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The paper reviews the history of the concepts used to depict poverty in Africa. “Pauperism” is a legal concept, deriving from early modern law in Britain, which frames individual situations, places the paupers under specific rights and duties, and was applied in early colonial situations. Percentile is a economic-demographic concept, implying class difference, indexed to measurable or imputed monetary income, which became an instrument of government in the colonial world mainly after 1945, moving into the international comparative world after the era of independence. In the neoliberal era after 1989, the concept of precarity, and a focus on realizable assets rather than income, has taken higher profile than an emergent replacement for the comparative-percentile approach, sometimes now depicted as “living on $2 a day”. The paper indicates the conceptual and political implications and challenges of each of these depictions.

The Frazer Lecture was launched in 1921, with the support of scholars from all over Europe, explicitly in the context of the “meeting on common ground” after World War I. In the spirit of anthropologists examining postdisaster processes of any kind, to meet with scholars from other disciplines for mutual illumination, and to revisit its own rich intellectual and empirical archive, my lecture explored processes of recuperation. Recuperation is selective of elements rather than rescuing whole systems, then followed by creative reconfiguration. Sources from classics, recent philosophically inspired anthropology, new ethnography of Africa, and postwar Vietnam are examined as examples that pick up the spirit of the Frazer Lecture itself.

In this special section of Hau (part II), we present four texts that allow us to go further with the objective to provoke the real, ethnographically. We explore the empirical and conceptual program...

African peoples have managed multiple currencies, for all the classic four functions of money, for at least a thousand years: within each society’s own circuits, in regional exchange, and across the continent’s borders with the rest of the world. Given the materials of some of these currencies, and the general absence of formalized denominations until the colonial period, some early European accounts defined certain transactions as barter. The management of multiplicity is traced through four eras: a) the precolonial period, with some monies locally produced and acquired, and others imported through intercontinental trades, such as the Atlantic slave trade, and eventually under the expansion of capitalism to Africa; b) the colonial period, when precolonial monies, in some places, still circulated with official monies; c) postcolonial national monies for the new African states; and d) the most recent phase of multiplicity in use, due to migration and sales across borders as well as to the use of new technologies, such as mobile money. The management of multiplicity thereby has a long history and continues to be an inventive frontier. History and ethnography meet on common ground to address these dynamics through empirical study of money in practice, and broader scholarship has drawn on a large variety of original sources.

Many of us, in different parts of the world, face the responsibility of teaching the history of anthropology. In what ways do we narrate this history? While there are differences in styles of teaching across cultures and contexts, there are shared assumptions that we seek to challenge, for instance, the history of anthropological thought conceived of as a teleological parade of “isms,” each one outmoded by its successor, or an Oedipal sense of “postreflexive” anthropology as if “old” anthropology had no sense of politics or subjectivity. In this Special Section of Hau , entitled “A Joyful History of Anthropology,” we ask what it would mean to enliven our relationship to the history of anthropology. By “joyful” we do not mean a simple affirmation, but an intensity of engagement, the possibility of the reemergence of the old as the new, and a sense of anthropological texts as potentially exceeding the “isms” within which they are often bound. We invited articles that sought a nonteleological way to inhabit the history of anthropology, in the mode of immersion and agonistic or convivial companionship in ways that unsettle ideas of old and new within anthropology. Among the several abstracts we received in response from scholars across four continents, we selected the following six articles and a “game” that converse with one another across three themes: 1) Canonical recreations, 2) Minor events in the history of anthropology, and 3) Ways of inhabiting a body of knowledge. We do not necessarily make a claim to newness in our endeavor. Rather, we hope that this collection intensifies a longstanding albeit often incipient, and sometimes repressed tendency within anthropology, which is to encounter our disciplinary archive not necessarily as a history of error or villainy but as a field of possibilities.

Between 2007 and 2014, on his own and in association with Gaymon Bennett and Anthony Stavrianakis, Paul Rabinow has been devoted to the development of an “anthropology of the contemporary.” The project is widely recognized as being original, stimulating, and provocative, within and outside of the disciplinary corridors of anthropology. Only spotty attention has been paid, however, to the overarching integrity of the complex spiral of figuration and refiguration through which it has unfolded. Even less attention has been paid to the overarching integrity of the works that Rabinow inaugurated and has continued to pursue throughout his career—from an original and frequently cited formulation of the relation between tradition and modernity through his more recent articulations of the anthropology appropriate to the relation between modernity and the contemporary. Severally and jointly, the contributors to this forum give attention to both. Anthony Stavrianakis joins Rabinow in a response that engages these co...

