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41. | | Title: Politics of the womb: women, reproduction, and the state in KenyaAuthor: Thomas, Lynn M Published: University of California Press, 2003 Subjects: History | Women's Studies | African Studies | AnthropologyPublisher's Description: In more than a metaphorical sense, the womb has proven to be an important site of political struggle in and about Africa. By examining the political significance - and complex ramifications - of reproductive controversies in twentieth-century Kenya, this book explores why and how control of female initiation, abortion, childbirth, and premarital pregnancy have been crucial to the exercise of colonial and postcolonial power. This innovative book enriches the study of gender, reproduction, sexuality, and African history by revealing how reproductive controversies challenged long-standing social hierarchies and contributed to the construction of new ones that continue to influence the fraught politics of abortion, birth control, female genital cutting, and HIV/AIDS in Africa. [brief]Similar Items | 42. | | Title: The possessed and the dispossessed: spirits, identity, and power in a Madagascar migrant town Author: Sharp, Lesley Alexandra Published: University of California Press, 1994 Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Medical Anthropology | Women's Studies | Indigenous ReligionsPublisher's Description: This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power. These women, Leslie Sharp argues, are far from powerless among the peasants and migrant laborers who work the land in this plantation economy. In fact, Sharp's wide-ranging analysis shows that tromba , or spirit possession, is central to understanding the complex identities of insiders and outsiders in this community, which draws people from all over the island and abroad.Sharp's study also reveals the contradictions between indigenous healing and Western-derived Protestant healing and psychiatry. Particular attention to the significance of migrant women's and children's experiences in a context of seeking relief from personal and social ills gives Sharp's investigation importance for gender studies as well as for studies in medical anthropology, Africa and Madagascar, the politics of culture, and religion and ritual. [brief]Similar Items | 43. | | Title: Rebel and saint: Muslim notables, populist protest, colonial encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904) Author: Clancy-Smith, Julia A Published: University of California Press, 1994 Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Postcolonial Studies | French Studies | African StudiesPublisher's Description: Julia Clancy-Smith's unprecedented study brings us a remarkable view of North African history from the perspective of the North Africans themselves. Focusing on the religious beliefs and political actions of Muslim elites and their followers in Algeria and Tunisia, she provides a richly detailed analysis of resistance and accommodation to colonial rule.Clancy-Smith demonstrates the continuities between the eras of Turkish and French rule as well as the importance of regional ties among elite families in defining Saharan political cultures. She rejects the position that Algerians and Tunisians were invariably victims of western colonial aggression, arguing instead that Muslim notables understood the outside world and were quite capable of manipulating the massive changes occurring around them. [brief]Similar Items | 44. | | Title: Remembering the present: painting and popular history in ZaireAuthor: Fabian, Johannes Published: University of California Press, 1996 Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Art | African History | Politics | African StudiesPublisher's Description: This book combines ethnography with the study of art to present a fascinating new vision of African history. It contains the paintings of a single artist depicting Zaire's history, along with a series of ethnographic essays discussing local history, its complex relationship to forms of self-expression and self-understanding, and the aesthetics of contemporary urban African and Third World societies. As a collaboration between ethnographer and painter, this innovative study challenges text-oriented approaches to understanding history and argues instead for an event- and experience-oriented model, ultimately adding a fresh perspective to the discourse on the relationship between modernity and tradition.During the 1970s, Johannes Fabian encouraged Tshibumba Kanda Matulu to paint the history of Zaire. The artist delivered the work in batches, together with an oral narrative. Fabian recorded these statements along with his own question-and-answer sessions with the painter. The first part of the book is the complete series of 100 paintings, with excerpts from the artist's narrative and the artist-anthropologist dialogues. Part Two consists of Fabian's essays about this and other popular painting in Zaire. The essays discuss such topics as performance, orality, history, colonization, and popular art. [brief]Similar Items | 45. | | Title: Reproduction and social organization in Sub-Saharan Africa Author: Lesthaeghe, Ron J 1945- Published: University of California Press, 1989 Subjects: African Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Medical AnthropologyPublisher's Description: Unlike most Asian and Latin American countries, sub-Saharan Africa has seen both an increase in population growth rates and a weakening of traditional patterns of child-spacing since the 1960s. It is tempting to conclude that sub-Saharan countries have simply not reached adequate levels of income, education, and urbanization for a fertility decline to