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Anthropology

Latest addition : 5 December 2012.

This category's books

  • Divine Bud: Testimonies of God’s intervention

    2012, author(s)-editor(s) Philip Mutaka
    This book presents innovative material on ethnography; more specifically, it exposes events where African individuals deal with the supernatural – such as: reaction to the death of a child whose surgical operation was considered an answer to prayers to God, how African students have dealt with evil spirits in their lives, how African people have experimented the phenomenon of “miracle” with their specific religious background that merges imported religions (Christian and Islam) and their (...)

  • Bourgeon Divin: Témoignages

    2012, author(s)-editor(s) Philip Mutaka
    Ce livre dévoile un matériel ethnographique innovant, notamment, des événements dans lesquels des individus font face au super naturel, tel la réaction à la mort d’un enfant dont l’opération chirurgicale était considérée comme la réponse aux prières à Dieu, la manière dont des étudiants Africains ont fait face à de mauvais esprits dans leurs vies, comment des Africains ont expérimenté le phénomène de « miracle » avec une toile de fond qui marie les religions importées (Christianisme et Islam) avec leurs (...)

  • DISCOnnections: Popular Music Audiences in Freetown, Sierra Leone

    2012, author(s)-editor(s) Michael Stasik
    This book offers an intriguing account of the complex and often contradictory relations between music and society in Freetown’s past and present. Blending anthropological thought with ethnographic and historical research, it explores the conjunctures of music practices and social affiliations and the diverse patterns of social dis/connections that music helps to shape, to (re)create, and to defy in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown. The first half of the book traces back the changing social (...)

  • Witchcraft in Post-colonial Africa: Beliefs, techniques and containment strategies

    2012, author(s)-editor(s) Khaukanani Mavhungu
    This is a comparative ethnographic study of witchcraft and associated violence between the kingdoms of Kom and Venda in Cameroon and South Africa respectively. The book shows why despite its prevalence in both societies, witchcraft does not lead to open violence in Kom, while such large-scale violence is commonplace in Venda. It reveals that this difference can be explained by factors such as the variations in local ideas on witches, differences in the role of traditional authorities, and (...)

  • The Struggle of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems in an Age of Globalization: A Case for Children’s Traditional Games in South-Eastern Zimbabwe

    2012, author(s)-editor(s) Munyaradzi Mawere
    This is a comprehensive study and erudite description of the struggle of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems in an Age of Globalization, using in particular eighty-four children’s traditional games in south-eastern Zimbabwe. The book is an informative and interesting anthropological account of rare African children’s games at the risk of disappearing under globalization. The virtue of the book does not only lie in its modest philosophical questioning of those knowledge forms that consider (...)

  • Cameroon Grassfields Civilization

    2012, author(s)-editor(s) Jean-Pierre Warnier
    This book brings and blends together a dozen scholarly articles published by the author since the 1970s. It sketches two different yet related stories: first, that of one of the most ancient and prestigious African civilizations, the antiquity and sophistication of which are becoming more and more prominent as field research unfolds their many facets. Second, the story of the researcher himself, who has had to alter and shift his approach to that civilization as he got to meet (...)

  • Message in a Mobile: Mixed-Messages, Tales of Missing and Mobile Communities at the University of Khartoum

    2011, author(s)-editor(s) Siri Lamoureaux
    This detailed, meticulous ethnographic study on mobile phone use among Nuba students at the University of Khartoum in Sudan, distinguishes itself from other studies by taking a focused look at the linguistic content of mobile phone interactions via text-messaging, portraying it as a site for the expression of personalized and affective language. While men and women appear to be equally aggressive consumers and producers of text-message poetry, women are formally discouraged in using the (...)

  • The Postcolonial Turn: Re-Imagining Anthropology and Africa

    2011, author(s)-editor(s) Francis B. Nyamnjoh, René Devisch
    This innovative book is a forward-looking reflection on mental decolonisation and the postcolonial turn in Africanist scholarship. As a whole, it provides five decennia-long lucid and empathetic research involvements by seasoned scholars who came to live, in local people’s own ways, significant daily events experienced by communities, professional networks and local experts in various African contexts. The book covers materials drawn from Botswana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of (...)