Erin Baines is an Associate Professor at the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She is author of Buried in the Heart: Women and Complex Victimhood (Cambridge, 2017) and Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, the UN and the Global Refugee Crisis (Ashgate, 2017).

Kristen E. Cheney is Associate Professor of Children and Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, the Netherlands. Her research has focused on children’s survival strategies amidst difficult circumstances in sub‐Saharan Africa. Her most recent research examines the impact of the global “orphan industrial complex” – including orphanage tourism, support for orphanages, and intercountry adoption – on child protection and welfare in developing countries. She is also studying youth sexual and reproductive health and has participated in child/youth‐related research, consultancy, and capacity‐building projects in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Euclides Gonçalves is a researcher and director at Kaleidoscopio – Research in Public Policy and Culture. His research examines public encounters with bureaucratic power through the analysis of the performativity of documents. His published articles include “Orientações superiores: Time and Bureaucratic Authority in Mozambique” and “Imagining Agricultural Development in South–South Cooperation: The Contestation and Transformation of ProSAVANA.”

Roy Richard Grinker is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the George Washington University and Editor‐in‐Chief of Anthropological Quarterly. He is the author of Houses in the Rainforest: Ethnicity and Inequality among Farmers and Foragers in Central Africa (University of California Press, 1994), Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War (St. Martin’s Press, 1997), In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (Basic Books, 2007). He is co‐editor of Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation (Wiley Blackwell, 2010).

Jane I. Guyer is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. A graduate from the London School of Economics (1965), and the University of Rochester (1972), her fieldwork was in Nigeria and Cameroon, on small‐scale farming and money in African communities. She is a member of the National Academy of Science. Her most widely cited work is Marginal Gains. Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (2004), an extension of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures of 1997.

Joseph Hellweg is Associate Professor of Religion and Anthropology in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. He has conducted research in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali in both French and Mandekan among dozo hunters and N’ko healers. He has also written on the lives of LGBT Africans, especially about those living in Côte d’Ivoire. He is currently president of the Mande Studies Association and an editor of the “Religion in Transforming Africa” Series published by James Currey and Boydell & Brewer.

Danny Hoffman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. His research in Sierra Leone and Liberia focuses on youth mobilization and militancy. He is the author of two books on the region, The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia (2011) and Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and Political Imagination in Liberia (2017).

Victor Igreja is Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland. He teaches International Relations, Anthropology, and Social Justice. Recent articles appeared in the Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, Wiley‐Blackwell’s International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, International Journal of Transitional Justice, Social Science and Medicine, British Journal of Psychiatry, Transcultural Psychiatry, Journal of African Law, Journal of Religion in Africa, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Journal of Traumatic Stress. Between September 2018 and July 2019, he will be a research fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, University of Bielefeld, Germany.

Alessandro Jedlowski is a Belgian Scientific Research Fund (FRS‐FNRS) post‐doctoral fellow in anthropology at the University of Liege (Belgium). His research interests include Nigerian cinema, African visual cultures, and South–South media interactions. He is the editor of a special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies on China‐Africa media interactions and of the books Mobility between Africa, Asia and Latin America: Economic Networks and Cultural Interactions (Zed Books, 2017) and Cine‐Ethiopia: The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa (Michigan State University Press, 2018).

Jessica Johnson is a social anthropologist and lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, UK. She also serves as an editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies. Her first book, In Search of Gender Justice: Rights and Relationships in Matrilineal Malawi, is forthcoming in the International African Library series, published by Cambridge University Press.

Eric Kramon is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. His research focuses on clientelism, ethnic politics, and electoral accountability in new democracies, with a regional focus on sub‐Saharan Africa. His work has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the International Growth Center, the Department for International Development (DfID), and the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) Metaketa initiative, and has been published by Cambridge University Press, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, The British Journal of Political Science, The Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and Perspectives on Politics.

Suzanne Leclerc‐Madlala is Senior Anthropologist at the Global Health Bureau, U.S. Agency for International Development. Her research and publications focus on cultural schematics of gender and sexuality related to social change and the evolving HIV/AIDS epidemic in southern Africa. From 2000 to 2009 she was Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa.

