After the revolution of 2011, the electoral victory of the Islamist party ‘Ennahdha’ allowed previously silenced religious and conservative ideas about women’s right to abortion. This book explores the changes and continuity in the local discourses and practices related to the body in Tunisia during this time.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology

Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

Reexamining a classical work of Social Anthropology, African Political Systems (1940), edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, this book looks at the colonial and academic context from which the work arose, as well as its reception and its subject matter and looks at how the work can help with analysis of current politics in Africa.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History Development Studies

Drawing on rich linguistic-ethnographic details of Zambian children interacting, combined with observations of school and household procedures, the author provides a rare insight into the lives, voices, and learning paths of children in a rural African setting.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies Educational Studies

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

The historical emergence of centralised mineral resource governance in Ghana can be tied to its failed colonially transplanted legal system. This book offers a reflection of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) formalisation, with a focus on its complex operationalisation in formerly colonized societies, to consider environmental responsibility and accountability in the administration of access to mineral rights.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History Sustainable Development Goals

An ethnography of the lives of white citizens of the Okavango Delta, Botswana, this book examines their relationships with the natural and social environments of the region. In response to the insecurity of their European descent in a postcolonial African state, the white Batswana have developed values and practices that allow them high levels of belonging.

Subject: Anthropology (General)

The construction of the Merowe Dam along the Nile in northern Sudan flooded local villages and forced thousands of inhabitants to flee to higher ground. This book follows the Manasir people’s attempts to resist state-run resettlement schemes, preserve their homeland, and try out meaningful ways of life along the emerging reservoir.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Peace and Conflict Studies

This ethnography examines how the cooperation between a national park in Madagascar and a Swiss zoo is perceived by ordinary people at either end. One view focuses on power and history, the other on morality and progress. Nature conservation therefore widens the gap between people in the North and South.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Development Studies Anthropology (General)

Based on fieldwork in Kinshasa and Paris, Breaking Rocks examines patronage payments within Congolese popular music. This book offers insights into both the ideologies of power and value in central Africa’s troubled post-colonial political economy, and the economic flows that make up the hidden side of the globalization.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

Loving cows, then killing them. The relation with cattle in Mursi country is shaped by the dichotomy between the value given to it during life and the death imposed upon it. This book investigates the link between the nurturing and killing of cattle, and its accompanying aesthetics, with Mursi society itself.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Development Studies

Forms of group identity play a prominent role in everyday lives and politics in northeast Africa. Case studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya illustrate the way that identities are formed and change over time, and how local, national, and international politics are interwoven. Specific attention is paid to the impact of modern weaponry, new technologies, religious conversion, food and land shortages, international borders, civil war, and displacement on group identities.

Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

Drawing on the expertise of anthropologists, historians and geographers, these volumes provide a significant account of a society profoundly shaped by identity politics and contribute to a better understanding of the nature of conflict and war, and forms of alliance and peacemaking, thus providing a comprehensive portrait of this troubled region.

Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies

This original study carefully considers how young people perceive their living environment and how growing up in exile structures their view of the past and their country of origin, and the future and its possibilities.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology

Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations.

Subject: Medical Anthropology

Drawing upon the fields of environmental history and political ecology, Colonial Seeds in African Soil unravels the complex forest conservation history of Sierra Leone during the 20th century. It grounds a broader trans-national history of Empire Forestry with a case study focused on Sierra Leone, examining how colonial ideas shaped forest conservation in West Africa.

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present

This is the first comprehensive economic history of the Basotho people of Southern Africa and spans from the 1820s to the present day. The book documents what the Basotho have done on their own account, focusing on their systematic exclusion from trade and their political efforts to insert themselves into their country’s commerce.

Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History

This volume analyses conflicts in the Lake Chad Basin based on insights into local dynamics and the lived world of the people themselves.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology

The second edition of this remarkable book updates the immense advances in policy and soft international law with regards to the rights of mobile indigenous peoples in conservation.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals

Subject: History (General)

Exploring the dynamics of identity formation processes in diasporic spaces, this book analyses how gender, cultural and religious practices are renegotiated in a situation of displacement. The author presents the comparative case study of Somali migrant women in Nairobi and Johannesburg:  two cosmopolitan urban hubs in the global South.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

Investigates the political reasons for South Africa adopting an allegedly self-regulating market despite its disastrous effects and identifies the colonialist ideas of property rights as a mainstay of the existing social order.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology

Despite high degrees of cultural and ethnic diversity as well as prevailing political instability, Guinea-Bissau’s population has developed a strong sense of national belonging. By examining contemporary and historical perspectives, A Creole Nation explores how creole identity, culture, and political leaders have influenced postcolonial nation-building processes in Guinea-Bissau.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Political and Economic Anthropology

Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

Cutting and Connecting rethinks anthropology’s comparative endeavor by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. The contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent anthropological studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

A historically informed ethnography of creativity, agency, and the fashioning of selves through the different life stages in urban Senegal, this book explores the significance of multiple engagement with dance in a context of economic uncertainty and rising concerns over morality in the public space.

Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

This concise, forcefully argued volume lays out a groundbreaking interpretation of the “Mandela phenomenon.” Contrary to a neoliberal social model that privileges adversarial criminal justice and a rationalistic approach to warmaking, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni elevates transformative political justice and a pluriversal vision of society as key features of Nelson Mandela’s legacy.

Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

In Mubende Hill, Uganda, African art history lives through its spiritual traditions. Centering the agency of ritual objects and the ancestral Omweyimirize tree, this book reveals how clay pots, calabashes, Bachwezi cups and other artefacts mediate healing, identity, and continuity among the Balyammere.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Museum Studies

The Sahrawi refugees in southwestern Algeria have struggled from exile for fifty years to reconfigure the animated desert they call badiya. They recovered camel husbandry and access to part of the former rangeland, and wove it back as seasonal nomadism. Desert Entanglements analyzes this process as an act of place-making premised on refugees’ agency.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Sustainable Development Goals

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the World Bank and a Ugandan ministry, this book critically examines how the new aid architecture recasts aid relations in terms of a partnership.

Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

The contributions assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa’s historical development. From prehistoric dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of postcolonial nationalism, each engages with African intellectual history while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like “work” and “land” take shape.

Subject: History (General)

Axel Sommerfelt has been an important influence on Norwegian and Scandinavian anthropology, but his contributions are almost unknown. This book brings together some of his critical writings, newly written articles and an interview positions him in the history of ‘North Sea’ social anthropology and shows his continued relevance.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)

As migration from poverty-stricken and conflict-affected countries continues to hit the headlines, this book focuses on an important counter-flow: the money that people send home. This book explores the dynamics, infrastructure, and far-reaching effects of remittances from the perspectives of people in the Somali regions and the diaspora. By ‘following the money’ the author opens a window on the everyday lives of people caught up in processes of conflict, migration, and development. The book demonstrates how, in the interstices of state disruption and globalisation, and in the shadow of violence and political uncertainty, life in the Somali regions goes on, subject to complex transnational forms of social, economic, and political innovation and change.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies

The author’s sharply critical perspective reveals how an epistemology of alterity has kept Africa ensnared within colonial matrices of power, serving to justify external interventions in African affairs, including the interference with liberation struggles and disregard for African positions. Evaluating the quality of African responses and available options, the author opens up a new horizon that includes cognitive justice and new humanism.

Subject: Colonial History

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies Development Studies

Looking at Tanga, a city on the Tanzanian Swahili coast, Dominik Mattes examines the implementation of antiretroviral HIV-treatment (ART) in the area, exploring the manifold infrastructural and social fragilities of treatment provision in public HIV clinics as well as patients’ multi-layered struggles of coming to terms with ART in their everyday lives.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals

Food and Families in the Making looks at knowledge reproduction about how we know cooking and its role in the making of everyday family life. It also examines a political economy of cooking that situates Marrakchi women’s lived experience in the broader context of persisting poverty and food insecurity in Morocco.

Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Food Connections follows the movement of food from its production sites in West Africa to its final spaces of consumption in Europe. It is an ethnographic study of economic and social life amongst a close-knit community of food producers, traders andconsumers and a wide range of small intermediaries that operate in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal.

Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

The Forest People without a Forest explores how the Baka, who live in Eastern Cameroon, assert forms of belonging in order to participate in development interventions, and how community life is shaped and reshaped through these interventions. These interventions raise paradoxes of belonging for the Baka, and are often targeted toward competing and contradictory goals.

Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

Using interviews with scholars from Tunisia and Japan, this book examines the manner in which Foucault experienced and explained his encounters with non-Western cultures, unraveling the anthropological implications of his unwavering commitment to cultural difference.  It also traces the philosophical-theoretical sources of his conception of difference, and uncovers the contradictions of his dismissal of empirical anthropology to know human beings.

Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Caring for small children and the family in Burkina Faso is hard work. Although the health infrastructure in Burkina Faso is weak and many citizens feel neglected by the state, Fragile Futures shows that the state continues to play an important role in people’s engagements and hopes for a better future.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals

Subjects: Film and Television Studies Anthropology (General) History (General)

Mauritian Independence in 1968 marked the end of the heyday of the island’s Franco-Mauritian elite, who are now is faced with a more diverse power constellation. This book focuses on the power of these white elites still lingering on in postcolonial realities, and addresses how this group aims to prolong its position over time.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

Friendship, descent and alliance are basic forms of relatedness that have received unequal attention in social anthropology. Offering new insights into the ways in which friendship is conceptualized and realized in various sub-Saharan African settings, the contributions to this volume depart from the recent tendency to study friendship in isolation from kinship. In drawing attention to the complexity of the interactions between these two kinds of social relationships, the book suggests that analyses of friendship in Western societies would also benefit from research that explores more systematically friendship in conjunction with kinship.

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Based on unprecedented access to the Ghanaian military barracks and inspired by the recent resurgence of coups in West Africa, the book assesses why and how the Ghana Armed Forces were transformed from an organisation that actively orchestrated coups into an institution that accepts the authority of the democratically elected civilian government.

Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Applied Anthropology

This volume brings together scholars who have conducted research on funerary events across sub-Saharan Africa. The contributions offer an in-depth understanding of the broad changes and underlying causes in African societies over the years, such as changes in religious beliefs, social structure, urbanization, and technological changes and health.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

This classic study, now available for the first time in English, explains how German colonial ambitions foundered in present-day Namibia. As it shows, the highly rationalized planning of Wilhelmine authorities could not accommodate the practical, lived realities of both colonizer and colonized.

Subjects: Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present

Drawing on ethnographic research in the village of Canhane, host to the first community tourism project in Mozambique, this volume explores the influence of development and tourism in relation to ethics, and non-state governance in contemporary life.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Travel and Tourism

Laplante follows umhlonyane — one of the oldest and best-documented indigenous medicines in South Africa. The volume follows the plant anthropologically on its trails and trials of becoming a biopharmaceutical — from the “open air” to controlled environments — learning from the plant itself, and from the people who use it with hopes in healing.
 

Subject: Medical Anthropology

Drawing on previously inaccessible and overlooked archival sources, The Herero Genocide undertakes a groundbreaking investigation into the war between colonizer and colonized in what was formerly German South West Africa and is today the nation of Namibia. The result is an indispensable account of a genocide that has been neglected for too long.

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Genocide History

Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies

In northwest Namibia, people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General) Sustainable Development Goals

Scandals and economic stagnation in the colonies demanded a new and positive image of their value for Germany. By promoting business and establishing a new genre within the fast growing film industry, films of the colonies triggered patriotic feelings but also addressed the audience as travelers, explorers, wildlife protectionists, and participants in unique cultural events.

Subjects: Film and Television Studies Colonial History

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

Drawing from original fieldwork in Khartoum and empirical data, In-Betweenness in Greater Khartoum uses in-between spaces as a lens to analyze how political events, in particular the 2011 independence of South Sudan, works along with other processes such as globalization and eco-nomic neo-liberalization to impact communities across the region.

