Suchergebnisse

This article focuses on the reception of revolutionary oratory in what was once known as The People's Revolutionary Republic of Guinea. Sékou Touré, Guinea's first president, captivated the nation with fiery, unscripted speeches lasting four, five, or six hours. Guinean audiences were enthralled by his sublime revolutionary rhetoric. In a 2008 coup, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara declared himself president, attempting to recreate the fervour of Guinea's revolutionary days. Guinean citizens initially provided a willing revolutionary audience, though Camara's oratory fell far short of Touré's example. The article explores how the effects of shock and boredom that Ngai describes as 'stuplimity' (2005) emerged in reaction to Camara's performances. Stuplimity was a halfway point between Guineans' initial 'revolutionary' suspension of disbelief regarding the junta's intentions and their subsequent rejection and anger, which led to the junta's collapse less than a year after it took power.

This article explores the ways that the institution of the avunculate has been used as an idiom for negotiating forced displacement, dispossession, and insecurity in the forested region where modern‐day Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire converge. The essay analyses the ways that the rights and responsibilities that inhere in the MB‐ZS relationship are both invoked 'aspirationally' by those with no prior link of kinship and parried by those who should in principle be bound by them. This degree of play suggests that the avunculate in this region is best understood as one of several idioms used to legitimate claims made on others, often in times of uncertainty and instability. Rather than treat this relationship as an always‐already existing social institution, the article suggests that it is also the product of a historical experience of persistent warfare, displacement, and flight.

In 1997, I found myself newly arrived at Oxford University. I was taking a detour from my path to do research in West Africa thanks to a fellowship that funded a year of ancillary training before my fieldwork. Though studying anthropology, I was at St. Antony's College, where Paul Collier's Center for the Study of African Economies is located, and was in the same entering cohort as Collier's now-famous student Dambisa Moyo (assuming I would not be able to remember her first name, she offered, "it sounds kind of like 'pizza'").

Der Artikel gibt einen Überblick über Innenpolitik, Außenpolitik und die sozioökonomische Entwicklung in Guinea im Jahr 2009