to mention what I consider major turning points, after 40 years, more or less, at the same department. To start off, when I came, signing up as a doktorand (PhD student) meant knocking on the door of Sture Lagercrantz and saying, “I’ve been herding reindeer for four years and I would like to write it up.” And he said, “Okay, just go on. You are now a doktorand at the department.” Now it’s all applications and people are sometimes let in and sometimes refused and things like that. Back then the university gave you nothing. You didn’t have a computer, you didn’t have a phone, you didn’t have an office. All they did was they promised they would get somebody to read through your dissertation and see if it would pass. So, for them, it was a freebie, especially since they got money for every dissertation that was produced. We, the people that used to come and still do come to study anthropology, they’re often what the Swedes call eldsjälar (driving spirits). They really want to get their thing out and they’ve been spending their life at it. It’s not just seen as a job, it’s a calling. And that’s their interest and they want to get it done. But there are also others that see it as they want to get a job and they’re going to apply to Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) and that’s how they see their career. And that’s fair enough. But how does the funding that you brought up here play into this? Well, time reform said you’re going to get funded. But then it causes all these kinds of terrible breakdowns in relations. You’re signing these study plans and saying to your mentor, “If I’m not done in four years, it’s your fault.” “No, it’s your fault.” It’s somebody’s fault.

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: So, it’s the institutionalisation of the doktorandutbilding, the PhD education, the funding system, and also the structuration of the departments in general that also affected the relations and the profiling, perhaps, of the department. And this of course brings us to the question of the external factors that influence the setup, the profile of the department. So maybe I can throw this from you, Hugh, to the panel, and Sten is already on it. So what are some of the most important external factors that influence the makeup of the department?

STEN HAGBERG: There are so many external factors that have already been mentioned: the funding system, the key to distribute resources within the faculty, and so on. As a department, we are better off today in the sense that we have representation on all different levels, and we are also seen as one of the big departments of the faculty. One very big issue that is hitting us hard now is the new government’s cut of development research, what is called Uforsk (Utvecklingsforskning). The most important was to cut the projects with bilateral cooperation. We have a long-standing collaboration with Mozambique. We also had a collaboration with Burkina Faso, and we also have two PhD students from Bolivia. And the cuttings announced by the new government are a real concern for us. And I myself am one of those taking a lead nationally to fight this… And then the minister is saying you should apply for funding elsewhere. Yes. But the point is that we have a specific kind of research, and if we are going to compete with anyone else on these issues, many will succeed, but also a lot of research will not get done.

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: It is indeed a major challenge to development research and it’s a threat to not just anthropology, but to several disciplines and to free research in those areas.

NATHAN LIGHT: It occurs to me I haven’t heard a discussion of sort of the positioning of Uppsala theoretically and regionally, relative to nearby countries, relative to the rest of Europe, relative to the US and Canada. I was thinking Hugh might want to talk about that. It comes out a little bit in the discussion on social versus cultural anthropology, because in the US we don’t really distinguish them. People don’t really get all up in arms about that. You’d have to go to Britain to know what is strictly social anthropology. And when I went to Germany, there was this huge gap, as most of the anthropologists there are trained in the European or British tradition, so they completely miss out on a lot of Americanist ideas, approaches, and so on. It’s not the same in Uppsala in that way, and part of it is because of particular influences. So I’d be interested in what people have to say about this.

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: Who feels inclined to pick up on that very “easy” question? Johan?

JOHAN LINDQUIST: Well, I can’t really identify an Uppsala school of anthropology. I mean, Hugh Beach was working on the circumpolar issues, a very strong geographical concern, Anita Jacobson-Widding was an Africanist, and I think both of those traditions exist in the department. But I’d say, if there is a kind of stamp for Uppsala, it is the ethnographic stamp. Ethnography rather than theory. Or ethnographic theory. Some years ago Dominic Boyer was in Stockholm. We were talking and he says, “you know, I recognize this, Stockholm is very familiar compared to Rice,” because we had Ulf Hannertz in Stockholm and Rice had George Marcus. “After they retired, it feels like post-authoritarian environments.” And not in a necessarily negative way, right? There’s this kind of diversification of interests. So we had these chair professors for a while, and now the chair professors are gone. That’s another kind of institutional reform. That opens up for more diverse kinds of intellectual profiles in departments. The relationship between institutional reform and intellectual change, and also the chasing of grants, have become increasingly important. And that’s not just true in Sweden, of course, but also in Europe. Hence the demand for performance and auditing and what have you. Reacting against this kind of audit culture is really important. And again, back to the “breathing room.” How do we debate and how do we discuss and how do we develop ideas independently of institutional demands? I see in our latest call for PhD students (at Stockholm University), we had a lot of great students working on multispecies issues. So we also see how there’s an intellectual force emerging from below that comes out of anthropological scholarship. So I think we need to also be attentive to these intellectual forces emerging from below, since, you know, faculty tend to be more conservative given that we’re around for a longer time than the students.

