African Systems of Thought

Series · 12

books · 1982-2012

By Barbara M. Cooper, Michael D. Jackson, Anne Kelk Mager, and more

Books in series

The Culture of Colonialism

The Cultural Subjection of Ukaguru

2012

What did it mean to be an African subject living in remote areas of Tanganyika at the end of the colonial era? For the Kaguru of Tanganyika, it meant daily confrontation with the black and white governmental officials tasked with bringing this rural people into the mainstream of colonial African life. T. O. Beidelman's detailed narrative links this administrative world to the Kaguru's wider social, cultural, and geographical milieu, and to the political history, ideas of indirect rule, and the white institutions that loomed just beyond their world. Beidelman unveils the colonial system's problems as it extended its authority into rural areas and shows how these problems persisted even after African independence.

Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa

2010

Beer connects commercial, social, and political history in this sobering look at the culture of drinking in South Africa. Beginning where stories of colonial liquor control and exploitation leave off, Anne Kelk Mager looks at the current commerce of beer, its valorizing of male sociability and sports, and the corporate culture of South African Breweries \[SAB\], the world's most successful brewing company. Mager shows how the industry, dominated by a single brewer, was compelled to comply with legislation that divided customers along racial lines, but also promoted images of multi-racial social drinking in the final years of apartheid. Since the transition to majority rule, SAB has rapidly expanded into new markets―including the United States with the purchase of Miller Brewing Company. This lively book affords a unique view into global manufacturing, monopolies, politics and public culture, race relations, and cold beer.

Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel

2006

Barbara M. Cooper looks closely at the Sudan Interior Mission, an evangelical Christian mission that has taken a tenuous hold in a predominantly Hausa Muslim area on the southern fringe of Niger. Based on sustained fieldwork, personal interviews, and archival research, this vibrant, sensitive, compelling, and candid book gives a unique glimpse into an important dimension of religious life in Africa. Cooper’s involvement in a violent religious riot provides a useful backdrop for introducing other themes and concerns such as Bible translation, medical outreach, public preaching, tensions between English-speaking and French-speaking missionaries, and the Christian mission’s changing views of Islam.

African Words, African Voices

Critical Practices in Oral History

2001

Until the advent of African independence, Africans were not considered fitting subjects for historical research and their words, voices, and experiences were largely absent from the continent’s history. In 13 lively and provocative essays focusing on all areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, oral sources are seen as a way to restore African expression to African history. African Words, African Voices evokes the richness and relevance of oral sources for understanding a complex past for readers at all levels. Contributors include E. J. Alagoa, David William Cohen, Laura Fair, Babacar Fall, Tamara Giles-Vernick, Isabel Hofmeyr, Abdullahi A. Ibrahim, Corinne A. Kratz, Stephan F. Miescher, Bethwell Allan Ogot, Megan Vaughan, Luise White, and Kwesi Yankah.

African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry

2000

This book assesses the direction and impact of African philosophy as well as its future role. What is the intellectual, social, cultural, and political territory of African philosophy? What directions will African philosophy take in the future? What problems will it face? In 10 probing essays by distinguished African, European, and American scholars, African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry examines the role of African philosophy at the opening of the new millennium. Here philosophy cuts across disciplinary boundaries to embrace ideas taken from history, literary studies, anthropology, and art. Addressing topics such as the progress of philosophical discourse, knowledge and modes of thought, the relevance of philosophy for cultures that are still largely based on traditional values, and the meaning of philosophy to cultures and individuals in the process of modernization, this volume presents today's best thinking about the concerns and practices that constitute African experience. New views about personhood, freedom, responsibility, progress, development, the role of the state, and life in civil society emerge from these broad-based considerations of the crisis of the postcolonial African state. In a lively fashion this diverse book shows how philosophical questions can be applied to interpretations of culture and reveals the multifaceted nature of philosophical discourse in the multiple and variable settings that exist in contemporary Africa.

#12

African Material Culture

1996

"This volume has much to recommend it―providing fascinating and stimulating insights into many arenas of material culture, many of which still remain only superficially explored in the archaeological literature." ―Archaeological Review ". . . a vivid introduction to the topic... A glimpse into the unique and changing identities in an ever-changing world." ―Come-All-Ye Fourteen interdisciplinary essays open new perspectives for understanding African societies and cultures through the contextualized study of objects, treating everything from the production of material objects to the meaning of sticks, masquerades, household tools, clothing, and the television set in the contemporary repertoire of African material culture.

#13

Speaking for the Chief

Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory

1995

...an unprecedented opportunity to understand West African oratory from the point of view of a native Akan speaker who is also a gifted linguist and ethnographer...\[Yankah\] shows with elegance the connections between verbal strategies and the cultural organization of West African social systems. - "Alessandro Duranti". Among the Akan of Ghana and in other areas of West Africa, royal speech is not articulated with a single voice but is rather a composite of the chief's words and their artistic relay by his orator and principal diplomat, the okyeame. In the royal entourage the okyeame is the most conspicuous personage, functioning as the chief's mouth and the individual through whom the chief speaks and through whom others' words may reach the chief. This little-studied phenomenon receives comprehensive exploration in Kwesi Yankah's engaging "Speaking for the Chief", a theoretically informed work rich with firsthand observations. Yankah shows the art of the okyeame to be not simply a genre of speaking but a set of cultural practices that mediate and reconstitute local notions of power, hegemony, and public discourse.

