These two edited volumes reflect two major trajectories in the anthropological study of Africa today. One is rather more theoretically inclined, interested in the broader narratives that have been spun in the media and in scholarship about Africa, ruminating ‘within the paradoxes, perplexities and apparent certitudes Africa is taken to insinuate’ (Goldstone & Obarrio, p. 3, their emphasis). The other is broadly empirical and empiricist – interested in what social scientific endeavour might reveal about contemporary economic life in Africa, what its editor calls ‘the political economy of everyday life’ (Adebanwi, p. 4), an inquiry into the ways in which Africans live their lives and exercise agency in relation to economic circumstances and constraints not of their immediate making. Right off the bat, there is an unmistakable divergence in ambition and method between these two volumes, expressed in form as much as content. African futures is 264 pages of short essays, containing meditations on ethnographic and conceptual issues in the study of Africa. The political economy of everyday life in Africa is almost half as long again, comprised of far more extensive chapters exhibiting a more sustained engagement with empirical material. Insofar as the ambitions of these books differs greatly, they can hardly be compared on the same terms. But insofar as they are emblematic of the two polarities of contemporary Africanist anthropology, they intrigue.

African futures begins with an introduction by the editors, Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio, that sets the tone for much of what follows: ‘This book of essays approaches the subject of futurity in Africa as an irreducibly open question, one whose potential answers are contingent not only on who is posing the question but also on the myriad specificities – of scale, location, sensibility – that orient it’ (p. 1). At the heart of this book is a concern with experiences of time and crisis in Africa, and how the continent's relationship to the rest of the world has been mediated (by scholars and media pundits alike) as one defined by time and crisis. The narrative of Africa as a place of crisis, which scholars can hardly be seen to have stood apart from, or as one of newfound optimism (the ‘Africa Rising’ trope, p. 1) looms large in the introduction and across the subsequent essays. The introduction is immediately followed by the first of the book's three subsections, ‘Rethinking crisis’, in which chapters 2 to 4 by Janet Roitman, Brian Larkin, and Ramah McKay respectively contribute in distinctive ways towards rethinking the notion of ‘crisis’ in Africanist scholarship.

I must dwell a little longer on this section – and particularly on the essays by Roitman and Larkin – since it tells us much about the knots that anthropological scholarship can tie itself in against its better judgement. Roitman goes to great lengths to argue that ‘crisis’ is of enormous import to understanding Africa today, but primarily in relation to narratives bequeathed either by academics (she refers to her own co‐authored article ‘Figures of the subject in times of crisis’ [Mbembe & Roitman 1995]), other commentators, or anecdotal evidence of Africans themselves who claim to be in a state of crisis. Crisis is a contingent, shifting signifier bound to be deployed in all manner of contexts, Roitman insists. And yet one wonders how anthropologists ended up narrating ‘crisis’ as a facet of African lifeworlds to begin with and how useful it might be to continue to plough that particular field.

Brian Larkin's intervention is revealing. When he conducted fieldwork in Nigeria, it was during the height of structural adjustment's economic effects, but he notes this was not the same ‘crisis’ described by Charles Piot (2010) in Togo, nor James Ferguson (1999) in Zambia. ‘Like the poor’, Larkin says, ‘crisis, it seems, is always with us’ (p. 45). His solution is to recognize the situatedness of crisis narratives, the relativity of crisis as a descriptive tool – a perspective embraced by a number of other contributors to African futures. Yet my concern about the concept remained pronounced even after reading such reasonable rapprochements between divergent accounts of ‘crises’. Does it still make sense to speak about a singular ‘crisis’ as a quality of African life and experience? What is lost in abstracting from country‐specific experiences of economic change, and out to a wider notion of ‘crisis’? Undoubtedly, discussions of conceptual tools like crisis will be of interest to some readers, and yet one can wonder whether such large‐scale abstractions serve to blunt fine‐grained ethnographic description (particularly if they have to be calibrated at such great length) rather than elucidate it. The time spent dwelling on the term is emblematic of a trajectory in anthropology (not merely Africanist anthropology) concerned with concept production and rumination, at times to the detriment of ethnographic investigation. The idea of crisis as ‘continual movement’ (Larkin, p. 46) gets us little further. That ‘no condition is permanent’ remains something of a truism – the question remains what anthropologists can add to the study of impermanent African contexts rather than objectifying their flux as a characteristic in and of itself.

