01/26/21 ANTH_MSc SocAnth_Themes in the Anthropology of Africa_HT | University of

Oxford

ANTH_MSc SocAnth_Themes in the View Online

Anthropology of Africa_HT
(Academic Year 2020/21)

Digitisation code: AnthAfA

134 items

Preliminary reading
Anthropology and Africa: changing perspectives on a changing scene - Sally Falk Moore,
1994
Book

African anthropologies: history, critique and practice - Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills,
Mustafa H. M. Babiker, 2006
Book

Theory from the South: or, How Euro-America is evolving toward Africa - Jean Comaroff,
John L. Comaroff, c2012
Book

Global shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order - James Ferguson, 2006
Book

Drinking from the cosmic gourd: how Amos Tutuola can change our minds - Francis B.
Nyamnjoh, 2017
Book

Selected texts (1 items)

Antiretroviral Therapy and Nutrition in Southern Africa: Citizenship and the Grammar of
Hunger - Thomas Cousins, 2016-09-02
Article

Queer(ing) popular culture: homo-erotic provocations from Kinshasa - Thomas Hendriks,

2019-01-02
Article

Masking Youth: Transformation and Transgression in Annang Performance - David Pratten,

2008
Article

Prophetic Diasporas Moving Religion Across the Lusophone Atlantic - Ramon Sarró, Ruy
Llera Blanes, 2009
Article

BORDERS ARE GALAXIES: INTERPRETING CONTESTATIONS OVER LOCAL ADMINISTRATIVE

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BOUNDARIES IN SOUTH SUDAN - Zoe Cormack, 2016-08

Article

Parallel worlds: an anthropologist and a writer encounter Africa - Alma Gottlieb, Philip
Graham, 1994
Book | An excellent account of ‘doing’ ethnographic research in Africa

Braided worlds - Alma Gottlieb, Philip Graham, 2012

Book

Perspectives on Africa : a reader in culture, history, and representation

Book | A collection of key articles covering the major issues in the anthropology of
Africa:

Week 1 Anthropology & Africa (D. Pratten) (2 items)

This introductory session will provide an overview of the themes and activities of the
course. We will provide an introductory overview in two parts: the debates concerning the
history of anthropology in Africa, and the major themes in African anthropology
by revisiting of three ‘classic’ case studies - value, modernity, and kinship.  

African anthropologies: history, critique and practice - Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills,
Mustafa H. M. Babiker, 2006
Book

Anthropology and Africa: changing perspectives on a changing scene - Sally Falk Moore,
1994
Book

Localizing strategies: regional traditions of ethnographic writing - Richard Fardon, 1990

Book

Retroversion, introversion, and extraversion: three aspects of African anthropology - D.

Pratten
Chapter

Blinded by Sight: Divining the Future of Anthropology in Africa - Francis B. Nyamnjoh, 2012
Article | (and see the debate in 48 (1) 2013)

Africa Observed: Discourses of the Imperial Imagination - J. Comaroff, J. Comaroff

Chapter

Anthropology in Post-Independence Africa: End of an Era and the problem of

self-redefinition - A. Mafeje
Chapter

Drinking from the cosmic gourd: how Amos Tutuola can change our minds - Francis B.

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Nyamnjoh, 2017
Book | Chapter 1 and read selectively.

Revisiting the ‘Classics’ (9 items)

Copperbelt Modernities (2 items)

Mobile Workers, Modernist Narratives: A Critique of the Historiography of Transition on the
Zambian Copperbelt [Part One] - James Ferguson, 1990
Article

Mobile Workers, Modernist Narratives: A Critique of the Historiography of Transition on the

Zambian Copperbelt [Part Two] - James Ferguson, 1990
Article

A Tent with a View: Colonial Officers, Anthropologists, and the Making of the Field in
Northern Rhodesia, 1937-1960 - Lynette Schumaker, 1996
Article

The kalela dance: aspects of social relationships among urban Africans in Northern
Rhodesia - J. Clyde Mitchell, 1956
Book

Kinship in the Sahel (2 items)

Remotely global: village modernity in West Africa - Charles Piot, 1999
Book

The Political System of the Tallensi of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast - M. Fortes
Chapter

