Dissertation Abstract: Brian Palmer

Source: Dissertation Abstracts. Publisher contact: 300 N. Zeeb Rd., PO Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346

Written at Harvard University, 2000
Advisors: Michael Herzfeld and Harvey Cox
301 pages

This ethnographic study looks at how socially engaged Swedes work to uphold egalitarian values and institutions in the face of what they see as the merciless indifference of a market-driven era. I document and analyze the social imagination of urban, middle-class Swedes who are dissenters in an increasingly neoliberal national and global order. How do they draw upon cultural idioms of equality? How do they articulate and seek to practice an ethic of solidarity?

The first chapter introduces my hosts and recounts my multi-sited fieldwork. In Chapter 2, I explore twentieth-century foreign portrayals of Sweden as a utopia or dystopia. To scrutinize two famous accounts of the nation, I draw upon Michael Herzfeld's conception of social poetics. Chapter 3 deals with collective expectations and constraints in Swedish everyday life. I examine canons of behavior with regard to personal modesty, income and consumption, prostitution and pornography, and traffic safety. Such codes reveal the social construction of habits of conscientiousness that are essential to a solidaristic community. In Chapter 4, I analyze the inventive public dramatizations through which left-leaning Swedes depict a gentle general-welfare society beleaguered by neoliberal profiteers. The final chapter traces the history and uses of the word "solidarity," while also providing two portraits of solidarity in practice—one exploring the public promotion of children's well-being, the other relating the story of a young Swedish internationalist.

In closing, I argue that the existential solidarity of socially concerned Swedes may be understood as the making of human sacredness by means of (1) connective attention, (2) material sharing, (3) the staging of equality, and (4) the acknowledgment of human vulnerability. This definition frames solidarity as an act of classification, a reclassifying of categorical outsiders as insiders who are entitled to participate in societal networks of reciprocity and care. Such reclassifications take place through a staging of equality, a dramatized acting as if people were already equal. Sweden's champions of solidarity thus challenge neoliberal globalization with a vision of, and a path toward, a common humanity.

Author's Comments:

It is an ethnographic study of Swedes who work to uphold egalitarian values and institutions in the face of what they see as an increasingly market-driven national and global order. My principal informants are engaged public intellectuals, or what Swedes call "society debaters" (samhällsdebattör). They include leaders of advocacy and humanitarian organizations as well as public officials such as Sweden’s Ombudsman for Children’s Rights.

How do these socially engaged Swede’s articulate and seek to practice an ethic of solidarity? The enclosed chapter attempts to answer that question. After tracing the history and uses of the word "solidarity," I provide two portraits of solidarity in practice. The first explores the public promotion of children’s well-being; the second relates the story of a young Swedish internationalist, whose conscientious lifestyle and self-effacing protests exemplify a Swedish style of leadership-from-below.

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