Sociology Book List ·

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.…

Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa

In June 1976 political demonstrations in the black township of Soweto exploded into an insurrection that would continue sporadically and spread to urban areas across South Africa. In their assault on apartheid the youths who spearheaded the rebellion attacked and often destroyed the state institutions that they linked to their oppression: police stations, government offices, schools, and state-owned liquor outlets.…

An African American in South Africa

The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche 28 September 1937–1 January 1938

Ralph Bunche, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, traveled to South Africa for three months in 1937. His notes, which have been skillfully compiled and annotated by historian Robert R. Edgar, provide unique insights on a segregated society.…

Moral Philosophy and Development

The Human Condition in Africa

Although development issues generally have been considered in a framework of economic theory and politics, in this volume Tedros Kiros looks to European ideas of moral philosophy to explain the underdevelopment of Africa and the persistent African food crisis.…

Unhappy Valley

Clan, Class & State In Colonial Kenya

This long-awaited book is a considerable revision in the understanding of the history of colonial Kenya and, more widely, colonialism in Africa. There is a substantial amount of new work and this is interlocked with shared areas of concern that the authors have been exploring since 1976.…

Faces in the Revolution

The Psychological Effects of Violence on Township Youth in South Africa

One of South Africa’s most serious problems is the large number of youths in the black townships who have been exposed to an incredible depth and complexity of trauma. Not only have they lived through severe poverty, the deterioration of family and social structures, and an inferior education system, but they have also been involved in catastrophic levels of violence, both as victims and as perpetrators.…

Cannabis, Alcohol, and the South African Student

Adolescent Drug Use, 1974-1985

Du Toit examines the results of two surveys which he made a decade apart among high school students of Black, Indian, White, and Colored backgrounds. The initial survey showed some acceptance of the use of these substances among a small proportion of high school students but a high degree of intolerance of such use by the majority.…

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.…

The Mau Mau War in Perspective

The book breaks new ground in following the story of the participants of the rural movement during the decade after the defeat of the Mau Mau. New archival sources and interviews provide exciting material on the mechanics of the sociology of decolonization and on the containment of rural radicalism in Kenya.…

Conflict Resolution in Uganda

There is a new mood in Uganda. There is a determination to reak out of the bitter history of internal conflict. Uganda gives hope to all those other areas of the world where violence has become endemic such as Ulster, Lebanon, and Sri Lanka.…

From Kampung to City

A Social History of Kucing Malaysia, 1820-1970

One of the major processes in modern Southeast Asian history has been the development of ethnically heterogeneous towns and cities. Kucing, an intermediate-sized urban center in Sarawak, Malaysia, is today an institutionally complex, predominantly Chinese city of 100,000 led by modern political leaders.…

Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905–1963

Language and Social Change in Java

Linguistic Reflexes of Modernization in a Traditional Royal Polity

Errington explores linguistic evidence of social change among the traditional priyayi elite of Surakarta in south-central Java. Employing data from texts, interviews, observed speech, and questionnaires, he shows a progressive leveling in the language used to denote traditional status differences, and he demonstrates how perceptions of speech styles reflect etiquette and the views of the users.…

The Wounded Woman

Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship

This book is an invaluable key to self-understanding. Using examples from her own life and those of her clients, as well as from dreams, fairy tales, myths, films, and literature, Leonard, a Jungian analyst, exposes the wound of the spirit that both men and women of our culture bear – a wound that is grounded in a poor relationship between masculine and feminine principles.…