Morten Nielsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3611953 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Morten Nielsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Morten |
| FAMILY NAME | Nielsen |
| SIGNATURE | NIELSEN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8483-164X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 234 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Cambridge Companion to Stand-Up Comedy
Stand-up comedy is one of the simplest theatre forms in existence. The comedian stands on a (usually) bare stage, talking straight to the audience in the hope of getting laughs. Yet it has never been more popular, with national scenes developing across every continent except Antarctica. In this insightful and accessibly written volume, diverse chapters explore the subject from many angles, ranging from national scenes, live venues, and recordings…
Modelling the city: Bedroom drawer blueprints as urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique
It has become a well-rehearsed truism that the growth of sub-Saharan African cities is the result of an amassing of persons, things and knowledge that takes place in the absence of centrally planned development initiatives and without any tightly orchestrated coordination of social life. Under such conditions, the argument goes, urbanites make do with whatever resources are available while increasingly chaotic cities expand beyond their social an…
Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization
Urban chiaroscuro: Plunging into the obscurity of the city
In this article, we examine those facets of the urban that cannot be captured by conventional scalings of the city. Based on ethnographic reflections from Jakarta, Indonesia, and Maputo, Mozambique, we suggest that the notion urban chiaroscuro may offer a productive analytical heuristic for urban theorization of those manifestations of urban life whose nature is never fully captured in any given specification or determination of its conditions. A…
Monumental Misunderstandings: The Material Entextualization of Mutual Incomprehension in Sino-Mozambican Relations
A statue of stainless steel cast in China and placed at the entrance of the new National Stadium in Mozambique sparked controversy between Chinese donors and Mozambican recipients in the period leading up to the stadium’s 2011 inauguration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Mozambican and Chinese nationals involved in the project, we explore the multiple misunderstandings surrounding the statue and show how they came to define Sino-Mozamb…
The Political Aesthetics of Middle Class Housing in (not so) Neoliberal Mozambique
This article explores the social and material repercussions of middle class aspirations in a system that is still infused by socialist aesthetics in Maputo, Mozambique. We argue the activation of “middle classness” reproduces ingrained inequalities and boundaries. This is demonstrated through two ethnographic case studies of urban housing, long central to imaginaries of prosperity. First, fearing downward mobility, members of the upper middle cla…
Natural Resource Extraction in the Interior: Scouts, Spirits and Chinese Loggers in the Forests of Northern Mozambique
In their search for precious hardwood in the forests of northern Mozambique, Chinese logging companies employ locals with knowledge of the forest to scout for trees. Known as olheiros, these tree scouts are indispensable to both Chinese and Mozambican participants in the industry, but, strangely, they are also regarded with scepticism and sometimes even hostility from both sides. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Mozambicans and Chinese invol…
Comedic Lies as Transitory Truths
Distortion: Social Processes Beyond the Structured and Systemic
This text was, in essence, originally circulated as a concept paper at a workshop held at the University of Copenhagen, in January 2012, to inaugurate the project, ‘Optimal distortion: Ethnographic explorations of paradoxical connections’, that had been funded by the Danish Research Board for Culture and Communication (with us as its two principal investigators). By concluding the present volume with an ‘epi-pro-logue’ 1 that was written before t…
Ideological twinning: Socialist aesthetics and political meetings in Maputo, Mozambique
Based on recent ethnographical data from Maputo, Mozambique, this essay examines the revolutionary aesthetics of political meetings in a sociopolitical environment marked by the collapse of a national socialist ideology. Local political meetings in Mozambique articulate a paradoxical tension between sacrifice and revolution . While socialist rule disintegrated in the mid‐1980s, most local political meetings allow for the actualization of the revo…
The Composition Of Anthropology: How Anthropological Texts Are Written
