Modernization in Africa has created new problems as well as new freedoms. Multiparty democracy, resource privatization and changing wealth relationships, have not always created stable and prosperous communities, and violence continues to be endemic in many areas of African life - from civil war and political strife to violent clashes between genders, generations, classes and ethnic groups. Violence and Belonging explores the crucial formative role of violence in shaping people's ideas of who they are in uncertain postcolonial contexts where, as resources dwindle and wealth is contested, identities and ideas of belonging become a focal area of conflict and negotiation. Focusing on fieldwork from across the continent, its case studies consider how routine everyday violence ties in with wider regional and political upheavals, and how individuals experience and legitimize violence in its different forms. The Zimbabwean and Sudanese civil wars, Kenyan Kikuyu domestic conflicts, Rwandan massacres and South African Truth and Reconciliation processes, are among the contexts explored.

The contributions to this volume map the surprisingly multifarious circumstances in which trauma is invoked - as an analytical tool, a therapeutic term or as a discursive trope. By doing so, we critically engage the far too often individuating aspects of trauma, as well as the assumption of a universal somatic that is globally applicable to contexts of human suffering. The volume takes the reader on a journey across widely differing terrains: from Norwegian institutions for psychiatric patients to the post-war emergence of speech genres on violence in Mozambique, from Greek and Cameroonian ritual and carnivalesque treatments of historical trauma to national discourses of political assassinations in Argentina, the volume provides an empirically founded anti-dote against claiming a universal 'empire of trauma' (Didier Fassin) or seeing the trauma as successfully defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Instead, the work critically evaluates and engages whether the term's dual plasticity and endurance captures, encompasses or challenges legacies and imprints of multiple forms of violence.

Despite its immense significance and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the complex workings of trust are poorly understood and theorized. This volume explores trust and mistrust amidst locally situated scenes of sociality and intimacy. Because intimacy has often been taken for granted as the foundation of trust relations, the ethnographies presented here challenge us to think about dangerous intimacies, marked by mistrust, as well as forms of trust that cohere through non-intimate forms of sociality.

Modernisation in Africa has created new problems as well as new freedoms. Multiparty democracy, resource privatization and changing wealth relationships, have not always created stable and prosperous communities, and violence continues to be endemic in many areas of African life - from civil war and political strife to violent clashes between genders, generations, classes and ethnic groups. "Violence and Belonging "explores the crucial formative role of violence in shaping people's ideas of who they are in uncertain postcolonial contexts where, as resources dwindle and wealth is contested, identities and ideas of belonging become a focal area of conflict and negotiation. Focusing on fieldwork from across the continent, its case studies consider how routine everyday violence ties in with wider regional and political upheavals, and how individuals experience and legitimize violence in its different forms. The Zimbabwean and Sudanese civil wars, Kenyan Kikuyu domestic conflicts, Rwandan massacres and South African Truth and Reconciliation processes, are among the contexts explored.

This volume, the first comprehensive overview of Scandinavian cross-cultural research on gender issues in the English language, addresses fundamental analytical issues currently debated within international feminist anthropology and beyond. Offering examples from a wide range of ethnographic settings, the essays show that gender comprises far more than sexual relationships: it takes on political significance insofar as it influences the distribution of resources and access to public and domestic spheres, to knowledge and to power.

This volume, the first comprehensive overview of Scandinavian cross-cultural research on gender issues in the English language, addresses fundamental analytical issues currently debated within international feminist anthropology and beyond. Offering examples from a wide range of ethnographic settings, the essays show that gender comprises far more than sexual relationships: it takes on political significance insofar as it influences the distribution of resources and access to public and domestic spheres, to knowledge and to power.

Despite its immense significance and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the complex workings of trust are poorly understood and theorized. This volume explores trust and mistrust amidst locally situated scenes of sociality and intimacy. Because intimacy has often been taken for granted as the foundation of trust relations, the ethnographies presented here challenge us to think about dangerous intimacies, marked by mistrust, as well as forms of trust that cohere through non-intimate forms of sociality.

The contributions to this volume map the surprisingly multifarious circumstances in which trauma is invoked - as an analytical tool, a therapeutic term or as a discursive trope. By doing so, we critically engage the far too often individuating aspects of trauma, as well as the assumption of a universal somatic that is globally applicable to contexts of human suffering. The volume takes the reader on a journey across widely differing terrains: from Norwegian institutions for psychiatric patients to the post-war emergence of speech genres on violence in Mozambique, from Greek and Cameroonian ritual and carnivalesque treatments of historical trauma to national discourses of political assassinations in Argentina, the volume provides an empirically founded anti-dote against claiming a universal 'empire of trauma' (Didier Fassin) or seeing the trauma as successfully defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Instead, the work critically evaluates and engages whether the term's dual plasticity and endurance captures, encompasses or challenges legacies and imprints of multiple forms of violence.

Development donors have supported thousands of environmental initiatives in Africa over the past quarter century. The contributors to this provocative new collection of essays assess these projects and conclude that environmental programmes constitute one of the major forms of foreign and state intervention in contemporary African affairs. Drawing on case study material from eight countries, the authors demonstrate clearly that environmental programmes themselves often have direct and far-reaching consequences for the distribution of wealth and poverty on the continent.Individual essays in the collection theorise specific forms of environmental intervention; the degree of historical discontinuity that exists between contemporary and past environmental policies and practices; the effect environmental programmes have had on localised systems of knowledge and value regimes; the strategies of accumulation that have been spun out of heavy donor and state investment in environmental programmes; and the numerous social, cultural and political-economic dislocations these initiatives have produced in African environments all across the continent.