Cutting and Connecting : : 'Afrinesian' Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange / / ed. by Knut Christian Myhre.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2016
• MitwirkendeR: Englund, Harri,; Hultin, Niklas,; Myhre, Knut Christian,; Niehaus, Isak,; Reed, Adam,; Rodima-Taylor, Daivi,; Sommerfelt, Tone,; Vokes, Richard,; Yarrow, Thomas,
• HerausgeberIn: Myhre, Knut Christian,
• Place / Publishing House: New York ;, Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (162 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Cutting and Connecting—‘Afrinesian’ Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange -- Chapter 1 Kuru, AIDS, and Witchcraft: Reconfiguring Culpability in Melanesia and Africa -- Chapter 2 Law, Opacity, and Information in Urban Gambia -- Chapter 3 From Cutting to Fading: A Relational Perspective on Marriage Exchange and Sociality in Rural Gambia -- Chapter 4 Gathering Up Mutual Help: Work, Personhood, and Relational Freedoms in Tanzania and Melanesia -- Chapter 5 Rethinking Ethnographic Comparison: Persons and Networks in Africa and Melanesia -- Chapter 6 Membering and Dismembering: The Poetry and Relationality of Animal Bodies in Kilimanjaro -- Chapter 7 The Place of Theory: Rights, Networks, and Ethnographic Comparison -- Afterword: Something to Take Back—Melanesia Anthropology after Relationality -- Index