Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Study of Africa

Introduction

The primary source for knowledge about the peoples of Africa—about their cultures and societies—from the late colonial era until today, is anthropology, but modern anthropology developed as a discipline very late. The origins can be dated from 1900 in the United States and 1927 in Great Britain, when the first doctorates were awarded to people trained in new canons of understanding and explanation and in the practice of extended fieldwork. Before the arrival of the professionals there were some exceptional individuals with sufficient curiosity to devote the effort and time to produce serious books about the ways of life of particular African peoples—works worth noting. The greatest increment to academic knowledge of African societies and cultures occurred when PhD students trained in the British social anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown began their fieldwork at the end of the 1920s. After four decades carrying out research primarily in the United States, American anthropologists also began to do ethnographic research in Africa after World War II, many of them supported by the Ford Foundation. Since the late 1960s, the independence of Africa, and the numerous intellectual upheavals and reorientations of world scholarship as a result of the emergence of the women’s movement, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and more, the anthropological landscape has changed considerably. This bibliography concentrates primarily on contributions from the British and American traditions that produced the largest, most coherent, and most readily available body of information and ideas about African cultures and societies. Although the focus is largely on the literature from the turn of the 20th century through the 1980s, the heyday of social and cultural anthropology in Africa, it includes works done from the critical perspectives of more recent decades as well.

General Overviews

The literature is vast but the following works offer a variety of perspectives on important aspects of the history and practice of British, and, to a lesser degree, American anthropology in Africa. While Gulliver 1965 offers a summary of the work of anthropologists working in Africa up to the 1960s—still early times—the review articles Hart 1985 and Werbner 1984 are specific to particular regions and cover another twenty years of research. While Kuper 1973 deals with British anthropology as a whole, African experience dominates the work, as it does Goody 1995. Moore 1994 has the widest perspective of all, while Schumaker 2001, like Werbner, focuses on the important Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and Hammond-Tooke 1997 offers a more intimate and detailed view of the anthropologists who worked in South Africa. Ntarangwi, et al. 2006 consists of more recent articles, quite varied, some historical, some looking to the future.

Goody, Jack. The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918—1970. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511557927Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A veteran anthropologist and a scholar of wide knowledge and many contributions, Jack Goody offers an insider’s view of the development of British social anthropology—heavily but hardly only in Africa—following its key figures through the years. It is a rich intellectual history and offers important correctives to certain fashionable thoughts about the field, especially its relation to colonialism.
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Gulliver, Philip. “Anthropology.” In The African World: A Survey of Social Research. Edited by Robert A. Lystad, 57–105. New York: Praeger, 1965.
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Gulliver produced an extensive view of the situation of anthropology in Africa as of the early 1960s—as African countries were becoming independent. Dated but very useful as a picture of anthropology at that time.
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Hammond-Tooke, W. D. Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists 1920–1990. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997.
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A knowledgeable, detailed, and critical study of anthropologists in South Africa, one of the most troubled nations in the world, where anthropology existed in particularly difficult and complex circumstances.
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Hart, Keith. “The Social Anthropology of West Africa.” Annual Review of Anthropology 14 (1985): 243–272.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.14.100185.001331Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hart gives a useful overview of social anthropological research and publication in West Africa from the early days of professional anthropology until the 1980s.
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Kuper, Adam. Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School, 1922–1972. New York: Pica, 1973.
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A basic history of British anthropology focused primarily on research in Africa, Adam Kuper provides a basic intellectual genealogy of various approaches, especially those applied to research in Africa up to the 1980s. Second revised and expanded edition, London and New York: Routledge, 1983.
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Moore, Sally F. Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994.
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Moore presents an intellectual odyssey through British anthropology in Africa, with consideration of French and American contributions as well. A balanced and fair-minded book discussing many works and considering various arguments in a compact volume, it is the best single source for an overview of anthropology in Africa until the early 1990s. She deals with the question of anthropology and colonialism with dispatch.
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Ntarangwi, Mwenda, David Mills, and Mustafa Babiker. African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice. London: Zed Books, 2006.
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This volume contains thirteen essays by both African and Euro-American anthropologists considering aspects of anthropology in the past, present—and speculating on its future on the continent of Africa.
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Schumaker, Lyn. Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822380795Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this original work based on a study of the records of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and its researchers, Schumaker demonstrates the interplay of ideas and relations between the European researchers and their African assistants and the ways in which the assistants influenced the work of the Institute. It is an ethnography of ethnography.
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Werbner, Richard. “The Manchester School in South-Central Africa.” Annual Review of Anthropology 13 (1984): 157–185.
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Werbner analyzes the approaches and the works of the anthropologists who worked with Max Gluckman at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute from the 1930s to the 1980s. Working in both rural and urban areas, with farmers and miners, they developed distinctive perspectives stressing social process, conflict, and conflict resolution, presented through actual cases, detailed accounts of events and the people involved.
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Texts

