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Wale Adebanwi - Everyday State and Democracy in Africa, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2022

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa

Ethnographic Encounters

Av Wale Adebanwi

Del i serien Cambridge Centre of African Studies Series

924 kr

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Beskrivning
Bottom-up case studies, drawn from the perspective of ordinary Africans' experiences with state bureaucracies, structures, and services, reveal how citizens and states define each other.This volume examines contemporary citizens' everyday encounters with the state and democratic processes in Africa. The contributions reveal the intricate and complex ways in which quotidian activities and experiences—from getting an identification card (genuine or fake) to sourcing black-market commodities to dealing with unreliable waste collection—both (re)produce and (re)constitute the state and democracy. This approach from below lends gravity to the mundane and recognizes the value of conceiving state governance not in terms of its stated promises and aspirations but rather in accordance with how people experience it. Both new and established scholars based in Africa, Europe, and North America cover a wide range of examples from across the continent, including bureaucratic machinery in South Sudan, Nigeria, and Kenyainfrastructure and shortages in Chad and Nigeriadisciplinarity, subjectivity, and violence in Rwanda, South Africa, and Nigeriathe social life of democracy in the Congo, Cameroon, and Mozambiqueeducation, welfare, and health in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina FasoEveryday State and Democracy in Africa demonstrates that ordinary citizens' encounters with state agencies and institutions define the meanings, discourses, practices, and significance of democratic life, as well its distressing realities.Contributors: Daniel AgbiboaVictoria BernalJean ComaroffJohn L. ComaroffE. FouksmanFred IkandaLori LeonardRose LøvgrenFerenc Dávid MarkóEbenezer ObadareRogers OrockJustin PearceKatrien PypeEdoardo QuarettaJennifer RigganHelle SamuelsenNicholas Rush SmithEric TrovallaUlrika Trovalla
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Wale Adebanwi is Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His monographs include Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria, Yorùbá Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ and Corporate Agency, and The Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning.

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"Major fresh perspectives on the state in everyday life that will be seminal reading for historians and social scientists as well as for Africanists." "Anthropologists, for some time, have successfully deconstructed essentialist notions of 'the' state in Africa by focusing on what states do when they are working. The contributors to this book push this approach further: they enquire about how ordinary citizens experience the state and its agents in multiple sites, focusing on the possibilities and constraints of everyday life and the resulting popular grammars of state and democracy. The book should be on the core reading list of every course on state and democracy, in Africa and beyond." "Mobilizing the decentering perspectives of ethnography to capture living practices, Everyday State and Democracy in Africa develops an original view from below on the huge changes throughout the continent since the end of the Cold War. The volume convincingly demonstrates that a focus on how the people involved see state and democracy might be more helpful than intricate theoretical discussions. Two themes seem to come back throughout the volume. The first is (unsurprisingly) the role of violence in people's everyday encounters with the state. The second (maybe more surprising) is that the state is all the more present in people's perceptions where it seems to be absent."

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