Overview
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, fact—knowledge accepted as true—derives 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.
Full Product Details
Author: Arne S. Steinforth ,
Sabine Klocke-Daffa
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Imprint: Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Edition: 1st ed. 2021
Weight: 0.633kg
ISBN: 9783030769260
ISBN 10: 3030769267
Pages: 459
Publication Date: 22 September 2022
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Author Information
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 Münster, 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 Tübingen, Germany. She has been Deputy Professor at various German universities and is a principal investigator of the Tübingen 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.
