Karen Tranberg Hansen
Biographic Data
| ID | 77951 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen Tranberg Hansen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen Tranberg |
| FAMILY NAME | Hansen |
| SIGNATURE | HANSEN K T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 75 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 492 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Dress Cultures in Zambia
Drawing on half-a-century of research in Zambia and regional scholarship, Karen Tranberg Hansen offers a vibrant history of changing dress practices from the late-colonial period to the present day. Exploring how the dressed body serves as the point of contact between personal, local, and global experiences, she argues that dress is just as central to political power as it is to personal style. Questioning the idea that the West led fashion trend…
Dress Cultures in Zambia
Response to Marzia Milazzo's review of Conspicuous Consumption in Africa
We are writing as contributors to, and editors of, the volume Conspicuous Consumption in Africa (WUP, 2019), to express our deep concern at a review of this book which was published in Ethnic and R
Changing Secondhand Economies
Research interest in secondhand economies has expanded in recent years among scholars of diverse disciplines, especially anthropology, history, geography, and sociology. The introduction to this Special Issue discusses a number of interdisciplinary and regional perspectives on the topic. After an overview of scholarship relating to secondhand economies, historical and contemporary, we introduce a number of themes that have attracted particular at…
Postscript
Distant Companions
Distant Companions
by sex, 1946 121 5.Estimated number of Africans employed in industry and services in Zambia, by occupational field and by sex, 1951-1957 130-131 6.Estimated number of Africans employed in industry and services in Zambia, by occupational field and by sex
Informal Sector
African Fashion, Global Style
This work is a book review considering the title African Fashion, Global Style: Histories, Innovations, and Ideas You Can Wear by Victoria L. Rovine
Cities of youth
With a focus on cities in eastern and southern Africa, this paper draws on recent scholarship and my own research in Lusaka, Zambia, to analyse pathways for, and challenges to, greater social mobility for youth against the background of economic, political, and spatial processes that are affecting urban livelihoods in the region, facilitating or hindering youth social mobility. The paper describes several forms of sociality that brings young wome…
African Dress
Dress and fashion practices in Africa and the diaspora are dynamic and diverse, whether on the street or on the fashion runway. Focusing on the dressed body as a performance site, African Dress explores how ideas and practices of dress contest or legitimize existing power structures through expressions of individual identity and the cultural and political order. Drawing on innovative, interdisciplinary research by established and up and coming sc…
Necessary Houses and Nowhere Spaces
Additional informationNotes on contributorsKaren Tranberg HansenKaren Tranberg Hansen is author of Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 (1989) and editor of African Encounters with Domesticity (1992). She also wrote Keeping House in Lusaka (1997) and Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (2000). She co-edited with Mariken Vaa Reconsidering Informality:Perspectives from Urban Africa (2004) and was lead aut…
Muslim Dress Practices and Islamic Fashion Visibly Muslim
Passport, please
Urban Africa
Reviewed by: Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the City Karen Tranberg Hansen Simone, AbdouMaliq, and Abdelghani Abouhani, editors. 2005. Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the City. Dakar: CODESRIA Books, in association with Zed Books, London and New York, and University of South Africa Press, Pretoria. 305 pp. $75.00 (cloth). This book, an edited collection of recent research on a variety of urban issues in Africa, cont…
Getting Stuck in the Compound
The young people on whose everyday experiences in Lusaka this article draws come from three different socioeconomic groupings: very poor, middle income, and rich. They are living in an urban setting where space and opportunity have changed in many ways since their parents were young. Focusing on urban space and mobility in relation to gender, the article discusses structural transformations of the city and their ramifications for young women and …
Salaula
The World in Dress
Clothing research has attracted renewed interest in anthropology over the past two decades, experiencing a florescence that had been kept within bounds by reigning theoretical paradigms. The works have been influenced by general explanatory shifts in anthropology, which inform disparate bodies of clothing research that otherwise have little unity. The most noticeable trend is a preoccupation with agency, practice, and performance that considers t…
Helping or hindering? Controversies around the international second-hand clothing trade
Visual Reviews
Mama Benz and the Taste of Money . Karin Junger, producer. 52 min. Color. New York: Filmakers Library, 2002
Metropolitanism as an African Way of Life
Fashioning
Focusing on dress practices that involve both new and secondhand clothing in Zambia, this article discusses the 'social death' of things. The ephemeral and fleeting qualities are revealed in the social relations and interactions in which dress is embedded. Different contextual evaluations of the involvement of dress with their wearers' changing lives illustrate how demonstrative display of the dressed body produces experiences of dress that vanis…
