Words and Worlds: A Lexicon for Dark Times (eds) V. Das & D. Fassin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press., 2021
In today’s world, open science and open government matter. When combined, many agree, they streng... more In today’s world, open science and open government matter. When combined, many agree, they strengthen science and democracy. Yet opening up – whether in the name of open science, open data, open source or open government – is rarely straightforward. This essay explores the curious alliances, novel tensions and surprising paradoxes that contemporary practices of openness entail. It dwells on two controversies in particular: Climategate and The Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017. These examples show that the grounds on which expertise and science for government work are shifting; and how difficult it can be to defend established scientific practices, which are increasingly cast as secretive, suspect and morally untenable. While pundits routinely take both examples as evidence of a populist, right-wing assault on science, the essay suggests that the recent push for openness and transparency itself contributes substantially to the challenges science for government faces. Familiar stories about a post-truth, anti-science Right that operates in the shadows, and a truthful, pro-science Left that does not, have limited explanatory value. Ultimately the essay aims to expand our thinking on the knotty entanglements of science and liberal democratic governance in the twenty-first century.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(2), 438-461., Jun 2015
Calls for accountability and ‘impactful’ research are fundamentally reshaping the academy, giving... more Calls for accountability and ‘impactful’ research are fundamentally reshaping the academy, giving rise to a large, critical scholarship on neoliberal regimes of accountability and their pernicious effects. But these calls also animate other institutional forms and practices that have received less critical attention. These include new forms of science that promise accountability through interdisciplinarity, collaborating with stakeholders, and addressing real-world problems. This article considers one example of such accountable science: human dimensions of climate change field research. This research endeavour has produced surprising results, including the uncritical adoption of controversial Euro-American ideas about traditional Others. In exploring how this has come about, the article considers how theoretical and disciplinary diversity are managed within this arena, and the organizing logics that enable climate sciences and scientists to work together. We ultimately argue that accountable science – like other neoliberal modes of accountability – can produce outcomes for which no one can be held to account.
Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, Oct 2016
Todd Sanders and Elizabeth Hall bring our debates about interdisciplinarity to climate change, a ... more Todd Sanders and Elizabeth Hall bring our debates about interdisciplinarity to climate change, a major global issue for which the need for interdisciplinary perspectives is taken for granted. How, they ask, “do we imagine and practice 'interdisciplinarity’ to save the planet?” The authors describe and critique a range of contrasting modalities for doing interdisciplinary work on climate change and the assumptions under which they operate. Sanders and Hall also reflect on the complexities of studying interdisciplinarity when its practitioners and observers are part of the same milieu—both being “natives” in the world of research.
Invited contribution to a HAU Book Symposium on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcra... more Invited contribution to a HAU Book Symposium on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcraft and doubt on an Indonesian island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
It is now common for anthropologists to argue that the occult is adequately explained as an obliq... more It is now common for anthropologists to argue that the occult is adequately explained as an oblique, metaphysical critique of the now, the new, the neoliberal. Indeed, such understandings have come to form a deep-seated anthropological analytic. Yet while this analytic has proved productive, the explanations it invites often hinge more on theoretical expectation than empirical demonstration. This may disable the very politics and ethics anthropologists seek to engage, insofar as it renders redundant the real-world inequalities and forms of exploitation they seek to understand. This article considers this analytic in relation to Tanzanian buses and the devils alleged to inhabit them. To re-engage anthropology's critical politics and ethics, the article suggests that anthropologists pay sustained attention to historical processes, particularly, continuities. This requires we reconfigure some longstanding theoretical frameworks, lexicons, explanations and pre-theoretical commitments. The article concludes by providing some conceptual signposts to re-orientate projects on the occult.
