Professor Harri Englund FBA

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Churchill College
  • Professor of Social Anthropology
  • Director of Postgraduate Education and Chair, PhD Committee
  • Fellow, Churchill College
  • Office hours: appointment by email
Professor Harri Englund FBA

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About

I am a social anthropologist who studies obligations, rights and justice in their vernacular forms. This has involved field and archival research in various religious, economic, legal, and political contexts in Africa as well as on African-European relations.

I was awarded a PhD in social anthropology by the University of Manchester in 1995 and held research fellowships at the Nordic Africa Institute and the Academy of Finland before joining the University of Cambridge in 2004. I served as the Director of the University’s Centre of African Studies in 2013-17 and was elected into the British Academy in 2019.

Research

Research interests

  • Central and Southern Africa
  • Northern Europe
  • Colonialism; humanitarianism and human rights
  • African-language political and moral thought
  • Mass mediation; radio and voice
  • Historical anthropology
  • Biography
  • Political and moral economy
  • Climate justice

Turbulent times make anthropological lives. Arriving in the borderlands between Malawi and Mozambique in the early 1990s, I fully expected to face challenges but not the seismic shifts that soon ensued. Decades of autocracy in Malawi and of civil strife in Mozambique were suddenly blown away by the winds of democratisation, much like the walls of a divided Europe had come down slightly earlier.

Making sense of the changes with my friends and neighbours in the rural borderlands sparked my interest in the extent to which liberal reformism can deliver justice. Over the decades, studying justice-seeking in its vernacular varieties has involved fieldwork with refugees, smallholder farmers, human rights activists, legal practitioners, slum dwellers, local politicians, Pentecostal Christians, radio journalists, and spoken-word poets.

The initial eighteen-month fieldwork on the Mozambique-Malawi borderland resulted in my PhD and then the book From War to Peace on the Mozambique-Malawi Borderland. Extended-case studies trace the effects of large-scale processes on the lives of persons and families, from colonialism by two European powers to postcolonial war and democratisation. I then moved to the peri-urban area of Chinsapo in Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital, for a nine-month fieldwork on the effects of political and economic liberalisation on the urban poor, many of them first-generation migrants to the city. This resulted in articles about migrants and Pentecostal Christians, but the period, and many subsequent years in Malawi, also alerted me to the limits of a key liberal idea: human rights.

Awarded the Amaury Talbot Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor presents what I had come to regard as human rights fundamentalism, a largely top-down transmission of supposedly superior knowledge about how to conduct oneself and how to make claims in an ostensibly democratised country, yet still beset by deep inequalities. Linguistic translation, civic education and legal aid offered perspectives on the limited prospects for successful claims when the concept of human rights had come to be translated as ufulu wachibadwidwe in Chichewa, a ‘birth freedom’ abstracted from the social relations within which Malawians lived their lives.

A key interest in my fieldwork all along, language assumed increasing importance as I recognised the need to move from critique to an exploration of the moral and intellectual resources that liberal reformism had overshadowed. Guided by long-standing interlocutors, I found in the vernacular radio a popular medium for making claims in ways that resonated with many Malawians and Zambians. Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio shows how listeners’ grievances were edited at the national broadcaster and how, in turn, the broadcast stories assumed lives of their own in rural and urban areas. In Gogo Breeze: Zambia's Radio Elder and the Voices of Free Speech, I shifted my attention to Zambia and the closely related language Chinyanja to follow a provincial radio personality’s travails as he pursued justice on his listeners’ behalf and offered an original perspective on that other liberal cornerstone: free speech.

A decade in the archives followed, still driven by questions of justice. Visions for Racial Equality: David Clement Scott and the Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth-Century Malawi tells the ill-fated story of a radical Scottish missionary, whose appreciation of an African vernacular inspired his criticism of European colonialism. The subjects in my first book in Finnish, Kongosta Sortavalaan - esseitä suomalais-afrikkalaisesta historiasta, also offer fresh insights into the histories of European-African connections at the turn of the twentieth century: Finns working on boats in the Congo river and an African woman carving out her space in pre-independence Finland. 

After the archival decade, the allure of fieldwork pulls me back to contemporary issues. Obligations have consistently eclipsed rights in my studies as the actual domains in which justice is claimed and contested. Climate justice throws obligations into relief – who owes what to whom, human and non-human, in a crisis whose consequences are unevenly distributed? The climate crisis demands more fieldwork in turbulent times. 

 

Research Projects 

 

Publications

Authored books

Edited works

Articles

Book chapters

Teaching and supervision

 

Research Supervision