Acknowledging The Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology 2001
Congo-Paris
Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law. Janet MacGaffey and Remy Bazenguissa-Ganga. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ix + 189 pp., glossary, bib- liography, index
Dressing dangerously
The World in Dress
Clothing research has attracted renewed interest in anthropology over the past two decades, experiencing a florescence that had been kept within bounds by reigning theoretical paradigms. The works have been influenced by general explanatory shifts in anthropology, which inform disparate bodies of clothing research that otherwise have little unity. The most noticeable trend is a preoccupation with agency, practice, and performance that considers t…
Distant Companions
by sex, 1946 121 5.Estimated number of Africans employed in industry and services in Zambia, by occupational field and by sex, 1951-1957 130-131 6.Estimated number of Africans employed in industry and services in Zambia, by occupational field and by sex
Getting Stuck in the Compound
The young people on whose everyday experiences in Lusaka this article draws come from three different socioeconomic groupings: very poor, middle income, and rich. They are living in an urban setting where space and opportunity have changed in many ways since their parents were young. Focusing on urban space and mobility in relation to gender, the article discusses structural transformations of the city and their ramifications for young women and …
African Encounters with Domesticity
Anthropologists usually think of domesticity as the activities related to the home and the family. Such activities have complex meanings associated with the sense of space, work, gender, and power. The contributors to this interdisciplinary collection of papers examine how indigenous African notions of domesticity interact with Western notions to transform the meaning of such activities. They explore the interactions of notions of domesticity in …
The Multiplication of Labor
Dealing with Used Clothing
Research Article| September 01 1994 Dealing with Used Clothing: Salaula and the Construction of Identity in Zambia's Third Republic Karen Tranberg Hansen Karen Tranberg Hansen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1994) 6 (3): 503-523. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-6-3-503 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Karen Tranberg Hansen; Dealing with Us…
Distant Companions
Distant Companions tells the fascinating story of the lives and times of domestic servants and their employers in Zambia from the beginning of white settlement during the colonial period until after independence. Emphasizing the interactive nature of relationships of domination, the book is useful for readers who seek to understand the dynamics of domestic service in a variety of settings. In order to examine the servant- employer relationship wi…
Helping or hindering? Controversies around the international second-hand clothing trade
Second-hand clothing encounters in Zambia
The rapid expansion in commercial exports of second-hand clothing from the West to the Third World and the increase in second-hand clothing consumption in many African countries raise challenging questions about the effects of globalisation and the meanings of the West and the local that consumers attribute to objects at different points of their journey across global space. This article draws on extensive research into the sourcing of second-han…
Paternalism, Patronage, and Potlatch
The intention of this article is to call anthropologists' attention to some of the theoretical and applied implications of paternalism and to report findings from field research on this question. Having defined paternalism as interference with another's autonomy justified in terms of the wish to benefit him, the article focusses on state (or bureaucratic) paternalism. Its principal concern is the effect of paternalism on corporate groups and cate…
Symbols of Change
Based on a four-year longitudinal study of urban adaptation in Lusaka, Zambia, this book offers both a theoretical analysis and a case study of African urbanization as a social process. The author's unique approach to this topic lies in her exploration of city-life adjustment through the subjective perception of the new urbanites themselves. The book contains the original interview material and numerous photos of the extensive fieldwork
Transnational biographies and local meanings
Drawing on preliminary field research in Zambia in 1992 and 1993 into the rapidly expanding trade in and consumption of used clothing imported from the West, this paper examines some methodological questions that arise from research‐in‐progress into the changing local appropriations of used clothing in Zambia. Because the processes that converge in this topic are not tied to any fixed locale, but call for contextualization in both politicoeconomi…
Body Politics
Body Politics: Sexuality, Gender, and Domestic Service in Zambia* Karen Tranberg Hansen Many maids come in the house as innocent as a new born babe. But the attitudes of some women to treat their maids almost like slaves or rivals certainly changes their outlook and behavior towards house work. Do you blame the maids if they look at the husband as a prize catch?1 During the colonial period in Northern Rhodesia and today in independent Zambia, emp…
Fashioning
Focusing on dress practices that involve both new and secondhand clothing in Zambia, this article discusses the 'social death' of things. The ephemeral and fleeting qualities are revealed in the social relations and interactions in which dress is embedded. Different contextual evaluations of the involvement of dress with their wearers' changing lives illustrate how demonstrative display of the dressed body produces experiences of dress that vanis…
