This study offers an incisive biography of the life and work of South Africa's foremost social anthropologist, Monica Hunter Wilson. By exploring her main fieldwork and intellectual projects in southern Africa between the 1920s and 1960s, the book offers insights into the personal and intellectual life of a leading African anthropologist.
"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"--
"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"--
The growth of a middle class has been a feature of the 'Africa Rising' narrative in recent years. Sumich sheds new light on this important topic by exploring the political, economic, and social origins of a middle class in Mozambique and the contradictions it faces.
White workers occupied a unique social position in apartheid-era South Africa. Shielded from black labour competition in exchange for support for the white minority regime, their race-based status effectively concealed their class-based vulnerability. Centred on this entanglement of race and class, Privileged Precariat examines how South Africa's white workers experienced the dismantling of the racial state and the establishment of black majority rule. Starting from the 1970s, it shows how apartheid reforms constituted the withdrawal of state support for working-class whiteness, sending workers in search of new ways to safeguard their interests in a rapidly changing world. Danelle van Zyl-Hermann tracks the shifting strategies of the blue-collar Mineworkers' Union, culminating in its reinvention, by the 2010s, as the Solidarity Movement, a social movement appealing to cultural nationalism. Integrating unique historical and ethnographic evidence with global debates, Privileged Precariat offers a chronological and interpretative rethinking of South Africa's recent past and contributes new insights from the Global South to debates on race and class in the era of neoliberalism.
Zongos, wards in West Africa populated by traders and migrants from the northern savannahs and the Sahel, are a common sight in Ghana's Asante region where the people of these wards represent a dual-minority as both foreigners and Muslims in a largely Christian area, facing marginalisation as a result. Islam provides the people of the zongos with a common ground and shared values, becoming central to their identity and to their shared sense of community. This detailed account of Islamic lifeworlds highlights the irreducible diversity and complexity of 'everyday' lived religion among Muslims in a zongo community. Benedikt Pontzen traces the history of Muslim presence in the region and analyses three Islamic phenomena encountered in its zongos in detail: Islamic prayer practices, the authorisation of Islamic knowledge, and ardently contested divination and healing practices. Drawing on empirical and archival research, oral histories, and academic studies, he demonstrates how Islam is inextricably bound up with the diverse ways in which Muslims live it.
Senegal features prominently on the UNESCO World Heritage List. As many of its cultural heritage sites are remnants of the French empire, how does an independent nation care for the heritage of colonialism? How does it reinterpret slave barracks, colonial museums, and monuments to empire to imagine its own national future? This book examines Senegal's decolonization of its cultural heritage. Revealing how Leopold Sedar Senghor's philosophy of Negritude inflects the interpretation of its colonial heritage, Ferdinand de Jong demonstrates how Senegal's reinterpretation of heritage sites enables it to overcome the legacies of the slave trade, colonialism, and empire. Remembering and reclaiming a Pan-African future, De Jong shows how World Heritage sites are conceived as the archive of an Afrotopia to come, and, in a move towards decolonization, how they repair colonial time.
Religious pluralism, as encountered in multi-faith settings such as Nigeria's biggest city Lagos, challenges much of what we have long taken for granted about religion, including the ready-made binaries of Christianity versus Islam, religion versus secularism, religious monism versus polytheism, and tradition versus modernity. In this book, Marloes Janson offers a rich ethnography of religions, religious pluralism and practice in Lagos, analysing how so-called 'religious shoppers' cross religious boundaries, and the coexistence of different religious traditions where practitioners engage with these simultaneously. Prompted to develop a broader conception of religion that shifts from a narrow analysis of religious traditions as mutually exclusive, Janson instead offers a perspective that focuses on the complex dynamics of their actual entanglements. Including real-life examples to illustrate religion in Lagos through religious practice and lived experiences, this study takes account of the ambivalence, inconsistency and unpredictability of lived religion, proposing assemblage as an analytical frame for exploring the conceptual and methodological possibilities that may open as a result.
Looking at Christian and Muslim schools in urban Tanzania, this book explores how transformations in the country's educational sector, and students', parents' and teachers' quests for a "good life" in the neoliberal context, have affected their school and professional trajectories.
Johnson here calls for a shift in focus from human rights to justice in the study of gender relations as she examines the stories of ordinary Malawians striving to resolve disputes and achieve successful gender and marital relations.
Focusing on four distinct sectors (cattle trade, transport, public contracts and NGO work), Munoz combines an ethnographic study of business practices with a lucid analysis of policies and legal rules to provide an in-depth look at how businesses and state bureaucracies cope with unpredictability in times of crisis and reform.
By focusing on families and schools in Durban, Hunter provides an original lens into South Africa's political transition from apartheid to democracy. In this vivid account of the marketisation of schooling, he reveals how whiteness retains value in schools.
How did Zulu Radio in apartheid South Africa, intended to stifle debate, become one of the largest stations in Africa? Gunner maps the fashioning of a modernising Black culture through radio and highlights links between these media figures with writers and political leaders from Harlem to the American South.