Whilst appearing somewhat laboured, these debates hardly derail the volume. Some of its most striking offerings are its ethnographic ones. Brad Weiss's chapter 14 explores notions of temporality and economic success in Tanzania – revealing familiar critiques of ill‐gotten wealth from ‘fast business’. Ramah McKay (chap. 4) analyses how notions of crisis amongst her interlocutors inform claims made on the state. A middle section sees a range of authors consider rural‐to‐urban peregrinations, ideas of luck, and the myriad, non‐teleological fates of African migrants. Again, the contributions are short, but not without important insights and ideas. Peter Geschiere and Antoine Socpa's reflections on Cameroonian ‘bush fallers’, for example, reveal the belief in luck underlying the risky migration strategies they pursue, often with family expectations pinned on them (chap. 12).

In contrast to African futures, The political economy of everyday life in Africa appears far more empiricist than critical‐theoretical. In this volume dedicated to the intellectual legacy of Jane Guyer (whose work also appears in African futures), Wale Adebanwi's thought‐provoking introduction spells out an intriguing and yet straightforwardly sociological mission for anthropologists of Africa today: to study the everyday lives of Africans under the economic constraints they face. Emblematic of this is Gbemisola Animasawun's chapter 9 on the struggles of okada motorcycle taxi riders in Lagos, their clashes with city authorities pursuing ‘urban renewal’, and the reordering of public space by restricting them from the urban centre, pushing the already marginal further to the margins.

Some of the first entries in the volume return to classic debates about the influence of money and commoditization in Africa. Chapters 1 and 2 by Jean and John Comaroff and David Pratten respectively are finely tuned to the importance of longue durée history and how wider transformations have shaped local conflicts over wealth and people. Pratten offers a meticulously researched chapter on the relationship between fluctuating exchange rates for prestige goods (manillas) and a whole range of local social conflicts in Nigeria surrounding bride‐price disagreements, including a spate of vengeful murders by mysterious ‘leopard men’. The book's ranging contributions touch on a variety of themes, from politics and patronage to disease and violence, always approached through the lens of wider economic dynamics. Fred Cooper's essay provides a valuable survey of debates and historiography on the topic of labour in African history, bringing them into discussion with the recent turn towards ‘precarity’ as a feature of ‘post‐Fordist’ economies in the Global North. Anne‐Maria Makhulu's important chapter observes how South African corporate capital increasingly relies on marginal sums extracted from the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid, providing credit that fuels desires for consumption whilst subjecting poor South Africans to new and pervasive forms of indebtedness.

From this perspective, the distinction between the two books could hardly appear more stark. In African futures, Roitman (p. 31) suggests that ‘Africanist anthropologists have much to learn from critiques of historiography’, approvingly citing Hayden White, but one of the major achievements of the work in this latter volume is to historicize African economic life and experience through carefully contextualized research. Exhortations to epistemological openness can fall rather flat in comparison to scholarship capable of weaving economic change with African understandings and knowledge production at the interstice of the global and the local.

The book is not without fault, however. Other reviewers have noted that its case studies are primarily focused on Nigeria and South Africa, and that their contributions do not adequately reflect the intention to study the ‘political economy of everyday life’ (see Allain 2018). The macro level at which many of these contributions work means that the ‘everyday’ can often become occluded by wider historical, economic, and political processes.

Where is an Africanist anthropologist left to go from here? The metaphysical concerns of African futures will provide plenty of food for thought for the curious. Yet its promise may prove disappointing for scholars who have already pursued long‐term embedded fieldwork and know that practically every concept or scholarly concern breaks up as it passes through the upper atmosphere of the deep and intuitive appreciation of social complexity we actively cultivate throughout our research. One wonders what colleagues from the continent might make of the volume's scale‐busting theorization of ‘Africa’ as such. As semi‐realized as it might be in The political economy of everyday life in Africa, the call to explore how ‘a certain, often difficult and challenging political economy is encountered, domesticated and made sensible; how people attempt to impose some measure of order and stability on their lives, even in the context of acute precarity, poverty and various forms of fiscal, social or political instability’ (p. 5) resounds and reverberates rather more clearly than rubrics of ‘crisis’ and ‘the future’ – a pathway to exploring the man‐made historical and material conditions in which Africans live and participate, less a metaphysical or a temporal predicament than a human, socio‐economic one. Both volumes will undoubtedly be of interest to Africanist anthropologists, and whilst African futures will attract anthropologists theorizing temporality and future‐making practices, The political economy of everyday life in Africa will draw attention from anthropologists of economic life and change.