African notions of witchcraft are neither archaic nor static, but are highly flexible and deeply ... more African notions of witchcraft are neither archaic nor static, but are highly flexible and deeply attuned to the conundrums of our contemporary world. Many anthropologists have recently argued that notions of the African witch provide commentaries on the meaning and merit of modernity as experienced in different historical and cultural settings. By exploring one particular type of witchcraft—that involving rain—amongst the Ihanzu of Tanzania, this article suggests that some forms of witchcraft may be more pertinent to understanding local notions of “tradition” than “modernity.” It is argued that the process of identifying rain witches provides Ihanzu men and women with a way to circumscribe, contemplate and ultimately reassert the veracity and significance of a conceptual category they call “tradition.” The article concludes by critiquing the homogenizing effects of terms like “the African witch” and “African witchcraft,” compelling us to think in terms of pluralities not singulars.
This chapter explores culturally specific idioms of movement amongst the Ihanzu and Sukuma of nor... more This chapter explores culturally specific idioms of movement amongst the Ihanzu and Sukuma of north-central Tanzania. Over the twentieth century, these two neighbouring peoples expanded in all directions in search of more fertile farming and grazing lands. The Sukuma’s numerical superiority and their preference for pastoralism have given them a decisive advantage as they increasingly encroach on Ihanzu lands. However, the Ihanzu have been concerned not just with a heightened influx of foreigners onto their soils but, more monumentally, with what they see as an all-out Sukuma occult offensive against them. Migration is, therefore, not simply about moving bodies over physical terrains but is imaginatively crafted through particular cultural lenses. Above all, this chapter seeks to problematise locally-inflected understandings of expansion, migration and mobility and to consider their entanglements with well- worn political-economy explanations of such processes.
For as long as scholars have written about African rainmaking rites and beliefs they have noted t... more For as long as scholars have written about African rainmaking rites and beliefs they have noted the salience of gender and sexual symbolism in them. Yet they often find this puzzling, and turn instead to the social, political and economic aspects of rainmaking. This article, on the contrary, explores locally-inflected understandings of rainmaking amongst the Ihanzu of Tanzania. It is argued that Ihanzu rain rites—and by implication, rain rites in other parts of Africa—are replete with sexual symbolism, and become locally meaningful, because they are linked to broad understandings about reproductive processes. For the Ihanzu (re)production of any sort, including making babies and rain, demands the equal and complementary combination of the cultural categories “male” and “female”. This contrasts markedly with their everyday notions of gender which imply gender hierarchy and inequality. The article thus demonstrates how competing notions of gender and gender practices are operationalised in certain ritual and everyday settings. Above all else, like previous scholarship on African rain rites, this article highlights the sexual symbolism in them; however, it goes further by seeking to explore, in one particular ethnographic locale, the cultural salience of that symbolism and the reasons it takes the form it does.
Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (eds) H.L. Moore & T. Sanders. London: Routledge., 2001
Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (eds) Henrietta Moore & Todd Sanders. London: Routledge., 2001
Words and Worlds: A Lexicon for Dark Times (eds) V. Das & D. Fassin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press., 2021
In today’s world, open science and open government matter. When combined, many agree, they streng... more In today’s world, open science and open government matter. When combined, many agree, they strengthen science and democracy. Yet opening up – whether in the name of open science, open data, open source or open government – is rarely straightforward. This essay explores the curious alliances, novel tensions and surprising paradoxes that contemporary practices of openness entail. It dwells on two controversies in particular: Climategate and The Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017. These examples show that the grounds on which expertise and science for government work are shifting; and how difficult it can be to defend established scientific practices, which are increasingly cast as secretive, suspect and morally untenable. While pundits routinely take both examples as evidence of a populist, right-wing assault on science, the essay suggests that the recent push for openness and transparency itself contributes substantially to the challenges science for government faces. Familiar stories about a post-truth, anti-science Right that operates in the shadows, and a truthful, pro-science Left that does not, have limited explanatory value. Ultimately the essay aims to expand our thinking on the knotty entanglements of science and liberal democratic governance in the twenty-first century.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(2), 438-461., Jun 2015
Calls for accountability and ‘impactful’ research are fundamentally reshaping the academy, giving... more Calls for accountability and ‘impactful’ research are fundamentally reshaping the academy, giving rise to a large, critical scholarship on neoliberal regimes of accountability and their pernicious effects. But these calls also animate other institutional forms and practices that have received less critical attention. These include new forms of science that promise accountability through interdisciplinarity, collaborating with stakeholders, and addressing real-world problems. This article considers one example of such accountable science: human dimensions of climate change field research. This research endeavour has produced surprising results, including the uncritical adoption of controversial Euro-American ideas about traditional Others. In exploring how this has come about, the article considers how theoretical and disciplinary diversity are managed within this arena, and the organizing logics that enable climate sciences and scientists to work together. We ultimately argue that accountable science – like other neoliberal modes of accountability – can produce outcomes for which no one can be held to account.
Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, Oct 2016
Todd Sanders and Elizabeth Hall bring our debates about interdisciplinarity to climate change, a ... more Todd Sanders and Elizabeth Hall bring our debates about interdisciplinarity to climate change, a major global issue for which the need for interdisciplinary perspectives is taken for granted. How, they ask, “do we imagine and practice 'interdisciplinarity’ to save the planet?” The authors describe and critique a range of contrasting modalities for doing interdisciplinary work on climate change and the assumptions under which they operate. Sanders and Hall also reflect on the complexities of studying interdisciplinarity when its practitioners and observers are part of the same milieu—both being “natives” in the world of research.
Invited contribution to a HAU Book Symposium on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcra... more Invited contribution to a HAU Book Symposium on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcraft and doubt on an Indonesian island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
It is now common for anthropologists to argue that the occult is adequately explained as an obliq... more It is now common for anthropologists to argue that the occult is adequately explained as an oblique, metaphysical critique of the now, the new, the neoliberal. Indeed, such understandings have come to form a deep-seated anthropological analytic. Yet while this analytic has proved productive, the explanations it invites often hinge more on theoretical expectation than empirical demonstration. This may disable the very politics and ethics anthropologists seek to engage, insofar as it renders redundant the real-world inequalities and forms of exploitation they seek to understand. This article considers this analytic in relation to Tanzanian buses and the devils alleged to inhabit them. To re-engage anthropology's critical politics and ethics, the article suggests that anthropologists pay sustained attention to historical processes, particularly, continuities. This requires we reconfigure some longstanding theoretical frameworks, lexicons, explanations and pre-theoretical commitments. The article concludes by providing some conceptual signposts to re-orientate projects on the occult.
African notions of witchcraft are neither archaic nor static, but are highly flexible and deeply ... more African notions of witchcraft are neither archaic nor static, but are highly flexible and deeply attuned to the conundrums of our contemporary world. Many anthropologists have recently argued that notions of the African witch provide commentaries on the meaning and merit of modernity as experienced in different historical and cultural settings. By exploring one particular type of witchcraft—that involving rain—amongst the Ihanzu of Tanzania, this article suggests that some forms of witchcraft may be more pertinent to understanding local notions of “tradition” than “modernity.” It is argued that the process of identifying rain witches provides Ihanzu men and women with a way to circumscribe, contemplate and ultimately reassert the veracity and significance of a conceptual category they call “tradition.” The article concludes by critiquing the homogenizing effects of terms like “the African witch” and “African witchcraft,” compelling us to think in terms of pluralities not singulars.
This chapter explores culturally specific idioms of movement amongst the Ihanzu and Sukuma of nor... more This chapter explores culturally specific idioms of movement amongst the Ihanzu and Sukuma of north-central Tanzania. Over the twentieth century, these two neighbouring peoples expanded in all directions in search of more fertile farming and grazing lands. The Sukuma’s numerical superiority and their preference for pastoralism have given them a decisive advantage as they increasingly encroach on Ihanzu lands. However, the Ihanzu have been concerned not just with a heightened influx of foreigners onto their soils but, more monumentally, with what they see as an all-out Sukuma occult offensive against them. Migration is, therefore, not simply about moving bodies over physical terrains but is imaginatively crafted through particular cultural lenses. Above all, this chapter seeks to problematise locally-inflected understandings of expansion, migration and mobility and to consider their entanglements with well- worn political-economy explanations of such processes.
