Andrew Apter
Biographic Data
| ID | 82882 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Apter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Apter |
| SIGNATURE | APTER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-0097-2880 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 376 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Matrix of Human Commodification in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World
This Forum examines varieties of commodified labour and personhood in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The authors consider a range of ways in which human life and labour were commodified, from prostitution and pawnship to debt bondage, indentured servitude, enslavement, and onomastics. These foci offer numerous ways to think beyond current paradigms of labour, political authority, and the theorization of capital in our understanding of com…
Slavery, Sovereignty, and the Fante State: The Rise of a Ritual Confederacy in Eighteenth-Century Ghana
The Fante are renowned for their historic engagement with Atlantic slavery in eighteenth-century West Africa but the form and development of their government remain elusive and enigmatic. Why are their political, military and ritual titles so difficult to define, converging into what Gorgio Agamben has called ‘zones of indistinction’? Through what forms and exchanges was sovereignty invested, and over what spaces and territories did it effectivel…
Historical ethnography and the ritual archive: The 2024 Jensen Memorial Lectures
The general theme of these lectures engages with the generative crossroads between anthropology and history, an interdisciplinary relationship with its own distinguished history, as evidenced by the illustrious genealogy of articles on the topic that have emerged since Evans-Pritchard’s signal Marrett Lecture of 1950. Based largely on my own experience in bringing anthropological methods to the topic of Afro-Atlantic historical ethnography, I exp…
Frobenius unbound: Black Atlantis and the poetics of displacement in the Yoruba diaspora
Whatever one thinks of his controversial reputation as a provocative gadfly among pioneering African ethnologists, Leo Frobenius contributed signifi-cantly to African studies, not only during his prodigious documentary expeditions throughout the continent but also via his productive imagination in perceiving pat-terns, regional affinities, and even hidden historicities within African cosmologies and their material forms. In this article, I return…
Festac 77: A Black World’s Fair
From January 15 to February 12, 1977, Nigeria hosted an extravagant international festival celebrating Africa’s cultural achievements and legacies on the continent and throughout its diaspora communities. Named the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (or Festac 77), it was modeled on Léopold Senghor’s inaugural Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (World Festival of Black Arts, or Fesman) held in Dakar in 1966 but expanded its…
History in the Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery and the Spirit of Capitalism in Cape Coast Castle, Ghana
In this article I focus on the “historicity” of Nana Tabir, a West African coastal deity who is associated with Cape Coast Castle and Atlantic slavery in Ghana. My goal is to take Tabir’s history seriously, less as a record of objective documentation than as a generative locus of insights into the past—in this case, of Afro-European encounters associated with the rise of the Atlantic economy and the development of Cape Coast government and societ…
Ethnographic X-files and Holbraad's double-bind: Reflections on an ontological turn of events
The ontological turn asks difficult questions and pushes conceptual boundaries both forward and against the grain, challenging our standard epistemological orientations. That it replaces epistemological with ontological concerns is a position I oppose in the following reflections, inspired by Martin Holbraad's "double-bind," one which frames a predicament that not only resonates with my own ethnographic experience but also represents something of…
Beyond Négritude: Black cultural citizenship and the Arab question in Festac 77
When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77) to celebrate the cultural foundations of the 'Black and African World', it was fashioned after Senghor's festival mondial des arts nègres (FESMAN 66) held in Dakar 11 years earlier. What began as an alliance between festival co-patrons, however, soon developed into a divisive debate over the meanings and horizons of black cultural citizenship. At issue…
A Genealogy of the Durbar
The case of the Nigerian durbar carries the arguments and perspectives of Mitchell and Bourdieu into the postcolonial situations of third world nation-states. Following Mitchell's discussions of the emergence of “the state” and “the economy” not as functional domains of institutional differentiation but as representational “effects” of modern political practices, the domain of “culture” is considered in a similar light. The point here is not mere…
Death and the King's Henchmen
