B Chalfin
Biographic Data
| ID | 8187 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Chalfin |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Chalfin |
| SIGNATURE | CHALFIN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Florida |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9748-4715 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 319 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Artisans of the African Anthropocene: Crafting the Patchy Plasticene in northern Ghana
Given plastics accumulation across the earth’s stratigraphy, climate scientists refer to the latest stage of the Anthropocene as the plasticene . Confounding conventional analyses of plastics through the lens of their unruly afterlives, this article shifts the focus to an iconic plastic object critically important to weathering the uncertainties of Anthropocene times. Large-scale plastic water tanks are vital to managing the compound stressors of…
Sand as Matter and Method
From shorelines remade by sea level rise to extractive enterprise, urban construction, and rural terraforming, sand is a preeminent indicator of human-induced global disturbance forming the substrate of Anthropocene lives. Drawing on case studies from Asia and Africa, this special section centers sand in ethnographic inquiry to argue that matters of sandy admixture are ripe for theorization, comparison, and informed engagement of planetary change…
Popular Infrastructures in West Africa
Popular infrastructures in West Africa encompass a broad array of basic utilities enabling access to water, sanitation, power, communication, and transportation networks. Though characterized as “by the people, for the people” formulations, popular infrastructures are rarely stand-alone and intersect with services sponsored by states, international investors, and humanitarian organizations. These amalgams evince a complex politics where self-dete…
On-shore, off-shore Takoradi: Terraqueous urbanism, logistics, and oil governance in Ghana
This paper places an empirical focus on logistics to link three strands of inquiry: Ghana's deep-water oil economy, the built environment of Ghana's oil-city of Takoradi, and the character of governance at their confluence. Moving beyond the land and sea, off-shore/on-shore dichotomy, logistics provides a means of instantiating and interpreting the regulatory terrain of off-shore extraction within a historically constituted urban landscape. Highl…
Waste work and the dialectics of precarity in urban Ghana: Durable Bodies and Disposable Things
What can the dialectics of waste work tell us about the urban underclass in the flux of late capitalism? What might waste reveal more broadly about the contradictions and uncharted possibilities of material accumulation in urban Africa? Utilizing a relational optic, these issues are explored from the perspective of young men working in the rubbish dumps of Ghana's 'edge city' of Ashaiman, a space where the detritus of local and global markets and…
Wastelandia: Infrastructure and the Commonwealth of Waste in Urban Ghana
Can infrastructure provide the basis of urban public life and the foundation for the commonwealth? And how might this be possible in contexts of modernist failure marked by the evacuation of resources, rights, and state investments and the accumulation of waste, from human excreta to industrial discharge and the detritus of everyday consumption? These questions are explored through a case study drawn from the wastelands of Ghana's city of Tema. A…
Governing Offshore Oil: Mapping Maritime Political Space in Ghana and the Western Gulf of Guinea
Ocean spaces are a dynamic arena of political transformation and claims-making essential to the unfolding of late capitalism. Indicative of the expanding geography of oil prospecting in the South Atlantic Ocean, the deep waters of the western Gulf of Guinea map a political economic frontier encompassing the maritime zones and resources of a swath of West African nation-states stretching from Senegal to Benin. In Ghana, the country at the leading …
Public things, excremental politics, and the infrastructure of bare life in Ghana's city of Tema
In Ghana's planned city of Tema, public toilets and sewerage systems are a formative terrain of urban political praxis giving tangible form to what Henri Lefebvre calls "the right to the city." Revealing the political potentials and determinations of both waste and municipal infrastructure, excreta and the systems devised to contain and channel them serve asres publicae, or "public things." At the same time they embody the inequities of bare life…
Nostalgia for the future: West Africa after the Cold War - By Charles Piot
Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa
Recasting maritime governance in Ghana: The neo-developmental state and the Port of Tema
In Africa, as elsewhere, ports are a telling indicator of the tenor of political power and the contests and shifting fortunes among ruling groups. Glaringly evident in the long era of imperial expansion, this is equally true in the present period of late-capitalist commercial acceleration and consolidation. With a focus on Ghana's port of Tema, a leading edge of containerised trade serving a vast swath of the West African sub-region, this essay e…
La rénovation du port de Tema: Économie politique de la frontière maritime du Ghana
