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.

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