Imagining Futures

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.

[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 (H-Soz-Kult) The book, Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family is an excellent ethnographic study, which offers a very unique perspective on an extended African family of over 500 members based in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso, the former French colony in West Africa...We recomend it with admiration and without reservation to college students as well as advanced scholars and the general reader, who wish to deepen their knowledge of the subject.- Peter Agyekum Boateng and Augustine Adu Frimpong (African and Asian Studies)

• ForewordIntroduction1. Celebrating Home and Family Unity2. Remembering the Ancestors3. Constructing an Ancestral Heritage4. Keeping the Home Fires Burning5. Creating a New Order6. Social Mobility and Moral Obligations7. Urban Nostalgia for Ancestral Traditions8. Making a Good Name for the Family9. Stemming the Tide of Dispersal10. Unfinished BusinessReferencesIndex