Research seminar with Raoul Galli: "Constructing the Royal Court Field: A Text-Based Seminar on the Reflexive Objectivation of the Swedish Monarchy and Anthropology*"

Abstract:

In this research seminar, I will take the opportunity to make visible what it means for me to work within a specific research tradition. After completing my first extended period of fieldwork as a doctoral student, I wrote a course paper in the philosophy of science entitled ‘…neither through deduction nor induction, but through construction,’ borrowing a formulation from Broady (1991). The title points to one of several epistemological principles of the Bourdieusian research tradition: construction.

The seminar is based on a short text of approximately six pages, which participants are expected to have read in advance. The text provides a recent example of how I work, focusing on the construction of a research object: a central component of the Swedish monarchy, the Royal Court (Kungl. Hovstaterna). I investigate whether, and to what extent, the relational concept of field can help us gain a deeper understanding of the monarchy by clarifying what the Royal Court produces and how this production takes place. A further step is to broaden the societal perspective by drawing on the field study to examine the position and function of the Swedish monarchy within the national field of power.

An essential part of constructing the research object within this tradition is reflexive work. For ethnographers in particular, this includes what Bourdieu calls ‘participant objectivation’. The question I propose for discussion is how far anthropology has progressed in its theoretical development and practical application of what we may call scientific reflexivity.

*Galli, R. 2026. Constructing the Royal Court Field. Observations and Objectivations of Swedish Monarchy and Anthropology. Practical Sense, Issue 5, December 2026.

Bio:

Raoul Galli holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and currently serves as director of studies at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. He is the author of Varumärkenas fält: Produktion av erkännande i Stockholms reklamvärld (2012; forthcoming in a revised English edition from Palgrave Macmillan). His more recent research explores the Swedish state, national symbolic capital and the constitutional monarchy. In the current project, Hovstaternas fält (The Royal Court Field), he investigates the Swedish Royal Court as a semi-state workplace and producer of symbolic resources. For Swedish speakers, we recommend the following episode of the Bildningspodden podcast, in which invited guests Mikael Palme and Raoul Galli discuss the Bourdieusian tradition in the social sciences: https://anekdot.se/bildningspoddavsnitt/pierre-bourdieu/