Book Launch: "The Sex Thieves. The Anthropology of A Rumor", by Dr. Julien Bonhomme (ENS Paris/CNRS)

Thursday 21st at the Alliance Française Ibadan and Sunday 24th September 2017 at the Jazzhole, Lagos

IFRA Nigeria is really pleased to invite you to the book launch of The Sex Thieves. The Anthropology of A Rumor, an essay by Dr. Julien Bonhomme (ENS Paris/CNRS). The event will occur in Ibadan at 5pm at the Alliance Française, Iyaganku, and in Lagos at 5pm at the bookshop the Jazzhole, Ikoyi.

"While working in Africa, anthropologist Julien Bonhomme encountered an astonishing phenomenon: people being accused of stealing or shrinking the genitals of strangers on the simple occasion of a handshake on the street. As he soon discovered, these accusations can have dramatic outcomes: the “sex thieves” are often targeted by large crowds and publicly lynched. Moreover, such rumors are an extremely widespread practice, having affected almost half of the African continent since the 1970s. In this book, Bonhomme examines the story of the “penis snatcher,” asking larger questions about how to account for such a phenomenon—unique in its spatial and temporal scale—without falling prey to the cliché of Africa as an exotic other.

Altogether, this book provides both richly ethnographic and theoretical understandings of urban sociality and the dynamics of human communication in contemporary Africa and beyond".

Dr. Julien Bonhomme is a Social Anthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and an Associate Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). His research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Gabon and Senegal (and, to a lesser extent, in Cuba), as well as on work on the colonial archives of French Equatorial Africa and Belgian Congo. His current work addresses four main topical issues: the powers of speech in ritual context, the social dynamics of witchcraft (through gossip and rumors), the prophetic writings and the Senegalese wrestling. Dr. Bonhomme has published several books about his research, among which Les voleurs de sexe. Anthropologie d'une rumeur africaine, translated last year in English as The Sex Thieves. The Anthropology of a Rumor (HAU Books/University of Chicago Press).

Entrance is free!