Ethnic Studies Commons^™

Witchcraft Dialogues : Anthropological And Philosophical Exchanges, George Clement Bond, Diane M. Ciekawy

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Witchcraft Dialogues analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the occult. It brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, to engage the metaphysical properties of witchcraft and sorcery and to explore their manifestations in people’s lived experiences.

While many Africanist scholars shun the analysis of witchcraft as an appropriate domain of investigation, the experiences, thoughts, activities, and powers that witchcraft encompasses have become increasingly the source of interest and debate. Concepts of witchcraft and the phenomena to which they are applied express something fundamental to the human condition and …

A Country Of Defiance : Mapping The Casamance In Senegal, Mark W. Deets

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

A historiographical analysis of human geography and a social history of nationalist separatism and cultural identity in southern Senegal.

This book is a spatial history of the conflict in Casamance, the portion of Senegal located south of The Gambia. Mark W. Deets traces the origins of the conflict back to the start of the colonial period in a select group of contested spaces and places where the seeds of nationalism and separatism took root. Each chapter examines the development of a different piece of the still unrealized Casamançais nation: river, rice field, forest, school, and stadium. Each of these locations …

Everyday State And Democracy In Africa : Ethnographic Encounters, Wale Adebanwi

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Bottom-up case studies, drawn from the perspective of ordinary Africans’ experiences with state bureaucracies, structures, and services, reveal how citizens and states define each other.

This volume examines contemporary citizens’ everyday encounters with the state and democratic processes in Africa. The contributions reveal the intricate and complex ways in which quotidian activities and experiences—from getting an identification card (genuine or fake) to sourcing black-market commodities to dealing with unreliable waste collection—both (re)produce and (re)constitute the state and democracy. This approach from below lends gravity to the mundane and recognizes the value of conceiving state governance not in terms of its …

Carceral Afterlives : Prisons, Detention, And Punishment In Postcolonial Uganda, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Drawing upon social history, political history, and critical prison studies, this book analyzes how prisons and other instruments of colonial punishment endured after independence and challenges their continued existence.

In Carceral Afterlives, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart traces the politics, practices, and lived experiences of incarceration in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the beginning of Yoweri Museveni’s presidency in 1986. During these decades, Ugandans experienced multiple changes of government, widespread state violence, and war, all of which affected the government’s approach to punishment. Bruce-Lockhart analyzes the relationship between the prison system and other sites of confinement—including informal …

War And Society In Colonial Zambia, 1939–1953, Alfred Tembo

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Written from a Zambian perspective, this leading study shows how the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) organized and deployed human, military, and natural resources during and after the Second World War.

The Second World War brought unprecedented pressures to bear on Britain’s empire, which then included colonial Northern Rhodesia. Through new archival materials and oral histories, War and Society in Colonial Zambia tells—from an African perspective—the story of how the colony organized its human and natural resources on behalf of the imperial government.

Alfred Tembo first examines government propaganda and recruitment of personnel for the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, …

Village Work : Development And Rural Statecraft In Twentieth-Century Ghana, Alice Wiemers

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

A robust historical case study that demonstrates how village development became central to the rhetoric and practice of statecraft in rural Ghana

Combining oral histories with decades of archival material, Village Work formulates a sweeping history of twentieth-century statecraft that centers on the daily work of rural people, local officials, and family networks, rather than on the national governments and large-scale plans that often dominate development stories. Wiemers shows that developmentalism was not simply created by governments and imposed on the governed; instead, it was jointly constructed through interactions between them.

The book contributes to the historiographies of development and …

The Great Upheaval: Women And Nation In Postwar Nigeria, Judith A. Byfield

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

This social and intellectual history of women’s political activism in postwar Nigeria reveals the importance of gender to the study of nationalism and poses new questions about Nigeria’s colonial past and independent future.

