Judith Scheele

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Judith Scheele is a social anthropologist, who works in the Sahara. Scheele is based at the EHESS, France.

Contents

Career

Scheele obtained her DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford. From 2006-2009, she was a fellow by examination at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2009 she was the All Souls College Evans Pritchard lecturer. In 2009 Scheele was elected as a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 2009. [1] Scheele is Directrice d’études at the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. [2] She holds an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. [2]

In 2019 she gave the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at LSE in London. [3]

In 2021-2022, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Selected publications

Monographs

Village Matters: Knowledge, Politics and Community in Kabylia (Algeria) (Oxford: James Currey, 2009).

Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

(with Julien Brachet) The Value of Disorder: Autonomy, Prosperity, and Plunder in the Chadian Sahara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Edited volumes

(ed. with James McDougall) Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).

(ed. with Fernanda Pirie) Legalism: Community and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

(ed. with Paul Dresch) Legalism: Rules and Categories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

(ed. with A. Shryock) The Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology: Form, Duration, Difference. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019)

Articles

Related Research Articles

Chad, officially the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It borders Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west. Due to its distance from the sea and its largely desert climate, the country is sometimes referred to as the "Dead Heart of Africa".

The Chad National Army consists of the five Defence and Security Forces listed in Article 185 of the Chadian Constitution that came into effect on 4 May 2018. These are the National Army, the National Police, the National and Nomadic Guard (GNNT) and the Judicial Police. Article 188 of the Constitution specifies that National Defence is the responsibility of the Army, Gendarmerie and GNNT, whilst the maintenance of public order and security is the responsibility of the Police, Gendarmerie and GNNT.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chadic languages</span> Branch of the Afroasiatic languages

The Chadic languages form a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken in parts of the Sahel. They include 150 languages spoken across northern Nigeria, southern Niger, southern Chad, the Central African Republic, and northern Cameroon. The most widely spoken Chadic language is Hausa, a lingua franca of much of inland Eastern West Africa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nilo-Saharan languages</span> Proposed family of African languages

The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria to Benin in the west; from Libya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the centre; and from Egypt to Tanzania in the east.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sahara</span> Desert on the African continent

The Sahara is a desert on the African continent. With an area of 9,200,000 square kilometres (3,600,000 sq mi), it is the largest hot desert in the world and the third-largest desert overall, smaller only than the deserts of Antarctica and the northern Arctic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Faya-Largeau</span> Place in Borkou, Chad

Faya-Largeau is the largest city in northern Chad and was the capital of the region of Bourkou-Ennedi-Tibesti. It is now in the Borkou Region, which was formed in 2008 from the Borkou Department of the former Bourkou-Ennedi-Tibesti region.

Political anthropology is the comparative study of politics in a broad range of historical, social, and cultural settings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Islam in Chad</span> Religion in Chad

The earliest presence of Islam in Chad can be traced back to Uqba ibn Nafi, whose descendants can be found settled in the Lake Chad region to this day. By the time Arab migrants began arriving from the east in the fourteenth century in sizeable numbers, the creed was already well established. Islamization in Chad was gradual, the effect of the slow spread of Islamic civilization beyond its political frontiers. Among Chadian Muslims, 48% professed to be Sunni, 21% Shia, 23% just Muslim and 4% Other.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trans-Saharan trade</span> Trade between Africa and the Mediterranean

Trans-Saharan trade, also known as the Arab trade, requires travel across the Sahara between West, Central, East, and North Africa. While existing from prehistoric times, the peak of trade extended from the 8th century until the early 17th century. The Sahara once had a very different environment. In Libya and Algeria, from at least 7000 BC, there was pastoralism, the herding of sheep, goats, large settlements, and pottery. Cattle were introduced to the Central Sahara (Ahaggar) from 4000 to 3500 BC. Remarkable rock paintings in places that are currently very dry, portray flora and fauna that are not present in the modern desert environment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saharan languages</span> Small language family in the East Sahara desert

The Saharan languages are a small family of languages across parts of the eastern Sahara, extending from northwestern Darfur to southern Libya, north and central Chad, eastern Niger and northeastern Nigeria. Noted Saharan languages include Kanuri, Daza, Teda, and Zaghawa. They have been classified as part of the hypothetical but controversial Nilo-Saharan family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Toubou people</span> Ethnic group in the central Sahara