Comment on Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the twenty-first century . Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

I was reading Tutuola’s novel Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer (1987) for another purpose: to look into African fictional representations of poverty. The lingering inspiration of our discussions in Jo...

The paper traces out the place of Eshu – the Yoruba god associated with confusion, the trickster and the messenger of the gods – in the classic sources on Yoruba religion, in a postcolonial play which comments on current politics, in the formulations of Christianity and Islam, and from fieldwork on present ideas and practices of the people of two towns in Western Nigeria. It works particularly closely on the place of Eshu in the causation, diagnosis and treatment of the condition known as daru, disturbance or confusion, which can apply to many levels of being from the mind to the body to relationships.

This paper introduces a collection of papers and responses presented as a panel at the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, in June 2013. The theme of the workshop that year was “The Life of Forms.” Our papers addressed the place of the concept of “form” in the emergence of terms such as precarity, fragmentation, impasse and others, applied to situations that comprise confusion, “too-muchness.” We bring ethnographic attention to cosmologies and approaches to daily life amongst African and Africa-descended populations in southwest Nigeria, Brazil and Congo, where there are already “forms,” such as personification and objectification, that have conventionally been translated into English in terms that convey confusion. Responses from the workshop extend the discussion by drawing on art and mathematics, and an African literary source. In this introduction, some existing past and recent literatures relative to “form” and “confusion” are discussed, and the papers and responses of the symposium are in...

The author remembers examples from her childhood and her adult life of the collection, management and curation of paper receipts: in so-called cash railways, mechanical devices used to move cash and receipts around a store; and the cigar box a relative used to store receipts. Receipts and their containers spotlight money as a unit of account, and the social, business, and personal significance of accountings and record keeping. Receipts are memories, not just of business transactions but of interpersonal relationships and values beyond the material. Receipts provoke conversation, and in so doing restore the symbolic and political dimension to otherwise impersonal economic transactions.

This paper introduces and explains the forum around my translation of the appendix to Paul Fauconnet’s 1920 book, entitled La responsibilite. Etude de sociologie , which resulted from his doctoral thesis. The appendix of this book is devoted to “The sentiment of responsibility and the sentiment of liberty.” The ideas in this piece on liberty were clearly developed in conversation with Durkheim and with other members of the group. My reading in the anthropology of ethics for papers of my own, led me to new work on liberty, but I found less attention than I expected in our contemporary anthropological scholarship to what I called durational ethics , which encompasses concepts such as responsibility, in the prospective sense, and fortitude. The following introduction explains this trajectory of exploration, which lead me to Fauconnet’s work, excerpts passages from a conference paper of mine entitled “Steadfastness and goodness,” and prefaces the translation. In addition, it profiles Fauconnet and offers a background to the concept of libre arbitre in Romance language thought, as differing from its usual translation as “free will” in the Germanic register of English.

As sequel to an earlier paper on ordinal ranking, this paper focuses on another old, but increasingly widespread, numerical expression, in both technical and public domains: namely, the percentage. It argues that the long and expanding genealogy of use, from descriptive to governmental to probabilistic, gives it persuasive as well as instrumental power, as people come to grips with novel terms of life by drawing on old concepts. The ‘one hundred’ offers a sense of understanding, while in public expressions, there appears to be an increasing vagueness of the specific nature of the one hundred as denominator and a new potential for one hundred to gesture towards an aspirational future rather than any simple description of the present. The second section engages with Helen Verran's approach to number, where she shows how numerical expressions can move from one mode to another through the possibility of expressing both one/many and part/whole relationships. The next section illustrates the applications of per...