This chapter examines how the plight of the Ogoni people came to represent the contradictions of oil capitalism in Nigeria at large. It shows how the pollution of natural ecosystems and environments provided the language for opposing historically specific forms of economic alienation and political dispossession throughout the nation as rentier capitalism and prebendal politics privatized the state and undermined the public sphere; and how the pat…
Conclusion
Unlike the commodity boom of Victorian England, which was generated by the Industrial Revolution, Nigeria's bonanza was fueled by oil, reversing the historic relationship between spheres of production and circulation. The visual ontology of “seeing is believing” and the signs of development that refashioned the nation represented a virtual productive sphere that was actually a hoax, producing at losses that could never be recouped. And here, in s…
Rebirth of a Nation
This chapter argues that the credibility of oil-rich Nigeria was ratified by signs of material development masquerading as its substance, purveying a “seeing-is-believing” ontology that disguised the absence of a productive base. If the oil economy was somehow dubious—with its invisible and mysterious sources of wealth fueling a nation on the move—FESTAC was designed as a stabilizing force, anchoring the signs of sudden prosperity in the bedrock …
The Mirror of Cultural Production
This chapter focuses on the phenomenology of the oil boom through the mirror of cultural production itself, examining its inflated costs, hidden fiscal pathways, and mercurial money forms. FESTAC represented not only the waste and excess of the oil economy but a peculiar form of deficit production disguised by the appearance of material progress. The chapter focuses on the role of copyright in transforming FESTAC's culture into legal property, a …
War Canoes and Their Magic
This chapter focuses on the FESTAC Regatta with Gell's reflections on the value of art not only because they throw the main themes—canoes, magic, money, and exchange—into bold relief, but also because they foreground the problem of value itself. Briefly stated, Gell uses Simmel to establish a basic contrast between magic as ideal technology versus money as ideal exchange. Whereas the technology of enchantment produces objects of value without exp…
M.G. Smith on the Isle of Lesbos: Kinship and Sexuality in Carriacou
In Kinship and Community in Carriacou (1962), M.G. Smith documents what he calls “abnormal” sexual relations between women in female-headed households on the island. These lesbian madivines represent statistically significant “deviations” from normative patterns of kinship and residence in domestic groups, and are associated with the shapeshifting witchcraft of sukuyan and lougarou . Linking Smith’s ethnography of “mating patterns” to transaction…
The Blood of Mothers: Women, Money, and Markets in Yoruba-Atlantic Perspective
Yoruba Ethnogenesis from Within
It is an anthropological truism that ethnic identity is 'other'-oriented, such that who wearerests on who we arenot. Within this vein, the development of Yoruba identity in the late nineteenth century is attributed to Fulani perspectives on their Oyo neighbors, Christian missionaries and the politics of conversion, as well as Yoruba descendants in diaspora reconnecting with their West African homeland. In this essay, my aim is to both complement …
The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. by Kate Ramsey
Matrilineal motives: Kinship, witchcraft, and repatriation among Congolese refugees
This article explores the significance of matrilineal descent among Congolese refugees in camp Kala, Zambia. Matriliny mattered in Kala, I argue, because it motivated repatriation, generating witchcraft accusations stemming from variations of the matrilineal puzzle. On the surface, Kala did not 'look' particularly matrilineal, given the ad hoc domestic arrangements of surviving refugees. But when placed against the backdrop of matrilineal descent…
Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa
The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria
Griaule's Legacy: Rethinking "la parole claire" in Dogon Studies
L'héritage de Griaule : repenser la Parole claire dans les études dogon.Comment lire l'œuvre de Griaule et évaluer son héritage ethnographique ? Que peut-on tirer de son projet ethnophilosophique ? Pour répondre à ces questions, je propose une relecture critique de son ethnographie dogon ainsi qu'un nouveau modèle du savoir ésotérique qu'il prétendit révéler. Ma relecture s'appuie sur deux approches méthodologiques qui redéfinissent le projet exé…
Griaule's Legacy: Rethinking “la parole claire” in Dogon Studies
Tarrying with Our Negatives (And Positives)
On African Origins: Creolization and Connaissance in Haitian Vodou
What is African in the African diaspora? In this article, I return to the problematic question of African origins in the black Americas, arguing that despite the distortions of baseline genealogies and associated myths of tribal purity, West African cultural frameworks-when critically reformulated-illuminate New World dynamics of creolization. Focusing on the Petwo paradox in Haitian Vodou, which opposes Creole powers of money and magic to the ve…
