In this comprehensive and provocative study of maternal reactions to child death in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, anthropologist Jonina Einarsdottir challenges the assumption that mothers in high-poverty societies will neglect their children and fail to mourn their deaths as a survival strategy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 1993 to 1998 among the matrilineal Papel who reside in the Biombo region, this work includes theoretical discussion of reproductive practices, conceptions of children, childcare customs, interpretations of diseases and death, and infanticide. Einarsdottir...
In this comprehensive and provocative study of maternal reactions to child death in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, anthropologist Jonina Einarsdottir cha...
Though the world was stunned by the horrific massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu majority in Rwanda beginning in April 1994, there has been little coverage of the reprisals that occurred after the Tutsi gained political power. During this time hundreds of thousands of Hutu were systematically hunted and killed. "Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee" in Zaire is the eyewitness account of Marie Beatrice Umutesi. She tells of life in the refugee camps in Zaire and her flight across 2000 kilometers on foot. During this forced march, far from the world s cameras, many Hutu...
Though the world was stunned by the horrific massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu majority in Rwanda beginning in April 1994, there has been little cover...
In this firsthand account of inexplicable brutality, day-to-day suffering, and survival, Marie Beatrice Umutesi sheds light on the other genocide that targeted the Hutu refugees of Rwanda after the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994. Umutesi's documentation of these years provides the world a history that is still widely unknown. Available in English for the first time, this poignant autobiography is more than a testimony to the lives and humanity lost; it is a call for those responsible for the atrocious crimes - and the devastating silence - to be held accountable.
In this firsthand account of inexplicable brutality, day-to-day suffering, and survival, Marie Beatrice Umutesi sheds light on the other genocide that...
The transition to democracy in South Africa was one of the defining events in twentieth-century political history. The South African women's movement is one of the most celebrated on the African continent. Shireen Hassim examines interactions between the two as she explores the gendered nature of liberation and regime change. Her work reveals how women's political organizations both shaped and were shaped by the broader democratic movement. Alternately asserting their political independence and giving precedence to the democratic movement as a whole, women activists proved flexible and...
The transition to democracy in South Africa was one of the defining events in twentieth-century political history. The South African women's movement ...
"All traders are thieves, especially women traders," people often assured social anthropologist Tuulikki Pietila during her field work in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, in the mid-1990s. Equally common were stories about businessmen who had "bought a spirit" for their enrichment. Pietila places these and similar comments in the context of the liberalization of the Tanzanian economy that began in the 1980s, when many men and women found themselves newly enmeshed in the burgeoning market economy. Even as emerging private markets strengthened the position of enterprising people, economic resources...
"All traders are thieves, especially women traders," people often assured social anthropologist Tuulikki Pietila during her field work in Kilimanja...
In the Red Sea Hills of eastern Sudan, where poverty, famines, and conflict loom large, women struggle to gain the status of responsible motherhood through bearing and raising healthy children, especially sons. But biological fate can be capricious in impoverished settings. Amidst struggle for survival and expectations of heroic mothering, women face realities that challenge their ability to fulfill their prescribed roles. Even as the effects of modernity and development, global inequities, and exclusionary government policies challenge traditional ways of life in eastern Sudan and throughout...
In the Red Sea Hills of eastern Sudan, where poverty, famines, and conflict loom large, women struggle to gain the status of responsible motherhood th...
Female genital excision, or the ritual of cutting the external genitals of girls and women, is undoubtedly one of the most heavily and widely debated cultural traditions of our time. By looking at how writers of African descent have presented the practice in their literary work, Elisabeth Bekers shows how the debate on female genital excision evolved over the last four decades of the twentieth century, in response to changing attitudes about ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, feminism, and human rights. Rising Anthills (the title refers to a Dogon myth) analyzes works in English, French,...
Female genital excision, or the ritual of cutting the external genitals of girls and women, is undoubtedly one of the most heavily and widely debated ...
Do African men and women think about and act out their ethnicity in different ways? Most studies of ethnicity in Africa consider men's experiences, but rarely have scholars examined whether women have the same idea of what it means to be, for example, Igbo or Tswana or Kikuyu. Or, studies have invoked the adage "women have no tribe" to indicate a woman's loss of ethnicity as she marries into her husband's community. This volume engages directly the issue of women's ethnicity and makes stimulating contributions to debates about how and why women's movements have a unifying role in African...
Do African men and women think about and act out their ethnicity in different ways? Most studies of ethnicity in Africa consider men's experiences, bu...
Abducted at the age of eleven, Evelyn Amony spent nearly eleven years inside the Lord s Resistance Army, becoming a forced wife to Joseph Kony and mother to his children. She takes the reader into the inner circles of LRA commanders and reveals unprecedented personal and domestic details about Joseph Kony. Her account unflinchingly conveys the moral difficulties of choosing survival in a situation fraught with violence, threat, and death. Amony was freed following her capture by the Ugandan military. Despite the trauma she endured with the LRA, Amony joined a Ugandan peace delegation...
Abducted at the age of eleven, Evelyn Amony spent nearly eleven years inside the Lord s Resistance Army, becoming a forced wife to Joseph Kony and ...