There are no textbooks, in the strict sense of the word, for the anthropology of Africa, but two volumes stand out as works offering different sorts of overviews. The work Gibbs 1965 consists of comparable ethnographies but Murdock 1959 is an unusual attempt at an all-encompassing view of Africa’s peoples and precolonial history.

Gibbs, James L., ed. Peoples of Africa. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965.
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The book consists of eleven chapters, each devoted to a different people, written by leading ethnographers familiar with each group. Chosen to represent a variety of regions, environments, and varieties of cultures and lifestyles, this work can serve as a useful introduction to African ethnography as seen from the perspective of the early 1960s.
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Murdock, George Peter. Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.
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An anthropologist without African research experience, Murdock attempted an ambitious overall organization of African ethnography by drawing upon Joseph Greenberg’s new classification of the languages of Africa, Nikolai Vavilov’s study of the origins of domesticated plants, meager archeological sources, and ethnographic methods for reconstructing history. The errors in the book are many but it may still repay consideration—with caution.
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Journals

There is only one journal devoted to Anglophone African anthropology (mostly) and others that have featured many articles about African anthropology through the years. The journal Africa is the flagship of the International African Institute (IAI), founded in 1926 (as the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures). The IAI has been the single most important institution behind the publications of African anthropology, and many of the books in this bibliography that were published in England were issued under the auspices of the IAI. Originally conceived as an international enterprise promoting research and publication about Africa, after years as a largely British institution it is once more quite international in its direction, including numerous Africans among its Council Members and Trustees. The IAI commissioned and published a series of volumes, each of which summarized basic facts and bibliographies for different African peoples, under the series title Ethnographic Survey of Africa (ESA). There were eighty-nine published between 1950 and 1974; they varied greatly in quality depending upon both the state of knowledge at the time and the experience of the author. None have been included in this bibliography. The African Studies Review, an American publication, has been in existence since 1958. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (sometimes also published under the title Man) is another source for works of African anthropology, while American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, and Ethnology all have carried African anthropology, mostly since the 1950s. Cahiers d’Études Africaines, the leading French journal, frequently includes articles in English as well as French.

Africa: Journal of the International African Institute (IAI). 1928–.
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Anthropologists have played a central role in this journal it since its inception in 1928, although it has welcomed articles on linguistics, history, and political subjects as well.
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African Studies Review. 1970–.
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This is the publication of the African Studies Association (ASA) of North America. It is a general journal of African studies but anthropology had a prominent role in the development of African studies, at least in the early decades. Published from 1958 to 1970 as African Studies Bulletin.
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American Anthropologist. 1899–.
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The leading journal of the American Anthropological Association; maintains the American tradition of “four fields,” including cultural anthropology (ethnology), biological anthropology, linguistics, and archeology.
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American Ethnologist. 1974–.
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Newer publication of the American Anthropological Association, devoted only to cultural anthropology.
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Cahiers d’Études Africaines. 1960–.
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Leading French journal of African studies, regularly publishing some articles in English.
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Ethnology. 1962–.
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Independent journal of general ethnology, publishing most works of ethnography and ethnographic analysis.
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI). 1901–.
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Long-running journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) has published many works on African subjects throughout more than a century, for many years under the title Man.
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Ethnography Before the Professional Anthropologists

The following titles are some of the significant works produced by amateurs before the professionalization of anthropology in Britain. Several African writers also wrote books that are included in this list.