For as long as scholars have written about African rainmaking rites and beliefs they have noted t... more For as long as scholars have written about African rainmaking rites and beliefs they have noted the salience of gender and sexual symbolism in them. Yet they often find this puzzling, and turn instead to the social, political and economic aspects of rainmaking. This article, on the contrary, explores locally-inflected understandings of rainmaking amongst the Ihanzu of Tanzania. It is argued that Ihanzu rain rites—and by implication, rain rites in other parts of Africa—are replete with sexual symbolism, and become locally meaningful, because they are linked to broad understandings about reproductive processes. For the Ihanzu (re)production of any sort, including making babies and rain, demands the equal and complementary combination of the cultural categories “male” and “female”. This contrasts markedly with their everyday notions of gender which imply gender hierarchy and inequality. The article thus demonstrates how competing notions of gender and gender practices are operationalised in certain ritual and everyday settings. Above all else, like previous scholarship on African rain rites, this article highlights the sexual symbolism in them; however, it goes further by seeking to explore, in one particular ethnographic locale, the cultural salience of that symbolism and the reasons it takes the form it does.
Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (eds) H.L. Moore & T. Sanders. London: Routledge., 2001
Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (eds) Henrietta Moore & Todd Sanders. London: Routledge., 2001
For over a century, the Ihanzu of north-central Tanzania have conducted rainmaking rites. As with... more For over a century, the Ihanzu of north-central Tanzania have conducted rainmaking rites. As with similar rites found across sub-Saharan Africa, these rites are replete with gender, sexual, and fertility motifs. Social scientists have typically explained such things as symbolizing human bodies and the act of procreation. But what happens when our interlocutors deny such symbolic explanations, when they insist that rain rites and the gender and sexual motifs in them do not symbolize anything but rather aim simply to bring rain?
Beyond Bodies examines Ihanzu sensibilities about gender through a fine-grained ethnography of rainmaking rites. It considers the meaning of ritual practices in a society in which gender is not as bound to the body as it is in the Euro-American imagination. Engaging with recent anthropological and gender theory, this book crucially calls into question how social scientists have explained gender symbolism in myriad ethnographic and historical studies across Africa.
This book will be invaluable for scholars concerned with explanation in the social sciences; African ritual, gender and cosmology; human-nonhuman relations; and rethinking culture and climate change.
This second edition of the widely praised Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology , featur... more This second edition of the widely praised Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology , features a variety of updates, revisions, and new readings in its comprehensive presentation of issues in the history of anthropological theory and epistemology over the past century. Provides a comprehensive selection of 60 readings and an insightful overview of the evolution of anthropological theory Revised and updated to reflect an on-going strength and diversity of the discipline in recent years, with new readings pointing to innovative directions in the development of anthropological research Identifies crucial concepts that reflect the practice of engaging with theory, particular ways of thinking, analyzing and reflecting that are unique to anthropology Includes excerpts of seminal anthropological works, key classic and contemporary debates in the discipline, and cutting-edge new theorizing Reveals broader debates in the social sciences, including th.e relationship between society and culture; language and cultural meanings; structure and agency; identities and technologies; subjectivities and trans-locality; and meta-theory, ontology and epistemology.
The 57 articles collected in this volume - together with the editors' introduction - provide an o... more The 57 articles collected in this volume - together with the editors' introduction - provide an overview of the key debates in anthropological theory over the past century. This book provides the most comprehensive selection of readings and insightful overview of anthropological theory available. It identifies crucial conceptual signposts and new theoretical directions for the discipline. It discusses broader debates in the social sciences: debates about society and culture; structure and agency; identities and technologies; subjectivities and trans locality; and meta-theory, ontology and epistemology.
