Suchergebnisse

When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. Andrew Apter's The Pan-African Nation tells the full story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust. According to Apter, FESTAC expanded the horizons of blackness in Nigeria to mirror the global circuits of its economy. By showcasing masks, dances, images, and souvenirs fr

AbstractIt is an anthropological truism that ethnic identity is "other"-oriented, such that who wearerests on who we arenot. Within this vein, the development of Yoruba identity in the late nineteenth century is attributed to Fulani perspectives on their Oyo neighbors, Christian missionaries and the politics of conversion, as well as Yoruba descendants in diaspora reconnecting with their West African homeland. In this essay, my aim is to both complement and destabilize these externalist perspectives by focusing on Yoruba concepts of "home" and "house" (ilé), relating residence, genealogy and regional identities to their reconstituted ritual frameworks in Cuba and Brazil. Following Barber's analysis of Yoruba praise-poetry (oríkì) and Verran's work on Yoruba quantification, I reexamine the semantics of the categoryiléin the emergence of Lucumí and Nagô houses in order to explain their sociopolitical impact and illuminate transpositions of racial "cleansing" and ritual purity in Candomblé and Santería. More broadly, the essay shows how culturally specific or "internal" epistemological orientations play an important if neglected role in shaping Atlantic ethnicities and their historical trajectories.

Abstract
In Kinship and Community in Carriacou (1962), M.G. Smith documents what he calls "abnormal" sexual relations between women in female-headed households on the island. These lesbian madivines represent statistically significant "deviations" from normative patterns of kinship and residence in domestic groups, and are associated with the shapeshifting witchcraft of sukuyan and lougarou. Linking Smith's ethnography of "mating patterns" to transactional pathways of reproductive value—blood, money, witchcraft and sexuality—I rework his ideological explanation of Carriacou lesbianism (as a "mechanism" for preserving female marital fidelity) into a feminist model of female empowerment with comparative potentialities throughout the Caribbean.

This article explores the significance of matrilineal descent among Congolese refugees in camp Kala, Zambia. Matriliny mattered in Kala, I argue, because it motivated repatriation, generating witchcraft accusations stemming from variations of the matrilineal puzzle. On the surface, Kala did not 'look' particularly matrilineal, given the ad hoc domestic arrangements of surviving refugees. But when placed against the backdrop of matrilineal descent – expressed in broader kinship networks between refugee households, and as an evaluative discourse of illegitimate accumulation – witchcraft‐driven repatriation makes sense as an 'extreme' form of lineage fission. Within the confines of the refugee camp, a Central African model of matriliny was effectively reduced to its core dynamics, highlighting a bio‐social economy of the womb and its witchcraft conversions of blood into money. After examining three social dramas of witchcraft and repatriation in Kala, I engage broader considerations of gender and history to recast descent as a regenerative scheme.RésuméL'auteur explore l'importance de la descendance matrilinéaire parmi les réfugiés congolais du camp de Kala, en Zambie. Il avance que la matrilinéarité a eu une importance à Kala parce que c'est elle qui motivait le rapatriement, suscitant des accusations de sorcellerie liées à des écarts dans l'écheveau matrilinéaire. Superficiellement, Kala « n'avait pas l'air » particulièrement matrilinéaire, compte tenu des dispositions domestiques ad hoc prises par les réfugiés survivants. Pourtant, lorsqu'il est replacé dans le contexte de la matrilinéarité, exprimée dans des réseaux de parentéélargis entre les foyers des réfugiés et au travers d'un discours évaluatif sur l'accumulation illégitime, le rapatriement pour motif de sorcellerie s'explique comme une forme « extrême » de fission lignagère. De fait, aux confins du camp de réfugiés, un modèle de matrilinéarité centrafricain a été réduit à sa dynamique fondamentale, mettant en évidence une économie bio‐sociale de la matrice et ses conversions sorcellaires du sang en argent. Après avoir examiné trois épisodes dramatiques de sorcellerie et de rapatriement à Kala, l'auteur s'engage dans des réflexions plus larges sur le genre et l'histoire, afin de recadrer la filiation comme un mode de régénération.

▪ Abstract  As an artifact of imperial culture, Africanist anthropology is historically associated with the colonization of Africa in ways that undermine the subdiscipline's claims of neutrality and objectivity. A critical literature on the ideological and discursive inventions of Africa by the West challenges the very possibility of Africanist anthropology, to which a variety of responses have emerged. These range from historical reexaminations of imperial discourses, colonial interactions, and fieldwork in Africa, including dialogical engagements with the very production of ethnographic texts, to a more dialectical anthropology of colonial spectacle and culture as it was coproduced and reciprocally determined in imperial centers and peripheries. Understood philologically, as an imperial palimpsest in ethnographic writing, the colonial legacy in Africanist ethnography can never be negated, but must be acknowledged under the sign of its erasure.

ON 16 August 1983, towns throughout Nigeria's Ondo State erupted into violence. The ostensible cause was popular reaction against rigged gubernational elections which favoured a National Party of Nigeria (N.P.N.) candidate in an overwhelmingly Unity Party of Nigeria (U.P.N.) State. It is easy to dismiss the violence in Undo (and in Oyo State too) as the protest of a frustrated plebiscite – as indeed it was. But western accounts of 'the breakdown of democracy' in Africa, so often associated with primordialism, tribalism, and class conflict in plural societies, seldom grasp experiences of the breakdown itself.1 From the external perspectives of national integration and voting behaviour, popular violence involving mobs and crowds is characterised as affective, 'irrational' action, in contrast to the 'rational' norms of institutionalised democracy.2

Darlegung innenpolitischer Strukturen, Machtansprüche und Erwartungen im Ondo-Staat Nigerias, die nach den Regionalwahlen von 1983 aufgrund der Nichtberücksichtigung lokaler Belange zu Aufruhr und Gewaltausbrüchen führten. Kennzeichnung der nationalen und lokalen politischen Rahmenbedingungen. Das Wahlverhalten der Yoruba-Bevölkerung. Hauptproblem war die durch die Wahlen begünstigte National Party of Nigeria, deren Anhänger nach den Wahlen schlimmen Ausschreitungen ausgesetzt waren. Versuch einer Erklärung, warum sich der Aufstand nicht gegen die verantworliche Zentralregierung, sondern gegen die eigenen Landsleute richtete. (DÜI-Hlb)