Bøger i International African Library serien

This book offers an ethnography of the emergence of a local Christianity and its relation to changing social, political and economic formations among the Peki Ewe in Ghana. Focusing on the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which arose from encounters between the Ewe and German Piestist missionaries, the author examines recent conflicts leading to the secession of many pentecostally oriented members, which it places in a historical perspective. The main argument is that, for the Ewe, involvement with modernity goes hand in hand with new enchantment, rather than disenchantment, of the world. At the grassroots level, the study focuses on the image of the Devil, which the missionaries communicated to the Ewe through translation and which currently receives much attention in the Pentecostal churches. It is shown that this image played and still plays a crucial role in the local appropriation of Christianity, since diabolisation confirmed the existence of local gods and witchcraft and incorporated them into Christian belief as demons. Comparing the discourses and practices of mission and Pentecostal churches, the study reveals that the latter pay much more attention to Satan - especially through 'deliverance' rituals. Pentecostalism's increasing popularity thus stems from the fact that it ties into historically generated local understandings of Christianity, which, despite a declared dislike of non-Christian religious practices, stand much closer to Ewe religion than missionary Christianity. With its emphasis on the hybrid image of the Devil and people's obsessions with occult forces as a way to mediate the attractions and discontents of modernity, this book sheds light on a hitherto neglected dimension in studies of African Christianity.

"Drawing from extensive fieldwork in Kenya and the United Kingdom, Leslie Fesenmyer considers the kinship dilemmas - moral, material, and affective - facing transnational families. By asking who is responsible for whom, she reveals that questions of intergenerational care are at the heart of relations between individuals, societies, and states"--

"Dress Cultures in Zambia Drawing on half-a-century of research in Zambia and regional scholarship, Karen Tranberg Hansen offers a vibrant history of changing dress practices from the late-colonial period to the present day. Exploring how the dressed body serves as the point of contact between personal, local, and global experiences, she argues that dress is just as central to political power as it is to personal style. Questioning the idea that the West led fashion trends elsewhere, Hansen demonstrates how local dress conventions appropriated western dress influences as Zambian and shows how Zambia contributed to global fashions, such as the colourful Chitenge fabric that spread across colonial trading networks. Brought to life with colour illustrations and personal anecdotes, this book spotlights dress not only as an important medium through which Zambian identities are negotiated, but also as a key reflector and driver of history. Karen Tranberg Hansen is Professor Emerita at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the informal economy, clothing, and consumption. Her previous publications include Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 (1989), African Encounters with Domesticity (1992), Keeping House in Lusaka (1997) and Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (2000), which was awarded the Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology in 2001, and the Society of Economic Anthropology Book Award in 2003. She is the recipient of several book prizes and awards including the Conrad M. Arensberg Award from the Society for the Anthropology of Work in 1997"--

Medicine murder involved the cutting of body parts from victims, usually while they were still alive, to be used for the preparation of medicines intended to enhance the power of the perpetrators. A 'very startling' increase in cases of medicine murder apparently took place in Basutoland (now Lesotho), in southern Africa, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It gave rise to a dramatic crisis of late colonial rule. Was this increase a real one? If so, why did it happen? How far does it explain the crisis? What other factors contributed? This book offers some comprehensive answers to these difficult, complex and controversial questions and a highly readable analysis of how the crisis arose and of how it fell away. The authors draw sensitively and critically on many different and often conflicting sources of evidence.

This book examines the evolution of a distinctive Yoruba community, Remo, and the central role played in this process by the Remo-born Nationalist and Yoruba leader Obafemi Awolowo (1909-87). Since the Nineteenth Century, popular participation has played an important role in challenging or confirming local hierarchies in Remo. This historical dynamic had a significant impact on Awolowo's vision both for Yoruba and Nigerian politics. When he moved into national politics in the 1950s, his career at the national level also gave him the opportunity to shape Remo's political identity. Awolowo was both a product and a producer of Remo politics.Based on a subtle analysis of local-level politics, this book argues that traditional and modern participatory structures play an important role both in Yoruba politics and in the African postcolonial state. At the same time, its focus on Awolowo makes an important contribution to the scholarly debate on one of Nigeria's most important politicians.

This book gives an account of how migrant women, whose lives and experiences have heretofore been neglected in the pages of academic scholarship, dance and sing the vibrant and expressive musical style of kiba. In so doing, they build an identity as autonomous breadwinners whose aspirations and values are nonetheless rooted in 'tradition'.

This book explores the roles of contemporary urban shrines and their visual traditions in Benin City. It focuses on the charismatic priests and priestesses who are possessed by a pantheon of deities, the communities of devotees, and the artists who make artifacts for their shrines. The visual arts are part of a wider configuration of practices that include song, dance, possession and healing. These practices provide the means for exploring the relationships of the visual to both the verbal and performance arts that feature at these shrines. The analysis in this book raises fundamental questions about how the art of Benin, and non-Western art histories more generally, are understood. The book throws critical light on the taken-for-granted assumptions which underpin current interpretations and presents an original and revisionist account of Benin art history.

Introducing poetry, prose, songs and theatre from Nigeria, this engaging volume blends translated extracts with a rich commentary on the historical development and modern context of this hugely creative culture. Examining imaginative prose-writing, the tale tradition, popular song, Islamic religious poetry and modern TV drama amongst other topics, this is a clear and accessible book on a literary culture that has previously been little-known to the English-speaking readership.

In the inter-war years, groups of enterprising Yoruba traders from a few towns in Western Nigeria established a successful trading network throughout the Gold Coast (Ghana). Then, in 1969, they were abruptly ordered to leave the country. At the time of the exodus, Jerry Eades followed the traders back to Nigeria. There, on the basis of extensive interviews and archival sources, he reconstructed the history of the migration from four Yorubu towns to northern Ghana. The result is one of the fullest and most detailed accounts of chain migration and its implications for economic development ever written.

