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Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar

Author: Denis Regnier

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1000182428

This book explores the prejudice against slave descendants in highland Madagascar and its persistence more than a century after the official abolition of slavery. ‘Unclean people’ is a widespread expression in the southern highlands of Madagascar, and refers to people of alleged slave descent who are discriminated against on a daily basis and in a variety of ways. Denis Regnier shows that prejudice is rooted in a strong case of psychological essentialism: free descendants think that ‘slaves’ have a ‘dirty’ essence that is impossible to cleanse. Regnier’s field experiments question the widely accepted idea that the social stigma against slavery is a legacy of pre-colonial society. He argues, to the contrary, that the essentialist construal of ‘slaves’ is the outcome of the historical process triggered by the colonial abolition of slavery: whereas in pre-abolition times slaves could be cleansed through ritual means, the abolition of slavery meant that slaves were transformed only superficially into free persons, while their inner essence remained unchanged and became progressively constructed as ‘forever unchangeable’. Based on detailed fieldwork, this volume will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, African studies, development studies, cultural psychology, and those looking at the legacy of slavery.

Austronesian Paths and Journeys

Author: James J. Fox

Publisher: ANU Press

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 1760464333

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This is the eighth volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. The papers in this volume examine metaphors of path and journey among specific Austronesian societies located on islands from Taiwan to Timor and from Madagascar to Micronesia. These diverse local expressions define common cultural conceptions found throughout the Austronesian-speaking world.

Re-Creating Anthropology

Author: David N. Gellner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-04-26

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1000568970

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This book makes a notable contribution to discussions of what anthropology is and should be in the twenty-first century through a reconsideration, from diverse sub-disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, of the interactions between sociality, matter, and the imagination. It explores the imagination in its social contexts, how it is put to work, and how, in its embodied and material forms, it works in practice. The chapters provide detailed case studies, including film-making in Egypt; spirit-possession/exorcism in Italy; Theosophy and the production of knowledge about UFOs; the role of mistakes or glitches in public performances; humans’ varying relationships to the environment; post-coloniality, time, and crisis in anthropology; and artistic creativity.

Decolonising Education in Islamic West Africa

Author: Anneke Newman

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-12-24

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1040273912

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This book uses perceptions and experiences of Qur’anic schools in West Africa to outline a much-needed postsecular approach, reconsidering the place of Islamic education within African decolonial debates about educational pluralism, and the contributions of religious perspectives in academic and international development spaces. Decolonial theory is used to overcome the challenges of problematic Eurocentric and colonialist stereotypes about religious actors and faith-based schools which persist within international education scholarship and global policy agendas. Through fine-grained ethnography, chapters discuss how parents and young people today engage with classical Qur’anic schools, Islamic schools and French-medium secular education in Senegal, thereby exposing inequalities around gender, descent-based or caste identities and socioeconomic status, as well as their influence on young people’s pursuit of knowledge. These findings are valuable for scholars exploring the development-education-religion nexus and promoting Education for All in communities characterised by other-than-secular worldviews. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the sociology of education, international education, anthropology and religious education. Practitioners involved in postcolonial and decolonial debates will also benefit from recommendations regarding educational reform in plural educational contexts.

Family Violence and Social Change in the Pacific Islands

Author: Lois Bastide

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-23

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1000683885

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The Pacific Islands have some of the highest rates of family violence in the world. Addressing the contemporary mutations of Pacific Island families and the shifting understandings of violence in the context of rapid social change, this book investigates the conflict dynamics generated by these transformations. The contributors draw from detailed case studies in a range of Pacific territories to examine family violence in relation to the social, economic and political situation of native populations as well as individual, collective and institutional responses to the development of violence within and upon the family. They focus on vernacular understandings, conflicting social norms, the emergence of different types of violent patterns, the impact of violence on individuals and communities, and local attempts at mitigating or combating it. Combining ethnographic expertise with engaged scholarship, this volume offers a vivid account of ongoing social change in Pacific Island societies and a crucial contribution to the understanding of family violence as a social process, cultural construct, and political issue. This book will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of violence and the family, Pacific studies, development studies, and the social and cultural anthropology of Oceania.

How People Compare

Author: Mathijs Pelkmans

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-26

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1000845028

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This book focuses on comparison in anthropology, turning an ethnographic lens onto the diversity of comparative practice. It seeks to understand how, why and with what consequences diversely situated groups of people – many of whom operate on radically different premises to professional anthropologists – make comparisons, above all, between themselves and real or imagined others. What motivates people to compare, what techniques or logics do they employ, and what are the most likely outcomes – both intended and unintended? How do comparative practices reflect, reinforce or refuse uneven relations of power? And finally, what can a rejuvenated comparative anthropology learn from the anthropology of comparison? The volume develops a dialogue between scholars with long- term ethnographic engagement in a variety of contexts around the world and is particularly valuable reading for those interested in anthropological methodology and theory.