Postcolonial Borderland Legacies of Anglo–French Partition in West Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
William F. S. Miles
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
National Level ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Colonial Legacies ◽  
The One ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
And Behavior

Abstract:More than five decades after independence, Africa still struggles with the legacies of colonial partition. On the territorial frontiers between the postcolonial inheritors of the two major colonial powers, Great Britain and France, the continuing impact of European colonialism remains most acute. On the one hand, the splitting of erstwhile homogeneous ethnic groups into British and French camps gave rise to new national identities; on the other hand, it circumvented any possibility of sovereignty via ethnic solidarity. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the ethnic groups that were divided between English- and French-speaking states in West Africa, let alone the African continent writ large. This article joins postcolonial ethnography to the emerging field of comparative borderland studies. It argues that, although norms of state-based identity have been internalized in the Anglophone–Francophone borderlands, indigenous bases of association and behavior continue to define life along the West African frontier in ways that undermine state sovereignty. Although social scientists tend to focus on national- and sub-national-level analyses, and increasingly on the effects of globalization on institutional change, study of the African borderlands highlights the continuing importance of colonial legacies and grassroots-derived research.

Ethnicity of Turkic Central Asia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Finke
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Shared Culture ◽  
Patrilineal Descent ◽  
Mongol Empire ◽  
The One

Ethnic identity is a fuzzy concept for several reasons. On the one hand, the very question of what is an ethnic group is not an easy one to answer. On the other hand, once this is established for a specific case, it is yet another task to define who belongs to it, and who does not, and how stable such assignments actually are. This is as true for Central Asia as for any other place in the world, and the fact that, for earlier periods of history, the records—both native ones and others—use a great variety of terms for human populations, does not make it any easier. Thus, it is largely unclear, which of the tribal groups or early statehoods correspond to a contemporary understanding of ethnicity. Anthropological scholarship on Central Asia has, by contrast, stressed the rather vague and floating categories that people in the region used to define themselves and others. According to this view, the creation of ethnic groups was largely a product of more or less artificial engineering during Soviet times. Before, local communities and extended kin groups, regularly reshuffled and redefined in history, were of much greater importance for people’s identification and alliances than language or assumed genetic ties. While there is some truth in that, the picture is more complex. Particularly among the Turkic-speaking groups in the region, a steady process of consolidation set in following the decline of the Mongol Empire, resulting in the emergence of contemporary ethnic groups out of earlier configurations. The underlying concepts of attachment and self-understanding vary, however, and can be distinguished in two different modes, roughly corresponding to the divide between nomadic and sedentary groups. Among the former, the idea of patrilineal descent, or a genealogical model, is at the bottom of internal divisions as well as external demarcation; in the oases, the prime criteria are proximity and shared culture, or a territorial model of ethnic identity. Kazaks and Uzbeks respectively represent examples of these two models. Processes of ethnic demarcation have, however, been greatly accelerated during the Soviet period and its aftermath. Today, a hasty search for national identities can be observed across the region; while following lines of Soviet ethnicity concepts, these identities fundamentally change their understanding as well as inter-ethnic and majority-minority relations. This is still a very open and dynamic process leading to new (inter-)ethnic constellations and political power relations.

The Patron-Client Concept and Macro-Politics: Prospects and Problems

1974 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert R. Kaufman
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
National Level ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Mass Publics ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
And Behavior

In order to make sense of the endless complexities of social life, social scientists conceptualize the empirical world in terms of interlocking systems and subsystems of roles and behavior, holding some of these spheres constant so that others can be studied and understood. This is a necessary and desirable aspect of social scientific enterprise. It may well be, however, that too many aspects of human interaction are held constant by the conventional ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ distinctions that dominate the study of developing nations. Although we have a growing body of data about the attitudes, values, and behaviors of the individuals who comprise the mass publics of such nations, we have relatively little systematic information about how this micro-level analysis feeds into and affects the processes and actors that are visible at the national level of political life. Most countrycentered macro-studies, in turn, make few, if any, systematic references to variables extending beyond national boundaries into the international environment. Such criticism seems to call for a more extensive analysis across systems—analysis which not only takes into account the attributes of individuals and of national institutions, but which also links these units to one another and to a variety of other sub- and supra-national structures and processes as well.

