ABSTRACT In Africa, the youth play a major role both as activists and participants in cultural life and politics. Framed around the concepts of conservatisms and radicalisms, this special issue references various African contexts to explore the intersections of youthhood, identities, cultural practices, politics, struggle narratives, education, and marginalisation, and the role young people play in the political process. To this end, articles in this special issue collectively relate to and recount the politics and practices of neoliberalism, capitalism, globalisation, poverty, violence, elections, resource allocation, disability, social justice, and identity re-constitution.
{"title":"Identities, exclusionism and politics in Africa","authors":"Edwin Etieyibo, Muchaparara Musemwa, Obvious Katsaura","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2020.1866921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2020.1866921","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Africa, the youth play a major role both as activists and participants in cultural life and politics. Framed around the concepts of conservatisms and radicalisms, this special issue references various African contexts to explore the intersections of youthhood, identities, cultural practices, politics, struggle narratives, education, and marginalisation, and the role young people play in the political process. To this end, articles in this special issue collectively relate to and recount the politics and practices of neoliberalism, capitalism, globalisation, poverty, violence, elections, resource allocation, disability, social justice, and identity re-constitution.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00020184.2020.1866921","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42784282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2020.1859355
Ângela Ferreira
ABSTRACT Post-democratic South Africa continues to experience migrancy to large urban centres such as Johannesburg. One understudied group of migrants are women from the KwaBhaca region in the Eastern Cape. Many amaBhaca women are entrapped in Johannesburg because of the exorbitant costs required to return home, and they are increasingly isolated from their ‘home’ communities. Some women have formed dance groups that perform mamtiseni to mitigate the effects of urban entrapment. Through the life histories of these women and the performances by two mamtiseni dance groups, we can see how the dance has aided these women in navigating their everyday lives. Mamtiseni is used to build and strengthen networks, preserve a sense of ‘Bhaca’ community and culture, socialise the youth, reshape the urban space, and represent home in a foreign space. This study adds to the limited amaBhaca historiography and contributes to an understanding of how marginalised migrants use performance to shape and reinforce identity.
{"title":"Echoes of home: Mamtiseni in the everyday of post-apartheid amaBhaca women migrants in Johannesburg, circa 1994–2017","authors":"Ângela Ferreira","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2020.1859355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2020.1859355","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Post-democratic South Africa continues to experience migrancy to large urban centres such as Johannesburg. One understudied group of migrants are women from the KwaBhaca region in the Eastern Cape. Many amaBhaca women are entrapped in Johannesburg because of the exorbitant costs required to return home, and they are increasingly isolated from their ‘home’ communities. Some women have formed dance groups that perform mamtiseni to mitigate the effects of urban entrapment. Through the life histories of these women and the performances by two mamtiseni dance groups, we can see how the dance has aided these women in navigating their everyday lives. Mamtiseni is used to build and strengthen networks, preserve a sense of ‘Bhaca’ community and culture, socialise the youth, reshape the urban space, and represent home in a foreign space. This study adds to the limited amaBhaca historiography and contributes to an understanding of how marginalised migrants use performance to shape and reinforce identity.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00020184.2020.1859355","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45790518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-29DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2020.1821351
Gift Mwonzora, Kirk Helliker
ABSTRACT This article examines political violence enacted by youth during the presidential run-off election in Zimbabwe in 2008. After the presidential election in March 2008, no clear winner emerged, leading to a run-off election in June 2008 between Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). In the face of a possible defeat in the run-off, ZANU-PF unleashed significant levels of violence against MDC activists and members, such that Tsvangirai withdrew. Central to the violence were youths, and mainly young men, who performed this violence for diverse reasons, including promises of material rewards and compliance due to fear of being labelled as a sell-out. While not denying the significance of these reasons, this article explores the importance of political socialisation of youth in Zimbabwe by the ‘war generation’, that is, those who fought during the war of liberation in the 1970s. This socialisation entailed the propagation of an authoritarian nationalist narrative by ZANU-PF in which violence was justified in defending ‘the revolution’. This narrative was very pervasive in the years preceding 2008 and in the months leading up to the run-off. There is evidence that suggests that youths learnt about the efficacy of violence through this process of political socialisation and, on this basis, performed violence during the run-off. We conclude that this ‘indoctrination’ is of some significance in understanding youth violence in 2008. However, we argue that any youths considered as inspired on nationalist grounds to enact violence also had their own personal motivations that are irreducible to nationalist fervour.
