Anthropology
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Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of Politics
1 Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of Politics Human Rights Richard A. Wilson [email protected] I. Human Rights, Cultural Relativism and the Cold War In the middle of the twentieth century, cultural anthropology was largely hostile to the notion of human rights, but by the end of the twentieth century, the study of human rights had become a significant strand within political anthropology. This is an account of that realignment of the place of rights in the discipline from marginality to mainstream. The key to understanding anthropology's historical opposition to human rights lies in the centrality of the concept of 'culture' and the resultant adherence to a moral-ethical position of cultural relativism within the discipline during the Cold War period of 1945-1989. In the United States by the 1940s, cultural anthropology was becoming established in universities as one of the youngest of the social sciences. The founding father of modern cultural anthropology in the US was a German emigré Franz Boas (1859-1941), who carried out empirical research among Inuit (Eskimos) and North American Indians. Boas reacted against the widely accepted evolutionary theories of the time, advocated by those such as the British anthropologist Edward Tylor, the sociologist Hebert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan who in turn influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Evolutionism broadly asserted that all societies progressed in a unilinear fashion along a scale from the most 'simple' to the most 'complex', with each stage achieving a higher level of moral and societal improvement. In the context of the European colonialism of the time, this social evolutionism involved an explicit ranking of societies which reinforced the colonial project and a sense of western superiority. -
Managing the Postcolony: an Ethnography at the Bank Technology Centre
Managing the Postcolony: an ethnography at the Bank Technology Centre A degree submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2019 Felicity R. C. Heathcote-Márcz Alliance Manchester Business School People, Management and Organizations Table of Contents Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... 2 Table of Figures .......................................................................................................................... 5 Declaration ................................................................................................................................. 7 Copyright Statement .................................................................................................................. 8 Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 9 The Author ............................................................................................................................... 10 Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. 11 Introduction: Crashing into the field……………………………………………………………………………………12 Chapter 1 .................................................................................................................................. 17 Postcolony: an ethnography against the grain -
The Political Economy of Africa's Natural Resources And
Theme On The Environment, Macroeconomics, Trade And Investment (TEMTI) Economic Perspectives on Global Sustainability TEMTI Series EP 02/2015 The Political Economy of Africa’s natural resources and the ‘Great Financial Crisis’ Bram Büscher Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, the Netherlands; Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg and Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Stellenbosch in South Africa Recommended Citation Büscher, B. (2015), The political economy of Africa’s natural resources and the ‘Great Financial Crisis,’ TEMTI Series of Economic Perspectives on Global Sustainability, EP 02- 2014, TEMTI –CEESP / IUCN. Available at: http://www.iucn.org/about/union/commissions/ceesp/what_we_do/wg/temti.cfm Original publication: Büscher, B. (2012), The political economy of Africa’s natural resources and the ‘Great Financial Crisis,’ in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2012, Vol. 103, No. 2, pp. 136–149. Original article available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467- 9663.2012.00708.x/ International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policies (CEESP) THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AFRICA’S NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ‘GREAT FINANCIAL CRISIS’tesg_708 136..149 Bram Büscher1 ABSTRACT Over the last decade, Africa’s natural resources have seen another rapid rise in political- economic importance. The continent’s abundant biodiversity underpins the fast-growing (eco)tourism industry, while its rich energy resources have seen renewed attention from global powers. Obviously, these boom-and-bust cycles of interest in African natural resources have signified the continent’s place in the capitalist world order for a long time. -
