Anthropology, Change, and Development – serie

The contributors explore diverse contexts of performance to discuss peoples' own reflections on political subjectivities, governance and development. The volume refocuses anthropological engagement with ethics, aesthetics, and politics to examine the transformative potential of political performance, both for individuals and wider collectives.

This collection explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa. Eight ethnographic case studies from across the continent examine how uncertainty is used to negotiate insecurity, create and conduct relationships, and act as a source for imagining the future.

This book explores the daily mobilities and immobilities of children and young people in sub-Saharan Africa. The authors draw on findings from rural and urban field research extending over many years, culminating in a 24-site study across three African countries: Ghana, Malawi, and South Africa. Wider reflections on gender, relationality, the politics of mobility, and field methodology frame the study. By bringing together diverse strands of a complex daily mobilities picture-from journeys for education, work, play/leisure and health, to associated experiences of different transport modes, road safety, and the virtual mobility now afforded by mobile phones-the book helps fill a knowledge gap with crucial significance for development policy and practice.

The ways we understand processes of agrarian change are pressing issues for policy makers and development practitioners. Interpreting changes in two agrarian societies in India and Indonesia, the author reveals how transformations to self are critical factors shaping change, as well as under-recognized consequences of development initiatives.

The contributors investigate the inter-relationships between migrant remittances and the family in Asia. They argue that, in the context of Asian transnational labour migration where remittances tend to become a primary currency of care, the making or breaking of the family unit is mainly contingent on how individuals handle remittance processes.

The contributors explore diverse contexts of performance to discuss peoples' own reflections on political subjectivities, governance and development. The volume refocuses anthropological engagement with ethics, aesthetics, and politics to examine the transformative potential of political performance, both for individuals and wider collectives.

This collection explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa. Eight ethnographic case studies from across the continent examine how uncertainty is used to negotiate insecurity, create and conduct relationships, and act as a source for imagining the future.

The contributors investigate the inter-relationships between migrant remittances and the family in Asia. They argue that, in the context of Asian transnational labour migration where remittances tend to become a primary currency of care, the making or breaking of the family unit is mainly contingent on how individuals handle remittance processes.

This open access book provides methodological devices and analytical frameworks for the study of societies in transformation. It explores a central paradox in the study of change: making sense of change requires long-term perspectives on societal transformations and on the different ways people experience social change, whereas the research carried out to study change is necessarily limited to a relatively short space of time. This volume offers a range of methodological responses to this challenge by paying attention to the complex entanglement of qualitative research and the metanarratives generally used to account for change. Each chapter is based on a concrete case study from different parts of the world and tackles a diversity of topics, analytical approaches, and data collection methods. The contributors’ innovative solutions provide valuable tools and techniques for all those interested in the study of change.

This book takes food parcels as a vehicle for exploring relationships, intimacy, care, consumption, exchange, and other fundamental anthropological concerns, examining them in relation to wider transnational spaces. As the contributors to this volume argue, food and its related practices offer a window through which to examine the reconciliation of people’s localised intimate experiences with globalising forces. Their analyses contribute to an embodied and sensorial approach to social change by examining migrants and their families’ experiences of global connectedness through familiar objects and narratives. By bringing in in-depth ethnographic insights from different social and economic contexts, this book widens the understanding of the lived experiences of mobility and goes beyond the divide between origin and destination countries, therefore contributing to new ways of thinking about migration and transnationalism that take into consideration the materiality of global connections and the way such connections are embodied and experienced at the local level.