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Though relatively unsung in the English-speaking world, Jean Rouch (1917–2004) was a towering figure of ethnographic cinema, who, over the course of a fifty-year career, completed over one hundred films, both documentary and fiction, and exerted an influence far beyond academia. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Rouch's practical filmmaking methods, which he developed while conducting anthropological research in West Africa in the 1940s–1950s. His innovative use of unscripted improvization by his subjects had a profound impact on the French New Wave, the author reveals, while his documentary work launched the genre of cinema-vérité. In addition to tracking Rouch's pioneering career, the author examines the technical strategies, aesthetic considerations, and ethical positions that contribute to Rouch's cinematographic legacy.

Civil wars, corporate exploitation, AIDS, and Ebola—but also democracy, burgeoning cities, and unprecedented communication and mobility: the future of Africa has never been more uncertain. Indeed, that future is one of the most complex issues in contemporary anthropology, as evidenced by the incredible wealth of ideas offered in this landmark volume. A consortium comprised of some of the most important scholars of Africa today, this book surveys an intellectual landscape of opposed perspectives in order to think within the contradictions that characterize this central question: Where is Africa headed? The essays in this book address Africa’s future as it is embedded within various social and cultural forms emerging on the continent today: the reconfiguration of the urban, the efflorescence of signs and wonders and gospels of prosperity, the assorted techniques of legality and illegality, lotteries and Ponzi schemes, apocalyptic visions, a yearning for exile, and many other phenomena. Bringing together social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints, the book reveals not one but multiple prospects for the future of Africa. In doing so, it offers a pathbreaking model of pluralistic and open-ended thinking and a powerful tool for addressing the vexing uncertainties that underlie so many futures around the world.

This book argues that HIV/AIDS policy has been a venue through which the South African government has attempted to balance the contradictory demands of postcolonial nation-building: forced to satisfy the demands of neoliberal global capital and meet the needs of its poorest populations. It suggests that one of the primary ways in which this ‘postcolonial paradox’ is managed is through the re-signification of the tropes of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ – both within the public sphere and in the discourses and ideologies of people living with HIV/AIDS. The book traces the politics of AIDS in South Africa from 1994 through 2010, analyzing: the political economy of the post-apartheid health system, the symbolic struggle between ‘AIDS denialists’ and treatment activists over the signification of HIV/AIDS, and the ways in which communities profoundly affected by the epidemic incorporate culturally hybrid subjectivities, informed by both indigenous and biomedical healing paradigms. As such, it draws connections between the macro and micro levels – insisting therefore, not only on the reciprocal nature of causality, but also on the often complex and contradictory relationship between global processes, national policies and local practices. This bio-political history is positioned within the squatter camp, considering HIV/AIDS politics from the perspective of those in whose name these battles are fought but who have been rendered voiceless in its telling. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research conducted in informal settlements on the outskirts of Johannesburg, the book details what it is like to live with and die of AIDS in South Africa’s urban slums.

Organizations strive to create campaign messages that yield clear, consistent, and resonant interpretations that motivate people to buy their product, support their cause, vote for their candidate, or take active steps to improve or protect their health. However, once these campaigns leave the controlled environments of focus groups, advertising agencies, and stakeholder meetings to circulate through public space, people interpret and use campaigns in ways the designers never intended. Best Laid Plans explains why these instrumental-rational attempts to persuade the public through culture and media often fail. To explain these failures, the book identifies mechanisms that encourage “cultural entropy”: the process through which the intended meanings and uses of cultural objects fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. To develop the concept of cultural entropy, the book analyzes HIV/AIDS media campaigns in Accra, Ghana. AIDS organizations in Accra, and throughout the world, seek to control and organize how local communities make sense of the disease. They develop campaigns based on models of “Behavior Change Communication” that purport to use media to change sexual practices. AIDS organizations attempt to control the message by routinizing best practices like evidence-based design, involving opinion leaders in the design process, and getting all organizations behind a single message. Despite their best efforts to persuade the public, campaigns rarely work as intended, disrupted by misinterpretation and misuse. These cultural misfires are not random. Rather, these disruptions are patterned, widespread, and inevitable, indicative of a broader and important-to-understand process of cultural entropy.

Most women in the West use contraceptives in order to avoid having children. But in rural Gambia and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, many women use contraceptives for the opposite reason—to have as many children as possible. Using ethnographic and demographic data from a three-year study in rural Gambia, this book explains this seemingly counterintuitive fact by juxtaposing two very different understandings of the life course: one is a linear, Western model that equates aging and the ability to reproduce with the passage of time, the other a Gambian model that views aging as contingent on the cumulative physical, social, and spiritual hardships of personal history, especially obstetric trauma. Viewing each of these two models from the perspective of the other, the book produces fresh understandings of the classical anthropological subjects of reproduction, time, and aging as culturally shaped within women's conjugal lives.

