Download or read book Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa written by E. Cooper and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-03 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa. Eight ethnographic case studies from across the continent examine how uncertainty is used to negotiate insecurity, create and conduct relationships, and act as a source for imagining the future.
Download or read book Edges of Global Transformation written by Håkon Fyhn and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through nine ethnographic case-studies, Edges of Global Transformation explores situations where global transformations associated with neoliberalism meet local realities. The “edge” of transformation is characterized by uncertainty, as old patterns are consumed and new formed. The nine case studies from Africa, Europe and the Middle East shed light on how uncertainty plays an inevitable and essential role in the grey zone between macro-transformations and local responses. Despite the tremendous difference in precariousness between these cases, each contributor explores ways in which transformations are conceived and acted upon within the space of possibility that is opened and apprehended locally. The role of uncertainty as an active force is explored throughout the book. While in some cases, uncertainty has a clear restricting effect; other cases illustrate its potential as a productive force. As a contribution to understanding the dynamic of the local realities of global change, the book will be valuable reading for anyone interested in globalization and the neoliberal world order.
Download or read book Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa written by E. Cooper and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-03 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa. Eight ethnographic case studies from across the continent examine how uncertainty is used to negotiate insecurity, create and conduct relationships, and act as a source for imagining the future.
Download or read book Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa written by Sherine Hafez and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines ethnographic accounts of fieldwork with overviews of recent anthropological literature about the region on topics such as Islam, gender, youth, and new media. It addresses contemporary debates about modernity, nation building, and the link between the ideology of power and the production of knowledge. Contributors include established and emerging scholars known for the depth and quality of their ethnographic writing and for their interventions in current theory.
Download or read book Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration written by Nauja Kleist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the relationship between hope, mobility, and immobility in African migration. Through case studies set within and beyond the continent, it demonstrates that hope offers a unique prism for analyzing the social imaginaries and aspirations which underpin migration in situations of uncertainty, deepening inequality, and delimited access to global circuits of legal mobility. The volume takes departure in a mobility paradox that characterizes contemporary migration. Whereas people all over the world are exposed to widening sets of meaning of the good life elsewhere, an increasing number of people in the Global South have little or no access to authorized modes of international migration. This book examines how African migrants respond to this situation. Focusing on hope, it explores migrants’ temporal and spatial horizons of expectation and possibility and how these horizons link to mobility practices. Such analysis is pertinent as precarious life conditions and increasingly restrictive regimes of mobility characterize the lives of many Africans, while migration continues to constitute important livelihood strategies and to be seen as pathways of improvement. Whereas involuntary immobility is one consequence, another is the emergence and consolidation of new destinations emerging in the Global South. The volume examines this development through empirically grounded and theoretically rich case studies in migrants’ countries of origin, zones of transit, and in new and established destinations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Latin America and China. It thereby offers an original perspective on linkages between migration, hope, and immobility, ranging from migration aspirations to return.
Download or read book A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa written by Roy Richard Grinker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.
Download or read book Adventures in Aidland written by David Mosse and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development’s discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant attention to knowledge producers themselves, despite anthropologists being among them. This is the focus of this volume. It concerns the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction but is equally interested in the social life of development professionals, in the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, in networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and in the dilemmas of maintaining professional identities. Going well beyond obsolete debates about ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ anthropology, the book examines the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and practices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy making knowledge.
Download or read book Ethnographies of Waiting written by Manpreet K. Janeja and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all wait - in traffic jams, passport offices, school meal queues, for a response, for better weather, the holidays, an end to fighting, peace. Time spent waiting produces hope, boredom, anxiety, doubt, or uncertainty. Ethnographies of Waiting explores the social phenomenon of waiting and its centrality in human society. Using waiting as a central analytical category, the book investigates how waiting is negotiated in myriad ways and provides a new perspective on waiting as the uncertain interplay between doubting and hoping. Featuring eight detailed ethnographies covering areas such as India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Tajikistan, South Africa, Russia, and the UK, it examines both the political and existential dimensions of waiting to ask this central question: when is time worth the wait? With contributions from scholars in the UK, Europe, Australia, and the United States - as well as an afterword by Ghassan Hage - this is a vital contribution to the field of anthropology of time and essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and philosophy.
Download or read book Those Who Play With Fire written by Henrietta Moore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, bringing rain or protesting taxation, many in Africa share a vision of a world where the cultural, symbolic and cosmic categories of 'male' and 'female' serve, through ritual, to both reimagine and transform the world. Those Who Play With Fire introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exploring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thought and ritual practices. Thus, the book provides a powerful framework with which to evaluate previous ethnographic material on Africa. In addition, Those Who Play With Fire presents a broad range of new case studies - of hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and pastoralists - revealing the varied and complex ways in which African ideas and ideals of what it means to be 'male' and 'female' broadly inform and give meaning to a wide range of transformative rituals.
