Elusive Adulthoods examines why, within the past decade, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have been heard around the world. By exploring the changing meaning of adulthood in Botswana, China, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States, contributors to this volume pose the problem of "What is adulthood?" and examine how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful stage in its studies. Through these case studies we discover different means of recognizing the achievement of adulthood, such as through negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. We also encounter the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood, instead jumping directly into old age in the course of rapid social change, or a reluctance to embrace the stability of adulthood and necessary subordination to job and family. In all cases, the contributors demonstrate how changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experience and understanding of adulthood, which is a major focus of concern for people around the globe as they negotiate changing ways of living.

Elusive Adulthoods examines why, within the past decade, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have been heard around the world. By exploring the changing meaning of adulthood in Botswana, China, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States, contributors to this volume pose the problem of "What is adulthood?" and examine how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful stage in its studies. Through these case studies we discover different means of recognizing the achievement of adulthood, such as through negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. We also encounter the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood, instead jumping directly into old age in the course of rapid social change, or a reluctance to embrace the stability of adulthood and necessary subordination to job and family. In all cases, the contributors demonstrate how changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experience and understanding of adulthood, which is a major focus of concern for people around the globe as they negotiate changing ways of living.

This is the first book of its kind on Sudan, and arguably one of the first in North Africa. We are part of an emerging, more cosmopolitan approach that calls for a reassessment of ideas about not only the concept of identities, but also about migration and technology, especially social media. Our essayists engage in redefinitions, the broadening of our key variables, the linking and intersecting of concepts, and the investigations of methods and ethics, and opt for an approach that is, at once, culturally specific to Sudan (one of the most fluid social landscapes in the world) and transnational. Our essays address the narrowness of studies of migration and note the almost total neglect in the broader Sudan literature of the rise of technology-mobile telephony and social media, in particular. Furthermore, our essayists address the near neglect in the Sudan literature of certain categories of people, such as youth, or certain diverse spaces, such as neighborhoods or gold mines. We have also been attempting to move away from the nearly stereotypic descriptions of Sudan to deal with topics that align Sudan with transnational issues and themes, knowledge production among them. This multidisciplinary collection of essays is the first comprehensive work to grapple explicitly with the question of knowledge production in such a diverse social landscape. We discuss the impact of current trends in information technology and contemporary forms of identity and mobility on knowledge production. These issues are pertinent for different sectors such as academia, government or business, and, as we demonstrate, reveal a myriad of possibilities for studying diverse population groups like youth, women, diaspora, or specific political contexts such as conflict or oppression.

"In this original and meticulous work of historical ethnography, Janice Boddy deftly offers an acute analysis of imperial ambition and the gendering of policy on both sides of the colonial divide, as well as some wryly observed lessons for 'civilizing missions' of the present day. This is a major contribution that will change the terms of debate."--Michael Lambek, author of "The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar"

"Janice Boddy's "Civilizing Women" is a sensitive and superbly researched exploration of issues in the history of British-Sudanese relations that resonate strongly with the present. Focusing on the way that the British attempted to reform the personal lives of northern Sudanese women through introducing modern hygiene, health, and family morals, she illuminates a whole social world. Based on many years of firsthand research in the Sudan and on archival sources, this book probes the silent zones of gender relations and the inequalities of imperial power in a new way."--Wendy James, University of Oxford

"This very well-written book marks the first sustained attempt to look at gender in the Sudanese historical record and to ground the history of Condominium rule in a broader cultural framework."--Susan M. Kenyon, author of "Five Women of Sennar: Culture and Change in Central Sudan"

"Engaging and detailed, "Civilizing Women" creates a lively picture of events, places, people. Scholars interested in the Sudan, as well as colonial Africa more generally, will find this work invaluable. Janice Boddy sets a new standard for colonial studies by anthropologists--she seems to have combed every inch of the archives in both the United Kingdom andSudan, and the material comes to life through her artful prose."--Lesley A. Sharp, author of "The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar"

This is the extraordinary first-person account of a young woman's coming of age in Somalia and her struggles against the obligations and strictures of family and society. By the time she is nine, Aman has undergone a ritual circumcision ceremony; at eleven, her innocent romance with a white boy leads to a murder; at thirteen she is given away in an arranged marriage to a stranger. Aman eventually runs away to Mogadishu, where her beauty and rebellious spirit leads her to the decadent demimonde of white colonialists. Hers is a world in which women are both chattel and freewheeling entrepreneurs, subject to the caprices of male relatives, yet keenly aware of the loopholes that lead to freedom. Aman is an astonishing history, opening a window onto traditional Somali life and the universal quest for female self-awareness.

Adherents to the ""zar"" cult in northern Sudan encounter spirits that are parallels of historically relevant figures in the known human world. Those possessed, usually women, meet aliens who speak about issues confronting a village such as the increasing influence of formal Islam or encroaching Western economic domination. By manifesting spirits while possessed, women also can provocatively embody their moral antitheses. In learning to accommodate their spirits, they learn the antilanguage of ""zar"" and are able metaphorically to reformulate everyday discourse to portray consciousness of their subordination. The book is organized into three parts: part 1 examines the moral universe of village women by discussion the meaning of female circumcision, personhood, kinship, marriage, and bodily integrity. Part 2 introduces the ""zar"" cult and, with several examples, describes the conditions under which possession, initially an illness, might occur. The author discusses the role of possession in the lives of men as well as women, both as members of families exhibiting a propensity for spirit intrusion and as individuals suffering from poor self-image largely occasioned by infertility. Part 3 describes the spirit world apart from specific incidents of possession in order to understand what messages villagers will derive from their experiences of spirits. Based on nearly two years of ethnographic field work in a Muslim village in northern Sudan, Janice Boddy's study offers a multidimensional interpretation of the ""zar"" that is grounded in observation, anthropological theory, and practice.