The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: a Multilevel Process Theory1
The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory1 Andreas Wimmer University of California, Los Angeles Primordialist and constructivist authors have debated the nature of ethnicity “as such” and therefore failed to explain why its charac- teristics vary so dramatically across cases, displaying different de- grees of social closure, political salience, cultural distinctiveness, and historical stability. The author introduces a multilevel process theory to understand how these characteristics are generated and trans- formed over time. The theory assumes that ethnic boundaries are the outcome of the classificatory struggles and negotiations between actors situated in a social field. Three characteristics of a field—the institutional order, distribution of power, and political networks— determine which actors will adopt which strategy of ethnic boundary making. The author then discusses the conditions under which these negotiations will lead to a shared understanding of the location and meaning of boundaries. The nature of this consensus explains the particular characteristics of an ethnic boundary. A final section iden- tifies endogenous and exogenous mechanisms of change. TOWARD A COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY OF ETHNIC BOUNDARIES Beyond Constructivism The comparative study of ethnicity rests firmly on the ground established by Fredrik Barth (1969b) in his well-known introduction to a collection 1 Various versions of this article were presented at UCLA’s Department of Sociology, the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies of the University of Osnabru¨ ck, Harvard’s Center for European Studies, the Center for Comparative Re- search of Yale University, the Association for the Study of Ethnicity at the London School of Economics, the Center for Ethnicity and Citizenship of the University of Bristol, the Department of Political Science and International Relations of University College Dublin, and the Department of Sociology of the University of Go¨ttingen. -
NOTES on ANTHROPOLOGICAL METHOD, Mainly in the Key of E
NOTES ON ANTHROPOLOGICAL METHOD, mainly in the key of e John Comaroff There is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method – and that is impossible. Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard1 PROLEGOMENON It is exceptionally difficult to address questions of method for anthropology at large un- less one reduces the field to a caricature of itself. To wit, the discipline – if anything so obviously polythetic, anything so unruly in its expansiveness, can be called a discipline at all – extends from the “hard” biological sciences and archaeological forensics through “comparative sociology” in the British tradition, technical linguistics of the various Ameri- can schools, and ethno-everything in the formalist mode, to the “soft” hermeneutics of interpretive and historical ethnography. And this barely begins to exhaust the field. Even if we take Clifford Geertz’s (1973) fashionable saw for the seventies, that anthropolo- gists “do ethnography,” it is difficult to pin down what this might mean in general, replic- able terms; after all, Geertz’s often imitated, widely-cited methodological approach – which was fleshed out only illustratively, never rigorously – was itself directed toward ideographic particularity and away from anything that might present itself as nomothetic, general, theoreticist. Since then, moreover, the discipline has become much more diverse, much less coherent; having departed the village, the reservation, the island, both its ends and its means are more contested than ever before.2 Indeed, if, for David Lodge (1999:52), writing a novel is “like playing chess in three dimensions,” doing anth- ropology nowadays is like playing it in four; the fourth being the terrain of the virtual, the electronic commons that ties even fairly remote social worlds into an expansive, if often exclusionary, global ecumene. -
Legal Pluralism As Omnium Gatherum
FIU Law Review Volume 10 Number 1 Article 5 Fall 2014 Legal Pluralism as Omnium Gatherum Sally Falk Moore Harvard Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/lawreview Part of the Other Law Commons Online ISSN: 2643-7759 Recommended Citation Sally F. Moore, Legal Pluralism as Omnium Gatherum, 10 FIU L. Rev. 5 (2014). DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.25148/lawrev.10.1.5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by eCollections. It has been accepted for inclusion in FIU Law Review by an authorized editor of eCollections. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 37010-fiu_10-1 Sheet No. 7 Side A 11/13/2015 07:10:42 02 - MOORE_FINAL_9.24.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 10/3/15 9:18 AM Legal Pluralism as Omnium Gatherum Sally Falk Moore* I will divide the roughly fifty-year history of legal pluralism into two periods: the beginning starting in the 1960s as I experienced it, and the rest from the 1970s to the present. My objective is to try to present a large range of situations that have come my way in the literature, and that have been called “legal pluralism.” My emphasis will be on the variety of types and some of their historical pasts. I am contending that some of these instances are so unlike each other that while they have been classified together as “legal pluralism,” they are not really examples of the same social phenomenon. I am by no means trying to review the whole literature. -
