Overview
- Offers theoretically grounded ethnographies of power and/or authority in selected African settings
- Puts local perspectives and transformations in the context of ongoing public debates and thereby challenges modernist assumptions
- Provides a rich source of information to anthropologists focusing on the (post)colonial politics of Africa, legal and illegal authorities, secret societies, and hidden dimensions of power
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About this book
When the notion of ‘alternative facts’ and the alleged dawning of a ‘postfactual’ world entered public discourse, social anthropologists found themselves in unexpectedly familiar territory. In theirempirical experience, fact—knowledge accepted as true—derives its salience from social mechanisms of legitimization, thereby demonstrating a deep interconnection with power and authority. In thisperspective, fact is a continually contested and volatile social category.
Due to the specific histories of their colonial and post-independence experience, African societies offer a particularly broad array of insights into social processes of juxtaposition, opposition, and even outright competition between different postulated authorities. The contributions to the present volume explore the variety of ways in which authority is contested in Southern and Eastern Africa, investigating localized discourses on which institution, what kind of knowledge, or whose expertise is accepted as authoritative, thus highlighting the specificities and pluralities in ‘modern’ societies. This edited volume engages with larger theoretical questions regarding power and authority in the context of (post)colonial states (neo)traditional authority, claiming space, conflict and (in)justice, and contestations of knowledge. It offers in-depth critical analyses of ethnographic data that put contemporary African phenomena on equal footing with current controversies in North America, Europe, and other global settings.
Due to the specific histories of their colonial and post-independence experience, African societies offer a particularly broad array of insights into social processes of juxtaposition, opposition, and even outright competition between different postulated authorities. The contributions to the present volume explore the variety of ways in which authority is contested in Southern and Eastern Africa, investigating localized discourses on which institution, what kind of knowledge, or whose expertise is accepted as authoritative, thus highlighting the specificities and pluralities in ‘modern’ societies. This edited volume engages with larger theoretical questions regarding power and authority in the context of (post)colonial states (neo)traditional authority, claiming space, conflict and (in)justice, and contestations of knowledge. It offers in-depth critical analyses of ethnographic data that put contemporary African phenomena on equal footing with current controversies in North America, Europe, and other global settings.
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Keywords
Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Contested Authorities and State Power
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Front Matter
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Power and Authority over Space
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Front Matter
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Conflict, (In)Justice, and Plural Legitimacies
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Front Matter
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Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Arne S. Steinforth is Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at York University, Toronto, Canada. Previously, he has been Senior Research Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster, Germany. His research and prior publications focus on issues of mental disorder and society as well as power, politics, and cosmology in Southern Africa.
Sabine Klocke-Daffa is Senior Researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen, Germany. She has been Deputy Professor at various German universities and is a principal investigator of the Tübingen Collaborative Research Center “ResourceCultures”, funded by the German Research Foundation. She has done intensive research in Southern Africa focusing on social, political, and religious issues.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Challenging Authorities
Book Subtitle: Ethnographies of Legitimacy and Power in Eastern and Southern Africa
Editors: Arne S. Steinforth, Sabine Klocke-Daffa
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-76923-9Published: 21 September 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-76926-0Published: 22 September 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-76924-6Published: 20 September 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXV, 459
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations, 28 illustrations in colour
Topics: Ethnography, Anthropology, African Politics, Political Sociology, Imperialism and Colonialism