In Monrovia Modern Danny Hoffman uses the ruins of four iconic modernist buildings in Monrovia, Liberia, as a way to explore the relationship between the built environment and political imagination. Hoffman shows how the E. J. Roye tower and the Hotel Africa luxury resort, as well as the unfinished Ministry of Defense and Liberia Broadcasting System buildings, transformed during the urban warfare of the 1990s from symbols of the modernist project of nation-building to reminders of the challenges Monrovia's residents face. The transient lives of these buildings' inhabitants, many of whom are ex-combatants, prevent them from making place-based claims to a right to the city and hinder their ability to think of ways to rebuild and repurpose their built environment. Featuring nearly 100 of Hoffman's color photographs, Monrovia Modern is situated at the intersection of photography, architecture, and anthropology, mapping out the possibilities and limits for imagining an urban future in Monrovia and beyond.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine’s Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.
Rapid urbanization and political liberalization is changing the nature of African politics and societies. This book develops a framework for the study of democracy and development that emphasizes informal institutions and the politics of belonging in the context of daily life, in contrast to the formal and electoral paradigms that dominate the social sciences. Based on fifteen months of field research including ethnographic observation, focus group interviews, and original quantitative survey analysis in Ghana, this book intervenes in major debates about public goods provision, civic participation, ethnic politics and democratization, and the future of urban sustainability in a rapidly changing world. By developing new understandings of democracy, as well as providing novel explanations for good governance and development in poor urban neighborhoods, the book transcends the narrative of a failing and corrupt Africa and charts a new way forward for the study of democracy and development.
The City of Lovers, Liars, and Thieves is a story about 21st Century Monrovia and its residents that are embroiled in everything that is human--love, lies, sex, deceptions and survival, and a hope for a better future. This wonderful story which is filled with lovable characters, real and honest views of everyday people, steamy sexual encounter and romantic verses, is an embodiment of optimism for a city rising from the aches of war and viral epidemic. Set in modern day Monrovia, a small West African city on the Atlantic Ocean where dishonesty and individualism are antithesis to progress and hope for a better tomorrow for the city and its residents. Stanley Nimely, tells his story of struggle for love and survival in parallel to the city he so dearly loves which is struggling for everything a modern city needs. This story is so complex that it may require more than one reading to fully understand and digest the evolution of the people, the characters, the events and history of Monrovia, the shinning city on the hill. The City of Lovers, Liars, and Thieves is a character driven novel that tells the story of Stanley, a forty-something year-old divorced writer who is at odd with the political establishment and the city's pretentious religious leaders that have accused him of writing explicitly flaming books that are corrupting the minds of the city's youth. Remaining true to himself, Stanley exposes everything that is going wrong with the city and its people. With a firm belief that the city's future will bury its ugly past, he exposes the lifestyles of those that are persecuting him in a fury of daily articles which tells everything that is done in the dark--corruption, sexual exploitation by both residents and foreigners, thievery, political backstabbing, and all the vices that give a good city a bad name. Stanley's experiences with some residents and politicians of the city have made him to believe that Monrovians are ungrateful, fickle, and wicked liars that should never be trusted. But in the thick of his struggles when he finally meets the perfect woman, everything changes. As the saying goes, "Women have a special way of complicating things and beguiling a man's mind."
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Sonic ethnography makes a compelling argument for taking sound seriously as a crucial component of social life and as an ethnographic form of representation. This volume explores the role of sound-making and listening practices in the formation of local identities in the southern Italian region of Basilicata. With an approach that cuts across sensory anthropology, sound studies and ethnomusicology, Sonic ethnography demonstrates how acoustic tradition is made and disrupted and acoustic communities are brought together in shared temporality and space. Based extensive research, this volume provides an innovative take on soundful cultural performances such as tree rituals, carnivals, pilgrimages and more informal musical performances, with particular attention to the interactions between classic ethnographic scholarship from the past century and the local politics of heritage. Featuring stunning colour photographs and more than an hour of sound recordings, Sonic ethnography uses a unique combination of media to investigate distinctive ways of knowing, beyond more traditional ethnographic forms of representation. Two methodological chapters, respectively on music-making as creative research practice and on photo-ethnography, make the book an essential contribution for those interested in the production of sounds and still images as relational and interactive approaches to fieldwork. The pioneering anthropologist of sound, Steven Feld, collaborated to some of the research and contributed to the book an afterword and a soundscape composition.
The Liberia Exodus of 1878 was the one of the biggest events in African American history. It certainly rivaled the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery in the nineteenth century, as the grand event and the most talked about until the coming of Marcus Garvey some forty years later.