Books by Non-Africans

Junod 1962, Roscoe 1911, and Roscoe 1923 were written by missionaries; Meek 1931 and Rattray 1929 were written by colonial government officials; and Smith and Dale 1920 was written by both (Smith, a missionary, and Dale, a governmental official). The authors of Routledge and Routledge 1910 were apparently adventurous intellectuals, and the author of Bleek 1928 was a devoted amateur. The prevailing intellectual orientation toward “primitive cultures” in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th century, “Victorian” social/cultural evolutionism, often combined with racial determinism to produce a picture of African peoples as both culturally and intellectually inferior. But despite their references to such “armchair” theorists of cultural evolution as Edward B. Tylor, James G. Frazer, John Lubbock, and Andrew Lang, the authors of these works actually knew Africans through long residence among them. Whatever outdated attitudes they had, they tried to produce sympathetic and complete accounts of the peoples they knew, usually stating the hope that their works would lead to greater understanding and appreciation of them. As Smith and Dale wrote, “. . . whether one is to teach or govern, one’s first duty is to understand the people” (Smith and Dale 1920, p. ix).

Bleek, Dorothea Frances. The Naron: a Bushman Tribe of the Central Kalahari. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1928.
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Dorothea Bleek was born into a family of German origin in South Africa that contributed greatly to knowledge of the languages of the Khoisan peoples from the 1870s. This work is considered the most reliable and fullest information available about any one Bushman group until the Marshall family studies and the Harvard Kalahari project beginning in the 1960s.
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Johnston, Sir Harry H. H. The Uganda Protectorate. Vol. 2. London: Hutchinson, 1902.
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This item is included as an egregious example from the era. It is a massive work, copiously illustrated—especially with naked bodies—containing a mass of ethnographic scraps and considerable ethnocentrism and racism. Johnston was a prolific writer, an old-fashioned African explorer—and an important player in the Scramble for Africa. Despite its glaring faults this work contains a good deal of information, including linguistic material, that can be used (with caution) by researchers.
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Junod, Henri A. The Life of a South African Tribe. 2 vols. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1962.
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This work by a Swiss Protestant missionary who went to live among the Th’onga people in Mozambique in 1889 covers individual, family, village, and “national life” in the first volume and devotes most of the second to “literary and artistic life,” and religious life and conceptions of nature, man, magic, witchcraft, and morality. Junod was devoted to these people but modern readers may be put off by his struggles as he considered their future and their souls. Originally 1912. The 1962 edition contains a foreword by Keith Irvine.
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Meek, Charles Kingsley. A Sudanese Kingdom: An Ethnographical Study of the Jukun-Speaking Peoples of Nigeria. London: Kegan Paul, 1931.
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Written at the suggestion of an enthusiastic superior in the colonial government, this richly detailed ethnography of a complex political system is intended to demonstrate the connections between the religion and politics of certain peoples of Northern Nigeria and those of ancient Egypt. The approach was already outdated by the time it was published but it offers material for supporters of Afrocentricity.
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Rattray, Robert Sutherland. Ashanti Law and Constitution. London: Oxford University Press, 1929.
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An acknowledged classic by an official of the colonial government of the Gold Coast whose driving interest was the religious beliefs and political system of the Ashanti, whom he knew very well. Despite his belief in the value of Christianity for the development of African peoples and his interest in maintaining harmonious relations between the colonizer and the colonized, this book has been much honored by Ashanti and by scholars.
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Roscoe, John. The Baganda: An Account of Their Native Customs and Beliefs. London: Macmillan, 1911.
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A massive and detailed work attempting “to describe the social and religious life of the Baganda in the old days before their country. . . came under the influence of Europe” (p. ix). Roscoe was a long-time missionary turned ethnographer, writing under the inspiration of his friend James G. Frazer and aided by Sir Apolo Kagwa.
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Roscoe, John. The Bakitara, or Banyoro. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1923.
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A work inspired by James G. Frazer’s fascination with divine kingship. Much of what Roscoe recorded was told to him in interviews with the king and other highly placed individuals. He notes that the land was full of missionaries but he attempted to get at the “traditional” ways many of which were still being practiced.
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Routledge, W. Scoresby, and Katherine Routledge. With a Prehistoric People: The Akikuyu of British East Africa. London: Frank Cass, 1910.
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A detailed and sympathetic work based on several years “in intimate contact with the Akikuyu,” from 1902 when the area was “practically unknown and its people unsubdued” (p. ix). Today’s reader will be put off by the evolutionist credo, “. . . the Akikuyu of today are, in their civilization and methods, at the point where our ancestors stood in earliest times” (p. xvii), but this book is fundamental for knowledge of the Kikuyu people.
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Smith, Edwin W., and Andrew M. Dale. The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1920.
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Despite the authors’ 19th-century attitudes to physical types, this portrayal of the culture and social life of these people is a classic of pre-professional ethnography. An academically inclined missionary, Edwin Smith (b. 1876–d. 1957) became a central figure in the development of African studies as a founder of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (today, the International African Institute). Captain Dale died of blackwater fever in 1919.
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Books by Africans

