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Book Book Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa
Editors:Cooper, Elizabeth
Pratten, DavidISNI
Year:2015
Pages:198
Language:English
Series:Anthropology, change, and development
City of publisher:Houndmills
Publisher:Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN:9781349468607; 9781137350831
Geographic terms:Africa
Kenya
Tanzania
Guinea-Bissau
Ethiopia
Subjects:social conditions
social problems
social relations
social security
food security
family planning
Abstract:This collective volume explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa. Uncertainty has become a dominant trope in the subjective experience of life in contemporary African societies. The volume investigates how uncertainty animates people's ways of knowing and being across the continent and examines how uncertainty is used as a social resource to negotiate insecurity and conduct and create relationships. It also addresses how uncertainty acts as a source for imagining the future. Uncertainty does not exist as an autonomous, external condition. Rather, it is entwined with social relations and shapes people's relationship between the present and the future. Contributions: Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa: an introduction (Elizabeth Cooper and David Pratten). Part I - Social contingencies. Contingency: interpersonal and historical dependencies in HIV care (Susan Reynolds Whyte and Godfrey Etyang Siu); Charity and chance: the manufacture of uncertainty and mistrust through child sponsorship in Kenya (Elizabeth Cooper); The quest for trust in the face of uncertainty: managing pregnancy outcomes in Zanzibar (Nadine Beckmann); Food security, conjugal conflict, and uncertainty in 'Bangladesh', Mombasa, Kenya (Adam Gilbertson). Part II - Future visions. Social invisibility and political opacity: on perceptiveness and apprehension in Bissau (Henrik Vigh); Rhythms of uncertainty and the pleasures of anticipation (on Mozambique, Julie Soleil Archambault); Embracing uncertainty: young people on the move in Addis Ababa's inner city (Marco Di Nunzio); 'We wait for miracles': ideas of hope and future among clandestine Burundian refugees in Nairobi (Simon Turner). [ASC Leiden abstract]
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