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This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical
advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating
customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan
Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of
customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or
even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking
Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year
period, the book shows, the ‘customary’ is robustly enduring,
central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the
local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law
continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the
country’s past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British
colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state’s
present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along
with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the
anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law
as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal
realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to
the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of
legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but
also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and
socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change,
public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of
politics and judicial decision making.
Placing the Manchester School at the vanguard of modern social
anthropology, this book reveals the cosmopolitan distinctiveness of
the intimate circle around Max Gluckman. Such distinctiveness was
driven by creative difference, travelling theories and innovative,
interdisciplinary approaches. The expansion of social anthropology
as a dynamic, open discipline became the hallmark of the Manchester
School. The remarkable careers and legacies of the Manchester
School anthropologists are shown for the first time through
inter-linked social biography and intellectual history, to reach
broadly across politics, law, ritual, development studies,
comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical
sociology. Werbner reveals that members of the circle engaged in
deep dialogue, enduring friendships, and creative collaboration. --
.
Placing the Manchester School at the vanguard of modern social
anthropology, this book reveals the cosmopolitan distinctiveness of
the intimate circle around Max Gluckman. Such distinctiveness,
Richard Werbner argues, was driven by creative difference,
travelling theories and innovative, interdisciplinary approaches.
The expansion of social anthropology as a dynamic, open discipline
became the hallmark of the Manchester School. The remarkable
careers and legacies of the Manchester School anthropologists are
shown for the first time through inter-linked social biography and
intellectual history, to reach broadly across politics, law,
ritual, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network
analysis and mathematical sociology. Werbner reveals that members
of the circle engaged in deep dialogue, enduring friendships, and
creative collaboration. The re-discovery of the complexity of their
engagement and their lasting impact illuminates the exploration of
the frontiers between ethnography, the sociology of knowledge, and
the anthropology of colonial to postcolonial change. -- .
This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical
advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating
customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan
Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of
customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or
even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking
Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year
period, the book shows, the 'customary' is robustly enduring,
central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the
local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law
continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the
country's past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British
colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state's
present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along
with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the
anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law
as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal
realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to
the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of
legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but
also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and
socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change,
public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of
politics and judicial decision making.
Richard Werbner takes readers on a journey though contemporary
charismatic wisdom divination in southern Africa. Beginning with
the silent language of the divinatory lots, Werbner deciphers the
everyday, metaphorical, and poetic language that is used to reveal
their meaning. Through Werbner's skillful interpretations of the
language of divination, a picture of Tswapong moral imagination is
revealed. Concerns about dignity and personal illumination,
witchcraft, pollution, the anger of dead ancestors, as well as the
nature of life, truth, cosmic harmony, being, and becoming emerge
in this charged African setting.
This book examines the charismatic Christian reformation presently
underway in Botswana's time of AIDS and the moral crisis that
divides the church between the elders and the young, apostolic
faith healers. Richard Werbner focuses on Eloyi, an Apostolic
faith-healing church in Botswana's capital. Werbner shows how
charismatic 'prophets' - holy hustlers - diagnose, hustle, and
shock patients during violent and destructive exorcisms. He also
shows how these healers enter into prayer and meditation and take
on their patients' pain and how their ecstatic devotions create an
aesthetic in which beauty beckons God. Werbner challenges
theoretical assumptions about mimesis and empathy, the power of the
word, and personhood. With its accompanying DVD, "Holy Hustlers,
Schism, and Prophecy" integrates textual and filmed ethnography and
provides a fresh perspective on ritual performance and the
cinematic.
Richard Werbner takes readers on a journey though contemporary
charismatic wisdom divination in southern Africa. Beginning with
the silent language of the divinatory lots, Werbner deciphers the
everyday, metaphorical, and poetic language that is used to reveal
their meaning. Through Werbner's skillful interpretations of the
language of divination, a picture of Tswapong moral imagination is
revealed. Concerns about dignity and personal illumination,
witchcraft, pollution, the anger of dead ancestors, as well as the
nature of life, truth, cosmic harmony, being, and becoming emerge
in this charged African setting.
These essays on postcolonial subjectivities cross the frontiers of
critical theory by illuminating the contradictory predicaments
Africans confront in strikingly different parts of the continent at
the start of the 21st century. The focus is on the making of
subjectivities as a process which is political, a matter of
subjugation to state authority; moral, reflected in the conscience
and agency of subjects who bear rights, duties and obligations; and
realised existentially, in the subjects' consciousness of their
personal or intimate relations. The notion of agency is
interrogated, without lapsing into the new Afro-pessimism. The
essays recognise postcolonies troubled by state decline and
increasing exploitation, dispossession and marginalisation, but
avoid Afro-pessimism's reduction of subjects to mere victims. Even
more against the grain of conventional postcolonial studies is the
radical questioning of the force of 'modern subjectivism' in
struggles for control of identity, autonomy and explicit
consciousness, and through artistic self-fashioning in globally
driven consumption. With substantial cases based on autobiography,
personal experience and long-term scholarly fieldwork in countries
as diverse as Madagascar, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Botswana and
Cameroon, the book opens out a fresh field for comparative research
and theory on postcolonial transformations in intersubjectivity.
This is to take seriously the people's perception, so widespread in
postcolonial Africa, that to live life to the full is to live it in
interdependence, in conviviality, if possible; that care and
respect for others - indeed, civility - is a precious, and indeed,
precarious condition of survival and as such is the object of
recognised strategies for its conscious defence; and that because
significant others are opaque - never being totally knowable -
uncertainty, ambivalence and contingency are inescapable conditions
of human existence.
The critique of power in contemporary Africa calls for a new
approach to the making of political subjectivities. Through
theoretically informed anthropology, this book meets the urgent
need to rethink our understanding of the moral and political force
of memory, its official and unofficial forms, its moves between the
personal and the social in postcolonial transformations. Memory and
the Postcolony brings these transformations into perspective. It is
divided into three sections in which distinguished anthropologists
explore death and subjectivity; the memory work of elections and
public commissions; and fundamentalism and the future. Presenting a
sustained comparative analysis of memory as a politicized reality,
the book will be essential reading for all scholars of postcolonial
societies, as well as all those with an interest in contemporary
Africa.
In this book, distinguished anthropologists, political scientists
and social historians from Africa, Europe and America make a
radical break with much conventional wisdom in postcolonial
discourse to explore contemporary African identities in transition.
They look at the colonial legacy and how colonial identities are
being reconstructed in the face of deepening social inequality
across the continent. They ask how the postcolonial imagination as
a highly specific, locally created and historical force
reconfigures personal knowledge and how that reconfiguration shapes
the moral and religious realities around the uses and abuses of
postcolonial power. Using case-studies, the book explores why
postcolonial studies has to enunciate and interpret the distinctive
languages of identity politics in all the cultural richness of
their specific metaphors. It asks whether the very idea of the
postcolonial conceals the continued dependence of African
countries? Is the postcolonial thus merely a neo-colonial
mystification, a Eurocentric product of Western scholarship in
collusion with Western imperialism?
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