Constructing History, Culture and Inequality


Book Description

During the early 20th century, a group of ex-slaves established a frontier society in the no-man’s-land of the extreme Southern Highlands of Madagascar. First settlers skilfully deployed a fluid set of Malagasy customs to implant a myth of themselves as tompon-tany or “masters of the land”. Eventually, they created a land monopoly to reinforce their legitimacy and to exclude later migrants. Some of them were labelled andevo (“slave” or “slave descent”). The tompon-tany prohibited the andevo from owning land, and thereby from having tombs. This book focuses on the plight of the tombless andevo, and how their ascribed impurity and association with infertility, illness, death and misfortune made them an essential part of the tompon-tany world-view.




Ancestral Encounters in Highland Madagascar


Book Description

Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders and missionaries. This book considers the challenges that such actors pose for historical accounts of the past and for thinking about questions of presence and representation. How were the dead made present, and how were they recognized or not? In attending to these multifarious encounters of the nineteenth century, how might we reflect on the ways in which our own history-writing makes the dead present? To tackle these questions, Zoë Crossland tells an anthropological history of highland Madagascar from a perspective rooted in archaeology and Peircean semiotics, as well as in landscape study, oral history and textual sources.




Children of the Soil


Book Description

In Children of the Soil, Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, before, during, and after colonization. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she weaves together the lives and afterlives of built spaces to show how city residents negotiated imperial encroachment, colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over two centuries. From Mahajanga’s hilltop palace to the alluvial depths of its cesspools, the city’s spaces were domains for ideological debates between rulers and subjects, French colonizers and indigenous Malagasy peoples, and Comorian migrants and Indian traders. In these spaces, Mahajanga’s residents expressed competing moral theories about power over people and the land. The built world was also where varying populations reckoned with human, ancestral, and ecological pasts and laid present and future claims to urban belonging. Migrants from nearby Comoros harnessed built forms as anticipatory devices through which they sought to build their presence into the landscape and transform themselves from outsiders into "children of the soil" (zanatany). In tracing the centrality of Mahajanga’s architecture to everyday life, Rijke-Epstein offers new ways to understand the relationships between the material world, the more-than-human realm, and the making of urban life.




Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission


Book Description

This selection of texts introduces students and researchers to the multi- and interdisciplinary field of mission history. The four parts of this book acquaint the readers with methodological considerations and recurring themes in the academic study of the history of mission. Part one revolves around methods, part two documents approaches, while parts three and four consist of thematic clusters, such as mission and language, medical mission, mission and education, women and mission, mission and politics, and mission and art.Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission is suitable for course-work and other educational purposes.




Handbook Global History of Work


Book Description

Coffee from East Africa, wine from California, chocolate from the Ivory Coast - all those every day products are based on labour, often produced under appalling conditions, but always involving the combination of various work processes we are often not aware of. What is the day-to-day reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? How do they work today, and how did they work in the past? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work – a young discipline that is introduced with this handbook. In 8 thematic chapters, this book discusses these aspects of work in a global and long term perspective, paying attention to several kinds of work. Convict labour, slave and wage labour, labour migration, and workers of the textile industry, but also workers' organisation, strikes, and motivations for work are part of this first handbook of global labour history, written by the most renowned scholars of the profession.




Sex and Salvation


Book Description

Sex and Salvation chronicles the coming of age of a generation of women in Tamatave in the years that followed Madagascar’s economic liberalization. Eager to forge a viable future amid poverty and rising consumerism, many young women have entered the sexual economy in hope of finding a European husband. Just as many Westerners believe that young people break with the past as they enter adulthood, Malagasy citizens fear that these women have severed the connection to their history and culture. Jennifer Cole’s elegant analysis shows how this notion of generational change is both wrong and consequential. It obscures the ways young people draw on long-standing ideas of gender and sexuality, it ignores how urbanites relate to their rural counterparts, and it neglects the relationship between these husband-seeking women and their elders who join Pentecostal churches. And yet, as talk about the women circulates through the city’s neighborhoods, bars, Internet cafes, and churches, it teaches others new ways of being. Cole’s sophisticated depiction of how a generation’s coming of age contributes to social change eschews a narrow focus on crisis. Instead, she reveals how fantasies of rupture and conceptions of the changing life course shape the everyday ways that people create the future.




A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion


Book Description

A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion presents a collection of original, ethnographically-informed essays that explore the variety of beliefs, practices, and religious experiences in the contemporary world and asks how to think about religion as a subject of anthropological inquiry. Presents a collection of original, ethnographically-informed essays exploring the wide variety of beliefs, practices, and religious experiences in the contemporary world Explores a broad range of topics including the ‘perspectivism’ debate, the rise of religious nationalism, reflections on religion and new media, religion and politics, and ideas of self and gender in relation to religious belief Includes examples drawn from different religious traditions and from several regions of the world Features newly-commissioned articles reflecting the most up-to-date research and critical thinking in the field, written by an international team of leading scholars Adds immeasurably to our understanding of the complex relationships between religion, culture, society, and the individual in today’s world




Eviction from the Chagos Islands


Book Description

This book represents the first joint effort to document the historical background of the eviction (late 1960s, early 1970s) of the Chagosssians from the Chagos archipelago when the main island became an US-military base. It documents their eviction, resettlement, livelihoods, legal struggles and future aspirations.




Strength Beyond Structure


Book Description

Drawing on a wide range of historical and anthropological case studies from various parts of Africa, this anthology provides an understanding of the importance of agency in processes of social transformation, especially in the context of crisis and structural constraint.




The Ethnography of Tourism


Book Description

**Winner of the 2020 Edward M. Bruner Book Award from the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group** "Leite, Castaneda, and Adams's volume is a beautiful retrospective of the enduring importance of Ed Bruner's work and legacy in our field, and we have no doubt that it will be used as a central historical, theoretical, and teaching text by many." - Prize Committee What does it mean to study tourism ethnographically? How has the ethnography of tourism changed from the 1970s to today? What theories, themes, and concepts drive contemporary research? Thirteen leading anthropologists of tourism address these questions and provide a critical introduction to the state of the art. Focusing on the experience-near, interpretive-humanistic approach to tourism studies widely associated with anthropologist Edward Bruner, the contributors draw on their fieldwork to illustrate and build upon key concepts in tourism ethnography, from experience, encounter, and emergent culture to authenticity, narrative, contested sites, the borderzone, embodiment, identity, and mobility. With its comprehensive introductory chapter, keyword-based organization, and engaging style, The Ethnography of Tourism will appeal to anthropology and tourism studies students, as well as to scholars in both fields and beyond. For more information, check out A Conversation with the Editors of the Ethnography of Tourism: Edward M. Bruner and Beyond and In Memoriam: Ed Bruner.