We are delighted to inform you that we will be attending the 7th European Conference on African Studies in Basel, Switzerland from the 29th June – 1st July 2017. Please stop by to browse our selection of titles on display, and take away some free journal samples.
If you are unable to attend, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. Valid through August 1st, use discount code ECAS17 at checkout and receive a 25% discount on all African Studies titles found on our website.
Our most recent and forthcoming releases can be found in our African Studies Catalogue, while the titles featured include a selection of those which will be highlighted at the conference:
The Good Holiday
Development, Tourism and the Politics of Benevolence in Mozambique
João Afonso Baptista
Volume 30, EASA Series
Drawing on ethnographic research in the village of Canhane, which is host to the first community tourism project in Mozambique, The Good Holiday explores the confluence of two powerful industries: tourism and development, and explains when, how and why tourism becomes development and development, tourism. The volume further explores the social and material consequences of this merging, presenting the confluence of tourism and development as a major vehicle for the exercise of ethics, and non-state governance in contemporary life.
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THE MYTH OF SELF-RELIANCE
Economic Lives Inside a Liberian Refugee Camp
Naohiko Omata
Volume 36, Forced Migration
For many refugees, economic survival in refugee camps is extraordinarily difficult. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative research , this volume challenges the reputation of a ‘self-reliant’ model given to Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana and sheds light on considerable economic inequality between refugee households.By following the same refugee households over several years, The Myth of Self-Reliancealso provides valuable insights into refugees’ experiences of repatriation to Liberia after protracted exile and their responses to the ending of refugee status for remaining refugees in Ghana.
Read Introduction: Buduburam: An Exemplary Refugee Camp?
Breaking Rocks
Music, Ideology and Economic Collapse, from Paris to Kinshasa
Joe Trapido
Volume 19, Dislocations
Based on fieldwork in Kinshasa and Paris, Breaking Rocks examines patronage payments within Congolese popular music, where a love song dedication can cost 6,000 dollars and a simple name check can trade for 500 or 600 dollars. Tracing this system of prestige through networks of musicians and patrons – who include gangsters based in Europe, kleptocratic politicians in Congo, and lawless diamond dealers in northern Angola – this book offers insights into ideologies of power and value in central Africa’s troubled post-colonial political economy, as well as a glimpse into the economic flows that make up the hidden side of the globalization.
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WHO KNOWS TOMORROW?
Uncertainty in North-Eastern Sudan
Sandra Calkins
Although uncertainty is intertwined with all human activity, plans, and aspirations, it is experienced differently: at times it is obsessed over and at times it is ignored. This ethnography shows how Rashaida in north-eastern Sudan deal with unknowns from day-to-day unpredictability to life-threatening dangers. It argues that the amplification of uncertainty in some cases and its extenuation in others can be better understood by focusing on forms that can either hold the world together or invite doubt. Uncertainty, then, need not be seen solely as a debilitating problem, but also as an opportunity to create other futures.
Read Introduction: Taming Unknowns in Sudan
THE FOREST PEOPLE WITHOUT A FOREST
Development Paradoxes, Belonging and Participation of the Baka in East Cameroon
Glory M. Lueong
Development interventions often generate contradictions around questions of who benefits from development and which communities are targeted for intervention. This book examines how the Baka, who live in Eastern Cameroon, assert forms of belonging in order to participate in development interventions, and how community life is shaped and reshaped through these interventions. Often referred to as ‘forest people’, the Baka have witnessed many recent development interventions that include competing and contradictory policies such as ‘civilize’, assimilate and integrate the Baka into ‘full citizenship’, conserve the forest and wildlife resources, and preserve indigenous cultures at the verge of extinction.
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LIFE AS A HUNT
Thresholds of Identities and Illusions on an African Landscape
Stuart A. Marks
“Few academic books display such depth as does this one, but then few anthropologists devote over five decades to the same communities and issues. Anthropologist Marks first worked among Zambia’s Valley Bisa people in 1966, returning frequently for further research. The result is a masterwork of description, interpretation, and self-reflection.” · Choice
The “extensive wilderness” of Zambia’s central Luangwa Valley is the homeland of the Valley Bisa whose cultural practices have enriched this environment for centuries. Beginning with the intrusions of warlords and later British colonials, successive generations have experienced the callousness and challenges of colonialism. Their homeland, a slender corridor surrounded by three national parks and an escarpment, is a microcosm of the political, economic and cultural battlefields surrounding most African protected areas today. The story of the Valley Bisa diverges from the myths that conservationists, administrators, and philanthropists, tell about Africa’s environmental and wildlife crises.
