Charles Piot. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 200 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibiography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $20.00. Paper.

Abstract

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Charles Piot. Nostalgia for the Future: West Af rica after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 200 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibiography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $20.00. Paper. Charles Piot's landmark 1999 ethnography, Remotely Global, showed that societies of the savanna region of northern Togo, far from being static, insular polities on the margins of the nation-state, lying history and isolated from global forces, have always been influenced and preoccupied by the outside world. In this new book, Piot argues that the ending of the Cold War brought about a decrease in the power of both the state and local chieftaincy in Togo, the emergence of a radically new political economy centered on NGOs and Pentecostal churches, and new, future-oriented social imaginaries, modes of subjectivity, sovereignty, and storytelling. Piot's tide indexes Togolese longing for a future that replaces untoward pasts, both political and cultural. Such longing is represented not only in Christian End Times narratives and die universal quest for exit visas but also in the embrace of a thousand development initiatives that hail youth and leave elders behind (20). Utopian yearnings find expression in a passion for playing the green card lottery, fantasies of fictitious marriages with foreigners, membership in churches that promise supernatural abundance, Internet searches for exit strategies, and a turn to the transient pleasures of sex, drugs, and music for an instantaneous sense of affective power and presence. This emphasis on inwardness and self-fulfillment stands in dramatic contrast to the prevailing ethos of a traditional culture, where duty, forebearance, and respect for elders imply a stoic acceptance of life as one finds it and the suppression of thoughts and feelings that challenge the status quo. Traditionally, lip service was paid to the idea that one must sacrifice personal gratification and spontaneous self-expression to make sociality viable (the implication being that what is good for the many will prove good for die individual). Collective rituals and everyday practices of commensality, neighborliness, and mutuality reinforced the common weal. Modernity reverses these assumptions. Personal development through education, travel, and purchasing power becomes the royal road to social development, a precondition for the wider social good. This revolutionary change in worldview does not occur adventitiously. It follows radical disruptions to the social fabric - civil war, famine, epidemic illness, mass migration or displacement, and urbanization. Piot paints a grim picture of the anomic background against which the new social imaginarles emerged in the 1990s. These changes burst onto this socio-cosmological stage like a comet from the sky. Disconcerted by the violence against Kabre in the cities of the south, puzzled by those strange new keywords democratie and droits de l'homme, attacked by the Pentecostal churches, stung by currency devaluation and state withdrawal, and increasingly neglected by cash-strapped diasporics, this authority system was shaken to its roots (99). …