Inge Butter
Inge Butter has a background in cultural anthropology and sociology (MA, Leiden University) and an interest in Arabic language and culture (BA, Leiden University). Her fields of interest range from the informal garbage collection sector to attitudes and perceptions of digital financial services. Inge has spent most of her professional career working for and affiliated with the African Studies Centre Leiden, the Netherlands. She has 10 years of experience setting up research projects, carrying out fieldwork, analysing results, monitoring and evaluating the process, as well as putting together reports for a variety of audiences. For her PhD, a total of 12 months of fieldwork were carried out over a period of three years, in both urban and rural locations in Chad and the Central African Republic. In that time, she became part of a strong network of local Chadian professionals. Inge’s areas of interest include (post)conflict dynamics and how these play out in an everyday setting, understanding local and trans-national socio-economic networks, and the interplay of insecurity and belonging. Her past research in Chad and the Central African Republic focused on Arab nomads. While currently based in the USA, she is working on proposals for projects in Anglophone Cameroon, and recently published her PhD thesis as a book with De Gruyter.
Themes of interest: mobility, connectivity, insecurity, duress, trust, the everyday, communication (technologies), sending of money, pastoral-nomadism, islam, Arabic.
Recent publications:
Butter, I.C. (2023) Nomadic connectivity: An ethnography of Walad Djifir navigating insecurities in Central Africa, De Gruyter Oldenbourg: Berlin.
Butter, I.C. (2020) Navigations of a globalizing Chad: Nomadic Walad Djifir grounded in connectivity, PhD thesis, Universiteit Leiden/African Studies Centre Leiden.
De Bruijn, M.E., I.C. Butter & A.S. Fall (2017) 'An ethnographic study on mobile money attitudes, perceptions and usages in Cameroon, Congo DRC, Senegal and Zambia', Final Report, ASCL/IFC.