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In this innovative study, Ben Jones argues that scholars too often assume that the state is the most important force behind change in local political communities in Africa. Studies look to the state, and to the impact of government reforms, as ways of understanding processes of development and change. Using the example of Uganda, regarded as one of Africa's few "success stories", Jones chronicles the insignificance of the state and the marginal impact of Western development agencies. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a Ugandan village reveals that it is churches, the village court, and organizations based on family and kinships obligations that represent the most significant sites of innovation and social transformation.

Groundbreaking and critical in turn, Beyond the State offers a new anthropological perspective on how to think about processes of social and political change in poorer parts of the world. It should appeal to anyone interested in African development.

Key Features

• Offers a new approach to studying development and change
• Gives a fresh perspective on Christianity in Africa
• Looks at problems of international development assistance
• Provides a rich ethnographic rural study from east Africa

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Winner of the 2009 Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology.

The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast offers an in-depth analysis of an iconoclastic religious movement initiated by a Muslim preacher among coastal Baga farmers in the French colonial period.

With an ethnographic approach that listens as carefully to those who suffered iconoclastic violence as to those who wanted to 'get rid of custom', this work discusses the extent to which iconoclasm produces a rupture of religious knowledge and identity, and analyses its relevance in the making of modern nations and citizens.

The book will appeal to a wide range of readers, particularly those with an interest in the anthropology of religion, iconoclasm, the history and anthropology of West Africa, or the politics of heritage.

This book examines the historical complexity of the interface between Islam, tradition religions and Christianity in west Africa, and how this interface links with dramatic political changes

It gives a detailed ethnographic approach through which such complex history is unveiled and analysed

It presents a dialogue between the field findings, a long tradition of anthropology and the most recent anthropological debates

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This book explores the roles of contemporary urban shrines and their visual traditions in Benin City. It focuses on the charismatic priests and priestesses who are possessed by a pantheon of deities, the communities of devotees, and the artists who make artifacts for their shrines. The visual arts are part of a wider configuration of practices that include song, dance, possession and healing. These practices provide the means for exploring the relationships of the visual to both the verbal and performance arts that feature at these shrines. The analysis in this book raises fundamental questions about how the art of Benin, and non-Western art histories more generally, are understood. The book throws critical light on the taken-for-granted assumptions which underpin current interpretations and presents an original and revisionist account of Benin art history.

This book is an account of murder and politics in Africa, and an historical ethnography of southern Annang communities during the colonial period. Its narrative leads to events between 1945 and 1948 when the imperial gaze of police, press and politicians was focused on a series of mysterious deaths in south-eastern Nigeria attributed to the 'man-leopard society'. These murder mysteries, reported as the 'biggest, strangest murder hunt in the world', were not just forensic but also related to the broad historical impact of commercial, Christian and colonial aid relations on Annang society.

Philosophising in Mombasa provides an approach to the anthropological study of philosophical discourses in the Swahili context of Mombasa, Kenya. In this historically established Muslim environment, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, philosophy is investigated as social discourse and intellectual practice, situated in everyday life. This is done from the perspective of an 'anthropology of philosophy', a project which is spelled out in the opening chapter.

Entry-points and guidelines for the ethnography are provided by discussions of Swahili literary genres, life histories, and social debates. From here, local discourses of knowledge are described and analysed. The social environment and discursive dynamics of the Old Town are portrayed, firstly, by means of following and contextualising informal discussions among neighbours and friends at daily meeting points in the streets; and secondly, by presenting and discussing in-depth case studies of local intellectuals and their contributions to moral and intellectual debates within the community. Taking recurrent internal discussions on social affairs, politics, and appropriate Islamic conduct as a focus, this study sheds light on local practices of critique and reflection.

In particular, three local intellectuals (two poets, one Islamic scholar) are portrayed against the background of regional intellectual history, Islamic scholarship, as well as common public debates and private discussions. The three contextual portrayals discuss exemplary issues for the wider field of research on philosophical discourse in Mombasa and the Swahili context on the whole, with reference to the lives and projects of distinct individual thinkers. Ultimately, the study directs attention beyond the regional and the African contexts, towards the anthropological study of knowledge and intellectual practice around the world.

Drawing on two decades of research this social and political history of North-Western Ghana traces the creation of new ethnic and territorial boundaries, categories and forms of self-understanding, and represents a major contribution to debates on ethnicity, colonialism and the ‘production of history’. It explores the creation and redefinition of ethnic distinctions and commonalities by African and European actors, showing that ethnicity’s power derives from a contradiction: while ethnic identities purport to be non-negotiable, creating permanent bonds, stability and security, the boundaries of the communities created and the associated traits and practices are malleable and adaptable to specific interests and contexts."