STEN HAGBERG: I agree. I think ethnography is really what brings many of us together. And I would like to mention another kind of development in the way of doing ethnographic research: the importance of collaboration. Collaboration is key today in the context of decoloniality and decolonization. For us working in the Global South, this is evident, but I think it’s not limited to the Global South. In my work in West Africa, we are working a lot in teams nowadays, with scholars from Mali, Burkina Faso, and together we do field research, working in different municipalities, and then we do the analysis together. This is also a way to decolonize anthropology and decolonize research practice, so that it’s not the authority of the professor from Uppsala, but it’s a joint creation. And this is not just me. Sverker Finnström has his long-term collaboration with Jimmy Otim, who was his research assistant and who is now a PhD student in Gulu and in Aarhus. Mats Utas has several projects on the broker and the research assistant. So it’s not just about ethnography, but about finding new ways of doing it collaboratively.

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: That should open up the discussion for further reflection, because this is not just, as you say, a way of doing ethnography, but it also feeds into theories of decolonisation and the democratisation of knowledge production.

CARINA GREEN: I think we often take it for granted that that’s part of doing ethnographic fieldwork. We create relationships that will last a lifetime from our fieldwork. But that is very specific for our discipline, really. My colleagues in sociology think this is very strange in a way. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit here, but they do their interviews, they transcribe the interviews, they code them, and voila, they have their data. That is one way of doing it, but that’s not our way. And I just think it’s a practice that we don’t reflect enough on.

CHARLOTTA WIDMARK: I just wanted to add one thing here in relation to theory, namely that, as Johan also said, it comes from the bottom up. When I was a PhD student, the postcolonial turn was there, and it was the PhD students who promoted a new way of looking at theory. Back then we had the phenomenological approach of Anita (Jacobson-Widding), but the new things came from the PhD students. And when I see what theories are attractive to our PhD students and our master’s students, such as the more-than-human, the ontological turn, and so on, I think it comes from the bottom up. Take digital ethnography, for example: that’s something that no one in the permanent staff is doing, but half of our master’s students are working on that.

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: I agree. I just wonder whether what Johan said about the structural post-authoritarian picture of our departments, if I may say so, does that relate to the diversification of methods, theory and so on in the departments? Is there a link there, or are these just two different aspects of doing anthropology? The organisation of the discipline and the way in which we do it? Collaboration, bottom-up research, learning from the younger ones.

JOHAN LINDQUIST: At times there are strong programmes that garner support and create a critical mass. We have a group like that in our department now, which is focused on more-than-human ethnography, and that reflects the times and allows for access to funding, because it’s in the air. What I think really creates an environment of intellectual innovation is seminars and discussion groups and reading groups, that there’s a kind of intensity of discussion that is not necessarily focused on one issue, right? It’s really important to remain curious about other questions and problems. And that, in fact, is what creates the basis for, sort of, cross fertilisation and theoretical innovation.

SUSANN BAEZ ULLBERG: I wanted to throw in something else also and hear what the panel thinks about this other institutional challenge that has come up more recently, which are the ethical vetting procedures and their implications for our anthropological and ethnographic practice. I know in Sweden at least there are, maybe, some changes coming up, hopefully soon.

JOHAN LINDQUIST: There’s this concern with data, overzealous perhaps in academia, while in the private sector data is being captured and organised and profited upon, right? That’s where the real ethical danger is.

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: The question is also what this does to fieldwork. If that has been a distinctive marker of Uppsala Anthropology, which I think we can agree on, the stringency of doing rigorous ethnographic work can be threatened by these new developments, and not just here, but everywhere.

STEN HAGBERG: I think there is one distinction that is important, the distinction between research ethics and the ethical approval bureaucracy. What we would like to have is an ethical discussion that is serious, that is not just ticking a box.

SVERKER FINNSTRÖM: Several of you mentioned this text by Anita Jacobson-Widding from 1982 that she wrote as Chair of Anthropology in Uppsala. There’s a lot of self-confidence in that text: in a sense, she’s outlining the history of anthropology from her point of view. And you have been talking about bottom-up approaches, about collaborations, and I agree with all that. But, you know, Anita was anthropology in a sense. When we talk about Uppsala’s profile, that’s what she thought about it. Then we moved on to the next chair, Hugh Beach. And actually there’s another text and it’s his installation speech, which for me is, well, not really a history of anthropology in Uppsala, but a manifesto of what anthropology can be. Today we don’t really have these… spokespersons of the discipline, and although now we have four full professors in Uppsala, none of them have actually produced any kind of manifesto of what anthropology is from their point of view. They talk about more practical details, but sometimes I miss that and I think students miss it as well. You know, what is anthropology? The only one who has actually somehow addressed that in a manifesto way here today is not a professor of anthropology, it was Alf actually. So I would like to ask the panellists to define anthropology.