Decline of Ideology: A Dissent and an Interpretation

1966 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph La Palombara
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
The United States ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Intellectuals ◽  
The One ◽  
And Behavior

With increasing frequency and self-assurance, the scientific objectivity of American social science is proclaimed by some of its prominent practitioners. Various explanations are offered for the onset of social science's Golden Age, but central to most of them is the claim that modern social science has managed to resolve Mannheim's Paradox, namely, that in the pursuit of the truth the social scientist himself is handicapped by the narrow focus and distortions implicit in ideological thought. Presumably, the social scientist can now probe any aspect of human organization and behavior as dispassionately as physical scientists observe the structure of the atom or chemical reactions. For this reason, it is claimed by some that the ideologically liberated social scientists—at least in the United States—can expect to be co-opted into the Scientific Culture, or that segment of society that is presumably aloof from and disdainful toward the moralistic speculations and the tender-heartedness of the literary intellectuals.The behaviorial “revolution” in political science may have run its course, but it has left in its wake both obscurantist criticisms of empiricism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an unquestioning belief in “science.” Quite often the latter belief is not merely anti-historical and anti-philosophical but also uncritical about the extent to which empirical observations can be colored by the very orientation to values that one seeks to control in rigorous empirical research.The claims of modern social scientists are greatly buttressed by the views of Talcott Parsons.

Western Education and the Rise of a New African Elite in West Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Apollos Okwuchi Nwauwa
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Western Education ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
Indispensable Tool ◽  
The One ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The 19Th Century

With the arrival of Europeans in West Africa in the 15th century, which preceded formal conquest and pacification, missionaries took the lead in introducing Western education as an indispensable tool for effective evangelism. Subsequently, the various European colonial governments appropriated education as a means of consolidating colonial rule in West Africa. By the middle of the 19th century, Western education began to produce a new, educated elite, at the core of which were “liberated slaves” in Sierra Leone. Western education produced its own contradictions. On the one hand, it produced educated hybrids who were alienated from their own peoples and cultures and who collaborated with Europeans to entrench colonialism in West Africa. On the other hand, the new elite, educated both in Africa and overseas, subsequently morphed into the new nationalists who became valuable agents for the liquidation of European imperialism in Africa. The emergent institutions of higher learning and the three new universities in West African founded in the aftermath of World War II became hotbeds of intellectual discourse just as the debate over the need for adaptation and Africanization resurfaced. Following the end of colonial rule, the “new elite,” now expanding in number, continued to provide contentious, neocolonial leadership and direction for development in postcolonial West Africa. Thus, despite its undesirable effect on European colonialism, Western education played into the hands of the educated elite who appropriated and deployed its latent, potent force in order to dislodge Europeans from Africa.

scholarly journals Putting the History Back into Ethnicity: Enslavement, Religion, and Cultural Brokerage in the Construction of Mandinka/Jola and Ewe/Agotime Identities in West Africa, c. 1650–1930

2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 920-948 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Nugent
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Administrative Practices ◽  
Urban Migrants ◽  
Cultural Brokerage ◽  
Constructivist Approaches ◽  
Generally True

It does not always happen that academic debates result in an agreed victory or a tidy consensus. As often as not, the protagonists lose interest, or the terrain itself shifts. For that reason, it is worth remarking on the fact that after around two decades of debating the roots of ethnicity in Africa, something like a consensus has in fact emerged. The colonial thesis that Africans were born into “tribes” that were rooted in a timeless past has been effectively critiqued by historians and social scientists alike. Arguably beginning with John Iliffe, revisionists advanced a challenging antithesis, namely that colonial administrative practices generated the very identities that officials and missionaries took for granted. In Iliffe's famous formulation: “The British wrongly believed that Tanganyikans belonged to tribes; Tanganyikans created tribes to function within the colonial framework.” Although Iliffe coined the term “the creation of tribes,” it was Terence Ranger's contribution to The Invention of Tradition that really sparked an interest in the historicity of ethnicity in Africa. In fact, this was only one facet of Ranger's overall argument, one that was a good deal more nuanced than he has sometimes been given credit for. Be that as it may, the time was evidently ripe for a historiographical break, and during the 1980s and 1990s historians set about demonstrating that particular ethnic groups were indeed the product of an interplay between European interventions—by administrators, missionaries, employers, and colonial ethnographers—and selective African appropriations—through the agency of Christian converts, educated elites, urban migrants, and rural patriarchs. The steady accretion of case-study material has subsequently culminated in reflections that have distilled the broad comparative lessons. These have been helpful in creating a sense of agreement that the debate was necessary, whilst underscoring that a law of diminishing returns has set in, something more generally true of debates about constructivist approaches to identity.

