Publications

In some areas in sub-Saharan Africa a rural proletariat has emerged, consisting mainly of labourers living and working on plantations and large mixed farms. Besides these fully proletarianized estate workers, there is also a category of workers that can be labelled 'semi...

Dit artikel onderzoekt de grenzen van de bruikbaarheid van het door Mary Douglas ontwikkelde 'grid-group' model aan de hand van het voorbeeld van de ontwikkeling van puriteinse (antihekserij) bewegingen in Malawi. De auteur stelt, dat de rehabilitatie van het...

By bringing the active challenge to ethnographic authority by people written about to the fore, the authors of this chapter hope to raise some doubts about the matter-of-factness with which ethnographers maintain their identity as scholarly writers who do their research in...

In the late twentieth century, Nioro du Sahel, an economically marginal town in Mali, has become an important regional pilgrimage centre for Muslims. The present paper discusses the prayer economy in this town, the rather complex but pervasive practices in which gifts are...

This book, which is based on field research carried out between 1987 and 1990, explores government interventions in soil and water conservation (SWC) in the dryland region around the town of Kassala, in eastern Sudan. The interventions introduced from the early 1980s onwards...