The papers collected in this volume were first presented at a conference on 'Globalization, development and the making of consumers: what are collective identities for?' which was held in The... Show moreThe papers collected in this volume were first presented at a conference on 'Globalization, development and the making of consumers: what are collective identities for?' which was held in The Hague, The Netherlands, on 13-16 March 1997. The papers are concerned with the challenge to the development paradigm presented by its potential submersion within processes of economic globalization. The following chapters are on Africa: The accountability of commodities in a global marketplace: the cases of Bolivian coca and Tanzanian honey (Alberto Arce, Eleanor Fisher) - The Pentecostal gift: Ghanaian charismatic churches and the moral innocence of the global economy (Rijk van Dijk) - 'Progress' as discursive spectacle: but what comes after development? (David Mills on Uganda) - Christian mind and worldly matters: religion and materiality in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast (Birgit Meyer) - Mary's room: a case study on becoming a consumer in Francistown, Botswana (Wim van Binsbergen) - Second-hand clothing encounters in Zambia: global discourses, Western commodities and local histories (Karen Tranberg Hansen) - Globalization and the making of consumers: Zambian kitchen parties (Thera Rasing) - African corruption in the context of globalization (Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan) - Market expansion, globalized discourses and changing identity politics in Kenya (Andreas van Nahl) - The production of translocality: initiation in the sacred grove in southern Senegal (Ferdinand de Jong) - The production of 'primitiveness' and identity: Surma-tourist interactions (Jan Abbink) - Anthropology, identity politics, consumption and development in post-apartheid South Africa (P.A. McAllister) - Rural democratization in Zanzibar: the 1995 general elections (Greg Cameron). Show less
The author first traces the successive approaches to African chieftaincy in the course of the 20th century, contrasting the dualistic and the transactionalist models. He then examines the thesis... Show moreThe author first traces the successive approaches to African chieftaincy in the course of the 20th century, contrasting the dualistic and the transactionalist models. He then examines the thesis of the resilient chief by considering a case from western central Zambia. He shows that the power base of local chiefs and their room for manouvring is weakening and that the chiefs are experimenting with new strategies in order to survive. They are driven into the arms of new actors on the local scene, against whom they are rather defenceless. One such new actor is an ethnic voluntary organization, the Kazanga Cultural Association. This NGO has been amazingly successful in bridging indigenous politics and the State in a process of ethnicization. Gradually, the revival of chieftainship which this NGO has brought about, is turning out to lead not to resilience but to impotent folklorization. Chiefs who are unable to link their symbolic capital - their ceremonial functions - to the experimental worlds of the urbanites, find themselves locked into a position of declining significance. Show less
