Narrating history and anthropology J. D. Y. Peel’s ‘the Past in the Present’
September 2017
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Journal article
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Religion and Society
Policing boundaries: the cultural work of African policing
July 2017
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Chapter
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Police in Africa: The Street Level View
SBTMR
Currency and conflict in colonial Nigeria
June 2017
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Chapter
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Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa: Beyond the Margins
This chapter examines a central theme in Jane Guyer’s analysis of monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa – the implications of money valuation in relation to social order and disorder in Nigeria. It revisits the case of manilla currency exchange that she has discussed extensively in relation to calculation, ranking and political legitimacy (Guyer 2004, 2009). The manilla exchange rate is often ignored as a contributory factor in the various social upheavals of the region in the period before the manilla was ‘redeemed’ in 1948.¹ Following Guyer’s lead, and drawing on the pioneering scholarship of Naanen (1993), this chapter argues that manilla...
Creole pioneers in the Nigerian provincial press
August 2016
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Chapter
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African Print Cultures Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century
Broad-ranging essays on the social, political, and cultural significance of more than a century s worth of newspaper publishing practices across the African continent "
SBTMR, Language Arts & Disciplines
Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa
November 2014
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Edited book
Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa: an introduction
October 2014
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Chapter
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Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa
This collection explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa.
SBTMR, social science
The precariousness of prebendalism
February 2013
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Chapter
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Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria Critical Interpretations
SBTMR, political science
Retroversion, introversion, extraversion: three aspects of African anthropology
July 2012
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Chapter
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SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology: Volume 1
Social Science
Retroversion, Introversion, Extraversion: Three Aspects of African Anthropology
January 2012
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Chapter
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The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology
Bodies of power: narratives of selfhood and security in Nigeria
November 2010
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Chapter
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Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa
It is often asserted that crime and disorder are related to transitions within political systems – from authoritarianism to democracy, from military to civilian rule, from communist regime to market economy, or from civil war to peace (Shaw 2000). Also, in tracing the emergence of contemporary vigilantism in Nigeria it is tempting to point to watershed moments that link vigilantism to transition and rupture within the nation’s political fabric. The Nigerian Civil War (1967–70) is often cited as such a watershed, not least because of the subsequent availability of arms for criminal use. The impact of structural adjustment and neoliberal...
SBTMR, literary collections
Masking youth: Transformation and transgression in Annang performance
October 2008
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Journal article
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African Arts
SBTMR
The Politics of protection: Perspectives on vigilantism in Nigeria
February 2008
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Journal article
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Africa
SBTMR
‘The Thief Eats His Shame’: Practice and Power in Nigerian Vigilantism
February 2008
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Journal article
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Africa
Global Vigilantes
January 2008
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Book
Global Vigilantes is the first book to offer a comprehensive overview of contemporary vigilantism and its relationship to different members of society and state authorities.
Political Science
The man-leopard murders: History and society in Colonial Nigeria
Michel de Certeau: ethnography and the challenge of plurality
May 2007
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Journal article
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Social Anthropology
Michel de Certeau
Introduction: Global vigilantes: perspectives on justice and violence
March 2007
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Chapter
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Global Vigilantes
Vigilantes and organised vigilantism are a growing phenomenon, as this book amply demonstrates. From Northern Ireland to West Africa, from Bombay or Moscow, vigilante movements and ideologies have widespread appeal. Whether as localised ‘self-policing’ of crime and other forms of social behaviour, or as surveillance of drug trafficking or terrorism, vigilantes patrol the frontiers that emerge as transnational global flows meet real or imagined political borders. Global Vigilantes is the first book to offer a comprehensive overview of contemporary vigilantism in its relation to different members of society and to state authorities. It explores how vigilantes produce and reproduce themselves within shifting climates of hate and fear; it addresses their historical antecedents; explores the cults and cultures of conflict associated with vigilantism, and analyses the modes, meanings and methods of vigilante vilolence.
political science
The 'rugged life': Youth and violence in Southern Nigeria
February 2007
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Chapter
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Violence and non-violence in Africa
This unique volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of terrorism as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide.
Political Science
Mystics and missionaries: narratives of the spirit movement in Eastern Nigeria
February 2007
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Journal article
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Social Anthropology
This paper combines insights from de Certeau's writings on mysticism, history and possession, along with Africanist perspectives on new religious movements to inform a case study of a Christian revival movement in late 1920s south‐eastern Nigeria. The paper focuses on the events and fallout of the so‐called Spirit Movement of 1927 in which bands of young men and women entered states of spiritual possession, paraded along the roads, attacked elders and secret society members, and killed suspected witches. Accounts of the origins and meaning of the Spirit Movement were highly contested and contradictory. This paper asks how we account for the mystical in historical ethnography, what light this event throws on colonial subjectivities, how we negotiate dominant missionary and colonial versions of such events, and how the problematic disjunction of sensorial experience and written account can be approached.
