H Englund
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 18631 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | H Englund |
| NOMBRES | H |
| APELLIDO | Englund |
| FIRMA | ENGLUND H |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6063-4986 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 40 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 420 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 40 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Cutting freedom down to size
Freedom, as a concept and a value, presents limited prospects for anthropological comparison. The study of enslavement, much neglected in attempts to develop an anthropology of freedom, shows that freedom has been imagined by the enslaved as the opposite of their condition only under particular circumstances. An exploration of vernacular opposites to enslavement reveals obligations rather than freedom as having the potential to expand the scope o…
African Literature in Transition
This book offers a compelling vision of the dynamism of local printing presses across colonial Africa and the new textual forms they generated. It invites a reconceptualisation of African literature as a field by revealing the profusion of local, innovative textual production that surrounded and preceded canonical European-language literary traditions. Bringing together examples of print production in African, Europea and Arabic languages, it exp…
Expansive Languages in Nineteenth-Century Central Africa
In many parts of Africa, the mass production of printed texts began with Christian missions. Missionaries’ descriptions of African languages and their compilation of dictionaries were essential for the emergence of print cultures. However, missionary linguistics mirrored missionary politics. Two Protestant missionaries in Central Africa, one in Congo and the other in Malawi, differed in their views on both African languages and the European prese…
Visions for Racial Equality
Focusing on David Clement Scott, the head of the Church of Scotland mission in Malawi, who came to see Europeans as learners in Africa, this innovative book narrates the rise and demise of a unique vision for racial equality in nineteenth-century Africa. By immersing himself in the vernacular language and institutions, Scott developed a theology of reversals to pursue justice in race relations. It set him on a collision course with the Church, co…
Love and homophobia in Malawi's spoken-word poetry movement
By the early 2010s, a number of Malawian poets in their twenties had begun to substitute the elliptical expression of earlier generations with a language that resonated with popular idioms. As poetry directed at 'the people', its medium is spoken word rather than print, performed to live audiences and distributed through CDs, radio programmes and the internet. Crafted predominantly in Chichewa, the poems also address topics of popular interest. T…
Prisoners of Freedom
In this vivid ethnography, Harri Englund investigates how ideas of freedom impede struggles against poverty and injustice in emerging democracies. Reaching beyond a narrow focus on the national elite, Prisoners of Freedom shows how foreign aid and human rights activism hamper the pursuit of democratic citizenship in Africa. The book explores how activists’ aspirations of self-improvement, pursued under harsh economic conditions, find in the human…
The front line of free speech
Among Finland's public-service broadcasters, there is a contrast between professional ethics and the "fearless speech" of parrhêsia. This contrast reveals some of the diverse forms in which free speech is pursued in contemporary liberal polities. In 2015, Kansanradio (The people's radio), a popular Finnish radio show, became a site for fresh controversies over free speech when the so-called migrant crisis dominated its discussions. Caught between…
Gogo Breeze
Human Rights
Human rights, as described in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a set of moral and legal principles that apply to all human beings irrespective of their age, sex, religion, nationality, and other such characteristics. Yet they can only ever be claimed and applied in specific historical and cultural circumstances. It is from recognising this basic paradox between a universal principle and its practical application th…
Law, law everywhere
Comment on Obarrio, Juan. 2014. The spirit of the laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Multivocal morality
Multivocal morality concentrates attention on the ideologies of voice in efforts to narrate boundary-crossing moral dilemmas. This article's focus on the relationship between narrative and sentiment in moral transgression brings together two distinct bodies of literature. One is anthropologists' recent statements about a disciplinary shift from the study of law-like morality to ethical reasoning. The other is literary scholars' emphasis on the no…
Forget the Poor
Gogo Breeze, a popular radio personality in Zambia's Eastern Province, responds to his listeners' frequent evocations of poverty by refusing to consider them as members of the generic poor. Instead, he deploys idioms of kinship by which his status as the listeners' grandfather on air assigns him moral authority that is both intimate and infallible. In this article I examine radio kinship in the context of abundant labor and scarce opportunities t…
Anti Anti-Colonialism