Louisa Lombard is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. She is the author of State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic and a number of articles on rebellion, armed conservation, and international peacebuilding. She is currently researching how military peacekeepers charged with protecting civilians in the midst of violent conflict understand their work and the moral dilemmas it entails.

Stephen C. Lubkemann is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. His fieldwork in Mozambique, South Africa, Angola, and Liberia – and with diasporas in Portugal and the United States – focuses on displacement, violence, and international intervention. As a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, he also co‐directs the Slave Wrecks Project – a global collaboration using maritime archeology to investigate the history and enduring legacies of the African slave trade. He is the author of Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War (University of Chicago Press, 2008), co‐editor of Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation (Wiley Blackwell, 2010) and co‐author of Looking for Justice: Liberian Experiences with and Perceptions of Local Justice Options (U.S. Institute for Peace, 2009).

George Paul Meiu is John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on the political economy of gender and sexuality, kinship, belonging, and citizenship in Kenya. He is author of Ethno‐erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017) as well as of articles published in American Ethnologist, Ethnos, Anthropology Today, and the Canadian Journal of African Studies.

Jesse C. Miller is a doctoral student in History and Ethnography of Religions at Florida State University. His research on exchange patterns at funerals in West Africa’s Volta Basin challenges intellectual scaffolding behind development, economy, and religion. His further research interests encompass Islamic reform and Sufi movements in West Africa.

Mwenda Ntarangwi is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and currently Commission Secretary and CEO of Commission for University Education in Kenya. His research interests lie in the intersection between popular culture and social practices as well as in the practice of anthropology as a discipline. He is the author of The Street is My Pulpit: Hip Hop and Christianity in Kenya (Illinois, 2016), Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology (Illinois, 2010), East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization (Illinois, 2009), and Gender Identity and Performance: Understanding Swahili Culture Through Songs (Africa World Press, 2003), among others, and co‐editor of African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice (CODESRIA, 2006). He holds a doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign and a Master’s in Swahili Cultural Studies from Kenyatta University, Kenya.

Pauline E. Peters has been affiliated with Harvard University since 1982 as a Fellow with the former Harvard Institute for International Development and as a member of the faculties of the Department of Anthropology and the Harvard Kennedy School. Since her retirement from teaching in 2008, she has been a Faculty Fellow at the Center for International Development and a Fellow of the Center for African Studies. Her research has concentrated on southern Africa, particularly Malawi, and her publications on land, rural economy, kinship, and gender.

Katrien Pype, Associate Professor at the University of Leuven (Belgium), at the time of writing this chapter, and part‐time Fellow at the University of Birmingham (UK), is a cultural anthropologist who has been studying Kinshasa’s media worlds since 2003. She has published on the production of television serials, propaganda through news journalism, and the entanglements of media and the urban experience in the lifeworlds of Kinshasa’s elderly in journals such as Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; Ethnos; Africa: Journal of the International African Institute; Journal of Modern African Studies; and Journal of African Cultural Studies. Her book, The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama. Religion, Media, and Gender in Kinshasa (2012), was published with Berghahn Books. Currently, she guides a team project studying the intersections of technology and the city in Africa.

Raquel Rodrigues Machaqueiro earned her BA in anthropology from Nova University, Lisbon (2000), and her MA in anthropology from ISCTE, Lisbon (2003). She is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at the George Washington University. For eight years she served the Portuguese government as a policy analyst for environmental issues. Her current work examines policy‐making and transnational environmental interventions in countries from the Global South, namely Brazil and Mozambique.

Carolyn Rouse is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work explores the use of evidence to make particular claims about race and social inequality. She is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam, Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease, and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment. Her manuscript Development Hubris: Adventures Trying to Save the World examines discourses of charity and development and is tied to her own project building a high school in a fishing village in Ghana. In the summer of 2016 she began studying declining white life expectancies in rural California as a follow‐up to her research on racial health disparities. In addition to being an anthropologist, Rouse is also a filmmaker. She has produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998), and Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015).

