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.
Culture, Cities and the World. Amsterdam: Centrum voor Grootstedelijk Onderzoek.
(pamphlet)
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.)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Articles, book chapters in recent years
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.
Writing Nigeria, Past and Present. Anthropology News website, September 21.
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.
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.
Sweden, Anthropology in. In Hilary Callan, ed., The International Encyclopedia of
Anthropology. Oxford: Wiley.
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.
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.
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.