African newspapers published in vernacular languages, particularly papers sponsored by colonial governments, have been understudied. A close reading of their contents and related archival sources provides insights into diverse ways in which the colonized framed and made claims. New kinds of claims were mediated by the government-sponsored vernacular press no less than by nationalists. Just as vernacularism was not nativism, African aspirations th…
The Place of Theory
The relationship between theory and place has remained a central problem for the discipline of anthropology. Focusing on debates around the concepts of human rights and networks, specifically as these traverse African and Melanesian contexts, this article highlights how novel ideas emerge through sustained comparison across different regions. Rather than understanding places as sources of theories to be applied to other contexts, we argue that an…
Zambia at 50
Zambia at 50:The Rediscovery of Liberalism Harri Englund (bio) Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (eds), One Zambia, Many Histories: toward a history of post-colonial Zambia. Leiden: Brill (pb €44 – 9789004165946). 2008, 304 pp. Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (eds), Living the End of Empire: politics and society in late-colonial Zambia. Leiden: Brill (pb €43 – 9789004209862). 2011, 333 pp. David M. Gordon, In…
Radio in Africa
Reclaiming the anthropology of claim-making
Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations
The suggestion that the anthropological study of morality is theoretically undeveloped carries with it the risk of caricaturing ideas of moral obligation in mid-twentieth-century social anthropology. The need for recovering aspects of these ideas is demonstrated by the tendency of moral philosophers to reduce the issue of world poverty to a question of ethical choices and dilemmas. Examining the diplomatic tie that had existed for almost 42 years…
Pentecostalism Beyond Belief
The concept of belief, when applied in its strong sense, assumes an inner state that sets believers apart from non-believers. This article suggests that a concept of trust is more appropriate for the study of the religious orientation among Pentecostal Christians in Chinsapo, an impoverished township in Malawi's capital city. Trust is a critical issue because even fellow members of Pentecostal congregations can turn out to have been sent by the D…
Witchcraft and the limits of mass mediation in Malawi
This article explores what the study of witchcraft in an African setting can contribute to current efforts to theorize mass mediation and the imagination it fosters. Recent ethnographies of witchcraft discourses in Africa have continued to associate them with the formation of small-scale groups, but evidence from Malawi shows how they enable subjects to imagine sociality on an indeterminate scale. The article deploys the concept of mediation to t…
Critically Modern
Gender Relations in African-Language Literature
Priests, Witches and Power
Maia Green, Priests, Witches and Power: popular Christianity after mission in Southern Tanzania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hard covers £40, US$60, ISBN 0 521 62189 5). 2003>, 180 pp. - Volume 74 Issue 4
Towards a Critique of Rights Talk in New Democracies
As an institutionalized form of human rights discourses, rights talk plays a prominent role in recently democratized countries. It also poses a challenge to critical analysts of language, because its contribution to maintaining inequalities is not apparent in its emancipatory rhetoric. This article examines rights talk at a non-governmental centre for free legal aid in Malawi. By deploying the notion of narrative inequality, the article shows how…
Cosmopolitanism and the Devil in Malawi
The article contributes to recent attempts to provide historically and ethnographically nuanced accounts of cosmopolitanism. A central argument in the article revolves around the notion of situated cosmopolitanism. While cosmopolitanisms must be envisaged in the plural, common to these diverse cultural projects is an uneasy relation to the home that imposes itself on the subject. Pentecostal Christians in an impoverished township in Malawi consid…
Witchcraft, Modernity and the Person
L'A. affirme que les discours de sorcellerie dans le district de Dedza a Malawi sont des discussions sur la maniere dont la prosperite peut etre acquise d'une facon moralement acceptable (contraire a l'individualisme) plutot que des reactions a l'imposition d'un ordre global de production, de transaction et de consommation de matieres premieres. Depuis que la population de Dedza participe aux relations de ces biens dans le cadre de la migration d…
Ethnography After Globalism
Sites and places present analytical problems to ethnographers who acknowledge the reality of global flows but doubt their I iberatory potential. In this article, I suggest that ethnographers move beyond the rhetoric and organizing assumptions of globalism not simply by discarding the local-global distinction but also by interrogating the analytical tendency to disconnect culture from place. Such a tendency appears to contribute to the resilience …
The Village in the City, the City in the Village
While the impact of transnational migration on Malawi's economic and social history is widely recognised, less is known about the country's urbanisation. The end of large-scale labour recruitment to South Africa appears to have increased internal migration, further encouraged by the political transition in the early 1990s. On the basis of fieldwork among migrants in a poor 'squatter' settlement in the capital, the article shows the economic and s…
Pentecostalism Beyond Belief