occur. This book argues, however, that such a socioeconomic threshold hypothesis will not provide an adequate basis for comparison. These authors take the view that any reproductive regime is also anchored to a broader pattern of social organization, including the prevailing modes of production, rules of exchange, patterns of religious systems, kinship structure, division of labor, and gender roles. They link the characteristic features of the African reproductive regime with regard to nuptiality, polygyny, breastfeeding, postpartum abstinence, sterility, and child-fostering to other specifically African characteristics of social organization and culture. Substantial attention is paid to the heterogeneity that prevails among sub-Saharan societies and considerable use is made, therefore, of interethnic comparisons. As a result the book goes considerably beyond mere demographic description and builds bridges between demography and anthropology or sociology. [brief]Similar Items | 46. | | Title: The rise of a party-state in Kenya: from "Harambee" to "Nyayo!" Author: Widner, Jennifer A Published: University of California Press, 1993 Subjects: Politics | African StudiesPublisher's Description: Although Kenya is often considered an African success story, its political climate became increasingly repressive under its second president, Daniel arap Moi. Widner charts the transformation of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) from a weak, loosely organized political party under Jomo Kenyatta into an arm of the president's office, with "watchdog" youth wings and strong surveillance and control functions, under Moi. She suggests that single-party systems have an inherent tendency to become "party-states," or single-party regimes in which the head of state uses the party as a means of control. The speed and extent of these changes depend on the countervailing power of independent interest groups, such as business associations, farmers, or professionals. Widner's study offers important insights into the dynamics of party systems in Africa. [brief]Similar Items | 47. | | Title: Scarcity, choice, and public policy in middle Africa Author: Rothchild, Donald S Published: University of California Press, 1978 Subjects: African Studies | Politics | Public PolicySimilar Items | 48. | | Title: Shadows of war: violence, power, and international profiteering in the twenty-first centuryAuthor: Nordstrom, Carolyn 1953- Published: University of California Press, 2004 Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Economics and Business | Global Studies | PoliticsPublisher's Description: In this provocative and compelling examination of the deep politics of war, Carolyn Nordstrom takes us from the immediacy of war-zone survival, through the offices of power brokers, to vast extra-legal networks that fuel war and international profiteering. She captures the human face of the front lines, revealing both the visible and the hidden realities of war in the twenty-first century. Shadows of War is grounded in ethnographic research carried out at the epicenters of political violence on several continents. Its pages are populated not only with the perpetrators and victims of war but also with the scoundrels, silent heroes, and average families who live their lives in the midst of explosive violence. War reconfigures our most basic notions of humanity, Nordstrom demonstrates. This book, of crucial importance at the present moment, shows that war is enmeshed in struggles over the very foundations of the sovereign state, the crafting of economic empires both legal and illegal, and innovative searches for peace. Nordstrom describes the multi-trillion-dollar international financial networks that support warfare. She traces the entangled routes by which illegal drugs, precious gems, weapons, basic food supplies, and pharmaceuticals are moved by an international cast of businesspeople, profiteers, and black-market operators. Shadows of War demonstrates how the experiences of both the architects of war and of ordinary people are deleted from media accounts and replaced with stories about soldiers, weapons, and territory. For the first time, this book retrieves from the shadows the faces of those whose stories seldom reach the light of international recognition. [brief]Similar Items | 49. | | Title: Shady practices: agroforestry and gender politics in the Gambia Author: Schroeder, Richard A Published: University of California Press, 1999 Subjects: Geography | Anthropology | Ecology | African Studies | Social ProblemsPublisher's Description: Shady Practices is a revealing analysis of the gendered political ecology brought about by conflicting local interests and changing developmental initiatives in a West African village. Between 1975 and 1985, while much of Africa suffered devastating drought conditions, Gambian women farmers succeeded in establishing hundreds of lucrative communal market gardens. In less than a decade, the women's incomes began outstripping their husbands' in many areas, until a shift in development policy away from gender equity and toward environmental concerns threatened to do away with the social and economic gains of the garden boom. Male landholders joined forestry personnel in attempts to displace the gardens and capture women's labor for the irrigation of male-controlled tree crops.This carefully documented microhistory draws on field experience spanning more than two decades and the insights of disciplines ranging from critical human geography to development studies. Schroeder combines the "success story" of the market gardens with a cautionary tale about the aggressive pursuit of natural resource management objectives, however well intentioned. He shows that