SBTMR
Man-Leopard Murders : History and Society in Colonial Nigeria
January 2007
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Book
This book is an account of murder and politics in Africa, and an historical ethnography of southern Annang communities during the colonial period.
History, Anthropology
Singing thieves: history and practice in Nigerian popular justice
January 2007
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Chapter
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Global Vigilantes: Perspectives on Justice and Violence
Vigilantes and organised vigilantism are a growing phenomenon, as this book amply demonstrates. From Northern Ireland to West Africa, from Bombay or Moscow, vigilante movements and ideologies have widespread appeal.
Criminal justice, Administration of
The district clerk and the 'man-leopard murders': Mediating law and authority in colonial Nigeria
September 2006
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Chapter
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Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa
By uncovering the role of such men (and a few women) in the construction, function, and legal apparatus of colonial states, the essays in this volume highlight a new perspective.
Africa, colonialism, history
The politics of vigilance in southeastern Nigeria
June 2006
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Journal article
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Development and Change
<p>This article argues that governance can be best analysed within modes of vigilance. Where recent work on the post‐colonial state has emphasized the symbolic and practical constitution of the state through surveillance and spatialization, so in counterpoint, this analysis illustrates that social engagement with the state is based on conceptions of vigilance and practices of counter‐surveillance with both spatial and temporal dimensions. Drawing on an ethnography of Annang youth associations in southeastern Nigeria, this analysis outlines how the micro‐politics of vigilance are based on knowledge of the states' patrimonial ‘ways of operating’ and processes which define internal, localized rights, registers and styles of action. This argument is based on an analysis of popular responses to disorder which contribute to an ‘insurgent’ construction of the public realm in which groups marginalized and excluded challenge the logic, locations, patterns of discourse and constructions of the public good.</p>
SBTMR
Conversion, conquest and the Qua Iboe Mission
July 2005
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Chapter
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Christianity and Social Change in Africa Essays in Honor of J.D.Y. Peel
The essays reflect the importance of comparative historical inquiry, inter-disciplinary perspectives, Peels contributions to the transformation of history and sociology, and the paths that a new generation of scholars must chart to ...
social science
The politics of plunder: the rhetorics of order and disorder in Southern Nigeria
April 2003
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Journal article
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African Affairs
This article looks at four cases of youth‐led identity‐based social movements in Benin City and in the Annang area of southern Nigeria. It shows how each of these movements — youth associations, ‘area boys’, vigilantes and campus cults — draws on different, older repertoires of discourse and organization, and enters into relations with state authority that combine elements of complicity, insurgency, monitoring and disengagement. It argues that their activities, mobilized around resource control and community security, can be understood as a response to the Nigerian ‘politics of plunder’, endemic since the beginning of the oil boom, but locally perceived as having intensified from the 1990s onwards.
SBTMR
Return to the roots? Urban networks, rural development and power in Sudan
January 2000
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Report
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CAS Occasional Paper No. 82, University of Edinburgh, 2000
Local institutional development and relief in Ethiopia: A Kire-based seed distribution programme in north Wollo
June 1997
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Journal article
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Disasters
Highlighted here is the important role played by community‐based organisations in relief supply operations. In the context of an emergency seed supply project in northern Ethiopia in 1995, it examines the participation of burial societies, known as kires, in targeting, distribution and management. The paper illustrates that factors of local institutional legitimacy, transparency and accountability are central, both to the effective representation of community views and to long‐term partnerships between local institutions and non‐governmental organisations.
SBTMR
Reconstructing community: the intermediary role of Sahelian associations in processes of migration and rural development
January 1996
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Journal article
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African Rural and Urban Studies
Since the 1920s, associations formed by rural migrants in Africa's towns and cities have sought to advance the position of their communities through political representation and socioeconomic development. From the late 1950s onward, however, the role of these groups in processes of migration and urbanization has continued to puzzle observers of social change. This paper assesses two central axes of migrant association representation in their role as mediators between the State and the household: internal, to their members and to the community for whom they claim to speak, and external, to the wider sphere of governmental and nongovernmental agencies. The material presented is based on fieldwork conducted in Mali, Sudan and Ethiopia between 1993 and 1995. The examples are taken from a range of minority and majority ethnic and religious groups, with contrasting historical patterns of rural-urban migration. Each case study is set in the context of State compression and retrenchment with significant implications for State-society relations and local initiative. Together, these cases illustrate the important role of State discourse in shaping the responses of associations to rural development issues.
Bamako bound: the social organization of migration in Mali
January 1996
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Report
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Bamako Bound: The Social Organization of Migration in Mali
'Return to the roots': Processes of legitimacy in Sudanese migrant associations
November 1995
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Chapter
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Governmental Organisations - Performance and Accountability: Beyond the Magic Bullet