Jennifer Cole - Böcker

"Sex and Salvation" chronicles the coming of age of a generation of women in Tamatave in the years that followed Madagascar's economic liberalization. Eager to forge a viable future amid poverty and rising consumerism, many young women entered the sexual economy in hope of finding a European husband. Just as many Westerners believe that young people break with the past as they enter adulthood, Malagasy citizens fear that these women have severed the connection to their history and culture. Jennifer Cole's elegant analysis shows how this notion of generational change is both wrong and consequential. It obscures the ways young people draw on long-standing ideas of gender and sexuality, it ignores how urbanites relate to their rural counterparts, and it neglects the relationship between these husband-seeking women and their elders who join Pentecostal churches. And yet, as talk about the women circulates through the city's neighborhoods, bars, Internet cafes, and churches, it teaches others new ways of being. Cole's sophisticated depiction of how a generation's coming of age contributes to social change eschews a narrow focus on crisis.Instead, she reveals how fantasies of rupture and conceptions of the changing life course shape the everyday ways that people create the future.

"Sex and Salvation" chronicles the coming of age of a generation of women in Tamatave in the years that followed Madagascar's economic liberalization. Eager to forge a viable future amid poverty and rising consumerism, many young women entered the sexual economy in hope of finding a European husband. Just as many Westerners believe that young people break with the past as they enter adulthood, Malagasy citizens fear that these women have severed the connection to their history and culture. Jennifer Cole's elegant analysis shows how this notion of generational change is both wrong and consequential. It obscures the ways young people draw on long-standing ideas of gender and sexuality, it ignores how urbanites relate to their rural counterparts, and it neglects the relationship between these husband-seeking women and their elders who join Pentecostal churches. And yet, as talk about the women circulates through the city's neighborhoods, bars, Internet cafes, and churches, it teaches others new ways of being. Cole's sophisticated depiction of how a generation's coming of age contributes to social change eschews a narrow focus on crisis.Instead, she reveals how fantasies of rupture and conceptions of the changing life course shape the everyday ways that people create the future.

In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life - a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. "Love in Africa" seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from the 1930s to the present, the contributors collectively argue for the importance of paying attention to the many different cultural and historical strands that constitute love in Africa.Covering such diverse topics as the reception of Bollywood movies in 1950s Zanzibar, the effects of a Mexican telenovela on young people's ideas about courtship in Niger, the models of romance promoted by South African and Kenyan magazines, and the complex relationship between love and money in Madagascar and South Africa, "Love in Africa" is a vivid and compelling look at love's role in African society.

In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life - a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. "Love in Africa" seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from the 1930s to the present, the contributors collectively argue for the importance of paying attention to the many different cultural and historical strands that constitute love in Africa.Covering such diverse topics as the reception of Bollywood movies in 1950s Zanzibar, the effects of a Mexican telenovela on young people's ideas about courtship in Niger, the models of romance promoted by South African and Kenyan magazines, and the complex relationship between love and money in Madagascar and South Africa, "Love in Africa" is a vivid and compelling look at love's role in African society.

The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts on such a mass scale contribute to a broader process of social regeneration. The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges.Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.

"This volume illuminates how families and the communities in which they are enmeshed negotiate everyday lives with the social, cultural, economic, and political resources available to them. It provides an excellent example of how anthropology matters to our understanding of the contemporary world and its global restructuring." —Karen Tranberg Hansen, Northwestern UniversityGlobalization is not only a large-scale phenomenon: it is also inextricably bound up with intimate aspects of personhood, care, and the daily decisions through which we make our lives. Looking at sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar, Mexico, the U.S., Europe, India, and China, Generations and Globalization investigates the impact of globalization in the context of families, age groups, and intergenerational relations. The contributors offer an innovative approach that focuses on the changing dynamics between generations, rather than treating changes in childhood, youth, or old age as discrete categories. They argue that new economies and global flows do not just transform contemporary family life, but are in important ways shaped and constituted by it.Contributors are Jennifer Cole, Deborah Durham, Jessica Greenberg, Sarah Lamb, Julie Livingston, Roger Magazine, Andrea Muehlebach, Martha Areli Ramírez Sánchez, and T. E. Woronov.

While doing fieldwork in a village in east Madagascar that had suffered both heavy settler colonialism and a bloody anticolonial rebellion, Jennifer Cole found herself confronted by a puzzle. People in the area had lived through almost a century of intrusive French colonial rule, but they appeared to have forgotten the colonial period in their daily lives. Then, during democratic elections in 1992-93, the terrifying memories came flooding back. Cole asks, How do once-colonized peoples remember the colonial period? Drawing on a fine-grained ethnography of the social practices of remembering and forgetting in one community, she develops a practice-based approach to social memory.

Planetary Health - the idea that human health and the health of the environment are inextricably linked - encourages the preservation and sustainability of natural systems for the benefit of human health. Drawing from disciplines such as public health, environmental science, evolutionary anthropology, welfare economics, geography, policy and organizational theory, it addresses the challenges of the modern world, where human health and well-being is threatened by increasing pollution and climate change. A comprehensive publication covering key concepts in this emerging field, Planetary Health reviews ideas and approaches to the subject such as natural capital, ecological resilience, evolutionary biology, One Earth and transhumanism. It also sets out through case study chapters the main links between human health and environmental change, covering: - Climate change, land use and waterborne infectious diseases. - Sanitation, clean energy and fertilizer use. - Trees, well-being and urban greening. - Livestock, antibiotics and greenhouse gas emissions. Providing an extensive overview of key theories and literature for academics and practitioners who are new to the field, this engaging and informative read also offers an important resource for students of a diverse range of subjects, including environmental sciences, animal sciences, geography and health.

Child laborers in South Asia, child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Uganda, Chinese youth playing computer games to earn virtual gold, youth involved in sex trafficking in the former Soviet republics and Thailand: these are just some of the young people featured in the news of late. The idea that young people are more malleable and the truisms that "youth are the future" or "children are our hope for the future" give news stories and scholarly accounts added meaning. To address how and why youth and children have come to seem so important to globalization, the contributors to this book look at the both the spatial relations and the temporal dimensions of globalization in places as far apart as Oakland, California, and Tamatave, Madagascar, in situations as disparate as the idealization of childhood innocence and the brutal lives of street children. Discourses of, and practices by, youth and children, from the design of toys to political mobilization, are critical sites through which people everywhere conceive of, produce, contest, and naturalize the new futures.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the 9th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, which was held in June 2004 at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The theme of the conference was Change in Phonology, broadly conceived as to include both language evolution at the level of the speech community and development within the individual speaker/hearer. The chapters in this book are organized in five sections: phonological variation and change within the speech community, mechanisms of change in sound systems, phonological acquisition from different experimental perspectives, second language phonology, modeling of language variation, and segmental and suprasegmental phenomena related to the timing of speech gestures. These topics are explored from a number of perspectives, both within and outside of traditional linguistics. We believe that the papers included in this volume demonstrate that the Laboratory Phonology approach has reached maturity and has succeeded in its aim not only to bridge the gap between phonetics and phonology but also to establish a fruitful and mutually beneficial dialog between linguists and other scientists and scholars concerned with the study of the sound patterns of human language from different perspectives.