The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria
Herskovits's Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora
It is customary, if not mandatory, in contemporary African diaspora studies to invoke the pioneering spirit of Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), whose lifework was dedicated to the repossession of Africa’s heritage in the New World. Not that Herskovits was the first to engage in such research. Others before him included W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, as well as Jean Price-Mars of Haiti, Fernando Ortiz of Cuba, and—more his contemporari…
Africa, Empire, and Anthropology: A Philological Exploration of Anthropology's Heart of Darkness
As an artifact of imperial culture, Africanist anthropology is historically associated with the colonization of Africa in ways that undermine the subdiscipline's claims of neutrality and objectivity. A critical literature on the ideological and discursive inventions of Africa by the West challenges the very possibility of Africanist anthropology, to which a variety of responses have emerged. These range from historical reexaminations of imperial …
On African Origins: Creolization and Connaissance in Haitian Vodou
What is African in the African diaspora? In this article, I return to the problematic question of African origins in the black Americas, arguing that despite the distortions of baseline genealogies and associated myths of tribal purity, West African cultural frameworks-when critically reformulated-illuminate New World dynamics of creolization. Focusing on the Petwo paradox in Haitian Vodou, which opposes Creole powers of money and magic to the ve…
In Dispraise of the King: Rituals 'Against' Rebellion in South-East Africa
On Imperial Spectacle: The Dialectics of Seeing in Colonial Nigeria
Critical studies of visual culture have established profound connections between capitalism, state power and the “scopic regimes of modernity” (Jay 1988). As the dominant philosophical leitmotif of the European enlightenment, visuality characterized the domain of reason and truth, modeling both the clear and distinct ideas of Continental rationalism and the sense-based epistemology of British empiricism. Compelling in its “given” transparency, th…
Beyond Négritude: Black cultural citizenship and the Arab question in Festac 77
When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77) to celebrate the cultural foundations of the 'Black and African World', it was fashioned after Senghor's festival mondial des arts nègres (FESMAN 66) held in Dakar 11 years earlier. What began as an alliance between festival co-patrons, however, soon developed into a divisive debate over the meanings and horizons of black cultural citizenship. At issue…
Discourse and its disclosures: Yoruba women and the sanctity of abuse
If ritual songs of obscenity and abuse have become a familiar topic in Africanist ethnography since Evans-Pritchard's first discussion of their 'canalising' functions in 1929, few studies have paid sufficient attention to the socio-political and discursive contexts of the song texts themselves. The present article moves in that direction by relocating abusive songs of the Oroyeye festival in an Ekiti Yoruba town within the local forms of history …
Things Fell Apart? Yoruba Responses to the 1983 Elections in Ondo State, Nigeria
ON 16 August 1983, towns throughout Nigeria's Ondo State erupted into violence. The ostensible cause was popular reaction against rigged gubernational elections which favoured a National Party of Nigeria (N.P.N.) candidate in an overwhelmingly Unity Party of Nigeria (U.P.N.) State. It is easy to dismiss the violence in Undo (and in Oyo State too) as the protest of a frustrated plebiscite – as indeed it was. But western accounts of ‘the breakdown …
Que Faire?' Reconsidering Inventions of Africa
The Pan-African Nation: Oil-Money and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria
Research Article| September 01 1996 The Pan-African Nation: Oil-Money and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria Andrew Apter Andrew Apter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1996) 8 (3): 441–466. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8-3-441 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Apter; The Pan-African Nation: Oil-Money and the Spectacle of Culture in…
The Blood of Mothers: Women, Money, and Markets in Yoruba-Atlantic Perspective
Matrilineal motives: Kinship, witchcraft, and repatriation among Congolese refugees
This article explores the significance of matrilineal descent among Congolese refugees in camp Kala, Zambia. Matriliny mattered in Kala, I argue, because it motivated repatriation, generating witchcraft accusations stemming from variations of the matrilineal puzzle. On the surface, Kala did not 'look' particularly matrilineal, given the ad hoc domestic arrangements of surviving refugees. But when placed against the backdrop of matrilineal descent…
Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society
The Embodiment of Paradox: Yoruba Kingship and Female Power