#14

Status and Identity in West Africa

Nyamakalaw of Mande

1995

.."". the contributors to Status and Identity in West Africa have swept away the dust that has obscured the study of the societies of western Sudan and have made it possible to pursue the salutory work of decolonizing the history and sociology of these regions.""A—American Ethnologist ""This discussion is among the most significant contributions that African studies can make to the contemporary global dialogue on multicultural issues."" — Choice ""It is 'must' reading for anyone who works in African literature today."" — Research in African Literatures ""an indispensable guide to understanding the producers of art in the Mande world, including the art of the spoken word. The writing and arguments are clear and jargon-freeit will provide a rich harvest of detailed original research"" — African Arts ""\[This\] book... is the most impressive effort to look at these groups in comparative perspective. The essays fit together nicely to challenge notions that came out of colonial scholarship."" — Journal of Interdisciplinary History .."". the volume makes a significant contribution to the social history and ongoing processes of cultural pluralism in West Africa."" — Journal of Religion in Africa The nyamakalaw—blacksmiths, potters, leather-workers, bards, and other artists and specialists among the Mande-speaking peoples of West Africa—play powerful roles in Mande society. This book presents the first full portrait of one of Africa's most powerful and least understood social groups.

#17

Iron, Gender, and Power

Rituals of Transformation in African Societies

1993

"\[Herbert\] has constructed a model of power relationships structured upon gender and age, and derived from male transformative processes, and in so doing has written a notable, and most enjoyable, book." ―African History "Herbert examines with great care and thoroughness the relationships between gender and power and the rationales that give them social form... \[Her\] analytical ability is outstanding." ―Patrick McNaughton "This book is a well-written and essential study of the place of belief in African material culture." ―International Journal of African Historical Studies Herbert relates the beliefs and practices associated with iron working in African cultures to other transformative activities―chiefly investiture, hunting, and pottery making―to propose a gender/age-based theory of power.

#20

Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution

1990

In 1958, Guinea declared independence from France and propelled Ahmed Sékou Touré to power. Early revolutionary fervor was not to last, and until his death in 1984, Sékou Touré ruled with an iron fist. What would it have been like to participate in Guinea's changing political fortunes? Jay Straker invites readers to reconsider the sources, stakes, and ramifications of Guinea's nation-building experience. By engaging official political tracts, state and popular newspapers, education journals, novels, poems, plays, photographs, and personal histories, Straker offers an alternative view of the uneven effects of the state's attempts to reshape popular attitudes, social practice, and youth consciousness. Showing how visions of ideal youth played into the workings of revolutionary power, Straker creates a captivating and intense history that uncovers the ambitions that drove militant socialist-revolutionary politics in Guinea.

#22

Allegories of the Wilderness

Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives

1982

..". a model of judiciousness and integrative analysis... " —Research in African Literatures Poet and anthropologist Michael Jackson brings to this study of the folktales of the Kuranko people of Sierra Leone a sensitivity to the philosophical nuances of literature.

#23

The Drunken King, or, The Origin of the State

1982

" . . . de Heusch has achieved a significant advance over Lévi-Strauss' formulations... \[A\] landmark contribution to anthropological theory, historical methodology, structural analysis, and African studies." ― Choice A major work that modifies and extends Lévi-Straussian myth analysis in profound and exciting ways. Roy Willis' masterful translation makes technical terms accessible to the general reader.

Authors

Michael D. Jackson (born 1940) is a post-modern New Zealand anthropologist who has taught in the anthropology departments at the University of Copenhagen and Indiana University and is currently a professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School. He holds a BA from Victoria University of Wellington, an MA from the University of Auckland and a PhD from Cambridge University. Jackson is the founder of existential/phenomenological anthropology, a sub-field of anthropology using ethnographical fieldwork as well as existential theories of being in order to explore modes of being and interpersonal relationships as they exist in various cultural settings throughout the world. In this way he creates an interdisciplinary approach that attempts to understand the human condition by examining the various ways in which this condition manifests itself cross-culturally. In so doing, he concentrates on concrete, individual, lived situations and attempts to recreate and explain these situations as they are perceived and experienced by the other. For example, rather than looking at what mythology or ritual may mean for a group of people, he looks at what mythology or ritual means for an individual existing in the group. In this way he is able to examine "being-in-the-world", a concept fundamental to the field of existentialism. This approach also allows him to address the problem of intersubjectivity, which has as a goal the understanding of the other in terms of the other's individual lifeworld. In this way the other's relationship with the world around them is explained in a manner not previously seen, and is fundamental to the project of understanding intersubjective existence (or the relation between two individual subjects). A large part of Jackson's methodology is also his account of personal experiences he acquired during his fieldwork. This method of reflexivity is indicative of the current postmodern trend in the field of anthropology, which seeks to contextualize the ethnographer as a subjective participant in the field. This methodology allows him to explain very accurately his relation with the world around him, referencing frequently existential theories in the process. His influences include: Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Claude Levi-Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, William James, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, Bronislaw Malinowski, Richard Rorty, Paul Ricoeur, Marcel Mauss. He is in no way related to the famous singer, also named Michael Jackson.