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Governance of Daily Life in Africa: Ethnographic Explorations of Publicand Collective Services, The

African Studies Review, Apr 2010by Rubbers, Benjamin

Giorgio Blundo and Pierre-Yves Le Meur, eds. The Governance of Daily Life in Africa: Ethnographic Explorations

of Public and Collective Services. Leiden: Brill, 2009. African Social Studies series, vol. 19. x 347 pp. Tables.

Map. Notes. Bibliography. About the Contributors. Index. $108.00. Paper.

Resulting from a conference held in Leiden in 2002, this book presents a collection of thirteen contributions on

the provision of public and collective services in Africa. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, these deal with topics

as diverse as politics in refugee camps in Senegal, waste management in Ghana, drinking-water supply in

Niger, and health services in Tanzania. Though most contributions deserve some attention, for reasons of space

I will focus on those of particular interest to me.

Contributions by Gerhard Anders and Julia Hornberger show the relevance of legal anthropology in the study of

the interplay between state and society. Anders analyzes in depth how a civil servant sought and obtained from

his service two cars (with drivers) to carry the corpse of his housekeeper's mother back to her village. From thiscase study, the author argues that "corruption" in Africa is best understood not as a practice in conflict with

official rules, but as the result of a negotiation among several different types of norms: the heterogeneous body

of laws and regulations; the expectations of redistribution, or feelings of obligation, existing in kinship and

patron-client networks; and the moral debts circulating among colleagues at work. For Anders, civil servants do

not in any simple way fail to enforce official rules because of informal pressure from parents, clients, or

colleagues. Instead, they need to be seen as active agents, playing with the ambiguities in the interrelations

among official, personal, and informal professional norms.

The contribution of Hornberger offers a "thick" ethnography about the consequences of the 1999 Domestic

Violence Act for the police of Westbury, Johannesburg. Women in this district regularly call the police to lodge a

complaint against their male partner in the name of this legislation, but in most cases they withdraw it some

days later. The author argues that such withdrawals result less from women's powerlessness and fear - or the

image of victimhood that brought about the legislation to begin with - than from a form of gendered agency.

Women use police intervention, or the threat of it, to solve private conflicts; they want to teach men a lesson,

not to break off their relationships with them. This practice of inviting the state into the domestic sphere,

Hornberger shows, has a long history in Westbury. It also contributes, he says, to "emasculating" men, because

the relationship of men to women has helped define male identity: since the colonial period women have

commonly been represented as dutiful mothers at home suffering from the violence of absent husbands, and

such a notion of men's power over women has been a crucial component of the masculine self. And the practice

of calling on the police to enter into domestic disputes on the side of the women also erodes the masculine

identity of policemen, who are now required to perform what they see as the feminized job of die social worker.

Although the female point of view is missing, I found this focus on the processes of subjectivization particularly

suggestive.

Contributions by Jacky Bouju and Wiebe Nauta succeed in taking into account the point of view of all

stakeholders - an integrative approach that often remains but wishful thinking in the literature. The two authors

also offer interesting reflections on the concepts of public space and public good. Bouju argues that the

behavior of the inhabitants of Bobo-Dioulasso regarding the cleanliness of common areas is related to their

sense of connection or lack of connection to the urban community. According to this perspective, waste can be

conceived of as a form of resistance against public authorities, though there is the risk here of confusing what

could be simple neglect with a weapon of the weak. Nauta also shows that the concept of public good may be

subject to different forms of "strategic translation" by development brokers. The author emphasizes the role of

research reports produced by NGOs, which are often scientific and technocratic in their format and discourse

but present their data selectively in order to support their political views. This distortion should be kept in mind

when social scientists cite such reports as authoritative sources in their own analysis.

Considered as a group, the thirteen contributions to the book - as Blundo and Le Meur explain in the

introduction - document a shift in the major concerns of the Euro-African Association for the Antiiropology of

Development and Social Change (APAD), from an emphasis on development projects to a focus on public

services. However, although this new direction widens the field of investigation, it nonetheless draws on the

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older analytical framework - with particular attention to the role of development organizations and brokers in

the implementation of public reforms. The aim now is to renew the study of the state in Africa - a domain of

research currendy dominated by comparative essays - and to broaden it beyond the ethnography of local

administrations. At the same time, Blundo and Le Meur share the goal, now common in political anthropology,

of moving beyond an approach centered on the state, to take into account the interplay among different

categories of actors in the provision of public and collective services.

The resulting approach can be represented as starting from a determination of a public policy function or goal -

the provision of a public service - moving from there to providing an analysis of the existing institutional and

political set-up, and then a reimagining of the structures that eventually could allow for the goal's fulfillment.

Blundo and Le Meur refer broadly to structures of "governance," but they understand this concept in a non-

normative sense. Here governance refers to the social processes through which different categories of actors

contribute to the provision of public and collective services; it entails an analysis of their cultural frames of

reference and varying interpretations of data and objectives. In my opinion, however, the concept of

governance, precisely because of its normative connotation, obscures more than it illuminates. All in all, I share

the preference of Bayart and Moore for the concept of "governmentality" (8), which implies a focus on the

processes of subjectivation. But this is a matter of words: the aim of the book is to study how public and

collective services are delivered in Africa. For all social scientists interested in this new field of research, it is

definitely essential reading.

Benjamin Rubbers

Universit?de Li?ge

Li?ge, Belgium

Rubbers, Benjamin "Governance of Daily Life in Africa: Ethnographic Explorations of Public and Collective Services,

The". African Studies Review. FindArticles.com. 15 Sep, 2010.

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