Dianna Shandy is Associate Dean in the Institute for Global Citizenship and Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. She earned a PhD, MPhil, and MA in Anthropology at Columbia University and a BS in Languages and Linguistics with Certificates in African Studies and Russian Area Studies at Georgetown University. Her books include: Conformity and Conflict: A Reader in Cultural Anthropology, 15th Edition (with David McCurdy and James Spradley, 2016); Glass Ceilings and 100‐Hour Couples: What the Opt‐Out Phenomenon Can Teach Us About Work and Family (with Karine Moe, 2010); Nuer‐American Passages: Globalizing Sudanese Migration (2007); and a revised edition of The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society, 2nd Edition (with David McCurdy and James Spradley, 2005).

James H. Smith is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He received his PhD in social‐cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2002, and was a Rockefeller Research Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame from 2003–2004. His research interests include Temporality, Artisanal Mining and Resource Extraction, “Development” Vernaculars, and Religion and the Occult in Africa. He is the author of Bewitching Development: Witchcraft and the Reinvention of Development in Neoliberal Kenya (University of Chicago Press, Series in the Practices of Meaning, 2008); author, with Ngeti Mwadime, of Email from Ngeti: An Ethnography of Sorcery, Redemption and Friendship in Global Africa (University of California Press, 2014); and co‐editor of Displacing the State: Religion and Conflict in Neoliberal Africa (University of Notre Dame Press).

Christopher B. Steiner is the Lucy C. McDannel ‘22 Professor of Art History and Anthropology at Connecticut College, where he also serves as Director of Museum Studies. He is the author of African Art in Transit (Cambridge University Press, 1994), and co‐editor of Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (University of California Press, 1999), Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation (Wiley Blackwell, 2010), and Africa in the Market: Twentieth‐Century Art from the Amrad African Art Collection (Royal Ontario Museum, 2016).

Rebecca L. Upton is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at DePauw University, and the founding Director of its Global Health program. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Brown University and her MPH degree in Prevention Science from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University where she is also an affiliated faculty member. Her research has focused on infertility, reproductive health, and gender in southern Africa, as well as HIV/AIDS, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), and masculinity and migration. She has been a Fulbright Fellow and Andrew Mellon and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grantee. She is the author of The Negotiation of Work, Family and Masculinity Among Christian Long‐Haul Truck Drivers: What Would Jesus Haul? (2016) and of numerous peer‐reviewed articles (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Gender & Society, Gender & Development, the African Journal of Reproductive Health, Journal of Southern African Studies).

The editors wish to express their deepest gratitude to the many authors who contributed to this book. We also truly appreciate the efforts of Mark Graney, Tanya McMullin, and Elisha Benjamin at Wiley Blackwell for shepherding such a large project to the finish line, as well as the work of others on the Wiley Blackwell team who tended this project along the way. Along the way, numerous colleagues and students also helped us immensely. We extend our thanks to Evy Vourlides and Mackenzie Fusco, for assisting in the organization of authors and texts, as well as first‐rate editing, and to Nicole Malli and Courtney Jirsa for providing invaluable support in the cross‐checking and finalization of several of the chapters’ bibliographies. Diogo Oliveira, Raquel Machaqueiro, Loren Landau, and Victoria Avis provided important critical readings of early drafts of a number of chapters. Numerous colleagues who did not write chapters for the book nonetheless helped the editors to identify vital topics in the history and future of the anthropology of Africa. Although the editors accept full responsibility for all shortcomings in the book, we would like to acknowledge these individuals: Kelly Askew, Francis Nyamnjoh, Peter Geschiere, Mary Moran, John Mugane, Owen Sichone, Scott Ross, and Parker Shipton. In addition, we would like to acknowledge our early mentors who insisted we study the works of anthropologists we might, in our youth, have deemed antiquated and irrelevant, and told us why – because much of what we believe to be new or singular still contains within it the evidence of a history that underwrites its development: David William Cohen, George Hicks, David Kertzer, Robert A. Levine, and Sally Falk Moore. Finally, we extend special appreciation to our families for supporting us in our work (Grinker: Joyce, Isabel, Olivia; Lubkemann: April, Ava Ray, and Samuel; Steiner: Rebecca, Kyra, and Everett; Goncalves: Sandra, Yuran, and Loueke).