{"title":"Learning and performing political violence: ZANU-PF Youth and the 2008 presidential run-off election in Zimbabwe","authors":"Gift Mwonzora, Kirk Helliker","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2020.1821351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2020.1821351","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines political violence enacted by youth during the presidential run-off election in Zimbabwe in 2008. After the presidential election in March 2008, no clear winner emerged, leading to a run-off election in June 2008 between Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). In the face of a possible defeat in the run-off, ZANU-PF unleashed significant levels of violence against MDC activists and members, such that Tsvangirai withdrew. Central to the violence were youths, and mainly young men, who performed this violence for diverse reasons, including promises of material rewards and compliance due to fear of being labelled as a sell-out. While not denying the significance of these reasons, this article explores the importance of political socialisation of youth in Zimbabwe by the ‘war generation’, that is, those who fought during the war of liberation in the 1970s. This socialisation entailed the propagation of an authoritarian nationalist narrative by ZANU-PF in which violence was justified in defending ‘the revolution’. This narrative was very pervasive in the years preceding 2008 and in the months leading up to the run-off. There is evidence that suggests that youths learnt about the efficacy of violence through this process of political socialisation and, on this basis, performed violence during the run-off. We conclude that this ‘indoctrination’ is of some significance in understanding youth violence in 2008. However, we argue that any youths considered as inspired on nationalist grounds to enact violence also had their own personal motivations that are irreducible to nationalist fervour.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00020184.2020.1821351","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44953783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-29DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0218
Harry Verhoeven
Following the global upsurge in conflict in the late 1980s and early 1990s, no confrontation turned out to be more devastating than the Great African War, which led to mass excess mortality with estimates ranging between 2.7 million and 5.4 million people dead in the 1998–2007 period. Unlike the First World War, with which it is often compared because of the multitude of states which battled each other on Congolese territory, Africa’s Great War cannot be defined by unambiguous start and end dates. The violence since the 1990s is perhaps more usefully thought of in analogy with Europe’s Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century or, as some historians argue, the cataclysmic conflict centered on Eurasia that encompassed both World Wars, separated only by a failing truce between 1919 and 1937. With not only alliances changing regularly in the Great African War but also a whole cast of participants joining and leaving the battlefield and the frontlines gradually blurring to the point of becoming virtually indefinable, many scholars prefer using “Congo Wars” to refer to a series of regularly interlinked but sometimes also clearly distinct conflicts—local, national, regional—waged on the territory of what was formerly known as Zaire and now as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Thus, while a narrow definition separates out a “First Congo War” (beginning in September or October 1996 [once again, depending on one’s definition!] and ending on 17 May 1997) from the “Second Congo War” (the Great African War “proper,” from 2 August 1998 to 17 December 2002), other perspectives date the start of the conflict(s) back to the Rwandan genocide and argue that the Congo Wars, in parts of the territory like North and South Kivu and Ituri, are still ongoing. This bibliography takes a relatively expansive view of the conflagration, focusing publications analyzing the central events between 1996 and 2002, but acknowledging the impressive body of scholarship that not only scrutinizes the consequences of six years of catastrophic violence but also traces ongoing localized and/or transnational conflict in the DRC. At the time of writing (summer 2019), some optimism is taking hold after the peaceful (if controversial) handover of presidential power by Joseph Kabila to Felix Tshisekedi in January 2019 following elections in December 2018; violent confrontations among militias and between rebel groups, the MONUC/MONUSCO UN force, and the state still occur regularly, but not since 2013 have insurgents (i.e., the M23 rebellion) credibly threatened to take over an entire province, let alone seek to oust the president in Kinshasa: progress by Congolese standards. Although foreign actors still meddle in Congo’s politics, they do not do so as overtly and probably also not as profusely and effectively in the 2000s. The task will fall to historians a generation from now to assess whether the Congo Wars really have been coming to an end, twenty-five years after they began raging,