In the years following World War II, the women of Abeokuta, Nigeria, staged a successful tax revolt that led to the formation first of the Abeokuta Women’s Union and then of Nigeria’s first national women’s organization, the Nigerian Women’s Union, in 1949. These organizations became central to a new political vision, a way for women across Nigeria to define their interests, desires, and needs while fulfilling the …

Female Monarchs And Merchant Queens In Africa, Nwando Achebe

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

An unapologetically African-centered monograph that reveals physical and spiritual forms and systems of female power and leadership in African cultures.

Nwando Achebe’s unparalleled study documents elite females, female principles, and female spiritual entities across the African continent, from the ancient past to the present. Achebe breaks from Western perspectives, research methods, and their consequently incomplete, skewed accounts, to demonstrate the critical importance of distinctly African source materials and world views to any comprehensible African history. This means accounting for the two realities of African cosmology: the physical world of humans and the invisible realm of spiritual gods and forces. That …

Emergent Masculinities : Gendered Power And Social Change In The Biafran Atlantic Age, Ndubueze L. Mbah

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

In Emergent Masculinities, Ndubueze L. Mbah argues that the Bight of Biafra region’s Atlanticization—or the interaction between regional processes and Atlantic forces such as the slave trade, colonialism, and Christianization—between 1750 and 1920 transformed gender into the primary mode of social differentiation in the region. He incorporates over 250 oral narratives of men and women across a range of social roles and professions with material culture practices, performance traditions, slave ship data, colonial records, and more to reveal how Africans channeled the socioeconomic forces of the Atlantic world through their local ideologies and practices. The gendered struggles over the means …

Football And Colonialism : Body And Popular Culture In Urban Mozambique, Nuno Domingos

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist José Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends. Through gesture, footwork, and patois, they used what Craveirinha termed “malice”—or cunning—to negotiate their places in the colonial state. “These manifestations demand a vast study,” Craveirinha wrote, “which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography.” …

South Sudan : A New History For A New Nation, Douglas H. Johnson

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Africa’s newest nation has a long history. Often considered remote and isolated from the rest of Africa, and usually associated with the violence of slavery and civil war, South Sudan has been an arena for a complex mixing of peoples, languages, and beliefs. The nation’s diversity is both its strength and a challenge as its people attempt to overcome the legacy of decades of war to build a new economic, political, and national future.

Most recent studies of South Sudan’s history have a foreshortened sense of the past, focusing on current political issues, the recently ended civil war, or the …

Threatening Others : Nicaraguans And The Formation Of National Identities In Costa Rica, Carlos Sandoval-Garcia

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan “immigrants.”
Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica explores the representation of the Nicaraguan “other” in the Costa Rican imagery. It also seeks to address more generally why the sense of national belonging constitutes a crucial identification in contemporary societies. Interdisciplinary and based on extensive fieldwork, it looks critically at the “exceptionalism” that Costa Ricans take for granted and view as …

Under The Heel Of The Dragon : Islam, Racism, Crime, And The Uighur In China, Blaine Kaltman

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

The Turkic Muslims known as the Uighur have long faced social and economic disadvantages in China because of their minority status. Under the Heel of the Dragon: Islam, Racism, Crime, and the Uighur in China offers a unique insight into current conflicts resulting from the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the Chinese government’s oppression of religious minorities, issues that have heightened the degree of polarization between the Uighur and the dominant Chinese ethnic group, the Han.

Author Blaine Kaltman’s study is based on in-depth interviews that he conducted in Chinese without the aid of an interpreter or the knowledge of …

Burma’S Mass Lay Meditation Movement : Buddhism And The Cultural Construction Of Power, Ingrit Jordt

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power describes a transformation in Buddhist practice in contemporary Burma. This revitalization movement has had real consequences for how the oppressive military junta, in power since the early 1960s, governs the country.
Drawing on more than ten years of extensive fieldwork in Burma, Ingrid Jordt explains how vipassanā meditation has brought about a change of worldview for millions of individuals, enabling them to think and act independently of the totalitarian regime. She addresses human rights as well as the relationship between politics and religion in a country in which …