B E Bertelsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 13505 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B E Bertelsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | B E |
| FAMILY NAME | Bertelsen |
| SIGNATURE | BERTELSEN B E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bergen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3194-3664 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 93 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Text, art and ambulation against detachment: Alternatives to enclaving in Maputo
The dire inequalities that characterize African cities are often described in terms of structural or neoliberal violence, and anthropological analyses typically depict disparate patterns of exclusion, dehumanization and violence – including urban patterns of ‘enclaving’. Even though such analyses are crucial, we argue that studies of Africa should also identify urban practices of relationality, mutuality and collectivity; we approach these practi…
Enclaving: Materializing detachment and attachment across African cities
For decades, African urban spaces have been characterized by rapid expansion, great transformation, vast economic growth, and experimentation with new material and spatial formats, developments famously inspiring The Economist to adorn its front page in 2011 with an ‘Africa Rising’ cover. Yet, we know that such developments have been very uneven – not just between cities and countries but also within urban orders.
In/visibilizing statehood: Contemporary warfare governance
War is changing globally. This collection suggests that the notion of "warfare governance" provides an analytical tool to grapple with a contemporary world where most wars and forms of large-scale or endemic violence unfold in domains, territories, and on scales beyond the format and trope of a war with clear fronts. Crucially, what we argue to be forms of warfare governance has risen in prominence beyond widely disseminated and mass-mediated glo…
Between Resilience and Radicalisation: Reassessing the Trajectory of Internally Displaced Populations in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique
Displacement is an endemic phenomenon that affects those uprooted, the communities that feel the impact of those arriving, governments, and the international agencies which are increasingly engaged in organising the displaced. The current war in the north of Mozambique, which has caused a massive displacement of people from 2017 onwards, may be related to a number of factors, including economic, social and even political. Although some actors and…
Ambulerende omsorg. Eller, spekulasjon i møte med byers oppløsning og framtidens slutt i Maputo
Grell ulikhet i globale storbyer forklares ofte som et resultat av strukturell eller nyliberal vold og antropologiske analyser skildrer gjerne mangeartede eksklusjonsmønstre, dehumanisering og vold. Selv om slike framstillinger er velbegrunnede, har, mener vi, antropologer et avgjørende oppdrag i å også identifisere bypraksiser rettet mot former for omsorg, empati og gjensidighet. I denne artikkelen utforsker vi slike praksiser hovedsakelig i for…
Urban polarisering: Antropologiske bidrag
Dette spesialnummeret er viet antropologiske studier av urbane formasjoner og fokuserer særlig på polarisering og det sosiale livet som utspiller seg i møte med denne. Særlig søker vi å utforske og sammenligne de mangeartede og mangetydige konsekvensene av en langvarig, global dreining mot nyliberal byutvikling og byplanlegging. Som bidragene viser så innebærer dette ofte at urbane fellesskap og rom omdefineres. Genereringen av mangeartede og oms…
Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania
Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. They included Norwegian shipowners, captains, and diplomats; traders and whalers along the African coast and in Antarctica; large-scale plantation owners in Mozambique and Hawai’i; big business men in South Africa; jacks of all trades in the Solomon Islands; tim…
Introduction Norwegians Navigating Colonial Orders in Africa and Oceania
Chapter Nine Sorcery and Death Squads Transformations of State, Sovereignty, and Violence in Postcolonial Mozambique
Egalitarian Lives and Violence: Community Policing in Mozambique
Since independence in 1975, Mozambique has experimented with society-state relations, including an Afro-socialist revolutionary transformation followed by a multi-party democracy with nominal state functions, such as policing. Building on fieldwork, this article analyzes the genealogy and practices of community policing, arguing that while its emergence reflects a global transformation of state apparatuses reliant on securitization, this transiti…
An Introduction to Egalitarian Thought and Dynamics
In this introduction we approach egalitarianism as an upsetting force that in various ways has shaped much of modern, especially Western, human history. We outline philosophical trajectories from the Enlightenment onward; consider the historical realization of an agency of ‘the people’ for the articulation of state, society, and politics; and highlight some issues that arise when the claims to freedom and equality clash against established instit…