American Lutherans have had a longstanding foreign involvement with Madagascar through pre-colonial evangelical missions that began on the island in 1888 and continued for over a century. This book explores Lutherans’ efforts to institute an aid alliance that departs from the inequalities of the earlier mission work on the island. Focusing on a 30-year-old medical aid program between Lutherans in Madagascar (Fiangonana Loterana Malagasy) and the U.S. (after 1988, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), it provides a close analysis of the tensions among humanitarian activity, capitalism and global religious fellowship. Since the early 1980s, Lutherans have pursued an increasingly common aid model that entails sending from Minneapolis to Antananarivo the often unused medical discards of the U.S. medical establishment, created primarily by planned obsolescence or biomedical innovation. The book draws upon twenty-four months of primary ethnographic research in the Midwest U.S. and shorter research periods in Madagascar among Lutheran clinicians, aid workers, volunteer laborers, healer-evangelists and former missionaries. It develops an approach to Christian aid spaces as “conversionary sites,” or under-analyzed cultural spaces that operate as busy moral crossroads between past and present, as well as between geographically dispersed religious communities and global commodity chains. The book therefore maintains that contemporary biomedical aid from the United States to Madagascar is a multifaceted cultural and historical transaction; it is an ongoing, incomplete conversion of the moral foundation, practices and ways of knowing tied to the colonial legacy.

The African HIV/AIDS pandemic has defined the childhoods of an entire generation. Many children have lost their parents to AIDS while HIV-infected children are now surviving thanks to life-saving antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). In this incisive ethnography, Cheney argues that humanitarian misreadings of the 'AIDS orphan crisis' have affected children's lives as irrevocably as HIV/AIDS itself. Using participatory research with the “post-ARV generation” in Uganda, this book traces the social transformations caused by AIDS orphanhood and it impacts on children, families, and communities. Young people’s experiences in the post-ARV era show how orphan suffering is still compounded by poverty and other structural vulnerabilities. Cheney explains how these vulnerabilities have posed new challenges to traditional systems of family support and child protection. Moreover, she argues that global humanitarian responses such as Western ‘orphan rescue’ efforts to relieve the ‘orphan crisis’ have actually deepened it. Crying for Our Elders substantially expands theoretical discussions of humanitarianism, children’s studies, orphanhood, kinship and the resilience of family as well as methodological innovations in longitudinal participatory research with children. Privileging young people’s perspectives, Cheney demonstrates that despite the challenges of growing up in the era of HIV/AIDS, the post-ARV generation still holds out hope for the future.

Fought in the wake of a decade of armed struggle against colonialism, the Mozambican civil war lasted from 1977 to 1992, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives while displacing millions more. As conflicts across the globe span decades and generations, this book suggests that we need a fresh perspective on war when it becomes the context for normal life rather than an exceptional event that disrupts it. The book calls for a new point of departure in the ethnography of war that investigates how the inhabitants of war zones live under trying new conditions and how culture and social relations are transformed as a result. This book focuses on how Ndau social networks were fragmented by wartime displacement and the profound effect this had on gender relations. Demonstrating how wartime migration and post-conflict return were shaped by social struggles and interests that had little to do with the larger political reasons for the war, it contests the assumption that wartime migration is always involuntary.

This book is an ethnography of street culture and youth sociality in urban Niger. It explores the universe of fadas, the tea-circles unemployed young men join to deal with boredom and redefine the terms of belonging. Through a focus on the diverse expressions of masculinity that are forged at the fada, it addresses a seeming paradox at the heart of male sociality, namely the fact that tea-circles are simultaneously spaces of inactivity and indolence and forums of creativity and futurity. It argues that waiting and working must be understood as co-constitutive rather than polar opposites. By examining how time is not just lived but also constructed at the fada, it traces the multiple temporalities that emerge most visibly through an implicit tension between idleness and productivity in the lives of Nigerien youth. The introduction maps out the territory of waiting that young men navigate in Niger in their quest for stable livelihoods. It presents some of the key concepts that anchor the discussion of boredom and belonging at the fada and it discusses what it means to be young in Niger. It provides a brief history of the fadas against a backdrop of sociopolitical instability followed by a description of the chapters that follow.

