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Imagining Futures
Memory and Belonging in an African Family
Carola Lentz (Author), Isidore Lobnibe (Author)
9780253060211
Hardback, published 3 May 2022
296 pages, 26 b&w illus., 1 map - 26 Illustrations, black and white - 1 Maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.603 kg
[Imagining Futures] is a grippingly personal, yet analytically cogent, biography of a unit whose existence is testified to by the affections, deliberations and practices of its members, yet is undermined as its membership becomes progressively larger and more diverse. It will fascinate – and prove instructive to – students of anthropology, history and social sciences more generally, in Africa and beyond. The book, Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family is an excellent ethnographic study, which offers a very unique perspective on an extended African family of over 500 members based in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso, the former French colony in West Africa...We recomend it with admiration and without reservation to college students as well as advanced scholars and the general reader, who wish to deepen their knowledge of the subject.
What keeps a family together? In Imagining Futures, authors Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe offer a unique look at one extended African family, currently comprising over five hundred members in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso. Members of this extended family, like many others in the region, find themselves living increasingly farther apart and working in diverse occupations ranging from religious clergy and civil service to farming. What keeps them together as a family? In their groundbreaking work, Lentz and Lobnibe argue that shared memories, rather than only material interests, bind a family together. Imagining Futures explores the changing practices of remembering in an African family and offers a unique contribution to the growing field of memory studies, beyond the usual focus of Europe and America. Lentz and Lobnibe explore how, in an increasingly globalized, postcolonial world, memories themselves are not static accounts of past events but are actually malleable and shaped by both current concerns and imagined futures.
Foreword
Introduction
1. Celebrating Home and Family Unity
2. Remembering the Ancestors
3. Constructing an Ancestral Heritage
4. Keeping the Home Fires Burning
5. Creating a New Order
6. Social Mobility and Moral Obligations
7. Urban Nostalgia for Ancestral Traditions
8. Making a Good Name for the Family
9. Stemming the Tide of Dispersal
10. Unfinished Business
References
Index