Transparency has, in recent years, become a watchword for good governance. Policymakers and analy... more Transparency has, in recent years, become a watchword for good governance. Policymakers and analysts alike evaluate political and economic institutions—courts, corporations, nation-states—according to the transparency of their operating procedures. With the dawn of the New World Order and the “mutual veil dropping” of the post–Cold War era, many have asserted that power in our contemporary world is more transparent than ever. Yet from the perspective of the relatively less privileged, the operation of power often appears opaque and unpredictable. Through vivid ethnographic analyses, Transparency and Conspiracy examines a vast range of expressions of the popular suspicion of power—including forms of shamanism, sorcery, conspiracy theory, and urban legends—illuminating them as ways of making sense of the world in the midst of tumultuous and uneven processes of modernization.
In this collection leading anthropologists reveal the variations and commonalities in conspiratorial thinking or occult cosmologies around the globe—in Korea, Tanzania, Mozambique, New York City, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nigeria, and Orange County, California. The contributors chronicle how people express profound suspicions of the United Nations, the state, political parties, police, courts, international financial institutions, banks, traders and shopkeepers, media, churches, intellectuals, and the wealthy. Rather than focusing on the veracity of these convictions, Transparency and Conspiracy investigates who believes what and why. It makes a compelling argument against the dismissal of conspiracy theories and occult cosmologies as antimodern, irrational oversimplifications, showing how these beliefs render the world more complex by calling attention to its contradictions and proposing alternative ways of understanding it.
This volume sets out recent thinking on witchcraft in Africa, paying particular attention to vari... more This volume sets out recent thinking on witchcraft in Africa, paying particular attention to variations in meanings and practices. It examines the way different people in different contexts are making sense of what 'witchcraft' is and what it might mean. Using recent ethnographic materials from across the continent, the volume explores how witchcraft articulates with particular modern settings for example: the State in Cameroon; Pentecostalism in Malawi; the university system in Nigeria and the IMF in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. The editors provide a timely overview and reconsideration of long-standing anthropological debates about 'African witchcraft', while simultaneously raising broader concerns about the theories of the western social sciences.
Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, bringing rain or protesting taxation, many in Africa ... more Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, bringing rain or protesting taxation, many in Africa share a vision of a world where the cultural, symbolic and cosmic categories of 'male' and 'female' serve, through ritual, to both reimagine and transform the world. Those Who Play With Fire introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exploring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thought and ritual practices. Thus, the book provides a powerful framework with which to evaluate previous ethnographic material on Africa. In addition, Those Who Play With Fire presents a broad range of new case studies - of hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and pastoralists - revealing the varied and complex ways in which African ideas and ideals of what it means to be 'male' and 'female' broadly inform and give meaning to a wide range of transformative rituals.
Spirits in Politics: Uncertainties of Power and Healing in African Societies (eds) B. Meier & A. Steinforth. Campus Verlag & University of Chicago Press. , 2014
Spirits in Politics explores the interface between religion and politics in African societies by ... more Spirits in Politics explores the interface between religion and politics in African societies by examining recent and ongoing research in a variety of regional settings. Case studies from across the African continent exemplify how—and at which social levels—spirits, witchcraft, and other supernatural agents play an active role in political action and the conceptualization of power. This volume illustrates not only how ritual techniques such as divination or spirit possession may play a vital role in people’s efforts to regain control over the political processes that determine their lives, but also how magical and other secret practices are at the center of local discourse on democratization and state politics. Moreover, the contributors show that these practices are prominent in day-to-day decision-making processes at local levels, including the interaction between spirit-based and democratic institutions of social organization in modern urban life and economies.
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 28(2), 348-350. (Special Forum on COVID-19), 2020
In light of current global efforts to ‘flatten the curve,’ this piece considers what the curve is... more In light of current global efforts to ‘flatten the curve,’ this piece considers what the curve is, how varied populations are working on it, and some of the implications for anthropological thinking and theorising.
