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Liberty and moral ambivalence: Postsocialist transitions, refugee hosting, and bodily comportment in the Republic of Guinea
Author(s) -
MCGOVERN MIKE
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.12128
Subject(s) - ambivalence , refugee , agency (philosophy) , ethos , gender studies , sociology , morality , meaning (existential) , subaltern , embodied cognition , new guinea , ethnology , political science , politics , psychoanalysis , social science , law , philosophy , psychology , epistemology
Guinean hosts viewed Liberian refugees with the same ambivalence and fascination that many held for their own children, who were embracing the consumerist ethos of Guinea's postsocialist 1990s. Loma‐speaking farmers’ categories for evaluating historical change and refugee comportment grew out of metaphors of embodied agency and morality. These categories challenge some aspects of both Guinean elites’ and contemporary anthropologists’ understandings of the meaning of post–Cold War social change. [ subaltern historiography, embodiment, Guinea, West Africa, fast capitalism, postsocialism ]