Subjects: Urban Studies Peace and Conflict Studies

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

Subject: Medical Anthropology

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

Rangeland, forests and riverine landscapes of pastoral communities in Eastern Africa are increasingly under threat. Abetted by states who think that outsiders can better use the lands than the people who have lived there for centuries, outside commercial interests have displaced indigenous dwellers from pastoral territories. This volume presents case studies from Eastern Africa.

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Mobility Studies Sustainable Development Goals

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Performance Studies Colonial History

Juǀ’hoan collective decision-making processes epitomize direct, participatory democracy: one person/one vote, enhanced by in-depth negotiations that lead to consensus. These practices are the basis of Juǀ’hoan education and culture, resulting in anr egalitarian culture that forms the foundation of an enduring democracy.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

The landscape of Zambia’s central Luangwa Valley has been crafted over centuries by the Valley Bisa who live there. Stuart Marks explores an emergent dissonance with the inconvenient conventions and myths of conservationists, administrators and philanthropists who seek to intervene in Africa’s environmental and wildlife crises on new terms and with technical means.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)

Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies

Since the end of the Rwandan genocide, the new political elite has been challenged with building a unified nation. The book investigates this project of civic education, the explosion of neo-traditional institutions and activities, and the uses of camps and retreats that come together to shape the “ideal” Rwandan citizen.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Media Studies Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

Subject: Anthropology (General)

This handy, concise biography describes the life and intellectual contribution of Max Gluckman (1911-75) who was one the most significant social anthropologists of the twentieth century.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

Deriving from innovative new work by six researchers, this book questions what the new media's role is in contemporary Africa. The focus is on media-related practices, which require engagement with different perspectives and concerns while situating these in a wider analytical context.

Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General) Development Studies

Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa, the model of rule has been medicine – and not (as Europeans have long assumed) the colonizer’s despotic administrator, the missionary’s divine king, or Vansina’s big man.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Memory Studies Literary Studies

Demystifying Somali residence and mobility in urban East Africa, this volume shows its historical depth, and explores the social, cultural and political underpinnings of Somali-led urban transformation. In so doing, it offers a vivid case study of the transformative power of (forced) migration on urban centres, and the intertwining of urbanity and mobility.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Urban Studies

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

Based on fieldwork conducted in two national economic cycles in Nigeria - the petroleum-boom prosperity (in 1977-1979), and the macro-economic decline (in 1985, 1996 and 1998) - this book unveils a new paradigm of economic change in the West African savannah, demonstrating how rural accumulation in a polygynous society actually limits the extent of inequality while at the same time promoting technical change.  A uniquely African non-capitalist trajectory of accumulation subordinates the acquisition of capital to the expansion of polygynous families, clientage networks, and circles of trading friends.  The whole trajectory is driven by an indigenous ethics of personal responsibility. This model disputes the validity of both Marxian theories of capitalist transformation in Africa and the New Institutional Economics.

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Subject: Medical Anthropology

Based on original fieldwork collected in Sudan from 2006 to 2011, contributors’ look at “access to resources” from various disciplinary approaches — socio-anthropology, geography, politics, history, linguistic. The book analyzes major transformations, from the 1980s to South Sudan’s independence in 2011, which affected the country in the framework of “globalization.”

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

Museums flourished in post-apartheid South Africa. In older museums, there were renovations on the go, and at least fifty new museums opened. Most sought to depict violence and suffering under apartheid and the growth of resistance. These unlikely journeys are tracked as museums became a primary setting for contesting histories. The author demonstrates how an institution concerned with the conservation of the past is simultaneously a site for changing history.

