Michael Stasik | University of Basel (original) (raw)
Books by Michael Stasik
The Making of the African Road offers an account of the long-distance road in Africa. Being a lat... more The Making of the African Road offers an account of the long-distance road in Africa. Being a latecomer to automobility and far from saturated mass mobility, the African road continues to be open for diverging interpretations and creative appropriations. The road regime on the continent is thus still under construction, and it is made in more than one sense: physically, socially, politically, morally and cosmologically. The contributions to this volume provide first-hand anthropological insights into the infrastructural, economic, historical as well as experiential dimensions of the emerging orders of the African road.
Contributors are: Kurt Beck, Amiel Bize, Michael Bürge, Luca Ciabarri, Gabriel Klaeger, Mark Lamont, Tilman Musch, Michael Stasik, Rami Wadelnour.
Reviewed in: Politique africaine 147 (2017); Social Anthropology 26:4 (2018); Transfers 8:3 (2018).
Edited collections by Michael Stasik
Basel Anthropology Papers: Drawings, May 2024
Inaugural issue of Basel Anthropology Papers (BAP), with forty-five contributions on the theme of... more Inaugural issue of Basel Anthropology Papers (BAP), with forty-five contributions on the theme of Drawings. BAP seeks to engage in anthropological conversations by imaginatively exploring and expanding different genres of writing, while experimenting with different formats of presentation and analysis.
Critical African Studies, 2020
1. Temporalities of waiting in Africa: introduction to special issue Michael Stasik, Valerie Häns... more 1. Temporalities of waiting in Africa: introduction to special issue
Michael Stasik, Valerie Hänsch and Daniel Mains
2. Waiting: elements of a conceptual framework
Gregor Dobler
3. ‘Wasting time’: migratory trajectories of adolescence among Eritrean refugee girls in Khartoum
Katarzyna Grabska
4. Maisha ni kuvumiliya: patrimonialism, progress and the ambiguities of waiting in Goma, DR Congo
Silke Oldenburg
5. Waiting as a site of subject formation: examining collective prayers by Ethiopian asylum seekers in Germany
Serawit Debele
6. Unemployment, service delivery and practices of waiting in South Africa’s informal settlements
Joseph Mujere
7. On patience: perseverance and imposed waiting during dam-induced displacement in Northern Sudan
Valerie Hänsch
8. Waiting and political transitions: anticipating the new Gambia
Niklas Hultin
9. Waiting, relationships and money in a Ponzi scheme in Northern Ghana
Jan Beek
10. Waiting for Gadaa: a critical exploration through transnational Siinqee feminism
Martha Kuwee Kumsa
Africa Today, 2018
1. Introduction to Special Issue: Bus Stations in Africa Michael Stasik and Sidy Cissokho 2. Fi... more 1. Introduction to Special Issue: Bus Stations in Africa
Michael Stasik and Sidy Cissokho
2. Fighting over Urban Space: Fighting over Urban Space: Matatu Infrastructure and Bus Stations in Nairobi, 1960–2000
Robert Heinze
3. The Woro-Woro Gares Routières of Abidjan: Artisanal Transport and Local Governance in Côte d'Ivoire's Largest City
Marie Richard Zouhoula Bi
4. Mobility, Social Status, and Cooperative Practices in the Sucupira Hiace Central Station, Santiago Island, Cape Verde
Gerard Horta and Daniel Malet Calvo
5. The Vernacular Bureaucracy of Taxi Logistics at the Airport of Dakar
Peter Lambertz
6. Waiting Together: The Motorcycle Taxi Stand as Nairobi Infrastructure
Basil Ibrahim and Amiel Bize
7. Station Waka-Waka: The Temporalities and Temptations of (Not) Working in Ghanaian Bus Stations
Michael Stasik and Gabriel Klaeger
8. Afterword: The Matrix Reloading: On African Bus Stations
Ato Quayson
Articles by Michael Stasik
Critical African Studies, 2020
Africa Today, 2018
We here explore the temporalities and temptations of working in-yet at times beyond-bus stations ... more We here explore the temporalities and temptations of working in-yet at times beyond-bus stations in Ghana by focusing on the practices and strategies of two kinds of mobile entrepreneurs: bus drivers and hawkers. Expanding on the emic categories of drivers' "overlapping" and hawkers' "waka-waka," both of which equate shrewd entrepreneurship with effort, movement, tactic, and timing, we show how drivers and hawkers accommodate the vicissitudes of "slow/fast business" by alternating between working inside the station and moving beyond it. Their mobile engagements with the temporalities of bus stations, we suggest, allow us to grasp stations as part of a more complex infrastructure in which stations and road/sides become linked with each other through different actors' practices and movements.