The Toubou or Tubu are an ethnic group native to the Tibesti Mountains that inhabit the central Sahara in northern Chad, southern Libya and northeastern Niger. They live either as herders and nomads or as farmers near oases. Their society is clan-based, with each clan having certain oases, pastures and wells.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">French Chad</span> French colony between 1900 and 1960

Chad was a part of the French colonial empire from 1900 to 1960. Colonial rule under the French began in 1900 when the Military Territory of Chad was established. From 1905, Chad was linked to the federation of French colonial possessions in Middle Africa, known from 1910 under the name of French Equatorial Africa. Chad passed in 1920 to French civilian administration, but suffered from chronic neglect.

The Transitional Government of National Unity was the coalition government of armed groups that nominally ruled Chad from 1979 to 1982, during the most chaotic phase of the long-running civil war that began in 1965. The GUNT replaced the fragile alliance led by Félix Malloum and Hissène Habré, which collapsed in February 1979. GUNT was characterized by intense rivalries that led to armed confrontations and Libyan intervention in 1980. Libya intervened in support of the GUNT's President Goukouni Oueddei, against the former GUNT Defence Minister Hissène Habré.

The Armed Forces of the North was a Chadian rebel army active during the Chadian Civil War. Composed of FROLINAT units that remained loyal to Hissène Habré following his break from Goukouni Oueddei and the CCFAN in 1976. Consisting at first of only a few hundred Toubou and some Hajerai and Ouaddaïan fighters, FAN began its operations from bases in eastern Chad, where it received help from Sudan. Driven from N'Djamena back to its eastern refuge after the Libyan incursion of 1980, FAN scored a series of victories over Goukouni's Transitional Government of National Unity (GUNT) forces in 1982, which culminated in the recapture of N'Djamena and Habré's assumption of the presidency. FAN became the core of the new national army, Chadian National Armed Forces (FANT), in February 1983.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti (region)</span>

The Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti (BET) was until 2008 one of the then 18 regions of Chad, its capital being Faya-Largeau. It comprised the former Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti Prefecture. Most of the region was part of the Sahara desert.

Mohamed Baghlani was a Chadian insurgent leader during the First Chadian Civil War.

The derde is the title held by the highest religious and political authority among the Toubou Teda of the Tibesti, in north-western Chad. He is elected among the three most prominent families of the Tomagra clan, and at the death of the derde the title never passes to the son of the deceased, but to a member of the other two families.

Audrey Isabel Richards, CBE, FRAI, FBA, was a pioneering British social anthropologist. She produced notable ethnographic studies. The most famous of which is Chisingu: A Girl's initiation ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia.

In the late 1980s, the only mineral exploited in Chad was sodium carbonate, or natron. Also called sal soda or washing soda, natron was used as a salt for medicinal purposes, as a preservative for hides, and as an ingredient in the traditional manufacture of soap; herders also fed it to their animals. Natron deposits were located around the shore of Lake Chad and the wadis of Kanem Prefecture, and near the oasis of Faya-Largeau.

Chad achieved independence in 1960. At the time, it had no armed forces under its own flag. Since World War I, however, southern Chad, particularly the Sara ethnic group, had provided a large share of the Africans in the French army. Chadian troops also had contributed significantly to the success of the Free French Forces in World War II. In December 1940, two African battalions began the Free French military campaign against Italian forces in Libya from a base in Chad, and at the end of 1941, a force under Colonel Jacques Leclerc participated in a spectacular campaign that seized the entire Fezzan region of southern Libya. Colonel Leclerc's 3,200-man force included 2,700 Africans, the great majority of them southerners from Chad. These troops went on to contribute to the Allied victory in Tunisia. Chadians, in general, were proud of their soldiers' role in the efforts to liberate France and in the international conflict.

References

  1. "All Souls College Oxford". www.asc.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-10-31.
  2. 1 2 Sociales, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences (2018-07-26). "Judith Scheele". EHESS (in French). Retrieved 2019-10-31.
  3. "Malinowski Memorial Lectures". London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved 2019-10-31.