Download or read book Police Work and Identity written by Andrew Faull and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the men and women who police contemporary South Africa. Drawing on rich, original ethnographical data, it considers how officers make sense of their jobs and how they find meaning in their duties. It demonstrates that the dynamics that lead to police abuses and scandals in transitional and neo-liberalising regimes such as South Africa can be traced to the day-to-day experiences and ambitions of the average police officer. It is about the stories they tell themselves about themselves and their social worlds, and how these shape the order they produce through their work. By focusing on police officers, this book positions the individual in primacy over the organisation, asking what policing looks like when motivated by the pursuit of ontological security in precarious contexts. It acknowledges but downplays the importance of police culture in determining officers’ attitudes and behaviour, and reminds readers that most officers’ lives are entangled in, and shaped by a range of social, political and cultural forces. It suggests that a job in the South African Police Service (SAPS) is primarily just that: a job. Most officers join the organisation after other dreams have slipped beyond reach, their presence in the Service being almost accidental. But once employed, they re-write their self-narratives and enact carefully choreographed performances to ease managerial and public pressure, and to rationalize their coercive practices. In an era where ‘evidence’ and ‘what works’ reigns supreme, and where ‘cop culture’ is often deemed a primary socializing force, this book emphasises how officers’ personal histories, ambitions, and vulnerabilities remain central to how policing unfolds on the street.
Download or read book Contribution to the Ethnography of Africa written by Sture Lagercrantz and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa written by Max Gluckman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays are mainly concerned with the development of some of Max Gluckman's ideas about African politics. He regarded frequent rebellions to replace incumbents of political offices (as against revolutions to alter the structure of offices) as inherent in these politics. Later he connected this situation with modes of husbandry, problems of the devolution of power, types of weapons and the law of treason. He advanced to a general theory of ritual, as well as to general propositions about the position of officials representing conflicting interests within a hierarchy, typified by the African chief under colonial rule. Originally published in 1963.
Download or read book Questioning Misfortune written by Susan Reynolds Whyte and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the most interesting ethnographies of experience are concerned to highlight the indeterminate nature of life. Questioning Misfortune is very much within this tradition. Based on a long-term study of adversity and its social causes in Bunyole, eastern Uganda, it considers the way in which people deal with uncertainties of life, such as sickness, suffering, marital problems, failure, and death. Divination may identify causes of misfortune, ranging from ancestors and spirits to sorcerers. Sufferers and their families will then try out a variety of remedial measures, including pharmaceuticals, sorcery antidotes, and sacrifices. But remedies often fail, and doubt and uncertainty persist. Even the commercialisation of biomedicine, and the peril of AIDS can be understood in terms of a pragmatics of uncertainty.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Epidemics written by Ann H. Kelly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decades, infectious disease epidemics have come to increasingly pose major global health challenges to humanity. The Anthropology of Epidemics approaches epidemics as total social phenomena: processes and events which encompass and exercise a transformational impact on social life whilst at the same time functioning as catalysts of shifts and ruptures as regards human/non-human relations. Bearing a particular mark on subject areas and questions which have recently come to shape developments in anthropological thinking, the volume brings epidemics to the forefront of anthropological debate, as an exemplary arena for social scientific study and analysis.
Download or read book Nomadic Connectivity written by Inge Butter and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-08-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A focus on the everyday has produced this ethnography, which hopes to give a nuanced voice to an extended family of semi-sedentary nomads, living at the centre of a country and region known for its political turmoil, ecological insecurities, and socio-economic hardship. The everyday of the Chadian Walad Djifir is one in which sedentarity and mobility are approached as two entwined parts of a whole, and where economic and geographical boundaries do not necessarily form constrictions. The ferīkh (nomadic camp) is where all of the Walad Djifir’s networks meet, and often also begin— a physical place embodying various networks and connections, which span time and geographical space. This analytical and methodological approach gives insight in how regional trends can be understood in light of the Walad Djifir’s daily lives. Over time, the Walad Djifir have developed ways of coping and dealing with insecurities, interacting with infrastructural, technological, and socio-political developments in specific ways. In exploring how such insecurities and crises become anchored into the everyday, the ferīkh provides answers. It is precisely the mundane elements of daily life which anchor disruption.
Download or read book Dealing with Elusive Futures written by Noemi Steuer and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time to come - as well as the exploration thereof - remains elusive for social actors and social scientists alike. The contributors accept the challenge to depict young men and women's future-creating activities in urban contexts of sub-Saharan Africa. Very consciously, they study young graduates having obtained a university degree and provide a vivid picture of their strategies to socially grow older by doing adulthood in contexts of great uncertainty. The examples include Burkina Faso, Guinea, Ethiopia, Mali and Tanzania, visually enriched through pictures taken by young Malian photographers.
Download or read book At Ansha s written by Daria Trentini and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ansha and the Spirits -- Rural and Urban -- Health and Healing -- Wives and Husband -- Demons and Spirits -- Insiders and Outsiders -- Mountains -- Coast -- Rivers and Bridges -- Outside the mosque -- Makhuwa and Maka -- Books and Roots -- Muslims of the Spirits, Muslims of the Mosque -- Healers and the Governo -- Nurses and Healers -- Knowing and Not-Knowing -- Patients -- Good and Evil -- Close and Open -- The Dead and the Living -- Juniors and Seniors -- Tradition and Modernity -- Spirits and Women -- Returns -- Life and Death -- Epilogue.