The Legacy of Michelle Rosaldo: Politics and Gender in Modern Societies Alejandro L Ugo and Bill Maurer
The Legacy of Michelle Rosaldo: Politics and Gender in Modern Societies Alejandro L ugo and Bill Maurer For the past twenty years the work of Michelle Z. Rosaldo has had a pro found impact on feminism and anthropology, both among scholars who knew and worked closely with Rosaldo, and continued her research agenda after her death in 198 1, and those, like the editors of this volume, who never knew Rosaldo but who find her work provocative and, in our own cases, were led to graduate work in feminist theory and anthropology in part because of her interventions. For both of the editors reading Ros aldo's lead essay in Woman, Culture and Society (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974) was a defining moment in our antlu-opological educations and in our development as persons; it led us to rethink our position as gendered (male) subjects, to bring feminist analysis "home" to our everyday lives, and, ultimately, to become graduate students at Stanford University, where we studied with some of Rosaldo's colleagues and coauthors. Some of the contributors to this volume are anthropologists who knew and worked with Rosaldo (Lamphere, Collier, and Maccormack as col leagues and Gray as a student of hers) and some who had not but had relied heavily on her thinking (Diaz Barriga, Gutmann, Lugo, and Mau rer). Four of these scholars (Diaz Barriga, Gutmann, Lugo, and Maurer) are younger male ethnographers who were trained in the tradition of fem inist anthropology during the 1980s and received their Ph.D. degrees in the 1990s under female feminist anthropologists of Michelle Rosaldo's gener ation. -
Global Reconfigurations of Poverty and the Public: Anthropological Perspectives and Ethnographic Challenges
Global Reconfigurations of Poverty and the Public: Anthropological perspectives and ethnographic challenges Responsible Institution: Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen (UiB) Disciplines: Social Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies, Sociology Course Leader: Vigdis Broch-Due, Professor of International Poverty Research, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen Invited Course Leaders: Jean Comaroff, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago Akhil Gupta, Professor and Chair, IDP South Asian Studies Department of Anthropology and International Institute, UCLA Alice O'Connor, Associate Professor,Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara & Director for the programs on Persistent Urban Poverty and International Migration at the Social Science Research Council (USA) Course Description: “The Poor”, - a group figuring so prominently in contemporary media and the discourses of aid, human rights and global insecurity, in fact consist largely of the classical subjects of anthropology. While anthropologists continue to produce ethnography about the specificities of different peoples, few address the problems that arise when all that cultural diversity is subsumed under the headings “Poverty” or “the Poor”. Anthropologists who do address questions of poverty are often sidelined in increasingly globalised policy debates that set quantitative “goals” and seek measurable formulae for attaining them. Why are anthropologists vocal on the plight of distinct peoples but silent or marginalized on the subject of the “the poor”? How do we research, theorize, let alone compose ethnographies, which focus on such a diffuse, standardised, globalised entity as “poverty” and “the poor”? Should we? And what are the consequences of remaining on the sidelines? These questions outline the analytical challenges of this PhD course. -
Writing African Christianity Perspectives from the History of the Historiography of African Christianity*
