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Challenging authorities : ethnographies of legitimacy and power in eastern and southern Africa / Arne S. Steinforth, Sabine Klocke-Daffa, editors.

9783030769246 (electronic bk.)
3030769240 (electronic bk.)
9783030769239
3030769232

Cham : Palgrave Macmillan, [2021]

©2021

English

1 online resource : illustration (chiefly color)

10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6 doi

HN780.Z9 P6 2021

320.9676

When the notion of alternative facts and the alleged dawning of a postfactual world entered public discourse, social anthropologists found themselves in unexpectedly familiar territory. In theirempirical experience, factknowledge accepted as truederives its salience from social mechanisms of legitimization, thereby demonstrating a deep interconnection with power and authority. In thisperspective, fact is a continually contested and volatile social category. Due to the specific histories of their colonial and post-independence experience, African societies offer a particularly broad array of insights into social processes of juxtaposition, opposition, and even outright competition between different postulated authorities. The contributions to the present volume explore the variety of ways in which authority is contested in Southern and Eastern Africa, investigating localized discourses on which institution, what kind of knowledge, or whose expertise is accepted as authoritative, thus highlighting the specificities and pluralities in modern societies. This edited volume engages with larger theoretical questions regarding power and authority in the context of (post)colonial states (neo)traditional authority, claiming space, conflict and (in)justice, and contestations of knowledge. It offers in-depth critical analyses of ethnographic data that put contemporary African phenomena on equal footing with current controversies in North America, Europe, and other global settings. Arne S. Steinforth is Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at York University, Toronto, Canada. Previously, he has been Senior Research Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics" at the University of Munster, Germany. His research and prior publications focus on issues of mental disorder and society as well as power, politics, and cosmology in Southern Africa. Sabine Klocke-Daffa is Senior Researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tubingen, Germany. She has been Deputy Professor at various German universities and is a principal investigator of the Tubingen Collaborative Research Center "ResourceCultures", funded by the German Research Foundation. She has done intensive research in Southern Africa focusing on social, political, and religious issues

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Description based on print version record.

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