Daniel Jordan Smith
Biographic Data
| ID | 81610 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Jordan Smith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel Jordan |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH D J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2612-9166 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 530 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
How Nigerians see the state: An essay in honor of James C. Scott
In this essay, I take up Scott’s call for greater attention to local knowledge, experience, and practices. But instead of exploring the benefits for development, I apply Scott’s advice to add another vantage point to his perspective on the state. Focusing on Nigeria, I reverse the optic in Seeing like a state, and instead ask how Nigerians see the state and what we might learn from their point of view—about the contemporary Nigerian state, explic…
Reflections on the Value of Anthropology for Understanding Population Processes
In this commentary-written to celebrate, but also evaluate, the relationship between anthropology and demography at the 50th anniversary of the journal-I focus on the insights gained and the challenges posed by applying anthropological theory and utilizing ethnographic methods in population studies. Population and Development Review has been the venue of choice for many anthropologists because it has consistently recognized and welcomed the contr…
Conspicuous redistribution: Money, morality, and masculinity in Nigeria
This article introduces the concept of conspicuous redistribution to elucidate the complex geometry of masculinity, money, and morality in southeastern Nigeria. For Nigerian men-especially elites, and also those who aspire to join the middle class-having money is zealously pursued and spending it is widely rewarded. But money is also linked to collectively disparaged social ills such as greed and corruption. As a result, ethical uncertainties con…
Hannerz, Ulf: Afropolitan Horizons. Essays toward a Literary Anthropology of Nigeria
A debt never dies: Navigating trust and betrayal in southeastern Nigeria
In southeastern Nigeria, Igbo-speaking people commonly assert that "a debt never dies." In anthropology, it is well established that debts contribute to constituting social relations. Whether related to money or not, debt has wide social significance and invites moral and metaphorical interpretations. The Igbo provide a particularly salient case for exploring the multidimensional implications of debt because they regularly deploy the concept acro…
Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Nigeria, written by Obadare, Ebenezer
Water Entrepreneurs, Infrastructural Citizenship, and State Power in Nigeria
In today's world, entrepreneurialism is frequently promoted for its potential to address major global social problems. Entrepreneurs are often celebrated for their ability to achieve what governments and development programs commonly fail to do: deliver sustainable economic and social benefits to poor people in the Global South. Typically, entrepreneurship is seen as bypassing the state. This essay offers a different perspective, showing how, in …
A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War by Samuel Fury Childs Daly
Biafra is perhaps best known in relation to the humanitarian crisis associated with Nigeria’s civil war from 1967 until 1970, in which, by most estimates, between 1 and 2 million people in the breakaway republic starved to death. In addition, both historians and Nigerians (including former Biafrans) frequently recount the war’s diplomatic history—that is, which countries supported Biafra and Nigeria, respectively, and for what reasons. Many schol…
The Pentecostal prosperity gospel in Nigeria: Paradoxes of Corruption and Inequality
Preachers of the prosperity gospel in Nigeria criticise politicians' greed and government corruption, even as many church leaders amass great wealth themselves. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article explores the relationship between Pentecostalism's prosperity gospel and political culture in Nigeria, especially as it pertains to problems of inequality and corruption. The analysis builds on a case study of one particular prosperity church…
Masculinity, Money, and the Postponement of Parenthood in Nigeria
In southeastern Nigeria, several interconnected processes of social change are combining to delay parenthood. Most of the demographic and social sciences literature examining the postponement of parenthood has paid primary attention to women. To address this gap, this article foregrounds the changing social landscape of masculinity as a significant context within which to situate these demographic changes. At the core of Nigerian men's perception…
Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy, and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique by Julie Soleil Archambault
Reviewed by: Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy, and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique by Julie Soleil Archambault Daniel Jordan Smith Julie Soleil Archambault, Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy, and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 224 pp. Anyone who has spent significant time in sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade will have been struck by the dramatic growth in ownership and use of mobile p…
