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Introduction: Deconstructing Tropes of Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies

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Abstract

The editors, Højbjerg, Knörr, and Murphy, summarize and reevaluate key explanatory themes in the broad research program on Upper Guinea Coast ethnography and history in light of contemporary changes, crises, and continuities. Intense sociopolitical transformations in this West African region—for example, civil war, refugees, regional insecurity, postconflict nation-building, and transnational epidemics—challenge the standard research paradigms for understanding the region. The introduction explores and transcends the central explanatory tropes that have oriented this research, such as “big man” patronage and patrimonialism, firstcomers and latecomers as tropes of historical precedence shaping contemporary migration and settlement patterns, secret society initiations as part of postwar social reconstruction, and the language of autochthony as shaping ethnic and national identities, citizenship, and creolization within and of the imagined nation-state.

We thank Wilson Trajano Filho and Maarten Bedert for their most helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this introduction. We thank Conny Schnepel for being a diligent and patient copy-editor of the whole book.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark

    Christian K. Højbjerg

  2. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Jacqueline Knörr

  3. Martin Luther University, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Jacqueline Knörr

  4. Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    William P. Murphy

Authors
  1. Christian K. Højbjerg
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  2. Jacqueline Knörr
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  3. William P. Murphy
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Christian K. Højbjerg

  2. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Jacqueline Knörr

  3. Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

    William P. Murphy

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Højbjerg, C.K., Knörr, J., Murphy, W.P. (2017). Introduction: Deconstructing Tropes of Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies. In: Højbjerg, C., Knörr, J., Murphy, W. (eds) Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95013-3_1

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