Cultures, Open and in Process: An Interview with Ulf Hannerz

In this interview, Ulf Hannerz reflects on the relationship between the development of his career as an anthropologist and the elaboration of his theoretical positions. He recalls some of his fieldwork experiences and connects those experiences to his emerging conceptual apparatus in his own take on the culture concept, on cosmopolitanism, on creolization and cultural hybridity, on cultural flows and fluxes, on urban globalization and global futures, and on nationalism and transnationalism. He pauses to consider some of the controversies surrounding his earlier work in Washington, DC, and “ghetto culture” as well as his entry into the debates on the creolization concept. Given his interest in the history and politics of anthropology—and where anthropology is headed in the future—Hannerz also locates his own intellectual production and the influences on, and evolution of, his theoretical and ethnographic perspectives in the competing histories of national traditions, making critical comments on the hierarchization of anthropology and the advent of accountability regimes negatively affecting the discipline. [ culture, cultural anthropology, creolization, globalization, Ulf Hannerz ]