Cattle & Money in Sudan (3 items)

Nuer dilemmas : coping with money, war, and the state
Chapter

The Nuer: a description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic
people - E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 1969
Book

Regional Comparison in African Anthropology on JSTOR

Article

Week 2 (D Pratten) (26 items)

Film: Xala (26 items)

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Xala - Ousmane Sembène, 2005

Audio-visual document | Essential

(Sembene Ousmane; 119 minutes; 1974) 

Senegal has finally won independence from France and the white members of the
Chamber of Commerce have been thrown out. The people's revolution of "African
Socialism" begins as the black businessmen fill those empty seats, only to take enormous
bribes that ensure the whites will secretly remain in power. One of these businessmen
celebrates by marrying a third wife, but on the day of the wedding he finds he's contracted
the curse of Xala, rendering him impotent. 

Learning from the curse: Sembene's Xala - Richard Fardon, Sènga La Rouge, 2017
Book

Film criticism (1 items)

‘Xala’ and the Curse of Neo-Colonialism - Gerry Turvey, 1985-05-01
Article

Ousmane Sembène's "Xala:" The Novel, the Film, and Their Audiences on JSTOR
Article

Interview with Ousmane Sembène on JSTOR

Article

Social Realist Cinema and Representations of Power in African Nationalist Discourse on

JSTOR
Article

Reimaging Gender and African Tradition? Ousmane Sembène's Xala Revisited on JSTOR
Article

Political Allegory and "Engaged Cinema": Sembene's "Xala" on JSTOR

Article

Film reviews (3 items)

The impotence of the political bourgeoisie
Webpage

Ousmane Sembene: Xala | Features | guardian.co.uk Film

Webpage

Film Festival: Cutting, Radiant 'Xala' - The New York Times

Webpage

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Further references (1 items)

Xala - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications
Webpage

On big men, bodies and vulgarity (11 items)

Of Commandement
Chapter

On Private Indirect Government

Chapter

Provisional Notes on the Postcolony on JSTOR

Article

For a review, see:

On the Aesthetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony on JSTOR

Webpage

The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony - A. Mbembe,
1992-04-01
Article

The 'Thing' and its Double in Cameroonian Cartoons - A. Mbembe

Chapter

The state in Africa: the politics of the belly - Jean-François Bayart, 1993
Book

Becoming a Kpako
Chapter

Political legitimacy in Middle Africa: father, family, food - Michael G. Schatzberg, c2001
Book

The Sublime Dance of Mende Politics: An African Aesthetic of Charismatic Power on JSTOR
Article

See also: (2 items)

A man of the people - Chinua Achebe, 1975, c1966
Book

The beautyful ones are not yet born: a novel - Ayi Kwei Armah, 1969
Book

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Week 3: States and politics

Week 4: Rethinking the African frontier

Week 5: Critical entanglements in time

Module: From Fetish to Pharmaceuticals: vitalism, materialism, health

These two lectures sketch out a broad approach to the study of life and death, as
philosophical and ethnographic challenges, as they appear in various ethnographic
accounts of Africa. The first lecture provides an introduction to the anthropology of
struggles over health and healing in Africa. The second lecture takes on the liveliness of
things, specifically as they relate to concerns with health and wellbeing.

Week 6 Social struggles and the politics of health and healing in Africa
(22 items)
The first lecture explores how the politics of health and healing in Africa are deeply
embedded in grounded histories of social struggle around life and death, value and
exchange, generation and reproduction. The literature on healing in Africa is vast,
especially in relation to the effects of colonialism, exchanges between healing systems,
and the effects of biomedicine and global health in various parts of the continent. The
lecture will outline the various approaches, themes, and periodisations that have
characterised ethnographies of health and healing in Africa.