In Beyond Bodies, Todd Sanders explores rainmaking among the Ihanzu of Tanzania, as the subtitle ... more In Beyond Bodies, Todd Sanders explores rainmaking among the Ihanzu of Tanzania, as the subtitle of the book suggests, and advances two main claims: one focused on the relation between gender and bodies, and a second on how local assertions about rainmaking are made anthropologically sensible. The point of the title is that for the Ihanzu gender ranges far ‘beyond bodies’. Gender is about complementarities, the author admits, but while female and male bodies must necessarily be complementary to be re/productive, it does not follow that gendered things other than bodies reference human bodies in order to be culturally sensible. Sanders thus asks us to abandon the lurking primacy of bodies in Western studies of gender by accepting the insistent Ihanzu claims that rainmaking is about practice, about the necessary process of causing rain to fall. So, gender is not about bodies and rainmaking is not ‘about’ anything beyond making rain. These two points confound much in the anthropological tradition of studying gender and rainmaking in the African context, and in other contexts as well. Building from earlier work by Leach, Oyewumi, Strathern, and Bourdieu, Sanders has produced both a readable ethnography of contemporary Africa and a daring analysis of it. [...]
The author opens his book on rainmaking and gendering among the Ihanzu in North–CentralTanzania b... more The author opens his book on rainmaking and gendering among the Ihanzu in North–CentralTanzania by stating that it“has been written with the student reader in mind” (p.ix).There is a risk of being overly modest here. The book is indeed very accessible—clearly structured and well-written—but it is also quite ambitious in theoretical respect. The author’s starting point is the emphatic gendering of rain-making among the Ihanzu: collaboration between two royal rainmakers, one male and the other female, is absolutely necessary; also in other respects there is a strong emphasis on gender complementarity as an indispensable condition for the success of the rainmaking rituals. Such complementarity is very marked in the field of rainmaking because this is of crucial importance to Ihanzu livelihood, but it pervades everyday life in all respects. However, Sanders finds that familiar approaches among social scientists to understand such gendering do not work in the Ihanzu context. [...]
These books are about what is frequently referred to as ‘the occult’ in African society, where th... more These books are about what is frequently referred to as ‘the occult’ in African society, where this term has a dictionary definition of ‘transcending the bounds of natural knowledge, mysterious, magical, supernatural’. Religion on the other hand is ‘belief in a higher unseen controlling power or powers with the emotion andmorality connected therewith’. The boundary between the two, if there is one, may appear to be unclear to an external observer but for adherents of the principal sects of mainstream religions the small scale, local activities of practitioners of the occult such as sooth sayers,magical healers, spirit mediums, witch-doctors and witches are often condemned as dangerous and potentially evil. Yet throughout Africa, as in much of the rest of the world, both spheres of activity coexist, often depending on the support of the same individuals. The three books reviewed here provide an invaluable summary of the range and ubiquity of occult belief to be found across the African continent as well as exploring its rationale by relating it to forms of modernity reacting to change in the wider social and economic environment. [...]
The world is a confusing and complex place. Now, more than ever, not only is everywhere connected... more The world is a confusing and complex place. Now, more than ever, not only is everywhere connected to everywhere else but people are conscious of that connection. Great inequalities exist between people which, coupled with increased awareness of the scale of the inequality, has led to social unrest and distress. Witchcraft appears to be a symptom of this; in many cases and for many people the best explanation for success is the operation of an occult economy.
Moore and Sanders have collected a fascinating set of papers that illuminate the complexity and scale of the topic. Witchcraft is not simply a social levelling mechanism, an instrumental means of dealing with misfortune, or an idiom for rationalizing chance. In different places, for different people at different times, it is all of these truisms from the anthropological literature and more. Engaging with the Comaroffs and Peter Geschiere, the authors provide vivid evidence – in a resolutely anthropological fashion– of the scale and importance of witchcraft in contemporary Africa. [...]
