Cutting and Connecting: 'Afrinesian' Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange / Edition 1

by Knut Christian Myhre

Overview

Questions regarding the origins, mobility, and effects of analytical concepts continue to emerge as anthropology endeavors to describe similarities and differences in social life around the world. Cutting and Connecting rethinks this comparative enterprise by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. On this basis, the contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent and to explore how this exchange influences the borrowed anthropological perspectives. By focusing on ways in which networks are cut and connections are made, these empirical investigations show how particular relationships are created in today's Africa. In addition, the volume aims for an approach that recasts relationships between theory and place and concepts and ethnography, in a manner that destabilizes the distinction between fieldwork and writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785332630
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Pages:	162
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Knut Christian Myhre is a researcher attached to the ERC-funded project "Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons" in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Recent publications include articles in American Ethnologist, Anthropological Theory, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Social Analysis. He previously held research positions at the University of Oslo, the Nordic Africa Institute, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Cutting and Connecting-'Afrinesian' Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange Knut Christian Myhre 1

Chapter 1 Kuru, AIDS, and Witchcraft: Reconfiguring Culpability in Melanesia and Africa Isak Niehaus 25

Chapter 2 Law, Opacity, and Information in Urban Gambia Niklas Hultin 42

Chapter 3 From Cutting to Fading: A Relational Perspective on Marriage Exchange and Sociality in Rural Gambia Tone Sommerfelt 58

Chapter 4 Gathering Up Mutual Help: Work, Personhood, and Relational Freedoms in Tanzania and Melanesia Daivi Rodima-Taylor 76

Chapter 5 Rethinking Ethnographic Comparison: Persons and Networks in Africa and Melanesia Richard Vokes 95

Chapter 6 Membering and Dismembering: The Poetry and Relationality of Animal Bodies in Kilimanjaro Knut Christian Myhre 114

Chapter 7 The Place of Theory: Rights, Networks, and Ethnographic Comparison Harri Englund Thomas Yarrow 132

Afterword: Something to Take Back-Melanesia Anthropology after Relationality Adam Reed 150

Index 156

Editorial Reviews

"For over two decades the New Melanesian ethnography has extended itself in many useful directions, though rarely, in Africa, has it proved so productive as in this fascinating collection. Working at the analytic crossroads of anthropology, Africa and Melanesia, Cutting and Connecting provides fresh insights into some of today's most pressing anthropological challenges: theorizing relationality, networks, and exchange; the relation between knowledge practices and place; theory and ethnography; the complications of comparison. The book is a major contribution to anthropological scholarship and promises many theoretical returns." - Todd Sanders, author of Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania

From the Publisher