Department seminar: Sverker Finnström

Seminar paper

Brokers and breakers of war stories in northern Uganda

The talk/paper explores the tensions that built up between two European journalists who had teamed up to shoot a TV documentary on the entanglement of war and development cooperation in Uganda. They arrived in northern Uganda in late 2005, at a moment in history when the International Criminal Court unsealed its arrest warrants for the leadership of the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels. A disconnect quickly built up between the two journalists and between them and the Ugandans they encountered. It was as if the two journalists had arrived to entirely different places, worlds apart.

A parallel theme of the talk/paper deals with epistemological vulnerability, change happenings, and the potentials of social research as such, in zones of civil war as well as elsewhere. Already since the days of Franz Boas and his relativist contemporaries, the anthropological project aims at producing relational ontologies that draw the researcher into conversations and collaborations, a kind of intersubjective endeavor that refuses any position of the researcher as a variable independent to the actual research. Still, a more recent trend is for anthropologists, following the path of other disciplines, to take on the role as overseers of teams of assistants on big yet rigorously defined research projects. In contrast to the open-ended Boasian legacy, this trend depersonalises the researchers’ connection to the so-called field. In exploring the tensions between the journalists and the persons they encountered, the talk/paper explores also the tensions between these two different epistemological legacies.

About the lecturer

Sverker Finnström is Associate Professor in Cultural Anthropology and advisory board member of the Engaging Vulnerability research program at Uppsala University.

Light refreshments will be served in the Corner Room after the seminar. All interested are welcome!