Magic is alive and well! Long banned from progressive ethnographic accounts for its implications ... more Magic is alive and well! Long banned from progressive ethnographic accounts for its implications of backwardness and primitivism, the concept of magic has been reclaimed from its prior function as a negative trope in the constructions of the exotic other and recast to elucidate a wide variety of social processes and practices. Like other once maligned but now rehabilitated conceptual tools of the anthropologist's kit – fetishism and syncretism are two that come to mind – magic has gained a new lease on life to judge from these three recent publications focused on the occult and its ever visible place in contemporary societies the world over. If the volumes under review can be said to share anything, it is precisely an interest in the newly discovered use of magic as an analytical category as well as the intent to contribute to the framing of this renewed anthropological interest. [...]
This edition offers an outstanding collection of papers that seek to understand the phenomenon of... more This edition offers an outstanding collection of papers that seek to understand the phenomenon of occult economies and witchcraft in contemporary Africa. It confirms that the realities and imaginations of witchcraft are still widespread across the continent and thriving on the uncertainties that modern living has brought. As such it offers a valuable ethnographic and analytical resource of the political economy of witchcraft and the moral commentaries it engenders. The authors have situated their analyses within the broader historical as well as contemporary economic and political contexts, and these throw light on the dynamic and changing nature of witchcraft narratives in Africa. [...]
This edited volume brings together transparency and conspiracy, two subjects that are receiving a... more This edited volume brings together transparency and conspiracy, two subjects that are receiving a great deal of attention both inside the academy and outside, in an effort to capture contemporary operations of power. Part of a growing critical literature on these two modern artifacts
Scholars and students interested in the emergence, social significance, and cultural variation of... more Scholars and students interested in the emergence, social significance, and cultural variation of conspiracy narratives in the post cold war era will find this compilation a welcome addition to the otherwise thin literature on the subject. In addition to the rich ethnographies presented, this collection offers the potential beginnings for a new research paradigm that utilizes conspiracy narratives as a legitimate research pathway for understanding globalization. […]
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Articles by Todd Sanders
[Africa; witchcraft; modernity; tradition; rainmaking; anthropological theory]
[Africa; witchcraft; modernity; tradition; rainmaking; anthropological theory]
Beyond Bodies examines Ihanzu sensibilities about gender through a fine-grained ethnography of rainmaking rites. It considers the meaning of ritual practices in a society in which gender is not as bound to the body as it is in the Euro-American imagination. Engaging with recent anthropological and gender theory, this book crucially calls into question how social scientists have explained gender symbolism in myriad ethnographic and historical studies across Africa.
This book will be invaluable for scholars concerned with explanation in the social sciences; African ritual, gender and cosmology; human-nonhuman relations; and rethinking culture and climate change.
In this collection leading anthropologists reveal the variations and commonalities in conspiratorial thinking or occult cosmologies around the globe—in Korea, Tanzania, Mozambique, New York City, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nigeria, and Orange County, California. The contributors chronicle how people express profound suspicions of the United Nations, the state, political parties, police, courts, international financial institutions, banks, traders and shopkeepers, media, churches, intellectuals, and the wealthy. Rather than focusing on the veracity of these convictions, Transparency and Conspiracy investigates who believes what and why. It makes a compelling argument against the dismissal of conspiracy theories and occult cosmologies as antimodern, irrational oversimplifications, showing how these beliefs render the world more complex by calling attention to its contradictions and proposing alternative ways of understanding it.
Moore and Sanders have collected a fascinating set of papers that illuminate the complexity and scale of the topic. Witchcraft is not simply a social levelling mechanism, an instrumental means of dealing with misfortune, or an idiom for rationalizing chance. In different places, for different people at different times, it is all of these truisms from the anthropological literature and more. Engaging with the Comaroffs and Peter Geschiere, the authors provide vivid evidence – in a resolutely anthropological fashion– of the scale and importance of witchcraft in contemporary Africa. [...]