bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Forgetting from Above and Memory from Below: Strategies of Legitimation and Struggle in Postsocialist Mozambique
Authors: Pitcher M. Anne 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThis article examines two opposing strategies – one used by government officials and businesses, the other expressed by urban workers – that have emerged in postsocialist Mozambique. On the one hand, government officials and businesses have pursued a deliberate strategy of what several writers in other contexts have called ‘organized forgetting', whereby they seek to airbrush the socialist past from history. They have revised the country's ideological orientation, built new coalitions of support among domestic and internal investors, and remade the ruling party's legitimacy following the abandonment of socialism and the transition to a free‐market democracy. On the other hand, some urban workers have revived and repackaged the language of socialism to protest against the effects of neo‐liberalism. Relying on collective and individual memories of socialism, they denounce ‘exploitation', ‘recolonization', ‘injustice’ and ‘inequality’ as they struggle to understand, resist or modify the impact of structural adjustment and privatization. I argue that, although the end of socialism has allowed a plurality of voices to surface in Mozambique, such discursive pluralism is characterized by increasing power inequities. The consolidation of capital and the ideological pronouncements that accompany it may ultimately silence the now dissident language of the socialist past.
Between Death and Funeral: Mortuaries and the Exploitation of Liminality in Kwahu, Ghana
Authors: van der Geest Sjaak 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThis essay describes (1) how mortuaries changed the Akan funeral culture of Ghana and (2) how that converged with the interests of relatives and hospital managers. Such a development would not have been possible, however, (3) without the money provided by well-to-do relatives staying abroad. Mortuaries enable relatives to stretch the liminal period between death and funeral as long as they want to while they prepare everything for a grand funeral. For hospitals, this new fashion means an attractive extra source of income, as the mortuary is more lucrative than its medical services. My observations derive from anthropological fieldwork in Kwahu, Ghana.
Manimory and the Aesthetics of Mimesis: Forest, Islam and State in Ivoirian Dozoya
Authors: Hellweg Joseph 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThis article explores the hunting aesthetics of initiated Jula hunters of Côte d'Ivoire who call themselves dozos. It explains how their hunting aesthetic structures their relationship to Islam and the Ivoirian state. Although many Africans approach Islam in the context of tensions between local ritual traditions and modernizing Muslim reform, dozos approach Islam the way they approach the forests where they hunt, assimilating to both in order to tame them. They organize their hunting activities around an aesthetic centred on notions of sweetness and fullness; their contraries, difficulty and emptiness; and the process of mimetic transformation (shape-shifting) that mediates between these extremes. With these categories dozos assimilate themselves to and appropriate power from the forest to kill game. They also link themselves to pre-Qur'anic Muslim figures to legitimize themselves as Muslims. More recently, they tried to assimilate to the Ivoirian state to become a parallel police force. Stories of their tutelary spirit, Manimory, and the texts of their hunting songs, incantations, and epics encode diverse ways for dozos to relate to Islam, leaving room for dozos to eschew it as well. Their texts reveal a dynamic sense of history that defies classification in terms of tradition, modernity or postmodernity.
‘We are all the same, because we all Worship God.’ The Controversial Case of a Female Saint in the Gambia
Authors: Janson Marloes 
Published: July 2008

AbstractBased on ethnographic field research, this article explores religious discourses about proper ritual observance in The Gambia, a country where our understanding of processes of Islamization is largely lacking. These discourses centre upon the case of Berekuntu, a shrine guarded by a female saint in the village of Kartong. On the basis of three ‘texts’, the female saint's biographical narrative, a series of sermons delivered by reformist scholars, and a newspaper article based on an interview with the Supreme Islamic Council, the article shows that shrine and saint veneration are not relics of the past, but are part of a lively contemporary dispute about ‘authentic’ Islam and who represents it. While reformist Muslims seem to have conquered the public sphere during the last decade under the influence of President Jammeh's rule, the Sufi understanding of Islam, as embodied by the saint, still enjoys great support among the Gambian population. Although ‘reformists’ and ‘Sufis’ seem at first sight to be diametrically opposed, they sometimes borrow from each other. An analysis of the (re)negotiation of Muslim identities indicates that Islamization is not a single monolithic movement but, rather, a diffuse process happening at different levels.
Doing Politics in Bushbuckridge: Work, Welfare and the South African Elections of 2004
Authors: Niehaus Isak A. 
Published: July 2008