Akiga 1965, Danquah 1928, and Kagwa 1934, were written by notable Africans eager to record the ways of their people.

Akiga. Akiga’s Story: The Tiv Tribe as Seen by One of its Members. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
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This extensive account of the customs and social and political organization of the Tiv of Nigeria was originally written in the Tiv language, then translated and annotated by Rupert East—whose attitudes will annoy modern readers. Akiga, the son of a blacksmith, was educated at a mission and set about to tell the story of his people so that “we all may still know something of our fathers who have gone before us” (p. 4). Originally published in 1939.
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Danquah, J. B. Gold Coast: Akan Laws and Customs and the Akim Abuakwa Constitution. London: G. Routledge, 1928.
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Danquah was a member of the royal family of the Akan state of Akim Abuakwa as well as a University of London–educated lawyer. A prominent political figure in the politics of the Gold Coast and then Ghana, this is an insider’s account of the political system and it can be compared with the account of Ashanti by Rattray, published shortly after.
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Kagwa, Sir Apolo. The Customs of the Baganda. Vol. 22. Translated by Ernest B. Kalibala, edited by May Mandelbaum Edel. New York: Columbia Contributions to Anthropology, 1934.
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Apolo Kagwa was prime minister of Buganda at the turn of the 20th century and a primary informant and facilitator for the research of John Roscoe. In 1918 he published his own account of the ways of his people; it was later translated into English and published.
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The First Professional Anthropologists

A dozen talented and ambitious young anthropologists went to Africa from Britain at the end of the 1920s and had a powerful and long-lasting influence on the anthropology of Africa—and elsewhere. They set out for research with new ideas and inspired by Malinowski’s new canons of fieldwork. Their new paradigm, called either functionalism (associated with Malinowski) or structural-functionalism (Radcliffe-Brown’s preferred term), was built around the notion of a social science that would concentrate on questions of how societies or cultures worked (and cohered) as systems, eschewing questions of origins. (They either ignored or explicitly argued against evolutionism, as well as the less-well-known alternative, “diffusionism.”). Evans-Pritchard 1937 is a study of cultural logic while Evans-Pritchard 1940 exemplifies the approach of Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950 in its attempt to understand the social structures and dynamics that account for social coherence. Similarly, the two works Fortes 1945 and Fortes 1949 also ignore the presence of British colonial control in an effort to understand how a system of descent through lineages and clans might operate to keep a society on an even keel. Nadel 1942, on the other hand, tackles a complex society, a kingdom (state), as does Herskovits 1938 (Dahomey), the only book in this section that was written by an American. These particular works (except Dahomey) were directed to understanding how these cultures might have operated in the absence of colonial overrule in order to contribute to the comparative science of society—as Radcliffe-Brown put it.

