Anthropology Book List ·

African Philosophy, Culture, and Traditional Medicine

For over two centuries, Western scholars have discussed African philosophy and culture, often in disparaging, condescending terms, and always from an alien European perspective. Many Africans now share this perspective, having been trained in the western, empirical tradition.…

African Sacred Groves

Ecological Dynamics and Social Change

In Western scholarship, Africa’s so-called sacred forests are often treated as the remains of primeval forests, ethnographic curiosities, or cultural relics from a static precolonial past. Their continuing importance in African societies, however, shows that this “relic theory” is inadequate for understanding current social and ecological dynamics.…

Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits

War in Northern Uganda, 1985-97

In August 1986, Alice Auma, a young Acholi woman in northern Uganda, proclaiming herself under the orders of a Christian spirit named Lakwena, raised an army called the “Holy Spirit Mobile Forces.” With it she waged a war against perceived evil, not only an external enemy represented by the National Resistance Army of the government, but internal enemies in the form of “impure” soldiers, witches, and sorcerers.…

The Anatomy of a South African Genocide

The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples

In 1998 David Kruiper, the leader of the ‡Khomani San who today live in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, lamented, “We have been made into nothing.” His comment applies equally to the fate of all the hunter-gatherer societies of the Cape Colony who were destroyed by the impact of European colonialism.…

Anthropology and Historiography of Science

Whether history or anthropology is the most fundamental social science remains still a controversial and undecided issue. For a proper understanding of this instructive controversy, the presuppositions of these two disciplines need to be critically and philosophically reviewed.…

A Bed Called Home

Life in the Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town

In the last three years the migrant labor hostels of South Africa, particularly those in the Transvaal, have gained international notoriety as theaters of violence. For many years they were hidden from public view and neglected by the white authorities.…

Being Maasai

Ethnicity and Identity In East Africa

Everyone “knows” the Maasai as proud pastoralists who once dominated the Rift Valley from northern Kenya to central Tanzania. But many people who identity themselves as Maasai, or who speak Maa, are not pastoralist at all, but farmers and hunters.…

The Bushmen of Southern Africa

A Foraging Society in Transition

This book, by an anthropologist, historian, social anthropologist, and schoolteacher, introduces the long history and current condition of the hunting people of southern Africa to students, teachers, and interested laypersons.…

Butterflies & Barbarians

Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa

Swiss missionaries played a primary and little-known role in explaining Africa to the literate world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book emphasizes how these European intellectuals, brought to the deep rural areas of southern Africa by their vocation, formulated and ordered knowledge about the continent.…

The Cape Herders

A History of the Khoikhoi of Southern Africa

The Cape Herders provides the first comprehensive picture of the Khoikhoi people. In doing so, it fills a long-standing gap in the resources of Southern African studies, and at a time when interest in the indigenous populations of South Africa is growing daily.…

Change and Continuity in Minangkabau

Local, Regional, and Historical Perspectives on West Sumatra

Social scientists have long recognized many apparent contradictions in the Minangkabau. The world’s largest matrilineal people, they are also strongly Islamic and, as a society, remarkably modern and outward looking.…

Claim to the Country

The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd

In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction and the death of their language, several San men and women told their stories to two pioneering colonial scholars in Cape Town, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. The narratives of these San—or Bushmen—were of the land, the rain, the history of the first people, and the origin of the moon and stars.…

Controlling Anger

The Anthropology of Gisu Violence

Controlling Anger examines the dilemmas facing rural people who live within the broader context of political instability. Following Uganda's independence from Britain in 1962, the Bagisu men of Southeastern Uganda developed a reputation for extreme violence.…

Dance Civet Cat

Tonga Children and Labour in the Zambezi Valley

In this, the first comprehensive study of the Tonga people in Zimbabwe, Pamela Reynolds focuses on children’s work in a subsistence agricultural system, assessing how much work they do, the value of their work to their families and how it both limits their opportunities and fosters their personal growth and knowledge.…

Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History

The Case of Tanganyika, 1850–1950

This pioneering book was one of the first to place the history of East Africa within the context of the environment. It has been used continuously for student teaching. It is now reissued with an introduction placing it within the debate that has developed on the subject; there is also an updated bibliography.…

The Emergence of the Moundbuilders

The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio

Native American societies, often viewed as unchanging, in fact experienced a rich process of cultural innovation in the millennia prior to recorded history. Societies of the Hocking River Valley in southeastern Ohio, part of the Ohio River Valley, created a tribal organization beginning about 2000 bc.…

Ethnicity & Conflict in the Horn of Africa

Composed of eleven studies on the Horn of Africa, the book is based on primary research by David Turton, Hiroshi Matsuda, John Lamphear, Eisei Kurimoro, Wendy James, P.T.W. Baxter, Tim Allen and others.…

Forests of Gold

Essays on the Akan & the Kingdom of Asante

The Asante had unique conceptions of time and motion, and the relationships between the unborn, the living and the dead. This study suggests that awareness of their past has much to do with the survival of their culture in this century.…

The History and Conservation of Zanzibar Stone Town

Zanzibar Stone Town presents the problems of conservation in its most acute forms. Should it be fossilized for the tourists? Or should it grow for the benefit of the inhabitants? Can ways be found to accommodate conflicting social and economic pressures? For its size, Zanzibar, like Venice, occupies a remarkably large romantic space in world imagination.…

History of the Malay Kingdom of Patani

This translation of Ibrahim Syukri’s Sejarah Kerajaan Melayu Patani (SKMP) makes available a little known but important manuscript published privately ca. 1950 and printed in jawi (Malay written in a modified Arabic script).…