At a time when so-called fundamentalism has become the privileged analytical frame for understanding Muslim societies past and present, this study offers an alternative perspective on Islam. In an innovative combination of anthropology, history, and social theory, Benjamin Soares explores Islam and Muslim practice in an important Islamic religious centre in West Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on ethnography, archival research, and written sources, Soares provides a richly detailed discussion of Sufism, Islamic reform, and other contemporary ways of being Muslim in Mali and offers an original analytical perspective for understanding changes in the practice of Islam more generally.

Medicine murder involved the cutting of body parts from victims, usually while they were still alive, to be used for the preparation of medicines intended to enhance the power of the perpetrators. A ‘very startling’ increase in cases of medicine murder apparently took place in Basutoland (now Lesotho), in southern Africa, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It gave rise to a dramatic crisis of late colonial rule. Was this increase a real one? If so, why did it happen? How far does it explain the crisis? What other factors contributed? This book offers some comprehensive answers to these difficult, complex and controversial questions and a highly readable analysis of how the crisis arose and of how it fell away. The authors draw sensitively and critically on many different and often conflicting sources of evidence.

This book examines in historical perspective the hitherto little-studied relationship between Islam and caste among the Haalpulaaren of Senegal. The Islamic uprising of the 1770s, which established a class of Islamic clerics in positions of authority in the Senegal river valley, had long-term consequences for the social relations between clerics and caste groups. The book examines how at different historical junctures attempts were made to negotiate the equalitarian claims of a universalist faith with the expression of social differentiation lying at the heart of caste inequality. While the existing literature focuses on those who established Islam within the region, this present work provides insights into how marginalised artisans, poets and musicians understood themselves and how they responded to a faith which had become the cornerstone of social prestige and status. It analyses the knowledge practices of clerics and of specialised craft groups, arguing that they are crucial for our understanding of social and cultural distinction. This involves a synthesis of historical sources and ethnography, and provides an innovative approach to the study of religious identity and specialist practitioners.

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This is a compelling study of the origins and trajectory of a legendary black uprising against apartheid - the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986. Using insights from the literature on collective action and social movements, it delves deep into the rebellion's inner workings. It examines how the residents of Alexandra - a poverty-stricken, segregated township in Johannesburg - manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time and power in their sequestered world; how they used political theatre to convey, stage and dramatise their struggle; and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics. Theatres of Struggle asks the reader to enter into the world of the rebels, and to confront the moral complexity and social duress they experienced as they invented new social forms and violently attacked old ones.

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This book describes and analyses life in 'St Antony's', a Zambian Catholic boys' mission boarding school in the 1990s, using the context-sensitive methods of social anthropology. Drawing upon Michel Foucault's notion of the panoptic gaze, Anthony Simpson demonstrates how students are both drawn to mission education as a 'civilising process', yet also resist many of the lessons that the official institution offers, particularly with respect to claims of 'true' Christian identity and educated masculinity. The phrase 'Half-London' reflects the boys' own perception of their privileged but very partial grasp, in the Zambian context of acute socio-economic decline, of 'civilised' status. The book offers unparalleled detail and insight into the contribution of mission schooling to the processes of postcolonial identity formation in Africa. Its rich and compelling ethnography opens up a strong sense of everyday life within the school and raises compelling questions about identity in plural societies beyond the confines of St Antony's.

Anthony Simpson taught at the Zambian Catholic mission boys' boarding school from 1974 to 1997. He arrived in Zambia as an English teacher, but his involvement in the day-to-day life of St Antony's led him to an interest in anthropology and psychology.

Key Features

• A lively account of African mission schooling , examining the process of postcolonial education
• A practical demonstration of Michel Foucault's discussion of subjectivity and the invention of self
• A detailed demonstration of religious plurality in an African setting

From War to Peace on the Mozambique-Malawi Borderland is the first full-length ethnography to tell villagers' stories from war to peace in Mozambique. Extended case studies of particular villages and families on the Mozambique-Malawi borderland form the core of the book. While tracing their paths to war, exile and post-war reconstruction, the book reveals the human face of national and transnational crises. This detailed study takes the reader beyond the stereotypes which often accompany interventions into humanitarian catastrophes. The villagers in this book are not nameless victims but persons with social relationships; participants, in their own way, in the histories of colonialism, nationalism, labour migration, guerrilla war, exile, repatriation and, most recently, liberal democracy.

A major contribution of the book is to show how changing historical circumstances have variously pitted villagers against one another and fostered co-operation. Questions of trust, moral value and legitimate authority inform ethnographic description, leading to an innovative critique of current analytical approaches to social capital. Those interested in humanitarian catastrophes, African politics, refugee studies and development studies will be inspired by its detailed rebuttal of stereotypes which continue to represent Africans as helpless victims.