This book examines in historical perspective the hitherto little-studied relationship between Islam and caste among the Haalpulaaren of Senegal. The Islamic uprising of the 1770s, which established a class of Islamic clerics in positions of authority in the Senegal river valley, had long-term consequences for the social relations between clerics and caste groups. The book examines how at different historical junctures attempts were made to negotiate the equalitarian claims of a universalist faith with the expression of social differentiation lying at the heart of caste inequality. While the existing literature focuses on those who established Islam within the region, this present work provides insights into how marginalised artisans, poets and musicians understood themselves and how they responded to a faith which had become the cornerstone of social prestige and status. It analyses the knowledge practices of clerics and of specialised craft groups, arguing that they are crucial for our understanding of social and cultural distinction. This involves a synthesis of historical sources and ethnography, and provides an innovative approach to the study of religious identity and specialist practitioners.

This is a compelling study of the origins and trajectory of a legendary black uprising against apartheid - the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986. Using insights from the literature on collective action and social movements, it delves deep into the rebellion's inner workings. It examines how the residents of Alexandra - a poverty-stricken, segregated township in Johannesburg - manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time and power in their sequestered world; how they used political theatre to convey, stage and dramatise their struggle; and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics. Theatres of Struggle asks the reader to enter into the world of the rebels, and to confront the moral complexity and social duress they experienced as they invented new social forms and violently attacked old ones.

Philosophising in Mombasa provides an approach to the anthropological study of philosophical discourses in the Swahili context of Mombasa, Kenya. In this historically established Muslim environment, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, philosophy is investigated as social discourse and intellectual practice, situated in everyday life. This is done from the perspective of an 'anthropology of philosophy', a project which is spelled out in the opening chapter. Entry-points and guidelines for the ethnography are provided by discussions of Swahili literary genres, life histories, and social debates. From here, local discourses of knowledge are described and analysed. The social environment and discursive dynamics of the Old Town are portrayed, firstly, by means of following and contextualising informal discussions among neighbours and friends at daily meeting points in the streets; and secondly, by presenting and discussing in-depth case studies of local intellectuals and their contributions to moral and intellectual debates within the community. Taking recurrent internal discussions on social affairs, politics, and appropriate Islamic conduct as a focus, this study sheds light on local practices of critique and reflection. In particular, three local intellectuals (two poets, one Islamic scholar) are portrayed against the background of regional intellectual history, Islamic scholarship, as well as common public debates and private discussions. The three contextual portrayals discuss exemplary issues for the wider field of research on philosophical discourse in Mombasa and the Swahili context on the whole, with reference to the lives and projects of distinct individual thinkers. Ultimately, the study directs attention beyond the regional and the African contexts, towards the anthropological study of knowledge and intellectual practice around the world.

The result is a book compelling in both its historical detail and its analytic sophistication.

This book is an account of murder and politics in Africa, and an historical ethnography of southern Annang communities during the colonial period. Its narrative leads to events between 1945 and 1948 when the imperial gaze of police, press and politicians was focused on a series of mysterious deaths in south-eastern Nigeria attributed to the 'man-leopard society'. These murder mysteries, reported as the 'biggest, strangest murder hunt in the world', were not just forensic but also related to the broad historical impact of commercial, Christian and colonial aid relations on Annang society.

In this innovative study, Ben Jones argues that scholars too often assume that the state is the most important force behind change in local political communities in Africa. Studies look to the state, and to the impact of government reforms, as ways of understanding processes of development and change. Using the example of Uganda, regarded as one of Africa's few "e;success stories"e;, Jones chronicles the insignificance of the state and the marginal impact of Western development agencies. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a Ugandan village reveals that it is churches, the village court, and organizations based on family and kinships obligations that represent the most significant sites of innovation and social transformation.Groundbreaking and critical in turn, Beyond the State offers a new anthropological perspective on how to think about processes of social and political change in poorer parts of the world. It should appeal to anyone interested in African development.

Drawing on two decades of research this social and political history of North-Western Ghana traces the creation of new ethnic and territorial boundaries, categories and forms of self-understanding, and represents a major contribution to debates on ethnicity, colonialism and the 'production of history'. It explores the creation and redefinition of ethnic distinctions and commonalities by African and European actors, showing that ethnicity's power derives from a contradiction: while ethnic identities purport to be non-negotiable, creating permanent bonds, stability and security, the boundaries of the communities created and the associated traits and practices are malleable and adaptable to specific interests and contexts.

This is the fascinating social history of a remote chiefdom in Zimbabwe.

This study, based on research spanning 25 years, focuses on the shifting patterns of social assimilation and exclusion that have characterised the inter-ethnic relations of North Cameroon for almost two centuries.

This is a comprehensive survey, in both its theory and its practice, of the Tabwa who live on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

At a time when so-called fundamentalism has become the privileged analytical frame for understanding Muslim societies past and present, this study offers an alternative perspective on Islam.

This study of local perceptions of population and development in a rural southwestern Nigerian town questions some of the underlying assumptions of the demographic theory of fertility transition.

The first full-length ethnography to tell villagers' stories from war to peace in Mozambique.

This social biography chronicles the life histories of several generations of Kalanga men and women in a single extended family.

This book examines life in a set of pilgrim villages in Sudan to show how the concept of pilgrimage is maintained.

This conmprehensive account studies a key group of the new entrepreneurs in Botswana - the ranchers.

An account of life in the Asante village of Ade beba in West Africa.

Exploring the institution of domestic service, this book discloses processes of postcolonial class formation both as exploitation and cultural elaboration. It also uncovers gender struggles amongst workers and those who employ them.