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(Un)Settling Place
Diverse and Divergent Place-Making of People on the Move

Edited by Nanneke Winters, Heike Drotbohm, and Yaatsil Guevara González

People who are “on the move,” particularly migrants and the displaced, often inhabit places that are considered temporary, peripheral, and remote. (Un)Settling Place recentralizes these “out-of-the-way” places as key sites in the shaping of people’s mobility and identities. Ranging from the surveillance and care that migrants experience to the re-creation of social ties and the re-claiming of space, this collection volume seeks to show how a critical approach to in-between place-making can challenge the idea of place as fixed, singular, or one-directional, offering new ways of understanding migrant trajectories.

2025, 272 pages
Berghahn
ISBN: 978-1-80539-810-3

Life Course, Work, and Labour in Global History

Edited by Josef Ehmer and Carola Lentz

Series: Work in Global and Historical Perspective, Band 18 

This multidisciplinary volume offers unique perspectives on the complexity of the nexus between work and the life course. For industrialized regions, from Germany and Western Europe to China and Japan, it questions the widespread notion of an overall growing working life course instability, since the 1970s. For unindustrialized or industrializing regions, from West Africa to state socialist East Central Europe, as well as for transnational and transcontinental labour migrations, it shows the enormous influence of the extended family and wider kin on individual pathways into and out of work. For early modern Europe, India, and China, and up to twentieth-century state socialism and to current welfare states, it stresses and concretizes the crucial impact of age and gender for both societal labour relations and individual work-related decision making.

2023, 411 pages
De Gruyter
ISBN: 9783111147529 (E-Book) / 9783111145907

Policing race, ethnicity and culture
Ethnographic perspectives across Europe

Edited by Jan Beek, Thomas Bierschenk, Annalena Kolloch & Bernd Meyer

How to deal with differences based on culture, ethnicity and race, has become a key issue of policing. The collected edition explores everyday, often mundane interactions between police officers and migrantised actors in European countries and asks how both sides deal with perceived differences. The contributions reflect that such differences are not just ‘out there’ but are being situationally (re-) produced in police-citizen encounters. By taking a comparative approach, the book develops a distinctly European perspective on these questions. The book contains 12 ethnographies from ten European countries, based on new and often innovative empirical research, two theoretical contributions, an introduction and a postface.

2023, 352 pages
Manchester University Press
ISBN: 978-1-5261-6558-9

Humour and Politics in Africa
Beyond Resistance

by Daniel Hammett, Laura S. Martin and Izuu Nwankwọ

Analyses of humour often focus primarily on the Global North, with little consideration for examples and practices from elsewhere. This book provides a vital contribution to humour theory by developing a Global South perspective.
Taking a wide-ranging view across the whole of the continent, the book examines the relationship between humour and politics in Africa. It considers the context of the production and reception of humour in African contexts and argues that humour is more than just symbolic. Moving beyond the idea of humour as a mode of resistance, the book investigates the ‘political work’ that humour does and explores the complex entanglements in which the politics, practices and performances of humour are located

2023, 168 pages
Bristol University Press
ISBN: 978-1529219715

A History of Mali’s National Drink
Following the Tea Ritual from China to West Africa

by Ute Röschenthaler

Reihe: African History, Band: 11

Green tea, imported from China, occupies an important place in the daily lives of Malians. They spend so much time preparing and consuming the sugared beverage that it became the country’s national drink. To find out how Malians came to practice the tea ritual, this study follows the beverage from China to Mali on its historical trade routes halfway around the globe. It examines the circumstances of its introduction, the course of the tea ritual, the equipment to prepare and consume it, and the meanings that it assumed in the various places on its travel across geographical regions, political economies, cultural contexts, and religious affiliations.

