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Unmasking the state : making Guinea modern / Mike McGovern.
Penn Museum Library DT543.8 .M35 2013
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- McGovern, Mike.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- History.
- Nationalism.
- Religion and state.
- Politics and government.
- Guinea--Politics and government--20th century.
- Guinea.
- Religion and state--Guinea--History--20th century.
- Ethnology--Guinea.
- Ethnology.
- Nationalism--Guinea--History--20th century.
- Guinea--History--20th century.
- Physical Description:
- xvi, 293 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm
- Place of Publication:
- Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2013 [that is, 2012], ©2013.
- Summary:
- When the Republic of Guinea gained independence in 1958, one of the first policies of the new state was a village-to-village eradication of masks and other ritual objects it deemed "fetishes." The Demystification Program, as it was called, was so urgent it even preceded the building of a national road system. In Unmasking the State, Mike McGovern attempts to understand why this program was so important to the emerging state and examines the complex role it had in creating a unified national identity. Describing the intertwined relationship between national and local identity-making, McGovern showcases the coercive power and the unintended consequences involved when states attempt to engineer culture. In doing so, he tells a dramatic story of cat-and-mouse where minority groups cling to their important-and outlawed-customs. Book jacket.
- Contents:
- Competing cosmopolitanisms
- The tactics of mutable identity
- Interlude 1. Togba's sword
- Autochthony as a cultural resource
- The emergence of ethnicity
- Portable identities and the politics of religion along the forest-savanna border
- Interlude 2. Bonfire
- Personae : demystification and the mask
- Unmasking the state : making Guinea modern
- Performing the self, performing the nation
- Doube double consciousness in an African postcolony.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages [275]-288) and index.
- ISBN:
- 9780226925097
- 0226925099
- 9780226925103
- 0226925102
- OCLC:
- 783150350
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