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Errance and Elsewheres among Africans Waiting to Restart Their Journeys in Dakar, Senegal
This article analyzes the experience of Africans stranded in Dakar, Senegal, halfway through their intended journeys out of the continent.
Envisioning, Evaluating and Co-Enacting Performance in Global Health Interventions: Ethnographic Insights from Senegal
The notion of performance has become dominant in health programming, whether being embodied through pay-for-performance schemes or through other incentive-based interventions. In this article, we seek to unpack the idea of performance and performing in a dialogical fashion between field-based…
Engaging ‘communities’: anthropological insights from the West African Ebola epidemic
This article reflects on the nature of community engagement during the Ebola epidemic and demonstrates a disjuncture between local realities and what is being imagined in post-Ebola reports about the lessons that need to be learned for the future.
Doing gender, doing alcohol: The paradox of gendered drinking practices among young Nigerians.
In traditional Nigeria, consumption norms prohibited women’s and young people’s alcohol use. Nowadays, young men and women use alcohol, and many enact identities with heavy drinking. This study uses gender performance theory and interviews/focus group data from 72 young Nigerian…
Displacement in Casamance, Senegal: lessons (hopefully) learned, 2000–2019
The paper reflects on fieldwork conducted since 2000 with displaced communities in Lower and Middle Casamance, Senegal, amid West Africa’s arguably longest running civil conflict. While this is a small conflict in a geographically confined space, Casamance presents a microcosm…
Displacement at seascapes: Senegalese fishermen in between state power and foreign fleets
Through semi-structured interviews with Senegalese fishermen, this article examines their displacement following the depletion of fishing stocks in Senegalese waters owing to the activities of European and Asian industrial fleets over the last two decades.
Discriminate biopower and everyday biopolitics: views on sickle cell testing in Dakar
Many physicians in Senegal and France, where most Senegalese sickle cell specialists are partially trained, assume that genetic testing that could imply selective abortion for people with sickle cell would run counter to the religious and cultural ethics of people…
Diagnosing Diabetes, Diagnosing Colonialism: An Ethnography of the Classification and Counting of a Senegalese Metabolic Disease
This article explores the top-down production of the statistics frequently circulated in global health. These data must first originate in a place like the public hospital in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in doctor’s offices and laboratories and medical archives.
COVID-19 in Senegal: Exploring the Historical Context
While many academics and popular journalists have recently addressed historical epidemics in the context of COVID-19, much of this literature concerns the history of former colonial powers rather than the history of formerly colonized states. This review finds that the…
Courting success in HIV/AIDS prevention: the challenges of addressing a concentrated epidemic in Senegal
This article presents findings from a study of HIV/AIDS programmes for urban sex workers in Dakar, Senegal. The objective of the research was to assess HIV prevention and treatment efforts to date, and to identify challenges that must be overcome…
Corruption, NGOs, and development in Nigeria
This article examines corruption in Nigeria’s development sector, particularly in the vastly growing arena of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Grounded in ethnographic case studies, the analysis explores why local NGOs in Nigeria have proliferated so widely, what they do in…
Corruption and “culture” in anthropology and in Nigeria
This article examines the publication and reception of a book about corruption in Nigeria as a form of ethnographic evidence that is useful to interrogate the fraught relationship between the concepts of culture and corruption. The evidence points to multiple…