这两本经过编辑的书反映了当今非洲人类学研究的两个主要轨迹。一个人在理论上比较倾向于，对媒体和有关非洲的学术研究中产生的更广泛的叙述感兴趣，认为“内部”非洲被认为是挑衅的悖论，困惑和明显的态度”（Goldstone和Obarrio，第3页，其重点）。另一位是广泛的经验主义者和经验主义者–对社会科学的努力可能揭示非洲当代经济生活，其编辑者称之为“日常生活的政治经济学”（Adebanwi，第4页）感兴趣，对其中的方式进行了研究。非洲人的生活和行使代理权与经济状况和不受其直接影响的限制有关。马上，这两个书卷的野心和方法之间就存在着明显的分歧，无论形式还是内容，它的表达方式都是一样的。非洲的未来是264页的短文，其中包含对非洲研究中人种学和概念问题的沉思。非洲日常生活的政治经济学将近又延长了一半，由更广泛的章节组成，这些章节对经验资料的参与更加持久。只要这些书的志向有很大的不同，就很难用相同的术语来比较它们。但是，就它们象征当代非洲人类学的两种极性而言，它们很吸引人。

非洲的期货始于编辑Brian Goldstone和Juan Obarrio的介绍，为随后的许多事情定下了基调：“这本杂文将非洲的未来问题作为一个不可回避的开放性问题来探讨，其潜在答案视情况而定。不仅是由谁提出问题，而且还取决于定向问题的众多特异性–规模，位置，敏感性–（第1页）。本书的核心是对非洲时间和危机经验的关注，以及如何通过（学者和媒体专家等）来调解非洲与世界其他地区的关系，其定义如下：时间和危机。非洲的叙述作为一个危机的地方，几乎没有学者认为它是与之分离开来的，或者是一种新发现的乐观主义（“非洲崛起”系列，第1页），在引言和随后的所有论文中都显得比较大。 。引言之后紧接着是本书的三个小节中的第一个小节，“重新思考危机”，其中珍妮特·罗特曼，布莱恩·拉金和拉玛·麦凯分别在第二章至第四章中做出了独特的贡献，以重新思考非洲主义者的“危机”概念。奖学金。

我必须在本节上再讲一点，特别是在Roitman和Larkin的论文上，因为它告诉了我们很多关于人类学学术可以与其更好的判断力相提并论的难题。罗伊特曼（Roitman）竭尽全力辩称，“危机”对于当今理解非洲具有重要意义，但主要涉及学者或学者遗赠的叙述（她指的是她自己合着的文章“危机时期的主题数字”）。 [Mbembe＆Roitman 1995]），其他评论员，或声称自己处于危机状态的非洲人自己的轶事证据。Roitman坚持认为，危机是一种偶然的，不断变化的指代物，势必会部署在各种情况下。然而，有人想知道人类学家如何最终将“危机”描述为非洲生活世界的一面，以及继续耕种这一特定领域可能有多大用处。

布莱恩·拉金（Brian Larkin）的干预正在揭示。当他在尼日利亚进行实地考察时，正处于结构调整对经济产生影响的高峰期，但他指出，这与多哥的查尔斯·皮奥特（2010）或赞比亚的詹姆斯·弗格森（1999）所描述的“危机”不同。拉金说，“就像穷人一样”，危机似乎总是伴随着我们”（第45页）。他的解决方案是认识到危机叙事的真实性，危机作为描述性工具的相对性-其他许多对非洲未来的贡献者所接受的观点。然而，即使阅读了关于“危机”的各种说法之间的这种合理的和解，我对这一概念的关注仍然很明显。将奇异的“危机”描述为非洲生活和经验的品质仍然有意义吗？从特定于国家的经济变化经验中提炼出更广泛的“危机”概念，会丢失什么？毫无疑问，一些读者对诸如危机之类的概念工具的讨论将引起兴趣，但是人们可能会怀疑，如此大规模的抽象是否能使细粒度的人种志描述（尤其是如果它们必须以如此长的长度进行校准）成为钝器？阐明它。停留在这个词上的时间象征着人类学（不仅是非洲人类学）与概念产生和反省有关的轨迹，有时会危害人种学研究。危机被称为“持续运动”（Larkin，第46页），这使我们走得更远。“没有条件是永久性的”仍然是一个不言而喻的问题–问题仍然是人类学家可以在研究非永久性非洲环境时增加哪些内容，而不是将其流动性作为其本身的特征加以客观化。