Corruption and "Culture" in Anthropology and in Nigeria
This article examines the process of publication and reception of the author's 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 misunderstandings-but also to the powerful political purposes for which accusations of corruption (and, more specifically, notions of corruption as a "cultural " proble…
To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job: Masculinity, Money, and Intimacy in Nigeria
Sexuality: Cultural Aspects
Special Issue: Population and Development: Comparative Anthropological Perspectives
What Happened to the Chibok Girls
The kidnapping of the Chibok girls by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria generated widespread national and international attention, but a year later that attention has faded and the girls’s fate remains unknown. This essay is an effort to analyze and explain what happened, both to the initial global and Nigerian outrage about the Chibok girls and with regard to Boko Haram more generally. I focus on four issues: 1) the initial outburst of attention af…
Corruption complaints, inequality and ethnic grievances in post-Biafra Nigeria
Based on anthropological field work in southeastern Nigeria, this paper explores the public concerns and everyday experience of corruption in a society still living with the legacies of the Biafran secession attempt. The paper shows how the revival of Igbo nationalism and resentment over perceived marginalisation is fuelled by perceptions that the corrupt machinery of the federal government runs against the interests of the Igbo people, and funne…
Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of Aids in Africa ed. by Hansjorg Dilger and Ute Luig, and: The Land Is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya by Paul Wenzel Geissler an…
Reviewed by: Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa ed. by Hansjorg Dilger and Ute Luig, and: The Land Is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya by Paul Wenzel Geissler and Ruth Jane Prince Daniel Jordan Smith Hansjorg Dilger and Ute Luig , eds. Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. x + 354 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Contributors. Index. $…
Aids NGOS and corruption in Nigeria
An Author Meets Her Critics
In the now very rapidly growing literature on Pentecostalism in Africa, Ruth Marshall’s book occupies a special place. In disciplinary terms, most of that literature falls under religious studies or history. The anthropologists came later, particularly those from North America, who had to get over their distaste for a religion that seemed so saturated in the idioms of the US Bible Belt. The originality of Marshall’s book is grounded in its linkag…
Benefiting from Aids in Contemporary Nigeria
The Nigerian weekly news magazine Tell ran a cover story in July 2004 reporting on the country’s lucrative AIDS industry, entitled “Feeding Fat on AIDS.” The article connected one of the Nigeria’s biggest health problems with one of its most significant-and certainly its most notorious-political problems: corruption. The central link between AIDS and corruption identified in the story was the proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs)…
Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania by Brad Weiss
Response to Eric Uslaner's review of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria
I am grateful for Eric Uslaner's thoughtful review of my book. The exchange between us highlights for me, above all, the benefits of reading and conversing across disciplinary boundaries. Uslaner correctly notes that my book refers relatively little to a vast political science literature on corruption. My aim was to understand corruption in Nigeria as it is experienced by ordinary citizens, rather than to contribute to Western analytical debates …
Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law: The Bulging Pocket Makes the Easy Life . By Eric M Uslaner
Eric Uslaner's ambitious book argues that—across a wide range of countries and contexts—the fundamental underlying engine and explanation for corruption is inequality. Mustering an array of sources, including survey data, comparative literatures, and personal anecdotes, Uslaner makes a compelling case that the faith often placed in relatively simplistic institutional changes as a means for combating corruption is misguided. Such approaches ignore…
Corruption, NGO s, 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 practice, what effects they have beyond their stated aims, and how they are perceived and experienced by ordinary Nigerians. It shows that even faux NGOs and disin…
The Bakassi Boys: Vigilantism, Violence, and Political Imagination in Nigeria
In Nigeria and elsewhere, vigilantism appears to be a common response to ambivalence and discontent about the authority of the state. The rise of the Bakassi Boys and their tremendous popularity reveal complexities and contradictions that characterize the contours of political organization and imagination in contemporary Nigeria. Vigilantism is shown to be a reaction to the disappointments of Nigeria's neoliberal economic reforms and democratizat…
The Arrow of God: Pentecostalism, Inequality, and the Supernatural in South-Eastern Nigeria