Ten years–eventful ones in our new century of intellectual and world experience –have passed since I published Marginal Gains in 2004. Reading the nine articles on the ‘popular economy’ in South Africa recently presented in Africa (Hull and James 2012)–several of which draw in one way or another on my own work– presents me with new momentum for revisiting and updating some of the lines of research and argument that we could be developing further. In fact, the L. H. Morgan Lectures, delivered at the University of Rochester, from which Marginal Gains was developed, were delivered in 1997, so the impulse to update should be even stronger. Also we need to extend the purview of this analytical and comparative work beyond Atlantic Africa, whose domestic and international economic history for several hundred years is so largely oriented towards trade and markets. South Africa is a particularly important case to bring into comparative study, with its hundred-year history of domination by the extractive industries and deliberate impoverishment of African popular economies until the 1990s, when new initiatives began to fill in gaps in the labour market and spaces in the economics of daily life. More and more of the continent is converging somewhere between the two models: a mix of extractive industry (and agriculture) dominated by international business (but counted in the official figures as part of the gross domestic product) and a ‘do-it-yourself’ sector based variously on customary-legal access to resources, expertise built up from the past, non-official modes of social mobilization, and sheer ingenuity within the increasingly intricate and not necessarily coherent interstices in what I called ‘formalities’ (Guyer 2004), in the plural. In Atlantic Africa and elsewhere on the continent, an old, established popular sector is being brought into sharp confrontation with expanding capital-intensive presences. In South Africa, an old and powerfully established formal, capitalintensive sector deals with a newly emergent and experimental popular sector. This may be a different version of the same ‘interface’ that we put into the framework for our first collection on ‘money matters’ (Guyer 1995a) in West and Equatorial Africa, and that I took as the general historical backdrop to the analyses in Marginal Gains. Can our analytics work across these variously constructed and rapidly changing interfaces? These articles create an important and challenging opportunity to expand regional relevance and raise general

Mauss’s Essay on the Gift was the only article to be included when the journal L’Année sociologique was relaunched after the Great War. Prepared during 1923/1924, it appeared in 1925. The Essay was preceded by Mauss’s eulogy to colleagues who had died since the last edition (1912), including five killed in action and its founder, Émile Durkheim (1917). Hundreds of pages of reviews followed, many written by Mauss himself. This article places the essay back in its original context by exploring the resonance of the whole issue with the Jewish ritual of chesed shel emet (generally translated into English as ‘the true gift’) which takes care of the body between death and burial. The three parts of the paper cover: the empirical method of The Gift (very briefly); the eulogy and the reviews; and the concept of chesed (‘kindness’) in Jewish thought. This reading follows Mauss’s own method of combining empirical profusion with a hermeneutics of consonance.

The 1980s are seen as a turning point in the global economy due to the opening up of the vast markets of the post-communist world, the pursuit of neoliberal national policies reframing the place of the state in economic management, and the rise in financial technologies for an expanded range of fields for investment. One historically concomitant shift is the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement on international exchange rates in the 1970s and the rise of currency markets, while national currencies were proliferating. The post-imperial moment in Africa (1960–1980) had seen the creation of 22 new currencies, and the post-Soviet/post-Yugoslav Union had produced 20 new currencies. One result is concentrated control of currency markets by big banks, and a multitude of small interventions in regional markets and the global networks that mediate trade and currency exchange in the small-scale commodity economy.

Current variation in the forms of money challenges economic anthropologists and historians to review theory and comparative findings on multiple currency systems. There are four main sections to the paper devoted to ( i ) the present continuum of hard to soft currencies as an instance of multiplicity, including discussion of different combinations of the classic four functions of money, especially the relationship between store of value and medium of exchange; ( ii ) the logic of anthropological inquiry into multiple currency economies; ( iii ) the case of the monies of Atlantic Africa, applying the analytics of exchange rates as conversions to African transactions; and ( iv ) the return to economic life in a present day Nigerian economy lived in soft currency and cash. The paper identifies five findings that suggest foci for future research. ( i ) The widespread occurrence of conversions, which bring together ranking principles within transactions. ( ii ) Several types of positional ranking ranging from simple stepwise ordinal scales to iconic ordinality that creates a parabolic curve of value. ( iii ) Fictional units of account that serve to mediate both the memorization of nonreductive transactions and their nature as conversions. ( iv ) The importance of the temporal reach of what constitutes wealth: over the short run, the life span, intergenerational succession, and in (legal) perpetuity (as for corporate and sovereign debts and specified assets). ( v ) The social niches in which these qualities are brought together in transactional regimes. In conclusion, the paper returns to the exchange function of cash, soft currencies, and new money forms.

