Archive for category: General

An interesting list from Der Spiegel.

It has been a couple of months since I got back from fieldwork. Shortly after getting back I headed off to Chicago for the Africa Studies Association meeting to present a paper. It was really nice to be there, although my presentation was really preliminary as I had not had time for any serious or meaningful analysis.
Now that the fieldwork is over it is time for me to write an anthropological study. I have been trying to make the chapterisation, and when i finish with that II will draw up a timetable. I must say that it is not going too smoothly at the moment, but I realise that the choices I make in the chapterisation are really important so I am trying to take my time.
That is what has been happening.

I have again been away for a while. I got back to Germany and had to almost immediately start working on a conference paper. Last week I was in Chicago for the annual meeting of the African Studies Association. The abstract of the paper I presented is below.

Anthropologists of economic relations are well experienced in dealing with the deployment of informal relationships by economic actors. These informal relations are often based on kinship ties and patron client relations. The paper aims to examine a particular manifestation of a mixture of both kinship relations and patron client relations. Rather than starting off with any assumptions about the relationship between these relations, or discussing the functions they serve, the paper aims to describe the relations among Igbo migrant traders in Cotonou. The trade in used clothing in the Republic of Benin is not just dominated by Igbo migrants, but almost all of the traders are from one local government area of Abia state in Nigeria. Looking briefly at the history of the trade in used clothing in Lome and Cotonou, the paper presents an examination that shows the way a specific expression of patron client relations is structured. It describes the modes of recruitment of clients by masters who are often owners of big used clothing businesses; it also describes the way the relationship between the Master and the Boy, or very often Boys, is structured. The paper draws from a year-long ethnographic fieldwork on the informal trade in used clothing between Nigeria and Benin.

My name is Olumide Abimbola. I am a Nigerian PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany. I have an MA in Development Studies from the Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden.
My research is on informal trade between Nigeria and Republic of Bénin.
Theoretically, I am interested in the Sociology of Association or Actor-Network Theory. I am also interested in New Institutional Economics and the ways institutions affect trade and economic behavior. There are of course others that I cannot think of at the moment. I will write about them as they arise.
This blog is going to be about general anthropological issues that I find interesting. My interests, as they will appear on this page, may be more slanted towards theories.
Yea, that is me. I should be back in some days.