AbstractIn the South African national elections of 2004 the ruling ANC (African National Congress) increased its majority, particularly within the poorer, black, rural voting districts. Drawing on ethnographic research that I conducted in Impalahoek – a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the Limpopo Province – this paper investigates reasons for this pattern of voting. With reference to a survey of 87 households I show that unemployment, crime and disease had increased dramatically between 1990/1 and 2003/4. Yet, at the same time, there have been considerable improvements in access to state pensions, housing, school feeding schemes and child support grants. In this context, I argue that the ANC's election campaign highlighted the capacity of government in service provision, and that voting for the ruling party constituted a strategic attempt to obtain access to state-controlled services. Hence the election was characterized by neo-patrimonial politics and by a transactional logic of voting. Voting for the ruling party does not amount to an ideological endorsement of its policies, and discontent is more likely to be expressed through boycotting the elections rather than voting for opposition parties.
The Idiom of Age in a Popular Kenyan Newspaper Serial
Authors: Ogola George 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThis article examines the narratives constructed around age in Kenya. Noting the ‘spatial crossings’ of the Kenyan subject, who is as much attuned to the village ethos as he is to the globalized world, the article problematizes our approach to the study of age in Africa. It discusses the multiple narratives now constructed around age within the context of a society in rapid flux, especially underscoring its relationship to authority. The article proposes that there are multiple ways – some new, others merely reinvented – in which social and political relationships are now (re)constructed around age in Africa. The article is based on a critical reading of popular fiction, an important site of popular cultural production where the performance of political power is manifest and narratives around power are created and enacted. The work is based on a popular Kenyan newspaper serial ‘Whispers’, an important site of cultural production in the 1980s–1990s. This period witnessed ruthless political repression in Kenya when spaces of popular expression were all but monopolized by the government. It is in such sites as ‘Whispers’ that ‘spaces of freedom’ emerged, narrating the travails of the period and challenging the ‘bounds of the expressible’. Through ‘Whispers’, the article explores how age and gender are used as ‘instrumentalities of political survival’ but also how African maledom reacts to the challenges of globalization that threaten to disrupt the status quo, especially regarding the normative grammar of patriarchy. Further, the article explores how the twin elements of gender and age are manipulated by the Kenyan polity but also simultaneously reproduced and contested by society, resulting in a largely contradictory discourse that challenges but at the same time reaffirms the (il)legitimacy of gerontocracy and the sanctity of the male order.
Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Authors: Buckley-Zistel Susanne 
Published: July 2008

AbstractMore than a decade after the genocide, Rwanda's local communities remain severely affected by the experience of the violence and horror. This is reflected in the way people remember their past, as well as in what they choose to forget. During fieldwork in Nyamata and Gikongoro it became apparent that even though the memory of the genocide as such, its pain and suffering, was essential for all interviewees, a clearer picture of the causes of the genocide had disappeared into oblivion. In this article I argue that this forgetting of pregenocide social cleavages reflects less a mental failure than a conscious coping mechanism. What I shall refer to aschosen amnesia, the deliberate eclipsing of particular memories, allows people to avoid antagonism and enables a degree of community cohesion necessary for the intimacy of rural life in Rwanda. While this is presently essential for local coexistence, it prevents the emergence of a critical challenge to the social cleavages that allowed the genocide to occur in the first place and impedes the social transformation necessary to render ethnicity-based violence impossible.
Roadblock Ethnography: Negotiating Humanitarian Access in Ituri, Eastern Dr Congo, 1999–2004
Authors: Pottier Johan 
Published: July 2008

AbstractBased on field research carried out in 2004, this article focuses on how Ituribased Congolese relief workers negotiate humanitarian access with roadblock militias. Experiences and testimonies highlight the importance of sociocultural and political awareness during relief work induced by conflict. It is demonstrated that relief workers in conflict zones do not (and cannot) shed their ethnic identities; that instead they accept that a perceived ethnic identity brings strategic advantages as well as disadvantages. Further, a relief worker's bargaining power is shown to be influenced by militia perceptions of how his/her organization is positioned in the conflict. The overall argument responds to the renewed policy interest in debating the political context of humanitarian intervention.
Recollections of Childhood Experiences During the Nigerian Civil War
Authors: Uchendu Egodi 
Published: July 2008

