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- Convenors:
-
David O'Kane
(Nelson Mandela University)
Dmitry Bondarenko
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
Global polarisation threatens today's changing Africa with new shocks from without and within. This panel invites papers from any subfield or African region that deal with the uses of tradition and neotraditionalism in response to such challenges. Both contemporary and historical cases are welcome.
Long Abstract
The concepts of "tradition" and "neotraditionalism" are as diverse as the realities they define: implied in the concept of the invention of tradition is the idea that traditions can evolve and change, even if such changes imply that traditions are not handed down from the past in pristine form or condition. In the case of Africa, the exogenous shocks of colonialism and imperialist partition presented a particular challenge to the transmission of tradition from past generations to future ones, with particular implications for local cultures: today, as the world becomes, at the same time,increasingly polarised and multipolar, new and unpredictable shocks may threaten the continent from without and within. This is especially so given the superpower rivalries that may make Africa, once again, a zone of geopolitical competition, with unpredictable outcomes for the continent and its peoples. Our panel invites papers that deal with the uses of tradition and neotraditionalism in responding to those challenges. Since the beginning of political decolonization of Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, tradition has been seen as a source of cultural and ideological decolonization, or as a major obstacle to independent nation-building. Attempts to deploy tradition for political purposes may overlap with religious or other social uses of tradition: and tradition may well become a tool of political action in a multi-polarising world, and whose challenges for Africa may not yet be fully understood. Papers submitted for this panel may deal with these issues from any theoretical perspective, and may do so from the ground-up level of the grassroots, or from the point of view of nation-states and the political elites who control them. Papers submitted for this panel may come from any subfield of anthropology, may deal with any location in Africa, and may be concerned with contemporary or historical cases.
Accepted paper
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines how moral economies of care are negotiated amid everyday violence in diasporic and transnational contexts. It advances a theory of diasporic ethics, in which the pervasive structures of inequity and neglect underpin everyday ethical decision among post-colonial communities.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how the moral economies of care are negotiated amid the slow erosion enacted by everyday violence in diasporic and transnational contexts. It advances a theory of diasporic ethics, in which aspirations, orientations, imaginations, and translations of values are entangled with the pervasive structures of inequity and neglect that underpin everyday ethical decision among post-colonial communities.
Drawing on long-term anthropological fieldwork with Yoruba women and their families in London and Nigeria, the paper explores how mothers’ narratives of loss generate shifting alignments and polarisations in moral judgment. It centres on one Yoruba woman who loses her firstborn child to the consternation of religious female peers, and a decade later, deliberates whether to attend the funeral of a female pastor’s son. “That Oyinbo land has changed her”, is a third-person narrative the mother projects onto herself, voicing collective judgment while simultaneously resisting it. The utterance reveals how collective moral voices inhabit the everyday (Mattingly 2014) through narrative (Das 2012) and practice.
At the same time, the narrative demonstrates how violence is recast through a ‘new lexicon of moral sentiments’ (Fassin 2012), in which structural inequities are translated into personal moral failings, and community alienation for perceived moral wrongs is construed as care. By combining ethnography with attention to narrative and ethical entanglements lived and enacted, this paper reveals how moral economies of care emerge within, and in response to, structural violence, and how judgment and moral repair among post colonial communities are underpinned by a recognition of shared precarity.