Description
Book Synopsis Questions regarding the origins, mobility, and effects of analytical concepts continue to emerge as anthropology endeavors to describe similarities and differences in social life around the world. Cutting and Connecting rethinks this comparative enterprise by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. On this basis, the contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent and to explore how this exchange influences the borrowed anthropological perspectives. By focusing on ways in which networks are cut and connections are made, these empirical investigations show how particular relationships are created in today’s Africa. In addition, the volume aims for an approach that recasts relationships between theory and place and concepts and ethnography, in a manner that destabilizes the distinction between fieldwork and writing.
Trade Review “For over two decades the New Melanesian ethnography has extended itself in many useful directions, though rarely, in Africa, has it proved so productive as in this fascinating collection. Working at the analytic crossroads of anthropology, Africa and Melanesia, Cutting and Connecting provides fresh insights into some of today’s most pressing anthropological challenges: theorizing relationality, networks, and exchange; the relation between knowledge practices and place; theory and ethnography; the complications of comparison. The book is a major contribution to anthropological scholarship and promises many theoretical returns.” · Todd Sanders, author of Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania
Table of Contents Introduction: Cutting and Connecting: ‘Afrinesian’ Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange
Knut Christian Myhre
Chapter 1. Kuru, AIDS, and Witchcraft: Reconfiguring Culpability in Melanesia and Africa
Isak Niehaus
Chapter 2. Law, Opacity, and Information in Urban Gambia
Niklas Hultin
Chapter 3. From Cutting to Fading: A Relational Perspective on Marriage Exchange and Sociality in Rural Gambia
Tone Sommerfelt
Chapter 4. Gathering up Mutual Help: Work, Personhood, and Relational Freedoms in Tanzania and Melanesia
Daivi Rodima-Taylor
Chapter 5. Rethinking Ethnographic Comparison: Persons and Networks in Africa and Melanesia
Richard Vokes
Chapter 6. Membering and Dismembering: The Poetry and Relationality of Animal Bodies in Kilimanjaro
Knut Christian Myhre
Chapter 7. The Place of Theory: Rights, Networks, and Ethnographic Comparison
Harri Englund and Thomas Yarrow
Afterword
Adam Reed
Index
