Publications

Vigdis Broch-Due

VIOLENCE AND BELONGING: The quest for identity in post-colonial Africa
English

Modernisation in Africa has created new problems as well as new freedoms. Multi-party democracy, resource privatisation and changing wealth relationships have not always created stable and prosperous communities, and violence continues to be endemic in many areas of African life from civil war and political strife to violent clashes between genders, generations, classes and ethnic groups. Violence and Belonging: the quest for identity in post-colonial Africa explores the crucial formative role at violence in shaping peoples ideas about who they are in uncertain post-colonial contexts. As resources dwindle and wealth is contested, identities and ideas of belonging become a focal area of conflict and negotiation. Focusing on fieldwork from across the continent, case studies consider hew everyday violence ties iii with wider regional and political upheavals, and how individuals experience and legitimise violence in its different forms. The chapters also challenge the popular image of an African or ethnic violence I has is primordial, anarchic and primitive, arguing instead that violence, even in its most terrifying form, is integral to modern social, political and business interest. The Zimbabwean and Sudanese civil wars, Kenyan Kikuyu domestic conflicts, Rwandan massacres and South African Truth and Reconciliation processes are among the contexts explored.

Contributors: Jocelyn Alexander, Astrid Blystad, Vigdis Broch-Due, Harri Englund, John C. Galaty, Amrik Heyer, Sharon Elaine Hutchinson, Björn Lindgren, Jo Ann McGregor, Isak Niehaus, Johan Pottier, Fiona C. Ross and Kjetil Tronvoll.

Vigdis Broch-Due is Professor in international Poverty Research and Social Anthropology al the University of Bergen in Norway. She has held senior teaching and research positions at the universities of Washington, Oslo, Cambridge and London, and at Rutgers University. Her books include Carved Flesh/Cast Selves: gendered symbols and social practices (1993), The Poor Are Not Us: poverty and pastoralism in eastern Africa (1999) and Producing Poverty and Nature in Africa (2000).

Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa
by Vigdis Broch-Due (Editor), Richard A. Schroeder (Editor)

North Africa Institute (2001)

Development donors have supported thousands of environmental initiatives in Africa over the past quarter century. The contributors to this provocative new collection of essays assess these projects and conclude that environmental programs constitute one of the major forms of foreign and state intervention in contemporary African affairs. Drawing on case study materials from eight countries, the authors demonstrate clearly that environmental programs themselves often have direct and far-reaching consequences for the distribution of wealth and poverty on the continent.

Individual essays in the collection theorize specific forms of environmental intervention; the degree of historical (dis)continuity that exists between contemporary and past environmental policies and practices; the effect environmental programs have had on localized systems of knowledge and regimes of value; the strategies of accumulation that have spun out of heavy donor and state investment in environmental programs; and the numerous social, cultural and political-economic dislocations these initiatives have produced in African environments all across the continent.

The Poor Are Not Us: Poverty and Pastoralism in Eastern Africa (Eastern African Studies)

David M. Anderson (Editor), Vigdis Broch-Due (Editors). James Currey (January 1, 2000)

Eastern African pastoralists often present themselves as being egalitarian, equating cattle ownership with wealth. By this definition “the poor are not us”: poverty is confined to non-pastoralist, socially excluded persons and groups.

Exploring this notion means discovering something about self-perceptions and community consciousness, how pastoralist identity has been made in opposition to other modes of production, how pastoralists want others to see them and how they see themselves.

This collection rejects the premise of pastoral egalitarianism and poses questions about the gradual creep of poverty, changing patterns of wealth and accumulation, the impact of diminishing resources on pastoral communities and the impact of external values of land, labor, and livestock.

Carved Flesh / Cast Selves : Gendered Symbols and Social Practices (Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women)

by Vigdis Broch-Due I. Rudie / Tone Bleie. Berg Publishers
06 January, 1993

This volume, the first comprehensive overview of Scandinavian cross-cultural research on gender issues in the English language, addresses fundamental analytical issues currently debated within international feminist anthropology and beyond. Offering examples from a wide range of ethnographic settings, the essays show that gender comprises far more than sexual relationships: it takes on political significance insofar as it influences the distribution of resources and access to public and domestic spheres, to knowledge and to power.

John-Andrew McNeish

Lazar, S & McNeish, J Eds (2006) The Millions Return: Democracy in Bolivia at the Start of the 21st Century. Special Edition. Bulletin of Latin American Research (BLAR) Blackwells Publishing: Cambridge. Vol 25:2.

