You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Should people in the way lose out as new reservoirs, mines, plantations, or superhighways displace them from their homes and livelihoods? What if the process of resettlement were made accountable to those impacted, empowering them to achieve just outcomes and to share in the benefits of development projects? This book seeks to answer these questions, putting forward powerful counterfactual case studies to assess what problems real-world development projects would likely have avoided if the project had included the affected people in decision making about whether and how they should resettle. Drawing on contributions from leading and emerging scholars from around the world, this book consider...
Directly confronts myths of an exotic Africa, full of insoluble problems
This excellent new volume in the series from the Society for Economic Anthropology focuses on the role of labor in world economies. Contributors offer a range of case studies illustrating labor processes in both western and nonwestern societies. Individual sections include discussions on household labor, firms and corporatations, and state and transnational conditions. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars, students, and interested readers of international economics, anthropology, development issues, labor studies, and sociology.
Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book advances a novel answer: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. The book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The containment policies aimed at regulating immigration flows towards Europe and emerging economies like South Africa have profoundly altered the dynamics of migration in Africa. Drawing on original empirical research, this volume explores the notion of threshold as an operative concept to envisage in turn: the discursive frameworks of containment policies, the challenges to local spaces and their equilibrium, and finally, the sense of liminality experienced by migrants caught in those situations.
This volume offers valuable anthropological insight into urban Africa, covering a range of cities across a continent that has become one of the fastest urbanizing geographic areas of the globe. Consideration is given to the structures, social formations, and rhythms that constitute the definition of an African city, town, or urban space, and to current concepts for thinking about African cities in the twenty-first century. The contributors examine topics including notions of belonging, the effects of globalization, colonialism, and transnationalism on African urban life, the cultural dimensions of infrastructure and public resources, mobility, labor issues, spatial organization, language, and popular culture trends, among other themes. The book reflects on how the ethnography of urban Africa fits within anthropology and urban studies, and on new theoretical concepts and methodologies that can be created through anthropological fieldwork in African cities. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students from anthropology, African studies and urban studies, as well as sociology and geography.
Griot Potters of the Folona reconstructs the past of a particular group of West African women potters using evidence found in their artistry and techniques. The potters of the Folona region of southeastern Mali serve a diverse clientele and firing thousands of pots weekly during the height of the dry season. Although they identify themselves as Mande, the unique styles and types of objects the Folona women make, and more importantly, the way they form and fire them, are fundamentally different from Mande potters to the north and west. Through a brilliant comparative analysis of pottery production methods across the region, especially how the pots are formed and the way the techniques are tau...
"Bringing together a wide diversity of authors based on three continents and from different disciplinary backgrounds, this book offers analyses of a wide range of factors that characterize and that are shaping the future of the African Sahel. In forty chapters, organized in nine sections, the book examines this complex and rapidly changing region on multiple dimensions. Collectively, the book attempts to offer an understanding of the specificity of the Sahel, and to examine its core characteristics as shaped by the geographic, cultural, and political parameters that define it. Following a series of chapters focused on the shaping of the Sahelian space as a region, six chapters explore the di...
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...
With Mande Music, Eric Charry offers the most comprehensive source available on one of Africa's richest and most sophisticated music cultures. Using resources as disparate as early Arabic travel accounts, oral histories, and archival research as well as his own extensive studies in Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and the Gambia, Charry traces this music culture from its origins in the thirteenth-century Mali empire to the recording studios of Paris and New York. He focuses on the four major spheres of Mande music—hunter's music, music of the jelis or griots, jembe and other drumming, and guitar-based modern music—exploring how each evolved, the types of instruments used, the major artists, and how each sphere relates to the others. With its maps, illustrations, and musical transcriptions as well as an exhaustive bibliography, discography, and videography, this book is essential reading for those seeking an in-depth look at one of the most exciting, innovative, and deep-rooted phenomena on the world music scene. A compact disc is available separately.