Asante Identitiesis an account of life in the Asante village of Ade beba in West Africa during a century of rapid change, told as far as possible in the words of the villagers themselves. Asante is the most intensely studied of all sub-Saharan African cultures, and this book takes Asante and African historiography to new levels of reconstruction , analysis and understanding. This is the most closely focused historical study thus far achieved of African people engaging with issues of selfhood, identity and agency in an era that saw the continent fall under European domination.

Key Features

• Major contribution to African studies in its historical depth and analytic sophistication
• A book of wider interest to non-Africanist historians, social scientists and others
• Considers issues of broad and current concern never before studied at this level

Asante Identities is a volume in the International African Library, a major monograph series from the International African Institute which complements its quarterly periodical Africa, the premier journal in the field of African Studies.

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This is a comprehensive survey, in both its theory and its practice, of the Tabwa who live on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika in the Democratic Republic of Congo (fomerly Zaire). The following topics are covered: concepts of the body and of illness, illness categories and approaches to diagnosis, divination and the meaning of illness in the life-histories of individuals and lineage groups. Moving to a broader perspective, it embraces therapies both of bodily events ('medicine') and of social circumstances ('magic' and 'religion'), and relates them to the cosmological beliefs which link and underwrite all three.

Based on nearly four years of fieldwork, Dr Davis' book is the most complete study so far of an African therapeutic system. In contrast to most ethnographies of medicine, which take social structures as primary and treat medical knowledge as an extension or reflection of it, this study focuses on the medical system itself. When medicine is thus considered first as an indigenous or vernacular science, it is soon seen that much of what passes for an inderstanding of ritual, magic and religion in Africa is thin and misconceived.

Death in Abeyance was awarded the 2002 Wellcome Medal (Royal Anthropological Institute).

This book offers an ethnography of the emergence of a local Christianity and its relation to changing social, political and economic formations among the Peki Ewe in Ghana. Focusing on the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which arose from encounters between the Ewe and German Piestist missionaries, the author examines recent conflicts leading to the secession of many pentecostally oriented members, which it places in a historical perspective. The main argument is that, for the Ewe, involvement with modernity goes hand in hand with new enchantment, rather than disenchantment, of the world. At the grassroots level, the study focuses on the image of the Devil, which the missionaries communicated to the Ewe through translation and which currently receives much attention in the Pentecostal churches. It is shown that this image played and still plays a crucial role in the local appropriation of Christianity, since diabolisation confirmed the existence of local gods and witchcraft and incorporated them into Christian belief as demons. Comparing the discourses and practices of mission and Pentecostal churches, the study reveals that the latter pay much more attention to Satan - especially through 'deliverance' rituals. Pentecostalism's increasing popularity thus stems from the fact that it ties into historically generated local understandings of Christianity, which, despite a declared dislike of non-Christian religious practices, stand much closer to Ewe religion than missionary Christianity. With its emphasis on the hybrid image of the Devil and people's obsessions with occult forces as a way to mediate the attractions and discontents of modernity, this book sheds light on a hitherto neglected dimension in studies of African Christianity.

This book gives an account of how migrant women, whose lives and experiences have heretofore been neglected in the pages of academic scholarship, dance and sing the vibrant and expressive musical style of kiba. In so doing, they build an identity as autonomous breadwinners whose aspirations and values are nonetheless rooted in 'tradition'.

This is the fascinating social history of a remote chiefdom in Zimbabwe. The book focuses on the religion and politics of the area, describing how the Hwesa people adapted the Christianity that the missionaries brought to found their own popular Christianity, pitted against local notions of evil. It also examines the role of the chief, challenging the idea that the they were no more than colonial stooges.

Key Features

• Original and perceptive writing from a prominent Africanist historian
• Fresh body of new data, challenging conventional wisdom

Of the several forces reshaping West African rural societies and economies in the post-colonial period, one of the most pervasive is the rapid growth of urban demand. This book studies a Yoruba community in the supply hinterland of Ibadan over twenty years. It tells the social and agricultural history of its various producers, from the Nigerian civil war, via the oil boom and bust, to structural adjustment. It argues that principles of occupational organisation inherited from the past are now being applied to the creation of a competitive and responsive regional market that promises to be one of the most important social forms in West Africa's future.

Introducing poetry, prose, songs and theatre from Nigeria, this engaging volume blends translated extracts with a rich commentary on the historical development and modern context of this hugely creative culture. Examining imaginative prose-writing, the tale tradition, popular song, Islamic religious poetry and modern TV drama amongst other topics, this is a clear and accessible book on a literary culture that has previously been little-known to the English-speaking readership.

