Ulf HannerzProfessor emeritus

About me

Ulf Hannerz was Professor of Social Anthropology 1981-2007 (acting professor 1976-80). He received his Ph.D. at Stockholm University in 1969 and has also taught at several American, European, Asian and Australian universities. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, an honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, an honorary member and former Chair (1995-96) of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), a former director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS), and a former editor of the journal Ethnos. He was the Anthropology editor for the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2001). He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1984-85, gave the Lewis Henry Morgan lectures at the University of Rochester in 2000, a Munro Lecture at the University of Edinburgh in 2002, the Daphne Berdahl Memorial Lecture at the University of Minnesota in 2011 and the Eric R. Wolf Memorial Lecture at Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna, in 2014. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Oslo, and in 2010 he received the Anders Retzius gold medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography. His two most recent books, published in 2022, are Afropolitan Horizons: Essays toward a Literary Anthropology of Nigeria och Två Kråkor håller inte med: essäer om mångfald i den globala byn.

Research
Ulf Hannerz has conducted field research in a Black neighborhood in Washington, DC, on the Cayman Islands and in a small town in Nigeria, as well as a multilocal study of the working life of newsmedia foreign correspondents in Jerusalem, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Hong Kong. Later he has studied the global scenarios which emerged as a genre at the end of the Cold War, treating them both as texts and as components in an emergent transnational collective consciousness. With professor Andre Gingrich, Vienna, he has coordinated an international comparative project of anthropological studies of small countries. He has also led an interdisciplinary research project on cosmopolitanism. Most recently he has engaged in literary anthropology through a scrutiny of Nigerian writing, with an emphasis on transnational motifs, relating to his earlier field studies in Nigeria. Theoretical work has resulted in earlier books on urban anthropology, cultural complexity and transnational anthropology.

Selected publications

Books in English, and translations into other languages (books in Swedish are listed in the Swedish-language section of the website)

1969   Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community. New York: Columbia University Press.

1974   Caymanian Politics: Structure and Style in a Changing Island Society. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, no. 1.

1980   Exploring the City: Inquiries toward an Urban Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press.

1983   Explorer la ville. Paris: Editions de Minuit. (French edition of Exploring the City.)

1986   Exploración de la Ciudad. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. (Spanish-language edition of Exploring the City.)

1992   Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.

1992    Culture, Cities and the World. Amsterdam: Centrum voor Grootstedelijk Onderzoek. (pamphlet)

1992    Esplorare la città. Bologna: il Mulino. (Italian edition of Exploring the City.)

1996    Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge.

1998    Conexiones transnacionales. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. (Spanish edition of Transnational Connections.)

1998    La complessità culturale. Bologna: il Mulino. (Italian edition of Cultural Complexity.)

2000    ed., with Kjell Goldmann and Charles Westin, Nationalism and Internationalism in the Post-Cold War Era. London: Routledge.  

2000    La diversità culturale. Bologna: Il Mulino. (Italian selection from Transnational Connections.)

2004   Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2004    Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Second edition, with new afterword.) 

2006   Odkrywanie miasta. Krakow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego. (Polish translation of Exploring the City.)

2006    Powiazania transnarodowe. Krakow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego. (Polish translation of Transnational Connections.)

2010   Anthropology’s World: Life in a Twenty-first Century Discipline. London: Pluto Press.

2010    La complexité culturelle: Études de l’organisation sociale de la signification. Bernin: À la Croisée. (French translation of Cultural Complexity, with new foreword.)

2012   Il mondo dell’antropologia. Bologna: Il Mulino. (Italian translation of Anthropology’s World.)

2015   Explorando a Cidade: Em Busca de Uma Antropologia Urbana. Petrópolis, RJ: Editora Vozes. (Portuguese translation of Exploring the City.)

2016   Writing Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

2017   (ed., with Andre Gingrich) Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

2019   World Watching: Streetcorners and Newsbeats on a Journey through Anthropology. London: Routledge.

2022    Afropolitan Horizons: Essays Toward a Literary Anthropology of Nigeria. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. 

2022   Två kråkor håller inte med: Essäer om mångfald i den globala byn.     Stockholm: Carlssons.

2024   Resenärer: svenska röster om världens mångfald 1900-1960. Stockholm: Appell Förlag.

 

Articles, book chapters in recent years

2025   1960s Washington, DC: Field Work with Soul. In Nigel Rapport, ed., Anthropology’s Philosophy: How Anthropology Makes Concepts its Own. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

 2024   Cultural Complexity. In Abitare le Diversitá: Culture e complessitá nuove. Colle di Val d´Elsa: Fondazione Intercultura.

2023   Swedish anthropology in the rear view mirror: Before 1960. Kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology, 6(1): 81-106.

 2023 Kafanchan: A Nigerian Town and its Global Horizons. In Deborah Pellow and Suzanne Scheld, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Africa and Urban Anthropology. London: Routledge.

2022  Anywheres, Somewheres and the Faces of Cosmopolitanism. In Peter Beyer, ed., Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application: Essays in Honour of Roland Robertson. Leiden: Brill.

2021   Afterword: East Asia – Being There and Being Elsewhere. In Frank Pieke and Koichi Iwabuchi, eds., Global East Asia.  Berkeley: University of California Press. 

2021   Writing Nigeria, Past and Present. Anthropology News website, September 21.

2021   Studying Sideways: My Grandfather’s Cousin, Missionary in China. Asian Anthropology, 20(4): 269-277.

2020   Afterword: A Rooted Cosmopolitan Remembered. In Robert P. Weller and Keping Wu, eds., It Happens Between People. Oxford: Berghahn. 

2019   World Order of Languages, Public Anthropology, Translations. American Anthropologist, 121: 210-212. 

2019   Winners, Losers and Ethnic Flux. In Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Marek Jakoubek (eds.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries Today: A Legacy of Fifty Years. London: Routledge.
2018   Swedish Anthropology: Past and Present. Kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology, 1(1): 55-68. 
2018   Sweden, Anthropology in. In Hilary Callan, ed., The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Oxford: Wiley.
2018   Cosmopolitanism: Three Faces. Przeglad Kulturoznawczy, 1(35): 130-133.
2017  (with Andre Gingrich) Exploring Small Countries. In Ulf Hannerz and Andre Gingrich, (eds.), Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.      
2017   Swedish Encounters: End Notes of a Native Son. In Ulf Hannerz and Andre Gingrich, (eds.), Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 

2017   American Theater State: Reflections on Political Culture. In Virginia H. Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, eds., America Observed. Oxford: Berghahn.

2016  Writing Otherwise. In Helena Wulff, (ed.), The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Berghahn.