A Shadowy 'City of Light: Private Urbanism, Large-Scale Land Acquisition and Dispossession in Ghana
The rapid expansion of African cities has created both housing deficits and a pluralization of urban orders, including the growth of slum settlements. With an ever-increasing middle class, urban sub-Saharan Africa is now also characterized by large-scale land acquisition processes linked to the construction of wholly private and increasingly enclaved cities. This article maps the impacts of the Appolonia City of Light project-a privately built en…
Cracks in the System and Anthropology: A Response to Bråten
We begin by thanking our colleague Eldar Bråten for taking the time to read and comment on our article with such thoroughness. We continue right away with a response. A key aspect of Bråten's critique is his claim that it is difficult to understand how we reason and, therefore, 'how to discern substantial arguments in texts that overflow with evocative and metaphoric prose?' In order to reply to such a concern, we choose to, first, take a step ba…
Civil war and the non-linearity of time: Approaching a Mozambican politics of irreconciliation
At least 1 million people died during the Mozambican civil war (1976/7-92). Unfolding after gaining independence from Portugal (1975) and alongside experiments with Afro-socialism in the 1980s, the war, despite its brutality, has not been subjected to global templates of reconciliation processes. Thus it comprises a unique case to probe what irreconciliation might mean - both as a political horizon and as an analytical concept. This text juxtapos…
A lesser human? Utopian registers of urban reconfiguration in Maputo, Mozambique
In the age of climate change, human life’s pliability is also re-shaping anthropological debates. For debates centring on the urban domain, questions revolve around flexibility, adaptability and resilience, while in work drawing on the Anthropocene similar ideas of human beings as subsumable to Gaia are emerging. This article reflects on how these perspectives interweave and imply a paradoxical human figure. On the one hand, they convey a being t…
Utopian confluences: Anthropological mappings of generative politics
In this introductory essay, we introduce the possibility of an anthropology of generative politics, focusing in particular on its utopian unfoldings. We depart from the recognition that the current global political landscape is exposing new forms of collective mobilisation that challenge prevailing understandings of ‘the human’, collective agency and chronotopical experiences. Through a critical review of anthropological and other scholarship on,…
Enclaving: Spatial detachment as an aesthetics of imagination in an urban sub-Saharan African context
While detachment and separation continue to be central to urban development across the globe, in several sub-Saharan African cities they have acquired a particular form of acute social and political efficacy. In many European and American cities, the making of fortified enclosures is considered to be an effect of an endemic fear of societal dissolution, and a growing number of sub-Saharan African cities are, seemingly, affected by a similar socio…
Just out of Reach: Imminence, Meaning, and Political Ontology in Mozambique
The leader of Mozambique's Renamo party, Afonso Dhlakama, died on May 3, 2018. His death both necessitates an ethnographic, regionally comparative rethinking of the analytical approach to the dominant Mozambican political parties (Frelimo and Renamo) as diametrically opposed formations from independence onward and invites a more general reconsideration of anthropological approaches to politics and the trajectory of African postcolonial states. Ba…
Catholicism and the Making of Politics in Central Mozambique, 1940–1986, by Eric Morier-Genoud
Emergent Police States: Racialized Pacification and Police Moralism from Rio’s Favelas to Bolsonaro
The Pacifying Police Units, rolled out in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics, were part of a police intervention conceived to end the logic of war that characterized the city’s public security policies. As such, it adopted “so” strategies of policing aimed at reducing violence and asserting state sovereignty in “pacified” favelas. Drawing on a postcolonial framework of analysis, we argue that these favelas can be understood as sites…
D avid M orton . Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique
How does one approach and make sense of the material form of housing in an African city such as Maputo? David Morton’s beautifully and eloquently written book provides multiple and equally interesting answers, and he does so by charting the city’s—and thereby Mozambique’s—rocky course from the 1940s, when it was a Portuguese colonial capital, and through various political upheavals until the present age, concentrating on the postindependence (197…
Knut Christian Myhre: Returning Life: Language,Life Force and History in Kilimanjaro
Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique, written by Premawardhana, Devaka
Mozambique on the Move: Challenges and Reflections