questions of power and social justice at the community level need to enter the debates of policymakers and specialists in environment and development planning. [brief]Similar Items | 50. | | Title: South Africa, a study in conflict Author: Van den Berghe, Pierre L Published: University of California Press, 1967 Subjects: African StudiesSimilar Items | 51. | | Title: Speaking with vampires: rumor and history in colonial Africa Author: White, Luise Published: University of California Press, 2000 Subjects: African Studies | African History | African Studies | Cultural AnthropologyPublisher's Description: During the colonial period, Africans told each other terrifying rumors that Africans who worked for white colonists captured unwary residents and took their blood. In colonial Tanganyika, for example, Africans were said to be captured by these agents of colonialism and hung upside down, their throats cut so their blood drained into huge buckets. In Kampala, the police were said to abduct Africans and keep them in pits, where their blood was sucked. Luise White presents and interprets vampire stories from East and Central Africa as a way of understanding the world as the storytellers did. Using gossip and rumor as historical sources in their own right, she assesses the place of such evidence, oral and written, in historical reconstruction. White conducted more than 130 interviews for this book and did research in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. In addition to presenting powerful, vivid stories that Africans told to describe colonial power, the book presents an original epistemological inquiry into the nature of historical truth and memory, and into their relationship to the writing of history. [brief]Similar Items | 52. | | Title: The spirit of freedom: South African leaders on religion and politics Author: Villa-Vicencio, Charles Published: University of California Press, 1996 Subjects: Religion | Politics | African StudiesPublisher's Description: This collection of interviews explores the role of religion in the lives of eminent South Africans who led the struggle against apartheid. Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, Desmond Tutu, Nadine Gordimer, and seventeen other political, religious, and cultural leaders share the beliefs and values that informed the moral positions they adopted, often at great cost. From all ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds, these men and women have shaped one of the greatest political transformations of the century.What emerges from the interviews are reflections on all aspects of life in an embattled country. There are stories of the homelands and townships, and tales of imprisonment and exile. Dedicated communists relate their intense youthful devotion to Christianity; Muslim activists discuss the complexity of their relationships with their communities. As the respondents grapple with difficult questions about faith, politics, and authority, they expose a more personal picture: of their daily lives, of their pasts, and of the enormous conflicts that arise in a society that continually strains the moral fiber of its citizens. Taken together, these interviews reveal the many-faceted vision that has fueled South Africa's struggle for democracy. [brief]Similar Items | 53. | | Title: The state must be our master of fire: how peasants craft culturally sustainable development in SenegalAuthor: Galvan, Dennis Charles Published: University of California Press, 2004 Subjects: Politics | Anthropology | African Studies | Postcolonial StudiesPublisher's Description: Over several centuries, the Serer of the Siin region of Senegal developed a complex system of land tenure that resulted in a stable rural society, productive agriculture, and a well-managed ecosystem. Dennis Galvan tells the story of what happened when French colonial rulers, and later the government of the newly independent Senegal, imposed new systems of land tenure and cultivation on the Serer of Siin. Galvan's book is a painstaking and skillful autopsy of ruinous Western-style "rational" economic development policy forced upon a fragile, yet self-sustaining, society. It is also a disquieting demonstration of the general folly of such an approach and an attempt to articulate a better, more sensitive, and ultimately more productive model for change - a model Galvan calls "institutional syncretism." [brief]Similar Items | 54. | | Title: Transforming settler states: communal conflict and internal security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe Author: Weitzer, Ronald John Published: University of California Press, 1990 Subjects: European Studies | Politics | Sociology | African Studies | European HistoryPublisher's Description: In the past two decades, several settler regimes have collapsed and others seem increasingly vulnerable. This study examines the rise and demise of two settler states with particular emphasis on the role of repressive institutions of law and order. Drawing on field research in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe, Ronald Weitzer traces developments in internal security structures before and after major political transitions. He concludes that thoroughgoing transformation of a repressive security apparatus seems to be an essential, but often overlooked, precondition for genuine democracy.In an instructive comparative analysis, Weitzer points out the divergent development of initially similar governmental systems. For instance, since independence in 1980, the government of Zimbabwe has retained and fortified basic features of the legal and organizational machinery of control inherited from the white Rhodesian state, and has used this apparatus to neutralize obstacles to