Amah Edoh

Amah Edoh is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the production of knowledge about Africa, and on how “African-ness” is produced across West Africa and Western Europe, both through objects and in bodies. Amah was Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at MIT from 2017 to 2022. She has researched and written on Dutch Wax cloth, a textile designed and manufactured in the Netherlands for West and Central African markets since the early 20th century, that has since become a highly prized textile in these regions. Her latest publication, forthcoming in American Anthropologist, is an autoethnographic exploration of how political and economic upheaval in Togo since the early 1990s impacted the Dutch Wax cloth trade and the Togolese women who, over the course of decades, had made the cloth into a significant cultural artifact in the country.