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The Underneath of Things
In this erudite and gracefully written ethnography, Mariane Ferme explores the links between a violent historical and political legacy, and the production of secrecy in everyday material culture. The focus is on Mende-speaking southeastern Sierra Leone and the surrounding region. Since 1990, this area has been ravaged by a civil war that produced population displacements and regional instability. The Underneath of Things documents the rural impact of the progressive collapse of the Sierra Leonean state in the past several decades, and seeks to understand how an even earlier history is reinscribed in the present.
Out of War
Out of War draws on Mariane C. Ferme’s three decades of ethnographic engagements to examine the physical and psychological aftereffects of the harms of Sierra Leone's civil war. Ferme analyzes the relationship between violence, trauma, and the political imagination, focusing on “war times”—the different qualities of temporality arising from war. She considers the persistence of precolonial and colonial figures of sovereignty re-elaborated in the context of war, and the circulation of rumors and neologisms that freeze in time collective anxieties linked to particular phases of the conflict (or “chronotopes”). Beyond the expected traumas of war, Ferme explores the breaks in the intergenerational transmission of farming and hunting techniques, and the lethal effects of remembering experienced traumas and forgetting local knowledge. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, this ethnography traces strategies of survival and material dwelling, and the juridical creation of new figures of victimhood, where colonial and postcolonial legacies are reinscribed in neoliberal projects of decentralization and individuation.
The Underneath of Things
"Researched with unusual sensitivity, original in approach, illuminating beyond its immediate geographical and theoretical referents, and written in a style that is both carefully crafted and eminently accessible...this is the work of a remarkably talented observer and scholar."--Jane Guyer, editor of Money Matters: Instability, Values and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities, former president of the African Studies Association "The world is currently quite aware of Sierra Leone and its predicament, and it needs this well-informed and beautifully written account of what makes the country so wonderful despite its woes. Ferme's work is truly transcendent, capturing...
Anthropology in the Margins of the State
The very form and reach of the modern state are changing radically under the pressure of globalization. Drawing on fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Peru, Guatemala, India, Chad, Colombia, and South Africa, the contributors examine official documentary practices and their forms and falsifications; the problems that highly mobile mercenaries, currency, goods, arms, and diamonds pose to the state; emerging non-state regulatory authorities; and the role language plays as cultures struggle to articulate their situation.
The Fame of Gawa
This new edition of the critically acclaimed The Fame of Gawa--originally published in 1986--makes available for the first time this important work in paperback. The Fame of Gawa is concerned with fundamental practices of value creation on Gawa, a small island off the southeast coast of mainland Papua New Guinea, the inhabitants of which participate in the long-distance kula shell exchange ring. Integrating various aspects of the study of society and culture--including the sociocultural construction of space and time, self-other relations and the body, and moral and political problems of hierarchy and equality--Nancy D. Munn shows that it is through achieving fame in the wider inter-island world that the Gawan community asserts its own internal viablity.
Visions from the Forests
Published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of the same name organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and held at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., April 9-August 17, 2014; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, September 20, 2014-January 18, 2015; Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, March-May 2015; and High Museum of Art, Atlanta, July-October 2015.
In Sierra Leone
In 2002, as Sierra Leone prepared to announce the end of its brutal civil war, the distinguished anthropologist, poet, and novelist Michael Jackson returned to the country where he had intermittently lived and worked as an ethnographer since 1969. While his initial concern was to help his old friend Sewa Bockarie (S. B.) Marah—a prominent figure in Sierra Leonean politics—write his autobiography, Jackson’s experiences during his stay led him to create a more complex work: In Sierra Leone, a beautifully rendered mosaic integrating S. B.’s moving stories with personal reflections, ethnographic digressions, and meditations on history and violence. Though the Revolutionary United Front (...
Email from Ngeti
Cover; Email from Ngeti; Title; Copyright; CONTENTS; Acknowledgments; 1 Emails from the Field: An Introduction; 2 English Makes You See Far; 3 God Helps Those That Help Themselves; 4 Good Ants, Bad Milk, and Ugly Deeds; 5 The Power of Prayer; 6 Works and Days; 7 A Confrontation; 8 Reflections; Appendix of Names; Notes; Bibliography. Email from Ngeti is a captivating story of sorcery, redemption, and transnational friendship in the globalized twenty-first century. When the anthropologist James Smith returns to Kenya to begin fieldwork for a new research project, he meets Ngeti Mwadime, a young man from the Taita Hills who is as interested in the United States as Smith is in Taita. Ngeti possesses a savvy sense of humor and an unusual command of the English language, which he teaches himself by watching American movies and memorizing the Oxford English Dictionary. Smith and Mwadime soon develop a friendship th.
Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa
The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's work, they examine the impact of colonial ideology, postcoloniality, and development practice on discourses of civility, the workings of everyday politics, the construction of new modes of selfhood, and the pursuit of moral community. Incisive and original, the book shows how struggles over civil society in Africa reveal much about larger historical forces in the post-Cold War era. It also makes a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology to contemporary discourses on the rise of a "new world order."
A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa
An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study....