The concept of belief, when applied in its strong sense, assumes an inner state that sets believers apart from non-believers. This article suggests that a concept of trust is more appropriate for the study of the religious orientation among Pentecostal Christians in Chinsapo, an impoverished township in Malawi's capital city. Trust is a critical issue because even fellow members of Pentecostal congregations can turn out to have been sent by the D…
The self in self-interest
This article examines agricultural labour contracts and household-based production in Dedza District, Malawi. Deepening impoverishment seemingly creates conditions for profound social changes. In agriculture, small-scale contracts rather than big work parties mobilise the bulk of 'extra-domestic' labour. Although labourers are paid in cash or in kind, they are most often the recruiter's relatives or affines. The pattern fits, therefore, uneasily …
Witchcraft and the limits of mass mediation in Malawi
This article explores what the study of witchcraft in an African setting can contribute to current efforts to theorize mass mediation and the imagination it fosters. Recent ethnographies of witchcraft discourses in Africa have continued to associate them with the formation of small-scale groups, but evidence from Malawi shows how they enable subjects to imagine sociality on an indeterminate scale. The article deploys the concept of mediation to t…
Cosmopolitanism and the Devil in Malawi
The article contributes to recent attempts to provide historically and ethnographically nuanced accounts of cosmopolitanism. A central argument in the article revolves around the notion of situated cosmopolitanism. While cosmopolitanisms must be envisaged in the plural, common to these diverse cultural projects is an uneasy relation to the home that imposes itself on the subject. Pentecostal Christians in an impoverished township in Malawi consid…
Christian Independency and Global Membership
Recent scholarship on Pentecostalism in Africa has debated issues of transnationalism, globalisation and localisation. Building on Bayart's notion of extraversion, this scholarship has highlighted Pentecostals' far-flung networks as resources in the growth and consolidation of particular movements and leaders. This article examines strategies of extraversion among independent Pentecostal churches. The aim is less to assess the historical validity…
A Different Kind of War Story
Death, trauma and ritual
From War to Peace on the Mozambique-Malawi Borderland
From War to Peace on the Mozambique-Malawi Borderland is the first full-length ethnography to tell villagers' stories from war to peace in Mozambique. Extended case studies of particular villages and families on the Mozambique-Malawi borderland form the core of the book. While tracing their paths to war, exile and post-war reconstruction, the book reveals the human face of national and transnational crises. This detailed study takes the reader be…
Towards a Critique of Rights Talk in New Democracies
As an institutionalized form of human rights discourses, rights talk plays a prominent role in recently democratized countries. It also poses a challenge to critical analysts of language, because its contribution to maintaining inequalities is not apparent in its emancipatory rhetoric. This article examines rights talk at a non-governmental centre for free legal aid in Malawi. By deploying the notion of narrative inequality, the article shows how…
Forget the Poor
Gogo Breeze, a popular radio personality in Zambia's Eastern Province, responds to his listeners' frequent evocations of poverty by refusing to consider them as members of the generic poor. Instead, he deploys idioms of kinship by which his status as the listeners' grandfather on air assigns him moral authority that is both intimate and infallible. In this article I examine radio kinship in the context of abundant labor and scarce opportunities t…
The dead hand of human rights
This article shows the importance of understanding the pluralism of moral ideas in contemporary Africa. Although the discourse on human rights is only one aspect of that pluralism, it threatens to overshadow other ways of conceiving human dignity. The impact of the ‘human rights talk’ can be observed in Christian churches, and the article contrasts elite and lay practices in Catholic and pentecostal churches in Malawi. Drawing upon rural and urba…
The front line of free speech
Among Finland's public-service broadcasters, there is a contrast between professional ethics and the "fearless speech" of parrhêsia. This contrast reveals some of the diverse forms in which free speech is pursued in contemporary liberal polities. In 2015, Kansanradio (The people's radio), a popular Finnish radio show, became a site for fresh controversies over free speech when the so-called migrant crisis dominated its discussions. Caught between…
Multivocal morality
Multivocal morality concentrates attention on the ideologies of voice in efforts to narrate boundary-crossing moral dilemmas. This article's focus on the relationship between narrative and sentiment in moral transgression brings together two distinct bodies of literature. One is anthropologists' recent statements about a disciplinary shift from the study of law-like morality to ethical reasoning. The other is literary scholars' emphasis on the no…
Anti Anti-Colonialism
