Department of
Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology

Cultural Anthropology

A workshop on Legal Pluralism and the Rule of Law was organised in November 2008 with the participation of four West African researchers: Isabelle Anani (Benin), Issa Diallo (Burkina Faso), Faring Ba (Mali), and Bachir Talfi Drissa (Niger)

West Africa Discussion Group

In the West Africa Discussion Group Uppsala-anthropologists focus on issues related to identity, politics and the state in local arenas in West Africa. The group consists of lecturers, researchers and PhD-students of the department, but is simultaneously connected to networks of scholars in Europe and West Africa. The West Africa Discussion Group hosts workshops and guest lectures.

Several individual research projects form part of the West Africa Discussion Group. Sten Hagberg's work focuses on a wide range of issues in Burkina Faso, including ethnicity and associational life, as well as decentralization and local democracy. Sita Zougouri's research on forest management and local power is another strand. Gabriella Körling's research on perceptions and imagination of the State in Niger looks in to the school and the health station as privileged sites of observation. Jesper Bjarnesen studies youth and mobility among Ivoirians returning to Burkina Faso, the country of origin of their parents. Ulrika Andersson Trovalla focuses on medicine and politics in Jos, Nigera. Mats Utas's research on youth and war in Liberia and Sierra Leone is another focus.

The West Africa Discussion Group also includes master students who did Minor Field Study, such as Ulrik Jennische's study on perceptions of democracy in Ghana, Katrina Bergander's study on dirt and cleanliness in a rural municipality of Mali, and Josefine Lindström's work on memory of the translatlantic slave in the cultural heritage of Gorée Island in Senegal.

Current master students working in West Africa include Nina Miller's study of daily encounters between HIV/AIDS-positive teenage mothers' and health care and health care personnel in a municipality in Burkina Faso and Aîda Sanogo's study of people who have been resettled after the inondations in Ouagadougou on 1 September 2009.

While the research focus on West Africa is growing, many public activities of the group are now channelled in the research group on Democratic Culture and Local Development in Africa.

Le goudron à Gongasso, Mali

CURRENT EVENTS

The project "Spheres of opposition": In October 2011 Sten Hagberg and Gabriella Körling started up fieldwork on municipal politics in Mali. In December 2011-January 2012 Gabriella Körling fieldworked on municipal politics in Niger. In April-May 2012 Sten Hagberg fieldworked on municipal politics in Burkina Faso.

Jesper Bjarnesen is currently finalising his PhD-dissertation on youth and mobility in the Burkinabe-Ivorian Transnational Space. Jesper participated in the ESF workshop New Approaches for Researching the Determinants of Migration Processes, organized by the International Migration Institute (IMI) at Oxford University 29-30 September 2011.

Aïdas Sanogo fieldworks in Burkina Faso April-June 2012.

Ulrika Andersson Trovalla with a PhD-thesis succesfully defended in May 2011, holds a short-term employment as researcher of the urban cluster at Nordic Africa Institute.

Gabriella Körling successfully defended her PhD dissertation In Search of the State: An Ethnography of Public Service Provision in Urban Niger in September 2011.

Fall 2011 Nina Miller is doing her ERASMUS-semester as exchange student at Université Paris Ouest.

Issa Diallo presented a paper on "Contribution des langues locales au respect des droits de la femme en milieu rural mossi à tradition orale"