In September 1996 the city of Owerri in south-eastern Nigeria erupted in riots over popular suspicion that the town'snouveaux richeswere responsible for a spate of ritual murders allegedly committed in the pursuit of 'fast wealth'. In addition to destroying the properties of the purported perpetrators, the rioters burned several pentecostal churches. This article examines the place of religion in the Owerri crisis, particularly the central positi…
Ritual Killing, 419, and Fast Wealth: Inequality and the Popular Imagination in Southeastern Nigeria
In this article, I situate a seemingly fantastic series of events in Nigeria in a context that renders them meaningful and acknowledges their intimate connection to everyday issues of wealth, power, and inequality. Focusing on popular stories of the occult circulating in the wake of a widely publicized case of ritual killing, I argue that these stories depict popular discontent over inequality, but also Nigerians' ambivalence about and critical a…
Burials and Belonging in Nigeria: Rural-Urban Relations and Social Inequality in a Contemporary African Ritual
In sub-Saharan Africa, rural-urban relationships are primary arenas in which social change is shaped, expressed, and contested. Like people in many contemporary African societies, rural-urban migrants of the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria face powerful expectations to be buried "at home" in their ancestral villages and to perform elaborate and expensive funeral ceremonies for their dead relatives. This article argues that Igbo funerals crystallize …
Patronage, Per Diems and the “Workshop Mentality”: The Practice of Family Planning Programs in Southeastern Nigeria
Kinship and Corruption in Contemporary Nigeria
This article explores the social reproduction of 'corruption' in Nigeria, using ethnographic data collected in the Igbo-speaking southeast. The author argues that corruption must be understood in the context of everyday instances of patronage as they occur in networks of kin, community, and interpersonal association. Kinship relationships, and other social ties rooted in similar moral obligations and affective attachments, enable Igbos to navigat…
Contradictions in Nigeria's Fertility Transition: The Burdens and Benefits of Having People
Nigeria appears to be experiencing a transition to lower fertility. Based on ethnographic research, this article shows how Nigerians navigate a paradoxical political-economic and cultural context, wherein they face powerful pressures both to limit their fertility and to have relatively large families. The main argument advanced here is that Nigerians' fertility behavior must be understood in the context of the ways that parenthood, children, fami…
Modern Marriage, Men’s Extramarital Sex, and HIV Risk in Southeastern Nigeria
For women in Nigeria, as in many settings, simply being married can contribute to the risk of contracting HIV. I studied men’s extramarital sexual behavior in the context of modern marriage in southeastern Nigeria. The results indicate that the social organization of infidelity is shaped by economic inequality, aspirations for modern lifestyles, gender disparities, and contradictory moralities. It is men’s anxieties and ambivalence about masculin…
Romance, Parenthood, and Gender in a Modern African Society
Young Igbo men and women in Nigeria increasingly insist on choosing their marriage partners and ideas about love are shaping Igbo constructions of marriage. But the viability of marriage still depends on fertility. This article examines the divergent consequences for men and women as they negotiate the transition from the role of romantic lover that now commonly characterizes courtship to the roles of mother and father embedded in webs of kinship…
Promiscuous Girls, Good Wives, and Cheating Husbands: Gender Inequality, Transitions to Marriage, and Infidelity in Southeastern Nigeria
The transition from premarital sexual relationships and courtship to marriage and parenthood in southeastern Nigeria involves particularly dramatic adjustments for young women who have absorbed changing ideas about sexuality, marriage, and gender equality, and who have had active premarital sexual lives. In the eyes of society, these women must transform from being promiscuous girls to good wives. This paper examines these adjustments and, specif…
Legacies of Biafra: Marriage, 'Home People' and Reproduction Among the Igbo of Nigeria
This article examines the ways in which the legacies and collective memories of Biafra, the secessionist state established at the time of Nigeria's civil war from 1967 to1970, shape contemporary Igbo practices and experiences of marriage, rural-urban ties and reproduction. The importance of appropriate and permanent marriage and the perceived necessity of dependable affinal relations for contemporary Igbos are analysed in relation to recollection…
Antiretroviral therapy and reproductive life projects: Mitigating the stigma of Aids in Nigeria
Masculinity, Money, and the Postponement of Parenthood in Nigeria
In southeastern Nigeria, several interconnected processes of social change are combining to delay parenthood. Most of the demographic and social sciences literature examining the postponement of parenthood has paid primary attention to women. To address this gap, this article foregrounds the changing social landscape of masculinity as a significant context within which to situate these demographic changes. At the core of Nigerian men's perception…
