This collection explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa. Eight ethnographic case studies from across the continent examine how uncertainty is used to negotiate insecurity, create and conduct relationships, and act as a source for imagining the future.

From Pussy Riot and the Arab Spring to Italian mafia dance, this collection provides an interdisciplinary analysis of relational reflexivity in political performance. By putting anthropological theory into dialogue with international development scholarship and artistic and activist practices, this book highlights how aesthetics and politics interrelate in precarious spheres of social life. The contributors of this innovative interdisciplinary volume raise questions about the transformative potential of participating in and reflecting upon political performances both as individual and as...

The contributors investigate the inter-relationships between migrant remittances and the family in Asia. They argue that, in the context of Asian transnational labour migration where remittances tend to become a primary currency of care, the making or breaking of the family unit is mainly contingent on how individuals handle remittance processes.

The ways we understand processes of agrarian change are pressing issues for policy makers and development practitioners. Interpreting changes in two agrarian societies in India and Indonesia, the author reveals how transformations to self are critical factors shaping change, as well as under-recognized consequences of development initiatives.

This book explores the daily mobilities and immobilities of children and young people in sub-Saharan Africa. The authors draw on findings from rural and urban field research extending over many years, culminating in a 24-site study across three African countries: Ghana, Malawi, and South Africa. Wider reflections on gender, relationality, the politics of mobility, and field methodology frame the study. By bringing together diverse strands of a complex daily mobilities picture-from journeys for education, work, play/leisure and health, to associated experiences of different transport modes,...

This volume offers an ethnographic look at food sending and receiving practices among migrants in different regional contexts. For migrants and their families separated by migration, food circuits are a powerful and sensuous source of connection, which can help to maintain, reinforce and in some cases even create new transnational connections. The book takes food parcels as a material through with to think about relationships, consumption, exchange, and other fundamental anthropological concerns in changing societies, examining them in relation to wider transnational spaces. The book also...