Deborah Durham
Biographic Data
| ID | 80403 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deborah Durham |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deborah |
| FAMILY NAME | Durham |
| SIGNATURE | DURHAM D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Sweet Briar College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 433 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
In the Meantime
The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the str…
In the Meantime
The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the str…
In the Meantime
Morality in the middle
Batswana contrast owning cars with owning houses: the first signals self-centred accomplishment and possibly deceptive status claims, and the second an investment in sociality. The tensions between individual accomplishment and social connectivity are long-standing in Botswana, and a close examination of cars and houses finds that each is tied up with both dimensions of self-making. The new materiality that envelopes Botswana, however, with risin…
Death in Botswana
Material deceptions and the qualities of time
Previous articleNext article FreeEditorial NoteMaterial deceptions and the qualities of timeDeborah Durham, Mariane C. Ferme, and Luiz CostaDeborah DurhamKellogg Visiting Fellow, University of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author , Mariane C. FermeUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author , and Luiz CostaUniversidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Search for more articles by this author Kellogg Visiting F…
Vital infrastructures
Previous articleNext article FreeEditors' IntroductionVital infrastructuresDeborah Durham, Mariane C. Ferme, and Luiz CostaDeborah DurhamVisiting Fellow, Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author , Mariane C. FermeUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author , and Luiz CostaUniversidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Search for more articles by this author Visiting Fellow, Kellogg…
Future orientations
Previous articleNext article FreeEditorial NoteFuture orientationsMariane C. Ferme, Luiz Costa, and Deborah DurhamMariane C. FermeUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author , Luiz CostaUniversidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Search for more articles by this author , and Deborah DurhamLongwood University; University of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author University of California, BerkeleyUniversidade F…
Elusive Adulthoods
Debate
This article examines the ways in which American gun owners deploy a particular ethical system in their responses to instances of mass gun violence. I argue that anthropology is uniquely situated to provide a better understanding of how this ethical system is produced, thereby allowing us to move beyond the falsely dichotomous terms of the gun control debate. Recently returned from a period of fieldwork with a gun rights activist community in San…
Making Modern Girls
The twenty-first century seems to be a century for saving the girl child. Nicholas Kristof devotes most of his columns in the New York Times to identifying girls in the developing world who are abused by their seniors for profit and for “traditions,” and numerous international NGOs have set up operations across Africa and Asia and intensely market their product—girl-saving—to an audience in the West. Saving women and girls from forms of violence …
Youth
Youth was originally theorized by ethnographers of colonial Africa in functionalist terms that saw each age grade as an integral part of a social system that reproduced itself intact with every new generation. Theories developed in the 1960s began to account for social strife and tensions between youth and elders in hierarchical, gerontocratic social systems, but still saw initiation and other rites as resolving tensions and restoring the status …
Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town by Steffen Jensen
Disgust and the Anthropological Imagination
Although disgust often features in anthropological shop talk and teaching, it has not been explored as a heuristic in formal anthropological studies. I suggest that studying disgust would contribute to understanding the tensions and revealing underdeveloped elements in some common analytical frameworks, including the mind-body relationship, the nature of the self, anthropological approaches to the senses and to emotion, recent interest in intimac…
The Lady in the Logo
BotswanaIn 1990, a recurring topic at meetings of the Herero Youth Association, or Otjira tjOmitanda, in Mahalapye, Botswana was the design of a logo. Once selected, this logo would grace membership cards and one of the ubiquitous stamps that authorize communications in Botswana. Members of the Yout
Generations in Africa
New Horizons
New Horizons:Youth at the Millennium Deborah Durham Anne Allison , Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 332 pp. Vanessa L. Fong , Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China's One-Child Policy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. 242 pp. Cindi Katz , Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004…
Generations and Globalization
A glimpse into how globalization shapes and is shaped by family life around the world
The Body Impolitic
Creating Germans Abroad
Culture and the Senses
Culture and Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. By Kathryn Linn Geurts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 315; 21 photographs; map. $54.95/£37.95 cloth; $21.95/£15.95 paper. How different are people? Surely we all share at least a common mental and physical apparatus. But how we put that apparatus to use, and recognize and evaluate its various capabilities, can be very different. The relationship between…
Disappearing youth
In this article, I explore the discourses of youth in Botswana, focusing the analysis on 1995 protests over the murder of a student. I argue that youth should be examined as a social shifter: When invoked, youth indexes sets of social relationships that are dynamic and constructed in the invocation. As people argue over who youth are and how they behave, they index shifting relationships of power and authority, responsibility and capability, agen…
Disabling Globalization
Funerals and the Public Space of Sentiment in Botswana
In Botswana, funerals are key to the exercise of civil conduct. Funerals constitute distinctive public spaces that focus local attention on how particular persons' sentiments influence the well-being of others. By managing the social impact of sentiments of sorrow, love, jealousy, anger and resignation, all those who attend funerals ideally maintain a footing of civility, preventing recognised differences from causing permanent disruptions in soc…
Love and Jealousy in the Space of Death
