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.
Table of Content
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
About the author
Carola Lentz is Senior Research Professor at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, University of Mainz, and president of the Goethe Institute. She is author of Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa, which won Melville Herskovits Prize, and author (with David Lowe) of Remembering Independence.
Isidore Lobnibe is a Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Western Oregon University, Monmouth.
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