ALF HORNBORG: I find it paradoxical that, in this day and age, so many people are talking about post-humanism and multispecies, and all these concepts where the implicit assumption is that there’s no such thing as human exceptionalism. That makes me wonder what the discipline of anthropology is all about. Why do we need a discipline of anthropology if there’s nothing special about the human species? In human ecology students are struggling with this concept of human exceptionalism as being some kind of colonial leftover that we should get rid of. Now I sound really old, I realise that. But we were taught that the symbol is very specific to the human species and, all of a sudden, we’re not different from rats or monkeys. I think this is really a big issue to discuss. Can anybody explain human behaviour except anthropologists? I think the role of symbols is really important. I know that’s Leslie White and that's the 1940s, but it should still be part of our inheritance.

HUGH BEACH: Surely you don’t mean that other species are devoid of all symbols.

ALF HORNBORG: I do mean that, yes. I follow Charles Sanders Peirce in saying that there are three kinds of signs: indexes, icons, and symbols. And humans are alone in using symbols. They’re based on conventions, not on contiguity or similarity, but on social convention.

HUGH BEACH: We bandy about the concept of culture a lot. If you have a society, let’s say there’s an Eskimo group, and they run out of food up in the north. They used to herd reindeer or something like that, and suddenly there’s no food. So most of them move out. Some of them remain and, instead of moving out, they eat pizza because they can get pizza at the local shop. And then the news gets in: “The Eskimo are abandoning their culture.” But it turns out that it’s thanks to the pizza that they’re able to stay up there and continue other parts of their culture. So who’s abandoning what culture? This reminds me very strongly of the words of my mentor, Gregory Bateson, who said to me once, “change on one level occurs to maintain unchanged more primary relationships.” So, we’ve got change going on to keep things steady.

CHRISTINA GARSTEN: Thank you, Hugh. That’s very encouraging. We need to round off here, and I think it would be nice to give each of you a chance to make a brief statement towards the end, on Uppsala Anthropology, towards the future.

CARINA GREEN: Uppsala Anthropology in the future… Where to start? First, I think Uppsala Anthropology has a great foundation now for going into the future with a lot of doctoral students. I’ve been away for a couple of years and there seems to be a buzz at the department now that bodes well for the future. And I think a lot of things that have been brought up here today are also things that Uppsala Anthropology can bring with it. Creating new manifestos of what is anthropology. What do we know? What do we not know?

STEN HAGBERG: I think we are a department within a very strong institution, Uppsala University, and we have a good place in this university. Today, in a world that is coming more and more together, we also need to stand up for the kind of specific knowledge that we can bring to the table.

ALF HORNBORG: I’m an outsider since the 1980s, but from afar, I think Uppsala Anthropology is extremely well-respected, not only for its ethnographic method but also for the concept of culture. And I don’t think it’s a complete coincidence that it’s called “cultural anthropology.” I think we need at least some place in Sweden where you can still define cultural anthropology, and where the word “culture” actually means something that makes us different from other species.

JOHAN LINDQUIST: Well, I look forward to the manifesto from the Gang of Four Professors. Something that I’ve been thinking about, which is not just about Uppsala, but about anthropology in general, is the value of ethnography today, because ethnography is a kind of methodological practice that is different from other kinds of methodologies. And that’s because it responds to the problem that Bourdieu raises, that people don’t do exactly what they say they do. I think that the fact that ethnography is being dispersed amongst other disciplines is significant, that there is a recognition that it responds to issues that make it relatively unique. There is funding from the Swedish Research Council on national research schools, and I think we should create a national research school in ethnography and bring together different departments and reclaim ethnography as the heart of anthropology, the intimate relationship between ethnographic description and theory. And I’m thinking about ethnography and theorisation as intimately linked, not as sort of layered upon one another.

CHARLOTTA WIDMARK: Yes, I agree that we have a special point there in relation to ethnography that we could develop, and we have a lot to build on. Besides, Uppsala Anthropology and other departments have all the possibilities of becoming or being really relevant for society. In this extremely turbulent world where we are right now, it seems like the anthropological perspective is more important than ever. That is what I would wish for going forward: a voice of anthropology in society.

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