这些辩论虽然显得有些费劲，但几乎没有使音量变大。它的某些最引人注目的产品是其民族志产品。布拉德·魏斯（Brad Weiss）的第14章探讨了坦桑尼亚的暂时性和经济成功的概念-揭示了人们对“快速经营”中的不义之财的批评。拉玛·麦凯（Ramah McKay，第4章）分析了对话者中的危机观念如何影响对国家的主张。中间部分看到许多作者考虑了从农村到城市的游荡，运气的观念以及非洲移民的无数无命运的命运。再次，贡献是短暂的，但并非没有重要的见解和想法。例如，彼得·格斯基耶（Peter Geschiere）和安托万·索帕（Antoine Socpa）对喀麦隆“丛林摔跤者”的反思，揭示了人们对运气的信念，即他们所追求的风险性移民战略，

相较于非洲的期货，在非洲的日常生活中的政治经济似乎比批判性理论更为经验主义。在这本专为简·古耶（Jane Guyer）的知识遗产撰写的著作中（该著作也出现在非洲的未来中），瓦尔·阿德班维（Wale Adebanwi）的发人深省的介绍为当今非洲人类学家提出了一个有趣而又直接的社会学使命：研究非洲人的日常生活他们面临的经济限制。这象征是Gbemisola Animasawun对的斗争第9章冈田 拉各斯的摩托车出租车司机，他们与市政府的冲突促使他们进行“城市更新”，并通过限制他们进入市中心来重新安排公共空间，从而将本已边缘化的人推向边缘。

该卷的第一批条目重新回到有关货币和商品化对非洲影响的经典辩论中。Jean和John Comaroff以及David Pratten分别在第1章和第2章中对Longuedurée重要性的微调历史以及更广泛的变革如何塑造了关于财富和人民的地方冲突。普拉滕（Pratten）提供了详尽研究的一章，介绍了高端商品汇率（马尼拉）的波动与尼日利亚各地围绕彩礼分歧的一系列地方社会冲突之间的关系，其中包括一系列神秘的``豹子人''进行的复仇谋杀。本书的广泛贡献涉及从政治和赞助到疾病和暴力的各种主题，这些主题总是通过更广泛的经济动态来探讨的。弗雷德·库珀（Fred Cooper）的文章对非洲历史上的劳动话题进行了辩论和史学的有价值的调查，使他们与最近转向“不稳定”作为全球北部“后福特主义”经济的特征的讨论进行了讨论。安妮·玛丽亚·马库卢（Anne‐Maria Makhulu）

从这个角度来看，两本书之间的区别几乎不会显得更加鲜明。在非洲期货，罗伊特曼（第31页）认为，“非洲主义人类学家有很多值得史学批评学”，赞许地引用海登·怀特，但工作在后者的体积的主要成果之一是历史化非洲的经济生活和通过仔细的情境研究获得经验。与能够将经济变化与非洲的理解和知识的产生编织在全球和地方的缝隙中的奖学金相比，认识论开放性的劝告可能会变得平淡无奇。

然而，这本书并非没有错。其他评论者指出，其案例研究主要集中在尼日利亚和南非，他们的贡献不足以反映研究``日常生活的政治经济''的意图（见Allain 2018）。这些贡献中许多发挥着宏观作用，这意味着“日常”通常会被更广泛的历史，经济和政治进程所笼罩。

非洲主义者的人类学家何去何从？非洲期货的形而上的担忧将为好奇者提供大量思考的食物。然而，对于那些已经进行了长期嵌入式实地考察并且知道几乎每个概念或学术关注都随着对社会复杂性的深刻而直观的欣赏而流失的学者而言，它的承诺可能会让他们感到失望，我们在整个研究过程中会积极地进行培养。 。有人想知道非洲大陆的同事会对“非洲”这样大规模破坏规模的理论产生什么影响。在非洲日常生活的政治经济学中可能会半途而废，呼吁探索“如何遇到，驯化并变得明智的，通常是困难的和具有挑战性的政治经济；人们如何试图在生活中施加某种程度的秩序与稳定，即使是在极端不稳定，贫困以及各种形式的财政，社会或政治不稳定的情况下”（第5页）也比“危机”和“未来” –探索非洲人赖以生存和参与的人为历史和物质条件的途径，而不是人类，社会经济的形而上学或暂时性的困境。毫无疑问，这两本书都是非洲人类学家感兴趣的，而非洲的未来将吸引人类学家对时间性和未来作法进行理论研究，非洲日常生活的政治经济学将吸引人类学家对经济生活和变革的关注。