Africa Spectrum, 2018
This article combines the concept of a “popular economy” with that of a “niche economy” to analys... more This article combines the concept of a “popular economy” with that of a “niche economy” to analyse the workings of a central bus station in Accra, Ghana, and, by extension, of Ghana’s public transport sector at large. In doing so it departs from generic models of the “informal sector” commonly used for describing road and roadside entrepreneurship in African contexts. At the same time, it challenges prevalent views of popular economies bent on emphasising mechanisms of reciprocity and solidarity over opportunity and profiteering. The focus on the station, it suggests, provides for a detailed reflection on the dialectics of collaboration and competition characteristic of Ghana’s local transport economics, and it offers significant continuities with practices, places, and politics of economic “informality” in Africa.
Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2017
In this article, I explore the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana, by focusi... more In this article, I explore the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana, by focusing on the relationship between rhythm and practice. In Accra’s station, departures do not follow pre-designated scripts of clock-time but are timed collectively by the inflow of passengers. These inflows follow diverse rhythmic temporalities co-composed in Accra and in the destinations served from the station. I show that by attending to the rhythmicity of activities in the yard, the station dwellers accommodate motional inputs that take shape hundreds of kilometres away. They do so by way of kinaesthetic enskilment, hence a tacit way of attuning to movements and rhythms. This link between rhythmanalysis and the anthropology of the senses, I suggest, offers a useful conceptual gateway for understandingWest African practices of road travel.
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 2016
The most popular music among youths in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown is music dealing with love... more The most popular music among youths in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown is music dealing with love. While the music, which is mainly of foreign origin, evokes idealized images of ‘real love’, the real-life relationships of its young audiences are characterized by chronic states of emotional uncertainty and dissatisfaction. Economic disparities lead to an increasing monetization of young people’s relationships, driving them either into a fragile flux of multiple partners or out of intimate engagements altogether. Taking this ‘dissonance’ between sonic representations and social relations as a point of departure, in this article I explore the ways in which young Freetonians position themselves at the juncture of desire and reality. After an introduction to Freetown’s contemporary music scene, I juxtapose various life and love stories of youths with the fantasies they invest in ‘love music’. In so doing, I discuss the complex relationships between affect, exchange, deprivation and the strictures involved in attaining social adulthood. Drawing on the notion of utopia – denoting a desired yet unattainable state – I argue that it is within the experiential gap between the consumption of a representation and the desire to live (up to) that representation that Freetown’s youths rework their horizons of possibilities.
Social Dynamics, 2016
In this article, I explore the intricate relationship between regulation and contingency in proce... more In this article, I explore the intricate relationship between regulation and contingency in processes of urban economic organisation by focusing on the workings of a central bus station in Accra, Ghana. After introducing the position of the station in Ghana’s urban economy and transport infrastructure, I set out its internal regulative arrangements in relation to larger socio-economic and political constellations the practices of the station workers are contingent upon. Next, I turn the analysis around and describe the ways in which people accommodate themselves within, exploit and thereby co-produce emergent contingencies. The focus on the station, I suggest, offers a window into the complex constituents of niche economic practices that prevail in many spheres of African cities and allows a nuanced reflection on the incongruous and undetermined dynamics of everyday urban ‘becomings.’
Anthropology Matters, 2016
Different people perceive sounds differently. Though a seemingly obvious insight at first, these ... more Different people perceive sounds differently. Though a seemingly obvious insight at first, these differences lead to questions about how sounds are organised into patterns perceived to be music or noise. Drawing on fieldwork in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, this paper tackles this conundrum. I start with some acoustemological vignettes about Freetown's sonic environments, juxtaposing these explorations of 'sonic sensibilities' with reflections on how sounds become perceived as noise. Building upon works from anthropology, musicology, and cognitive science, I then turn to a closely related question, asking what makes sounds become music. In the last part, I show that, within Freetown's social and sonic relationships, a main defining feature determining whether or not sounds are labelled music is the ability to dance to them. Ultimately, the danceability of Freetown's music takes me to matters of loudness because, more often than not, dance music audiences favour extensive uses of volume.