This vivid ethnography, describing the precarious lives of fisher folk in post-war Sierra Leone, offers fresh perspectives on themes of gender, youth, gift exchange, and secrecy. Everyday life in this fragile frontier economy is shaped both by a global ecological crisis and a local history of war, slavery, and esoteric practice.
An ethnographic study of Qur'anic schools in northern Nigeria that debunks stereotypes about such schools being recruitment grounds for Boko Haram and other violent groups. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Hannah Hoechner explores through the eyes of students the true nature of being young, poor, and Muslim in a context of pervasive inequality.
Alexander Thurston examines how Salafism, a globally influential Muslim movement, is reshaping religious authority in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. Appealing to scholars of religion and politics, it provides a model for understanding how many new religious movements, including Salafism, place texts at the centre of their preaching and activism.
This book draws together studies from history, archaeology, linguistics, the performing arts and cinema to show how the lifeways of the past were made into a store of authentic knowledge that political and cultural entrepreneurs could draw from - showing African heritage to be a mode of political organisation.
Unique in literature on gender-based violence in Africa, this ethnography of rape and its aftermath locates the staggering level of sexual violence women experience within broader northern Ugandan realities in a post-war context. A provocative study for scholars of gender studies, post-conflict recovery and transitional justice, and anthropologists.
Alexander Thurston examines how Salafism, a globally influential Muslim movement, is reshaping religious authority in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. Appealing to scholars of religion and politics, it provides a model for understanding how many new religious movements, including Salafism, place texts at the centre of their preaching and activism.
Tracing the personal and intellectual histories of six women anthropologists, this book will be welcomed by anthropologists, historians and students in African studies interested in the development of social anthropology in twentieth-century Africa, as well as by students and researchers in the field of gender studies.
Maxim Bolt explores the lives of Zimbabwean migrant labourers, of settled black farm workers and their dependants, and of white farmers and managers, as they intersect on the Zimbabwean-South African border. Focusing on one farm, the book investigates the role of a hub of wage labour in a place of crisis.
Based on a decade of fieldwork in southeastern Ghana and analysis of secondary sources, this book aims to reconstruct the religious history of the Anlo-Ewe peoples from the 1850s. In particular, it focuses on a corpus of rituals collectively known as 'Fofie', which derived their legitimacy from engaging with the memory of the slave-holding past. The Anlo developed a sense of discomfort about their agency in slavery in the early twentieth century which they articulated through practices such as ancestor veneration, spirit possession, and by forging links with descendants of peoples they formerly enslaved. Conversion to Christianity, engagement with 'modernity', trans-Atlantic conversations with diasporan Africans, and citizenship of the postcolonial state coupled with structural changes within the religious system - which resulted in the decline in Fofie's popularity - gradually altered the moral emphases of legacies of slavery in the Anlo historical imagination as the twentieth century progressed.
The Nazaretha church, with over four million members, is one of the largest and most influential African churches in South Africa. Unique among other churches, its members have written a new 'Bible' that tells the story of their community. This is the first study to focus upon how these believers used their new Bible to redefine Christianity in a Southern African context.
This study offers an incisive biography of the life and work of South Africa's foremost social anthropologist, Monica Hunter Wilson. By exploring her main fieldwork and intellectual projects in southern Africa between the 1920s and 1960s, the book offers insights into the personal and intellectual life of a leading African anthropologist.
This book offers an original anthropological approach to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, demonstrating why AIDS interventions in the former homeland of Venda have failed. Through the songs of female initiation, AIDS education and wandering minstrels, the book argues that music is central to understanding how AIDS interventions operate.
This monograph explores the expansion of the Tablighi Jama'at, a transnational Islamic missionary movement that originated in India in the mid-nineteenth century, and its impact in the Gambia (West Africa) in the past decade. The book investigates how Gambian youth have incorporated the South Asian Tablighi ideology into their daily lives and adapted it to their local context.
Casting new light on scholarly understandings of the connections between politics, witchcraft and AIDS in South Africa, this biography reconstructs the life of Jimmy Mohale, who studied and worked as a teacher during the anti-apartheid struggle and died from an undiagnosed sickness, attributing his misfortunes to witchcraft.
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a church of Brazilian origin, has been enormously successful in establishing branches and attracting followers in post-apartheid South Africa. Unlike other Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCC), the UCKG insists that relationships with God be devoid of 'emotions', that socialisation between members be kept to a minimum and that charity and fellowship are 'useless' in materialising God's blessings. Instead, the UCKG urges members to sacrifice large sums of money to God for delivering wealth, health, social harmony and happiness. While outsiders condemn these rituals as empty or manipulative, this book shows that they are locally meaningful, demand sincerity to work, have limits and are informed by local ideas about human bodies, agency and ontological balance. As an ethnography of people rather than of institutions, this book offers fresh insights into the mass PCC movement that has swept across Africa since the early 1990s.
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