Subjects: Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General)

This book examines the centrality of the East African Caravan Trade to Bagamoyo, a Tanzanian port town on the Indian Ocean, and explores the way that this history was silenced when Bagamoyo was instead branded as a slave route town in 2006 in an attempt to qualify it for the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Development Studies

The Myth of Self-Reliance provides valuable insights into refugees’ experiences of repatriation to Liberia after protracted exile and their responses to the ending of refugee status for remaining refugees in Ghana.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

This is the first book-length study analyzing the origins of Tanzania’s wildlife conservation under German colonial rule. It examines the shift of wildlife policies from exploitation to preservation. By situating East Africa’s conservation in a global context, The Nature of German Imperialism shows how colonial policy helped to shape international conservationist efforts.

Subjects: Colonial History Environmental Studies (General)

Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. This collection reveals narratives of the colonial era that are often ignored or obscured by the national histories of former colonial powers.

Subject: Colonial History

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Focusing on a sub-set of the Dagomba of northern Ghana, this book looks at the first generation to go through secondary school in the north. This book charts their path into elite status and argues that this generation uses the tools gained through education and social connections to influence politics back home.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies Development Studies

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become ubiquitous in the development sector in Africa and attracting more academic attention. However, the fact that NGOs are an integral part of the everyday lives of men and women on the continent has been overlooked thus far. By taking a radical empirical stance, this book studies NGOs as a vital part of the lifeworlds of Africans.

Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

In this accessible ethnography of a small town in northern Mozambique, everyday cultural knowledge and behaviors about food, cooking, and eating reveal the deeply human pursuit of a nourishing life. This emerges less through the consumption of specific nutrients than it does in the affective experience of alimentation in contexts that support vitality, compassion, and generative relations.

Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

An anthropological study of the health system of the Dagara people of northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, Of Life and Health develops a cultural and epistemological lexicon of Dagara life by examining its religious, ritual, and artistic expressions, and gives a holistic account of the Dagara knowledge system.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology

From 1942 to 1950, nearly twenty thousand Poles found refuge from the horrors of World War II in camps within Britain’s African colonies, including Uganda, Tanganyika, and Kenya. On the Edges of Whiteness tells their improbable story, tracing the manifold, complex relationships that developed among refugees, their British administrators, and their African neighbors.

Subjects: History: World War II Refugee and Migration Studies Colonial History

“This is an excellent book. The combination of theory and context works well…The prose is sharp and the author has set up the problem in a logical way that is easy to follow.  It also benefits from an interdisciplinary approach.  Her grasp of detail is superior to many theorists…It reads very fluently, the author is clearly a gifted prose writer. The thread of argument runs through the book in a compelling way…The conclusion is full of intriguing ties to other case studies and the author summarizes her argument well.”  ·  Cathie Carmichael, University of East Anglia

Subjects: Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

Twenty years after the 1994 genocide, Rwandans are still troubled by what made the violence possible and how they can know it will not recur. This study uncovers how Rwandan visions of peace and modern nationhood concern not only political reform or economic development, but also transformations in the self.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

Subjects: Colonial History Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

In Guinea, situated in the background of central government struggles, rural elites, through the use of identity politics, employ history and contemporary political reforms to maintain their privileges and perpetuate a generation-old local social contract that bridges ethnic and religious divides.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies

Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Medical Anthropology

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies Development Studies

This book follows young Cameroonian men who aspire to migrate abroad and play football for a living while analyzing masculinities in West Africa. The book argues that the athletic aspirations of young Cameroonians and their propensity to consult with Pentecostal Men of God offer new insights about the nature of social mobility in the neoliberal age.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality

Subjects: Educational Studies History: 20th Century to Present

Focussing ethnographically on private sector maternity care in South Africa, Privileges of birth attends to the ways healthcare and childbirth are shaped by South Africa’s racialised history. Examining the ethics of care in midwife-attended birth, the author offers a unique account of birthing care in the context of elite care services.