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2016
It is impossible to understand the gendered relation between women and public space without takin... more It is impossible to understand the gendered relation between women and public space without taking into account its other, that is, male engagements with and in space. Our joint paper contrasts the public spaces of a market and a bus station in central Accra, Ghana. While the former is historically associated with female entrepreneurship, masculinity is deeply inscribed in the activities defining the latter. However, recent developments gradually undermine these gendered divides. By focusing on interpersonal claims to entrepreneurial places in the two locations, we illustrate how the configurations and co-constructions of gender and space are exposed to ongoing , often subtle shifts, which are impelled by dialectically grounded transformations of quotidian spatial practices and social relations. Expanding upon the notion of viri–/uxorilocality, we explore shifts in the gendered strategies of newcomers establishing their presence in the two spaces and the extent to which these practices may alter gendered spatial significations.
Sociologus: Journal for Social Anthropology, 2015
Public transport in Ghana is a private enterprise. The incapacity of the Ghan-aian state to adequ... more Public transport in Ghana is a private enterprise. The incapacity of the Ghan-aian state to adequately provide for transport services is at once capitalized on and compensated for by local entrepreneurs. Characterized principally by market oriented entrepreneurial actions, their practices have not only been never captured by the state, but they form the basis for repelling regulative forays of the state. Manifest in the socially embedded economic behaviours of the transport workers is a form of entrepreneurship that can be conceived as both the source and the product of a 'vernacular neoliberalism'; that is, a kind of avant la lettre neoliberalism that has not been enforced exogenously, but that emerged from the local grounds of long-established modes of economic practice. Drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic research, this article examines the development of a market imperative as a main structuring force of social organization. In so doing, it suggests a progressive reversal of the ways the conceptual lens proffered by neoliberalism can be put to use for describing the significance and explaining the perseverance of local economic practices in Africa.
Book chapters by Michael Stasik
U. Engel, M. Boeckler & D. Müller-Mahn (eds.) Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018
K. Beck, G. Klaeger & M. Stasik (eds) The Making of the African Road. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017
K. Beck, G. Klaeger & M. Stasik (eds) The Making of the African Road. Leiden/Boston: Brill., 2017
Bus stations play a central role in Africa’s largely artisanal and informal public road transport... more Bus stations play a central role in Africa’s largely artisanal and informal public road transport. It is in the stations that a large part of motorised road traffic is enabled, maintained and, at times, also disrupted. In this chapter, I attend to the organisation of a long-distance bus station in Ghana’s capital Accra to explore how the orders of the road and of the roadside are constitutive of each other. Expanding on the notion of ‘involution’, understood as an inward-bound process of organisational change, I discuss the practices and occupational organisation by which the communities of the station accommodate the complexities of one of West Africa’s busiest road travel hubs. The concept of involution, I suggest, allows a detailed reflection on both the intricate arrangements that structure the workings of the roadside institution of the station as well as the practices that make these arrangements work and that keep the traffic moving up and down the roads.
In: P. Ivanov, M. Treiber & M. Verne (eds) Körper Technik Wissen. Kreativität und Aneignungsproze... more In: P. Ivanov, M. Treiber & M. Verne (eds) Körper Technik Wissen. Kreativität und Aneignungsprozesse in Afrika - In den Spuren Kurt Becks, pp. 405-417. Berlin: LIT.
http://www.lit-verlag.de/isbn/3-643-13739-5
In: D. Omanga & M. Diderot (Hrsg.) The Making of Meaning in Africa: Discourse, Image and Text.. Bayreuth: BIGSAS, 2013
Much of the music listened to by African audiences today is not produced locally but elsewhere an... more Much of the music listened to by African audiences today is not produced locally but elsewhere and by music artists living worlds apart from the local realities of their African audiences. Yet, much of the current Africanist research dealing with popular music in conjunction with African societies tends to confine itself to the study of locally-produced music and, in so doing, limits its principle focus to (local) musicians and their lyrics and songs. This empirical and epistemological bias brings in its wake the risk to exclude from its representational scope those who make music socially meaningful in the first place: the society, here understood as music audiences writ large. Drawing on the exemplary case of the social meanings audiences in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown make of Jamaican reggae music, in this article I propose a realignment of the research focus, shifting from (local) music producers to the ‘consumers’ and users of music. Though the results of such a shifted analysis are prone to be rather fractured and contradictory, I argue that they – thereby – come much closer to the fractured and contradictory meanings African audiences make of music be it of a foreign or of a local origin.
