My research and writing focus on processes of social and cultural reproduction and transformation, as these processes play out in post-colonial, globalizing contexts, and the way these more general processes articulate with the workings of social and individual memory, on the one hand, and processes of human development on the other. My first book, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory (Studies in Subjectivity Series, University of California Press, 2001), is an ethnography of how people in eastern Madagascar remember the colonial past. The book focuses on a puzzle: why it is that peasants who had lived through both a bloody anti-colonial rebellion and more mundane forms of colonial violence appeared to all but forget the colonial past in their daily lives, but remember it in a powerful and painful way during state elections that were held during the time of my fieldwork. My unraveling of this puzzle, through an examination of the diverse cultural practices like house placement, taboos and cattle sacrifice, led me to emphasize the ways in which social and individual memory are unevenly woven together through social practices, how memory is involved in the construction of tradition, and the implications of thinking about memory and remembering for our understandings of post-colonial subjectivity.
My current project, Sex and Salvation: Critical Perspectives on Youth and Social Change, examines the social construction of historical consciousness from a different perspective. Drawing on fieldwork in the Malagasy port town of Tamatave, I focus on how youth and adults alike construct their sense of rapid historical change through discourses about, and the practices of, urban youth. I focus on two practices which urban Malagasy claim epitomize the changes wrought by the neoliberal reforms that were enacted over the course of the 1990s: the wholesale entry of a generation of young women into the sexual economy and the rising popularity of Pentecostal churches. Using historical materials as well as long term fieldwork, my book seeks to isolate the changes taking place and to analyze the particular social practices which serve to make the perception of change a taken-for-granted reality.
In addition to this project, I have two edited volumes that further explore the themes of youth, age, and globalization. Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age and Family in the New World Economy (Indiana University Press, 2006), which I edited with the anthropologist Deborah Durham, demonstrates how intergenerational relations offer a fruitful analytic through which to examine the intersection between wide scale social changes and intimate family ties. Figuring the Future: Youth and Globalization (School of American Press, forthcoming), also co-edited with Deborah Durham, examines how youth offer a key site for the construction of temporality. I am currently working on a third edited volume with the historian Lynn Thomas, which examines love in Africa in historical and contemporary perspective. In the future, I intend to move my research site from the colony to the metropole, by studying immigrant youth in France.
My teaching has covered a range of topics including a two part class on culture, power and subjectivity, courses on memory and history, the history and ethnography of youth, theories of self and emotion, and finally various aspects of African societies.
email:
jcole@uchicago.edu
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Articles on Memory:
| 2006 |
Malagasy and Western Conceptions of Memory: Implications for Post-Colonial Politics and the Study of Memory. Ethos, 34(2): 211-243. |
| 2004 |
Memory and Modernity: Overcoming the Social/Individual Divide in Memory Studies. The Companion to Psychological Anthropology. Conerly Casey and Robert Edgerton (eds.). London: Blackwells. Pp. 103-120. |
| 2003 |
Narratives and Moral Projects: Generational Memories of the Malagasy 1947 Rebellion. Ethos 31(1): 95–126. |
| 1998 |
The Work of Memory in Madagascar. American Ethnologist 25(4): 610–633. |
Articles on Youth:
| 2006 |
Generation and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy. edited with Deborah Durham. Indiana University Press, Series Editor Robert Foster, Tracking Globalization Series. |
| 2005 | The Jaombilo of Tamatave, Madagascar. Journal of Social History, 38 (4) Special Issue on Childhood and Globalization, Peter Stearns (ed.). Summer 2005, Vol. 38 No. 4, pp. 891-914. |
| 2004 | Fresh Contact in Tamatave, Madagascar: Sex, Money and Intergenerational Transformation. American Ethnologist. 31(4):571-586. |
Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy
Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar
