Anthropology - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

African Sacred Groves

Thu, 01 Nov 2007

African Sacred Groves (2007)
Ecological Dynamics and Social Change

Edited by Michael J. Sheridan and Celia Nyamweru

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. African Sacred Groves challenges dominant views of these landscape features by redefining the subject matter beyond the compelling yet uninformative term “sacred.” The term “ethnoforests” incorporates the environmental, social-political, and symbolic aspects of these forests without giving undue primacy to their religious values. This interdisciplinary book by an international group of scholars and conservation practitioners provides a methodological framework for understanding these forests by examining their ecological characteristics, delineating how they relate to social dynamics and historical contexts, exploring their ideological aspects, and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses as sites for community-based resource management and the conservation of cultural and biological diversity.

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Butterflies & Barbarians

Thu, 23 Aug 2007

Butterflies & Barbarians (2007)
Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa

By Patrick Harries

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.

Central to this group was Junod, who became a pioneering collector in the fields of entomology and botany. He would later examine African society with the methodology, theories, and confidence of the natural sciences. On the way he came to depend on the skills of African observers and collectors. Out of this work emerged, in three stages between 1898 and 1927, an influential classic in the field of South African anthropology, Life of a South African Tribe.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Butterflies+%26+Barbarians.
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Claim to the Country

Mon, 02 Jul 2007

Claim to the Country (2007)
The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd

By Pippa Skotnes

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. These narratives were faithfully recorded and translated by Bleek and Lloyd, creating an archive of more than 13,000 pages including drawings, notebooks, maps, and photographs. Now residing in three main institutions—the University of Cape Town, the South African Museum, and the National Library of South Africa—this archive has recently been entered into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Lavishly illustrated, Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek, created, compiled, and introduced by Pippa Skotnes, presents in book form and on an accompanying DVD all the notebook pages and drawings that comprise this remarkable archive. Contextualizing essays by well-known scholars, such as Nigel Penn, Eustacia Riley, and Anthony Traill, and a searchable index for all the narratives and contributors are included.

Through this remarkable collection, we can better understand what it means that the people who lived in southern Africa long before any new arrivals settled the country no longer survive through their language or culture of intellectual traditions, but only as text on a page. The Bleek-Lloyd archive is the San's surviving claim to the country.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Claim+to+the+Country.
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The Emergence of the Moundbuilders

Wed, 30 Mar 2005

The Emergence of the Moundbuilders (2005)
The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio

Edited by Elliot M. Abrams and AnnCorinne Freter

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.

Edited by Elliot M. Abrams and AnnCorinne Freter, The Emergence of the Moundbuilders: The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio presents the process of tribal formation and change in the region based on analyses of all available archaeological data from the Hocking River Valley. Drawing on the work of scholars in archaeology, anthropology, geography, geology, and botany, the collection addresses tribal society formation through such topics as the first pottery made in the valley, aggregate feasting by nomadic groups, the social context for burying their dead in earthen mounds, the formation of religious ceremonial centers, and the earliest adoption of corn.

Providing the most current research on indigenous societies in the Hocking Valley, The Emergence of the Moundbuilders is distinguished by its broad, comparative overview of tribal life.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Emergence+of+the+Moundbuilders.
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New Terrains in Southeast Asian History

Tue, 15 Apr 2003

New Terrains in Southeast Asian History (2003)

Edited by Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee

At a watershed moment in the scholarly approach to the history of this important region, New Terrains in Southeast Asian History captures the richness and diversity of historical discourse among Southeast Asian scholars. Through the perspectives of scholars who live and work within the region, the book offers readers a rare opportunity to enter into the world of Southeast Asian historiography. Individual chapters subject the dominance of national narratives to critical reflection and deconstruction, while others highlight the need to go beyond essentially political narratives to seek out deeper cultural, economic, and social structures by utilizing new sources, methodologies, and concepts. Taken as a whole, the book contends that new terrains in Southeast Asian history may be found "at the interstices and on the margins" where nations, societies, or cultures engage the unending processes of historical change.