the installation of a one-party state. In contrast, though liberalization is far from complete. The British government has succeeded in reforming important features of the old security system since the abrupt termination of Protestant, Unionist rule in Northern Ireland in 1972. The study makes a novel contribution to the scholarly literature on transitions from authoritarianism to democracy in its fresh emphasis on the pivotal role of police, military, and intelligence agencies in shaping political developments. [brief]Similar Items | 55. | | Title: The unending frontier: an environmental history of the early modern worldAuthor: Richards, J. F Published: University of California Press, 2003 Subjects: History | Asian History | European History | United States History | Environmental Studies | Asian Studies | African StudiesPublisher's Description: It was the age of exploration, the age of empire and conquest, and human beings were extending their reach - and their numbers - as never before. In the process, they were intervening in the world's natural environment in equally unprecedented and dramatic ways. A sweeping work of environmental history, The Unending Frontier offers a truly global perspective on the profound impact of humanity on the natural world in the early modern period. John F. Richards identifies four broadly shared historical processes that speeded environmental change from roughly 1500 to 1800 c.e.: intensified human land use along settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife; and problems of energy scarcity. The Unending Frontier considers each of these trends in a series of case studies, sometimes of a particular place, such as Tokugawa Japan and early modern England and China, sometimes of a particular activity, such as the fur trade in North America and Russia, cod fishing in the North Atlantic, and whaling in the Arctic. Throughout, Richards shows how humans - whether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapes - altered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own. [brief]Similar Items | 56. | | Title: The way the world is: cultural processes and social relations among the Mombasa Swahili Author: Swartz, Marc J Published: University of California Press, 1991 Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | African StudiesPublisher's Description: Marc Swartz takes us for the first time into the homes and neighborhoods of the Swahili in the East African port of Mombasa. At the same time he develops a new model for the operation and transmission of culture.In asking how cultural elements influence the social behavior of those who do not share them as well as of those who do, Swartz points to the mediation of status. The many types of status available to individuals provide guidelines that help explain, for example, why the broadly shared elements of Swahili culture (Islamic religion or the nuclear family) do not alone translate into behavior. The Way the World Is demonstrates in a highly original way how culture "works." [brief]Similar Items | 57. | | Title: When we began there were witchmen: an oral history from Mount Kenya Author: Fadiman, Jeffrey Published: University of California Press, 1994 Subjects: History | Anthropology | African Studies | African HistoryPublisher's Description: This is the history of the Meru people of Mount Kenya, based on their own traditions, from the earliest times through the colonial period. Many of these tales have been ritually passed down through no fewer than nineteen generations; others were remembered by those personally involved. Jeffrey Fadiman gathered them in interviews with more than 100 of the Meru's oldest men and women.The traditions touch on every era of the Meru past. They include narrations, songs, chants, and riddles. They tell of a mysterious origin, past enslavement, despairing flight, mountain warriorhood, British conquest, and the fight for freedom. The Meru elders spoke most often of urogi, or witchcraft, the incantations, rituals, and potions used to deal with the supernatural aspects of Meru life. As their society evolved, so did their urogi , developing a history of its own as practitioners in every generation sought to cope with the challenges of slavery, migration, war, colonialism, and Christianity.Fadiman has crafted the tales into a compelling narrative, passing on in his turn the stories he was given. This is African history from African perspectives that stretch back over 300 years. [brief]Similar Items | 58. | | Title: White plague, black labor: tuberculosis and the political economy of health and disease in South AfricaAuthor: Packard, Randall M 1945- Published: University of California Press, 1989 Subjects: Anthropology | Medicine | Medical Anthropology | African Studies | PoliticsPublisher's Description: Why does tuberculosis, a disease which is both curable and preventable, continue to produce over 50,000 new cases a year in South Africa, primarily among blacks? In answering this question Randall Packard traces the history of one of the most devastating diseases in twentieth-century Africa, against the background of the changing political and economic forces that have shaped South African society from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. These forces have generated a growing backlog of disease among black workers and their families and at the same time have prevented the development of effective public health measures for controlling it. Packard's rich and nuanced analysis is a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on South Africa's social history as well as to the history of medicine and the political economy of health. [brief]Similar Items |
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