Peter Geschiere

Peter Geschiere (1941) is professor of African anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He studied history and anthropology at the Free University (Amsterdam). He taught both topics at the Free University, Erasmus University (Rotterdam) and the University of Leiden. He was visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris / Marseille), University of Yaounde (Cameroun), University of Kisangani (Congo / Zaire), University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), Columbia University (New York) and New School (New York).

His main interest is in the dynamics of local cultures in interaction with state formation, impact of the market economy and, more generally, processes of globalization. His main field-work is in West Africa (notably Cameroon). He published on the role of the “local state”; the dynamics of “witchcraft”; processes of monetization; new struggles over citizenship and belonging (“autochthony”); and the conservation of the rain-forest. Geschiere’s publications include “Village Communities and the State” (1982); “Les itineraires d’accumulation au Cameroun” (1995 – with Piet Konings); “The Modernity of Witchcraft” (1997); “Globalization and Identity - Dialectics of Flow and Closure” (1999, with Birgit Meyer); and “The Forging of Nationhood” (2003 – with Gyanendra Pandey). At present he is preparing a series of conferences for the Social Sciences Research Council (New York) on “The Future of Citizenship: New Struggles over Belonging and Exclusion in Africa and Elsewhere”.  Moreover, he is working on a book on the struggle over the rain forest, relating the dramatic “wild rubber-boom” in Cameroon during the German period (around 1900) to the ecological interventions in the same area during recent times.

Geschiere was chairman of the NWO research programme on “Globalization and the Construction of Communal Identities”. In 2002 he received the award of “distinguished Africanist of the year” from the African Studies Association in the US. He is fellow of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences and member of the board of the Prince Claus fund.