Your browser does not support JavaScript!
UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004
formerly eScholarship Editions
University of California Press logo California Digital Library logo
Home  Home spacer Search  Search spacer Browse  Browse
spacer   spacer
Bookbag  Bookbag spacer About Us  About Us spacer Help  Help
 
Your search for 'African Studies' in subject found 58 book(s).
Modify Search Displaying 1 - 20 of 58 book(s)
Sort by:Show: 
Page: 1 2 3  Next

1. cover
Title: African successes: four public managers of Kenyan rural development online access is available to everyone
Author: Leonard, David K
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | African  Studies
Publisher's Description: For the past twenty-five years Kenya has progressed while much of Africa has stagnated. Instead of the economic disasters, underdevelopment, and serious food shortages that have plagued its neighbors, Kenya has enjoyed an expanding economy and agriculture. And instead of a corrupt and incompetent public administration, Kenya has established several successful rural development programs run by public servants with integrity and professional commitment.What accounts for these Kenyan successes? In this innovative study, David Leonard illustrates the way public policy is made and implemented in Kenya by focusing on four public officials who have had a great impact on rural development. He skillfully weaves his analyses of Kenya's political, economic, and administrative systems into evocative biographical portraits of Charles Karanja, General Manager of the Kenya Tea Development Authority, Harris Mule, administrative head of Finance and Planning, Ishmael Muriithi, head of the Veterinary Department, and Simeon Nyachae, Cabinet Secretary and chief of the Civil Service. The result is a fascinating glimpse of Kenyan political life from the inside, set in the context of the historical and social forces that have shaped that country's government.   [brief]
Similar Items
2. cover
Title: Annihilating difference: the anthropology of genocide
Author: Hinton, Alexander Laban
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | African  Studies | Asian Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | History | Sociology | Media Studies | Religion | Religion
Publisher's Description: Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confronts us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.   [brief]
Similar Items
3. cover
Title: Beyond the stream: Islam and society in a West African town online access is available to everyone
Author: Launay, Robert 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | African  Studies | Islam
Publisher's Description: Robert Launay has been observing the changing religious practices of the Dyula, a Muslim community in West Africa, for more than a decade. In Beyond the Stream , he examines the ways in which this religious and ethnic minority group living on the fringes of the Muslim world maintains its ties to the universal Islamic tradition while adapting everyday religious practices to the local context. Through the lens of this specific community, Launay elucidates the interaction between fundamental Islamic beliefs, anchored historically in the Arab Middle East, and the continually changing ways that Islam is lived, wherever it is professed.By focusing on the tension between "particular" and "universal" - on how a given religious morality must function simultaneously within a tightly knit community and a larger global arena - Beyond the Stream addresses issues of broad concern to the anthropology of Islam and to world religions generally.   [brief]
Similar Items
4. cover
Title: The black homelands of South Africa: the political and economic development of Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu online access is available to everyone
Author: Butler, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1978
Subjects: African  Studies | African History | Politics
Similar Items
5. cover
Title: Black magic: religion and the African American conjuring tradition
Author: Chireau, Yvonne Patricia 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Religion | African  Studies | American Studies | United States History | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: Black Magic looks at the origins, meaning, and uses of Conjure - the African American tradition of healing and harming that evolved from African, European, and American elements - from the slavery period to well into the twentieth century. Illuminating a world that is dimly understood by both scholars and the general public, Yvonne P. Chireau describes Conjure and other related traditions, such as Hoodoo and Rootworking, in a beautifully written, richly detailed history that presents the voices and experiences of African Americans and shows how magic has informed their culture. Focusing on the relationship between Conjure and Christianity, Chireau shows how these seemingly contradictory traditions have worked together in a complex and complementary fashion to provide spiritual empowerment for African Americans, both slave and free, living in white America. As she explores the role of Conjure for African Americans and looks at the transformations of Conjure over time, Chireau also rewrites the dichotomy between magic and religion. With its groundbreaking analysis of an often misunderstood tradition, this book adds an important perspective to our understanding of the myriad dimensions of human spirituality.   [brief]
Similar Items
6. cover
Title: Bureaucracy and race: native administration in South Africa online access is available to everyone
Author: Evans, Ivan Thomas 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: African  Studies | African History | Sociology | Postcolonial Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Bureaucracy and Race overturns the common assumption that apartheid in South Africa was enforced only through terror and coercion. Without understating the role of violent intervention, Ivan Evans shows that apartheid was sustained by a great and ever-swelling bureaucracy. The Department of Native Affairs (DNA), which had dwindled during the last years of the segregation regime, unexpectedly revived and became the arrogant, authoritarian fortress of apartheid after 1948. The DNA was a major player in the prolonged exclusion of Africans from citizenship and the establishment of a racially repressive labor market. Exploring the connections between racial domination and bureaucratic growth in South Africa, Evans points out that the DNA's transformation of oppression into "civil administration" institutionalized and, for whites, legitimized a vast, coercive bureaucratic culture, which ensnared millions of Africans in its workings and corrupted the entire state. Evans focuses on certain features of apartheid - the pass system, the "racialization of space" in urban areas, and the cooptation of African chiefs in the Bantustans - in order to make it clear that the state's relentless administration, not its overtly repressive institutions, was the most distinctive feature of South Africa in the 1950s. All observers of South Africa past and present and of totalitarian states in general will follow with interest the story of how the Department of Native Affairs was crucial in transforming "the idea of apartheid" into a persuasive - and all too durable - practice.   [brief]
Similar Items
7. cover
Title: The call from Algeria: third worldism, revolution, and the turn to Islam
Author: Malley, Robert 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | History | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam | Intellectual History | African  Studies
Publisher's Description: The speed with which Algeria has gone from symbol of revolutionary socialism to Islamic battleground has confounded most observers. Charting Algeria's political evolution from the turn of the century to the present, Robert Malley explores the historical and intellectual underpinnings of the current crisis. His analysis helps makes sense of the civil war that is tearing Algeria apart.Using contemporary Algerian politics as a case study of the intellectual movement labeled "Third Worldism," Malley's thoughtful analysis also elucidates the broader transformations affecting countries of the Third World that once embraced ideologies of state-centered radical change. Malley focuses on the interplay between politics, economics, and ideology to explain the rise, essential components, and precipitous decline of Third Worldism - a movement that attracted scholars and activists in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds from the mid 1950s to the mid 1980s. He relates the disillusionment with Third Worldism to the growing appeal in the Third World of economic liberalism, versions of political pluralism, and ideological movements that threaten the very existence of the central state.At a time when the public increasingly is associating countries of the less developed world with Islamism, tribalism, and ethnic warfare, The Call from Algeria challenges our assumptions and offers a new perspective.   [brief]
Similar Items
8. cover
Title: Changing the rules: the politics of liberalization and the urban informal economy in Tanzania online access is available to everyone
Author: Tripp, Aili Mari
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Politics | Anthropology | African  Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: How are people in one of Africa's largest cities, Dar es Salaam, capable of surviving day to day when the downward decline of Tanzania's economy has become so pronounced that even high-ranking state employees receive among the lowest incomes in the country? In this impressively researched and highly original study, Aili Mari Tripp shows how the people of Dar es Salaam, through creativity and considerable ingenuity, supply for themselves the various goods and services that the government can no longer provide. With the growth of an informal economy, they have demonstrated resistance to state control, resulting in broad political, economic and social transformations within Tanzania. Moreover, the unprecedented participation of women in informal economic activities has had a profound effect on gender relations.Tripp incorporates in-depth interviews and a field survey conducted at the household and micro-enterprise level in examining the influence and impact of the urban informal economy on Tanzanian society. This informal sector encompasses the enterprises of masons, cooks, cobblers, and tailors; a dizzying myriad of market vendors; even educators and doctors. Tripp shows how the urban informal economy challenges state-defined bases of social justice with alternative notions of economic equity. Her work is an essential contribution to the study of African politics and state-society relations.   [brief]
Similar Items
9. cover
Title: Controlling corruption
Author: Klitgaard, Robert E
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Politics | Asian Studies | Economics and Business | African  Studies