How do anthropologists write their texts? What is the nature of creativity in the discipline of anthropology? This book follows anthropologists into spaces where words, ideas and arguments take shape and explores the steps in a creative process. In a unique examination of how texts come to be composed, the editors bring together a distinguished group of anthropologists who offer valuable insight into their writing habits. These reflexive glimpses…
Urban Times: Temporal Topographies and Non-scalable Cities
This is a proposed special issue with six thematic articles by different contributors on 'urban times' edited by me
Time and the Field
Time and the field
Fremtidens paradoks: Når sproget kollapser
The pataphysical state: Time, debt, and transfigured legalities in The spirit of the laws in Mozambique
Comment on Obarrio, Juan. 2014. The spirit of the laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
A wedge of time: Futures in the present and presents without futures inMaputo,Mozambique
A series of recent anthropological studies on time emphasize the crucial importance of the future as a guiding trope in the present. Although located beyond an immediate temporal horizon, the future is consequently taken as connected to the present in a meaningful way through a sequence of chronological moments and hence potentially accessible. This paper takes its point of departure from the growing body of anthropological work on time and futur…
Trans-temporal Hinges: Reflections on an Ethnographic Study of Chinese Infrastructural Projects in Mozambique and Mongolia
Based on two case studies of Chinese infrastructural interventions in Mozambique and in Mongolia, this article introduces the notion of 'trans-temporal hinge' as a heuristic methodological concept that brings together phenomena and events otherwise distributed across time. The authors explore envelopes used when paying Mozambican workers at a construction site in Maputo and roads dividing Chinese oil workers and local nomads in southern and easte…
Time and the Field
Prompted by the postmodern turn in anthropology, ethnographic fieldwork has been subjected to considerable analytical scrutiny. Yet despite numerous conceptual facelifts, definitions and demarcations of 'the field' have remained fundamentally anchored in tropes of spatiality with the association between field and fieldworker characterized as being maintained by distances in space. By exploring and unfolding the temporal properties of the field, a…
Analogic asphalt: Suspended value conversions among young road workers in southern Mozambique
This article explores the obviational process through which the value of salaries is continuously being transformed, based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among young road workers employed by a Chinese construction consortium to rehabilitate the N1 highway in the southern part of Mozambique. To the Mozambican workers, the value of salaries emerged by gradually dropping the traces of its own origin rather than indexing a fixed ratio between …
Diskussion
Lars Højer: Hvilke ting? Hvilke relationer? Hvilke verdener? Inger Sjørslev: Hvorfor skal forskelligheder være ontologiske? Anders Blok: Med Wittgenstein på kanten af antropologiens sprogspil? Heiko Henkel: Hvad kan 'mangfoldige verdener' gøre for os? Asger F. Simonsen, Toke K. Amlund, Lars Rømer, Astrid Grue og Christina Vega: Rejsen til planeterne M&M Morten Nielsen: Respons Morten Axel Pedersen: Respons
Vi Bebor Mangfoldige Verdener
Debatoplæg. For udsagnet
Roadside Inventions: Making Time and Money Work at a Road Construction Site in Mozambique☆
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a road construction site in southern Mozambique, this article explores the peculiar inverse process through which the road project acquired valuable meaning for young Mozambican workers hired by a Chinese construction consortium to rehabilitate the north–south N1 highway. Without viable alternatives, the Mozambican workers were often compelled to accept the intolerable working conditions that the Chinese company…
Interior Swelling
This article opens with the questions, What is on the inside of a relation? Might we imagine the inner workings of a relational form detached from the elements that it connects? Then, through an ethnographic examination of ancestral interventions among residents in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Maputo, the article challenges conventional understandings of relational forms as the connective "glue" holding together exterior and, to a certain e…
Enquete: Fremtidens eftervirkninger
Intet resumé
Futures within: Reversible time and house-building in Maputo, Mozambique
In this article, I introduce an anthropological approach to time and temporality which suggests that anticipatory actions are not always guided by futures separated from the present through a linear chronology. Whereas time is conventionally understood as a chronological series of succeeding moments, I argue that different temporalities might converge to create durations which cannot be gauged using a linear scale. I consequently explore anticipa…
A wedge of time: Futures in the present and presents without futures inMaputo,Mozambique