{"title":"Congo Wars","authors":"Harry Verhoeven","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0218","url":null,"abstract":"Following the global upsurge in conflict in the late 1980s and early 1990s, no confrontation turned out to be more devastating than the Great African War, which led to mass excess mortality with estimates ranging between 2.7 million and 5.4 million people dead in the 1998–2007 period. Unlike the First World War, with which it is often compared because of the multitude of states which battled each other on Congolese territory, Africa’s Great War cannot be defined by unambiguous start and end dates. The violence since the 1990s is perhaps more usefully thought of in analogy with Europe’s Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century or, as some historians argue, the cataclysmic conflict centered on Eurasia that encompassed both World Wars, separated only by a failing truce between 1919 and 1937. With not only alliances changing regularly in the Great African War but also a whole cast of participants joining and leaving the battlefield and the frontlines gradually blurring to the point of becoming virtually indefinable, many scholars prefer using “Congo Wars” to refer to a series of regularly interlinked but sometimes also clearly distinct conflicts—local, national, regional—waged on the territory of what was formerly known as Zaire and now as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Thus, while a narrow definition separates out a “First Congo War” (beginning in September or October 1996 [once again, depending on one’s definition!] and ending on 17 May 1997) from the “Second Congo War” (the Great African War “proper,” from 2 August 1998 to 17 December 2002), other perspectives date the start of the conflict(s) back to the Rwandan genocide and argue that the Congo Wars, in parts of the territory like North and South Kivu and Ituri, are still ongoing. This bibliography takes a relatively expansive view of the conflagration, focusing publications analyzing the central events between 1996 and 2002, but acknowledging the impressive body of scholarship that not only scrutinizes the consequences of six years of catastrophic violence but also traces ongoing localized and/or transnational conflict in the DRC. At the time of writing (summer 2019), some optimism is taking hold after the peaceful (if controversial) handover of presidential power by Joseph Kabila to Felix Tshisekedi in January 2019 following elections in December 2018; violent confrontations among militias and between rebel groups, the MONUC/MONUSCO UN force, and the state still occur regularly, but not since 2013 have insurgents (i.e., the M23 rebellion) credibly threatened to take over an entire province, let alone seek to oust the president in Kinshasa: progress by Congolese standards. Although foreign actors still meddle in Congo’s politics, they do not do so as overtly and probably also not as profusely and effectively in the 2000s. The task will fall to historians a generation from now to assess whether the Congo Wars really have been coming to an end, twenty-five years after they began raging,","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48621029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2020.1799751
L. Mokwena
ABSTRACT Ostensibly an exhibition on a beloved and widely used ‘South African’ cotton textile isishweshwe, the multi-year Isishweshwe Story: Material Women? exhibition at the Iziko Museums’ Slave Lodge in Cape Town, South Africa, provides an interesting portal through which to explore the manifestation, on the museological stage, of the geopolitics of South Africa as a regional actor. This article adopts a (geo)political lens through which to observe South Africa’s post-apartheid nation-making against the backdrop of historically hegemonic regional relations in Southern Africa. Through this discussion, my aim is to invigorate debates on the sociology of heritage and the public museum by shifting the attention away from the usual emphasis on the domestic politics of nation (re)imagining and transformation. Instead, I recast the debate on museums and heritage in transnational, regionalist terms, emphasising the persistence of geopolitical legacies wherein South Africa discursively collapses the boundaries between itself and its regional neighbours even where these are seemingly acknowledged. To this end, this article reorients the extensive scholarship on South African museums towards an interrogation of the subtle geopolitical dimensions of public museum exhibitions. It invites a focus on the politics and asymmetries of geography and how these intersect with and are (re)produced culturally on the museum platform.
