- Paperback: 238 pages
- Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (Oct 15 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0226669696
- ISBN-13: 978-0226669694
- Product Dimensions: 2.3 x 1.5 x 0.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #623,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
Book Description
At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic "out of the way" African culture—subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything "indigenous" or local. Through analyses of everyday and ceremonial social practices, Piot illustrates the intertwining of modernity with tradition and of the local with the national and global. In a striking example of the appropriation of tradition by the state, Togo's Kabre president regularly flies to the region in his helicopter to witness male initiation ceremonies.
Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, Remotely Global aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion.
Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, Remotely Global aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
This study is an attempt to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place (Tsing 1993)-a society in the savanna region of West Africa where Meyer Fortes, Jack Goody, and Marcel Griaule conducted their ethnographic research. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
This study is an attempt to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place (Tsing 1993)-a society in the savanna region of West Africa where Meyer Fortes, Jack Goody, and Marcel Griaule conducted their ethnographic research. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A new "take" on the history of colonization in West Africa.,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Paperback)
The thesis of Remotely Global is complex yet condensed: current Kabre culture, a classic remote African people of Northern Togo, illustrates a specific melding of influences both modern and traditional, global and local that is clearly driven by the desire to imitate or usurp the powers of the colonizers."As should be amply clear by now, the Kabre world is one of promiscuous mixing, in which sacrifice and MTV, rainmakers and civil servants, fetishists and catechists exist side by side and coauthor an uncontainable hybrid cultural landscape...They (the Kabre) are as at home in the world of so-called tradition as in that of the modern, and see the mixture of the two not only as unproblematic but also as desirable...An empty signifier whose content is forever shifting, modernity itself is not only intrinsically impure and hopelessly hybridized, but also incorrigibly plural and forever incomplete." (page 178) Remotely Global has a refreshing, astringent tone. It is clearly written with rich detail. As an ethnographer's outlook, it provides a new 'take' on the process of colonization and offers much to challenge or complete the common Western viewpoint of colonial civilization.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews) 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interstices of the traditional and the modern,
By Valter Cvijic - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Paperback)
Piot's book is a work of ethnographic mastery.The author shows how we can think gift economies, translocalities, ritual, commodities, gender, etc. in terms of dynamic interplay in which traditional societies are not passive absorbers of colonial power, but rather inform their own cultural categories by appropriating the colonial. Piot here exposes the error of seeing traditional societies as ahistorical, static societies, when they are actually as much modern as traditional; societies which dynamically communicate with the 'outside'. Piot's reflexivity in writing is stimulating as it rejects the Western analytical gaze, informed by individualization, essentialization and all too often seeking for mechanical solidarity. 11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A new "take" on the history of colonization in West Africa.,
By Midwest Book Review - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Paperback)
The thesis of Remotely Global is complex yet condensed: current Kabre culture, a classic remote African people of Northern Togo, illustrates a specific melding of influences both modern and traditional, global and local that is clearly driven by the desire to imitate or usurp the powers of the colonizers."As should be amply clear by now, the Kabre world is one of promiscuous mixing, in which sacrifice and MTV, rainmakers and civil servants, fetishists and catechists exist side by side and coauthor an uncontainable hybrid cultural landscape...They (the Kabre) are as at home in the world of so-called tradition as in that of the modern, and see the mixture of the two not only as unproblematic but also as desirable...An empty signifier whose content is forever shifting, modernity itself is not only intrinsically impure and hopelessly hybridized, but also incorrigibly plural and forever incomplete." (page 178) Remotely Global has a refreshing, astringent tone. It is clearly written with rich detail. As an ethnographer's outlook, it provides a new 'take' on the process of colonization and offers much to challenge or complete the common Western viewpoint of colonial civilization. |
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