Everyday State and Democracy in Africa
Ethnographic Encounters
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Ohio University Press
Published:12th Jul '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£66.00(9780821424872)
Through ethnographic case studies of Africans’ quotidian encounters with state bureaucracy, infrastructure, discipline, citizenship, democracy, political economy, education, and health, this book demonstrates how the state not only enables but also constrains and complicates ordinary Africans’ daily struggles to live and live well.
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 Kenya
infrastructure and shortages in Chad and Nigeria
disciplinarity, subjectivity, and violence in Rwanda, South Africa, and Nigeria
the social life of democracy in the Congo, Cameroon, and Mozambique
education, welfare, and health in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso
Everyday 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 Agbiboa
Victoria Bernal
Jean Comaroff
John L. Comaroff
E. Fouksman
Fred Ikanda
Lori Leonard
Rose Løvgren
Ferenc Dávid Markó
Ebenezer Obadare
Rogers Orock
Justin Pearce
Katrien Pype
Edoardo Quaretta
Jennifer Riggan
Helle Samuelsen
Nicholas Rush Smith
Eric Trovalla
Ulrika Trovalla
“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.”
ISBN: 9780821424902
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
450 pages