Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa

by Charles Piot

Book Overview

At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic "out of the way" African culture--subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything "indigenous" or local. Through...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226669696
• ISBN13: 9780226669694
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A new "take" on the history of colonization in West Africa.

The thesis of Remotely Global is complex yet condensed: current Kabre culture, a classic remote African people of Northern Togo, illustrates a specific melding of influences both modern and traditional, global and local that is clearly driven by the desire to imitate or usurp the powers of the colonizers. "As should be amply clear by now, the Kabre world is one of promiscuous mixing, in which sacrifice and MTV, rainmakers and civil servants, fetishists and catechists exist side by side and coauthor an uncontainable hybrid cultural landscape...They (the Kabre) are as at home in the world of so-called tradition as in that of the modern, and see the mixture of the two not only as unproblematic but also as desirable...An empty signifier whose content is forever shifting, modernity itself is not only intrinsically impure and hopelessly hybridized, but also incorrigibly plural and forever incomplete." (page 178) Remotely Global has a refreshing, astringent tone. It is clearly written with rich detail. As an ethnographer's outlook, it provides a new 'take' on the process of colonization and offers much to challenge or complete the common Western viewpoint of colonial civilization.