The Making of the African Road offers an account of the long-distance road in Africa. Being a lat... more The Making of the African Road offers an account of the long-distance road in Africa. Being a latecomer to automobility and far from saturated mass mobility, the African road continues to be open for diverging interpretations and creative appropriations. The road regime on the continent is thus still under construction, and it is made in more than one sense: physically, socially, politically, morally and cosmologically. The contributions to this volume provide first-hand anthropological insights into the infrastructural, economic, historical as well as experiential dimensions of the emerging orders of the African road.
Contributors are: Kurt Beck, Amiel Bize, Michael Bürge, Luca Ciabarri, Gabriel Klaeger, Mark Lamont, Tilman Musch, Michael Stasik, Rami Wadelnour.
Reviewed in: Politique africaine 147 (2017); Social Anthropology 26:4 (2018); Transfers 8:3 (2018).
Basel Anthropology Papers: Drawings, May 2024
Inaugural issue of Basel Anthropology Papers (BAP), with forty-five contributions on the theme of... more Inaugural issue of Basel Anthropology Papers (BAP), with forty-five contributions on the theme of Drawings. BAP seeks to engage in anthropological conversations by imaginatively exploring and expanding different genres of writing, while experimenting with different formats of presentation and analysis.
Critical African Studies, 2020
1. Temporalities of waiting in Africa: introduction to special issue Michael Stasik, Valerie Häns... more 1. Temporalities of waiting in Africa: introduction to special issue
Michael Stasik, Valerie Hänsch and Daniel Mains
2. Waiting: elements of a conceptual framework
Gregor Dobler
3. ‘Wasting time’: migratory trajectories of adolescence among Eritrean refugee girls in Khartoum
Katarzyna Grabska
4. Maisha ni kuvumiliya: patrimonialism, progress and the ambiguities of waiting in Goma, DR Congo
Silke Oldenburg
5. Waiting as a site of subject formation: examining collective prayers by Ethiopian asylum seekers in Germany
Serawit Debele
6. Unemployment, service delivery and practices of waiting in South Africa’s informal settlements
Joseph Mujere
7. On patience: perseverance and imposed waiting during dam-induced displacement in Northern Sudan
Valerie Hänsch
8. Waiting and political transitions: anticipating the new Gambia
Niklas Hultin
9. Waiting, relationships and money in a Ponzi scheme in Northern Ghana
Jan Beek
10. Waiting for Gadaa: a critical exploration through transnational Siinqee feminism
Martha Kuwee Kumsa
Africa Today, 2018
1. Introduction to Special Issue: Bus Stations in Africa Michael Stasik and Sidy Cissokho 2. Fi... more 1. Introduction to Special Issue: Bus Stations in Africa
Michael Stasik and Sidy Cissokho
2. Fighting over Urban Space: Fighting over Urban Space: Matatu Infrastructure and Bus Stations in Nairobi, 1960–2000
Robert Heinze
3. The Woro-Woro Gares Routières of Abidjan: Artisanal Transport and Local Governance in Côte d'Ivoire's Largest City
Marie Richard Zouhoula Bi
4. Mobility, Social Status, and Cooperative Practices in the Sucupira Hiace Central Station, Santiago Island, Cape Verde
Gerard Horta and Daniel Malet Calvo
5. The Vernacular Bureaucracy of Taxi Logistics at the Airport of Dakar
Peter Lambertz
6. Waiting Together: The Motorcycle Taxi Stand as Nairobi Infrastructure
Basil Ibrahim and Amiel Bize
7. Station Waka-Waka: The Temporalities and Temptations of (Not) Working in Ghanaian Bus Stations
Michael Stasik and Gabriel Klaeger
8. Afterword: The Matrix Reloading: On African Bus Stations
Ato Quayson
Critical African Studies, 2020
Africa Today, 2018
We here explore the temporalities and temptations of working in-yet at times beyond-bus stations ... more We here explore the temporalities and temptations of working in-yet at times beyond-bus stations in Ghana by focusing on the practices and strategies of two kinds of mobile entrepreneurs: bus drivers and hawkers. Expanding on the emic categories of drivers' "overlapping" and hawkers' "waka-waka," both of which equate shrewd entrepreneurship with effort, movement, tactic, and timing, we show how drivers and hawkers accommodate the vicissitudes of "slow/fast business" by alternating between working inside the station and moving beyond it. Their mobile engagements with the temporalities of bus stations, we suggest, allow us to grasp stations as part of a more complex infrastructure in which stations and road/sides become linked with each other through different actors' practices and movements.
