Till Förster

• University of Basel

Imagination is a fundamental part of human agency. It is performed from day to day. Without imagining what we aim at, without imagining a possible future, we would not act at all. However, imagination is not always practiced in the same way. To some degree, it is performed habitually, but there is always an element of the unfamiliar in it because w...

Bodily participation provides insights that mere observation cannot offer. Based on an ethnographic vignette, this article explores how bodily interactions in ethnographic fieldwork raise awareness for non-observational knowledge and hidden social practices. It looks at how such encounters shape all participants, including the ethnographer, and how...

John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, editors. The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. viii + 361 pp. Figures. Index. $105. Cloth. ISBN: 978-0-226-51076-7. - Till Förster

Secrecy and its performative display have been privileged perspectives in the study of poro and similar power associations in West Africa. I develop an alternative understanding of the Senufo poro as an institution that fosters and sustains bodily experience, establishing an all-embracing sensory regime for members as well as non-members in their v...

The West African savannah is an area where old and new institutions fill the lacunae that limited statehood has left. Some of them claim a long history, others have emerged recently as a reaction to military and civil crises. The performance of power, its display and presentation, is a theme that all these associations share. They do so on differen...

As elsewhere, cities in Africa exist as ensembles of houses, streets, social events, and practices and at the same time as objects in the minds of their inhabitants and visitors. Cities always have an imagined double as nobody can experience a city in all its parts and cultural dimensions. Urbanity as a way of living is intimately connected with pa...

The introduction presents the key concepts and core arguments of this special issue Re-Imagining African Cities: The Arts and Urban Politics that results from a workshop hosted by the Visual Culture Research Group at the Department of Anthropology, University of Basel, in 2016. Summarising and presenting the essays, it offers insights into how urba...

Africa is urbanising faster than any other continent. The stupendous pace of urbanisation challenges the usual image of Africa as a rural continent. The sheer complexity of African cities contests conventional understandings of the urban as well as standard development policies. Lingering between chaos and creativity, Western images of African citi...

L’Afrique s’urbanise plus vite que tout autre continent. Le rythme effréné de son urbanisation contredit l’image habituelle d’un continent rural. La complexité profonde des villes africaines interroge les conceptions traditionnelles de l’urbain et des politiques classiques de développement. Suspendues entre chaos et créativité, les images occidenta...

Today, most Africans who have a mobile phone have become photographers while professional photographers are going out of business. Picture files displayed on the small screens increasingly replace photoprints. This transformation affects the use of pictures deeply. It facilitates the exchange of pictures and broadens the ways in which ordinary peop...

Africa is urbanising faster than any other continent. The stupendous pace of urbanisa-tion challenges the usual image of Africa as a rural continent. The sheer complexity of African cities contests conventional understandings of the urban as well as standard development policies. Lingering between chaos and creativity, Western images of African cit...

Peace in a War Zone. A Long-Term Perspective on the Ivorian Crisis from Below Throughout the Ivorian crisis, small and sometimes bigger pockets of everyday peace emerged, persisted and even grew in rural as well as urban spaces. Although facing superior weaponry by military actors, such spaces managed to remain peaceful. Sometimes, these pockets it...

How do African cultures transform when they appropriate new media? This introduction to the following five articles raises and reflects basic questions related to the many transformations that African societies currently go through when they are faced with new media. It situates the concept of mediality in the social practice of those who deal with...

Koechlin and Förster observe that while for decades the capital cities of African countries dominated developmental and academic interest, secondary cities are now attracting increased attention as a result of their rapid growth and increasing social, economic and political significance on a regional and national level. They are becoming important...

Researching cultural diversity is a central subject of social anthropology. 25 authors from institutes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland offer an insight into the subject, its contents and theoretical perspectives. The articles cover a variety of topics: the history of the discipline as well as basic theories and methods, subareas such as busines...

Bamenda in English-speaking Cameroon has some 34 art workshops. Most of the workshops sell their works to a commercial audience and offer signboard painting as well as a couple of other genres of applied art. The competition is very high. Though most of the artists insist that they have an individual style, there are striking similarities between d...

Cities in Africa challenge the imagination of their inhabitants. And they challenge the imagination of anthropologists, too. There is hardly anything as complex and difficult to conceptualise than the large, sprawling and chaotic African cities. African urban spaces host a not even remotely comprehensible abundance of colours, signs, shapes, figure...

We tend to believe that rebel governance is based on an excessive use of violence. However, insurgents often establish a regular exchange with civilians under their domination. Building such an exchange affects both sides. It transforms rebel governance into a more civil order that builds on former experiences and incorporates long-lasting modes of...

How do government arrangements emerge? When and how does individual agency turn into collective agency? How do sensory experiences of violence, instability, etc affect the configuration of governance arrangements? When, why, and how are governance arrangements institutionalized? This book seeks to contribute to a non-normative conceptualization of...

