Key Figures in Creole Studies - Ulf Hannerz
Ulf Hannerz |
BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
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WORKS AND PUBLICATIONSAccording to Hannerz (1987), we live in ‘creolising world’. In his discussion of the global ecumene, Hannerz (1992: 217-63) argues that cultures are no longer as bounded or autonomous as they once were and that complex and asymmetrical flows have reshaped cultures which, given existing forms and meanings of culture are not likely to result in global homogenization. He is clear that ‘emerging hybridized webs of meaning’ (1992: 264) are neither spurious nor inauthentic cultures. While these Creole cultures may be relatively unformed, because they are recent, they can and do take on a complex character, often because the periphery is stronger than it may appear. As Hannerz (1992: 265-6) maintains: Creolization also increasingly allows the periphery to talk back. As it creates a greater affinity between the cultures of the center and the periphery, and as the latter increasingly uses the same organizational forms and the same technology as the center …some of its new cultural commodities become increasingly attractive on a global market. Third World music of a creolized kind becomes world music …Creolization thought is open-ended; the tendencies towards maturation and saturation are understood as quite possibly going on side by side, or interleaving. The creolization of the world in the sense described by Hannerz and other writers cited earlier has provided a space for many people to create a new sense of home, a locus to express their uniqueness in the face of cultural fundamentalisms and imperialism. Behind the strident assertions of nationalism, ‘old ethnicities’ and religious certainties is an increasing volume of cultural interactions, interconnections and interdependencies and a challenge to the solidity of ethnic and racial categories. These are the soft sounds of fugitive power, but you may need to have your ear cocked to the ground, or your finger on the pulse, if you are to fully hear them and discern their influence. |
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Ulf Hannerz is Professor of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Sweden (where he also received his Ph.D. in 1969) and has taught at several American, European, Asian and Australian universities. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, a former Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, a former director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS), and a former editor of the journal Ethnos. His research has been especially in urban anthropology, media anthropology and transnational cultural processes,with field studies in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. More recently he has been engaged in a study of the work of news media foreign correspondents, including field research in four continents, and in directing an interdisciplinary research project on cosmopolitanism. Among his books are Soulside (1969), Exploring the City (1980), Cultural Complexity (1992), Transnational Connections (1996) and Foreign News (2004); several of them have also appeared in French, Spanish, and Italian. He was the Anthropology editor for the International Enyclopedia 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 and a Munro Lecture at the University of Edinburgh in 2002. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Oslo.
