Staffan Löfving

 
Associate professor, Social anthropology and Senior lecturer, Intercultural studies

Research

I am interested in the tropes of cultural identity and diversity, in fields ranging from education and urban planning to managing social and political conflict. My long-term research engagement could perhaps best be summarized in terms of three partly overlapping themes:

  • Time and visual anthropology In this area, my work deals with photography as a visual technology of social and political memory, the capacity of the photograph to authenticate (or falsify) past experiences, and ways in which discourses and practices of a visual heritage tap into processes of social formation and identitarian politics of different kinds.
  • Theorization of displacement and emplacement. I have engaged critically with the conceptual and bureaucratized boundaries between labour mobility and politically motivated forced migration. I have done ethnographic work on this theme in Colombia and Guatemala, and I am presently involved in various research ventures in the two interconnected European contexts of Sweden and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
  • Economic anthropology and labour. In an ongoing exploration of the social dynamic of economic and political crises and a series of publications, I try to develop plausible contributions to an anthropological understanding of precarious labour and the capitalism of affect and communication. 

Collaboration

Since January 2023, Visiting Associate Professor with the SARChI Chair in South African Art & Visual Culture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa - see conferences and lectures/seminars. I am also involved in course and program development in the context of EUNICE, with the Universities of Mons, Belgium, and Cantabria, Spain.

Selected publications

2025. Maiming Monuments: Iconoclasm in Visual Culture After Yugoslavia. In Brenda Schmahmann (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Commemorative Public Art: Monumental Developments. Pp. 201-217. London and New York: Routledge.

2017. The Gift of Labor: The Town, the Union and the Corporate State in the Demise of the Swedish Car Industry. In E. Paul Durrenberger (ed.), Uncertain Times: The Anthropology of Labor in a Neoliberal World. Pp. 61-86. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

2009. The Paramilitary Function of Transparency in Latin America and Beyond. In Bruce Kapferer and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen (eds.), Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval. Pp. 187-209. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

2008. Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People (editor with Stef Jansen) Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

2007. Liberal Emplacement: Violence, Home, and the Transforming Space of Popular Protest in Central America. Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 49, No. 1.:45-61.

2007. Movement, Violence, and the Making of Home. (Journal theme section, co-edited with Stef Jansen) Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 49, No. 1.:1-61

2006. The Guerrilla Army of the Poor. In Thomas Leonard (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Developing World. Pp. 726-728. London and New York: Routledge

2006. Peopled Economies: Conversations with Stephen Gudeman. Uppsala and Stockholm: Uppsala University and Almqvist & Wiksell International.

2006. War as Field and Site: Anthropologists, Archaeologists, and the Violence of Maya Cultural Continuities. In Ton Otto, Henrik Thrane and Helle Vandkilde (eds.), Warfare and Society: Archaeological and Social Anthropological Perspectives. Pp. 469-479. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press

2005. Silence & the Politics of Representing Rebellion: On the Emergence of the Neutral Maya in Guatemala. In Paul Richards (ed.), No Peace No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts. Pp. 77-97. Oxford and Athens, Ohio: James Currey and Ohio University Press.

2004. Paramilitaries of the Empire: Guatemala, Colombia and Israel. Social Analysis, Vol. 48, Issue 1, Spring 2004. pp. 156-160 [also published in Bruce Kapferer (ed.), State, Sovereignty, War: Civil Violence in Emerging Social Realities. Pp. 159-166. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books]

2004. Om krigets konturer. In Ulf Hannerz (ed.), Antropologi/Journalistik: Om sätt att beskriva världen. Sid. 115-141. Lund: Studentlitteratur [Swedish]

2004. Ungdom, marginalitet og statsborgeskab: Et perspektiv fra det sydlige Afrika og Centralamerika. (Co-authored with Michael Barrett) In Simon Turner (ed.), Vrede unge mænd? Globalisering, marginalisering og mobilisering. Den Ny Verden, årg. 37, nr. 3.:39-48. [Danish]

2002. Banners of Belonging: The Politics of Indigenous Identity in Bolivia and Guatemala (editor with Charlotta Widmark) Leuven and Uppsala. ULRiCA, Uppsala-Leuven Research in Cultural Anthropology.

2002. An Unpredictable Past: Guerrillas, Mayas, and the Location of Oblivion in War-Torn Guatemala. Dissertation. Uppsala: Uppsala University.

Evaluations

2010. Fortalecimiento de la sociedad civil para la construcción de la paz en Colombia. Evaluación del apoyo de Asdi a la Consejería de Proyectos (PCS), Enero 2006 –Noviembre 2009. Versión final 6 de abril de 2010 [Sida evaluation, Spanish, co-authored with Adriana Gutierrez and Jocke Nyberg] 

2008. Swedish Democracy Promotion through NGOs in Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Peru: Outcome Oriented Evaluation of Diakonia’s Latin America Programme. Sida Evaluations 2008:02. Stockholm: Sida [co-authored with Roddy Brett, Miguel González, Victor Caballeros, Cecilia Salazar, Fernanda Soto and Charlotta Widmark]

Other

With a background in photography and a research interest in visual culture and curatorial practices, I have collaborated with museums and associations in Sweden, South Africa, and Bosnia and Herzegovina on exhibitions and other projects related to visual storytelling:

Late Bosnian artist Sasa Bukvic curated my photographs from the siege of Sarajevo in Gallery Zvono in 2016. The selection has since been donated to the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a sample is published on the website of the Sniper Alley photo project of Dzemil Hodzic, who also produced a film about my work in 2024 (The Story Behind the Photo, presented by N1 Sarajevo/English and Klix.ba/Bosnian). 

I have exhibited photographs from Guatemala at Ethnografiska Museet in Stockholm, collaborated with The Photography Legacy Project, South Africa, and The Sune Jonsson Centre for Documentary Photography at Västerbottens Museum in Umeå and Rackstadmuseet in Arvika. In 2023, I curated a retrospective exhibition of the work of 20th-century Swedish artist Hugo Löfving at Ölands Museum Himmelsberga, Borgholm.

Publications