Evans-Pritchard, E. Evans. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon, 1937.
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This book by the first Malinowski student to do research in Africa has an honored place in the history of anthropology and the sociology of knowledge. It was hardly the first work to present the case for the logical thought of “primitives” but it was a striking statement, supported by excellent, detailed fieldwork, concentrating on belief and related practices among the Azande of southwestern Sudan.
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Evans-Pritchard, E. Evans. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940.
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Perhaps the most-studied ethnography in the canon of British social anthropology, this account of the Nuer is noted above all for Evans-Pritchard’s presentation of the “segmentary lineage” system. He claims that the balance of opposed kinship units to contributes to maintaining “ordered anarchy” in this fragmented “stateless” and acephalous society. Some question whether the system could have worked as presented in this abstract scheme.
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Fortes, Meyer. The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi: Being the First Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe. London: Oxford University Press, 1945.
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The first of two books by Fortes detailing—and theorizing about—the function of lineage systems in the organization of social life of an acephalous society. The lineage and clans provide the basis for ritual, political, and judicial action. No less an expert than Evans-Pritchard considered it a very difficult book, but he also considered it of great importance for the understanding of kinship and descent systems—in societies in general, not just among the Tallensi, and not just in Africa.
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Fortes, Meyer. The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi: The Second Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe. London: Oxford University Press, 1949.
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This second volume of Fortes’ classic accounts of the structure and functions of kinship and descent focuses more on the family, the domestic side, and the moral basis of the kinship tie. Here he concentrates on the relations between husbands and wives, in-laws, co-wives, and many combinations of persons and interests. This and Fortes 1945 comprise a major statement of Radcliffe-Brown’s structural-functional perspective on social structure, and they influenced British anthropological work in Africa and the Pacific for two decades.
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Herskovits, Melville J. Dahomey, An Ancient African Kingdom. New York: J. J. Augustin, 1938.
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A student of Franz Boas, Herskovits was passionate about both African and “New World Negro” cultures and causes; his students were the first anthropologists from the United States to study in Africa. Based on only three months of fieldwork in Dahomey in 1931 Herskovits produced a two-volume work about a complex African kingdom and its art, stressing the indigenous nature of both against the Eurocentric speculations of the time.
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Nadel, Siegfried F. A Black Byzantium: The Kingdom of Nupe in Nigeria. London: Oxford University Press, 1942.
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This is a study of a kingdom of more than half a million people, and Nadel compared its political, social, and economic complexity to that of Byzantium or medieval European states. This richly detailed work deals with the political system and history of the kingdom and with material and economic life, including agriculture, industries and craft guilds (smiths, weavers, glass and bead makers), wealth, and exchange.
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Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., and Daryll Forde, eds. African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. London: Oxford University Press, 1950.
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Radcliffe-Brown provided a very long theoretical introduction laying out his approach to the important subject of kinship and marriage. It was a key source for British anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s, consisting of chapters by leading ethnographers, mostly from the first generation, presenting and analyzing systems of the peoples they studied, including the Swazi, the Tswana, the Zulu, the Nuer, the Ashanti, the Yakö, and Nuba groups of the Sudan.
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Early Works Directed to Problems of Change

Contrary to current belief, much of the work of the early professionals was directed to the problem of change and made no attempt to “erase” the presence of the colonial power and “European” influence. Hunter 1964 studied change in South Africa at the beginning of the 1930s while the paper Gluckman 1940 was immediately influential within the community of anthropologists the author led at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia. Richards 1939 studied the impact of migrant labor and other introduced changes on diet, Read 1936 looked at the impact of modern education as well as migrant labor, and Mair 1934 reported on the changes from all sources among the Bagada. Schapera 1938 studies the legal and court system among the Tswana as a contribution to the smooth operation of chiefdoms under “colonial tutelage,” but Jomo Kenyatta, who had participated in Malinowski’s seminar at the LSE, was clearly thinking of the end of colonial rule. He became Kenya’s first president.

