Conerly Casey is a cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist with extensive ethnographic research in the predominately Muslim northern Nigeria (1991-2017) and Kuwait (2006-2009). Working with Bori and Islamic healers, doctors, herbalists, sorcerers, and hunters, Casey is interested in the intimate, social and ecological of becoming ill and healing. Her current book project, Eco-Intimacies and Illnesses of the Nigerian Sahel, considers the beings and things of the Sahel, as they draw attention to themselves, respond, assemble, and vitally affect one another to co-produce illnesses, and to heal. Casey traverses sensory, relational practices, whether calling Bori spirits with music and songs, or using spirit recommended plants, to the spirit exorcisms of reformist malams, whose forceful Qur’anic readings heat up spirits, to expel them from their human hosts. She considers illnesses of the Sahel and forms of healing with the compositions of beings and things that come together to affect people, to redistribute forms of agency, and in turn, to rearrange what is medically sensible and knowable.
2014 “States of emergency”: Armed youths and mediations of Islam in northern Nigeria. Journal of International and Global Studies 5(2): 1-18. (Republished in 2016 in Déjà Lu Journal Issue 4 (February); https://www.waunet.org/wcaa/dejalu/issue4/)
2014 The art of suffering: Postcolonial (mis) apprehensions of Nigerian art. In Suffering, Art and Aesthetics, Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Michael Nijhawan, Eds., pp. 121-149. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2017 Bollywood banned, and the electrifying Palmasutra: Sensory politics in northern Nigeria, In Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global, Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, Eds., pp. 176-197. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2018 Sensory politics and war: Affective anchoring and vitality in northern Nigeria and Kuwait. In Political Sentiments and Social Movements, Claudia Strauss and Jack Friedman, Eds., pp. 147-174. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2021 Eco-intimacy and spirit exorcism in the Nigerian Sahel. Special Issue, The Ethnographic Palimpsest: Excursions in Paul Stoller’s Sensory Poetics, edited by Beth Uzwiak and Laurian Bowles. The Senses and Society 16 (2) : 132-150.
Conerly Casey is a cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist with extensive ethnographic research in the predominately Muslim northern Nigeria (1991-2017) and Kuwait (2006-2009). Working with Bori and Islamic healers, doctors, herbalists, sorcerers, and hunters, Casey is interested in the intimate, social and ecological of becoming ill and healing. Her current book project, Eco-Intimacies and Illnesses of the Nigerian Sahel, considers the beings and things of the Sahel, as they draw attention to themselves, respond, assemble, and vitally affect one another to co-produce illnesses, and to heal. Casey traverses sensory, relational practices, whether calling Bori spirits with music and songs, or using spirit recommended plants, to the spirit exorcisms of reformist malams, whose forceful Qur’anic readings heat up spirits, to expel them from their human hosts. She considers illnesses of the Sahel and forms of healing with the compositions of beings and things that come together to affect people, to redistribute forms of agency, and in turn, to rearrange what is medically sensible and knowable.