2022, 267 pages
Brill
ISBN: 978-90-04-52467-5 (E-Book) / 978-90-04-52466-8

African Agency in China’s Tea Trade
Commercial Networks, Brand Creation and Intellectual Property

by Ute Röschenthaler

Reihe: African Social Studies Series, Band: 43

Every month tons of green tea travel from China to West Africa in a movement that largely thrives beyond the attention of Western observers. In this trade, Malian merchants assumed a central role. They travel to China, visit family gardens and the factories, which process and package the product. Together with their Chinese suppliers, they select the tea leaves and create their brand. On Bamako’s largest market, the Grand Marché, more than a hundred different tea brands are found, whose packages have colourfully, often eye-catching designs with brand-names such as Gazelle, Tombouctou, Arafat and Obama. This book explores the unique tea culture that celebrates with its brands the strength of desert animals, the fading glory of trading places, the excitement of social events and the accomplishments of admired politicians.

2022, 350 pages
Brill
ISBN: 978-90-04-50569-8 (E-Book) / 978-90-04-50568-1

Nachtlinguistik. Sprachwissenschaftliche Streifzüge

by Nico Nassenstein & Anne Storch

Series: Lettre

In der Nacht manifestiert sich die Macht des Abseitigen, zugleich aber ist sie ein Zeitraum, dem Momente des Schönen innewohnen. Nico Nassenstein und Anne Storch nehmen die Nacht aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln unter die Lupe und verknüpfen historische Perspektiven mit Untersuchungen zur Sprache und unterschiedlichen Formen der Wissensproduktion. In Kapiteln unterschiedlichen Genres zeichnen sie so ein Bild der Nacht als andere Möglichkeitswelt, in der alternative und dekoloniale Wissensformen ihren Platz finden und Souveränität und Kreativität immer wieder neu erlangt werden können.

2022, 336 pages
transcript
ISBN: 978-3-8376-6538-3

Approaches to Language and Culture

Edited by Svenja Völkel & Nico Nassenstein

Series: Anthropological Linguistics [AL], 1

This book provides an overview of approaches to language and culture, and it outlines the broad interdisciplinary field of anthropological linguistics and linguistic anthropology. It identifies current and future directions of research, including language socialization, language reclamation, speech styles and genres, language ideology, verbal taboo, social indexicality, emotion, time, and many more. Furthermore, it offers areal perspectives on the study of language in cultural contexts (namely Africa, the Americas, Australia and Oceania, Mainland Southeast Asia, and Europe), and it lays the foundation for future developments within the field. In this way, the book bridges the disciplines of cultural anthropology and linguistics and paves the way for the new book series Anthropological Linguistics.

2022, 558 pages
De Gruyter Mouton 
ISBN: 9783110726992

Swahili Proverbs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo

by Nico Nassenstein

Series: Anthropological Linguistics [AL], 1

The idea for the present book first arose out of a fascination for some Kivu Swahili proverbs that came up during a recording session on Kivu Swahili sentences with my Congolese colleague Paulin Baraka Bose one day in Kampala (Uganda). The present editor was fascinated by their variability and the fact that proverbs could apparently easily be “transferred” by calquing them from Kinyabwisha, Mashi, and other languages. The fact that Swahili speakers’ use of proverbs from the Congo was thus characterized by fluidity and flexibility in their realization, dependent upon their linguistic backgrounds, trajectories, and creativity encouraged the editor to start collecting proverbs whenever working on Congo Swahili varieties. The purpose of the present book, besides the personal interest in the rich orature exemplified by proverbs, is to serve as a dialectological introduction – which, as a first compilation, offers insights into the grammatical variability of Congo Swahili regiolects.

2022, 136 pages
Rüdiger Köppe Verlag
ISBN: 978-3-89645-744-8

Swahili Proverbs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Edited by Cynthia Groff, Andrea Hollington, Ellen Hurst-Harosh, Jacomine Nortier, Helma Pasch, Nico Nassenstein, Helma Pasch

Series: Contributions to the Sociology of Language [CSL], 119

Most journal articles, edited volumes and monographs on youth language practices deal with one specific variety, one geographical setting, or with one specific continent. This volume bridges these different studies, and it approaches youth language from a much broader angle. A global framework and a diversity of methodologies enable a wider perspective that gives room to comparisons of youth’s manipulations and linguistic agency, transnational communicative practices and language contact scenarios. The research presented addresses structural features of everyday talk and text, youth identity issues related to specific purposes and contexts, and sociocultural emphases on ideologies and belonging.