This article examines funerals in a Herero community in Botswana as a discourse on the fundamental sentiments that orient people to one another and that connect them through effecting mutuality. I argue that the Herero community, in the face of ongoing dispersal, is more concerned with sustaining sociality than with reconstituting particular forms or relationships. At deaths, Herero highlight basic social orientations through sentimental assertio…
Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa
Youth are an increasingly compelling subject for study in Africa, entering into political space in highly complex ways. To pay attention to youth is to pay close attention to the topology of the social landscape-to power and agency; public, national, and domestic spaces and identities, and their articulation and disjunctures; memory, history, and sense of change; globalization and governance; gender and class. In this introduction to the articles…
Disappearing youth
In this article, I explore the discourses of youth in Botswana, focusing the analysis on 1995 protests over the murder of a student. I argue that youth should be examined as a social shifter: When invoked, youth indexes sets of social relationships that are dynamic and constructed in the invocation. As people argue over who youth are and how they behave, they index shifting relationships of power and authority, responsibility and capability, agen…
In the Shadow of Marriage
In the Shadow of Marriage: Gender and Justice in an African Community. ANNE M. O. GRIFFITHS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ix + 310 pp., photographs, figures, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index
Funerals and the Public Space of Sentiment in Botswana
In Botswana, funerals are key to the exercise of civil conduct. Funerals constitute distinctive public spaces that focus local attention on how particular persons' sentiments influence the well-being of others. By managing the social impact of sentiments of sorrow, love, jealousy, anger and resignation, all those who attend funerals ideally maintain a footing of civility, preventing recognised differences from causing permanent disruptions in soc…
Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination
The predicament of dress
To appreciate better the uncertain and unstable way that Herero women of Botswana understand their distinctive dress, I extend Bakhtin's notion of "sparkle" to include the disparate modalities through which meaning is constituted. An embodied subjectivity, or experiential sensibility, intrudes upon structured contrasts that also give the dress meaning in such registers as gender, ethnic relations, and the political economy of the liberal democrat…
Soliciting Gifts and Negotiating Agency
This article explores the playful asking for things that occurs daily in Botswana, and connects it with the frequent solicitations one receives there to aid public and private projects. In these transactions people mutually construct themselves as independent actors: such constructions are not a priori to the interchanges. Requests and solicitations, organized around the possibility of denial, configure the actors as essentially of equal agentive…
Love and Jealousy in the Space of Death
This article examines funerals in a Herero community in Botswana as a discourse on the fundamental sentiments that orient people to one another and that connect them through effecting mutuality. I argue that the Herero community, in the face of ongoing dispersal, is more concerned with sustaining sociality than with reconstituting particular forms or relationships. At deaths, Herero highlight basic social orientations through sentimental assertio…
Disgust and the Anthropological Imagination
Although disgust often features in anthropological shop talk and teaching, it has not been explored as a heuristic in formal anthropological studies. I suggest that studying disgust would contribute to understanding the tensions and revealing underdeveloped elements in some common analytical frameworks, including the mind-body relationship, the nature of the self, anthropological approaches to the senses and to emotion, recent interest in intimac…
Debate
This article examines the ways in which American gun owners deploy a particular ethical system in their responses to instances of mass gun violence. I argue that anthropology is uniquely situated to provide a better understanding of how this ethical system is produced, thereby allowing us to move beyond the falsely dichotomous terms of the gun control debate. Recently returned from a period of fieldwork with a gun rights activist community in San…
Morality in the middle
Batswana contrast owning cars with owning houses: the first signals self-centred accomplishment and possibly deceptive status claims, and the second an investment in sociality. The tensions between individual accomplishment and social connectivity are long-standing in Botswana, and a close examination of cars and houses finds that each is tied up with both dimensions of self-making. The new materiality that envelopes Botswana, however, with risin…
The Body Impolitic
Vital infrastructures
Previous articleNext article FreeEditors' IntroductionVital infrastructuresDeborah Durham, Mariane C. Ferme, and Luiz CostaDeborah DurhamVisiting Fellow, Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author , Mariane C. FermeUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author , and Luiz CostaUniversidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Search for more articles by this author Visiting Fellow, Kellogg…
Future orientations
Previous articleNext article FreeEditorial NoteFuture orientationsMariane C. Ferme, Luiz Costa, and Deborah DurhamMariane C. FermeUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author , Luiz CostaUniversidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Search for more articles by this author , and Deborah DurhamLongwood University; University of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author University of California, BerkeleyUniversidade F…
New Horizons
New Horizons:Youth at the Millennium Deborah Durham Anne Allison , Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 332 pp. Vanessa L. Fong , Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China's One-Child Policy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. 242 pp. Cindi Katz , Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004…
Memory and the Postcolony
Disabling Globalization
Some Spirits Heal, Others Only Dance
Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent
Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent:. South Korean Social Movement. NANCY ABELMANN. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xviii. 306 pp., illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index
Nuptiality in Sub-Saharan Africa
Actes de la conférence organisée par le Anthropology and demographic committee présidé par Gilles Pison, sous la direction de l'International union for the scientific study of population, Paris, 1988