Non-separatist insurgents unable to overthrow a sitting government often face a problem successful rebellions can avoid: They are not the only players who can claim to be acting on behalf of the nation. They will have to imagine the nation in a new way that distinguishes them from the older, established nationalism usually promoted by the existing...

Rebel domination is often thought of as arbitrary and associated with volatile environments that leave little space for anything beyond necessities and immediate survival. This chapter explains how the tension between the experience of past violence and the imagination of a better future informed the formation of these new genres. It asks how their...

The role of the workshop in the creation of African art is the subject of this revelatory book. In the group setting of the workshop, innovation and imitation collide, artists share ideas and techniques, and creative expression flourishes. African Art and Agency from the Workshop examines the variety of workshops, from those which are politically d...

The present boom in popular history is not unprecedented. The contributions to this volume investigate peaks of historical interest which favour popular approaches from around 1800 to the present. They analyse the media, genres and institutions through which historical knowledge has been disseminated - from artefacts to the archive, from poetry to...

VISONÀMONICA BLACKMUN, Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Côte d'Ivoire. Farnham and Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing (hb £65 – 978 1 40940 440-8). 2010, 216 pp. - Volume 82 Issue 3 - TILL FÖRSTER

Pictures make a difference. While moving through time and space, they simultaneously modify both. Our imagination of distant countries and societies is increasingly shaped by media pictures. Through these, Africa in particular has become a continent of affliction and crisis. But Africans, too, visualize their and our social world through pictures....

The transformation of statehood in the rebel-held northern half of Cote d'Ivoire builds on the reconfiguration of the social and political order. Though the state as an institution has almost ceased to exist, statehood as the practices that refer to it persists. This article examines the negotiations between the different non-state actors and how t...

The three parts of this book have dealt with our le ad questions on non-state standard-setting: How can the relevant actors and processes be described and mapped? By what authority do they set standards? And are the processes and their outcome, the standa rds, effective and legitimate? The chapters comprised in this volume explore diffe rent facets...

Introduction: Statehood beyond the state? From a Western perspective, the presence of the state as the dominant actor that sets or at least influences the setting of standards is often taken for granted - despite the recent shift to non-state actors in processes of standard setting addressed in this book. However, if one looks beyond the familiar r...

Es ist eine Erfahrung, die fast alle Europäer machen, wenn sie das erste Mal durch eine west- oder zentralafrikanische Stadt gehen: Die Stadt sieht anders aus. Nicht etwa, weil sie Armut nicht verbirgt und manchmal die Villen der Reichen unmittelbar neben den euphemistisch ‘spontane Siedlungen’ genannten Behausungen der Ärmsten stehen. Es ist wenig...

Der Umgang mit Fremden und Fremdheit kann höchst unterschiedlich sein. Dies hängt sowohl von allgemein anerkannten Interpretationsmustern - welche entscheiden, wer oder was "fremd" ist - als auch von der Alltagspraxis ab. Ein Vergleich von vier unterschiedlichen Gesellschaften bzw. gesellschaftlichen Milieus in Afrika zeigt, dass Fremde oft in die...

The treatment and reception of foreigners and of foreignness may be highly diverse. It relies on generally accepted interpretive patterns of what and who is to be foreign as well as on everyday practice. A comparison of four African societies and societal milieus respectively shows that by such practice, foreigners are often integrated into daily w...

Victor Turner has been one of the most influential anthropologists of religion in the 20th century. Especially his writings on ritual have influenced a wide variety of disciplines. Turner started his career with a study of the Ndembu in Central Africa, but later, his interests shifted to world religions and mass society. He argued that the dialecti...

In den Vitrinen westlicher Kunstsammlungen sehen wir afrikanische Masken als herausragende Werke der bildenden Kunst. Sie werden zu Skulpturen und auf ihre ›wesentlichen‹ Formen reduziert. Diese Reduktion auf die Qualitäten eines abendländischen Kunstwerkes verschließt den Zugang zu den Erfahrungen des Maskentanzes oder Spiels. Was einmal alle Sinn...

The change in property rights in the West African savannah has been analysed in particular from the perspective of development policy, i.e. from the perspective of state regulation. This contribution, however, attempts to trace property rights from the perspective of the farming population in the savannah in the northern part of Côte d'Ivoire. For...

Approche structurale des ceremonies d'initiation de la societe secrete Poro des fermiers Kafibele Senufo. L'A. s'interesse a l'experience esthetique des inities notamment a travers le port des masques rituels. L'A. part du principe que dans les societes africaines l'expression artistique est une part integrale de l'experience empirique et qu'on ne...

In diesem Beitrag werden Beziehungen zwischen sozialen Differenzierungsprozessen und Entwicklungsmaßnahmen dargestellt. Im Vordergrund steht nicht eine nur konstatierende Beschreibung verschiedener Zustände, sondern die empirisch belegte Analyse der Prozesse unter bestimmten gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen. Kulturellen Deutungsschemata wird dabei be...