Modernity on a shoestring
Dimensions of globalization, consumption and development in Africa and beyond
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Book offer: Modernity on a shoestring Dimensions of globalization, consumption and development in Africa and beyond |
MODERNITY
ON A SHOESTRING
Dimensions
of globalization, consumption and
development in Africa and beyond
edited
by
Richard Fardon, Wim van Binsbergen & Rijk van Dijk
hardback with full-colour cover, 432 pp.
published in 1999 by EIDOS (European Inter-University
Development Opportunities Study Group)
Leiden & London
ISBN (Dutch) —90.5448.037.8
(British) —0—7286—03012
cover illustration: business machines retail outlet in
Francistown, Botswana, 1989 (photo Wim van Binsbergen)
The editors:
Richard Fardon is Professor of African and Caribbean
anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, United Kingdom
Wim van Binsbergen is Professor of Foundations of Intercultural
Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Chair of the Theme
Group on Globalization, African Studies Centre, Leiden, The
Netherlands
Rijk van Dijk is Researcher and Deputy Chair of the Theme Group
on Globalization, African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Modernity
on a shoestring addresses the challenge posed to the
development paradigm represented by its potential submersion
within processes of economic globalization. Is development only
another of the discourses and practices of globalization? Is it
best understood in the context of other such forces and
tendencies?
The
chapters of this book derive from an interdisciplinary conference
in 1997; the predominance of Africanist papers reflects not only
the editors’ regional specialisation but also the peculiarly
tragic position that sub-Saharan Africa has come to occupy in any
discussion of development, which also gives our title Modernity
on a Shoestring its particular resonance.
Following the original conference’s
keynote address, Part I addresses problems of representing moral
accountability in the relations between consumers and producers
of development. The seven papers in this section (including case
studies on Sudan, Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, India and Bolivia) can
be read as a series of logical steps in an interrogation of the
sites at which development is defined and contested: in the
interrelation between donors and recipients, in the evaluation of
commodities moving between North and South, in local
appropriations of a future to be achieved through progress and
development under the hegemony of market culture. Contestations
over moral accountability entail moments of collective
identification.
Part II focuses more narrowly on the relations
between locally situated capacities to deploy commodities (often
manufactured elsewhere) and to make their consumption meaningful
in terms of modernity, progress, development and cognate ideas of
contemporary or future orientation. It begins with a series of
four African examples (from Ghana, Botswana, and two from Zambia)
celebrating the cultured ingenuity of Africans’ consumption.
After an account of the African corruption complex, these
chapters are offset against studies of consumption and lifestyles
in India and Thailand.
Part III is explicitly concerned with
collective identities and their relation to several senses of
globalization, in Kenya, Senegal, Ethiopia, South Africa,
Zanzibar and among the Black population of Venezuela.
A concluding paper provides an overview
of the book’s argument as a whole against a background of
studies in development and globalization since the 1980s, and
highlights the importance and ambiguities of collective
identifications in the delineation of the increasingly widespread
global phenomenon of modernity on a shoestring.
Table of contents:
List
of illustrations
List of contributors
Convenors' Preface
1 Key note: Globalization, consumption and development - WIM
VAN BINSBERGEN
Part
I. Consumption, development and accountability: North and South
2 On consuming and being consumed - GUDRUN DAHL
3 The paradox of the competent child and the global childhood
agenda - OLGA NIEUWENHUYS
4 The accountability of commodities in a global marketplace: the
cases of Bolivian coca and Tanzanian honey - ALBERTO ARCE AND
ELEANOR FISHER
5 The Pentecostal gift: Ghanaian charismatic churches and the
moral innocence of the global economy - RIJK VAN DIJK
6 'Progress' as discursive spectacle: but what comes after
development? - DAVID MILLS
7 The experience of globalization: Indian youth and
non-consumption (the birth of an alternative development rhetoric
to save the world) - KATHINKA SINHA-KERKHOFF
8 Globalized market culture and market fundamentalism -
HANS-DIETER EVERS AND SOLVAY GERKE
Part. II Identification: consumption and modernity
9 Christian mind and worldly matters: religion and
materiality in nineteenth-century Gold Coast - BIRGIT MEYER
10 Mary's room: a case study on becoming a consumer in
Francistown, Botswana - WIM VAN BINSBERGEN
11 Secondhand clothing encounters in Zambia: global discourses,
Western commodities and local histories - KAREN TRANBERG
HANSEN
12 Globalization and the making of consumers: Zambian kitchen
parties - THERA RASING
13 African corruption in the context of globalization -
JEAN-PIERRE OLIVIER DE SARDAN
14 The woman in the advertisement: historical explorations
through a type - R. SRIVATSAN
15 Communities of practice, communities of interest: the making
of consumers in south Thailand - ALEXANDER HORSTMANN
Part
III Identification: globalization and ethnic politics
16 Market expansion, globalized discourses and changing
identity politics in Kenya - ANDREAS VAN NAHL
17 The production of translocality: initiation in the sacred
grove in south Senegal - FERDINAND DE JONG
18 The production of 'primitiveness' and identity: Surma-tourist
interactions - JAN ABBINK
19 Anthropology, identity politics, consumption and development
in post-apartheid South Africa - PATRICK MCALLISTER
20 Rural democratization in Zanzibar: the 1995 general elections
- GREG CAMERON
21 The production and consumption of black identity: the case of
the 'Afrovenezuelans' - BART DUYSENS
22 Concluding note: Consumption and collective identification:
the question of public goods - RICHARD FARDON
Index
This empirically rich and theoretically stimulating book will be essential reading for development sociologists and economists, anthropologists, researchers in the fields of cultural studies and globalization, and policy makers.
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