Thesis (D. Min.)--Western Seminary, 1993. / Abstract. Includes test/surveys in French. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 359-372).

This thesis explores religion and popular culture in post-genocide Rwanda. In particular, I examine the rise of the new Pentecostal churches – the abarokore ("the saved ones") – and the reconstruction of the "modern" music industry after the genocide. I argue that contemporary social life in Rwanda is defined by "quiet insecurity" and "temporal dissonance". I employ these concepts to take seriously how young people in Rwanda create alternative pasts, presents, and futures for themselves within an authoritarian political context. While the government attempts to control the historical narrative and impose a particular developmentalist "vision" of the future onto its citizens, young people articulate and perform their hopes, fears, dreams, and anxieties within the realms of religion and popular culture, creating "unofficial" narratives that both converge with and contest those of the state. Against the prevailing academic consensus of Kigali as silent, I instead reposition the capital as a site of creativity wherein noisy debates take place about Rwandan identity and culture. I examine the new abarokore churches as important affective spaces that allow for healing and the keeping of secrets. Yet the fact that these same churches tend to be mono-ethnic suggests the limits of the born-again project. Conversely, the community imagined within popular culture, particularly through hip hop songs, is more inclusive, with identity forged through the mutual experience of pain and suffering. I pay particular attention to gender, and consider how patriarchal tendencies in the new churches and popular culture undermine the country's "progressive" gender policies. By examining Pentecostal services, conversion testimonies, song lyrics, the Kinyarwanda-language entertainment media, and discourses of musical corruption, I explore how young people respond to a context of quiet insecurity through quiet agency – they actively seek to transform and resolve their life circumstances, however modest or temporary their transformations or resolutions prove to be.

The thesis examines young women’s livelihoods in Calabar, southeastern Nigeria. It discusses how young women aim to realise their believed ‘destinies of greatness’, reconciling aspirations of fortune with present insecurities. Pinpointing a time when the city’s universities were on indefinite strikes, the discussions depict young women’s industriousness as they ‘wait’ amid uncertainty. The thesis focuses explicitly on young women’s engagement with Pentecostalism, the religion encouraging action, timeliness, and knowledge of the self and God. Understanding how young women fashion Pentecostal subjectivities attuned with ideals of urban success, the chapters focus on various ‘sites’ in their lives: church ministries, the home, sewing shops, beauty pageants. The thesis argues that young women believe they can realise future fortune by constantly partaking in acts of self-preparation. However, as action is driven by the competing forces of fear and faith, the acts young women believe will fashion subjectivities conducive to urban success are always gambles. Illuminating the emic concept of ‘destiny’ – a classic concept in West African Anthropology, denoting personhood and lifecourse (Fortes 1987) – the thesis builds upon recent analyses of how action underpins concepts of hope (Miyazaki 2004), doubt (Pelkmans 2013), and fortune (da Col 2012; Graeber 2012). Illuminating action and futures, the discussion contributes to recent analyses of time, productivity and youth (Honwana 2012; Jeffrey 2010; Masquelier 2013a). By examining the often-ignored category of young women, the thesis develops an understanding of ‘feminine cultures of waiting’. The discussion of how Pentecostal subjectivities are fashioned, which draws different ‘sites’ of young women’s lives together, also furthers analyses of African youth by countering salient narratives of youth in violence (e.g. Vigh 2006). Focusing on young women’s livelihoods, the thesis contributes to an Anthropology of (Pentecostal) Christianity by illustrating how religious rhetoric and practice are carried out and negotiated outside formal church institutions.

This thesis is an ethnographic analysis of a collection of field recordings of music from sub-Saharan Africa: The Sound of Africa series made and published by Hugh Tracey between 1933 and 1973. I analyse the aims, methods, value and potential use of this collection, now held at the International Library of African Music (ILAM), in order to address a gap in the ethnomusicological literature and to begin to develop a critical framework for an evaluation of field recording and aural ethnography. An archival analysis of the collection enables me to trace the scope and intended uses of Tracey’s recordings. Identifying a primary intended audience that has not to date been engaged, I argue for the need to develop a new way to circulate recordings among a source community that has never before been reached through institutional archival practice. I use a small sample of Tracey’s archival Xhosa recordings and develop a method of sound elicitation designed to take the recordings back to urban Xhosa communities in the townships located near ILAM. By circulating archival recordings using local mechanisms in township communities, rather than institutional archival methods, I assess the potential relevance of historical recordings to an urban source community more than fifty years after the recordings were made. Having collected and analysed contemporary Xhosa responses, I consider the limitations and the potential for the recordings to connect with indigenous audiences and generate value. I argue that non-analytical responses to historical recordings may contribute to ethnographic understanding, to people’s own sense of Xhosa identity, and to archiving practice in future. Such responses may help increase our understanding of the relationships between music collectors in the field and the people recorded, whether fifty years ago, today or in future.

