International records / OpenAlex research

Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa

What role does ritual play in the everyday lives of modern Africans? How are so-called traditional cultural forms deployed by people seeking empowerment in a world where modernity has failed to deliver on its promises? Some of the essays in Modernity and Its Malcontents address familiar anthropological issues but treat them in fresh ways, situating them amidst the polyphonies of contemporary Africa. Others explore distinctly non-traditional subjects - among them the Nigerian popular press and soul-eating in Niger - in such a way as to confront the conceptual limits of Western social science. A…