Yoruba Ethnogenesis from Within
It is an anthropological truism that ethnic identity is 'other'-oriented, such that who wearerests on who we arenot. Within this vein, the development of Yoruba identity in the late nineteenth century is attributed to Fulani perspectives on their Oyo neighbors, Christian missionaries and the politics of conversion, as well as Yoruba descendants in diaspora reconnecting with their West African homeland. In this essay, my aim is to both complement …
Griaule's Legacy: Rethinking "la parole claire" in Dogon Studies
L'héritage de Griaule : repenser la Parole claire dans les études dogon.Comment lire l'œuvre de Griaule et évaluer son héritage ethnographique ? Que peut-on tirer de son projet ethnophilosophique ? Pour répondre à ces questions, je propose une relecture critique de son ethnographie dogon ainsi qu'un nouveau modèle du savoir ésotérique qu'il prétendit révéler. Ma relecture s'appuie sur deux approches méthodologiques qui redéfinissent le projet exé…
Notes on Orisha Cults in the Ekiti Yoruba Highlands. A Tribute to Pierre Verger
Note sur le culte des Orisha dans les hautes terres yoruba: un hommage à Pierre Verger. — S'inspirant du travail pionnier de Pierre Verger relatif aux cultes orisha d'Afrique de l'Ouest et du Brésil, cette étude analyse les aspects socio-politiques et les transformations des cultes orisha au sein de deux royaumes yoruba de l'ensemble ekiti. La comparaison des schèmes politico-rituels dans le royaume décentralisé ishan et dans le royaume centralis…
Stage Fright: Its Role in Acting
The Historiography of Yoruba Myth and Ritual
The historiography of African myth begins by documenting, comparing, and interpreting variant traditions. Where documentation is inscriptive and comparison descriptive, interpretation is notoriously complex, embracing a variety of approaches within two methodological extremes. The functionalist extreme -- what Peel calls “presentism” -- defines myth as a charter of political and ceremonial relations in society, and interprets variant traditions a…
Ethnographic X-files and Holbraad's double-bind: Reflections on an ontological turn of events
The ontological turn asks difficult questions and pushes conceptual boundaries both forward and against the grain, challenging our standard epistemological orientations. That it replaces epistemological with ontological concerns is a position I oppose in the following reflections, inspired by Martin Holbraad's "double-bind," one which frames a predicament that not only resonates with my own ethnographic experience but also represents something of…
Griaule's Legacy: Rethinking “la parole claire” in Dogon Studies
Reading the Africa Exhibit
National Language Planning in Plural Societies: The Search for a Framework
SOMMAIRE La planification linguistique nationale dans les sociétés mixtes: À la recherche d'un système Le présent article propose le modèle du pluralisme élaboré par M. G. Smith comme système général d'analyse des problèmes de la planification linguistique nationale. Les avantages qu'offre ce modèle vis-à-vis les autres modèles dont nous faisons le compte-rendu analytique consistent dans sa spécification, premièrement, des bases nonlinguis-tiques…
National Language Planning in Plural Societies: The Search for a Framework
SOMMAIRE La planification linguistique nationale dans les sociétés mixtes: À la recherche d'un système Le présent article propose le modèle du pluralisme élaboré par M. G. Smith comme système général d'analyse des problèmes de la planification linguistique nationale. Les avantages qu'offre ce modèle vis-à-vis les autres modèles dont nous faisons le compte-rendu analytique consistent dans sa spécification, premièrement, des bases nonlinguis-tiques…
In Dispraise of the King: Rituals 'Against' Rebellion in South-East Africa
Mandragola
The Historiography of Yoruba Myth and Ritual
The historiography of African myth begins by documenting, comparing, and interpreting variant traditions. Where documentation is inscriptive and comparison descriptive, interpretation is notoriously complex, embracing a variety of approaches within two methodological extremes. The functionalist extreme -- what Peel calls “presentism” -- defines myth as a charter of political and ceremonial relations in society, and interprets variant traditions a…
Things Fell Apart? Yoruba Responses to the 1983 Elections in Ondo State, Nigeria
ON 16 August 1983, towns throughout Nigeria's Ondo State erupted into violence. The ostensible cause was popular reaction against rigged gubernational elections which favoured a National Party of Nigeria (N.P.N.) candidate in an overwhelmingly Unity Party of Nigeria (U.P.N.) State. It is easy to dismiss the violence in Undo (and in Oyo State too) as the protest of a frustrated plebiscite – as indeed it was. But western accounts of ‘the breakdown …
Stage Fright: Its Role in Acting
The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power, and Art in West Africa. Patrick R. Mc‐NAUGHTON
The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge
