Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa: Beyond the Margins

Description: Multi-disciplinary examination of the role of ordinary African people as agents in the generation and distribution of well-being in modern Africa.

What are the fundamental issues, processes, agency and dynamics that shape the political economy of life in modern Africa? In this book, the contributors - experts in anthropology, history, political science, economics, conflict and peace studies, philosophy and language - examine the opportunities and constraints placed on living, livelihoods and sustainable life on the continent. Reflecting on why and how the political economy of life approach is essential for understanding the social process in modern Africa, they engage with the intellectual oeuvre of the influential Africanist economic anthropologist Jane Guyer, who provides an Afterword. The contributors analyse the political economy of everyday life as it relates to money and currency; migrant labour forces and informal and formal economies; dispossession of land; debt and indebtedness; socio-economic marginality; and the entrenchment of colonial and apartheid pasts.

Brief description: David Pratten is Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa and Director of the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Since 2010 David has been Co-Editor of AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institut. His publications include Nigeria: The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (2007), which won the Amaury Talbot Prize awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Review Quotes: An essential volume. For scholars of Africa, several of the contributors and perspectives may well be familiar (more than half of the book's contributors are professors, who have published widely), but the gathering of critical perspectives offers a rare opportunity to take stock of what James Ferguson calls a 'shared intellectual sensibility' (Foreword, p. xvii). For those who are not so familiar with African research, or who may want to move beyond policy approaches, this book is a formidable place to start.-- "AFRICA AT LSE BLOG"