Religion & Theology 23 (2016) 275–312 Religion &Theology brill.com/rt Writing African Christianity Perspectives from the History of the Historiography of African Christianity* Elias Kifon Bongmba Rice University, Houston, tx, usa and, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa [email protected] Abstract In this overview of the historiography of Christianity in Africa a number of desiderata and considerations for future research are reviewed. The first issue considered relates to the practice of historiography.The second issue relates to African identity/-ies and its relationship to global cultural movements. The third desideratum is the pursuit of new disciplinary practices in the study of African Christianity, especially interdisciplinarity as scholarly ethos. Finally, a number of themes that should become foci in historiogra- phy of African Christianity are explored, among these are: concentration on local and regional narratives, the gendered character of Christianity in Africa, attention to the material conditions and needs of African religious communities and the various cul- tural innovations adopted to cope with these conditions, as well as the role of Christian communities in development in Africa and the wider encompassing question of ethics and morality. Keywords African Christianity – African religions – African history – African culture – incultura- tion – Africanization – sociology of religion in Africa – interdisciplinarity * This paper was first presented at a seminar, “The Study of Christianity in Africa – Methods and Perspectives,” hosted by the Unit: New Testament and Early Christian Studies in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies, University of South Africa, 8 July 2016. Financial support by the University of South Africa towards making the consultation possible, is hereby acknowledged. -
'Anthropologists Are Talking': About Anthropology and Post-Apartheid
This article was downloaded by: [Universitetsbiblioteket i Oslo] On: 21 March 2012, At: 01:09 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20 ‘Anthropologists Are Talking’: About Anthropology and Post- Apartheid South Africa Sindre Bangstad a , Thomas Hylland Eriksen a , John L. Comaroff b & Jean Comaroff b a University of Oslo, Norway b University of Chicago, USA Available online: 19 Mar 2012 To cite this article: Sindre Bangstad, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, John L. Comaroff & Jean Comaroff (2012): ‘Anthropologists Are Talking’: About Anthropology and Post- Apartheid South Africa, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 77:1, 115-136 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.590218 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. -
Chapter 1: Warlords and States in Africa Introduction This Book Concentrates on the Development of ‘Warlordism’ Across Africa
Chapter 1: Warlords and States in Africa Introduction This book concentrates on the development of ‘warlordism’ across Africa. Although the idea of the warlord is universal and is applied to similar individuals and groups within areas as diverse as Colombia, the former Soviet Union, Central Asia and the Far East, it is in Africa where the idea and the systems associated with it appear to have reached their most ‘developed’. Taking as its starting point a survey of nineteenth century African governance practices, the book paints a picture of governance in pre-colonial African empires and draws out themes and issues of pre- colonial governance that can be traced through the colonial and post-colonial periods. In particular, ideas connected with the core characteristics of collapse of central power, trade, primitive accumulation, use of violence and governance systems are seen to be long-term historical features of many African (and other) polities. The growth of warlords is intimately related to the overall growth of private, non-state actors in the security sector in Africa, which, quite correctly, is seen as a very clear symptom of state weakness. The growth of private military companies is well documented, but there is a wide variety of military operators available to those who are willing to pay for it1. Governments, for example, have resorted to hiring mercenaries to clear areas governing resources. Executive Outcomes, Sandline and others have been hired by a variety of African Governments with the aim of taking control of natural resources and splitting the profits, including Angola (oil and diamonds) and Sierra Leone (diamonds). -
Haney Foundation Series : Ethnography in Today's World : Color
Ethnography in Today’s World ................. 18429$ $$FM 05-28-13 10:19:34 PS PAGE i HANEY FOUNDATION SERIES A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney ................. 18429$ $$FM 05-28-13 10:19:34 PS PAGE ii Ethnography in Today’s World Color Full Before Color Blind Roger Sanjek UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS PHILADELPHIA ................. 18429$ $$FM 05-28-13 10:19:34 PS PAGE iii Copyright ᭧ 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sanjek, Roger, 1944– Ethnography in today’s world : color full before color blind / Roger Sanjek.—1st ed. p. cm. — (Haney foundation series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4545-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ethnology—United States—Methodology. 2. Ethnology—Methodology. 3. Anthropology—United States—Methodology. 4. Anthropology—Methodology. I. Title. GN345.S255 2014 305.800973—dc23 2013019444 ................. 18429$ $$FM 05-28-13 10:19:35 PS PAGE iv For my teachers: Anne Schwerner, Robert Stigler, Marvin Harris, Lambros Comitas, Jaap van Velsen, George C. Bond, Allen Johnson ................. 18429$ $$FM 05-28-13 10:19:35 PS PAGE v This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix PART I.