{"title":"Along the museological grain: An exploration of the (geo)political inheritance in Isishweshwe Story: Material Women?","authors":"L. Mokwena","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2020.1799751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2020.1799751","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ostensibly an exhibition on a beloved and widely used ‘South African’ cotton textile isishweshwe, the multi-year Isishweshwe Story: Material Women? exhibition at the Iziko Museums’ Slave Lodge in Cape Town, South Africa, provides an interesting portal through which to explore the manifestation, on the museological stage, of the geopolitics of South Africa as a regional actor. This article adopts a (geo)political lens through which to observe South Africa’s post-apartheid nation-making against the backdrop of historically hegemonic regional relations in Southern Africa. Through this discussion, my aim is to invigorate debates on the sociology of heritage and the public museum by shifting the attention away from the usual emphasis on the domestic politics of nation (re)imagining and transformation. Instead, I recast the debate on museums and heritage in transnational, regionalist terms, emphasising the persistence of geopolitical legacies wherein South Africa discursively collapses the boundaries between itself and its regional neighbours even where these are seemingly acknowledged. To this end, this article reorients the extensive scholarship on South African museums towards an interrogation of the subtle geopolitical dimensions of public museum exhibitions. It invites a focus on the politics and asymmetries of geography and how these intersect with and are (re)produced culturally on the museum platform.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00020184.2020.1799751","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48361570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2020.1838259
Rogers Asempasah
ABSTRACT This paper explores the link between exile and national redemption in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003). Although exile constitutes the dominant interpretive concept as it relates to the scandalous and the breaking of a vicious cycle of violence and hopelessness in both novels, the connection between exile and postcolonial national redemption has gone unexplored. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of becoming-traitor and on exile as ex salire, the paper argues that contrary to Edward Said’s and Walter Mignolo’s conceptualisation of exile as the idiom for rethinking location and identity beyond the imaginary of the nation as territoriality, Okri and Adichie re-present exile as an ethico-political act of radical refusal and epistemic disobedience to the existing norms of violence and nonbeing, and a precondition for postcolonial redemption. The paper reveals two things: that novelty, in both novels, can be located at the conceptual level wherein the transformation of exile into a strategy of rebellion and subversion becomes the precondition for postcolonial agency and redemption; and that the scandalous event is a site of contestation, epistemic disobedience and futurity.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2020.1788920
A. Adamo
ABSTRACT This article analyses the 2015 intervention of Specialized Tasks, Training, Equipment and Protection (STTEP International Ltd), a South African private military company (PMC), against Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorist group in Nigeria. The origins of PMCs are highlighted before an in-depth analysis of the mercenary intervention against Boko Haram is performed, with an eye on previous major PMC interventions in sub-Saharan Africa. On the one hand, the paper emphasises the unprecedented use of PMCs against Islamic extremist groups but on the other reveals that PMC interventions have not changed much. Finally, the article assesses STTEP’s intervention in light of the current debate on private security involving those who advocate its use and regulation and those who question the legitimacy of PMCs as a tool of conflict resolution.
摘要本文分析了2015年南非私营军事公司STTEP International Ltd对尼日利亚伊斯兰恐怖组织博科圣地的干预。在深入分析雇佣军对博科圣地的干预之前，重点介绍了PMC的起源，并着眼于PMC以前在撒哈拉以南非洲的主要干预。一方面，该文件强调了对伊斯兰极端组织前所未有地使用PMC，但另一方面表明，PMC的干预措施没有太大变化。最后，文章根据目前关于私人安全的辩论评估了STTEP的干预，辩论涉及主张使用和监管私人安全的人，以及质疑私营军事公司作为解决冲突工具的合法性的人。
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2020.1825927
Imani Sanga
ABSTRACT This article examines the use of musical figures in a Kiswahili play, Tendehogo. Written by an eminent Tanzanian playwright named Edwin Semzaba, the play recounts how slave trade was conducted by Arab traders in East Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It tells about the experiences of African slave captives being driven by an Arab slave trader away from their homeland in the interior of Tanganyika to the coast. This forced estrangement from their lives as free persons into slavery is accomplished on both physical and mental planes. The article examines how the play uses songs as literary devices, namely musical figures, to represent and enact African and Arab identities, as apparatuses of enslavement and as means of resistance. The article argues that the use of these musical figures in the play Tendehogo sonically mediates readers’ understanding of and attitudes towards East African slave trade and slavery as historical phenomena.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2020.1827947
I. Okafor-Yarwood, I. Adewumi
ABSTRACT Toxic waste is chemical compounds that, when ingested or inhaled, can cause physiological impairment and, in extreme cases, death. It is also known for its detrimental effect on the environment when disposed of in an unsafe manner. Yet, countries in the Gulf of Guinea continue to be targeted by Western waste-brokers notwithstanding the existence of laws prohibiting the transboundary disposal of such materials. There is also a rise in the export of electronic waste (e-waste) from developed countries to countries in the region, purportedly as reusable electronics, much of which ends up in landfills. The primitive recycling techniques of this e-waste undermines the health of the local populations and their environment due to inadequate care of the heavy metal and toxin content. Drawing on examples from Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Ghana, this paper argues that toxic waste dumping in the Gulf of Guinea amounts to environmental racism. The article makes recommendations relating to the challenges of toxic waste dumping in the Gulf of Guinea, including the need for countries to implement the provisions of the Basel and Bamako conventions in their entirety, recognise acts of environmental racism as violations of human rights, and for young people to rise to the occasion as ‘agents of change’.