African newspapers published in vernacular languages, particularly papers sponsored by colonial governments, have been understudied. A close reading of their contents and related archival sources provides insights into diverse ways in which the colonized framed and made claims. New kinds of claims were mediated by the government-sponsored vernacular press no less than by nationalists. Just as vernacularism was not nativism, African aspirations th…
Critically Modern
Zambia at 50
Zambia at 50:The Rediscovery of Liberalism Harri Englund (bio) Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (eds), One Zambia, Many Histories: toward a history of post-colonial Zambia. Leiden: Brill (pb €44 – 9789004165946). 2008, 304 pp. Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (eds), Living the End of Empire: politics and society in late-colonial Zambia. Leiden: Brill (pb €43 – 9789004209862). 2011, 333 pp. David M. Gordon, In…
Culture, environment & the enemies of complexity
This article assesses recent debate regarding dimensions of post‐cold war conflict in Africa. It reviews the populist, and influential assertion that the ‘coming anarchy’, in Africa and elsewhere, is the result increasingly of clashes between cultures rather than states, and that these nation states necessarily give rise to primordial ethnicities. There continues to be a view that Africa's ills lie with overpopulation, environmental degradation a…
Law, law everywhere
Comment on Obarrio, Juan. 2014. The spirit of the laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Reclaiming the anthropology of claim-making
Waiting for the Portuguese
(1996). Waiting for the Portuguese: Nostalgia, exploitation and the meaning of land in the Malawi‐Mozambique Borderland. Journal of Contemporary African Studies: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 157-172
Priests, Witches and Power
Maia Green, Priests, Witches and Power: popular Christianity after mission in Southern Tanzania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hard covers £40, US$60, ISBN 0 521 62189 5). 2003>, 180 pp. - Volume 74 Issue 4
Waiting for the Portuguese
(1996). Waiting for the Portuguese: Nostalgia, exploitation and the meaning of land in the Malawi‐Mozambique Borderland. Journal of Contemporary African Studies: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 157-172
Witchcraft, Modernity and the Person
L'A. affirme que les discours de sorcellerie dans le district de Dedza a Malawi sont des discussions sur la maniere dont la prosperite peut etre acquise d'une facon moralement acceptable (contraire a l'individualisme) plutot que des reactions a l'imposition d'un ordre global de production, de transaction et de consommation de matieres premieres. Depuis que la population de Dedza participe aux relations de ces biens dans le cadre de la migration d…
Church, Law and Political Transition in Malawi, 1992-94
From War to Peace on the Mozambique-Malawi Borderland
From War to Peace on the Mozambique-Malawi Borderland is the first full-length ethnography to tell villagers' stories from war to peace in Mozambique. Extended case studies of particular villages and families on the Mozambique-Malawi borderland form the core of the book. While tracing their paths to war, exile and post-war reconstruction, the book reveals the human face of national and transnational crises. This detailed study takes the reader be…
Culture, environment & the enemies of complexity
This article assesses recent debate regarding dimensions of post‐cold war conflict in Africa. It reviews the populist, and influential assertion that the ‘coming anarchy’, in Africa and elsewhere, is the result increasingly of clashes between cultures rather than states, and that these nation states necessarily give rise to primordial ethnicities. There continues to be a view that Africa's ills lie with overpopulation, environmental degradation a…
Death, trauma and ritual
A Different Kind of War Story
The self in self-interest
This article examines agricultural labour contracts and household-based production in Dedza District, Malawi. Deepening impoverishment seemingly creates conditions for profound social changes. In agriculture, small-scale contracts rather than big work parties mobilise the bulk of 'extra-domestic' labour. Although labourers are paid in cash or in kind, they are most often the recruiter's relatives or affines. The pattern fits, therefore, uneasily …
Ethnography and the Meta‐Narratives of Modernity
Current attempts to increase the relevance of sociocultural anthropology encourage anthropologists to engage in the study of modernity. In this discourse dominated by sociologists, the contribution of anthropology is often to reveal cultural diversity in globalization, leading to the notion of multiple modernities. Yet such ethnographic accounts draw upon familiar sociological abstractions such as time‐space compression, commodification, individu…
The dead hand of human rights
This article shows the importance of understanding the pluralism of moral ideas in contemporary Africa. Although the discourse on human rights is only one aspect of that pluralism, it threatens to overshadow other ways of conceiving human dignity. The impact of the ‘human rights talk’ can be observed in Christian churches, and the article contrasts elite and lay practices in Catholic and pentecostal churches in Malawi. Drawing upon rural and urba…
Religion in Malawi
Ce travail presente trois ouvrages de Kenneth Ross (le premier etant aussi de J.C. Chakanza) parus en 1998 : Religion au Malawi : Bibliographie annotee qui realise une bibliographie commencee presque vingt ans plus tot au departement de Theologie et d'Etudes religieuses de l'Universite du Malawi. Voici venir votre roi ! Christ, Eglise et nation au Malawi, qui rassemble quelques-uns des articles recents de Ross ayant contribue a faire de lui l'ecr…
