Celebrating Poverty and Wealth in East Africa. April 13, 2023 - 7:00pm @ BookCulture
Join Rhiannon Stephens and Carl Wennerlind in a conversation moderated by Rosalind Morris
REGISTER HERE FOR THE EVENT AT BOOK CULTURE
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. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. 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.
Event address: Book Culture, 536 W 112th St, New York, NY 10025
For more about the book, Poverty and Wealth in East Africa, visit the publisher's website here