Researching (with) Major Food Retailers

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Evans
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Major Food ◽  
Food Retailers ◽  
Food Retailer ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Opening Up

This paper considers the relationship between social science and the food industry, and it suggests that collaboration can be intellectually productive and morally rewarding. It explores the middle ground that exists between paid consultancy models of collaboration on the one hand and a principled stance of nonengagement on the other. Drawing on recent experiences of researching with a major food retailer in the UK, I discuss the ways in which collaborating with retailers can open up opportunities for accessing data that might not otherwise be available to social scientists. Additionally, I put forward the argument that researchers with an interest in the sustainability—ecological or otherwise—of food systems, especially those of a critical persuasion, ought to be empirically engaging with food businesses. I suggest that this is important in terms of generating better understandings of the objectionable arrangements that they seek to critique, and in terms of opening up conduits through which to affect positive changes. Cutting across these points is the claim that while resistance to commercial engagement might be misguided, it is nevertheless important to acknowledge the power-geometries of collaboration and to find ways of leveling and/or leveraging them. To conclude, I suggest that universities have an important institutional role to play in defining the terms of engagement as well as maintaining the boundaries between scholarship and consultancy—a line that can otherwise become quite fuzzy when the worlds of commerce and academic research collide.

INNOVATIVE SOCIETY: A SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM IN CHINA

2020 ◽  
pp. 50-59
Author(s):  
Weichzhen` Gao
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Credit System ◽  
Educational Mission ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Social Credit ◽  
Road Project ◽  
Patterns Of Behavior ◽  
The One ◽  
And Behavior

The basic principles of SCS implementation are as follows: Formation of sustainable social structure and its operational management; Monitoring and correction of social transformations and behavior of the general population: transparency as a major factor in the life of an innovative society; Stimulating competition as a motivation for success. Due to the transparency of social life, different patterns of behavior in different conditions are published in the information space of the society. Accordingly, actionable life scenarios are made available to the general public, which is fulfilling an educational mission regarding adaptation mechanisms in an innovative society; the SCS system is a significant component of the national strategy of integration and consolidation of the Chinese innovation society; carrying out softpolicy foreign policy: The positive experience of the Chinese innovation society in implementing SCS is a prerequisite for expanding its area of application in Asian, African and Latin American countries, especially the countries participating in the One Belt One Road project. SCS covers all spheres of social life of the modern Chinese citizen, forms a sustainable form of accountability to the society for the content and flow of their daily activities, aspirations and preferences.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Colm Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
The Third ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Sexual Part ◽  
The One ◽  
And Behavior

The introduction first sets out some preliminary definitions of sex, sexuality, and gender. It then turns from the sexual part of Sexual Identities to the identity part. A great deal of confusion results from failing to distinguish between identity in the sense of a category with which one identifies (categorial identity) and identity in the sense of a set of patterns that characterize one’s cognition, emotion, and behavior (practical identity). The second section gives a brief summary of this difference. The third and fourth sections sketch the relation of the book to social constructionism and queer theory, on the one hand, and evolutionary-cognitive approaches to sex, sexuality, and gender, on the other. The fifth section outlines the value of literature in not only illustrating, but advancing a research program in sex, sexuality, and gender identity. Finally, the introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this volume.

Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting

2006 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 157-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edna Ullmann-Margalit
Keyword(s):  
Decision Theory ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Atomic Level ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Newtonian Physics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Separate Treatment ◽  
The One

I want to focus on some of the limits of decision theory that are of interest to the philosophical concern with practical reasoning and rational choice. These limits should also be of interest to the social-scientists' concern with Rational Choice.Let me start with an analogy. Classical Newtonian physics holds good and valid for middle-sized objects, but not for the phenomena of the very little, micro, sub-atomic level or the very large, macro, outer-space level: different theories, concepts and laws apply there. Similarly, I suggest that we might think of the theory of decisionmaking as relating to middle-sized, ordinary decisions, and to them only. There remain the two extremes, the very ‘small’ decisions on the one hand and the very ‘big’ decisions on the other. These may pose a challenge to the ordinary decision theory and may consequently require a separate treatment.

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