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Constructions of Belonging
Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the Twentieth Century
Axel Harneit-Sievers
Constructions of Belonging provides a history of local communities living in Southeastern Nigeria since the late nineteenth century, examining the processes that have defined, changed, and re-produced these communities. Harneit-Sievers explores both the meanings and the uses that the community members have given to their particular areas, while also looking at the processes that have shaped local communities, and have made them work and continue to be relevant, in a world dominated by the modern territorial state and by worldwide flows of people, goods, and ideas.
Axel Harneit-Sievers is a research fellow at the Center for Modern Oriental Studies, and director of the Nigeria Office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Lagos.
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DETAILS
14 b/w illustrations
10 line illustrations
399 pages
Size: 9 x 6 in
13 digit ISBN: 9781580461672
Binding: Hardback
First published: 15/Jul/2006
Last reprinted: 15/Jul/2006
Price: 75.00 USD / 40.00 GBP
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
Series: Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
Subject: African Studies
BIC class: AVH
STATUS: Available
Details updated on 18/11/2008
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Reviews
Anyone wanting sources on the Igbo and the intellectual and cultural context of these works, and hard to find information about their authors, will find this book invaluable. However one delimits this region . . . tracing the continuities from precolonial to the present is a worthy and immensely difficult scholarly task. This work, drawing on multidisciplinary studies, is a brilliant contribution to Igno and Nigerian studies. --Michael D. Levin, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES
Recommended. CHOICE
In this major contribution to African studies, the author, an Igbo expert, traces the course of local communities in southeastern Nigeria from the pre-colonial period through colonial times, and the post-colonial era to the present. The author brilliantly explains how these communities adjusted again and again with surprising vitality to the changes attempted by British colonial governments and the modern Nigerian state, arguing convincingly that despite urbanization, Christianity, and modernity, the many hundreds of local Igbo communities have thrived in a population of some fifteen million today. The author systemically explains how these communities have exhibited flexibility to changing external forces as active participants and not merely as reactors to new conditions. Harneit-Sievers skillfully combines anthropology, history, religion, and politics to provide the long view of how a people sharing a major African culture have lived in social cooperation over time in the changing African world. --Simon Ottenberg, professor emeritus of anthropology, University of Washington
Constructions of Belonging magnificently articulates the Igbo odyssey with modernity during the twentieth century, their triumphs, fears, dilemmas, and uneasy engagement with the Nigerian state. Informed by a profound reading of social theory, historian Axel Harneit-Sievers -- who knows the Igbo inside-out -- integrates the best elements of apparently conflicting modes of analysis, avoiding the customary pitfalls in the scholarly discourse about the Igbo. The result is a book -- as sophisticated as it is accessible -- that paints a candid portrait of a complicated people negotiating tremendous challenges during a period of dizzying changes. --G. Ugo Nwokeji, assistant professor of African and African Diaspora history, University of California, Berkeley
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