Event link: https://sofheyman.org/events/celebrating-recent-work-by-rhiannon-stephens
Join us for our New Book Series event honoring Poverty and Wealth in East Africa by Rhiannon Stephens. In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa, Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.
Professor Rhiannon Stephens will be joined by panelists Raevin Jimenez, Caterina Pizzigoni, Pablo Piccato, and Laura Fair.
Friday, February 17, 2023, 12pm EST | In person at the Heyman Center and online via Zoom.
Registration required
