What does it mean to “fit in?” In this volume of essays, editors Günther Schlee and Alexander Horstmann demystify the discourse on identity, challenging common assumptions about the role of sameness and difference as the basis for inclusion and exclusion. Armed with intimate knowledge of local systems, social relationships, and the negotiation of people’s positions in the everyday politics, these essays tease out the ways in which ethnicity, religion and nationalism are used for social integration.
Dealing with the dynamics of identification and conflict, this book uses theoretical orientations ranging from political ecology to rational choice theory, interpretive approaches, Marxism and multiscalar analysis. Case studies set in Africa, Europe and Central Asia are grouped in three sections devoted to pastoralism, identity and migration. What connects all of these anthropological explorations is a close focus on processes of identification and conflict at the level of particular actors in relation to the behaviour of large aggregates of people and to systemic conditions.
This book explores shifting forms of continental colonialism in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, from the early modern period to the present. It offers an interdisciplinary approach bringing together historians, anthropologists, and sociologists to contribute to a critical historical anthropology of colonialism. Though focused on the modern era, the volume illustrates that the colonial paradigm is a framework of theories and concepts that can be applied globally and deeply into the past. The chapters engage with a wide range of topics and disciplinary approaches from the theoretical to the empirical, deepening our understanding of under-researched areas of colonial studies and providing a cutting edge contribution to the study of continental and internal colonialism for all those interested in the global impact of colonialism on continents.
This volume advances a comprehensive transdisciplinary approach to the affective lives of institutions – theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and critical. With this approach, the volume foregrounds the role of affect in sustaining as well as transforming institutional arrangements that are deeply problematic. As part of its analysis, this book develops a novel understanding of institutional affect. It explores how institutions produce, frame, and condition affective dynamics and emotional repertoires, in ways that engender conformance or resistance to institutional requirements. This collection of works will be important for scholars and students of interdisciplinary affect and emotion studies from a wide range of disciplines, including social sciences, cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, organizational and institution studies, media studies, social philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory.
In this ethnographic study of post-paternalist ruination and renovation, Christian Straube explores social change at the intersection of material decay and social disconnection in the former mine township Mpatamatu of Luanshya, one of the oldest mining towns on the Zambian Copperbelt. Touching on topics including industrial history, colonial town planning, social control and materiality, gender relations and neoliberal structural change, After Corporate Paternalism offers unique insights into how people reappropriate former corporate spaces and transform them into personal projects of renovation, fundamentally changing the characteristics of their community.
Reexamining a classical work of social anthropology, African Political Systems (1940), edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, this book looks at the colonial and academic context from which the work arose, as well as its reception and its subject matter, and looks at how the work can help with analysis of current politics in Africa. This book critically reflects upon the history of anthropology. It also contributes to a political anthropology which is aware of its antecedents, self-reflexive as a discipline, conscious of pitfalls and biases, and able to locate itself in its academic, social and political environment.
Rangeland, forests and riverine landscapes of pastoral communities in Eastern Africa are increasingly under threat. Abetted by states who think that outsiders can better use the lands than the people who have lived there for centuries, outside commercial interests have displaced indigenous dwellers from pastoral territories. This volume presents case studies from Eastern Africa, based on long-term field research, that vividly illustrate the struggles and strategies of those who face dispossession and also discredit ideological false modernist tropes like ‘backwardness’ and ‘primitiveness’.
This innovative Handbook sets out a conceptual and analytical framework for the critical appraisal of migration governance. Global and interdisciplinary in scope, the chapters are organised across six key themes: conceptual debates; categorisations of migration; governance regimes; processes; spaces of migration governance; and mobilisations around it.
In Managing Frontiers in Qing China, historians and anthropologists explore China's imperial expansion in Inner Asia, focusing on early Qing empire-building in Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and beyond – Central Asian perspectives and comparisons to Russia's Asian empire are included. Taking an institutional-historical and historical-anthropological approach, the essays engage with two Qing agencies well-known for their governance of non-Han groups: the Lifanyuan and Libu. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the Lifanyuan and Libu, revising and assessing the state of affairs in the under-researched field of these two institutions. The contributors explore the imperial policies towards and the shifting classifications of minority groups in the Qing Empire, explicitly pairing and comparing the Lifanyuan and Libu as in some sense cognate agencies. This text offers insight into how China's past has continued to inform its modern policies, as well as the geopolitical make-up of East Asia and beyond. Contributors include: Uradyn E. Bulag, Chia Ning, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Nicola DiCosmo, Dorothea Heuschert-Laage, Laura Hostetler, Fabienne Jagou, Mei-hua Lan, Dittmar Schorkowitz, Song Tong, Michael Weiers,Ye Baichuan, Yuan Jian, Zhang Yongjiang.
Migrant Emotions explores the interrelationships and tensions between mobility and immobility, emotions, affects and experiences, inclusion and exclusion, as well as narratives and representations in both local and global discourses. The overall objective of the volume is to underscore the significance of emotions in the analysis of mobile lives in the past and the current socio-political climate. The book provides a new framework that brings together the study of emotions and migration by focusing on the feelings or emotions of exclusion and inclusion through a range of theoretical lenses. Specifically, it offers a series of complex, interconnected studies on diverse experiences, responses, and voices of migrants (including, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented, and others on the move) both in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, and across the continents, including Europe (Molesini, Daniel, Stock, Castillo Goncalves, Cancian, Leese), Africa (Cancian, Kilpeläinen and Zechner), Asia (Mutiara, Paul, Ridgway), and Oceania (Heckenberg). Integral to the volume’s original objective is an emphasis on the global diversity of contributors and studies and the global reach of readership for purposes of comparison.