Corruption and "Culture" in Anthropology and in Nigeria
This article examines the process of publication and reception of the author's 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 misunderstandings-but also to the powerful political purposes for which accusations of corruption (and, more specifically, notions of corruption as a "cultural " proble…
Imagining HIV/Aids: Morality and perceptions of personal risk in Nigeria
The disparity between people's knowledge about HIV/AIDS and the extent to which they take measures to protect themselves is one of the most vexing issues for public health workers and social science analysts. This paper aims to explain some of this discrepancy, using survey and ethnographic data collected among young rural-urban migrants in Aba and Kano, two cities in Nigeria. The paper argues that many young Nigerian migrants do not perceive sig…
Corruption complaints, inequality and ethnic grievances in post-Biafra Nigeria
Based on anthropological field work in southeastern Nigeria, this paper explores the public concerns and everyday experience of corruption in a society still living with the legacies of the Biafran secession attempt. The paper shows how the revival of Igbo nationalism and resentment over perceived marginalisation is fuelled by perceptions that the corrupt machinery of the federal government runs against the interests of the Igbo people, and funne…
Premarital Sex, Procreation, and HIV Risk in Nigeria
In Nigeria, research has documented a significant disparity between people's knowledge of HIV/AIDS and the extent to which they act to protect themselves. Data from a survey of 863 adolescent and unmarried young adults, in‐depth interviews, and participant observation are combined in this study to explain some of this discrepancy. Young migrants appear to make sexual and contraceptive decisions in relation to gender norms and attitudes concerning…
Corruption, NGO s, 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 practice, what effects they have beyond their stated aims, and how they are perceived and experienced by ordinary Nigerians. It shows that even faux NGOs and disin…
Urbanization and the fertility transition in Ghana
These Girls TodayNa War-O: Premarital Sexuality and Modern Identity in Southeastern Nigeria
Daniel Jordan Smith, "These Girls Today Na War-O": Premarital Sexuality and Modern Identity in Southeastern Nigeria, Africa Today, Vol. 47, No. 3/4, Sexuality and Generational Identities in Sub-Saharan Africa (Summer - Autumn, 2000), pp. 99-120
These Girls Today Na War-O: Premarital Sexuality and Modern Identity in Southeastern Nigeria
Over the past few decades, several related changes have contributed to increasing the prevalence of premarital sexual relations in Nigeria. Demographic transformations such as rising age at marriage and increasing levels of urban migration are playing a part in changing the nature of male-female relationships. Sexual relationships are being socially constructed as an appropriate expression of intimacy, but also as a statement about a particular k…
The Pentecostal prosperity gospel in Nigeria: Paradoxes of Corruption and Inequality
Preachers of the prosperity gospel in Nigeria criticise politicians' greed and government corruption, even as many church leaders amass great wealth themselves. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article explores the relationship between Pentecostalism's prosperity gospel and political culture in Nigeria, especially as it pertains to problems of inequality and corruption. The analysis builds on a case study of one particular prosperity church…
Cell Phones, Social Inequality, and Contemporary Culture in Nigeria
Au Nigéria, il existe peu (ou pas) d'innovations technologiques ces dernières décennies qui aient produit des conséquences sociales et culturelles aussi immédiates et d'une envergure aussi grande que celles crées par les téléphones portables. Cet article examine la nature des changements générés par la prolifération massive de la technologie des téléphones portables. Il examine la manière dont l'utilisation massive des portables a accentué la dyn…
Special Issue: Population and Development: Comparative Anthropological Perspectives
Aids NGOS and corruption in Nigeria
These Girls Today Na War-O: Premarital Sexuality and Modern Identity in Southeastern Nigeria
Over the past few decades, several related changes have contributed to increasing the prevalence of premarital sexual relations in Nigeria. Demographic transformations such as rising age at marriage and increasing levels of urban migration are playing a part in changing the nature of male-female relationships. Sexual relationships are being socially constructed as an appropriate expression of intimacy, but also as a statement about a particular k…
These Girls TodayNa War-O: Premarital Sexuality and Modern Identity in Southeastern Nigeria
Daniel Jordan Smith, "These Girls Today Na War-O": Premarital Sexuality and Modern Identity in Southeastern Nigeria, Africa Today, Vol. 47, No. 3/4, Sexuality and Generational Identities in Sub-Saharan Africa (Summer - Autumn, 2000), pp. 99-120