Africa Spectrum, 2018
This article combines the concept of a “popular economy” with that of a “niche economy” to analys... more This article combines the concept of a “popular economy” with that of a “niche economy” to analyse the workings of a central bus station in Accra, Ghana, and, by extension, of Ghana’s public transport sector at large. In doing so it departs from generic models of the “informal sector” commonly used for describing road and roadside entrepreneurship in African contexts. At the same time, it challenges prevalent views of popular economies bent on emphasising mechanisms of reciprocity and solidarity over opportunity and profiteering. The focus on the station, it suggests, provides for a detailed reflection on the dialectics of collaboration and competition characteristic of Ghana’s local transport economics, and it offers significant continuities with practices, places, and politics of economic “informality” in Africa.
Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2017
In this article, I explore the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana, by focusi... more In this article, I explore the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana, by focusing on the relationship between rhythm and practice. In Accra’s station, departures do not follow pre-designated scripts of clock-time but are timed collectively by the inflow of passengers. These inflows follow diverse rhythmic temporalities co-composed in Accra and in the destinations served from the station. I show that by attending to the rhythmicity of activities in the yard, the station dwellers accommodate motional inputs that take shape hundreds of kilometres away. They do so by way of kinaesthetic enskilment, hence a tacit way of attuning to movements and rhythms. This link between rhythmanalysis and the anthropology of the senses, I suggest, offers a useful conceptual gateway for understandingWest African practices of road travel.
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 2016
The most popular music among youths in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown is music dealing with love... more The most popular music among youths in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown is music dealing with love. While the music, which is mainly of foreign origin, evokes idealized images of ‘real love’, the real-life relationships of its young audiences are characterized by chronic states of emotional uncertainty and dissatisfaction. Economic disparities lead to an increasing monetization of young people’s relationships, driving them either into a fragile flux of multiple partners or out of intimate engagements altogether. Taking this ‘dissonance’ between sonic representations and social relations as a point of departure, in this article I explore the ways in which young Freetonians position themselves at the juncture of desire and reality. After an introduction to Freetown’s contemporary music scene, I juxtapose various life and love stories of youths with the fantasies they invest in ‘love music’. In so doing, I discuss the complex relationships between affect, exchange, deprivation and the strictures involved in attaining social adulthood. Drawing on the notion of utopia – denoting a desired yet unattainable state – I argue that it is within the experiential gap between the consumption of a representation and the desire to live (up to) that representation that Freetown’s youths rework their horizons of possibilities.
Social Dynamics, 2016
In this article, I explore the intricate relationship between regulation and contingency in proce... more In this article, I explore the intricate relationship between regulation and contingency in processes of urban economic organisation by focusing on the workings of a central bus station in Accra, Ghana. After introducing the position of the station in Ghana’s urban economy and transport infrastructure, I set out its internal regulative arrangements in relation to larger socio-economic and political constellations the practices of the station workers are contingent upon. Next, I turn the analysis around and describe the ways in which people accommodate themselves within, exploit and thereby co-produce emergent contingencies. The focus on the station, I suggest, offers a window into the complex constituents of niche economic practices that prevail in many spheres of African cities and allows a nuanced reflection on the incongruous and undetermined dynamics of everyday urban ‘becomings.’
Anthropology Matters, 2016
Different people perceive sounds differently. Though a seemingly obvious insight at first, these ... more Different people perceive sounds differently. Though a seemingly obvious insight at first, these differences lead to questions about how sounds are organised into patterns perceived to be music or noise. Drawing on fieldwork in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, this paper tackles this conundrum. I start with some acoustemological vignettes about Freetown's sonic environments, juxtaposing these explorations of 'sonic sensibilities' with reflections on how sounds become perceived as noise. Building upon works from anthropology, musicology, and cognitive science, I then turn to a closely related question, asking what makes sounds become music. In the last part, I show that, within Freetown's social and sonic relationships, a main defining feature determining whether or not sounds are labelled music is the ability to dance to them. Ultimately, the danceability of Freetown's music takes me to matters of loudness because, more often than not, dance music audiences favour extensive uses of volume.