Read Introduction: On Poaching an Elephant: Calling the Shots and Following the Ricochets
Paperback Original
VIOLENT BECOMINGS
State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen
Volume 4, Ethnography, Theory, Experiment
Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called ‘traditional’ forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an array of contexts that include colonial regimes of forced labor and pacification, liberation war struggles and civil war, the social engineering of the post-independence state, and the popular appropriation of sovereign violence in riots and lynchings.
Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique by Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
This edition is supported by the University of Bergen. Full text.
THE UPPER GUINEA COAST IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Edited by Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl
Volume 12, Integration and Conflict Studies
For centuries, Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the African continent and beyond engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange, and various forms of conflict. This book provides a wide-ranging look at how such encounters have continued into the present day, identifying the disruptions and continuities in religion, language, economics, and various other social phenomena that have resulted. These accounts show a region that, while still grappling with the legacies of colonialism and the slave trade, is both shaped by and an important actor within ever-denser global networks, exhibiting consistent transformation and creative adaptation.
The Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective edited by Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
This edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Full Text.
DOING CONCEPTUAL HISTORY IN AFRICA
Edited by Axel Fleisch and Rhiannon Stephens
Volume 25, Making Sense of History
Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa’s historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like “work,” “marriage,” and “land” take shape.
Read Introduction: Theories and Methods of African Conceptual History
Paperback Original
THE DECOLONIAL MANDELA
Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life
Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
A significant contribution to the emerging literature on decolonial studies, this concise and forcefully argued volume lays out a groundbreaking interpretation of the “Mandela phenomenon.” Contrary to a neoliberal social model that privileges adversarial criminal justice and a rationalistic approach to war making, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni identifies transformative political justice and a reimagined social order as key features of Nelson Mandela’s legacy. Mandela is understood here as an exemplar of decolonial humanism, one who embodied the idea of survivor’s justice and held up reconciliation and racial harmony as essential for transcending colonial modes of thought.
Read Introduction: Mandela Phenomenon as Decolonial Humanism
Paperback Original
CUTTING AND CONNECTING
‘Afrinesian’ Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange
Edited by Knut Christian Myhre
Questions regarding the origins, mobility, and effects of analytical concepts continue to emerge as anthropology endeavors to describe similarities and differences in social life around the world. Cutting and Connecting rethinks this comparative enterprise by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. On this basis, the contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent and to explore how this exchange influences the borrowed anthropological perspectives. By focusing on ways in which networks are cut and connections are made, these empirical investigations show how particular relationships are created in today’s Africa. In addition, the volume aims for an approach that recasts relationships between theory and place and concepts and ethnography, in a manner that destabilizes the distinction between fieldwork and writing.
Read Introduction: Cutting and Connecting: ‘Afrinesian’ Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange
Forthcoming
CHILDREN OF THE CAMP
The Lives of Somali Youth Raised in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya
Catherine-Lune Grayson
Chronic violence has characterized Somalia for over two decades, forcing nearly two million people to flee. A significant number have settled in camps in neighboring countries, where children were born and raised. Based on in-depth fieldwork, this book explores the experience of Somalis who grew up in Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya, and are now young adults. This original study carefully considers how young people perceive their living environment and how growing up in exile structures their view of the past and their country of origin, and the future and its possibilities.
Forthcoming
PEACEFUL SELVES
Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda
Laura Eramian
This ethnography of personhood in post-genocide Rwanda investigates how residents of a small town grapple with what kinds of persons they ought to become in the wake of violence. Based on fieldwork carried out over the course of a decade, it uncovers how conflicting moral demands emerge from the 1994 genocide, from cultural contradictions around “good” personhood, and from both state and popular visions for the future. What emerges is a profound dissonance in town residents’ selfhood. While they strive to be agents of change who can catalyze a new era of modern Rwandan nationhood, they are also devastated by the genocide and struggle to recover a sense of selfhood and belonging in the absence of kin, friends, and neighbors. In drawing out the contradictions at the heart of self-making and social life in contemporary Rwanda, this book asserts a novel argument about the ordinary lives caught in global post-conflict imperatives to remember and to forget, to mourn and to prosper.