A series of recent anthropological studies on time emphasize the crucial importance of the future as a guiding trope in the present. Although located beyond an immediate temporal horizon, the future is consequently taken as connected to the present in a meaningful way through a sequence of chronological moments and hence potentially accessible. This paper takes its point of departure from the growing body of anthropological work on time and futur…
Inverse governmentality: The paradoxical production of peri-urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique
This article examines urban planning on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique, where governance constitutes an ambiguous realm whose imagined opportunities are as enticing as its dangers are frightening. Although state agencies have proven incapable of implementing coherent urban policies, numerous peri-urban areas reflect a remarkable aesthetic regularity. In the article I unfold how it emerged through informal attempts to mimic state-defined urba…
Filling in the Blanks: The Potency of Fragmented Imageries of the State
Recent neo-patrimonial approaches to the state see the sub-Saharan state as a façade that serves – with different degrees of effectiveness – to disguise the play of clientalistic relations and the interests of kin and kith. Drawing on an analysis of how ideas are reproduced in peri-urban areas of Maputo, Mozambique, this article argues that no pre-given causality exists between encounters with a dysfunctional state apparatus and subjectively held…
The Political Aesthetics of Middle Class Housing in (not so) Neoliberal Mozambique
This article explores the social and material repercussions of middle class aspirations in a system that is still infused by socialist aesthetics in Maputo, Mozambique. We argue the activation of “middle classness” reproduces ingrained inequalities and boundaries. This is demonstrated through two ethnographic case studies of urban housing, long central to imaginaries of prosperity. First, fearing downward mobility, members of the upper middle cla…
Roadside Inventions: Making Time and Money Work at a Road Construction Site in Mozambique☆
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a road construction site in southern Mozambique, this article explores the peculiar inverse process through which the road project acquired valuable meaning for young Mozambican workers hired by a Chinese construction consortium to rehabilitate the north–south N1 highway. Without viable alternatives, the Mozambican workers were often compelled to accept the intolerable working conditions that the Chinese company…
Ideological twinning: Socialist aesthetics and political meetings in Maputo, Mozambique
Based on recent ethnographical data from Maputo, Mozambique, this essay examines the revolutionary aesthetics of political meetings in a sociopolitical environment marked by the collapse of a national socialist ideology. Local political meetings in Mozambique articulate a paradoxical tension between sacrifice and revolution . While socialist rule disintegrated in the mid‐1980s, most local political meetings allow for the actualization of the revo…
Urban Times: Temporal Topographies and Non-scalable Cities
This is a proposed special issue with six thematic articles by different contributors on 'urban times' edited by me
Distortion: Social Processes Beyond the Structured and Systemic
This text was, in essence, originally circulated as a concept paper at a workshop held at the University of Copenhagen, in January 2012, to inaugurate the project, ‘Optimal distortion: Ethnographic explorations of paradoxical connections’, that had been funded by the Danish Research Board for Culture and Communication (with us as its two principal investigators). By concluding the present volume with an ‘epi-pro-logue’ 1 that was written before t…
Interior Swelling
This article opens with the questions, What is on the inside of a relation? Might we imagine the inner workings of a relational form detached from the elements that it connects? Then, through an ethnographic examination of ancestral interventions among residents in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Maputo, the article challenges conventional understandings of relational forms as the connective "glue" holding together exterior and, to a certain e…
Analogic asphalt: Suspended value conversions among young road workers in southern Mozambique
This article explores the obviational process through which the value of salaries is continuously being transformed, based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among young road workers employed by a Chinese construction consortium to rehabilitate the N1 highway in the southern part of Mozambique. To the Mozambican workers, the value of salaries emerged by gradually dropping the traces of its own origin rather than indexing a fixed ratio between …
Vi Bebor Mangfoldige Verdener
Debatoplæg. For udsagnet
Modelling the city: Bedroom drawer blueprints as urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique
