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Up to 2012, Mali was a poster child for African democracy, despite multiple signs of growing dissatisfaction with the democratic experiment. Then disaster struck, bringing many of the nation's unresolved contradictions to international attention. A military coup carved off the country's south. A revolt by a coalition of Tuareg and extremist Islamist forces shook the north. The events, so violent and unexpected, forced experts to reassess Mali's democratic institutions and the neoliberal economic reforms enacted in conjunction with the move toward democracy. This book's detailed study of cultural heritage and its transformations provides a key to understanding the impasse that confronts Malian democracy. As the book shows, postcolonial Mali privileged its cultural heritage to display itself on the regional and international scene. The neoliberal reforms both intensified and altered this trend. Profiling heritage sites ranging from statues of colonial leaders to women's museums to historic Timbuktu, the book portrays how various actors have deployed and contested notions of heritage. These actors include not just Malian administrators and politicians but UNESCO, and non-state NGOs. The book also delves into the intricacies of heritage politics from the perspective of Malian actors and groups, as producers and receivers—but always highly informed and critically engaged—of international, national and local cultural initiatives.

This ethnography is the first work to consider the role of clan in the Somali diaspora and the only book that considers women’s perspectives in addition to the traditionally recognized men’s perspectives on the topic of clan. The book is based on extensive fieldwork between 2000 and 2004 in the Helsinki metropolitan area. The comments of three research participants gathered in 2015 add a collaborative dimension and bring readers up to date on changes since the fieldwork period. It marks a departure from earlier kinship studies in Somalia, informed by structural-functionalism, by employing a practice theory approach to clan. Many Somalis are embarrassed by the notion that clan in any way affects their life abroad. They routinely blame cultural insiders and outsiders for its persistence as a source of both division and association. Cultural intimacy helps explain the cultural intricacies that shape Somalis’ contestation of clan. Daily life reveals the habitual, though understated efforts to construct clan and use clan networks to access and exchange capital and exposes networks as flexible and reveals innovative configurations and uses. Somalis consider clan alongside ideas of autonomy and gender equality and affinities toward clan relatives and nonrelatives. The book was written as a pedagogical tool, incorporating anthropological concepts and immersing readers in ethnographic research methods.

To some, Christianity and hip hop seem antithetical. Not so in Kenya. There, the music of Julius Owino, AKA Juliani, blends faith and beats into a potent hip hop gospel aimed at a youth culture hungry for answers spiritual, material, and otherwise. This book explores the Kenyan hip hop scene through the lens of Juliani's life and career. A born-again Christian, Juliani produces work highlighting the tensions between hip hop's forceful self-expression and a pious approach to public life, even while contesting the basic presumptions of both. This book forges an uncommon collaboration with its subject that offers insights into Juliani's art and goals even as the book explores the author's own religious experience and subjective identity as an ethnographer. What emerges is an original contribution to the scholarship on hip hop's global impact and a passionate study of the music's role in shaping new ways of being Christian in Africa.

An exemplary ethnography of post-apartheid life: this book takes the reader to a place that few people know even exists—a self-run shelter for homeless young people in Durban. What emerges is a searing portrait of drugs, violence, and AIDS but also of compassion, love, loyalty, and humanity. Point Place (a self-run homeless shelter for the young homeless) stands near the city center of Durban, South Africa. Condemned and off the grid, the five-story apartment building is home to a hundred-plus teenagers and young adults marginalized by poverty and chronic unemployment. This book draws on ten years of up-close fieldwork to explore the distinct cultural universe of the Point Place community. The investigations reveal how young men and women draw on customary notions of respect and support to forge an ethos of connection and care that allows them to live far richer lives than ordinarily assumed. The book's discussion of gender dynamics highlights terms like nakana—to care about or take notice of another—that young women and men use to construct “outside” and “inside” boyfriends and girlfriends and to communicate notions of trust. The book exposes the structures of inequality at a local, regional, and global level that contribute to socioeconomic and political dislocation. But it also challenges the idea that Point Place's marginalized residents need “rehabilitation.” As the book argues, these young men and women want love, secure homes, and the means to provide for their dependents—in short, the same hopes and aspirations mirrored across South African society.

Rhodesia's rebirth as Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe's rise to power dashed the hopes of women who had imagined independence as a road to gender equity and economic justice. Using history, literature, participant observation, and interviews, this book draws on thirty years of experience to survey Zimbabwean feminism from the colonial era to today. The book's analysis shows how actions as seemingly disparate as an ability to bake scones during the revolution and achieving power within a marriage in fact represent complex sources of female empowerment. The book also presents the ways women across Zimbabwean society—rural and urban, professional and domestic—accommodated or confronted post-independence setbacks. Finally, the book offers perspectives on the ways contemporary Zimbabwean women depart from the widespread view that feminism is a Western imposition having little to do with African women.