New in Paperback:
WITCHCRAFT, WITCHES, AND VIOLENCE IN GHANA
Mensah Adinkrah
“By attending to witch hunts in all its facets in Ghanaian society, [the author] offers the most in-depth examination of witchcraft to date… Although the author focuses on Ghana, the work draws attention to the fact that witchcraft-related violence is not unique to the country, but very much a part of global history, past and present. The wide variety of sources it pulls together and the human face it gives to witchcraft related violence are the biggest strengths of Witchcraft, Witches, and Violence. This is a valuable book for both undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and African studies.” · International Journal of African Historical Studies (IJAHS)
Read Introduction: Witchcraft Violence in Comparative Perspective
BEYOND THE LENS OF CONSERVATION
Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another
Eva Keller
Volume 20, Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology
“This book will make a great addition to undergraduate courses on Anthropology of the Environment and/or Development or Political Ecology. Keller’s highly readable style, in turn, will satisfy both those new to the subject and scholars already familiar with the topics of conservation practice in Madagascar. It could even become an important resource for those conservation experts who are trying – and (as the study shows) failing – to establish connections between distant places and people.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
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EVIDENCE, ETHOS AND EXPERIMENT
The Anthropology and History of Medical Research in Africa
Edited by P. Wenzel Geissler and Catherine Molyneux
“…a series of compelling and well written chapters…Considering the explosion of medical research in Africa in the age of global health, Evidence, ethos and experiment is a valuable and much-needed contribution to the development of multiple contextual frameworks for historical and contemporary medical research in Africa and elsewhere.” · Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
Read Introduction: Studying trial communities: anthropological and historical inquiries into ethos, politics and economy of medical research in Africa
MASKS AND STAFFS
Identity Politics in the Cameroon Grassfields
Michaela Pelican
Volume 11, Integration and Conflict Studies
“…necessary and significant, [this study is] a much-welcomed monograph that builds on and advances the corpus of knowledge about the evolution and dynamics of interethnic relations in the Cameroon Grasslands.” · American Anthropologist
Confrontational encounters stimulated by economic and political rivalry, as well as socially integrative processes, transformed collective self-understanding in Cameroon in conjunction with recent global discourses on human, minority, and indigenous rights. The book provides a vital contribution to the study of ethnicity, conflict, and social change in the anthropology of Africa.
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IMPERIAL PROJECTIONS
Screening the German Colonies
Wolfgang Fuhrmann
Volume 17, Film Europa
“One cannot rank the significance of Fuhrmann’s book as a model of German film historiography highly enough. Not only does Imperial Projection offer the first convincing overall overview of a forgotten and suppressed chapter of German film history; the book makes also clear what a modern, methodologically innovative and empirically supported film historiography is capable of achieving.” · H-Soz-Kult
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Forthcoming
AT HOME IN THE OKAVANGO
White Batswana Narratives of Emplacement and Belonging
Catie Gressier
“At Home in the Okavango is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the politics of belonging, safari tourism, and the meaning of whiteness in Botswana, Africa and beyond. Catie Gressier systematically leads her readers to her conclusion in an innovative synthesis of theoretical frames from political ecology, multispecies ethnography, the anthropology of whiteness, and the anthropology of race through the application and expansion of her concept of ‘experiential autochthony’.” · The Australian Journal of Anthropology
Read Introduction: Waiting for the Flood
Berghahn Journals
Regions and CohesionRegions and Cohesion is a needed platform for academics and practitioners alike to disseminate both empirical research and normative analysis of topics related to human and environmental security, social cohesion, and governance.
Social Analysis
The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice
Social Analysis has long been at the forefront of anthropology’s engagement with the humanities and other social sciences. In forming a critical, concerned, and empirical perspective, it encourages contributions that break away from the disciplinary bounds of anthropology and suggest innovative ways of challenging hegemonic paradigms through “grounded theory,” analysis based in original empirical research.
TheoriaA Journal of Social and Political Theory
Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory is an engaged, multidisciplinary, and peer-reviewed journal of social and political theory. Its purpose is to address, through scholarly debate, the many challenges posed to intellectual life by the major social, political and economic forces that shape the contemporary world.
Featured Issue: Egalitarian Liberalism – What Are Its Possible Futures in South Africa?
TransfersInterdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies
Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies is a peer-reviewed journal publishing cutting-edge research on the processes, structures, and consequences of the movement of people, resources, and commodities. Intellectually rigorous, broadly ranging, and conceptually innovative, the journal combines the empiricism of traditional mobility history with more recent methodological approaches from the social sciences and the humanities.
Special Issue on African Mobilities