2022, 354 pages
Gruyter Mouton
ISBN: 978-1-50151-468-5

Imagining Futures
Memory and Belonging in an African Family

by Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe

What keeps a family together? In Imagining Futures, authors Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe offer a unique look at one extended African family, currently comprising over five hundred members in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso. Members of this extended family, like many others in the region, find themselves living increasingly farther apart and working in diverse occupations ranging from religious clergy and civil service to farming. What keeps them together as a family? In their groundbreaking work, Lentz and Lobnibe argue that shared memories, rather than only material interests, bind a family together. Imagining Futures explores the changing practices of remembering in an African family and offers a unique contribution to the growing field of memory studies, beyond the usual focus of Europe and America.

2022, 296 pages
Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253060204 (Paperback); 9780253060211 (Hardcover); 9780253060198 (EBook)

Das Goethe-Institut
Eine Geschichte von 1951 bis heute

Carola Lentz und Marie-Christin Gabriel

Carola Lentz und Marie-Christin Gabriel

70 Jahre Goethe-Institut. Carola Lentz bietet eine ebenso informative wie konzise Geschichte des Goethe-Instituts und seiner sich wandelnden Aufgaben im Kontext bundesrepublikanischer und globaler Zeitgeschichte. Zugleich eröffnen Erfahrungsberichte von ehemaligen und aktuellen MitarbeiterInnen lebendige Eindrücke in die Arbeit eines der wichtigsten weltweit agierenden Kulturinstitute. Vom Kulturexport zum globalen Netzwerk – unter diesem Motto kann man die siebzigjährige Geschichte des Goethe-Instituts zusammenfassen, die eng mit der jüngeren Geschichte Deutschlands und mit globalen Umbrüchen verwoben ist.

2022, 320 pages
Klett-Cotta
ISBN: 978-3-608-98470-5

Entrepreneurs of Identity
The Islamic State’s Symbolic Repertoire

by Christoph Günther

Describing the Islamic State’s ideologues as ‘entrepreneurs of identity’, this book explores how the group defined categories of social identity and used them as tools of communicative and cognitive structuring. Based on a wide dossier of original texts, speeches, images, and videos, the book examines how these ideologues have built a symbolic repertoire around the black flag as well as ideas and social practices such as the dictum to command good and forbid wrong, the supervision of public behaviour, and the oath of allegiance to the Caliph.

2022, 220 pages
Berghahn
ISBN  978-1-80073-266-7, eISBN 978-1-80073-267-4

Disputing Discipline
Child Protection, Punishment, and Piety in Zanzibar Schools

by Franziska Fay

Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children’s rights activists’ efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago’s moral and political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local “child protection” aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people’s voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children’s views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children’s lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people’s well-being.

2021, 248 pages
Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9781978821736

Die Handlungsmacht ästhetischer Objekte

Herausgegeben von Annika Schlitte, Markus Verne and Gregor Wedekind

Reihe: Phoenix (Bd. 7)

Ästhetische Erfahrungen sind ohne spezifische Objekte grundsätzlich nicht zu denken. Welche Folgen hat diese Objektbezogenheit für das Wesen ästhetischer Erfahrung? Inwieweit bestimmen ästhetische Objekte die Art ihrer Erfahrung mit und damit auch ihre reflexiven und praktischen Folgen? Die Beiträge des Bandes verfolgen ihr Thema einerseits empirisch, durch die Untersuchung konkreter ästhetischer Objekte aus Kunst, Populärkultur und Religion, zum anderen aber auch durch fachhistorische und theoretische Reflexionen. In Auseinandersetzung mit theoretischen Neujustierungen wie Posthumanismus, Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie, objekt-orientierter relationaler Ontologie, spekulativem Realismus werden die herkömmlichen sozialkonstruktivistischen Erklärungsmodelle überwunden zugunsten einer Bestimmung des Ästhetischen als notwendiges Wechselspiel aus Objekt und Erfahrung, bei dem beides eng aufeinander bezogen ist, ohne dass aber das eine im jeweils anderen tatsächlich auch aufginge.