Romance, Parenthood, and Gender in a Modern African Society
Young Igbo men and women in Nigeria increasingly insist on choosing their marriage partners and ideas about love are shaping Igbo constructions of marriage. But the viability of marriage still depends on fertility. This article examines the divergent consequences for men and women as they negotiate the transition from the role of romantic lover that now commonly characterizes courtship to the roles of mother and father embedded in webs of kinship…
The Arrow of God: Pentecostalism, Inequality, and the Supernatural in South-Eastern Nigeria
In September 1996 the city of Owerri in south-eastern Nigeria erupted in riots over popular suspicion that the town'snouveaux richeswere responsible for a spate of ritual murders allegedly committed in the pursuit of 'fast wealth'. In addition to destroying the properties of the purported perpetrators, the rioters burned several pentecostal churches. This article examines the place of religion in the Owerri crisis, particularly the central positi…
Ritual Killing, 419, and Fast Wealth: Inequality and the Popular Imagination in Southeastern Nigeria
In this article, I situate a seemingly fantastic series of events in Nigeria in a context that renders them meaningful and acknowledges their intimate connection to everyday issues of wealth, power, and inequality. Focusing on popular stories of the occult circulating in the wake of a widely publicized case of ritual killing, I argue that these stories depict popular discontent over inequality, but also Nigerians' ambivalence about and critical a…
Kinship and Corruption in Contemporary Nigeria
This article explores the social reproduction of 'corruption' in Nigeria, using ethnographic data collected in the Igbo-speaking southeast. The author argues that corruption must be understood in the context of everyday instances of patronage as they occur in networks of kin, community, and interpersonal association. Kinship relationships, and other social ties rooted in similar moral obligations and affective attachments, enable Igbos to navigat…
Igbo
Patronage, Per Diems and the “Workshop Mentality”: The Practice of Family Planning Programs in Southeastern Nigeria
Voices of the Poor in Africa
Isichei's fine book points the way to further integration between anthropology and history, providing a rich example of the means by which scholars can investigate popular consciousness by taking seriously the world of symbolic meaning. - Intl. J of African Historical Studies Vol 36 No 2 (2003). Elizabeth Isichei explores the Atlantic slave trade, as reflected in the poetics of rumour and the poetics of memory - an approach different from the qua…
Imagining HIV/Aids: Morality and perceptions of personal risk in Nigeria
The disparity between people's knowledge about HIV/AIDS and the extent to which they take measures to protect themselves is one of the most vexing issues for public health workers and social science analysts. This paper aims to explain some of this discrepancy, using survey and ethnographic data collected among young rural-urban migrants in Aba and Kano, two cities in Nigeria. The paper argues that many young Nigerian migrants do not perceive sig…
Youth, sin and sex in Nigeria: Christianity and HIV/Aids‐related beliefs and behaviour among rural‐urban migrants
In Nigeria, popular understandings of HIV/AIDS and individual risk assessment and behaviour unfold within an interpretative grid that draws on a religious moral framework. This paper reports results from a two‐year study of HIV/AIDS‐related beliefs and behaviour among adolescent and young adult rural‐urban migrants in two Nigerian cities. The young people in the study originate from south‐eastern Nigeria; they almost uniformly identify themselves…
Premarital Sex, Procreation, and HIV Risk in Nigeria
In Nigeria, research has documented a significant disparity between people's knowledge of HIV/AIDS and the extent to which they act to protect themselves. Data from a survey of 863 adolescent and unmarried young adults, in‐depth interviews, and participant observation are combined in this study to explain some of this discrepancy. Young migrants appear to make sexual and contraceptive decisions in relation to gender norms and attitudes concerning…
Contradictions in Nigeria's Fertility Transition: The Burdens and Benefits of Having People
Nigeria appears to be experiencing a transition to lower fertility. Based on ethnographic research, this article shows how Nigerians navigate a paradoxical political-economic and cultural context, wherein they face powerful pressures both to limit their fertility and to have relatively large families. The main argument advanced here is that Nigerians' fertility behavior must be understood in the context of the ways that parenthood, children, fami…
The Bakassi Boys: Vigilantism, Violence, and Political Imagination in Nigeria
In Nigeria and elsewhere, vigilantism appears to be a common response to ambivalence and discontent about the authority of the state. The rise of the Bakassi Boys and their tremendous popularity reveal complexities and contradictions that characterize the contours of political organization and imagination in contemporary Nigeria. Vigilantism is shown to be a reaction to the disappointments of Nigeria's neoliberal economic reforms and democratizat…