Gluckman, Max. “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand.” Bantu Studies 14 (1940): 1–30, 147–174.
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This was a key paper, methodologically, for its explicit use of what the “Manchester School” would call “situational analysis” or the “extended case method.” Gluckman described the events of a single day, involving both Europeans and Zulus, both chiefs and others, and his analysis made explicit some of the elements of segregation, white domination, and African unhappiness under their rule.
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Hellmann, Ellen. Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slum Yard. Cape Town: Oxford University Press (for Rhodes-Livingstone Institute), 1948.
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Perhaps the earliest ethnographic study of the social life of newly urbanized Africans, portraying very bad social and economic conditions. Written as a master’s thesis in 1934–1935 but not published until rediscovered. This study is further evidence that anthropology, even in the 1930s, was not just the study of “primitives,” or in the service of colonial governments.
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Hunter, Monica. Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contacts with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.
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This is an exhaustive pioneering study, carried out in 1931–1932, of the processes and results of change among one-time rural cattle herders who became wage earners in mines, on sugar plantations, and towns in European-dominated South Africa. (Hunter later published under her married name, Monica Wilson.) (Abridged paperback edition with new preface by the author, Cape Town: David Philip, 1979.)
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Kenyatta, Jomo. Facing Mount Kenya. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.
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Jomo Kenyatta had little formal education but attended Malinowski’s seminars and published this book about his people, the Kikuyu. Malinowski called it “an invaluable document in the principles underlying culture-contact and change and as a personal statement of the new outlook of a progressive African . . .” (p. xiii). The book is fundamental for knowledge of the Kikuyu.
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Mair, Lucy P. An African People in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 1934.
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In contract to Roscoe 1923 (cited under Books by Non-Africans), Mair is not concerned about recording “the old ways” of the Baganda. A study of cultural change with recommendations for the future, the author takes colonial rule for granted, evaluates indirect rule positively, and suggests practical steps that might improve the situation of the Baganda under British dominion.
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Read, Margaret. “Tradition and Prestige among the Ngoni.” Africa 9.4 (1936): 453–484.
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Margaret Read was interested in “tradition and prestige” and the changing lives of the widespread Ngoni people of Central Africa. She began to study education and elites and the move to urban life as early as anyone. The paper is directed to the question of “indirect rule”—with concern for what Ngoni leaders want.
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Richards, Audrey I. Land, Labour, and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe. London: Oxford University Press, 1939.
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One of the first field research projects by a student of Malinowski. For a study of diet and nutritional problems among the Bemba, Richards had to deal with the whole system of production, distribution, and consumption of food, migrant labor, kinship and social and political organization, land-tenure, religious beliefs and practices, and more, following Malinowski’s “functionalist” approach (cf. Moore and Vaughan 1994, cited under Farming Systems and Economics).
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Schapera, Isaac. A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. London: Frank Cass, 1938.
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Schapera was asked to produce a “handbook” of law and custom by the colonial administration of Bechuanaland (Botswana) and the Tswana chiefs who administered the laws and were concerned about younger chiefs without such knowledge. This work reflects the realities of court proceedings, judgments, and conflicts—not an idealized view of “traditional” law and custom.
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Studies Focusing on Subsistence and Economic Systems

Subsistence—the varied ways peoples make their living, get their food and other material goods—is an ever-present element in human life and it has been an important concern of anthropologists. The peoples of Africa lived by various combinations of cultivation, animal husbandry, and foraging (hunting, collecting wild products). Most peoples availed themselves of all of these means of subsistence, but certain people were specialized as foragers or herders, and the pursuit of these specialties had major impacts on other aspects of their cultures.