Key Readings
Introduction
Chapter

Chapter 4
Chapter

A nervous state: violence, remedies, and reverie in colonial Congo - Nancy Rose Hunt,
2016
Book

Health, Religion, and Medicine in Central and Southern African Traditions - John Janzen
Chapter

Ngoma: discourses of healing in central and southern Africa - John M. Janzen, c1992
Book

Medical Ethnography over Time - Murray Last, 2019-03-1

Article

Ch 1: The Other Cancer Ward

Chapter

Ch 2. Neoplastic Africa: Mapping Circuits of Toxicity and Knowledge

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Chapter

Ch 6: Colonial Disease and Biological Commensurability

Chapter

Ch 7: Grounds for Comparison: Biology and Human Experiments

Chapter

The republic of therapy: triage and sovereignty in West Africa's time of AIDS - Vinh-Kim
Nguyen, 2010
Book

The Invention of the 'Tropical Worker': Medical Research and the Quest for Central African
Labor on the South African Gold Mines, 1903-36 on JSTOR
Article

Ch 3: Children of Tribulation: the need and the means to heal war trauma
Chapter

Further reading: (9 items)

Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande - E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Eva Gillies, 1976
Book

When bodies remember: experiences and politics of AIDS in South Africa - Didier Fassin,
Amy Jacobs, Gabrielle Varro, 2007
Book

The quest for therapy in Lower Zaire - John M. Janzen, William Arkinstall, 1978
Book

Necropolitics - A. Mbembe, 2003-01-01

Article

Rush/Panic/Rush: Speculations on the Value of Life and Death in South Africa's Age of AIDS
- R. C. Morris, 2008-04-01
Article

White plague, black labor: tuberculosis and the political economy of health and disease in
South Africa - Randall M. Packard, c1989
Book

The Value of Life: Somatic Ethics & the Spirit of Biocapital on JSTOR
Article

Sizwe's test: a young man's journey through Africa's AIDS epidemic - Jonny Steinberg,
2008
Book

The drums of affliction: a study of religious processes among the Ndembu of Zambia -
Victor W. Turner, International African Institute, 1968

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Book

Week 7 Life and/of objects (20 items)

In the second lecture, we examine how the concept of the fetish moves between different
sites of value and healing in order to think through a set of questions around vitalism,
materialism, image, and representation, as they come to bear on mediations of health and
life, and illness and death.  

First, what is “the fetish”? (3 items)

Fetishism Revisited: Kongo "Nkisi" in Sociological Perspective on JSTOR
Article

The Personhood of Ritual Objects: Kongo "Minkisi" on JSTOR

Article

Part I (Commodities and Money), Chapter 1 (Commodities), Section 4 (the Fetishism of

Commodities and the Secret Thereof)
Chapter

Then Pietz (3 items)

The Problem of the Fetish, I on JSTOR
Article

The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman's Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of
Fetishism on JSTOR
Article

The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish on JSTOR
Article

Then the retort: (2 items)

African Objects and the Idea of Fetish on JSTOR
Article

Kongo political culture: the conceptual challenge of the particular - Wyatt MacGaffey, 2000
Book

The “Social Lives” literature: (3 items)

The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective - Arjun Appadurai,
Ethnohistory Workshop, Symposium on the Relationship between Commodities and
Culture, 1986

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Book

Social lives of medicines - Susan Reynolds Whyte, Sjaak van der Geest, Anita Hardon, 2002
Book

Prescription Maximization And The Accumulation Of Surplus Health In The Pharmaceutical

Industry: The_Biomarx_Experiment - Joe Dumit
Chapter

Capitalism and contemporary African pharmaceuticals (5 items)

Ch 2: Neoplastic Africa: Mapping Circuits of Toxicity and Knowledge
Chapter

Speculative markets: drug circuits and derivative life in Nigeria - Kristin Peterson, 2014
Book

On the monopoly: Speculation, pharmaceutical markets, and intellectual property law in

Nigeria - KRISTIN PETERSON, 2014-02
Article

Synthesizing hope: matter, knowledge, and place in South African drug discovery - Anne
Pollock, 2019
Book

Places of pharmaceutical knowledge-making: Global health, postcolonial science, and hope

in South African drug discovery - Anne Pollock, 2014-12
Article

A little extra: (3 items)

Healing traditions: African medicine, cultural exchange, and competition in South Africa,
1820-1948 - Karen Elizabeth Flint, 2008
Book

The Market for Healing and the Elasticity of Belief: Medical Pluralism in Mpumalanga,
South Africa - Robert Thornton
Chapter

The role of ‘African Chemists’ in the health care system of the Eastern Cape province of
South Africa - Michelle Cocks, Anthony Dold, 2000-11
Article

Week 8. Masking & Modernity (D. Pratten) (35 items)

Masquerade and masking traditions in Africa have been an iconic subject of African art
studies and the subject of the Primitivism avant garde movement. For functionalist
anthropology masked societies have has long been an important lens through which to

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explore the social roles and relations within communities. But what of masking now? How
have masks changed in the face of new religious movements, urbanization and rapid social
change?