À partir de l'étude du cas du port ghanéen de Tema, cet article se propose d'analyser les frontières maritimes comme des espaces propices à l'innovation en matière de gouvernance. Conçu comme un moteur du développement national dans les années 1960, le port de Tema a ensuite connu plusieurs décennies de déclin. Depuis 2000, le port a effectué une spectaculaire remontée et se classe maintenant parmi les trois ports commerciaux les plus importants …
Sovereigns and citizens in close encounter: Airport anthropology and customs regimes in neoliberal Ghana
Through the examination of encounters between Customs officers and travelers at Ghana's international airport, I pose a series of arguments regarding sovereignty and citizenship within a developing state deeply enmeshed in processes of liberalization. Supporting the contention that transnational flows and supranational interventions restructure rather than undermine state power, the Ghanaian case reveals neoliberal conditions to facilitate the ex…
Cars, the Customs Service, and Sumptuary Rule in Neoliberal Ghana
This essay probes the role of commodities in the crafting of state power, working from the vantage point of contemporary Ghana, a polity at once post-socialist and staunchly neoliberal, least-industrialized and highly cosmopolitan. Among the many commodities which Ghana's citizens and state bodies identify with and rely upon, cars are of critical significance. In what follows, I explore the raft of interventions surrounding car importation and al…
Customs Regimes and the Materiality of Global Mobility: Governing the Port of Rotterdam
Focusing on customs operations at the Port of Rotterdam, this essay investigates the problematic of commercial governance at a historical moment characterized by the unprecedented volume and velocity of cross-border and transoceanic trade and an increasingly globalized security mandate. Although Netherlands Customs officers, facilities, and regulatory authority are visibly evident at the Port of Rotterdam, Customs operates largely through forms o…
Global Customs Regimes and the Traffic in Sovereignty: Enlarging the Anthropology of the State
Focusing on the character of national customs regimes, this paper argues that the anthropology of the state should investigate widely shared features of nationstates, not just distinctions among individual states or types of states. As governments are restructured because of the ascendance of supranational bodies, transnational commerce, and national security threats, customs policies around the world emerge as key sites for the production of new…
Border Scans: Sovereignty, Surveillance and the Customs Service in Ghana
This article explores the relationship between surveillance techniques and the production of sovereign statehood in an effort to track the day-to-day practices through which state authority is constituted in the context of globalization. This article explicitly probes the processes through which new forms of sovereignty come into being within the life of the state. It takes as its point of departure the operations of Ghana's Customs Service, a bo…
Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa . Jane I. Guyer
Border Zone Trade and the Economic Boundaries of the State in North-East Ghana
Focusing on the tri-juncture of Ghana, Togo and Burkina Faso, this article examines the role of cross-border traders in the construction and redefinition of international boundaries. Through the study of the social and spatial patterning of trade surrounding three commodities-imported cloth, beans and shea butter (karite)-it explores the multiple ways the border is endowed with or deprived of significance. When the border is viewed as a socio-geo…
Risky Business: Economic Uncertainty, Market Reforms and Female Livelihoods in Northeast Ghana
This article examines the implications of economic uncertainty for rural markets and the livelihoods of female traders. It does so through a case study of a community in northern Ghana caught in the throes of a structural adjustment-driven privatization initiative. In order to fully comprehend the nature of the economic uncertainties in which rural economic actors are enmeshed and the manner in which they resist, engage or engender these conditio…
Market Reforms and the State: The Case of Shea in Ghana
AMajorthrust of structural adjustment in Ghana, as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, is the promotion of the private sector coupled with the diminution of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).1However, while these are sometimes undermined, as when shares are sold to private buyers or assets liquidated, their complete demise in the course of market reform is not always so clear cut. This is the case when SOEs are themselves restructured in order to becom…
Public things, excremental politics, and the infrastructure of bare life in Ghana's city of Tema
In Ghana's planned city of Tema, public toilets and sewerage systems are a formative terrain of urban political praxis giving tangible form to what Henri Lefebvre calls "the right to the city." Revealing the political potentials and determinations of both waste and municipal infrastructure, excreta and the systems devised to contain and channel them serve asres publicae, or "public things." At the same time they embody the inequities of bare life…
Border Zone Trade and the Economic Boundaries of the State in North-East Ghana