Subject: Medical Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies

Subjects: Applied Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

“Blanes’ multi-sited ethnographic-cum-historical study of a prominent Christian prophetic church of Angolan origin is an excellent piece of scholarship, and makes a unique contribution to the literature on Christianity in Africa and on African Christianity in Europe. More than other scholars in the emerging anthropology of Christianity, Blanes gives detailed attention to the interlocking of temporal and spatial dimensions in the context of diasporic religion and religious self-identification.”  ·  Thomas Kirsch, University of Konstanz

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Colonial History Anthropology (General) Sociology

How have African moral worlds changed since the 1990s? Regimes of Responsibility in Africa analyses the transformations that discourses and practices of responsibility have undergone in Africa. The work enters into a dialogue with the emerging corpus of studies in the field of ethics, providing to it a set of analytical perspectives that can help further enlarge its theoretical and geographical scope.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

Through the examination of religious practices and public performance, the author offers a compelling study of how the Hindu community in the French territory of La Réunion assert pride in their religion as a means of gaining recognition as a religious minority.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume attempts to rethink (and unthink) development discourses and practices in southern Africa. The authors explore the ways in which legacies of colonialism impact development, as well as other factors such as regional politics, corruption, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.

Subjects: Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals

Returning Life explores how language and action affect life force. Diverse sources demonstrate how this phenomenon extends to coffee cash-cropping, Catholic Christianity, and colonial and post-colonial rule, featuring cognate languages throughout the area.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

Comparative studies on concentration camps have tended to neglect the African colonial experience at the turn of the twentieth century. A Sad Fiasco delves deeper into the daily lives led in the colonial concentration camps in southern Africa and the motives behind the mass extinction of thousands of internees.
 

Subjects: Genocide History Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present

Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Focusing on the intricate presence of a new Japanese religion (Sekai Kyûseikyô) in the densely populated and primarily Christian environment of Kinshasa (DR Congo), this ethnographic study offers a practitioner-orientated perspective to create a localised picture of religious globalization.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Refugee and Migration Studies

In the late 1890s through the 1940s, Germany enacted race-based population policies in Southwest Africa which instrumentalized German women as colonists. The Servants of Empire engages the history of these colonial operatives, mostly comprised of poor, white women, as they became an unsettling force in colonial settlements and contributed to the rise of the German embrace of genocide, National Socialism, and apartheid.

Subjects: Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present

In responding to the perceived threat posed by venereal diseases in Germany’s colonies, doctors took a biopolitical approach that employed medical and bourgeois discourses of modernization, health, productivity, and morality. Their goal was to change the behavior of targeted groups, or at least to isolate infected individuals from the healthy population. However, the Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Asians they administered to were not passive recipients of these strategies.

Subjects: Colonial History

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

Grounded in both theory and ethnography, this volume insists on taking social positionality seriously when accounting for Africa’s current age of polarizing wealth. To this end, the notion of social im/mobilities emphasizes the complexities of current changes, taking us beyond the prism of a unidimensional social ladder, for social moves cannot always be apprehended through the binaries of ‘gains’ and ‘losses’.

Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

In the early sixties, many South African anthropologists supported ‘Grand Apartheid’ in Namibia. South Africa’s colonial policies in the country served as a testing ground for many key features of its repressive infrastructure, and strategies for countering anti-apartheid resistance. The book also analyses how the knowledge used to justify and implement apartheid was created.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Peace and Conflict Studies

Known as highly mobile cattle nomads, the Wodaabe in Niger are today increasingly engaged in a transformation process towards a more diversified livelihood based primarily on agro-pastoralism and urban work migration. This book examines recent transformations in spatial patterns, notably in the context of urban migration and in processes of sedentarization in rural proto-villages.

Subjects: Mobility Studies Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

The papers in this volume examine the sociocultural, socioeconomic and environmental factors that condition spatial patterning of human behavior in food-producing (both agricultural and pastoral) societies. The spatially patterned material manifestations of that behavior are considered in the light of archaeological and ethnographical examples. Archaeological and ethnographic data sources are drawn primarily from Africa, as well as the ancient Near East.

Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)

In rural Punu communities, song and dance are shaped through ritual encounters between humans and spirit beings. This ethnography explores how performance creates connection and participation in the water spirit world, offering a matrifocal perspective that rethinks affect and embodied life.

Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Colonial History Educational Studies

Botswana has been portrayed as a major case of exception in Africa—as an oasis of peace and harmony with an enduring parliamentary democracy, blessed with remarkable diamond-driven economic growth. Whereas the “failure” of other states on the continent is often attributed to the prevalence of indigenous political ideas and structures, the author argues that Botswana’s apparent success is not the result of Western ideas and practices of government having replaced indigenous ideas and structures. Rather, the postcolonial state of Botswana is best understood as a unique, complex formation, one that arose dialectically through the meeting of European ideas and practices with the symbolism and hierarchies of authority, rooted in the cosmologies of indigenous polities, and both have become integral to the formation of a strong state with a stable government.

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Travel and Tourism

Through an in-depth historical and ethnographic study of forestry in Edo State, this book challenges the routine linking of political and ecological crisis narratives. It shows that the roots of many of today’s problems lie in scientific forest management itself, rather than its recent abandonment, and moreover that many “illegal” local practices improve rather than reduce biodiversity and forest cover. The book therefore challenges preconceptions about contemporary Nigeria and highlights the need to re-evaluate current understandings of what constitutes “good governance” in tropical forestry.

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

Traveling Models and Practical Norms examines how different modes of governance that deliver services of general interest experience significant gaps between explicit rules of the game and implicit practices, between planned actions and daily routines.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies

An insightful and wide-ranging study of the colonial history of conservation projects, Tropical Nature seeks to provide a much-needed history of the Global South from its own perspective. In doing so, this volume collection spotlights a “small-scale global history” that deciphers the relations binding human societies to the non-human world.

Subjects: Colonial History Environmental Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present

This collection of Claudia Roth's work closely documents the livelihood strategies of members of various neighbourhoods in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. This collection focuses on notions of “the African family” as a solidary network, changing marriage and kinship relations, and increasingly precarious social status of young women and men.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Urban Studies

Water, Life, and Profit offers a holistic analysis of the people, economies, cultural symbolism, and material culture involved in the management, production, distribution, and consumption of drinking water in the urban context of Niamey, Niger. Keough and Youngstedt offer new insights into the lived experiences of gender, ethnicity, class, and spatial structure in Niamey’s water economies today.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals

We Come as Members of the Superior Race discusses the stereotype of Africans as “primitive” and “unintelligent,” exploring how this legacy has enforced contemporary educational and development discourses which view African societies as subordinated in a global geopolitical order, and how it continues to influence education policy in Sub-Sahara Africa today.

Subjects: Educational Studies Development Studies Sociology Sustainable Development Goals

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

Through the theoretical lens of rhetoric, this book offers an interactionalist analysis of how the Kara – a small population in southern Ethiopia – negotiate ethnic and non-ethnic differences among themselves, the relations with their various neighbors, and eventually their integration in the Ethiopian state.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Whilst a student in South Africa, John Schlapobersky was arrested for opposing apartheid and tortured, detained and deported. In this volume, apartheid and its resistance come to life in personal stories that make this a vital historical document - one of its time and one for our own.

Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Performance Studies

Uncertainty, though intertwined with all human activity, is experienced differently—sometimes obsessed over and other times ignored. This ethnography shows how Rashaida in north-eastern Sudan deal with unknowns, which at times present debilitating problems, but also may offer opportunities to create other futures.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

Witchcraft violence is a feature of many contemporary African societies. In Ghana, belief in witchcraft and the malignant activities of putative witches is prevalent. This book provides a detailed account of Ghanaian witchcraft beliefs and practices and their role in fueling violent attacks on these alleged witches.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

Wrestling with Hope in Urban Senegal follows the journey of football players and wrestlers in Dakar as they confront the realities of their sporting aspirations. It grapples with themes of masculinity, belief systems and economic survival whilst navigating the complexities of a neoliberal landscape.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies Urban Studies

The rapidly expanding population of youth gangs and street children is one of the most disturbing issues in many cities around the world. By focusing on gender as the defining element of these children’s lives — as they describe it in their own words — this book offers a clear analysis of how the unequal and antagonistic gender relations that are tolerated and normalized by everyday school and family structures shape their lives at home and on the street.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)