The contributors are Abdul Rahman Haji Ismail, Abu Talib Ahmad, Andrew Hardy, Badriyah Haji Salleh, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, C. J. W.-L. Wee, Ni Ni Myint, Dhiravat na Pombejra, Hong Lysa, Huang Jianli, Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian, M. R. Fernando, P. Lim Pui Huen, Paul H. Kratoska, Tan Liok Ee, Thongchai Winichakul, and Yong Mun Cheong.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/New+Terrains+in+Southeast+Asian+History.
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Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia

Fri, 15 Nov 2002

Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia (2002)
Essays in History and Social Anthropology

Edited by Donald L. Donham and Wendy James

This pioneering book, first published to wide acclaim in 1986, traces the way the Ethiopian center and the peripheral regions of the country affected each other. It looks specifically at the expansion of the highland Ethiopian state into the western and southern lowlands from the 1890s up to 1974.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Southern+Marches+of+Imperial+Ethiopia.
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West African Challenge to Empire

Fri, 15 Feb 2002

West African Challenge to Empire (2002)
Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War

By Mahir Saul and Patrick Royer

West African Challenge to Empire examines the anticolonial war in the Volta and Bani region in 1915-16. It was the largest challenge that the French ever faced in their West African colonial empire, and one of the largest armed oppositions to colonialism anywhere in Africa. How such a movement could be organized in the face of European technological superiority despite the fact that this region is generally described as having consisted of rival villages and descent groups is a puzzle. In this jointly written book the two authors provide a detailed political and military history of this event based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork. Using cultural and sociological analysis, it probes the origins of the movement, its internal organization, its strategy, and the reasons for its initial success and why it spread.

In 2001 the authors of West African Challenge to Empire were awarded the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology by the Royal Anthropological Institute.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/West+African+Challenge+to+Empire.
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Witchcraft Dialogues

Fri, 15 Feb 2002

Witchcraft Dialogues (2002)
Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges

Edited by George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy

Witchcraft Dialogues analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the “occult.” It brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, to engage the metaphysical properties of “witchcraft” and “sorcery” and to explore their manifestations in people's lived experiences.

While many Africanist scholars shun the analysis of “witchcraft” as an appropriate domain of investigation, the experiences, thoughts, activities, and powers that “witchcraft” encompasses have become increasingly the source of interest and debate. Concepts of witchcraft and the phenomena to which they are applied express something fundamental to the human condition and have their equation in the logic of other human practices such as racism and its various crafts. Thus, the focus on “witchcraft” is not just a concern with the occult, but a manifestation of the convergence of interest in mediating and transcending disciplinary domains.

The contributors to this volume embrace the challenge of exploring “witchcraft” as a mode of experiencing and explaining human circumstances as well as confronting the limitations of their own intellectual traditions and paradigms. The range of their explorations takes us in new directions, making use not only of their academic training but also of their personal experiences, to reframe the conceptual terrain of the “occult” and the epistemological orientations of their various academic fields of inquiry.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Witchcraft+Dialogues.
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In the Company of Diamonds

Sun, 15 Jul 2001

In the Company of Diamonds (2001)
De Beers, Kleinzee, and the Control of a Town

By Peter Carstens

After the 1925 discovery of diamonds in the semi-desert of the northwest coast of South Africa, De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. virtually proclaimed its dominion over the whole region. In the town of Kleinzee, the company owns all the real estate and infrastructure, and controls and administers both the town and the industry.

Peter Carstens's In the Company of Diamonds draws a stark and startling portrait of this closed community, one that analyzes the power and hegemonic techniques used to acquire that power and maintain it.

As a prototypical company town, Kleinzee is subordinated to the industry and will of the owners. Employees and workers are variously differentiated and ordered according to occupation, ethnic variation, and other social criteria, a pattern reflected most markedly in the allocation of housing. Managers live in large, ranch-style houses, while contract workers are lodged in single-sex compounds.

As a community type, company towns like Kleinzee are not entirely unique, and Professor Carstens successfully draws a number of structural parallels with other closed and incomplete social formations such as Indian reservations, military bases, colleges, prisons, and mental hospitals.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/In+the+Company+of+Diamonds.
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Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa

Mon, 30 Apr 2001

Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa (2001)
Gender, Culture, and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist

Edited by Dorothy L. Hodgson

The dominant trend in pastoralist studies has long assumed that pastoralism and pastoral gender relations are inherently patriarchal. The contributors to this collection, in contrast, use diverse analytic approaches to demonstrate that pastoralist gender relations are dynamic, relational, historical, and produced through complex local-translocal interactions. Combining theoretically sophisticated analysis with detailed case studies, this collection will appeal to those doing research and teaching in African studies, gender studies, anthropology, and history. Among the topics discussed are pastoralism, patriarchy, and history among Maasai in Tanganyika; women's roles in peacemaking in Somali society; the fertility of houses and herds; gender, aging, and postchildbearing experience in a Tuareg community; and milk selling among Fulani women in Northern Burkina Faso.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Rethinking+Pastoralism+in+Africa.
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