Focusing on the tri-juncture of Ghana, Togo and Burkina Faso, this article examines the role of cross-border traders in the construction and redefinition of international boundaries. Through the study of the social and spatial patterning of trade surrounding three commodities-imported cloth, beans and shea butter (karite)-it explores the multiple ways the border is endowed with or deprived of significance. When the border is viewed as a socio-geo…
Global Customs Regimes and the Traffic in Sovereignty: Enlarging the Anthropology of the State
Focusing on the character of national customs regimes, this paper argues that the anthropology of the state should investigate widely shared features of nationstates, not just distinctions among individual states or types of states. As governments are restructured because of the ascendance of supranational bodies, transnational commerce, and national security threats, customs policies around the world emerge as key sites for the production of new…
Sovereigns and citizens in close encounter: Airport anthropology and customs regimes in neoliberal Ghana
Through the examination of encounters between Customs officers and travelers at Ghana's international airport, I pose a series of arguments regarding sovereignty and citizenship within a developing state deeply enmeshed in processes of liberalization. Supporting the contention that transnational flows and supranational interventions restructure rather than undermine state power, the Ghanaian case reveals neoliberal conditions to facilitate the ex…
Wastelandia: Infrastructure and the Commonwealth of Waste in Urban Ghana
Can infrastructure provide the basis of urban public life and the foundation for the commonwealth? And how might this be possible in contexts of modernist failure marked by the evacuation of resources, rights, and state investments and the accumulation of waste, from human excreta to industrial discharge and the detritus of everyday consumption? These questions are explored through a case study drawn from the wastelands of Ghana's city of Tema. A…
Waste work and the dialectics of precarity in urban Ghana: Durable Bodies and Disposable Things
What can the dialectics of waste work tell us about the urban underclass in the flux of late capitalism? What might waste reveal more broadly about the contradictions and uncharted possibilities of material accumulation in urban Africa? Utilizing a relational optic, these issues are explored from the perspective of young men working in the rubbish dumps of Ghana's 'edge city' of Ashaiman, a space where the detritus of local and global markets and…
On-shore, off-shore Takoradi: Terraqueous urbanism, logistics, and oil governance in Ghana
This paper places an empirical focus on logistics to link three strands of inquiry: Ghana's deep-water oil economy, the built environment of Ghana's oil-city of Takoradi, and the character of governance at their confluence. Moving beyond the land and sea, off-shore/on-shore dichotomy, logistics provides a means of instantiating and interpreting the regulatory terrain of off-shore extraction within a historically constituted urban landscape. Highl…
Recasting maritime governance in Ghana: The neo-developmental state and the Port of Tema
In Africa, as elsewhere, ports are a telling indicator of the tenor of political power and the contests and shifting fortunes among ruling groups. Glaringly evident in the long era of imperial expansion, this is equally true in the present period of late-capitalist commercial acceleration and consolidation. With a focus on Ghana's port of Tema, a leading edge of containerised trade serving a vast swath of the West African sub-region, this essay e…
Risky Business: Economic Uncertainty, Market Reforms and Female Livelihoods in Northeast Ghana
This article examines the implications of economic uncertainty for rural markets and the livelihoods of female traders. It does so through a case study of a community in northern Ghana caught in the throes of a structural adjustment-driven privatization initiative. In order to fully comprehend the nature of the economic uncertainties in which rural economic actors are enmeshed and the manner in which they resist, engage or engender these conditio…
Cars, the Customs Service, and Sumptuary Rule in Neoliberal Ghana
This essay probes the role of commodities in the crafting of state power, working from the vantage point of contemporary Ghana, a polity at once post-socialist and staunchly neoliberal, least-industrialized and highly cosmopolitan. Among the many commodities which Ghana's citizens and state bodies identify with and rely upon, cars are of critical significance. In what follows, I explore the raft of interventions surrounding car importation and al…
Governing Offshore Oil: Mapping Maritime Political Space in Ghana and the Western Gulf of Guinea
Ocean spaces are a dynamic arena of political transformation and claims-making essential to the unfolding of late capitalism. Indicative of the expanding geography of oil prospecting in the South Atlantic Ocean, the deep waters of the western Gulf of Guinea map a political economic frontier encompassing the maritime zones and resources of a swath of West African nation-states stretching from Senegal to Benin. In Ghana, the country at the leading …
Customs Regimes and the Materiality of Global Mobility: Governing the Port of Rotterdam
