Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

This book explores the emergent character of social orders in Sudan and South Sudan. It provides vivid insights into multitudes of ordering practices and their complex negotiation. Recurring patterns of exclusion and ongoing struggles to reconfigure disadvantaged positions are investigated as are shifting borders, changing alliances and relationships with land and language.

The book takes a careful and close look at institutional arrangements that shape everyday life in the Sudans, probing how social forms have persisted or changed. It proposes reading the post-colonial history of the Sudans as a continuous struggle to find institutional orders valid for all citizens. The separation of Sudan and South Sudan in 2011 has not solved this dilemma. Exclusionary and exploitative practices endure and inhibit the rule of law, distributive justice, political participation and functioning infrastructure. Analyses of historical records and recent ethnographic data assembled here show that orders do not result directly from intended courses of action, planning and orchestration but from contingently emerging patterns. The studies included look beyond dominant elites caught in violent fights for powers, cycles of civil war and fragile peace agreements to explore a broad range of social formations, some of which may have the potential to glue people and things together in peaceful co-existence, while others give way to new violence.


Table of Contents
 
Emergence and Contestation of Orders in the Sudans by  Sandra Calkins, Enrico Ille & Richard Rottenburg 1

Part 1: Borders and Boundaries

Re-Thinking the Role of Historiography in Sudan at a Time of Crisis: The De-Construction and Re-Construction of “Sudanese History” by Yoshiko Kurita 19 

The Long History of Conflict, Integration and Changing Alliances on the Darfur/Chad Border by Andrea Behrends 33 
Whose Land? Disentangling Border Claims in Sudan by Douglas H. Johnson 62 

Identifying the South Sudanese: Registration for the January 2011 Referendum and Defining a New Nationality by  Nicki Kindersley 72
The Order of Iconicity and the Mutability of “the Moro Language” by Siri Lamoureaux 88

Part 2: Production and Distribution

Competing Forms of Land Use and Incompatible Identifications of Who Is to Benefit from Policies in the South of the North: Pastoralists, Agro- Industry and Farmers in the Blue Nile Region by Günther Schlee 111 

Small-Scale Farming in Southern Gedaref State, East Sudan by Zahir Musa Abdal-Kareem 127

Gifts, Guns & Govvermen: South Sudan and its South-East by Immo Eulenberger 141

Negotiating Distributive Orders in Rural Sudan: Justification and Critique of Charitable Gifts by Sandra Calkins 176

Part 3: Organisation and representation

Greedy Seed Banks? Uncertainty and the Organisation of Distribution in the Nuba Mountains / South Kordofan by Enrico Ille 200

Institutionalisation and Regulation of Medical Kits in an Emergency Situation in the Nuba Mountains / South Kordofan by Mariam Sharif 219

“Popular Consultation” as a Mechanism for Peaceful Social Order in the Nuba Mountains / South Kordofan? by Guma Kunda Komey 229

Confusing DDR – How DDR Shifted its Face by Timm Sureau 247

Sudan experiences one of the most severe fissures between society and territory in Africa. Not only were its international borders redrawn when South Sudan separated in 2011, but conflicts continue to erupt over access to land: territorial claims are challenged by local and international actors; borders are contested; contracts governing the privatization of resources are contentious; and the legal entitlements to agricultural land are disputed. Under these new dynamics of land grabbing and resource extraction, fundamental relationships between people and land are being disrupted: while land has become a global commodity, for millions it still serves as a crucial reference for identity-formation and constitutes their most important source of livelihood.
This book seeks to disentangle the emerging relationships between people and land in Sudan. The first part focuses on the spatial impact of resource-extracting economies: foreign agricultural land acquisitions; Chinese investments in oil production; and competition between artisanal and industrial gold mining. Detailed ethnographic case studies in the second part, from Darfur, South Kordofan, Red Sea State, Kassala, Blue Nile, and Khartoum State, show how rural people experience "their" land vis-à-vis the latest wave of privatization and commercialization of land rights.

Contents
1  Disrupting territories: commodification and its consequences by Jörg Gertel, Richard Rottenburg and Sandra Calkins
2  Agricultural Investment through Land Grabbing in Sudan by Siddiq Umbadda
3  Territories of gold mining: international investment and artisanal extraction in Sudan by Sandra Calkins and Enrico Ille
4  Oil, Water and Agriculture: Chinese impact on Sudanese land use by Janka Linke
5  Nomad-sedentary relations in the context of dynamic land rights in Darfur: from complementarity to conflict by Musa Adam Abdul-Jalil
6  Sedentary-nomadic relations in a shared territory: post-conflict dynamics in the Nuba mountains, Sudan by Guma Kunda Komey
7  Entangled land and identity: Beja history and institutions by Sara Pantuliano
8  Gaining an access to land: everyday negotiations and ethnic politics of Rashaida in north-eastern Sudan by Sandra Calkins
9  Hausa and Fulbe on the Blue Nile: land conflict between farmers and herders by Elhadi Ibrahim Osman and Günther Schlee
10  A central marginality: the invisibilization of urban pastoralists in Khartoum state by Barbara Casciarri

Contemporary citing practices do something significant to developments in the sciences and the humanities: they create giants by attributing a scarce academic good – namely originality – to certain authors, while ignoring others. Originality is not a straightforward qualification of a contribution and its impact on academic disputes. Rather it is something that is made and stabilized through citation practices. We contend that the criteria by which authors select from an ocean of possible sources relate to structuring principles that organize the scientific field and various understandings of “what is” a proper publication and “what counts” in publishing scholarly work. The assertion is that these understandings can be identified as conventions of citation, which inform writing and citing practices. Thus far, this seems to be nothing particularly new. However, we bring existing arguments and approaches together to (1) make a first step towards a novel approach to citation analysis and (2) explore several conventions and techniques of citation in German-speaking anthropology after 1965. We show that some citing techniques have solidified more than others and contribute to aporetic debates about German anthropology’s parochialism.

Short summary

http://www.brill.com/products/book/travelling-models-african-conflict-management

Travelling Models offers a theoretical concept for comparative research on conflict management in Africa in processes of globalization: how is change in one place related to developments in other places? Why are certain issues that are important in one place taken up in other places, while others are not? The authors examine how the travel of models enact changes, particularly in African conflict situations, most often in unexpected ways. They look at what happens when a model has been put into practice at a conflict site, and they pay attention to the forms of social (re-)ordering resulting from this process. The authors look, among others, at conflict managing models of power- and revenue sharing, mediation, freedom of expression, disaster management, community involvement and workshopping.

Contributors are: Andrea Behrends, Lydie Cabane, Veronika Fuest, Dejene Gemechu, Mutasim Bashir Ali Hadi, Remadji Hoinathy, Mario Krämer, Sung-Joon Park, Tinashe Pfigu, Richard Rottenburg, Sylvanus Spencer and Kees van der Waal.

The introduction to this volume is open access.