Adia Benton

Bio: Adia Benton is an academic researcher from Northwestern University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Sierra leone & Exceptionalism. The author has an hindex of 11, co-authored 29 publications receiving 398 citations. Previous affiliations of Adia Benton include Brown University & University of Minnesota.

HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone

Abstract: Contents Preface Introduction: HIV Exceptionalism in Sierra Leone: Christiana's Story Part I. The Exceptional Life of HIV in Sierra Leone 1. The HIV Industry in Postwar Sierra Leone 2. Exceptional Life, Exceptional Suffering: Enumerating HIV's Truths Part II. Becoming HIV-Positive 3. The Imperative to Talk: Disclosure and Its Preoccupations 4. Positive Living: Hierarchies of Visibility, Vulnerability, and Self-Reliance Part III. HIV and Governance 5. For Love of Country: Model Citizens, Good Governance, and the Nationalization of HIV Conclusion: The Future of HIV Exceptionalism Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Temporality and Positive Living in the Age of HIV/AIDS--A Multi-Sited Ethnography.

Abstract: Drawing on comparative ethnographic fieldwork conducted in urban Mozambique, United States, and Sierra Leone, the article is broadly concerned with the globalization of temporal logics and how specific ideologies of time and temporality accompany health interventions like those for HIV/AIDS. More specifically, we explore how HIV-positive individuals have been increasingly encouraged to pursue healthier and more fulfilling lives through a set of moral, physical, and social practices called "positive living" since the advent of antiretroviral therapies. We describe how positive living, a feature of HIV/AIDS programs throughout the world, has taken root across varied political, social and economic contexts and how temporal rationalities, which have largely been under-examined in the HIV/AIDS literature, shape communities' responses and interpretations of positive living. Our approach is ethnographic and comparative, with implications for how anthropologists might think about collaboration and its analytical possibilities.

Enumeration, Identity, and Health

Abstract: Although the production of national spaces, citizens, and populations through enumerative practices has been well explored in a variety of disciplines, anthropological methods and analysis can help to illuminate the everyday practices of enumeration, their unexpected consequences, and the co-construction of identities through these processes by both the "counted" and the "counters." The authors in this special issue illustrate how enumeration inflects lived experiences, produces subjectivities, and reconfigures governance. Focusing on the spatial, temporal, ideological, and affective dimensions of the techniques of enumeration, the authors also provide insights into the multiple forms of biopolitical expertise and knowledge that accumulate legitimacy through numerical discourse. They also highlight the ways in which governing structures, institutional and cultural norms, market logics, and rational-technical interventions influence the relationship among numerical categories, subjectivity, and everyday experience.

African expatriates and race in the anthropology of humanitarianism

Abstract: Anthropological critiques of humanitarianism in Africa emphasize the workings of power, usually along lines of cultural, class, economic, and political difference While these critiques often mention race, they engage less explicitly with structural racism and white supremacy as intimately woven into humanitarian professional practice Such an engagement requires looking at how structures of inequality, white supremacy among them, shape the everyday practices of humanitarianism: from recruitment and hiring practices to reception and expectations by local staff Drawing on work experience (7 months, 2003–2004) and ethnographic data from post-conflict Sierra Leone (20 months, 2005–2007) and recent in-depth interviews with former colleagues (2012), I focus on African expatriates working in African countries in which they are not ‘native’ to re-format critical analyses that have emphasized translational or intermediary roles for African elites I argue that African expatriates navigate multiple levels and sca

萨义德的“Orientalism”释义

Abstract: 萨义德以其独特的双重身份,对西方中心权力话语做了分析,通过对文学作品、演讲演说等文本的解读,将O rie n ta lis m——"东方学",做了三重释义:一门学科、一种思维方式和一种权力话语系统,对东方学权力话语做了系统的批判,同时将东方学放入空间维度对东方学文本做了细致的解读。

The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

Abstract: To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

Abstract: Frantz Fanon’s explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world. Using Fanon’s incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples, it is both a crucial text in post-colonial theory, and a lesson in the power of analytical skills to reveal the realities that hide beneath the surface of things. Fanon was himself part of a colonized nation – Martinique – and grew up with the values and beliefs of French culture imposed upon him, while remaining relegated to an inferior status in society. Qualifying as a psychiatrist in France before working in Algeria (a French colony subject to brutal repression), his own experiences granted him a sharp insight into the psychological problems associated with colonial rule. Like any good analytical thinker, Fanon’s particular skill was in breaking things down and joining dots. His analysis of colonial rule exposed its implicit assumptions – and how they were replicated in colonised populations – allowing Fanon to unpick the hidden reasons behind his own conflicted psychological make up, and those of his patients. Unflinchingly clear-sighted in doing so, Black Skin White Masks remains a shocking read today.

The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge

Abstract: What is the meaning of Africa and of being African? What is and what is not African philosophy? Is philosophy part of Africanism ? These are the kind of fundamental questions which this book addresses. North America: Indiana U Press

Warlord Politics and African States

Abstract: Focusing on the examples of Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Zaire, this text demonstrates how African rulers hold on to power while severed from foreign aid and subjected to collapsing economies and disappearing bureaucracies.