Focusing on customs operations at the Port of Rotterdam, this essay investigates the problematic of commercial governance at a historical moment characterized by the unprecedented volume and velocity of cross-border and transoceanic trade and an increasingly globalized security mandate. Although Netherlands Customs officers, facilities, and regulatory authority are visibly evident at the Port of Rotterdam, Customs operates largely through forms o…
Market Reforms and the State: The Case of Shea in Ghana
AMajorthrust of structural adjustment in Ghana, as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, is the promotion of the private sector coupled with the diminution of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).1However, while these are sometimes undermined, as when shares are sold to private buyers or assets liquidated, their complete demise in the course of market reform is not always so clear cut. This is the case when SOEs are themselves restructured in order to becom…
Market Reforms and the State: The Case of Shea in Ghana
AMajorthrust of structural adjustment in Ghana, as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, is the promotion of the private sector coupled with the diminution of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).1However, while these are sometimes undermined, as when shares are sold to private buyers or assets liquidated, their complete demise in the course of market reform is not always so clear cut. This is the case when SOEs are themselves restructured in order to becom…
Risky Business: Economic Uncertainty, Market Reforms and Female Livelihoods in Northeast Ghana
This article examines the implications of economic uncertainty for rural markets and the livelihoods of female traders. It does so through a case study of a community in northern Ghana caught in the throes of a structural adjustment-driven privatization initiative. In order to fully comprehend the nature of the economic uncertainties in which rural economic actors are enmeshed and the manner in which they resist, engage or engender these conditio…
Border Zone Trade and the Economic Boundaries of the State in North-East Ghana
Focusing on the tri-juncture of Ghana, Togo and Burkina Faso, this article examines the role of cross-border traders in the construction and redefinition of international boundaries. Through the study of the social and spatial patterning of trade surrounding three commodities-imported cloth, beans and shea butter (karite)-it explores the multiple ways the border is endowed with or deprived of significance. When the border is viewed as a socio-geo…
Border Scans: Sovereignty, Surveillance and the Customs Service in Ghana
This article explores the relationship between surveillance techniques and the production of sovereign statehood in an effort to track the day-to-day practices through which state authority is constituted in the context of globalization. This article explicitly probes the processes through which new forms of sovereignty come into being within the life of the state. It takes as its point of departure the operations of Ghana's Customs Service, a bo…
Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa . Jane I. Guyer
Global Customs Regimes and the Traffic in Sovereignty: Enlarging the Anthropology of the State
Focusing on the character of national customs regimes, this paper argues that the anthropology of the state should investigate widely shared features of nationstates, not just distinctions among individual states or types of states. As governments are restructured because of the ascendance of supranational bodies, transnational commerce, and national security threats, customs policies around the world emerge as key sites for the production of new…
Customs Regimes and the Materiality of Global Mobility: Governing the Port of Rotterdam
Focusing on customs operations at the Port of Rotterdam, this essay investigates the problematic of commercial governance at a historical moment characterized by the unprecedented volume and velocity of cross-border and transoceanic trade and an increasingly globalized security mandate. Although Netherlands Customs officers, facilities, and regulatory authority are visibly evident at the Port of Rotterdam, Customs operates largely through forms o…
Sovereigns and citizens in close encounter: Airport anthropology and customs regimes in neoliberal Ghana
Through the examination of encounters between Customs officers and travelers at Ghana's international airport, I pose a series of arguments regarding sovereignty and citizenship within a developing state deeply enmeshed in processes of liberalization. Supporting the contention that transnational flows and supranational interventions restructure rather than undermine state power, the Ghanaian case reveals neoliberal conditions to facilitate the ex…
Cars, the Customs Service, and Sumptuary Rule in Neoliberal Ghana
This essay probes the role of commodities in the crafting of state power, working from the vantage point of contemporary Ghana, a polity at once post-socialist and staunchly neoliberal, least-industrialized and highly cosmopolitan. Among the many commodities which Ghana's citizens and state bodies identify with and rely upon, cars are of critical significance. In what follows, I explore the raft of interventions surrounding car importation and al…
La rénovation du port de Tema: Économie politique de la frontière maritime du Ghana