Foragers

There are relatively few people in Africa who live by foraging (previously known as “hunting and gathering”), but those who do have attracted a great deal of attention over the years. Most of the foragers are seen to be specialists, living among other groups, perhaps spending only part of their time hunting, collecting, and foraging. There are great disputes, however, over the question of the extent to which this is true of the most famous groups who were classified traditionally as “hunters”—the so-called “Pygmies” of the central forests and the “Bushmen” of the Kalahari Desert. Are or were they independent peoples, choosing the foraging way of life, or were they forced to take refuge in these areas and this livelihood by more powerful peoples, or are both true to some extent? The literature is vast, as can be seen in the bibliographies Barnard 1992 and Barnard 2007. The work Schapera 1930 was an early attempt by a professional anthropologist to pull together material on the Bushman and others written mostly by amateurs, while the works Marshall 1976 and Lee 1979 were the results of well-supported anthropological expeditions from the 1950s on. Wilmsen 1990 presents an extensive case for the “remnant” view of the Bushman. The problem of the “Pygmies”—in the absence of a name that the various groups all call themselves—is even more problematic. There are numerous forager groups, with many different names, who live in symbiotic—though depressed—relationship with farming groups. Some are of very short stature and have been labeled “Pygmies”—taken from the Greek; others are not physically distinguishable from their “hosts.” One of many discussions of the overall problem is given by Blench 1999. The “classic” Pygmy groups are found in the Congo Basin, especially the Ituri Forest, and one of the most extensive and convincing works is by Turnbull 1965. Grinker 1994 offers a much-needed perspective on the “Bantu” peoples among whom the foraging groups lived, who tended to be slighted by other writers. Finally, Marlowe’s work on the Hadza of Tanzania can avoid the pervasive controversies that haunt the study of the other groups.

Barnard, Alan. The Kalahari Debate: A Bibliographical Essay. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992.
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This exhaustive bibliography about the peoples of the Kalahari includes a major focus on the debate over the history and status of the Bushmen: Can they be taken as representatives of a hunting and gathering way of life under harsh desert conditions or are they actually they runaway survivors of domination by stronger peoples?
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Barnard, Alan. Anthropology and the Bushman. Oxford: Berg, 2007.
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This is a book for those interested in the long history of the contributions to knowledge of the people called Bushmen (Bushman). Despite sensitivity about this name, there no agreed-upon alternative, although “San” is often used.
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Blench, Roger. “Are the African Pygmies an Ethnographic Fiction?” In Central African Hunter-Gatherers in a Multidisciplinary Perspective: Challenging Elusiveness. Edited by Karen Biesbrouck, Stefan Elders, and Gerda Rossel, 41–60. Leiden, The Netherlands: Research School for Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies, University of Leiden, 1999.
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An interesting survey considering the numerous “Pygmy” foraging groups, questioning the notion that they are one related ancient population rather than a series of specialized caste groups, associated with settled (and larger) neighbors, who have developed distinctive ethnic identities relatively recently.
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Grinker, Roy R. Houses in the Rainforest: Ethnicity and Inequality among Farmers and Foragers in Central Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
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Although Grinker puts his emphasis on the Lese farmers, they are intimately linked with the Efe foragers—who are also known as Pygmies. This sophisticated study puts the subject of the relationship between farmers and foragers in Central Africa on a new basis.
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Lee, Richard B. The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
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This is a major study of subsistence activities among men and women who remain primarily foragers, focusing on environment, resources and technology, work activities, diet and nutrition, dispersion and aggregation, and including leadership, conflict, aggression, and violence.
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Marlowe, Frank W. The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
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A recent work about a distinctive people, many of whose members continue to hunt and gather and resist major changes although they have long been in contact with farmers and herders. The author is interested in testing evolutionary models and hypotheses and combines much quantitative material with classical ethnographic methods and observations.
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Marshall, Lorna. The !Kung of Nyae Nyae. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.
DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674180574Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A study of one group of San by an amateur observer, the mother of a family that made expeditions to the Kalahari in the 1950s and 1960s. Her son, John Marshall, was known for his ethnographic films, and her daughter, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, wrote The Harmless People. Lorna Marshall proved to be a remarkably sensitive and meticulous ethnographer.
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Schapera, Isaac, ed. The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa: Bushmen and Hottentots. London: Routledge, 1930.
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Isaac Schapera edited this collection of amateur works at the beginning his career. They are indicative of the state of the art before 1930.
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Turnbull, Colin. Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies. New York: Natural History, 1965.
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Turnbull tried to adopt the perspective of the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest of the Congo rather than that of their “Negro” hosts. He portrays a people who, while in an apparently weak and inferior relationship to the village cultivators next to whom they sometimes live, see themselves as independent users of the village economy who play off one village against another and then leave for their life in the forests that they know so well and that the others fear.
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Wilmsen, Edward. Land Filled with Flies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
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Wilmsen shook up the field with this book, in which he claimed that the Bushman, far from being an example of free-roaming hunters, exemplars of an adaptive foraging way of life from thousands of years back, are actually an underclass, part of larger social formations, long involved with outsiders.
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Herders

