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Crossing Religious Boundaries
A rich ethnography of lived religious experiences in Lagos, offering a unique look at religious pluralism in Nigeria's biggest city.
Islam, Youth and Modernity in the Gambia
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 Jama'at offers Gambian youth, and women in particular, new opportunities to express their religious identity in a way that is in line with a modern lifestyle. The book investigates how Gambian youth have incorporated the South Asian Tablighi ideology into their daily lives and adapted it to their local context.
Women's Songs from West Africa
Exploring the origins, organization, subject matter, and performance contexts of singers and singing, Women's Songs from West Africa expands our understanding of the world of women in West Africa and their complex and subtle roles as verbal artists. Covering Côte d'Ivoire, the Gambia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and beyond, the essays attest to the importance of women's contributions to the most widespread form of verbal art in Africa.
Religious Plurality in Africa
Grounded in ethnographic and historiographic research and taking a cross-regional approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of similarity and difference, rapprochement and detachment, and divergence and competition between practitioners of Christianity, Islam and African religious traditions.Across Africa, Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions live in shared settings, demarcating themselves in opposition to one another and at times engaging in violent conflicts, but also being entangled in complex ways and showing unexpected similarities and mutual cross-overs. However, while encounters and entanglements of African religious traditions with either Isl...
Being Young and Muslim
This volume explores the ways in which the young, both in Muslim majority societies and Muslim communities in the West, negotiate their Muslim identity in relation to their youthful desires - their individuality, the search for autonomy and security for the future. The cultural behavior of Muslim youths, the authors argue, must be understood as located in the political realm and representing a new arena of contestation for power. The essays in this volume look at the strategies Muslim youths deploy to realize their interests and aspirations, including music and fashion, party politics, collective violence, gang activities, religious radicalism and other forms of expression.
The Best Hand is the Hand that Always Gives
Griottes (female bards) are a striking feature of Mandinka culture. They can be recognized by their flamboyant style of dressing and their sharp voices. Nevertheless, griottes have largely been neglected in scientific literature, while ample attention has been paid to griots (male bards). This book tries to fill the gap. Marloes Janson lived with the griottes from a Mandinka community in eastern Gambia for more than a year and was trained by them as an apprentice. From this perspective she describes the daily life and concerns of the griottes, their skills, their techniques for learning the profession, their means of subsistence, their relationships with the griots and their patrons. The mai...
Civic Agency in Africa
Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed.
Epic Adventures
The many adventures of the "epic" in modern times are fascinating topics in themselves. The Romantics claimed that every self-respecting nation should, at some time, have had one and they set out to reconstruct these epics for political as well as cultural reasons. Such epics represented earlier stages in the development of nation-states and in this modern world they were, for a long time, hard to appreciate. The introduction of tape recorders, however, brought the epic back in the limelight. It became fashionable for scholars to record long oral narratives, and to present them as long written poems that reflected deeply ingrained ideas. Because of this technology, the idea of the epic was r...
Slave Emancipation, Christian Communities, and Dissent in Post-Abolition Tanzania, 1878-1978
The first historical account of the dramatic growth of Christianity in Western Tanzania during the twentieth century and of the role of former slaves in this process. Examining the intersection of post-slavery and evangelism, this book shows the ways that former slaves from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds came together to create new communities in the Christian missions of western Tanzania. It shows how converts adapted to Christianity and, at the same time, shaped it through their translations of the Bible and other religious texts into the Kinyamwezi language, integrating concepts from their own cultures and experiences of slavery. Working as teachers, pastors, and catechi...
In the Time of Ebola
The anthropologist Jonah Lipton was in Freetown, Sierra Leone, when the largest Ebola outbreak in history hit. In the Time of Ebola is his account of the epidemic, centering on the residents of a neighborhood swept up in the emergency. Lipton follows the lives of young men and women over a period of seven years, revealing what the epidemic looked like on the ground. He explores its causes, impacts, and legacies in a place where crisis might be considered the norm, not the exception. The emergency was disruptive and challenging, not least due to the short-term international response. Yet for many youths Ebola was a time of unusual clarity on the ambiguities around care, work, and coming of age experienced in a context of vast economic and social inequalities. Lipton shows how residents of this historically cosmopolitan West African city drew on centuries-old frameworks for managing foreign intervention. In the Time of Ebola questions dominant framings of crisis and offers ways of theorizing, researching, and responding to emergencies that make the home, the family, and "ordinary life" their starting point.