Publisher's Description: Corruption is increasingly recognized as a preeminent problem in the developing world. Bribery, extortion, fraud, kickbacks, and collusion have resulted in retarded economies, predator elites, and political instability. In this lively and absorbing book, Robert Klitgaard provides a framework for des . . . [more]
Similar Items
10. cover
Title: The Creation of tribalism in Southern Africa online access is available to everyone
Author: Vail, Leroy
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | African History | African  Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Despite a quarter century of "nation building," most African states are still driven by ethnic particularism - commonly known as "tribalism." The stubborn persistence of tribal ideologies despite the profound changes associated with modernization has puzzled scholars and African leaders alike. The bloody hostilities between the tribally-oriented Zulu Inkhata movement and supporters of the African National Congress are but the most recent example of tribalism's tenacity. The studies in this volume offer a new historical model for the growth and endurance of such ideologies in southern Africa.   [brief]
Similar Items
11. cover
Title: Crossing the line: a year in the land of apartheid online access is available to everyone
Author: Finnegan, William
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: African  Studies | Politics | Social Problems | Autobiography | Education | African History
Publisher's Description: William Finnegan's compelling account of a year spent teaching in a colored high school, "across the line," in Cape Town, South Africa brings the irrationality and injustice of apartheid into focus for the American reader. A new preface, written after the author's observation of the historic 1994 el . . . [more]
Similar Items
12. cover
Title: Culture and the senses: bodily ways of knowing in an African community
Author: Geurts, Kathryn Linn 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Cultural Anthropology | African  Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the "naturalness" of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.   [brief]
Similar Items
13. cover
Title: Dateline Soweto: travels with black South African reporters online access is available to everyone
Author: Finnegan, William
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Media Studies | African  Studies | Social Problems | Politics | African History
Publisher's Description: Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who - fearing government disapproval - may not print the stories these reporters risk their lives to get. William Finnegan revisited seve . . . [more]
Similar Items
14. cover
Title: A democratic South Africa?: constitutional engineering in a divided society online access is available to everyone
Author: Horowitz, Donald L
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | African  Studies | Sociology | Law
Publisher's Description: Can a society as deeply divided as South Africa become democratic? In a most timely work, Donald L. Horowitz, author of the acclaimed Ethnic Groups in Conflict , points to the conditions that make democracy an improbable outcome in South Africa. At the same time, he identifies ways to overcome these obstacles, and he describes institutions that offer constitution makers the best chance for a democratic future.South Africa is generally considered an isolated case, a country unlike any other. Drawing on his extensive experience of racially and ethnically divided societies, however, Horowitz brings South Africa back into African and comparative politics. Experience gained in Nigeria, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and other divided societies around the world is relevant because, as South Africa leaves apartheid behind, it will still confront problems of pluralism: racial, ethnic, and ideological. Countries like South Africa, Horowitz argues, must develop institutions capable of coping with such divisions.Reviewing an array of constitutional proposals for South Africa - group rights, consociation, partition, binationalism, and an enhanced role for the judiciary - Horowitz shows that most are inappropriate for the country's problems, or else run afoul of some major ideological taboo. Institutions that are both apt and acceptable do exist, however. These are premised on the need to create incentives for accommodation across group lines. In the final chapter, Horowitz makes a major contribution to the theory of democratization as he considers how commitments to democracy might be extracted even from political groups with undemocratic objectives.Ranging skillfully across studies of social distance and stereotypes, electoral and party systems, constitutions and judiciaries, conflict and accommodation, and negotiation and democratization, Horowitz displays a broad comparative vision. His innovative study will change the way theorists and practitioners approach the task of making democracy work in difficult conditions.   [brief]
Similar Items
15. cover
Title: Expectations of modernity: myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt
Author: Ferguson, James 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Anthropology | African  Studies | Cultural Anthropology | African History | Postcolonial Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline."Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives - the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies.Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.   [brief]
Similar Items
16. cover
Title: Forget colonialism?: sacrifice and the art of memory in Madagascar