{"title":"Toxic waste dumping in the Global South as a form of environmental racism: Evidence from the Gulf of Guinea","authors":"I. Okafor-Yarwood, I. Adewumi","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2020.1827947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2020.1827947","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Toxic waste is chemical compounds that, when ingested or inhaled, can cause physiological impairment and, in extreme cases, death. It is also known for its detrimental effect on the environment when disposed of in an unsafe manner. Yet, countries in the Gulf of Guinea continue to be targeted by Western waste-brokers notwithstanding the existence of laws prohibiting the transboundary disposal of such materials. There is also a rise in the export of electronic waste (e-waste) from developed countries to countries in the region, purportedly as reusable electronics, much of which ends up in landfills. The primitive recycling techniques of this e-waste undermines the health of the local populations and their environment due to inadequate care of the heavy metal and toxin content. Drawing on examples from Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Ghana, this paper argues that toxic waste dumping in the Gulf of Guinea amounts to environmental racism. The article makes recommendations relating to the challenges of toxic waste dumping in the Gulf of Guinea, including the need for countries to implement the provisions of the Basel and Bamako conventions in their entirety, recognise acts of environmental racism as violations of human rights, and for young people to rise to the occasion as ‘agents of change’.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00020184.2020.1827947","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46006901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-24DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0217
P. Lockwood, Constance Smith
Anthropology has a long and complicated history in Africa, and its study of economic life is no exception. In the early days of the discipline, in the 1930s and 1940s, anthropologists like Audrey Richards, Meyer Fortes, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard all departed for Africa to conduct fieldwork. In general, early British social anthropology was committed to holistic studies of small-scale societies, and thus what counted as “economic anthropology” was subsumed within broader studies of kinship and sociopolitical organization. Though later criticized by Manchester School anthropologists for their “bounding” of specific peoples, and by Marxist anthropologists for their neglect of “modes of production,” from a contemporary vantage point these early studies made the same point that anthropologists working in the substantivist tradition of Karl Polanyi also would: that the economy is embedded in social relations and practices. The growing influence of Marxist approaches from the 1960s, as well as growing sympathies between social anthropology and the historical study of Africa, introduced an appreciation of historical processes in the formation of local and regional economies. Feminist approaches expanded the frame of inquiry by demonstrating the gendered character of African economic life, and of the crucial role of women and households to markets and production. New analytical tools borrowed from political economy paved the way for studies of colonial economies—for instance, how the emergence of cash crop production shaped labor migration and land ownership, as well as the shift toward cash itself. The contemporary anthropological study of economic life in Africa has been transformed by pressing events in the latter part of the century—structural adjustment and economic liberalization, not to mention scholars’ identification of the “informal economy”—as key terrain for anthropological research. New attentiveness has been given to how Africans imagine and conceive of economic change, as well as the new types of wealth, credit, and debt brought about via access to foreign capital. The era of economic liberalization has transformed cities and African expectations of the future, sometimes in terms of improved living standards and “middle class” lifestyles, but also a growing disparity between rich and poor. Moving away from the narrative of crisis, newer work seeks to explore African attempts to pursue “the good life” amid ongoing economic turbulence. While anthropologists remain attuned to the effects of economic change, what continues to characterize their approach is an understanding of economies embedded in regional contexts, including their values and established practices.
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