AbstractDuring the three decades following the end of the Nigerian civil war little attention has been given to the children who lived through the hostilities. This article on the recollections of present-day adults who experienced the crisis in their childhood, gathered by means of a qualitative research methodology, tells the story of the Nigerian civil war as the narrators perceived it in their childhoods. It probes their feelings and responses to the conflict, their lives under hostilities and some of the effects of the war on child survivors.
Constructing Locality: TheTerroirApproach in West Africa
Authors: Bassett Thomas J. , Blanc-Pamard Chantal , Boutrais Jean 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThis article examines the origins and evolution of theterroirapproach as an organizing idea in development planning in West Africa. We consider the evolving meaning of theterroirconcept in three distinct periods: as a research approach crafted in a French geographical school; as a site for research-development programmes, and, most recently, as a tool for conservation planning, territorial restructuring, and land privatization. An important shift in the meaning of theterroirconcept is apparent in its evolving uses. For theterroirschool, theterroircame to represent the socio-natural heritage of a group in which its social organization and pattern of resource use became inscribed in the landscape. The concept took on new meaning in the late-1980s as an appropriate location for on-farm research by agricultural development planners. Theterroirbecame both an alternative research site and a setting for mobilizing rural populations to adopt new land management and farming techniques. The meaning of the concept shifted again in the 1990s with the advent of thegestion des terroirsapproach. In the hands of conservation and development planners, theterroirwas conceived of as a scale of intervention for a host of government, aid donor, and NGO programmes. In summary, a significant change in the meaning of the concept has taken place from one in which the notion of local heritage was dominant to one that emphasizes territory and boundary clarification.
Pentecostalism Beyond Belief: Trust and Democracy in a Malawian Township
Authors: Englund Harri 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThe concept of belief, when applied in its strong sense, assumes an inner state that sets believers apart from non-believers. This article suggests that a concept of trust is more appropriate for the study of the religious orientation among Pentecostal Christians in Chinsapo, an impoverished township in Malawi's capital city. Trust is a critical issue because even fellow members of Pentecostal congregations can turn out to have been sent by the Devil. Pastors also have to exercise considerable forbearance in order to encourage spiritual growth among backsliders. The boundaries of Pentecostal congregations are often permeable, with little emphasis on doctrinal differences. Pentecostal Christians also have frequent contact with kin, neighbours, customers and co-workers who do not share their religious orientation. Rather than being a matter of calculating risks, trust emerges in relation to the existential dangers of misfortune, hunger and disease that affect the lives of all township dwellers. Everyday contexts of township life are as important as proselytizing in generating trust between Pentecostals and those who are yet to experience the second birth in the Holy Spirit. In contrast to views that lament Africans’ particularized trust relations as an obstacle to democracy, this article suggests that generalized trust can emerge from a particular religious orientation. The article draws attention to the actual sources of civility and trust in contemporary Africa.
The Teso Insurgency Remembered: Churches, Burials and Propriety
Authors: Jones Ben 
Published: July 2008

AbstractFrom 1986 to 1993 the Teso region of eastern Uganda experienced a violent insurgency. The insurgency was remembered as a time of brutality, when norms of respect and reciprocity were broken down. Younger men targeted and killed older men, and life retreated inwards. In the years since the insurgency a number of institutional developments have reflected on this experience. A growing number of Pentecostal churches have been established in the region, while charismatic forms of worship have been introduced in Anglican and Catholic churches. Burial societies have been set up and in the local courts the presentation of cases has undergone a change of emphasis. In all these different institutions there has been an attempt to draw a line under the violence of the recent past. A growing emphasis on notions of propriety and respectability – whether in church, in court, or at a burial – was a common theme in the life of Teso villages. In emphasizing new forms of sociality and obligation, churches and burial societies promoted a sense of fortunes restored; a belief that the past could be divorced from the present. At the same time, however, the attempt to draw a line under the past made the insurgency, or rather the memory of the insurgency, a powerful catalyst for change. The article examines the continuing influence the insurgency has over processes of social and political change in Teso.
Practices of Relatedness and the Re-Invention of Duol as a Network of Care for Orphans and Widows in Western Kenya
Authors: Nyambedha Erick Otieno , Aagaard-Hansen Jens 
Published: July 2008

AbstractDuol is a term used in reference to traditional Luo life to signify unity and solidarity within a lineage under the authority of the elders. This authority was most prominent in the pre-colonial period, and continued up to independence. It declined steadily under the impact of modernity during the post-independence period. Consequently, the institution oí duol fell into disuse. The emergence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic has renewed the need for unity and solidarity in finding community-based solutions. The original principles of duol are now manifested in a transformed version of duol and similar collaborative community initiatives. This article suggests that efforts to assist communities adversely affected by HIV/AIDS pandemic should base their interventions in the various community-based collaborative initiatives. Traditional institutions, it is argued, may be re-invented in times of turmoil as new forms of relatedness through which human agency is focused to counter serious challenges to rural communities.
Crompton's Campaign: The Professionalisation of Dance Pedagogy in Late Victorian England
Authors: Buckland Theresa Jill 
Published: July 2008