Author: Cole, Jennifer 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | African  Studies | Geography | African History | Cultural Anthropology | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: While doing fieldwork in a village in east Madagascar that had suffered both heavy settler colonialism and a bloody anticolonial rebellion, Jennifer Cole found herself confronted by a puzzle. People in the area had lived through almost a century of intrusive French colonial rule, but they appeared to have forgotten the colonial period in their daily lives. Then, during democratic elections in 1992-93, the terrifying memories came flooding back. Cole asks, How do once-colonized peoples remember the colonial period? Drawing on a fine-grained ethnography of the social practices of remembering and forgetting in one community, she develops a practice-based approach to social memory.   [brief]
Similar Items
17. cover
Title: The fractured community: landscapes of power and gender in rural Zambia online access is available to everyone
Author: Crehan, Kate A. F
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | African  Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This study examines the lives of the women and men living in two small rural communities in Zambia on the eve of the collapse of the one-party state in the 1980s. Moving beyond the limits of traditional ethnography, Kate Crehan traces the often complex ways in which local, day-to-day realities are linked to wider economic, political, imaginative structures of power beyond northwestern Zambia.Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Crehan examines economics and gender, politics and kin relations, state and local relations, and witchcraft. Situating her data within a sophisticated yet accessible theoretical framework, she uncovers the power relations that have shaped and defined these communities. Among Crehan's theoretical contributions is a deft argument for the use of Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony to analyze ordinary life.This examination of a marginalized, rural society throws unexpected light on some of the concrete realities of capitalism in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. It also provides inspiring examples of how complicated theoretical viewpoints can be translated - without simplification - into clear starting points for research.   [brief]
Similar Items
18. cover
Title: God, Harlem U.S.A.: the Father Divine story
Author: Watts, Jill
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | United States History | Christianity | American Studies | African American Studies | African  Studies
Publisher's Description: How did an African-American man born in a ghetto in 1879 rise to such religious prominence that his followers addressed letters to him simply "God, Harlem U.S.A."?Using hitherto unknown materials, Jill Watts portrays the life and career of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing religious leaders, Father Divine. Starting as an itinerant preacher, Father Divine built an unprecedented movement that by the 1930s had attracted followers across the nation and around the world. As his ministry grew, so did the controversy surrounding his enormous wealth, flamboyant style, and committed "angels" - black and white, rich and poor alike.Here for the first time a full account of Father Divine's childhood and early years challenges previous contentions that he was born into a sharecropping family in the deep South. While earlier biographers have concentrated on Father Divine's social and economic programs, Watts focuses on his theology, which gives new meaning to secular activities that often appeared contradictory. Although much has been written about Father Divine, God, Harlem U.S.A . finally provides a balanced and intimate account of his life's work.   [brief]
Similar Items
19. cover
Title: Going for gold: men, mines, and migration
Author: Moodie, T. Dunbar
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | African  Studies | Social Theory | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: This book tells the story of the lives of migrant black African men who work on the South African gold mines, told from their own point of view and, as much as possible, in their own words. Dunbar Moodie examines the operation of local power structures and resistances, changes in production techniques, the limits and successes of unionization, and the nature of ethnic conflicts at different periods and on different terrains of struggle. He treats his subject thematically and historically, examining how notions of integrity, manhood, sexuality, work, power, solidarity, and violence have all changed over time, especially with the shift to a proletarianized work force on the mines in the 1970s. Moodie integrates analyses of individual life-strategies with theories of social change, illuminating the ways in which these play off each other in historically significant ways. He shows how human beings (in this case, African men) build integrity and construct their own social order, even in situations of apparent total repression.   [brief]
Similar Items
20. cover
Title: A history of Ethiopia
Author: Marcus, Harold G
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: African  Studies | African History | Postcolonial Studies
Similar Items
Sort by:Show: 
Page: 1 2 3  Next

Comments? Questions?
Privacy Policy
eScholarship Editions are published by eScholarship, the California Digital Library
© 2010 The Regents of the University of California