The Perils Of Belonging

Author : Peter Geschiere
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226289664
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Perils of Belonging written by Peter Geschiere and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. In The Perils of Belonging, Peter Geschiere 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 Geschiere 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.

Author : Markus Balkenhol
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030380505
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Secular Sacred written by Markus Balkenhol and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled across the world? In exploring this theme, The Secular Sacred focuses on diverse topics such as the dynamic roles of Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria, and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. The contributions focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce, and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. The Secular Sacred will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and social psychologists, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies and semiotics. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Author : Peter Geschiere
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022604775X
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust written by Peter Geschiere and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-08-09 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dante’s Inferno, the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for traitors, those who betrayed their closest companions. In a wide range of literatures and mythologies such intimate aggression is a source of ultimate terror, and in Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, Peter Geschiere masterfully sketches it as a central ember at the core of human relationships, one brutally revealed in the practice of witchcraft. Examining witchcraft in its variety of forms throughout the globe, he shows how this often misunderstood practice is deeply structured by intimacy and the powers it affords. In doing so, he offers not only a comprehensive look at contemporary witchcraft but also a fresh—if troubling—new way to think about intimacy itself. Geschiere begins in the forests of southeast Cameroon with the Maka, who fear “witchcraft of the house” above all else. Drawing a variety of local conceptions of intimacy into a global arc, he tracks notions of the home and family—and witchcraft’s transgression of them—throughout Africa, Europe, Brazil, and Oceania, showing that witchcraft provides powerful ways of addressing issues that are crucial to social relationships. Indeed, by uncovering the link between intimacy and witchcraft in so many parts of the world, he paints a provocative picture of human sociality that scrutinizes some of the most prevalent views held by contemporary social science. One of the few books to situate witchcraft in a global context, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust is at once a theoretical tour de force and an empirically rich and lucid take on a difficult-to-understand spiritual practice and the private spaces throughout the world it so greatly affects.

Author : Jennifer Cole
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022640529X
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Affective Circuits written by Jennifer Cole and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts—on such a mass scale—contribute to a broader process of social regeneration. The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.

Author : Faisal Z. Ahmed
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110848865X
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Perils of International Capital written by Faisal Z. Ahmed and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how financial globalization can be perilous, holding the capacity to finance the durability of authoritarian governments.

Author : Laila Lalami
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0525436049
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Conditional Citizens written by Laila Lalami and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Editors' Choice • Finalist for the California Book Award • Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, Los Angeles Times In this brilliantly argued and deeply personal work, Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S.citizen, using her own story as a starting point for an exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today, poignantly illustrating how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation. Weaving together her experiences with an examination of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture, Lalami illuminates how conditional citizens are all those whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other.

Author : Maybritt Jill Alpes
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317186044
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa written by Maybritt Jill Alpes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do young West Africans want to go abroad at any cost because they receive too little or erroneous information? Why do they and their families risk large sums of money with migration brokers? How do the risks of illegality and deportation change migration aspirations in West Africa? This book places trafficking and smuggling within a wider framework of high-risk migration and proposes a novel interpretation of how people manage unwanted and uncertain migration outcomes. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with aspiring and failed migrants, their families, migration brokers and consulate offices in anglophone Cameroon, the author analyses high-risk migration from the vantage point of people in a place of departure. Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa: Abroad at Any Cost develops a critical socio-legal approach to the governance of migration that sees the state without ‘seeing like the state’. The state’s monopoly over legitimate means of mobility is continuously in the making – frequently through accusations of fraud and criminality. By revealing how authority, legality and legitimacy operate in a country of origin, the analysis contributes original insights into processes that create the conditions for illegality and migrant exploitation. The book will appeal to those in the fields of migration and development, African studies, gender, anthropology, sociology, criminology and law.

Author : George Paul Meiu
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022649120X
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ethno-erotic Economies written by George Paul Meiu and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethno-erotic Economies explores a fascinating case of tourism focused on sex and culture in coastal Kenya, where young men deploy stereotypes of African warriors to help them establish transactional sexual relationships with European women. In bars and on beaches, young men deliberately cultivate their images as sexually potent African men to attract women, sometimes for a night, in other cases for long-term relationships. George Paul Meiu uses his deep familiarity with the communities these men come from to explore the long-term effects of markets of ethnic culture and sexuality on a wide range of aspects of life in rural Kenya, including kinship, ritual, gender, intimate affection, and conceptions of aging. What happens to these communities when young men return with such surprising wealth? And how do they use it to improve their social standing locally? By answering these questions, Ethno-erotic Economies offers a complex look at how intimacy and ethnicity come together to shape the pathways of global and local trade in the postcolonial world.

Author : Abu Bakarr Bah
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1786997894
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Post-Conflict Institutional Design written by Abu Bakarr Bah and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since gaining independence from colonial rule, most African countries have been struggling to build democratic and peaceful states. While African multiparty politics may be viewed as a democratic system of governance, in reality it is plagued by ethnic and regional political grievances that undermine meaningful democracy. By examining post-conflict institutional reforms in several African countries, this book sheds light on the common causes of violent conflicts and how institutional design can affect the conditions for peace and democracy in Africa. Focussing on conceptual and practical questions of designing ethnically and regionally inclusive state institutions and the way institutions are perceived by the citizenry Post-Conflict Institutional Design addresses political autonomy and control over resources, issues which are often key sources of ethnic and regional grievances. Crucially, it examines the meanings of institutional reforms as well ethnic and regional representation.

Author : Marshall Sahlins
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226925137
Total Pages : 121 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What Kinship Is-And Is Not written by Marshall Sahlins and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-25 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to produce an original outlook on the deepest bond humans can have. Covering thinkers from Aristotle and Lévy- Bruhl to Émile Durkheim and David Schneider, and communities from the Maori and the English to the Korowai of New Guinea, he draws on a breadth of theory and a range of ethnographic examples to form an acute definition of kinship, what he calls the “mutuality of being.” Kinfolk are persons who are parts of one another to the extent that what happens to one is felt by the other. Meaningfully and emotionally, relatives live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths. In the second part of his essay, Sahlins shows that mutuality of being is a symbolic notion of belonging, not a biological connection by “blood.” Quite apart from relations of birth, people may become kin in ways ranging from sharing the same name or the same food to helping each other survive the perils of the high seas. In a groundbreaking argument, he demonstrates that even where kinship is reckoned from births, it is because the wider kindred or the clan ancestors are already involved in procreation, so that the notion of birth is meaningfully dependent on kinship rather than kinship on birth. By formulating this reversal, Sahlins identifies what kinship truly is: not nature, but culture.