2012

Fellow of the Research Center of Social and Cultural Studies Mainz (SOCUM, JGU)
Professor John Comaroff
Department of African and African American Studies
Harvard University
Cambridge/Massachusetts, USA
jcomaroff@fas.harvard.edu

Professor John Comaroff was invited to take up a fellowship by the Research Centre of Social and Cultural Studies Mainz (SOCUM) from 3-10 November 2012 and visited the department. In a talk on “Divine detection: crime, policing, and the metaphysics of disorder” (6.11.2012), he presented his research at the departmental lecture series. He also held a workshop with several doctoral candidates, during which current research and publication projects were discussed.

John Comaroff is Professor of African and African-American Studies and Anthropology and Oppenheimer Research Scholar at Harvard University. Prior to this, he was Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. His current research on South Africa concerns crime, policing and the workings of the state, democracy and difference, and postcolonial politics.

Visiting Professor at the Centre for Intercultural Studies (ZIS)
Dr. Daniel Avorgbedor
Department of African Studies/Music Division
University of Ghana, Legon and Avorgbedor
Ghana

Daniel Avorgbedor is Associate Professor in the School of Music and Department of African-American and African Studies at The Ohio State University, Columbus. He received his PhD in Ethnomusicology and Folklore from the University of Bloomington, Indiana in 1995. Since then he has lectured at the University of Ghana in Legon, Bretton Hall College, West Bretton (UK) and City College, New York.

His main research areas include urban ethnomusicology; continuities in the African diaspora with a focus on the performing arts; contemporary church music in Africa; urbanization and its impact on the continuity of music and dance traditions in Africa; theories of identity; and cross-cultural aesthetics. His regional focus lies with the Anglo-Ewe in Ghana.

Daniel Avorgbedor was visiting professor at the Centre for Intercultural Studies (ZIS). During his visit to the department from 12-23 June 2012, he presented his research on a number of Ghanaian performance genres and rituals on several occasions. As part of a seminar course “Festival, Ritual, Spiel – Ethnologische Ansätze zur Performanzforschung”, taught by Hauke Dorsch, Avorgbedor presented a lecture on “Contemporary Notions of Festival as Articulated in Three Types of Field Examples from Ghana” and also conducted a thematic workshop on ritual and performance in Ghana (20.6.2012). He was invited to lecture on “The place of the visual in Ewe dufozi performances” (14.-16.6.2012) at the symposium “African Music in the 21st Century–An Iconic Turn”.

Professor Sten Hagberg
Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnography
Uppsala University
Uppsala, Sweden
Sten.Hagberg@antro.uu.se

Sten Hagberg has been Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University since 2010and has been Head of the Forum for Africa Studies since 2012. He has done extensive fieldwork in Burkina Faso on a wide range of topics such as farmer-herder conflicts and local dispute settlement, local perceptions of forest and land use, national political culture, ethnicity and identity, poverty and development, decentralization and democracy. His current research projects include political practice in emergent democratic cultures, democratic culture and local development in West African municipalities (comparative project on Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger), the postcolonial state and local forms of knowledge in Burkina Faso, and political culture and mass media in Burkina Faso.

Sten Hagberg was at the IfEAS as Erasmus visiting professor from 11-15 June 2012. He presented a talk on “Political parties, popular protests, and ‘the people’: opposition politics in West African municipalities” in the context of the lecture course “Introduction into Political Anthropology”.