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Andrew Apter

Professor of History and Anthropology, University of California, L.A.

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

October 2023; June 2024

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Historical Ethnography and the Ritual Archive«

Project outline:

The general theme of my Ad.E. Jensen Memorial Lecture engages the intersections of anthropology and history. I understand it as an interdisciplinary relationship with its own distinguished history evidenced by the illustrious genealogy of articles on the topic that have emerged since Evans-Pritchard’s signal Marrett Lecture delivered in 1950. Drawing on my experience in applying anthropological methods to Afro-Atlantic historical ethnography, I explore how rituals can be used as archives to unlock repressed historical memories and the pasts they reenact. The four lectures investigate questions such as how pasts are archived and accessed, as well as how we transform rituals into historical narratives without doing violence to their culturally specific frameworks:

»My Life in the Forests of Spirits« (03 June 2024),
»An Operating Manual for the Ritual Archive« (10 June 2024),
»The Ritual Archive in Yoruba Culture« (17 June 2024),
»›Yoruba-Culture‹ in the Frobenius Archive« (24 June 2024). (Andrew Apter)

Research partner:

Andrew Apter follows the invitation of the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.

Scholarly profile of Andrew Apter

Andrew Apter is Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he co-founded the Atlantic History Colloquium and directed the African Studies Center. Prior to UCLA he taught at Columbia University (1987–1989) and the University of Chicago (1989–2003). He has held visiting appointments at the University of Lagos; the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; St. Antony's College, Oxford University; and the University of Utrecht. Most recently, he was a Heinz Heinen Senior Fellow at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (2021). Apter has conducted fieldwork and archival research in Nigeria, Ghana, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and among Congolese refugees in Zambia. Apter’s books focus on West Africa and the Black Atlantic. He is currently working on Atlantic Slavery and the Spirits of Capitalism, exploring how Atlantic slavery and its fetishized forms of human commodification remain deeply buried within the core of racial capitalism.

Website:
Please find more information about Andrew Apter here.

Main areas of research:

Regional: Black Atlantic (Yoruba in Nigeria, Fante in Ghana) and the African Diaspora (Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba); Thematic: Ritual, Politics and Historical Memory; Atlantic Slavery and Racial Capitalism; Race, Gender, and Creolization; African Epistemologies and Philosophies of Language; Oral History; Archival Theory.

Selected publications:

»Frobenius Unbound: Black Atlantis and the Poetics of Displacement in the Yoruba-Atlantic«, in: Paideuma 68 (2022), p. 119-148.
Oduduwa’s Chain: Locations of Culture in the Yoruba Atlantic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2018.
»Queer Crossings: Kinship, Gender and Sexuality in Igboland and Carriacou«, in: Journal of West African History 3, 2 (2017), p. 39-66.
»Ethnographic X-Files and Holbraad’s Double-Bind: Reflections on an Ontological Turn of Events«, in: HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, 1 (2017), p. 287-302.
»History in the Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery and the Spirit of Capitalism in Cape Coast Castle, Ghana«, in: American Historical Review 122, 1 (2017), p. 23-54.
»The Blood of Mothers: Women, Money and Markets in Yoruba-Atlantic Perspective«, in: Journal of African American History 98, 1 (2013), p. 72-98. [= Special Issue on Women, Slavery, and the Atlantic World, ed. by Brenda S. Stevenson]
»Yoruba Ethnogenesis from Within«, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, 2 (2013), p. 356-387.
Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007.
The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005.
Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992.

Andrew Apter

Scholarly profile of Andrew Apter

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