Key readings (6 items)

What's in a Mask - John Picton, 1990
Article

Masks and Modernities - Charles Gore, 2008

Article

Art and the individual in African masquerades Introduction - Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi,
2018-11
Article

Papers by Gagliardi, Anderson, Homann, Reed and McNaughton

Behind the Inscrutable Wonder: The Dramaturgy of the Mask Performance in Traditional
African Society - Chinyere Grace Okafor, 1991
Article

Negotiating gender, power, and spaces in masquerade performances in Nigeria - John

Thabiti Willis, 2014-03-16
Article

Further readings (14 items)

Masks and Powers - Elizabeth Tonkin, 1979-06
Article

I am not myself: the art of African masquerade - Herbert M. Cole, University of California,
Los Angeles. Museum of Cultural History, c1985
Book

Disguise: masks and global African art - Pamela McClusky, Erika Dalya Massaquoi, 2015
Book

Humorous Masks and Serious Politics among Afikpo Ibo - S Ottenberg

Chapter

Or:

Humorous Masks and Serious Politics among Afikpo Ibo - S Ottenberg

Chapter

Elephant Women, Furious and Majestic: Women's Masquerades in Africa and the Diaspora -
Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, 1998-21
Article

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West African masks and cultural systems - Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, 1988
Book

Iconoclash: From "Tradition" to "Heritage" in Global Africa - Z.S. Strother, 2012

Article

“Breaking juju,” breaking trade: Museums and the culture of iconoclasm in southern
Nigeria - Z. S. Strother
Article

Remembering the future: Slavery, youth and masking in the Cameroon Grassfields1 -
Nicolas Argenti, 2007-01-19
Article

Cosmology and Symbolism on the Central Guinea Coast - M. C. Jedrej, 1986

Article

Pop Goes the Sacred: Dan Mask Performance and Popular Culture in Postcolonial Côte
d'Ivoire - Daniel B. Reed, 2001
Article

Masking Youth: Transformation and Transgression in Annang Performance - David Pratten,

2008
Article

Monographs and case studies (9 items)

Masquerading politics: kinship, gender, and ethnicity in a Yoruba town - John Thabiti Willis,
2018
Book

Unmasking the state: making Guinea modern - Mike McGovern, 2013

Book

The intestines of the state: youth, violence, and belated histories in the Cameroon
grassfields - Nicolas Argenti, 2007
Book

In step with the times: mapiko masquerades of Mozambique - Paolo Israel, 2014
Book

Masquerades of modernity: power and secrecy in Casamance, Senegal - Ferdinand De

Jong, Oxford University Press, International African Institute, c2007
Book

The way of the masks - Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1982

Book

Moving with the face of the devil: art and politics in urban West Africa - John W. Nunley,
c1987

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Book

Inventing masks: agency and history in the art of the Central Pende - Z. S. Strother, c1998
Book

African art in transit - Christopher Burghard Steiner, 1994

Book

Films (4 items)
In and out of Africa - Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, date of publication not
identified
Audio-visual document

Ilisa Barbarsh & Lucien Taylor, 59 min. 1993. 

This documentary explores with irony and humour issues of authenticity, taste, and racial
politics in the transnational trade in African art. 

Tracking the Pale Fox - 1983 - Luc de Heusch - YouTube

Audio-visual document

Luc de Heusch; 48 minutes, 1983  

This film tells the history of research on the Dogon since the famous 1931 expedition of
Marcel Griaule, and the meaning of masks in the complex mythology of the Dogon. 

On the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethic - Felwine
Sarr, Benedicte Savoy
Document

Achille Mbembe - On The Restitution Of African Art Objects

Audio-visual document

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