Being a first of its kind, this volume comprises a multi-disciplinary exploration of Mozambique’s contemporary and historical dynamics, bringing together scholars from across the globe. Focusing on the country’s vibrant cultural, political, economic and social world – including the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial era – the book argues that Mozambique is a country still emergent, still unfolding, still on the move. Drawing on the …
Zachary Kagan Guthrie. Bound for Work: Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 1940–1965
In what ways can one approach the issue of labor in colonial regimes? How was labor lived, negotiated, sought, evaded, and enforced in the Portuguese colonies in southern Africa? These are key questions raised by Zachary Kagan Guthrie in Bound for Work: Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 1940–1965, a clearly argued, quite eloquent, and overall highly successful work. Because the work draws on an impressive amount of origina…
Effervescence and Ephemerality: Popular Urban Uprisings in Mozambique
This article analyses the large-scale popular urban uprisings that shook Mozambican cities on 1 and 2 September 2010, following the government's announcement of successive rises in the price of public transport fares and basic commodities. Using ethnographic material from the city of Chimoio and the capital Maputo, the following work highlights the organisational character of the 'strikes' (greves), as the popular uprisings were called, and explo…
Engaging, transcending and subverting dichotomies: Discursive dynamics of Maputo's urban space
Historically, while cities such as Mozambique's capital Maputo have been analysed as divided into 'formal 'and 'informal' spaces, contemporary approaches tend to emphasise the heterogeneity and plasticity of African urbanities. Drawing upon original ethnographic material gathered from fieldwork in 2012/2013, we reframe the analysis of such cities through recognition of novel forms of urban imaginaries, emergent narratively, that may take the shap…
Enclaving: Spatial detachment as an aesthetics of imagination in an urban sub-Saharan African context
While detachment and separation continue to be central to urban development across the globe, in several sub-Saharan African cities they have acquired a particular form of acute social and political efficacy. In many European and American cities, the making of fortified enclosures is considered to be an effect of an endemic fear of societal dissolution, and a growing number of sub-Saharan African cities are, seemingly, affected by a similar socio…
The politics of affect
This article is based on the transcript of a roundtable on the rise of the far-right and right-wing populism held at the AAA Annual Meeting in 2017. The contributors explore this rise in the context of the role of affect in politics, rising socio-economic inequalities, racism and neoliberalism, and with reference to their own ethnographic research on these phenomena in Germany, Poland, Italy, France, the UK and Hungary
And Its Other Worlds: Global events and (anti-)state dynamics in France, Mozambique and Vanuatu
This article de-centres the moment, event and impact of 1968 and expands it temporally and spatially. Taking a longue durée approach charting a trajectory from the 1960s into the 1980s, we analyse statist and anti-statist dynamics through a comparison of the May 1968 Paris riots with the Nagriamel movement in Vanuatu and the phenomenon of Naparama in Mozambique. Such a horizontal triangulation and spatio-temporal expansion is undertaken to contri…
Anthropology and 1968: Openings and closures
It is now 50 years since 1968 and in this article we look back at the 1960s and the way that anthropology was shaped in those years. We find a period of rupture, generational upheaval, youthful exploration against authority and spiritual breaks with rationality and causality thinking, but also violent counter-insurgency and inventions of new authoritarian state forms. Our purpose is to look back at that period and reframe how those years were for…
A Shadowy 'City of Light: Private Urbanism, Large-Scale Land Acquisition and Dispossession in Ghana
The rapid expansion of African cities has created both housing deficits and a pluralization of urban orders, including the growth of slum settlements. With an ever-increasing middle class, urban sub-Saharan Africa is now also characterized by large-scale land acquisition processes linked to the construction of wholly private and increasingly enclaved cities. This article maps the impacts of the Appolonia City of Light project-a privately built en…
Moving at the margins to re‐centre anthropology – Interview with Bruce Kapferer
Just out of Reach: Imminence, Meaning, and Political Ontology in Mozambique
The leader of Mozambique's Renamo party, Afonso Dhlakama, died on May 3, 2018. His death both necessitates an ethnographic, regionally comparative rethinking of the analytical approach to the dominant Mozambican political parties (Frelimo and Renamo) as diametrically opposed formations from independence onward and invites a more general reconsideration of anthropological approaches to politics and the trajectory of African postcolonial states. Ba…