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2016
It is impossible to understand the gendered relation between women and public space without takin... more It is impossible to understand the gendered relation between women and public space without taking into account its other, that is, male engagements with and in space. Our joint paper contrasts the public spaces of a market and a bus station in central Accra, Ghana. While the former is historically associated with female entrepreneurship, masculinity is deeply inscribed in the activities defining the latter. However, recent developments gradually undermine these gendered divides. By focusing on interpersonal claims to entrepreneurial places in the two locations, we illustrate how the configurations and co-constructions of gender and space are exposed to ongoing , often subtle shifts, which are impelled by dialectically grounded transformations of quotidian spatial practices and social relations. Expanding upon the notion of viri–/uxorilocality, we explore shifts in the gendered strategies of newcomers establishing their presence in the two spaces and the extent to which these practices may alter gendered spatial significations.
Sociologus: Journal for Social Anthropology, 2015
Public transport in Ghana is a private enterprise. The incapacity of the Ghan-aian state to adequ... more Public transport in Ghana is a private enterprise. The incapacity of the Ghan-aian state to adequately provide for transport services is at once capitalized on and compensated for by local entrepreneurs. Characterized principally by market oriented entrepreneurial actions, their practices have not only been never captured by the state, but they form the basis for repelling regulative forays of the state. Manifest in the socially embedded economic behaviours of the transport workers is a form of entrepreneurship that can be conceived as both the source and the product of a 'vernacular neoliberalism'; that is, a kind of avant la lettre neoliberalism that has not been enforced exogenously, but that emerged from the local grounds of long-established modes of economic practice. Drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic research, this article examines the development of a market imperative as a main structuring force of social organization. In so doing, it suggests a progressive reversal of the ways the conceptual lens proffered by neoliberalism can be put to use for describing the significance and explaining the perseverance of local economic practices in Africa.
U. Engel, M. Boeckler & D. Müller-Mahn (eds.) Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018
K. Beck, G. Klaeger & M. Stasik (eds) The Making of the African Road. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017
K. Beck, G. Klaeger & M. Stasik (eds) The Making of the African Road. Leiden/Boston: Brill., 2017
Bus stations play a central role in Africa’s largely artisanal and informal public road transport... more Bus stations play a central role in Africa’s largely artisanal and informal public road transport. It is in the stations that a large part of motorised road traffic is enabled, maintained and, at times, also disrupted. In this chapter, I attend to the organisation of a long-distance bus station in Ghana’s capital Accra to explore how the orders of the road and of the roadside are constitutive of each other. Expanding on the notion of ‘involution’, understood as an inward-bound process of organisational change, I discuss the practices and occupational organisation by which the communities of the station accommodate the complexities of one of West Africa’s busiest road travel hubs. The concept of involution, I suggest, allows a detailed reflection on both the intricate arrangements that structure the workings of the roadside institution of the station as well as the practices that make these arrangements work and that keep the traffic moving up and down the roads.
In: P. Ivanov, M. Treiber & M. Verne (eds) Körper Technik Wissen. Kreativität und Aneignungsproze... more In: P. Ivanov, M. Treiber & M. Verne (eds) Körper Technik Wissen. Kreativität und Aneignungsprozesse in Afrika - In den Spuren Kurt Becks, pp. 405-417. Berlin: LIT.
http://www.lit-verlag.de/isbn/3-643-13739-5
In: D. Omanga & M. Diderot (Hrsg.) The Making of Meaning in Africa: Discourse, Image and Text.. Bayreuth: BIGSAS, 2013
Much of the music listened to by African audiences today is not produced locally but elsewhere an... more Much of the music listened to by African audiences today is not produced locally but elsewhere and by music artists living worlds apart from the local realities of their African audiences. Yet, much of the current Africanist research dealing with popular music in conjunction with African societies tends to confine itself to the study of locally-produced music and, in so doing, limits its principle focus to (local) musicians and their lyrics and songs. This empirical and epistemological bias brings in its wake the risk to exclude from its representational scope those who make music socially meaningful in the first place: the society, here understood as music audiences writ large. Drawing on the exemplary case of the social meanings audiences in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown make of Jamaican reggae music, in this article I propose a realignment of the research focus, shifting from (local) music producers to the ‘consumers’ and users of music. Though the results of such a shifted analysis are prone to be rather fractured and contradictory, I argue that they – thereby – come much closer to the fractured and contradictory meanings African audiences make of music be it of a foreign or of a local origin.
Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society, 2018
Anthropology Matters, Aug 28, 2017
Africa Today, 2018
Abstract:We here explore the temporalities and temptations of working in—yet at times beyond—bus ... more Abstract:We here explore the temporalities and temptations of working in—yet at times beyond—bus stations in Ghana by focusing on the practices and strategies of two kinds of mobile entrepreneurs: bus drivers and hawkers. Expanding on the emic categories of drivers' "overlapping" and hawkers' "waka-waka," both of which equate shrewd entrepreneurship with effort, movement, tactic, and timing, we show how drivers and hawkers accommodate the vicissitudes of "slow/fast business" by alternating between working inside the station and moving beyond it. Their mobile engagements with the temporalities of bus stations, we suggest, allow us to grasp stations as part of a more complex infrastructure in which stations and road/sides become linked with each other through different actors' practices and movements.
Africa Spectrum, 2018
This article combines the concept of a “popular economy” with that of a “niche economy” to analys... more This article combines the concept of a “popular economy” with that of a “niche economy” to analyse the workings of a central bus station in Accra, Ghana, and, by extension, of Ghana's public transport sector at large. In doing so it departs from generic models of the “informal sector” commonly used for describing road and roadside entrepreneurship in African contexts. At the same time, it challenges prevalent views of popular economies bent on emphasising mechanisms of reciprocity and solidarity over opportunity and profiteering. The focus on the station, it suggests, provides for a detailed reflection on the dialectics of collaboration and competition characteristic of Ghana's local transport economics, and it offers significant continuities with practices, places, and politics of economic “informality” in Africa.
The Making of the African Road, 2017
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2016
Critical African Studies, 2020
Public transport in Ghana is a private enterprise. Promoted indirectly through the incapacity of ... more Public transport in Ghana is a private enterprise. Promoted indirectly through the incapacity of the Ghanaian (and, already beforehand, of the colonial) state to adequately provide for a public transport sector, it is above all small-scale entrepreneurs who cater for the conveyance of people and goods. The urban bus station serves as the nerve centre of transportation conducts. It is in here that the complex systems of urban services and of long-distance routes are organized and kept running. This happens by ways of a great plenty of only loosely bound and radically market-driven processes of informal entrepreneurial actions. The economic and organizational efficiency of these invisible fingers of a largely self-regulating transport market are founded in a dynamic correlation between, on the one hand, competition, commodification and diversification, and, on the other hand, extreme adaptability, strategic cooperation and (most literally) mobility. Manifest in the therein-constituted...
This book offers an intriguing ac'co'unt of the co"mple"x and often contradicto... more This book offers an intriguing ac'co'unt of the co"mple"x and often contradictory relations between music and society in Freetown's past and present. Blending anthropological thought with ethnographic and historical research, it explores the conjunctures of music practices and social affiliations and the diverse patterns of social dis/connections that music helps to shape, to (re)create, and to defy in Sierra Leone's capital Freetown. The first half of the book traces back the changing social relationships and the concurrent changes in the city's music life from the first days of the colony in the late 18th century up to the turbulent and thriving music scenes in the first decade of the 21st century. Grounded in this comprehensive historiography of Freetown's socio-musical palimpsest, the second half of the book puts forth a detailed ethnography of social dynamics in the realms of music, calibrating contemporary Freetown's social polyphony with ...
Le Monde Afrique, 2019
présentation de la série : Gares routières, cœurs battants de l’Afrique (3). « Remplis et roule... more présentation de la série : Gares routières, cœurs battants de l’Afrique (3).
« Remplis et roule », « premier arrivé, premier servi », « passagers fantômes »… Ces principes permettent de comprendre les temporalités associées au voyage sur le continent.
In: Muße. Ein Magazin, 3. Jhg. 2017, Heft 1. URL: http://mussemagazin.de/?p=2123, 2017
Journal of African History, 2019
Challenging the view that African societies are solitudeless, this panel explores manifestations,... more Challenging the view that African societies are solitudeless, this panel explores manifestations, expressions and valuations of solitude in Africa by considering experiences of social isolation and withdrawal as well as broader-scale dynamics generative of both aloneness and autonomy.