Imagining Futures

"Memory makes family, and vice versa this is the intriguing insight unfolded in this unusual book. Grounded in a longstanding collaboration, Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe trace the practices of remembering, forgetting and silencing through which their vibrant, trans-national Dagara family mediates its past. A well-crafted, sparkling account that unravels not only how colonialism and conversion to Catholicism shaped the lives and relations of its ancestral members, but also how the family organizes belonging and togetherness in our time."Birgit Meyer, Utrecht University "Imagining Futures makes an extremely important contribution to scholarship in a range of fields, particularly Anthropology and African Studies. It expertly demonstrates how family relationships have been integral to forging pathways of survival and, for a few, accumulation in Northern Ghana. But they also provide a subtle understanding of how the definitions of 'family' have shifted, providing perspicacious analysis of some of the changes in who is included and excluded in the particular techniques and strategies of 'kinning' for this family under study."Blair Rutherford, author of Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics. "Imagining Futures is a compelling and beautifully written multi-generational saga of a remarkable family that is at once a unique contribution to African history and a rare longitudinal study of kinship. It will be widely read and admired."Michael Lambek, University of Toronto "[Imagining Futures] is a grippingly personal, yet analytically cogent, biography of a unit whose existence is testified to by the affections, deliberations and practices of its members, yet is undermined as its membership becomes progressively larger and more diverse. It will fascinate and prove instructive to students of anthropology, history and social sciences more generally, in Africa and beyond."Deborah James, London School of Economics, H-Soz-Kult

Carola Lentz is Senior Research Professor at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, University of Mainz, and president of the Goethe Institute. She is author of Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa, which won Melville Herskovits Prize, and author (with David Lowe) of Remembering Independence. Isidore Lobnibe is a Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Western Oregon University, Monmouth.

Foreword Introduction 1. Celebrating Home and Family Unity 2. Remembering the Ancestors 3. Constructing an Ancestral Heritage 4. Keeping the Home Fires Burning 5. Creating a New Order 6. Social Mobility and Moral Obligations 7. Urban Nostalgia for Ancestral Traditions 8. Making a Good Name for the Family 9. Stemming the Tide of Dispersal 10. Unfinished Business References Index