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The Taming of Fate
This book is about how extreme situations appearing to have a destructive potential can actually be used to produce meaningful individual and social lives. It is about the “taming of fate”. This notion means and accounts for the ability of individuals and communities to rebuild their lives against all odds. The book is based on case-studies that draw from theoretical insights derived from the sociology of disasters. It addresses some limitations of the sociology of risk, chief among which is the rejection of the relevance of the notion of risk to the study of technologically non-advanced societies. The book argues that this rejection has deprived the study of the human condition of an important analytical asset. The book claims that risk is a property of social action which can best be understood through the analytical scrutiny of its role in the historical constitution of social relations.
Dealing with Elusive Futures
The time to come--as well as the exploration thereof--remains elusive for social actors and social scientists alike. The contributors to this volume 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 who have 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.
Translation Revisited
How realistic is it to expect translation to render the world intelligible in a context shaped by different historical trajectories and experiences? Can we rely on human universals to translate through the unique and specific webs of meaning that languages represent? If knowledge production is a kind of translation, then it is fair to assume that the possibility of translation has largely rested on the idea that Western experience is the repository of these human universals against the background of which different human experiences can be rendered intelligible. The problem with this assumption, however, is that there are limits to Western claims to universalism, mainly because these claims ...
Popular Culture in Africa
This volume marks the 25th anniversary of Karin Barber’s ground-breaking article, "Popular Arts in Africa", which stimulated new debates about African popular culture and its defining categories. Focusing on performances, audiences, social contexts and texts, contributors ask how African popular cultures contribute to the formation of an episteme. With chapters on theater, Nollywood films, blogging, and music and sports discourses, as well as on popular art forms, urban and youth cultures, and gender and sexuality, the book highlights the dynamism and complexity of contemporary popular cultures in sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on the streets of Africa, especially city streets where different cultures and cultural personalities meet, the book asks how the category of "the people" is identified and interpreted by African culture-producers, politicians, religious leaders, and by "the people" themselves. The book offers a nuanced, strongly historicized perspective in which African popular cultures are regarded as vehicles through which we can document ordinary people’s vitality and responsiveness to political and social transformations.
Elgar Encyclopedia of Corruption and Society
Delving into the phenomenology of corruption and its impacts on the governance of societies, this cutting edge Encyclopedia considers what makes corruption such a resilient, complex, and global priority for study. This title contains one or more Open Access entries.
Claude E Ake: The making of an organic intellectual
Claude E. Ake, radical African political philosopher of the first four decades of the postcolonial era, stands out as a progressive social force whose writings continue to have appeal and relevance long after his untimely death in 1996. In examining Ake’s intellectual works, Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe sets out the framework of his theoretical orientations in the context of his life, and reveals him as one of the most fertile and influential voices within the social sciences community in Africa. In tracing the genesis and development of Ake’s political thought, Arowosegbe draws attention to Ake’s compelling account of the material implications and political costs of European colonisation of...
Entangled Histories and Negotiated Universals
Entangled Histories and Negotiated Universals explores the changing field of local histories. Young researchers from around the world--including scholars from Canada, Mozambique, China, and Germany, representing fields as diverse as history, linguistics, political science, anthropology, medicine, and materials science--present their findings, all of which coincide in their understanding that local histories are inseparably intertwined and that, fundamentally, all history is the history of relationships.
Living the City in Africa
Research on cities worldwide still takes its cue from cities in Europe and the US, which are seen as the standard model. However, cities in the global South are undergoing a much more rapid transformation, including multiple interlinked transitions, with Africa featuring the highest urbanization rates world-wide. Scholars therefore call for a new approach to urban studies which examines cities from a more global comparative perspective. This book discusses the new approach, which pays added attention to the role that societal creativity plays in processes of urbanization, instead of concentrating exclusively on expert-driven planning and intervention. Especially in fast-growing cities with weaker institutional capacity for interventions, the interplay between intervention and invention, between expert and societal agency, becomes more tangible and all the more significant. (Series: Swiss African Studies / Schweizerische Afrikastudien / Etudes africaines suisses - Vol. 10)
Forschen unter Bedingungen kultureller Fremdheit
Die Beitragsautoren gehen der Frage nach, ob unter der Bedingung kultureller Differenz gültiges Wissen erzeugt wird, wenn beispielsweise in westlichen Gesellschaften entwickelte und vielfach erprobte Methoden der Datengenerierung, wie sie das biographische bzw. erzählende Interview, das Gruppendiskussionsverfahren oder die Beobachtung darstellen, angewandt werden.
