Death of a king, death of a kingdom? Social pluralism and succession to high office in Dagbon, northern Ghana

2006 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt MacGaffey
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ghana ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Pluralism

The ongoing dynastic dispute in the kingdom of Dagbon in northern Ghana, which led to the killing of the king in 2002, remains unresolved and perhaps unresolvable. This paper updates Staniland's account of Dagomba politics from 1880 to 1974, and elaborates on the contradictions inherent in the social pluralism of a post-colonial state.

Vaccinating against Vasoori: Eradicating smallpox in the ‘model’ princely state of Travancore, 1804–1946

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-386
Author(s):  
Aparna Nair
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Herd Immunity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Medical Histories

The social and medical histories of vaccination are increasingly important in the twenty-first century, as anti-vaccination narratives threaten herd immunity across the world. Much of the historical scholarship on vaccination in India focusses on smallpox, largely in the context of the colonial or post-colonial state. This article explores the histories of this policy in the ‘model’ princely state of Travancore. The essay integrates medical and social history as it tracks the introduction and progress of vaccination into the princely state and examines the process as biomedical discourse about disease and public health, and as a set of corporeal practices. The article also examines the broader cultural meanings ascribed to biomedicine in this princely state and the efforts to construct a ‘modern’ corporeal consciousness through direct and indirect interventions. Finally, the article also engages with the question of what exactly the introduction of biomedicine entailed for the average resident of this region in terms of disease control and prevention.

Women in Equatorial Guinea

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Castillo-Rodriguez ◽  
Alba Valenciano Mañé
Keyword(s):  
Central Africa ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Equatorial Guinea ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Political Capacity ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Republic

Women who live in the territories that today comprise the Republic of Equatorial Guinea experienced important material and social changes during pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial times. They faced crucial imbalances in terms of their social and political position: while Guinean women had a vital role in household management and child rearing, in most cases they did not control their income nor the circulation of goods and people within their society. While they have historic commonalities with women in other parts of Central Africa, their particular experiences during the slave trade and Spanish colonialism, including the deployment of the national Catholic colonial state during Franco’s dictatorship in the territory, contributed to their unique history and situation today. Francoist colonialism, which lasted from 1936 until Equatorial Guinea’s independence from Spain in 1968, strengthened the existing patriarchal structure of the societies living within the country. Independence did not substantially change the social and political roles of women in Equatorial Guinea but nevertheless opened up new horizons for them. Since 1968, three generations of empowered women—teachers, traders, farmers, writers, and politicians—have contributed to the creation of alternative narratives for women and increased the scope of their role in the public domain. Despite these new avenues for women, Equatorial Guinea’s current regime and economy not only relies on extracting rents from an oil-based economy but also extracting the organizing and political capacity of ordinary Guinean women. As before, they still face the challenge of managing their households without controlling their larger economic circumstances while lacking political power in the country.

Unita and Ethnic Nationalism in Angola

1989 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda M. Heywood
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Allocation Of Resources ◽  
Ethnic Nationalism ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S

Over the last decade or so scholars in the social sciences have been reassessing works on the rise of nationalism in Africa published in the 1960s and early 1970s. These earlier studies, written during the euphoria following independence and the spread of liberation ideology, regarded the transfer of power to the African élite as signalling the end of subjugation to European control and the emergence of modern African states.1This revision focused on the post-colonial state and its rôle as a mediator between competing groups for power and the allocation of resources.2Since then, the trend has generated a revival in understanding ethnicity which is again seen as a major force in most of the crises which have troubled Africa.

scholarly journals A Bibliographic Survey on State-Minority Contestations in Post-Colonial Sri Lanka

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 48 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. M. Fazil
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Research Work ◽  
The State ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
State Constitution ◽  
The Social ◽  
Extensive Body

There is an extensive body of literature that delves deeply into the question of how a state is constituted, by examining it from various theoretical and empirical perspectives. Scholars engaged in the field of political science, as well as in other fields such as the social sciences, are constantly endeavouring to explain the myriad ways in which states are formed in different regions of the world. According to one set of academics, the social setup that prevailed in most of the post-colonial states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America was mainly due to the plurality of their multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-cultural populations. This plurality had a profound effect on the way the state was formed. A significant volume of literature on Sri Lanka too is available, much of which approaches the question of state formation and reconstitution from the standpoint of ethnicity and nationalism. This survey reviews both the theoretical and empirical literature on state constitution/ formation and pays special attention to three main themes; viz. theories on state constitution (formation), research on post-colonial state formation, and studies about Sri Lankan politics. The state-in-society theory is studied with focus on the crucial question of how state and society transform and constitute one another. This is a qualitative study based on text analysis. A wide selection of existing literature was reviewed. This survey shows that there is a paucity of research work on post-colonial state formation in Sri Lanka and state-minority contestations. It also draws attention to the research gaps in existing literature and the need to explore them further.

