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Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town
In the small town of Dogondoutchi, Niger, Malam Awal, a charismatic Sufi preacher, was recruited by local Muslim leaders to denounce the practices of reformist Muslims. Malam Awal's message has been viewed as a mixed blessing by Muslim women who have seen new definitions of Islam and Muslim practice impact their place and role in society. This study follows the career of Malam Awal and documents the engagement of women in the religious debates that are refashioning their everyday lives. Adeline Masquelier reveals how these women have had to define Islam on their own terms, especially as a practice that governs education, participation in prayer, domestic activities, wedding customs, and who wears the veil and how. Masquelier's richly detailed narrative presents new understandings of what it means to be a Muslim woman in Africa today.
Fada
Niger most often comes into the public eye as an example of deprivation and insecurity. Urban centers have become concentrated areas of unemployment filled with young men trying, against all odds, to find jobs and fill their time with meaningful occupations. At the heart of Adeline Masquelier’s groundbreaking book is the fada—a space where men gather to escape boredom by talking, playing cards, listening to music, and drinking tea. As a place in which new forms of sociability and belonging are forged outside the unattainable arena of work, the fada has become an integral part of Niger’s urban landscape. By considering the fada as a site of experimentation, Masquelier offers a nuanced depiction of how young men in urban Niger engage in the quest for recognition and reinvent their own masculinity in the absence of conventional avenues to self-realization. In an era when fledgling and advanced economies alike are struggling to support meaningful forms of employment, this book offers a timely glimpse into how to create spaces of stability, respect, and creativity in the face of diminished opportunities and precarity.
In the Meantime
The "meantime" represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of "the possible" where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the stress on the temporal tactics, social commitments, material connections, dispositional orientations, and affective circuits that emerge in the meantime even in the most desperate times.
Prayer Has Spoiled Everything
Bori, in the Mawri society of Niger, are mischievous and invisible beings that populate the bush. Bori is also the practice of taming these wild forces in the context of possession ceremonies. In Prayer Has Spoiled Everything Adeline Masquelier offers an account of how this phenomenon intervenes—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically—in human lives, providing a constantly renewed source of meaning for Mawri peasants confronted with cultural contradictions and socio-economic marginalization. To explore the role of bori possession in local definitions of history, power, and identity, Masquelier spent a total of two years in Niger, focusing on the diverse ways in which spirit mediums shar...
Manners and Mischief
"Manners and Mischief is a cohesive, stimulating volume. Reading these essays and the editors' enlightening introduction was a joy: I learned a great deal, smiled and laughed with uncommon regularity, and marveled at the quality of this remarkable collection." -William M. Tsutsui, author of Godzilla on My Mind "This book is full of fascinating insights. Well-written and often witty, it captures a detailed snapshot of Japanese society in the early 21st century. I would say this is the most insightful book on modern Japan I have read in years." -Liza Dalby, anthropologist and novelist
Muslim Youth and the 9/11 Generation
A new cohort of Muslim youth has arisen since the attacks of 9/11, facilitated by the proliferation of recent communication technologies and the Internet. By focusing on these young people as a heterogeneous global cohort, the contributors to this volume—who draw from a variety of disciplines—show how the study of Muslim youth at this particular historical juncture is relevant to thinking about the anthropology of youth, the anthropology of Islamic and Muslim societies, and the post-9/11 world more generally. These scholars focus on young Muslims in a variety of settings in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America and explore the distinct pastimes and performances, processes of civic engagement and political action, entrepreneurial and consumption practices, forms of self-fashioning, and aspirations and struggles in which they engage as they seek to understand their place and make their way in a transformed world.
In the Meantime
The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the stress on the temporal tactics, social commitments, material connections, dispositional orientations, and affective circuits that emerge in the meantime even in the most desperate times.
Rebellious Riots
Is violent conflict in Africa urbanizing? How do urban protests and civil war intersect? How do narratives, mechanisms and identities of contention move between urban and rural arenas? These questions constitute the basis of investigation and analysis of this unique cross-disciplinary volume. Applying diverging perspectives and methods from political science, anthropology and urban African studies, the book carefully constructs the relational and entangled nature of contemporary forms of contentious politics in Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia.
Dirt, Undress, and Difference
Explores how transgressions of the body's surface - dirt and undress in many forms - take on cultural, political, and moral value.
In Search of Tunga
This volume on Muslim life focuses on young male migrants of rural origin who move to build better lives in Bougouni, a provincial town in southwest Mali. Describing themselves as “simply Muslims” and “adventurers,” these migrants aim to be both prosperous and good Muslims. Drawing upon seventeen months of fieldwork, author André Chappatte explores their sense of prosperity and piety as they embark on tunga (adventure), a customary search for money and more in a tradition that dates back to the colonial period. In the context of the current global war on terrorism, most studies of Muslim life have focused on the politics of piety of reformist movements, their leaders, and members. B...