Entering the Red Sands: The Corporality of Punishment and Imprisonment in Chimoio, Mozambique
This article probes the understandings and experiences of punishment and imprisonment in and around Chimoio, Manica Province, Mozambique. Focusing on two cases of imprisonment under severe conditions in the provincial agricultural prison of Chimoio, the article argues that corporal punishment is part of the punitive infrastructure of both the colonial and post-colonial state. Analysing the two contrasting cases, the article probes the significanc…
Heart of darkness reinvented? A tale of ex‐soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Respond to this article at http: (Www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
This article presents the contemporary case of two Norwegian ex‐soldiers sentenced to death for murder, espionage and mercenary activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It analyses the wider context of the historical roots of Norwegian engagement in the Congo (now DRC) as well as the mass‐mediated discourses centring around the tropes of a Conradian ‘Heart of darkness’. Further, using the insights of Johannes Fabian's seminal work on e…
Antropologien og staten. En innledning
Urban polarisering: Antropologiske bidrag
Dette spesialnummeret er viet antropologiske studier av urbane formasjoner og fokuserer særlig på polarisering og det sosiale livet som utspiller seg i møte med denne. Særlig søker vi å utforske og sammenligne de mangeartede og mangetydige konsekvensene av en langvarig, global dreining mot nyliberal byutvikling og byplanlegging. Som bidragene viser så innebærer dette ofte at urbane fellesskap og rom omdefineres. Genereringen av mangeartede og oms…
Civil war and the non-linearity of time: Approaching a Mozambican politics of irreconciliation
At least 1 million people died during the Mozambican civil war (1976/7-92). Unfolding after gaining independence from Portugal (1975) and alongside experiments with Afro-socialism in the 1980s, the war, despite its brutality, has not been subjected to global templates of reconciliation processes. Thus it comprises a unique case to probe what irreconciliation might mean - both as a political horizon and as an analytical concept. This text juxtapos…
Å dø her koster ikke noe». Vold, rettsantropologi og suverenitet i det postkoloniale Mosambik
Antropologien og staten. En innledning
Å dø her koster ikke noe». Vold, rettsantropologi og suverenitet i det postkoloniale Mosambik
Bokomtaler
Multiple Sovereignties and Summary Justice in Mozambique: A Critique of Some Legal Anthropological Terms
Mozambique has echoed developments in other sub-Saharan countries by recently 'recognizing' its traditional authorities and extending their powers. Some celebrate this as 'legal pluralism' and what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls a 'heterogeneous state'. I question such assessments on the basis of case material collected in Chimoio, Mozambique, from 2007 to 2008. The two cases presented here explore the 2008 spate of the burning of alleged thiev…
Heart of darkness reinvented? A tale of ex‐soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Respond to this article at http: (Www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
This article presents the contemporary case of two Norwegian ex‐soldiers sentenced to death for murder, espionage and mercenary activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It analyses the wider context of the historical roots of Norwegian engagement in the Congo (now DRC) as well as the mass‐mediated discourses centring around the tropes of a Conradian ‘Heart of darkness’. Further, using the insights of Johannes Fabian's seminal work on e…
Entering the Red Sands: The Corporality of Punishment and Imprisonment in Chimoio, Mozambique
This article probes the understandings and experiences of punishment and imprisonment in and around Chimoio, Manica Province, Mozambique. Focusing on two cases of imprisonment under severe conditions in the provincial agricultural prison of Chimoio, the article argues that corporal punishment is part of the punitive infrastructure of both the colonial and post-colonial state. Analysing the two contrasting cases, the article probes the significanc…
Fear of Small Numbers. An Essay on the Geography of Anger by Arjun Appadurai
Iver B. Neumann: Tilbake til Durkheim. Staten og antropologien
Moving at the margins to re‐centre anthropology – Interview with Bruce Kapferer
Response to Thomas Blom Hansen’s review
Engaging, transcending and subverting dichotomies: Discursive dynamics of Maputo's urban space
Historically, while cities such as Mozambique's capital Maputo have been analysed as divided into 'formal 'and 'informal' spaces, contemporary approaches tend to emphasise the heterogeneity and plasticity of African urbanities. Drawing upon original ethnographic material gathered from fieldwork in 2012/2013, we reframe the analysis of such cities through recognition of novel forms of urban imaginaries, emergent narratively, that may take the shap…
Tore Bjørgo: Strategies for preventing terrorism
Conclusion: Uncapturability, Dynamics, and Power