"What is the meaning of Africa and being an African? What is and what is not African philosophy? Is philosophy part of Africanism? These are the kinds of fundamental questions that this book addresses. V. Y. Mudimbe argues that the various discourses themselves establish the worlds of thought in which people conceive their identity. Western anthropology and missionaries have introduced distortions not only for outsiders but also for Africans tryi…
Herskovits's Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora
It is customary, if not mandatory, in contemporary African diaspora studies to invoke the pioneering spirit of Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), whose lifework was dedicated to the repossession of Africa’s heritage in the New World. Not that Herskovits was the first to engage in such research. Others before him included W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, as well as Jean Price-Mars of Haiti, Fernando Ortiz of Cuba, and—more his contemporari…
The Embodiment of Paradox: Yoruba Kingship and Female Power
Que Faire?' Reconsidering Inventions of Africa
The Credo of Being and Nothingness
Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society
Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society
Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society
Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society
Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society
How can we account for the power of ritual? This is the guiding question of Black Critics and Kings, which examines how Yoruba forms of ritual and knowledge shape politics, history, and resistance against the state. Focusing on deep knowledge in Yoruba cosmology as an interpretive space for configuring difference, Andrew Apter analyzes ritual empowerment as an essentially critical practice, one that revises authoritative discourses of space, time…
Notes on Orisha Cults in the Ekiti Yoruba Highlands. A Tribute to Pierre Verger
Note sur le culte des Orisha dans les hautes terres yoruba: un hommage à Pierre Verger. — S'inspirant du travail pionnier de Pierre Verger relatif aux cultes orisha d'Afrique de l'Ouest et du Brésil, cette étude analyse les aspects socio-politiques et les transformations des cultes orisha au sein de deux royaumes yoruba de l'ensemble ekiti. La comparaison des schèmes politico-rituels dans le royaume décentralisé ishan et dans le royaume centralis…
The Broken Jug
Reading the Africa Exhibit
The Pan-African Nation: Oil-Money and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria
Research Article| September 01 1996 The Pan-African Nation: Oil-Money and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria Andrew Apter Andrew Apter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1996) 8 (3): 441–466. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8-3-441 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Apter; The Pan-African Nation: Oil-Money and the Spectacle of Culture in…
Discourse and its disclosures: Yoruba women and the sanctity of abuse
If ritual songs of obscenity and abuse have become a familiar topic in Africanist ethnography since Evans-Pritchard's first discussion of their 'canalising' functions in 1929, few studies have paid sufficient attention to the socio-political and discursive contexts of the song texts themselves. The present article moves in that direction by relocating abusive songs of the Oroyeye festival in an Ekiti Yoruba town within the local forms of history …
Africa, Empire, and Anthropology: A Philological Exploration of Anthropology's Heart of Darkness
As an artifact of imperial culture, Africanist anthropology is historically associated with the colonization of Africa in ways that undermine the subdiscipline's claims of neutrality and objectivity. A critical literature on the ideological and discursive inventions of Africa by the West challenges the very possibility of Africanist anthropology, to which a variety of responses have emerged. These range from historical reexaminations of imperial …
On African Origins: Creolization and Connaissance in Haitian Vodou
What is African in the African diaspora? In this article, I return to the problematic question of African origins in the black Americas, arguing that despite the distortions of baseline genealogies and associated myths of tribal purity, West African cultural frameworks-when critically reformulated-illuminate New World dynamics of creolization. Focusing on the Petwo paradox in Haitian Vodou, which opposes Creole powers of money and magic to the ve…
On Imperial Spectacle: The Dialectics of Seeing in Colonial Nigeria
Critical studies of visual culture have established profound connections between capitalism, state power and the “scopic regimes of modernity” (Jay 1988). As the dominant philosophical leitmotif of the European enlightenment, visuality characterized the domain of reason and truth, modeling both the clear and distinct ideas of Continental rationalism and the sense-based epistemology of British empiricism. Compelling in its “given” transparency, th…
Sociology (26 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (18 works) · History (17 works) · History (15 works) · Yoruba (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Politics (14 works)