Lusaka's Squatters
Between 1967 and 1970 the number of squatter settlements in Zambia's capital, Lusaka, increased from 9 to 32, accounting for more than one-third of the city's population (Simmance, 1974: 503). In 1973, one in every two persons in Lusaka was a squatter (Andrews, Christie and Martin, 1973: 17). Today, people continue to squat in Lusaka despite a four year upgrading project (1976-80) sponsored by the World Bank. Although they certainly grew in densi…
Markets in Africa in a New Era
The following articles are all authored by scholars who started out their research careers on African economies in the latter half of the 1990s. They had an unusual opportunity. The world they were studying posed new logistical challenges to researchers, while the realities they eventually came to know also challenged the theoretical co-ordinates with which they were familiar. Their work reflects these dilemmas; it represents a new engagement wit…
Domestic trials
Scholarship on paid domestic service has attributed the troublesome interaction between servants and employers to the peculiar interpersonal relationship characterized by domination and subservience that makes this labor process different from others. Viewing the trials and tribulations servants and employers in postcolonial Zambia experience in their interaction as social practices with which they contest a power relationship of autonomy and dep…
Negotiating sex and gender in Urban Zambia
Many studies of modern African towns are concerned with the changing relationships of women and men as they engage in the daily struggle to make a living. I Similar struggles took place during the coloinial era, and pre-colonial African societies probably also experienced conflict along gender lines. But there is no reason to assume that conflicts between men and women on the one hand, and between ordinary people and state authorities on the othe…
Other People's Clothes? The International Second-hand Clothing Trade and Dress Practices in Zambia
2000). Other People's Clothes? The International Second-hand Clothing Trade and Dress Practices in Zambia. Fashion Theory: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 245-274
Gender and housing
Lusaka is a city originally designed and built for European residents, to meet European needs and comforts. In the colonial period the African residents were either domestic servants living within European households' compounds or were other contracted wage-labourers who were confined to the areas of south-western Lusaka specifically allocated to them. Europeans preferred male domestic help; women and children living at close quarters were though…
Power and Solidarity
This study investigates a role-specific vertical solidarity in South India, where urban Christian households employ rural Christians as domestics. The mistress-servant bond is characterized by the paradoxical features of subordination and devotion, unconditionality and instrumentality, sentiment and social distance. Their bond may appear to be dyadic, but in fact it implies a network of reciprocities among multiple social actors: the families of …
After Copper Town
Hortense Powdermaker's "Copper Town (1962)" easily got lost among the more prolific writings on urban social interaction by social anthropologists associated with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia. Using a very different explanatory framework, Powdermaker's study nevertheless exhibited a remarkable sensitivity to the race, gender, and class relations of the late colonial situation that has proved of lasting influence on later …
Changing Secondhand Economies
Research interest in secondhand economies has expanded in recent years among scholars of diverse disciplines, especially anthropology, history, geography, and sociology. The introduction to this Special Issue discusses a number of interdisciplinary and regional perspectives on the topic. After an overview of scholarship relating to secondhand economies, historical and contemporary, we introduce a number of themes that have attracted particular at…
African Encounters with Domesticity
Distant Companions
When I was taught anthropology," wrote James Murray, who from 1929 on spent over thirty years in the colonial service in Northern Rhodesia, "we learnt how to put bird seeds in skulls, about totemism and exogamy, and a Mr. Malinowski startled us all with a theory about ignorance of paternity.We also read little bits in a long book called 'The Golden Bough/ I do not think anybody taught us about masters and servants.Certainly I cannot remember Dr. …
Contributing to Meeting Apathy
Lusaka's Squatters
Between 1967 and 1970 the number of squatter settlements in Zambia's capital, Lusaka, increased from 9 to 32, accounting for more than one-third of the city's population (Simmance, 1974: 503). In 1973, one in every two persons in Lusaka was a squatter (Andrews, Christie and Martin, 1973: 17). Today, people continue to squat in Lusaka despite a four year upgrading project (1976-80) sponsored by the World Bank. Although they certainly grew in densi…
Symbols of Change
Based on a four-year longitudinal study of urban adaptation in Lusaka, Zambia, this book offers both a theoretical analysis and a case study of African urbanization as a social process. The author's unique approach to this topic lies in her exploration of city-life adjustment through the subjective perception of the new urbanites themselves. The book contains the original interview material and numerous photos of the extensive fieldwork
Power and Solidarity