It has become a well-rehearsed truism that the growth of sub-Saharan African cities is the result of an amassing of persons, things and knowledge that takes place in the absence of centrally planned development initiatives and without any tightly orchestrated coordination of social life. Under such conditions, the argument goes, urbanites make do with whatever resources are available while increasingly chaotic cities expand beyond their social an…
Urban chiaroscuro: Plunging into the obscurity of the city
In this article, we examine those facets of the urban that cannot be captured by conventional scalings of the city. Based on ethnographic reflections from Jakarta, Indonesia, and Maputo, Mozambique, we suggest that the notion urban chiaroscuro may offer a productive analytical heuristic for urban theorization of those manifestations of urban life whose nature is never fully captured in any given specification or determination of its conditions. A…
Natural Resource Extraction in the Interior: Scouts, Spirits and Chinese Loggers in the Forests of Northern Mozambique
In their search for precious hardwood in the forests of northern Mozambique, Chinese logging companies employ locals with knowledge of the forest to scout for trees. Known as olheiros, these tree scouts are indispensable to both Chinese and Mozambican participants in the industry, but, strangely, they are also regarded with scepticism and sometimes even hostility from both sides. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Mozambicans and Chinese invol…
The pataphysical state: Time, debt, and transfigured legalities in The spirit of the laws in Mozambique
Comment on Obarrio, Juan. 2014. The spirit of the laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Nils Bredsdorff: Diskurs og konstruktion. En samfundsvidenskabelig kritik af diskursanalyser og socialkonstruktivismer
Anmeldes af Morten Nielsen
Efterskrift: Hvad er kritisk antropologi
Hvad er kritisk antropologi
For en Opløsning Af Alle Selvfølgeligheder: Et teoretisk bidrag til den kritiske analyse
The article suggests new theoretical and methodical ways of carrying out critical anthropology. The objective is an attempt to integrate a historical awareness in anthropological studies of symbol systems that often are perceived as standig outside history, such as love, morality or even the economic system. The point of departure is a fresh reading of Michel Foucault's later works, where the concept dispositif is being highlighted. Dispositif is…
Krise Og Kritik: Interview med George Marcus
Interviewet af Christian Groes-Green og Morten Nielsen
Filling in the Blanks: The Potency of Fragmented Imageries of the State
Recent neo-patrimonial approaches to the state see the sub-Saharan state as a façade that serves – with different degrees of effectiveness – to disguise the play of clientalistic relations and the interests of kin and kith. Drawing on an analysis of how ideas are reproduced in peri-urban areas of Maputo, Mozambique, this article argues that no pre-given causality exists between encounters with a dysfunctional state apparatus and subjectively held…
Interview af Nigel Rapport: Individualitet Som Dynamit
Interviewet af Morten Nielsen
Introduktion
INTRODUKTION
Contrapuntal cosmopolitanism: Distantiation as social relatedness among house-builders in Maputo, Mozambique
This article explores forms of social relatedness among peri-urban residents in Maputo, Mozambique, which have as their premise that social interaction occurs in a world that is both unknown and potentially dangerous. As I show, reciprocal encounters are therefore based on creating distance rather than approximation. Although people acknowledge the crucial importance of social others, it is important to maintain appropriate distances in order to …
Mimesis of the State: From Natural Disaster to Urban Citizenship on the Outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique
This article explores the generative effects of the flooding that hit Mozambique in 2000. Flood victims from the country's capital, Maputo, were resettled in Mulwene on the outskirts of the city. Although initially envisaged as a 'model neighborhood' based on a set of 'fixed urban norms', it soon became apparent that the Mozambican state was incapable of realizing the project. These failures notwithstanding, residents occupying land informally in…
Enquete: Fremtidens eftervirkninger
Intet resumé
Futures within: Reversible time and house-building in Maputo, Mozambique
In this article, I introduce an anthropological approach to time and temporality which suggests that anticipatory actions are not always guided by futures separated from the present through a linear chronology. Whereas time is conventionally understood as a chronological series of succeeding moments, I argue that different temporalities might converge to create durations which cannot be gauged using a linear scale. I consequently explore anticipa…
Inverse governmentality: The paradoxical production of peri-urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique
This article examines urban planning on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique, where governance constitutes an ambiguous realm whose imagined opportunities are as enticing as its dangers are frightening. Although state agencies have proven incapable of implementing coherent urban policies, numerous peri-urban areas reflect a remarkable aesthetic regularity. In the article I unfold how it emerged through informal attempts to mimic state-defined urba…
Roadside Inventions: Making Time and Money Work at a Road Construction Site in Mozambique☆
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a road construction site in southern Mozambique, this article explores the peculiar inverse process through which the road project acquired valuable meaning for young Mozambican workers hired by a Chinese construction consortium to rehabilitate the north–south N1 highway. Without viable alternatives, the Mozambican workers were often compelled to accept the intolerable working conditions that the Chinese company…
Interior Swelling
This article opens with the questions, What is on the inside of a relation? Might we imagine the inner workings of a relational form detached from the elements that it connects? Then, through an ethnographic examination of ancestral interventions among residents in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Maputo, the article challenges conventional understandings of relational forms as the connective "glue" holding together exterior and, to a certain e…
Trans-temporal Hinges: Reflections on an Ethnographic Study of Chinese Infrastructural Projects in Mozambique and Mongolia
Based on two case studies of Chinese infrastructural interventions in Mozambique and in Mongolia, this article introduces the notion of 'trans-temporal hinge' as a heuristic methodological concept that brings together phenomena and events otherwise distributed across time. The authors explore envelopes used when paying Mozambican workers at a construction site in Maputo and roads dividing Chinese oil workers and local nomads in southern and easte…
Time and the Field
Prompted by the postmodern turn in anthropology, ethnographic fieldwork has been subjected to considerable analytical scrutiny. Yet despite numerous conceptual facelifts, definitions and demarcations of 'the field' have remained fundamentally anchored in tropes of spatiality with the association between field and fieldworker characterized as being maintained by distances in space. By exploring and unfolding the temporal properties of the field, a…
Analogic asphalt: Suspended value conversions among young road workers in southern Mozambique
This article explores the obviational process through which the value of salaries is continuously being transformed, based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among young road workers employed by a Chinese construction consortium to rehabilitate the N1 highway in the southern part of Mozambique. To the Mozambican workers, the value of salaries emerged by gradually dropping the traces of its own origin rather than indexing a fixed ratio between …
Diskussion
Lars Højer: Hvilke ting? Hvilke relationer? Hvilke verdener? Inger Sjørslev: Hvorfor skal forskelligheder være ontologiske? Anders Blok: Med Wittgenstein på kanten af antropologiens sprogspil? Heiko Henkel: Hvad kan 'mangfoldige verdener' gøre for os? Asger F. Simonsen, Toke K. Amlund, Lars Rømer, Astrid Grue og Christina Vega: Rejsen til planeterne M&M Morten Nielsen: Respons Morten Axel Pedersen: Respons
Vi Bebor Mangfoldige Verdener
Debatoplæg. For udsagnet
A wedge of time: Futures in the present and presents without futures inMaputo,Mozambique
A series of recent anthropological studies on time emphasize the crucial importance of the future as a guiding trope in the present. Although located beyond an immediate temporal horizon, the future is consequently taken as connected to the present in a meaningful way through a sequence of chronological moments and hence potentially accessible. This paper takes its point of departure from the growing body of anthropological work on time and futur…
Time and the Field
Time and the field
Fremtidens paradoks: Når sproget kollapser
The pataphysical state: Time, debt, and transfigured legalities in The spirit of the laws in Mozambique
Comment on Obarrio, Juan. 2014. The spirit of the laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Distortion: Social Processes Beyond the Structured and Systemic
This text was, in essence, originally circulated as a concept paper at a workshop held at the University of Copenhagen, in January 2012, to inaugurate the project, ‘Optimal distortion: Ethnographic explorations of paradoxical connections’, that had been funded by the Danish Research Board for Culture and Communication (with us as its two principal investigators). By concluding the present volume with an ‘epi-pro-logue’ 1 that was written before t…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (18 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Ethnography (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (8 works)