Many observers of Kenya’s complicated history see causes for concern, from the use of public office for private gain to a constitutional structure historically lopsided towards the executive branch. Yet efforts from critics and academics to diagnose the country’s problems do not often consider what these fiscal and political issues mean to ordinary Kenyans. How do Kenyans express their own political understanding, make sense of governance, and articulate what they expect from their leaders? For Money and Elders addresses these questions by turning to the political, economic, and religious signs in circulation in Kenya today. The book examines how Kenyans attempt to make sense of political instability caused by the uncertainty of authority behind everything from currency to title deeds. When the symbolic order of a society is up for grabs, violence may seem like an expedient way to enforce the authority of signs. Drawing on fertile concepts of sovereignty, elderhood, counterfeiting, acephaly, and more, the book explores phenomena as diverse as the destabilization of ritual “oaths,” public anxieties about Satanism with the advent of democratic reform, and mistrust of official signs. The result is a fascinating glimpse into Kenya’s past and present and a penetrating reflection on meanings of violence in African politics.

When Breeze FM Radio, in the provincial Zambian town of Chipata, hired an elderly retired school teacher in 2003, no one anticipated the skyrocketing success that would follow. A self-styled grandfather on air, Gogo Breeze seeks intimacy over the airwaves and dispenses advice on a wide variety of grievances and transgressions by using idiomatic Chinyanja / Chichewa. Multiple voices are broadcast and juxtaposed through call-ins and dialogue, but free speech finds its ally in the radio elder who, by allowing people to be heard and supporting their claims, reminds authorities of their obligations toward the disaffected. This book is a detailed study of the popular radio personality that addresses broad questions of free speech in Zambia and beyond. By drawing on ethnographic insights into political communication, the book presents multivocal morality as an alternative to dominant Euro-American perspectives, displacing the simplistic notion of voice as individual personal property—an idea common in both policy and activist rhetoric. Instead, the book focuses on the creativity and polyphony of Zambian radio while raising important questions about hierarchy, elderhood, and ethics in the public sphere.

The young people of the Cameroon Grassfields have been subject to a long history of violence and political marginalization. For centuries the main victims of the slave trade, they became prime targets for forced labor campaigns under a series of colonial rulers. Today's youth remain at the bottom of the fiercely hierarchical and polarized societies of the Grassfields, and it is their response to centuries of exploitation that this book takes up. Beginning his study with a political analysis of youth in the Grassfields from the eighteenth century to the present, the author pays special attention to the repeated violent revolts staged by young victims of political oppression. He then combines this history with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Oku chiefdom, discovering that the specter of past violence lives on in the masked dance performances that have earned intense devotion from today's youth. The author contends that by evoking the imagery of past cataclysmic events, these masquerades allow young Oku men and women to address the inequities they face in their relations with elders and state authorities today.

Living Politics in South Africa’s Urban Shacklands examines liberal governance and political mobilization through the elements of fire, water, air, and land. Tracking everyday practices and interactions between poor residents and state agents in South Africa’s shack settlements, the author investigates the rise of nationwide protests since the late 1990s, which have focused on making urban environments viable and secure. Based on ethnography in the cities of Durban, Cape Town, and Johannesburg, the book analyzes the criminalization of popular forms of politics that were foundational to South Africa’s celebrated democratic transition. The book argues that we can best grasp the increasingly murky line between “the criminal” and “the political” with a “politics of living” that casts so-called slums and the state in opposition to one another. Living Politics shows how legitimate domains of politics are redefined, how state sovereignty is forcibly enacted, and how new citizenship identities crystallize at the intersections of race, gender, and poverty.

In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet, love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life—a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. This book seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from the 1930s to the present, the contributors collectively argue for the importance of paying attention to the many different cultural and historical strands that constitute love in Africa. Covering such diverse topics as the reception of Bollywood movies in 1950s Zanzibar, the effects of a Mexican telenovela on young people's ideas about courtship in Niger, the models of romance promoted by South African and Kenyan magazines, and the complex relationship between love and money in Madagascar and South Africa, this book is a vivid and compelling look at love's role in African society.

This book challenges the seasoned trend of disavowing Africa in the Black Atlantic, showing how Yoruba cultural frameworks from West Africa remade black kingdoms and communities in the Americas. Highlighting revisionary strategies and regenerative schemes that are grounded in the dialectics of ritual renewal, it revisits classic topoi in Afro-American studies such as Herskovits’s syncretic paradigm, the petwo paradox in Haitian Vodou, the historical conditions of orisha cult clustering, re-mappings of gender in plantation societies, and the rise of Lucumí and Nagô houses in Cuba and Brazil, in each case offering new interpretations based on cognate dynamics in Yorubaland. The book thereby argues for a critically reformulated culture concept, in this case distinctively “Yoruba,” which designates something real, somewhat knowable, eminently historical, and even indispensable for locating Africa in the Black Atlantic.