This study, based on research spanning 25 years, focuses on the shifting patterns of social assimilation and exclusion that have characterised the inter-ethnic relations of this region for almost two centuries. The analysis is brought right up to the 1990s when the decline of the Cameroon state, linked with World Bank structural adjustment policies as well as the growing importance of ethnic associations, NGOs and international bodies has had a major impact on ethnic conflicts and political mobilisation in the region. Engaging in current debates on the 'invention' of tradition, the deconstruction of ethnicity and the nature of the modern African state, this book makes a major contribution to the analysis of ethnic politics, and the risks and possibilities of democratisation, in Africa.

West African pilgrims in Sudan believe that walking across the savannas and desert is the only proper way of performing the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. However, their journey appears to stop halfway in Sudan, where many of them reside in stranger enclaves as fourth- and fifth-generation immigrants. Describing themselves as transients, they see these villages as temporary stations on their way to Mecca. This book examines life in a set of pilgrim villages to show how the concept of pilgrimage is maintained. It examines why these people allow themselves to live in a state of permanent transition, and argues that here pilgrimage is a symbolic journey analogous to life itself.

While Botswana's economic development has been extraordinary, little is known about how different social groups have adapted to the new economic opportunities. This comprehensive account studies a key group of the new entrepreneurs - the ranchers. It describes their changing lifestyles, their construction of personal and social space, and the way they have adapted to state-initiated political and economic change, showing through a series of case studies how ranching has grown from being the preserve of white settlers to include Botswana and other African farmers as well. The relationship between ranching and communal land tenure, and the effect of Botswana's Tribal Land Grazing Policy are analysed in detail, while the careers of non-elites, the practice of bordermanship, labour relations and the management of multiple enterprises and risks are also covered.

With environmental change and conservation in West Africa's tropical rainforests becoming topics of increasing political and academic interest, this book brings a fresh set of perspectives to the debate - those of the forest dwellers themselves. Based on her detailed field research in the Mende communities around Gola North Forest reserve, and surveying the recent debates and literature concerning forest conservations and current analytical approaches to gender and the environment, Melissa Leach examines the importance of rainforest resources to the local economy and social relations and shows that neither an understanding of forest use and change, nor adequate conservation policies can be achieved without a concern for gender.

Combining ethnographic and historical perspectives, this study is the most detailed, most extensive account of medium- and large-scale African business yet published. It examines the strategies and patterns employed by business people from the colonial period to the present day and provides profiles of Nigeria's key entrepreneurs. Not only a valuable digest of business activities, this important study also challenges existing views about African enterprise and is highly relevant to policy-makers concerned with economic development.

In the inter-war years, groups of enterprising Yoruba traders from a few towns in Western Nigeria established a successful trading network throughout the Gold Coast (Ghana). Then, in 1969, they were abruptly ordered to leave the country. At the time of the exodus, Jerry Eades followed the traders back to Nigeria. There, on the basis of extensive interviews and archival sources, he reconstructed the history of the migration from four Yorubu towns to northern Ghana. The result is one of the fullest and most detailed accounts of chain migration and its implications for economic development ever written.

This is a remarkable chronicle of the struggles of many people - black and white - whose lives have been rooted in one district of the South African highveld over the last hundred years. Thaba Nchu (Black Mountain) was the territory of an independent African chiefdom until it was annexed by the Orange Free State republic in 1884. By 1977, one-third had emerged as part of 'independent' Bophutswana with consequent 'inter-ethnic' antagonisms. As a result, on an adjoining piece of bare veld, there had developed the largest slum in South Africa, Botshabelo - a massive concentration of poverty and unemployment. The stories told by the inhabitants of the slum in 1980 led to this book. Detailed archival evidence and contemporary oral history illuminate all the important themes of the political economy of the rural highveld of South Africa from the mineral revolution of the late nineteenth century to the erosion of apartheid in the late twentieth century.

Based on observations in two West African villages - one a traditionally uncentralised community in contemporary Nigeria, the other a small chiefdom in Cameroon - this study shows that despite basic presuppositions regarding various types of being, the beliefs of the two groups manifest themselves in quite different ways. Focusing particularly on Chamba conceptions of people, masks and cults, Richard Fardon applies contemporary social theory to Chamba religion and shows how particular individuals integrate their concerns with notions of human purpose, the agricultural cycle and the values of the wilds.

In Yoruba culture oriki, or oral praise poetry, is a major part of both traditional performance and daily life, and as such reflects social change and structure both past and present. Karin Barber studies the oriki poetry of Okuku, a small town in the Oyo state of Nigeria. She shows how women, the main performers of the oriki, interpret the poems and examines the links it gives them between living and dead, human and spiritual, and present and past.

Illuminating 100 years of family history in Western Zimbabwe, from the colonial period to the present, this social biography is the first account of its kind for southern Africa. At the heart of the book are the life histories of several generations of Kalanga men and women in a single extended family. Together they chronicle the family's endurance and empowerment in the face of large scale eviction, displacement from home, the threat of imposed resettlement, guerrilla war, and near starvation in a food blockade.