(الإرهاب الدولي والأمن الفكري والروحي ودولة ما بعد الاستعمار: دراسة في نظام القيم في القرآن (القسم الأول (Global Terrorism, Spiritual-Intellectual Security and the Post-Colonial State: A Study on the Qur’anic Valuational System (Part: 1))

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-104
Author(s):  
إبراهيم محمد زين
Keyword(s):  
Just War ◽  
Security System ◽  
Security Systems ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
System Part ◽  
Global Terrorism

الملخّص يهدف هذا البحث لبيان أن السبيل الناجح لمواجهة الإرهاب الدولي المعاصر الملتبس بدعاوي الجهاد الإسلامي وإحياء دولة الخلافة الإسلامية هو التركز على معاني الأمن الفكري والروحي في الإسلام وهذا الاتجاه في المباحثة يُعيد النظر في طرائق قضايا الجهاد ويميز بين ما هو عقائدي ومرتبط بنظام الإسلام الكلي وبين ما هو من مجال حروب الفتنة والصعلكة.  الكلمات المفتاحيّة: الجهاد، حروب الصعلكة، حروب الفتنة، الأمن الروحي والفكري.              Abstract This study focuses on the most effective way of combating global terrorism that utilizes the banner of Jihad and restoration of the Khilafa system of governance. It should be emphasized that there is a dire need for a new line of investigation concerning the issue of Jihad that pays more attention to both spiritual and intellectual security systems in Islam. This requires a distinction to be made between what is universalistic in the Islamic system and what is particular. In this regard one has to differentiate between acts of just war and those of economic or sedition wars. Keywords: Jihad, economic war, sedition war, spiritual-intellectual security system.

Jumbos and Jumping Devils

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nisha P R
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Social History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of

Jumbos and Jumping Devils is an original and pioneering exploration of not only the social history of the subcontinent but also of performance and popular culture. The domain of analysis is entirely novel and opens up a bolder approach of laying a new field of historical enquiry of South Asia. Trawling through an extraordinary set of sources such as colonial and post-colonial records, newspaper reports, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, photographs, and oral interviews, the author brings out a fascinating account of the transnational landscape of physical cultures, human and animal performers, and the circus industry. This book should be of interest to a wide range of readers from history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies to analysts of history of performance and sports in the subcontinent.

Usurpers of Technology: Train Robbery and Theft in Egypt, 1876–1904

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Xiaoyue Li
Keyword(s):  
Negative Impact ◽  
Centralized Control ◽  
Informal Networks ◽  
Grassroots Activism ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
State Regulations ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Wealth ◽  
Everyday Knowledge

Abstract This article examines banditry, embezzlement, and other insider crimes along Egyptian railway lines during a period when British officials exerted centralized control over the Egyptian railway and financial austerity had a negative impact on the rail sector. By exploring the motives and tactics of railway crimes, I posit that criminals, by making claims on and use of the technology outside the purview of state regulations, expressed their heterogeneous desires to redistribute social wealth, repurpose the technological promise of modern railways, and confound intentions of colonial governance. Using new archival materials, this article utilizes a bottom-up approach to examine grassroots activism, everyday knowledge, informal networks, and the social mores and norms that criminals harnessed to discern infrastructural vulnerabilities and elude surveillance from the colonial state. Ultimately, I contend that criminal acts uncovered social crises otherwise hidden under the shadow of the exterior prosperity and stability of late 19th-century Egypt.

Baptising Pandita Ramabai: Faith and religiosity in the nineteenth-century social reform movements of colonial India

2021 ◽  
pp. 001946462110203
Author(s):  
Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati ◽  
Prithvi Sinha ◽  
Sneha Garg
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Annual Reports ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Pandita Ramabai ◽  
Role Of Religion

This essay aims to understand the role of religion in the social work of Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922). By focusing on a twenty-five-year period commencing with her conversion to Christianity in 1883, we argue that religion constructed a political framework for her work in Sharada Sadan and Mukti Mission. There is a lacuna in the conventional scholarship that underplays the nuances of religion in Ramabai’s reform efforts, which we try to fill by conceptualising faith and religiosity as two distinct signifiers of her private and public religious presentations respectively. Drawing on her published letters, the annual reports of the Ramabai Association in America, and a number of evangelical periodicals published during her lifetime, we analyse how she explored Christianity not just as a personal faith but also as a conduit for funds. The conversion enabled her access to American supporters, concomitantly consolidating their claim over her social work. Her peculiar religious identity—a conflation of Hinduism and Christianity—provoked strong protests from the Hindu orthodoxy while leading to a fall-out with the evangelists at the same time. Ramabai shaped the public portrayal of her religiosity to maximise support from American patrons, the colonial state, and liberal Indians, resisting the orthodoxy’s oppositions with these material exploits. Rather than surrendering to patriarchal cynicism, she capitalised on the socio-political volatilities of colonial India to further the nascent women’s movement.

Locating the politics of a Sierra Leonean chiefdom

Africa ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Fanthorpe
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Breeding Grounds ◽  
Primary Means

The chiefdoms of Sierra Leone are institutions of colonial origin but nevertheless continue to serve as local government units in the post-colonial state. The prevailing view among scholars is that these institutions have little basis in indigenous political culture, and have furthermore become breeding grounds of political corruption. This view has tended to elide anthropological analysis of internal chiefdom politics. However, it is argued in this article that such conclusions are premature. With reference to the Biriwa Limba chiefdom of northern Sierra Leone, it is shown that historical precedent, in many cases relating to prominent political figures of the late nineteenth century, continues to serve as a primary means of ordering local rights in land, settlement and political representation. This phenomenon is not a product of innate conservatism but emerges rather as a pragmatic response to the persistent failure of successive Sierra Leone administrations to extend modern measures of citizenship to the bulk of the rural populace. Rights and properties have become progressively localised in villages originally registered for tax collection in the early colonial era. Here one finds one of the most telling legacies of the British policy of indirect rule in post-colonial Sierra Leone.

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