Dr David Pratten

David Pratten

Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa

Fellow of St Antony's College

David Pratten joined the African Studies Centre in 2005-06. He is a social anthropologist and his post is a joint appointment with the Institute of Social Anthropology. He studied at Oxford, Manchester and SOAS, and previously taught at the universities of Edinburgh and Sussex.

David's research is based on a long-term engagement with Annang villagers in south-eastern Nigeria and focuses on themes of history, violence and the state. The focus of his initial work was an historical ethnography of colonialism which focused on the events surrounding a series of mysterious deaths in south-eastern Nigeria during the late 1940s. More recently his research has examined issues of youth, democracy and disorder in post-colonial Nigeria with a particular focus on vigilantism and new masquerade performances.

British Academy Summer Showcase 2018: Understanding the Niger Delta's agaba masquerade tradition

Contact

Email: david.pratten@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 1865 284998

 

Teaching and research interests
David Pratten examining Nigerian Masks

David Pratten examining Nigerian Masks 

(© Pitt Rivers Museum)

David is currently working on several research programmes including conducting research in Nigeria, under a French National Research Agency (ANR) project, called 'The politics of xenophobic exclusion in Africa: mobilisation, local orders and violence'.  He is also a co-organiser of the African Print Culture Network which has organised workshops and panels at conferences over the past five years, culminating in the Cadbury Conference 2013 on African Newspaper Cultures held in Birmingham. The network has been supported by the John Fell Fund. His own research on this theme is a collaborative study with Professor Stephanie Newell (University of Sussex) into the life and works of J.V. Clinton; a provincial newspaper editor and writer.

David's publications include a monograph on the investigations into ritual murders in colonial Nigeria: The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria published by Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, 2007. This book won the 2007 Amaury Talbot Prize awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute.

He has also co-edited a volume of essays on vigilantism, Global Vigilantes: Perspectives on Justice and Violence published by Hurst & Co., 2007 along with two recent journal special issues. The first was on the influence of Michel de Certeau's theories on anthropologists published in Social Anthropology (Vol. 15.1 2007) and the other is on ‘Perspectives on Vigilantism in Nigeria’ in Africa (Vol. 78.1 2008).

David teaches on the MSc in African Studies and convenes the core course on research methodology along with an option course in the Culture and Society of West Africa which is available to students from a range of graduate programmes. He teaches and supervises MPhil and DPhil students in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and lecture on anthropological theory. He was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award in 2009.

He has previously been Director of the African Studies Centre (2009-2013) and was the Director of Graduate Studies.

Since 2010 David has been Co-Editor of AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute which is the premier journal devoted to the study of African societies and culture.

Links

For more information please visit the African Studies Centre.

Learning from the Experts: Nigerian Masks and Masquerade(Pitt Rivers Museum blogpost featuring David Pratten, 6 September 2013).

I contributed to a programme about Masks on The Why Factor, broadcast on the BBC World Service in January 2014.

Current DPhil students
Selected publications

Books

2014, with Elizabeth Cooper, Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

2007, Global Vigilantes: Perspectives on Justice and Violence, Hurst: London.

2007, The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria, Edinburgh University Press & Indiana University Press for the International African Institute.

Book chapters

2012, ‘Retroversion, introversion, extraversion: three aspects of African anthropology’, In R. Fardon, O. Harris, Trevor H. J. Marchand, M. Nuttall, C. Shore, V. Strang, & Richard A. Wilson (eds) Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology, London: SAGE, pp. 308-324.

2010, ‘Bodies of power: narratives of selfhood and security in Nigeria’, In Thomas G. Kirsch and Tilo Grätz (eds) Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa, Oxford: James Curry, pp. 118-138.

2007, ‘The 'rugged life': Youth and violence in Southern Nigeria’, In P. Ahluwalia, L. Bethleham and R. Ginio (eds) Violence and Non-violence in Africa, Routledge: London, pp. 84-104.

2007, ‘Singing thieves: history and practice in Nigerian popular justice’, In D. Pratten and A. SenGlobal (eds) Vigilantes: Perspectives on Justice and Violence, Hurst: London, pp. 175-205.

2006, ‘The District Clerk and the ‘Man-Leopard Murders’: mediating law and authority in colonial Nigeria’, In Richard Roberts, B.N. Lawrance and E.L. Osborn (eds) Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa, University of Wisconsin Press,pp. 220-247.

2005, ‘Conversion, Conquest and the Qua Iboe Mission’, In T. Falola (ed.) Christianity and Social Change in Africa: Essays in Honor of J.D.Y. Peel, Carolina Academic Press: Durham, North Carolina, pp. 413-40.

1995, with Suliman Ali Baldo, ‘Return to the Roots: Processes of Legitimacy in Sudanese Migrant Associations’, In Michael Edwards, David Hulme (eds) Non-Governmental Organisations - Performance and Accountability: Beyond the Magic Bullet, Earthscan: London, pp. 119-129.

