HUMA Book Launch

Author: Anaïs Ménard, Max Planck Institute for Social Athropology

To access the book: 

Introduction: Integrating Strangers – Sherbro Identity and The Politics of Reciprocity along the Sierra Leonean Coast is an ethnographic study of Sherbro coastal communities in Sierra Leone. The book interrogates the politics and practices of identity through the lens of the reciprocal relations that exist between different socio-ethnic groups. This exploration of complex relations and bonds between landlords and strangers in the Freetown Peninsula, brings into sharp focus issues of high individual mobility and social interactions with implications on the fluidity of Sherbro identity formations and narratives. 

About the author: Anaïs Ménard is the second generation to grow fond of Sierra Leone country, after her parents, Jean-Claude Ménard and Grażyna Kręcka. This book is also about celebrating their respective trajectories and heritage.   Anais Ménard is Head of the Research Group, Gender, Migration and Social Mobility at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. She received the Otto-Hahn Medal and the Otto-Hahn Award of the Max Planck Society for her work on the impacts of internal migration on interethnic relations, reciprocity and social conflict in post-war Sierra Leone. Her research focuses on the construction of diasporic identities among West African populations living in Europe. Her project "Love, Ageing and Migration" critiques the long-term impacts of migration on the construction of intimacy in a gendered perspective. Ménard is a research fellow of Louvain 4 Migration at the Université de Louvain-la-Neuve and a FWO senior research fellow at the University of Leuven, Belgium, where she teaches and supervises. 

About the Discussant:

Dom

Dominique Somda is a sociocultural anthropologist. She received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre in France where she was a member of the Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative. As a postdoctoral researcher, she has held visiting positions at the Fondation des Maisons des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris and the London School of Economics. As a visiting professor, she has taught anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Recently, she was a traveling faculty member of the comparative study abroad programs - IHP Cities and IHP Human Rights (School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont). Her work focuses on how inequality – (or conversely), egalitarianism, emerges through everyday practices. This thematic interest has led her to engage more with the anthropology of slavery, democracy, Christianity, and feminist and postcolonial studies. Dominique Somda’s current regional focus is Madagascar. At HUMA, she explores the contributions of Christian African churches to the debates on the introduction of AI and the digital transformation of healthcare.

Convenor: Sandile Ngidi

More about the HUMA Book Lunch Series

Light refreshments will be served at 12:30 SAST (GMT+2).

RSVP to attend: send us an email at huma@uct.ac.za

Attending online? Register here to join via Microsoft Teams

Click here to watch via our YouTube Livestream

See Google Maps for directions