Orientador: Osmar Ribeiro Thomaz / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-11T06:03:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Oliveira_ArthurRovidade_M.pdf: 4021966 bytes, checksum: 0fc70b67b946b00cf18f3f71ef8a10c5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: A nação e a nacionalidade cultural, tendo-se como destaque o Estado de Moçambique, são temas complexos, porque reúnem uma série de aspectos políticos, históricos e culturais do país e de sua população. Para desenvolver esta pesquisa, escolheu-se como objeto de análise a categoria de canto e dança enunciada por estudiosos dos nativos de Moçambique, presente em monografias antropológicas do período colonial. Canto e dança são unidos numa categoria ocidental de pesquisa, não nativa. Assim, a princípio, questiona-se: como os autores retiram certos aspectos da vida social para escrever sobre canto e dança? Quais temáticas são criadas e delimitadas? Como, numa vida social ampla, definem-se certas categorias de canto e dança? Com isso, procura-se destacar quais representações são constituídas pelos autores da antropologia sobre o contexto da vida no império e sobre qual base material os autores constroem o conhecimento sobre seus pesquisados, fundamentando suas próprias relações de alteridade / Abstract: The nation and cultural nationality, specially in the state of Mozambique, are complex themes, because they take together a series of political, historical and cultural aspects of the country and its population. For this research, the analitical object chosen was the category of chant and dance made by researchers of the natives of Mozambique, present in anthropological monographs made at the colonial period. Chant and dance are taken together in an ocidental category of research, non-native. So, first of all, we may question: how the authors extract some social life aspects to write about chant and dance? Which thematics are created and delimited? How, in a wide social life, are set certain categories of chant and dance? Taking this point, we hope to know more about which representations are constituted by these anthropology authors in the context of imperial life, and what constitutes their own alterity relationships / Mestrado / Mestre em Antropologia Social

This thesis is concerned with plants, chronic illness and medicine in Oku, Northwest Region, Cameroon. I focus on patient strategies to obtain effective medical outcomes, and on how such outcomes may be obtained through seeking traditional medicine in Oku. I argue that biomedical notions of efficacy do not appropriately represent the central and diverse roles that plants play in traditional medicine nor do they correctly represent how people in Oku evaluate the efficacy of plant-based traditional medicine. I argue instead that efficacy must be understood in terms of the emic concept of power. This power is understood to be located in the Oku landscape, which is still uniquely forested and said to embody powerful ancestral spirits. With plants as the primary tangible material of power, and traditional doctors in Oku as those who claim exclusive rights to manipulate and disperse such power, I discuss traditional medicine in Oku as a system wherein power from the natural landscape is drawn upon to challenge harmful powers feared to derive from the social arena. Using the pragmatic and phenomenological approaches, I show how patients evaluate the efficacy of a medical treatment based on their bodily experiences, and how their actions, as revealed in their therapeutic trajectories, reveal their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a given diagnosis and/or therapy. I discuss how enduring illness generates and exacerbates bodily, treatment-outcome, social, and psychological uncertainties. In this context, effective outcomes can be understood as those which address and limit these uncertainties and anxieties while offering ways to imagine hopeful prognoses. This thesis then outlines the major sources of uncertainty, people’s responses to such uncertainties, and what people might achieve in terms of limiting uncertainties by seeking traditional medicine in Oku.

Orientador: Omar Ribeiro Thomaz / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-20T06:18:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marques_DiegoFerreira_D.pdf: 32444250 bytes, checksum: 17259e70e841df7f73488aef004a47c6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: ...Observação: O resumo, na íntegra, poderá ser visualizado no texto completo da tese digital / Abstract: ...Note: The complete abstract is available with the full electronic document / Doutorado / Antropologia Social / Doutor em Antropologia Social