Soliciting Gifts and Negotiating Agency
This article explores the playful asking for things that occurs daily in Botswana, and connects it with the frequent solicitations one receives there to aid public and private projects. In these transactions people mutually construct themselves as independent actors: such constructions are not a priori to the interchanges. Requests and solicitations, organized around the possibility of denial, configure the actors as essentially of equal agentive…
Nuptiality in Sub-Saharan Africa
Actes de la conférence organisée par le Anthropology and demographic committee présidé par Gilles Pison, sous la direction de l'International union for the scientific study of population, Paris, 1988
In the Shadow of Marriage
In the Shadow of Marriage: Gender and Justice in an African Community. ANNE M. O. GRIFFITHS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ix + 310 pp., photographs, figures, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index
Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination
The predicament of dress
To appreciate better the uncertain and unstable way that Herero women of Botswana understand their distinctive dress, I extend Bakhtin's notion of "sparkle" to include the disparate modalities through which meaning is constituted. An embodied subjectivity, or experiential sensibility, intrudes upon structured contrasts that also give the dress meaning in such registers as gender, ethnic relations, and the political economy of the liberal democrat…
Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent
Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent:. South Korean Social Movement. NANCY ABELMANN. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xviii. 306 pp., illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index
Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa
Youth are an increasingly compelling subject for study in Africa, entering into political space in highly complex ways. To pay attention to youth is to pay close attention to the topology of the social landscape-to power and agency; public, national, and domestic spaces and identities, and their articulation and disjunctures; memory, history, and sense of change; globalization and governance; gender and class. In this introduction to the articles…
Some Spirits Heal, Others Only Dance
Memory and the Postcolony
Madumo, a Man Bewitched
Funerals and the Public Space of Sentiment in Botswana
In Botswana, funerals are key to the exercise of civil conduct. Funerals constitute distinctive public spaces that focus local attention on how particular persons' sentiments influence the well-being of others. By managing the social impact of sentiments of sorrow, love, jealousy, anger and resignation, all those who attend funerals ideally maintain a footing of civility, preventing recognised differences from causing permanent disruptions in soc…
Love and Jealousy in the Space of Death
This article examines funerals in a Herero community in Botswana as a discourse on the fundamental sentiments that orient people to one another and that connect them through effecting mutuality. I argue that the Herero community, in the face of ongoing dispersal, is more concerned with sustaining sociality than with reconstituting particular forms or relationships. At deaths, Herero highlight basic social orientations through sentimental assertio…
Creating Germans Abroad
Culture and the Senses
Culture and Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. By Kathryn Linn Geurts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 315; 21 photographs; map. $54.95/£37.95 cloth; $21.95/£15.95 paper. How different are people? Surely we all share at least a common mental and physical apparatus. But how we put that apparatus to use, and recognize and evaluate its various capabilities, can be very different. The relationship between…
Disappearing youth
In this article, I explore the discourses of youth in Botswana, focusing the analysis on 1995 protests over the murder of a student. I argue that youth should be examined as a social shifter: When invoked, youth indexes sets of social relationships that are dynamic and constructed in the invocation. As people argue over who youth are and how they behave, they index shifting relationships of power and authority, responsibility and capability, agen…
Disabling Globalization
Generations and Globalization
A glimpse into how globalization shapes and is shaped by family life around the world
The Body Impolitic
New Horizons
New Horizons:Youth at the Millennium Deborah Durham Anne Allison , Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 332 pp. Vanessa L. Fong , Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China's One-Child Policy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. 242 pp. Cindi Katz , Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004…
The Lady in the Logo
BotswanaIn 1990, a recurring topic at meetings of the Herero Youth Association, or Otjira tjOmitanda, in Mahalapye, Botswana was the design of a logo. Once selected, this logo would grace membership cards and one of the ubiquitous stamps that authorize communications in Botswana. Members of the Yout
Generations in Africa
Disgust and the Anthropological Imagination
Although disgust often features in anthropological shop talk and teaching, it has not been explored as a heuristic in formal anthropological studies. I suggest that studying disgust would contribute to understanding the tensions and revealing underdeveloped elements in some common analytical frameworks, including the mind-body relationship, the nature of the self, anthropological approaches to the senses and to emotion, recent interest in intimac…
Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town by Steffen Jensen
Youth
Youth was originally theorized by ethnographers of colonial Africa in functionalist terms that saw each age grade as an integral part of a social system that reproduced itself intact with every new generation. Theories developed in the 1960s began to account for social strife and tensions between youth and elders in hierarchical, gerontocratic social systems, but still saw initiation and other rites as resolving tensions and restoring the status …
Making Modern Girls
The twenty-first century seems to be a century for saving the girl child. Nicholas Kristof devotes most of his columns in the New York Times to identifying girls in the developing world who are abused by their seniors for profit and for “traditions,” and numerous international NGOs have set up operations across Africa and Asia and intensely market their product—girl-saving—to an audience in the West. Saving women and girls from forms of violence …
Sociology (26 works) · Law (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (13 works) · Anthropology (12 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · African history and culture studies (9 works) · Art (8 works)