Articles

2008, ‘Perspectives on Vigilantism in Nigeria’, Africa - Special Issue 78 (1).

2008, ‘Masking Youth: Transformation and Transgression in Annang Performance’, African Arts 41 (1), pp. 44-60.

2008, ‘The thief eats his shame: practice and power in Nigerian vigilantism’, Africa 78 (1).

2007, ‘Mystics and Missionaries: Narratives of the Spirit Movement in Eastern Nigeria’, Social Anthropology 15 (1), pp. 47-70.

2006, ‘The Politics of Vigilance in south-eastern Nigeria’, Development and Change 37 (1), pp. 707-734.

1997, ‘Local Institutional Development and Relief in Ethiopia: A Kire-based Seed Distribution Programme in North Wollo’, Disasters 21 (2), pp. 138-154.

1996, ‘Reconstructing Community: The Intermediary Role of Sahelian Associations in Processes of Migration and Rural Development’, African Rural and Urban Notes 3 (1), 1996, pp. 49-77.

Reports                            

2000, 'Return to the Roots? Urban Networks, Rural Development and Power in Sudan', University of Edinburgh: Edinburgh.

1997, 'Bamako Bound: The Social Organization of Migration in Mali', SOS Sahel International UK: London.

Publications

  • Narrating History and Anthropology J. D. Y. Peel’s ‘the Past in the Present’

    September 2017
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Religion and Society

  • Currency and Conflict in Colonial Nigeria

    June 2017
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Beyond the Margins

  • Policing boundaries: The cultural work of African policing

    January 2017
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Police in Africa: The Street Level View
    © Jan Beek and Mirco Göpfert and Olly Owen and Jonny Steinberg, and the Contributors, 2017. Starting from research on vigilantism and informal justice in Nigeria, this chapter looks at policing practices in the light of their links to wider practices and repertoires of legitimacy, visibility, knowledge, and punishment used in controlling crime and social deviance and resolving disputes in Africa. These practices include both long-established cultural framings of rectitude and popular legitimacy and practices which appropriate ‘state-ness’, as demonstrated by vigilante groups with whom police forces share a public space.

  • Creole pioneers in the Nigerian provincial press

    September 2016
    |
    Chapter
    |
    African Print Cultures Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century
    Broad-ranging essays on the social, political, and cultural significance of more than a century s worth of newspaper publishing practices across the African continent.
    Language Arts & Disciplines

  • Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa

    November 2014
    |
    c-book
    This collection explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa.
    Social Science

  • Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa: An Introduction

    November 2014
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa
    This collection explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa.
    Social Science

  • The precariousness of prebendalism

    January 2013
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria: Critical Interpretations
    © Wale Adebanwi and Ebenezer Obadare, 2013. A critical aspect of Richard Joseph’s argument in Democracy and Prebendal Politics is easily overlooked. His analysis of the short-lived Second Republic (1979-1983) is well-known for identifying access to public office as the dominant political imperative in Nigeria, and that ethnic and regional identities became entrenched as a result of this quest for state resources. Less evident, however, is the basic, taken-for-granted motivation that sustains this prebendal system-insecurity.

  • Retroversion, introversion, extraversion: three aspects of African anthropology

    July 2012
    |
    Chapter
    |
    The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology
    Social Science

  • Retroversion, Introversion, Extraversion: Three Aspects of African Anthropology

    January 2012
    |
    Chapter
    |
    The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology

  • Bodies of power: Narratives of selfhood & security in Nigeria

    January 2010
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa
    © Contributors 2010. It is often asserted that crime and disorder are related to transitions within political systems – from authoritarianism to democracy, from military to civilian rule, from communist regime to market economy, or from civil war to peace (Shaw 2000). Also, in tracing the emergence of contemporary vigilantism in Nigeria it is tempting to point to watershed moments that link vigilantism to transition and rupture within the nation's political fabric. The Nigerian Civil War (1967–70) is often cited as such a watershed, not least because of the subsequent availability of arms for criminal use. The impact of structural adjustment and neoliberal reforms from the 1980s onwards, which heralded the demise of the powerful petro-state, might equally represent a significant turning point. Recent trends towards devolved and privatised security, including moves on the part of the federal government to embrace policies of ‘community policing’, along with the massive growth of the private security sector, have similarly led to official tolerance and, at times, promotion of vigilante groups, especially during the well-publicised ‘crime waves’ of the 1990s. And most proximately, the return to democracy in 1999 has introduced a fundamental decentralising impetus within the nation-state in which vigilantism has come to express re-ignited religious tension, ethnic cultural nationalism and the strategic ambitions of increasingly well-resourced state governors.
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