When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. This book tells the full story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust. According to this book, FESTAC expanded the horizons of blackness in Nigeria to mirror the global circuits of its economy. By showcasing masks, dances, images, and souvenirs from its many diverse ethnic groups, Nigeria forged a new national culture. In the grandeur of this oil-fed confidence, the nation subsumed all black and African cultures within its empire of cultural signs and erased its colonial legacies from collective memory. As the oil economy collapsed, however, cultural signs became unstable, contributing to rampant violence and dissimulation. The Pan-African Nation unpacks FESTAC as a historically situated mirror of production in Nigeria. More broadly, it points towards a critique of the political economy of the sign in postcolonial Africa.

Despite being told that we now live in a cosmopolitan world, more and more people have begun to assert their identities in ways that are deeply rooted in the local. These claims of autochthony—meaning “born from the soil”—seek to establish an irrefutable, primordial right to belong and are often employed in politically charged attempts to exclude outsiders. This book traces the concept of autochthony back to the classical period and incisively explores the idea in two very different contexts: Cameroon and the Netherlands. In both countries, the momentous economic and political changes following the end of the Cold War fostered anxiety over migration. For Cameroonians, the question of who belongs where rises to the fore in political struggles between different tribes, while the Dutch invoke autochthony in fierce debates over the integration of immigrants. This fascinating comparative perspective allows the book to examine the emotional appeal of autochthony—as well as its dubious historical basis—and to shed light on a range of important issues, such as multiculturalism, national citizenship, and migration.

What is the meaning of blackness in Africa? This book tackles the question of race in West Africa through its postcolonial manifestations. Challenging the view of the African continent as a nonracialized space—as a fixed historic source for the African diaspora—the book envisions Africa, and in particular the nation of Ghana, as a place whose local relationships are deeply informed by global structures of race, economics, and politics. Against the backdrop of Ghana's history as a major port in the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent and disruptive forces of colonialism and postcolonialism, the book examines key facets of contemporary Ghanaian society, from the pervasive significance of “whiteness” to the practice of chemical skin-bleaching to the government's active promotion of Pan-African “heritage tourism.” Drawing these and other examples together, this book shows that race and racism have not only persisted in Ghana after colonialism, but also that the beliefs and practices of this modern society all occur within a global racial hierarchy.

Reluctant Landscapes analyzes the political history of rural communities in the Siin province (Senegal) over the last 400 years. Much of Africa’s global history has been told from the standpoint of states, but less is known about peasants, whose past has often been written as a tale of political rupture or cultural persistence. Drawing on archaeology, history, and anthropology, this book charts how Siin villagers variably accommodated, resisted, or evaded the incursions of indigenous states, the Atlantic economy, colonialism, and postcolonial government. It pays particular attention to the role of material world – both the landscapes crafted by farmers over generations, and the systems of objects with which they interfaced through trade – in mediating between villagers and broader historical forces, and in shaping their political experiences. Over time, these material worlds incorporated the coordinates of a changing political economy, yet they also conserved certain principles of political life, whose expressions continue to orient collective expectations about politics today. Grounded in Siin’s history and cultural geography, the book not only intends to sharpen historical understanding of peasant communities in Senegal, but it also essays wider critical reflections about capitalism, international slavery, colonial governance, and post-independence statecraft in rural West Africa.

For the last twenty years, the West African nation of Guinea has exhibited all of the conditions that have led to civil wars in other countries, and Guineans themselves regularly talk about the inevitability of war. Yet the country has narrowly avoided conflict again and again. In A Socialist Peace?, Mike McGovern asks how this is possible, how a nation could beat the odds and evade civil war. Guinea is rich in resources, but its people are some of the poorest in the world. Its political situation is polarized by fiercely competitive ethnic groups. Weapons flow freely through its lands and across its borders. And, finally, it is still recovering from the oppressive regime of Sékou Touré. McGovern argues that while Touré’s reign was hardly peaceful, it was successful—often through highly coercive and violent measures—at establishing a set of durable national dispositions, which have kept the nation at peace. Exploring the ambivalences of contemporary Guineans toward the afterlife of Touré’s reign as well as their abiding sense of socialist solidarity, McGovern sketches the paradoxes that undergird political stability.