Foreword

Summary

This volume presents an exciting collection of recent scholarship addressing some of the most important and intellectually consequential issues in contemporary African studies. It is inspired by, and achieves its thematic coherence in relation to, the extraordinarily profound and extensive contributions to that field by Jane I. Guyer over the last four decades. Guyer's insights have extended widely across a range of foundational issues in African studies, but they have largely clustered around a set of themes and questions that animate the contributions to this volume. These include gender and household economy; wealth, knowledge and personhood; currencies, money and value; labour and informality; and the intersections of debt, social obligation and temporality. One way of characterizing this volume, then, would be to say that it is a collection of outstanding recent contributions to scholarship that are united by their focus on a set of linked topics associated with Guyer's most important work.

To put matters this way would be accurate enough, but I do not feel that it would really get at the real core either of this volume or of Jane Guyer's scholarly contributions over the years. Instead, it seems to me that it is perhaps less a unity of topical focus than a shared intellectual sensibility that is the real common thread here. Central to this sensibility is what I regard as an extremely valuable, and perhaps not always fully appreciated, approach to the relation of the theoretical and the empirical. While we have long ago learned to mistrust the old separation of empirical descriptions from the theories that would account for them, there are few scholars who have so completely worked through the full implications of treating empirical accounts as always-already theoretical. Guyer's most profound theoretical contributions have never involved ‘applying’ a theoretical framework to a body of ‘raw’ data; instead, they have always worked from a careful and imaginative interpretation of the mundane realities that lie right before our eyes. Engaging ordinary practices – of work, of trade, of coordinating and ‘composing’ social relationships – in all their concreteness, she has enabled us, again and again, to see how taken-for-granted analytical frames have misled us.