Eversole, R. & McNeish J. Eds (2005) Indigenous Peoples and Poverty in International Perspective. CROP Series in Poverty Studies. In Print:. Zed Books: London

This books brings together two of today's leading concerns in development policy- the urgent need to prioritize poverty reduction and the particular circumstances of indigenous countries. The contributors analyse patterns of indigenous disadvantage worldwide, the centrality of the right to self-determination, and indigenous people's own diverse perspectives on deveopment. One overall conclusion that emerges is that both differences and commonalities must be recognised in any realistic study of indigenous poverty.

The goals of this book is to contribute to academic debates on indigenous peoples and overty, and to international organisations' and NGOs' concrete responses to poverty amongst indigenous peoples. Also, by bringing together the experiences of diverse indigneous peoples in a comparative book, the authors hope to offer indigenous peoples, organisations and activists valuable practical insights from the experience of others.

McNeish, J (2005) Poverty, Policy and “Sleight of Hand” in Bolivia and Latin America. Chapter in “The Role of the State in Poverty Alleviation” Dean, H; Siquiera, J & Cimadamore, A (eds). CLACSO/CROP Series: Buenos Aires.

The spectre of poverty has had an enduring presence within the history of humankind. However, in these times the eradication of extreme poverty may be feasible. The resources to do so in a reasonable period of time are available. The desire and willingness of international organisations, governments and peoples to reduce and eradicate poverty are evident from prevailing discourses. What are the factors that are impeding the accomplishment of such a widely accepted goal? It is difficult to give a comprehensive and definate answer. However, a substantial explanation might be found in one of the most important, but problematic. structures of the modern world: namely the state.

This book seeks to open up a wealth of possibilities for debate and a consensus that the state- whatever its past and present limitations-must play a critical role in the struggle against poverty.

McNeish, J (2005) "Piedras por el Camino: Refleciones sobre el Crisis y las Politicas de Pobreza en Bolivia". Chapter in Alvarez, S (ed) Trabajao y Produccion de Pobreza en LatinAmerica y el Caribe. CLACSO/CROP Series. CLACSO: Buenos Aires.

This book examines the old and new processes that produce and reproduce poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean, with particular focus on changes in the conditions of work, the state, economic systems andsocial politics aimed at its reduction. The transformation of world economic politics, the internationalisation of the region's economies and the changes made to the role of the states as a result of the impact of neoliberalism have produced new mechanisms of exploitation and increased poverty. This book discusses the different means through which labour reforms, unemployment, social segregation and public policy have formed complex relations that have caused an increase in poverty through reference to concrete cases in the region. The images of the practices, the battles and protagonism of the victims of this new poverty also appear here as contrasting images, in a work that places in relief the effects of a new generation of politics that claims to erradicate poverty, through the manipulation of statistics and the reality of the region, ends up reproducing it.

McNeish, J. A (2002) Globalisation and the Reinvention of Andean Tradition. Chapter in Latin American Peasants. Library of Peasant Studies 21. Frank Cass: London & New York.

McNeish, J. A (2002) Globalisation and the Reinvention of Andean Tradition: The Politics of Community and Ethnicity in Highland Bolivia. The Journal of Peasant Studies Volume 29, No 3/4 April/July. Frank Cass: London & New York.

Lazar, S & McNeish, J Eds (2006) The Millions Return: Democracy in Bolivia at the Start of the 21st Century. Special Edition. Bulletin of Latin American Research (BLAR) Blackwells Publishing: Cambridge. Vol 25:2.

Masterthesises submitted under the Poverty Politics program

Berit Angelskar:
Children in the Interface of Tsunami and Ethnic Conflict: Interventional Consequences of Outsider Interpretations. Trincomalee, Sri Lanka. PDF-version

Hanne Elisabeth Wanvik Johansen:
Medisinsk Masala. Om forholdet mellom om urbefolkningsgruppe i Sør-Inda, og de ulike biomedisinske tilbudene de har til rådighet

Kristina Jones:
The Children of The Sea-Mother:
Charity, Development and the Economy of Poverty in a Fishing Village in Kerala, India. PDF-version

Leah W. Junge:
A Religious NGO with Microcredit Programmes in Embu and Mbeere, Kenya. PDF-version

Ingrid Jæger:
Crumbling houses - The transformation of Ladakhi elderhood. PDF-version

Stian Krog:
Living Homes and Dead Monuments. Cultural Heritage and the Construction of Space and Place in Hampi, India. PDF-version

Heidi Larsen:
Null sult på rottens øy? En antropologisk analyse av sosialstøtte og utvikling i Brasil. PDF-versjon

Iselin Åsedotter Strønen:
"For us this is Utopia coming True". Venezuela`s Bolivarian Revolution and PopularMovements in a Caracas barrio. PDF-version