Edges of Global Transformation

Håkon Fyhn is senior researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.Harald Aspen is associate professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.Anne Kathrine Larsen is associate professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The seesaw between inclusion and exclusion, between nativism and cosmopolitanism, is analyzed through the dual prisms of global neoliberalism and ontological uncertainty in this excellent and eminently readable book, where the universally human and the locally unique comes together through people uncomfortably wedged between the hopes and fears of an unpredictable world. The case studies, most of them African, demonstrate the strength of the ethnographic attention to flesh and blood, detail and context, while also indicating why anthropology must go multiscale and interdisciplinary to make a difference.

• Chapter 1: Building Creatures of Uncertainty: Crisis, Storytelling and Othering in the Norwegian Building Industry by Håkon FyhnChapter 2: The Perfect Subject and its Discontents: Central Europe at a Crossroad by Martin ThomassenChapter 3: Protection as a Strategy: The Response of Bedouin Village Women to the Development of Dubai by Anne Kathrine LarsenChapter 4: Localizing Ontologies of Uncertainty in Neoliberal Tanzania by Liv HaramChapter 5: Aggravated Uncertainty: The Dubious Influence of a Modern Management Regime on Lake Chad Fisheries by Bjørn ArntsenChapter 6: Vulnerability and Trust: Migrants in Search of a Better Position in Urban Northern Cameroon by Trond Waage Chapter 7: State, Peasant Society and Modernization in Ethiopia by Harald Aspen Chapter 8: Globally Designed Accountability and Local Social Inequality; A Case Study of Two Maternal Deaths in Tanzania by Siri Lange, Dorcas Mfaume and Astrid BlystadChapter 9: Well-Being, Healthcare and Development in Turkana: Pre and Post Devolution by Marianna Betti