Burials and Belonging in Nigeria: Rural-Urban Relations and Social Inequality in a Contemporary African Ritual
In sub-Saharan Africa, rural-urban relationships are primary arenas in which social change is shaped, expressed, and contested. Like people in many contemporary African societies, rural-urban migrants of the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria face powerful expectations to be buried "at home" in their ancestral villages and to perform elaborate and expensive funeral ceremonies for their dead relatives. This article argues that Igbo funerals crystallize …
Urbanization and the fertility transition in Ghana
Oil, Blood and Money: Culture and Power in Nigeria
Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 334 pp. Images of crisis dominate the circulation of representations regarding contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. Stories and photographs of grinding poverty, brutal wars, unfathomable famine and the devastation of HIV/AIDS permeate global collective consciousness about the continent, too often producing a mix of resignatio…
Legacies of Biafra: Marriage, 'Home People' and Reproduction Among the Igbo of Nigeria
This article examines the ways in which the legacies and collective memories of Biafra, the secessionist state established at the time of Nigeria's civil war from 1967 to1970, shape contemporary Igbo practices and experiences of marriage, rural-urban ties and reproduction. The importance of appropriate and permanent marriage and the perceived necessity of dependable affinal relations for contemporary Igbos are analysed in relation to recollection…
A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria
E-mails proposing an "urgent business relationship" help make fraud Nigeria's largest source of foreign revenue after oil. But scams are also a central part of Nigeria's domestic cultural landscape. Corruption is so widespread in Nigeria that its citizens call it simply "the Nigerian factor." Willing or unwilling participants in corruption at every turn, Nigerians are deeply ambivalent about it--resigning themselves to it, justifying it, or compl…
Cell Phones, Social Inequality, and Contemporary Culture in Nigeria
Au Nigéria, il existe peu (ou pas) d'innovations technologiques ces dernières décennies qui aient produit des conséquences sociales et culturelles aussi immédiates et d'une envergure aussi grande que celles crées par les téléphones portables. Cet article examine la nature des changements générés par la prolifération massive de la technologie des téléphones portables. Il examine la manière dont l'utilisation massive des portables a accentué la dyn…
Modern Marriage, Men’s Extramarital Sex, and HIV Risk in Southeastern Nigeria
For women in Nigeria, as in many settings, simply being married can contribute to the risk of contracting HIV. I studied men’s extramarital sexual behavior in the context of modern marriage in southeastern Nigeria. The results indicate that the social organization of infidelity is shaped by economic inequality, aspirations for modern lifestyles, gender disparities, and contradictory moralities. It is men’s anxieties and ambivalence about masculin…
Corruption, culture politique et démocratie au Nigeria: Réactions populaires à la croisade anti-corruption du président Obasanjo
Le président Obasanjo a fait de la lutte contre la corruption la priorité de son gouvernement. Cependant, après ses deux mandats, le phénomène est toujours aussi endémique. Malgré le scepticisme de nombreux Nigérians quant à la sincérité et l'efficacité de la croisade anti-corruption d'Obasanjo, ces initiatives ont modifié la culture politique du pays. En faisant des accusations de corruption un ingrédient des luttes politiques, Obasanjo a obligé…
Response to Eric Uslaner's review of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria
I am grateful for Eric Uslaner's thoughtful review of my book. The exchange between us highlights for me, above all, the benefits of reading and conversing across disciplinary boundaries. Uslaner correctly notes that my book refers relatively little to a vast political science literature on corruption. My aim was to understand corruption in Nigeria as it is experienced by ordinary citizens, rather than to contribute to Western analytical debates …
Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law: The Bulging Pocket Makes the Easy Life . By Eric M Uslaner
Eric Uslaner's ambitious book argues that—across a wide range of countries and contexts—the fundamental underlying engine and explanation for corruption is inequality. Mustering an array of sources, including survey data, comparative literatures, and personal anecdotes, Uslaner makes a compelling case that the faith often placed in relatively simplistic institutional changes as a means for combating corruption is misguided. Such approaches ignore…
Corruption, NGO s, 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 practice, what effects they have beyond their stated aims, and how they are perceived and experienced by ordinary Nigerians. It shows that even faux NGOs and disin…
Sociology (43 works) · Political science (31 works) · Law (24 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Anthropology (15 works) · Geography (14 works) · History (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Economics (12 works)