À partir de l'étude du cas du port ghanéen de Tema, cet article se propose d'analyser les frontières maritimes comme des espaces propices à l'innovation en matière de gouvernance. Conçu comme un moteur du développement national dans les années 1960, le port de Tema a ensuite connu plusieurs décennies de déclin. Depuis 2000, le port a effectué une spectaculaire remontée et se classe maintenant parmi les trois ports commerciaux les plus importants …
Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa
Recasting maritime governance in Ghana: The neo-developmental state and the Port of Tema
In Africa, as elsewhere, ports are a telling indicator of the tenor of political power and the contests and shifting fortunes among ruling groups. Glaringly evident in the long era of imperial expansion, this is equally true in the present period of late-capitalist commercial acceleration and consolidation. With a focus on Ghana's port of Tema, a leading edge of containerised trade serving a vast swath of the West African sub-region, this essay e…
Nostalgia for the future: West Africa after the Cold War - By Charles Piot
Public things, excremental politics, and the infrastructure of bare life in Ghana's city of Tema
In Ghana's planned city of Tema, public toilets and sewerage systems are a formative terrain of urban political praxis giving tangible form to what Henri Lefebvre calls "the right to the city." Revealing the political potentials and determinations of both waste and municipal infrastructure, excreta and the systems devised to contain and channel them serve asres publicae, or "public things." At the same time they embody the inequities of bare life…
Governing Offshore Oil: Mapping Maritime Political Space in Ghana and the Western Gulf of Guinea
Ocean spaces are a dynamic arena of political transformation and claims-making essential to the unfolding of late capitalism. Indicative of the expanding geography of oil prospecting in the South Atlantic Ocean, the deep waters of the western Gulf of Guinea map a political economic frontier encompassing the maritime zones and resources of a swath of West African nation-states stretching from Senegal to Benin. In Ghana, the country at the leading …
Wastelandia: Infrastructure and the Commonwealth of Waste in Urban Ghana
Can infrastructure provide the basis of urban public life and the foundation for the commonwealth? And how might this be possible in contexts of modernist failure marked by the evacuation of resources, rights, and state investments and the accumulation of waste, from human excreta to industrial discharge and the detritus of everyday consumption? These questions are explored through a case study drawn from the wastelands of Ghana's city of Tema. A…
On-shore, off-shore Takoradi: Terraqueous urbanism, logistics, and oil governance in Ghana
This paper places an empirical focus on logistics to link three strands of inquiry: Ghana's deep-water oil economy, the built environment of Ghana's oil-city of Takoradi, and the character of governance at their confluence. Moving beyond the land and sea, off-shore/on-shore dichotomy, logistics provides a means of instantiating and interpreting the regulatory terrain of off-shore extraction within a historically constituted urban landscape. Highl…
Waste work and the dialectics of precarity in urban Ghana: Durable Bodies and Disposable Things
What can the dialectics of waste work tell us about the urban underclass in the flux of late capitalism? What might waste reveal more broadly about the contradictions and uncharted possibilities of material accumulation in urban Africa? Utilizing a relational optic, these issues are explored from the perspective of young men working in the rubbish dumps of Ghana's 'edge city' of Ashaiman, a space where the detritus of local and global markets and…
Popular Infrastructures in West Africa
Popular infrastructures in West Africa encompass a broad array of basic utilities enabling access to water, sanitation, power, communication, and transportation networks. Though characterized as “by the people, for the people” formulations, popular infrastructures are rarely stand-alone and intersect with services sponsored by states, international investors, and humanitarian organizations. These amalgams evince a complex politics where self-dete…
Artisans of the African Anthropocene: Crafting the Patchy Plasticene in northern Ghana
Given plastics accumulation across the earth’s stratigraphy, climate scientists refer to the latest stage of the Anthropocene as the plasticene . Confounding conventional analyses of plastics through the lens of their unruly afterlives, this article shifts the focus to an iconic plastic object critically important to weathering the uncertainties of Anthropocene times. Large-scale plastic water tanks are vital to managing the compound stressors of…
Sand as Matter and Method
From shorelines remade by sea level rise to extractive enterprise, urban construction, and rural terraforming, sand is a preeminent indicator of human-induced global disturbance forming the substrate of Anthropocene lives. Drawing on case studies from Asia and Africa, this special section centers sand in ethnographic inquiry to argue that matters of sandy admixture are ripe for theorization, comparison, and informed engagement of planetary change…
Political science (17 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Economy (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · State (computer science (7 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (7 works)