Suspended in 2025/26
AN477      Half Unit
Topics in the Anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

It is preferred that students will normally have done preliminary courses in Anthropology or have a Social Science background, but there is some flexibility. Students should consult the course lecturer.

This course gives students a critical understanding of ethnographic and theoretical writing on sub-Saharan Africa. Grounded in some classic debates around tradition and modernity (kinship-based polities vs states; studies on occult knowledge vs rationally-oriented political economy approaches; ‘objective’ class vs forms of identification such as tribe or race), it explores questions about how the sub-continent’s societies orient themselves, and respond to new precarities, in a postcolonial and neoliberal age. How are changing urban realities experienced and expressed in popular culture? How are the politics of land and belonging being reshaped? Do youth have a future of work in post-industrial Africa - and what new gender identities are they developing? Are there specifically African forms of knowledge? What is postcolonial about the ‘postcolony’? Is Europe ‘evolving towards Africa’, as has been maintained? The course also thinks through the role of fiction, non-ethnographic writing and non-academic voices in shaping anthropology on the sub-continent.

15 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

The contact hours listed above are the minimum expected. 

Essay (1500 words)

Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course. This will consist of a formative review written during term time, to be evaluated by and discussed with the course lecturer. The formative review will allow for students' individuality and expression and allow them to bring their own interest in current debates into interplay with course materials. 

Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 4 of term.

Adebanwi, Wale. 2017. The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa: Beyond the Margins. Oxford: James Currey.

Comaroff, J and JL. 2012. Theory from the South or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa Anthropological Forum 22 (2).

Englund, Harri. 2006. Prisoners of Freedom. Human Rights and the African Poor. Berkeley: UC Press.

Geschiere, Peter. 2013. Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust: Africa in comparison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Guyer, Jane. 2014. Marginal Gains: monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Moore, H. L. 2013. Still life: hopes, desires and satisfactions. London, John Wiley & Sons.

Piot, Charles 1999. Remotely Global: village modernity in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Essay (100%, 3500 words)