2021, 224 Seiten
De Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110702798, eISBN: 9783110774351

Jihadi Audiovisuality and its Entanglements
Meanings, Aesthetics, Appropriations

Edited by Christoph Günther and Simone Pfeifer

Through 12 case studies, this book examines the different ways in which Jihadi groups and their supporters use visualisation, sound production and aesthetic means to articulate their cause in online as well as offline contexts. Divided into four thematic sections, the chapters probe Jihadi appropriation of traditional and popular cultural expressions and show how, in turn, political activists appropriate extremist media to oppose and resist the propaganda. By conceptualising militant Islamist audiovisual productions as part of global media aesthetics and practices, the authors shed light on how religious actors, artists, civil society activists, global youth, political forces, security agencies and researchers engage with mediated manifestations of Jihadi ideology to deconstruct, reinforce, defy or oppose the messages.

2020, 344 pages
Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 9781474467513

Metasex
The Discourse of Intimacy and Transgression

by Anne Storch and Nico Nassenstein

This study focuses on the language around sexuality and discourses about sex, labeled by the authors as metasex, from a broad crosslinguistic perspective. Unlike many existing studies on sexting that predominantly take into account the linguistic practices of teenagers often located in the Global North, this book offers a more holistic approach by discussing Southern concepts of body parts, their conceptualization and mediatization (“dick pics”), the interconnectedness of food and sex and its sensualization (“foodporn”) as well as processes of social cohesion around sex, sociability and conviviality (“bonding”). Based on an anthropological linguistic perspective, the authors analyze metasex practices from Nigeria, DR Congo, Uganda, the Mediterranean, and numerous other contexts. Africanist Agnes Brühwiler’s afterword on sex (talk) in Tanzania rounds off the various fresh insights this study offers.

2020, 132 pages
John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9789027207616

Histories of Independence in Côte d’Ivoire
An Ethnography of the Past

by Konstanze N’Guessan

Histories of Independence in Côte d’Ivoire: an Ethnography of the Past, deals with memory work in Côte d’Ivoire and bridges an ethnographic approach with the insights of newer theoretical approaches in historiography. Adopting a long-term perspective from the late 1950s to the present, I attempt to disentangle the condensation of meanings of the lieu de mémoire “Ivorian independence” and explore how different practices of recalling the past complement and/or contradict each other. Histories of independence in Côte d’Ivoire looks at national-day celebrations, academic historiography, oral tradition and memory politics in order to understand how (political) actors mobilize the past in order to produce pleasant presents and futures.

2020, 278 pages
Brill
ISBN: 9789004227583

Swearing and Cursing
Contexts and Practices in a Critical Linguistic Perspective

Edited by Nico Nassenstein und Anne Storch

Reihe: Language and Social Life [LSL], 22

While most of the more recent influential work on swearing has concentrated on English and other languages from the Global North, looking at forms and functions of swear words, this contribution redirects the necessary focus onto a sociolinguistics of swearing that puts transgressive practices in non-Western languages into the focus. The transdisciplinary volume contains innovative case studies that address swearing and cursing in parts of the world characterized by consequences of colonialism and increasingly debated inequalities. Turning away from more conventional and established methodologies and theoretical approaches, the book envisages to address transgressive linguistic practices, performances and contexts in Africa, Asia, America and Europe –including individuals’ creativity, subversive power and agency. Due to its interdisciplinary and non-mainstream focus, this volume is an essential addition to the field of studies.

2020, 335 pages
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN: 9781501517242

Remembering Indepence

by Carola Lentz and David Lowe

Remembering Independence explores the commemoration and remembrance of independence following the great wave of decolonisation after the Second World War. Drawing on case studies from Africa, Asia, and with reference to the Pacific, the authors find that remembering independence was, and still is, highly dynamic. From flag-raising moments to the present day, the transfer of authority from colonial rule to independent nation-states has served as a powerful mnemonic focal point. 2Remembering independence, in state as well as non-state constructions, connects to changing contemporary purposes and competing politic visions. Independence is a flexible idea, both a moment in time and a project, a carrier of hopes and ideals of social justice and freedom, but also of disappointments and frustrated futures. This richly illustrated volume draws attention to the broad range of media employed in remembering independence, ranging from museums and monuments to textual, oral and ritual formats of commemorative events, such as national days. Combining insights from history and anthropology, this book will be essential reading for all students of the history of empire, decolonisation, nation-building and post-colonial politics of memory.

