Alf Hornborg

Biography

B. 1954. Professor of Human Ecology, Lund University. PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Uppsala University 1986. Has published widely on global environmental history and the indigenous cultures of South America. Co-recipient of Linnaean grant for LUCID: Lund University Centre of Excellence for Integration of Social and Natural Dimensions of Sustainability.

Ongoing research

Hornborg will critically examine the conventional historical chronology of “pre-modernity”, “modernity”, and “post-modernity”. The most widespread definition dates the advent of modernity to 17th century Europe and its global demise to the 1970’s. Sociologists have emphasized the “disembedding” of technological, economic and political rationality from specific cultural contexts, and the consequent abstraction of trust and individual identity (cf. Giddens 1990). Such processes have been seen to promote increasing standardization and homogenization of social life. Other scholars have observed that the flip side of individualism is existential alienation and an epistemological dualism of subject vs. object, mind vs. body and culture vs. nature (cf. Evernden 1985). Simultaneously, the modern project has been characterized by its assumptions of progress and expansion, whether expressed through concepts such as “growth” and “development” or through a faith in the increasingly exact and comprehensive “master narrative” of science. However, recurrent concerns with tradition, ethnicity, community, local knowledge, spirituality, diversity, environment, etc. have challenged the modernist paradigm. Building on world-system analyses of global inequalities (Hornborg 2001), the study will seek to redefine modernity as a privileged social condition made possible at certain positions within global systems of resource flows, and thus physically and socio-economically impossible to universalize (cf. Bauman 1998). It will interrogate the condescending attitude that throughout history tends to permeate the approach of the affluent classes to the “pre-modern” lifestyles of the supposedly backward peoples in the global periphery. Rather than representing a past historical period (a “then”) within an evolutionist sequence, the so-called “less developed” populations of the world can be recognized as occupying a complementary – and contemporary – social space (a “there”).

Selected bibliography

Hornborg, Alf, eds. with J.D. Hill, Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia: Reconstructing Past Identities from Archaeology, Linguistics, and Ethnohistory (University Press of Colorado, in press)

– & J.R. McNeill & J. Martinez-Alier, eds., Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change (AltaMira/Rowman & Littlefield, 2007)

– & C. Crumley, eds., The World System and the Earth System: Global Socio-Environmental Change and Sustainability since the Neolithic (Left Coast Press, 2007)

– “Ethnogenesis, Regional Integration, and Ecology in Prehistoric Amazonia: Toward a System Perspective”, Current Anthropology 46:4 [2005].

– The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment. (Altamira/Rowman & Littlefield 2001)