Uncapturability, Dynamics, and PowerEthnography harbors the power of critique-political, social, and theoretical.Ultimately a capacity to destabilize, this orientation also applies when writing an account of the violence inherent to processes of state formation in Mozambique .While such critical potential may be realized in a number of ways, here I have privileged perspectives forged on the margins of the centers of power, supplemented by histori…
Violence: War, State, and Anthropology in Mozambique
War, State, and Anthropology in MozambiqueHow is one to make sense of state formation as a predominantly violent process?More concretely, how is one, as an anthropologist, to understand one' s interlocutors' repeated insistence on life being a sustained period of suffering (sofrimento)?One point at which to start is with the most recent large-scale period of violence, namely the Mozambican civil war (1976-92).During this phase of violent upheaval…
Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique
Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called ‘traditional’ forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an a…
Valuable Subversions: Gendered Generativity and Sorcerous Production in Central Mozambique
How is one to analyze the existence of a subterranean dwarfish couple (zwidoma) occupying the space underneath cooking places and whose central purpose is to reinforce a market woman’s sales—but simultaneously feeding off her very body? Using urban and rural ethnographic material from central Mozambique, where such assemblages comprising the zwidoma and a woman are integral to economic life and social orders, this article contextualizes such cons…
In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique by Paolo Israel
In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique, by Paolo Israel. Athens, Ohio University Press, 2014. xvi, 329 pp. $32.95 US (paper). Paolo Israel's excellent book is a celebration of creativity, play, and the near limitless human capacity for generating its own realities--in the past and in the present. Through a meticulous mapping of the styles of carving, imagining, and performing masks known as mapiko, we are as readers invited into…
Effervescence and Ephemerality: Popular Urban Uprisings in Mozambique
This article analyses the large-scale popular urban uprisings that shook Mozambican cities on 1 and 2 September 2010, following the government's announcement of successive rises in the price of public transport fares and basic commodities. Using ethnographic material from the city of Chimoio and the capital Maputo, the following work highlights the organisational character of the 'strikes' (greves), as the popular uprisings were called, and explo…
German Pentecostal Witches and Communists: The Violence of Purity and Sameness
This research investigates a commonly held view in certain peri-urban areas around Chimoio, Mozambique, that German Pentecostal pastors and missionaries, as well as German communists, have been operating as witches from the 1990s until the present time. Drawing on ethnographic material (1999–2016), the chapter explores the popular perception that these ‘Germans’ (alemãos) were promulgating an egalitarian value of sameness and an ethos of purity: …
Knut G. Nustad: Creating Africas. Strugglesover Nature, Conservation and Land
Policing and the politics of order-making
This refreshing read addresses a central challenge in global urban formations, namely: which forces and entities execute policing when public or national policing is, arguably, on the retreat? There are, of course, numerous reasons why policing needs to be approached as a practice transcending conventional national policing, a subject amply dealt with in the well-written introduction. Specifically, Kyed and Albrecht very usefully underline how po…
From Celebrating Female Emancipation to Emplacing Emperor Ngungunyane: Remoulding the Past in Mozambican National Narratology
Situating Mozambican Histories, Epistemologies, and Potentialities
Anthropology and 1968: Openings and closures
It is now 50 years since 1968 and in this article we look back at the 1960s and the way that anthropology was shaped in those years. We find a period of rupture, generational upheaval, youthful exploration against authority and spiritual breaks with rationality and causality thinking, but also violent counter-insurgency and inventions of new authoritarian state forms. Our purpose is to look back at that period and reframe how those years were for…
Mozambique on the Move: Challenges and Reflections
Being a first of its kind, this volume comprises a multi-disciplinary exploration of Mozambique’s contemporary and historical dynamics, bringing together scholars from across the globe. Focusing on the country’s vibrant cultural, political, economic and social world – including the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial era – the book argues that Mozambique is a country still emergent, still unfolding, still on the move. Drawing on the …
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (29 works) · Law (25 works) · History (21 works) · Politics (19 works) · Anthropology (14 works) · Geography (14 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · African history and culture studies (11 works)