In late Victorian England, dance teachers lacked national representation and means of communication among themselves to address professional concerns. By 1930, at least ten professional associations had emerged in Britain, some of which, such as the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD), The British Association of Teachers and Dancing (BATD) and the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD), are still active today. Little has been written about the wider context of their foundation and of earlier initiatives to establish a professional body for dance pedagogy in England. A key figure in contemporaneous efforts to develop an infrastructure was Robert Morris Crompton (c.1845–1926), a London-based dancing master. Choreographer, writer, and founder-editor of the first periodical devoted to dance in England (Dancing, 1891–1893), Robert Crompton finally succeeded in establishing a national organisation that was devoted to both social and stage dancing in 1904. As the first president of the ISTD, his visionary ideals of an annual technical congress, improvements in the status of the profession, and the future enhancement of dance as an art were placed on a firm institutional footing. Charlatan practitioners, declining standards in the ballroom, and unhelpful licensing laws, together with a scattered and highly individualised competitive profession, were challenges in the early 1890s that Crompton initially failed to overcome. Records of his dreams and anxieties in Dancing provide valuable insight into the problems that beset the teachers of the time. In tandem with other source material relating to the social context for dance of the period, consideration of the trials and aspirations that lay behind Crompton's campaign for a national professional association help to broaden understanding of the place of dance in late Victorian society in England.
Dancing in the Imagined Space of Music
Authors: Duerden Rachel 
Published: July 2008

Dance and music have several features in common – rhythm, metre, tempo, and the fact that they are structured in and through time – but they are also intrinsically different, they each ‘mean’ differently, making the task of talking about their interrelationship challenging. Perhaps, however, this combination of closeness and distance is what makes it possible to see dance as a metaphor for music, and vice versa. The closeness between the two announces a relationship, a connection that then extends beyond the natural affinity to embrace something more remote and surprising. In other words, linking two disparate entities in a way similar to metaphor highlights a clear point of contact between them, but it also invites us to consider additional connections – the ghostly resonances that become apparent through close study.Through an analysis in which illustrations are drawn from Balanchine and Stravinsky's Agon (1957) and Mark Morris' Falling Down Stairs (1997) set to J. S. Bach's 3rd Suite for Cello, this article examines the use of metaphor in talking about our responses to dance and music, thus illuminating some of the potential for subtlety and depth in their relationship, and the corresponding insights into human experience that they may offer.
The Politics of Protection: Perspectives on Vigilantism in Nigeria
Authors: Pratten David 
Published: July 2008

Vigilantism has become an endemic feature of the Nigerian social and political landscape. The emergence of night guards and vigilante groups as popular responses to theft and armed robbery has a long and varied history in Nigeria. Since the return to democracy in 1999, however, Nigeria has witnessed a proliferation of vigilantism: vigilante groups have organized at a variety of levels from lineage to ethnic group, in a variety of locations from village ward to city street, and for a variety of reasons from crime fighting to political lobbying. Indeed, vigilantism has captured such a range of local, national and international dynamics that it provides a sharply focused lens for students of Nigeria's political economy and its most intractable issues – the politics of democracy, ethnicity and religion.Contemporary Nigerian vigilantism concerns a range of local and global dynamics beyond informal justice.
On Judging the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
Authors: Reynolds Matthew 
Published: July 2008

The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, funded by Lord Weidenfeld and by New College, The Queen's College, and St Anne's College in Oxford, is awarded annually. It is judged by a panel of three Oxford acadamics and/or translators, plus a guest judge from the wider literary world. The 2007 shortlist consisted of modern novels from France, Austria, and Norway; the selected poems of a contemporary German poet; three volumes of the writings of a Swiss dramatist, essayist, and story-writer; and a parallel-text version of Dante. The field of eligible books published during 2006 had of course been far larger, and was also wider-ranging, for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize is for Englishings of prose fiction, poetry, and drama from living European languages. I have been a judge for the last four years now, and each time, when faced with the pile of eighty-odd entries, the multiple source languages (a few known to me, most not), the gamut of genres – from crime fiction and chick lit through Dumas (say) to Tolstoy and the poetry of Rilke or Kaplinski; not to mention the variety of translation challenges and ways of meeting them, from the exfoliation of a much-translated classic to the acute responsibility of introducing a writer for the first time, from the fairly straightforward demands of genre fiction to the peculiar meld of liberty and rigour required by the translation of poetry – each time, when faced with all this, I have asked: How on earth do you set about it? How can such incommensurables be compared?