The Village in the City, the City in the Village
While the impact of transnational migration on Malawi's economic and social history is widely recognised, less is known about the country's urbanisation. The end of large-scale labour recruitment to South Africa appears to have increased internal migration, further encouraged by the political transition in the early 1990s. On the basis of fieldwork among migrants in a poor 'squatter' settlement in the capital, the article shows the economic and s…
Africanizing Anthropology
Ethnography After Globalism
Sites and places present analytical problems to ethnographers who acknowledge the reality of global flows but doubt their I iberatory potential. In this article, I suggest that ethnographers move beyond the rhetoric and organizing assumptions of globalism not simply by discarding the local-global distinction but also by interrogating the analytical tendency to disconnect culture from place. Such a tendency appears to contribute to the resilience …
Christian Independency and Global Membership
Recent scholarship on Pentecostalism in Africa has debated issues of transnationalism, globalisation and localisation. Building on Bayart's notion of extraversion, this scholarship has highlighted Pentecostals' far-flung networks as resources in the growth and consolidation of particular movements and leaders. This article examines strategies of extraversion among independent Pentecostal churches. The aim is less to assess the historical validity…
Gender Relations in African-Language Literature
Priests, Witches and Power
Maia Green, Priests, Witches and Power: popular Christianity after mission in Southern Tanzania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hard covers £40, US$60, ISBN 0 521 62189 5). 2003>, 180 pp. - Volume 74 Issue 4
Towards a Critique of Rights Talk in New Democracies
As an institutionalized form of human rights discourses, rights talk plays a prominent role in recently democratized countries. It also poses a challenge to critical analysts of language, because its contribution to maintaining inequalities is not apparent in its emancipatory rhetoric. This article examines rights talk at a non-governmental centre for free legal aid in Malawi. By deploying the notion of narrative inequality, the article shows how…
Cosmopolitanism and the Devil in Malawi
The article contributes to recent attempts to provide historically and ethnographically nuanced accounts of cosmopolitanism. A central argument in the article revolves around the notion of situated cosmopolitanism. While cosmopolitanisms must be envisaged in the plural, common to these diverse cultural projects is an uneasy relation to the home that imposes itself on the subject. Pentecostal Christians in an impoverished township in Malawi consid…
Critically Modern
Pentecostalism Beyond Belief
The concept of belief, when applied in its strong sense, assumes an inner state that sets believers apart from non-believers. This article suggests that a concept of trust is more appropriate for the study of the religious orientation among Pentecostal Christians in Chinsapo, an impoverished township in Malawi's capital city. Trust is a critical issue because even fellow members of Pentecostal congregations can turn out to have been sent by the D…
Witchcraft and the limits of mass mediation in Malawi
This article explores what the study of witchcraft in an African setting can contribute to current efforts to theorize mass mediation and the imagination it fosters. Recent ethnographies of witchcraft discourses in Africa have continued to associate them with the formation of small-scale groups, but evidence from Malawi shows how they enable subjects to imagine sociality on an indeterminate scale. The article deploys the concept of mediation to t…
Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations
The suggestion that the anthropological study of morality is theoretically undeveloped carries with it the risk of caricaturing ideas of moral obligation in mid-twentieth-century social anthropology. The need for recovering aspects of these ideas is demonstrated by the tendency of moral philosophers to reduce the issue of world poverty to a question of ethical choices and dilemmas. Examining the diplomatic tie that had existed for almost 42 years…
The Place of Theory
The relationship between theory and place has remained a central problem for the discipline of anthropology. Focusing on debates around the concepts of human rights and networks, specifically as these traverse African and Melanesian contexts, this article highlights how novel ideas emerge through sustained comparison across different regions. Rather than understanding places as sources of theories to be applied to other contexts, we argue that an…
Zambia at 50
Zambia at 50:The Rediscovery of Liberalism Harri Englund (bio) Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (eds), One Zambia, Many Histories: toward a history of post-colonial Zambia. Leiden: Brill (pb €44 – 9789004165946). 2008, 304 pp. Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (eds), Living the End of Empire: politics and society in late-colonial Zambia. Leiden: Brill (pb €43 – 9789004209862). 2011, 333 pp. David M. Gordon, In…
Sociology (30 obras) · Political science (29 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Politics (15 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (14 obras) · Gender Studies (13 obras) · Philosophy (13 obras) · African history and culture studies (12 obras) · Anthropology (12 obras)