Anthropologist
lectures
In this brief presentation, I offer a few reflections on what it entails to move beyond rhetoric with respect to decolonising publishing in Africa. As I see it, we are doing, not just talking about defiant scholarship and publishing. We understand decolonising within the context of our work as defying and dismantling the norms, assumptions and gate-keeping practices that have historically shaped who and what gets published.
In this lecture, I examine some of the theoretical models that have dominated the anthropological debates on development. In the course of this exploration, we will demonstrate the privileged insights that anthropological approaches can bring to bear on our understanding of culture and the human quest for peace. Three key theoretical approaches are examined – namely, modernization, dependency theory and post-development. I discuss the basic tenets of each of the models and provide brief critiques, substantiating them with ethnographic examples from Africa, including my own fieldwork in Cameroon.