Cities as elusive, invisible, yet to come. ‘[T]he city is no-man's land’ (Grace Khunou, p. 240 in Mbembe and Nuttall). ‘Lagos is no man's land’ (heard in Lagos by the present writer, August 2010). A picture of a strangely empty and disrupted man-made landscape (William Kentridge, pp. 349–350 in Mbembe and Nuttall), balanced by a dense but also personless urban scene (by the same author, pp. 35–6 in the same text). … The slippage between conventional social scientific terms of runaway urbanization, the teeming human vitality of African cities, and the elusiveness of the titles, sayings and images of these three books, opens up the rich vein for research and writing into which these authors work their ways. Johannesburg. Kinshasa. Pikine (Dakar). Winterveld (a South African urban area outside Pretoria). Douala. Jeddah. The books reviewed here are based on detailed field research in six particular cities. They all juxtapose the categories of ‘metropolis’ and ‘modernity’ to the category of ‘Africa’, all positing the anomaly this move may represent in the categorical social scientific mind. The subtitles immediately indicate a different starting point from the analytics of population, geography and governance. With an approach through ‘tales’ (De Boeck and Plissart) and ‘reading the city’ (Mbembe and Nuttall), the authors indicate an alternative intellectual reach. They start from visual imagery, the language arts and the social mediations through which the lives lived in urban ‘modern’ Africa are expressed, communicated, understood, configured and conserved. Their aims evoked in my mind the modern art – rather than the analytics – of other cities. So here we have ‘circulation’ and vehicles as symbols and sounds without too much attention to traffic (the Lagos ‘go slow’; the accidents); ‘bodies’ without much attention to food or toilet needs or aging; ‘authority’ evaded or permeating rather than personified in mayors, town councils and multitudes of other officials and employees. In the ether of the invisible, what circulates are symbols and expressions; what emanates from bodies is sexual tension, aesthetic sensibility and physical vulnerability (‘bodies in danger’, De Boeck and Plissart, p. 117); what bears down oppressively is constraint and neglect of all kinds. In brief, what strikes the perceptive mind is precisely what bursts out of the conventional forms and has not yet taken a newly conventionalized shape. Through this orientation, all three books bring the humanities and artistic sensibilities to the question of the spirits, souls, inspirations, dangers, images and memories that inhabit the crowded spaces between buildings and people, insects and people, people and people.

This article draws on my experience as a member of the five-person International Advisory Group to the governments of Chad and Cameroon and the president of the World Bank on the Chad-Cameroon Oil Development and Pipeline Project (2001–2009) and as advisor to the Corporate Lives project. It addresses the problematics, for an academic anthropologist, of exercising judgment and perseverance in relation to corporate blueprints as the project developed over time. In three main parts, the article addresses our anthropological literature on ethics and involvement over time, offers examples of midstream dilemmas arising in the project, and lays out the responses of colleagues to my probing about the determinants of “hanging in.” The main purpose is to offer examples of ethnographic and ethical issues as they may arise in the increasingly complexly corporatized world on which the Corporate Lives project has focused attention and discussion.

Numerical ordinal rankings (or ratings) are proliferating in the current social and economic world. Many are used to derive and justify relative monetary valuation, by modes of equation and calculation. The article shows how these composite manipulations of order and value tend to produce a parabolic curve: very few at very high value at the top, descending in a curve to very many of very low value at the bottom. The article illustrates the form of this ordinal curve and assesses the metaphors that evoke its persuasiveness. The Great Chain of Being is explored as a source of terminology.

The article originates in a response to discuss ‘How Is Anthropology Going?’. Perceiving a new pattern in the almost 90 years looking backward and forward from my own undergraduate training, I concentrate on the recurrent concept of human ‘possibility’. Its changing referents are traced over four 20-year cycles, starting with Malinowski and Benedict (1920s and 1930s), moving to Gellner’s Thought and Change (1965), Marcus and Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), Graeber’s Possibilities (2008) and Rabinow’s Marking Time (2008). Particular attention is paid to the temporal horizons implied in the term and the forms of ethical, political and aesthetic agency one can infer from the orientations, tensions and attractions that horizons of possibility have inspired.