This study investigates a role-specific vertical solidarity in South India, where urban Christian households employ rural Christians as domestics. The mistress-servant bond is characterized by the paradoxical features of subordination and devotion, unconditionality and instrumentality, sentiment and social distance. Their bond may appear to be dyadic, but in fact it implies a network of reciprocities among multiple social actors: the families of …
Negotiating sex and gender in Urban Zambia
Many studies of modern African towns are concerned with the changing relationships of women and men as they engage in the daily struggle to make a living. I Similar struggles took place during the coloinial era, and pre-colonial African societies probably also experienced conflict along gender lines. But there is no reason to assume that conflicts between men and women on the one hand, and between ordinary people and state authorities on the othe…
Family History in Africa
No abstract available for this article
Social/Cultural Anthropology
Paternalism, Patronage, and Potlatch
The intention of this article is to call anthropologists' attention to some of the theoretical and applied implications of paternalism and to report findings from field research on this question. Having defined paternalism as interference with another's autonomy justified in terms of the wish to benefit him, the article focusses on state (or bureaucratic) paternalism. Its principal concern is the effect of paternalism on corporate groups and cate…
The bad guys and their henchmen
Offiong, Daniel A. Imperialism and Dependency. Obstacles to African Development. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982. xii + 304 pp. including 35 tables. $12.95 cloth, $6.95 paper
Domestic service in Zambia
Household Work as a Man's Job
The author is assistant professor in the department of anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Introduction Gender roles are not given, but made as a result of men's and women's changing social and economic experiences. If women are domestic by nature then, certainly, nature itself is constructed. The case of domestic service, through time and across cultures, shows quite clearly that men and women…
Applied Anthropology
Books reviewed
Peter Duignan and L.H. Gann, The United States and Africa. A History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Pp. xiv+450. William Minter, King Solomon's Mines Revisited. Western Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1986). Pp. xiii+401. $21.95. Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Pp. ix+181. £22.50. Andrew Ross, John Philip (1775–1…
The Multiplication of Labor
Women and the State in Africa
Explores women's access to the apparatus of the state in Africa, the consequences of their underrepresentation, and the mechanisms they have evolved to cope with their slim hold on the levers of power
White Women in Fiji, 1835-1930
Distant Companions
Strategies and Norms in a Changing Matrilineal Society
Labor Migration and Urban Child Labor During the Colonial Period in Zambia
Migrants No More
Body Politics
Body Politics: Sexuality, Gender, and Domestic Service in Zambia* Karen Tranberg Hansen Many maids come in the house as innocent as a new born babe. But the attitudes of some women to treat their maids almost like slaves or rivals certainly changes their outlook and behavior towards house work. Do you blame the maids if they look at the husband as a prize catch?1 During the colonial period in Northern Rhodesia and today in independent Zambia, emp…
Distant Companions
When I was taught anthropology," wrote James Murray, who from 1929 on spent over thirty years in the colonial service in Northern Rhodesia, "we learnt how to put bird seeds in skulls, about totemism and exogamy, and a Mr. Malinowski startled us all with a theory about ignorance of paternity.We also read little bits in a long book called 'The Golden Bough/ I do not think anybody taught us about masters and servants.Certainly I cannot remember Dr. …
Domestic trials
Scholarship on paid domestic service has attributed the troublesome interaction between servants and employers to the peculiar interpersonal relationship characterized by domination and subservience that makes this labor process different from others. Viewing the trials and tribulations servants and employers in postcolonial Zambia experience in their interaction as social practices with which they contest a power relationship of autonomy and dep…
Distant Companions
When I was taught anthropology," wrote James Murray, who from 1929 on spent over thirty years in the colonial service in Northern Rhodesia, "we learnt how to put bird seeds in skulls, about totemism and exogamy, and a Mr. Malinowski startled us all with a theory about ignorance of paternity.We also read little bits in a long book called 'The Golden Bough/ I do not think anybody taught us about masters and servants.Certainly I cannot remember Dr. …
Domestic service. what's in it for Anthropology
Maza, Sarah C. Servants and Masters in Eighteenth‐Century France. The Uses of Loyalty. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983. xiv + 368 pp. including illustrations, appendices, chapter references, sources and bibliography, and index. $32.50 cloth. Dudden, Faye E. Serving Women. Household Service in Nineteenth‐Century America. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1983. viii + 344 pp. including chapter references an…
Sociology (51 works) · Political science (41 works) · African history and culture studies (27 works) · Law (27 works) · Geography (24 works) · History (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Economics (16 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Politics (15 works)