2018, 244 pages
Routledge
ISBN: 9781138905733

Nicht nur Raubkunst!
Sensible Dinge in Museen und universitären Sammlungen

Herausgegeben von Anna-Maria Brandstetter & Vera Hierholzer

Reihe: Language and Social Life [LSL], 22

Öffentliche Sammlungen bewahren vielfach Dinge, die heute aus ethischen Gründen als sensibel eingestuft werden. Im Fokus stehen seit einigen Jahren die NS-Raubkunst und zunehmend auch Kulturgüter, die im Rahmen der Kolonialisierung nach Europa verbracht wurden. Doch gibt es noch viele weitere Arten sensibler Dinge wie sterbliche Überreste, religiöse Artefakte, illegal gehandelte Antiken oder unter den Artenschutz fallende Naturalia. Der Band wählt eine dezidiert vergleichende Perspektive und geht der Frage nach einem angemessenen Umgang mit diesen Objekten disziplinen- und institutionenübergreifend nach. Durch den Erfahrungsaustausch von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern aus Museen und Universitäten nimmt er das Thema erstmals auch systematisch für universitäre Sammlungen in den Blick, die aufgrund ihrer Heterogenität ein besonders breites Spektrum potentiell sensibler Objekte abdecken.

2018, 372 Seiten
Mainz University Press bei V&R
ISBN: 9783847108085

Police in Africa
The Street Level View

Edited by Jan Beek, Mirco Göpfert, Olly Owen and Jonny Steinberg

State police forces in Africa are a curiously neglected subject of study, even within the framework of security issues and African states. This book brings together criminologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and others who have engaged with police forces across the continent and the publics with whom they interact to provide street-level perspectives from below and inside Africa’s police forces. The contributors consider historical trajectories and particular configurations of police power within wider political systems, then examine the ‘inside view’ of police forces as state institutions – the challenges, preoccupations, professional ethics and self-perceptions of police officers – and finally look at how African police officers go about their work in terms of everyday practices and engagements with the public. The studies span the continent, from South Africa to Sierra Leone, and illustrate similarities and differences in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone states, post-socialist, post-military and post-conflict contexts, and amid both centralisation and devolution of policing powers, democratic transitions and new illiberal regimes, all the while keeping a strong ethnographic focus on police officers and their work.

2017, 376 pages
Hurst
ISBN: 9781849045773

Producing Stateness
Police Work in Ghana

by Jan Beek

Jan Beek’s book explores everyday police work in an African country and analyses how police officers, despite prevailing stereotypes about failed states and African police, produce stateness. Drawing on highly readable ethnographic descriptions, the book shows that Ghanaian police practices often involve the exchange of money (bribes), the use of violence and the influence of politicians. However, such informal practices allow police officers to deal with the inconsistent necessities and the social context of their work. Ultimately, Ghanaian police officers are also inspired by a bureaucratic ethos and their practices are guided by it. Stateness, the book argues, is a quality of organizations, gradually emerging out of such everyday encounters. Producing Stateness allows a close look at the realities of police work in Africa and provides surprising insights into the rationalities of policing and state bureaucracies everywhere.

2017, 237 pages
Brill
ISBN: 9789004332171, E-ISBN: 9789004334908

Producing Stateness
Police Work in Ghana

by Jan Beek

This book provides new ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between deportation, anxiety, and justice. As an instrument for controlling international migration, deportation policies may be justified by public authorities as measures responding to anxieties over (unregulated) migration. At the same time, they also bring out uncertainty and unrest to deportable and deported migrants as well as to their social and institutional environments, in which this act of the state may appear deeply unjust. Providing new and complementary insights into what ‘deportation’ as a legal and policy measure actually embraces in social reality, this book argues for an understanding of deportation as a process that begins long before (and carries on long after) the removal from one country to another has taken place. It provides a transnational perspective over the ‘deportation corridor’, covering different places, sites, actors, and institutions. Most importantly, it reasserts the emotional and normative elements inherent to contemporary deportation policies and practices, emphasising the interplay between deportation, perceptions of justice, and national, institutional, and personal anxieties.

2017, 136 pages
Routledge
ISBN 9781138222731