There are many forms and degrees of pastoralism around the world, based on the husbanding of many sorts of animals in many different environments. These have long been of interest to anthropologists and human geographers in particular. Animal husbandry in Africa runs the gamut from the keeping of a few goats and sheep to the maintenance of great herds of cattle or camels in grasslands and deserts. Here is a small selection of ethnographies of peoples who depended upon their herds for a living. Herskovits 1926 isolated a complex of traits that characterize cattle herders, primarily in East Africa, and the works Schneider 1959, Hopen 1958, and Hutchinson 1996 present striking cases of change and continuity among three peoples marked by their deep connection to cattle. Two of the peoples discussed by Goldschmidt 1969 and Gulliver 1966 practiced farming as well as cattle pastoralism. The books Fratkin 1991 and Spencer 1973 deal with the rigors—and successes—of camel and cattle pastoralism in arid areas of Kenya, while Stenning 1959 discusses the political and environmental vicissitudes that beset the pastoral Fulani.

Fratkin, Elliot. Surviving Drought and Development: Ariaal Pastoralists of Northern Kenya. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991.
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Based on fieldwork over a decade, Fratkin offers a picture of a pastoral people who are doing well despite droughts and the well-intentioned ministrations of development planners. The Ariaal keep camels, cattle, and small stock and are neighbors of the Rendille and Samburu, both discussed in Spencer 1973.
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Goldschmidt, Walter. Kambuya’s Cattle: The Legacy of an African Herdsman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
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This work documents the social relations, the interactions, and the drama resulting from the distribution of the cattle of a Sebei man named Kambuya, who at his death “left four sons by three different wives, a herd of more than two hundred cattle, a very old wife, and a series of economic obligations and credits” (p. 11).
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Gulliver, Philip H. The Family Herds: A Study of Two Pastoral Tribes in East Africa, the Jie and Turkana. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1966.
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This is a comparative study of two peoples: the Jie of Uganda, who have a mixed economy of animal husbandry and millet farming, and the Turkana of Kenya, who are nomadic herders with almost no horticulture. Gulliver’s focus is on “the regulations governing herds and flocks of animals as property, and the interrelation of these regulations with the kinship system” (p. 2).
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Herskovits, Melville J. “The Cattle Complex in East Africa.” American Anthropologist 28.4 (1926): 633–664.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1926.28.4.02a00040Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article, published in four parts, was based on a library dissertation summarizing the “complex” of relationships between East African herders and their cattle. It isolated a distinctive pattern of economic, social aesthetic, and emotional phenomena that obtained throughout a large part of the eastern half of Africa. Dated, based on pre-professional ethnography, it is still a useful orienting idea.
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Hopen, C. Edward. The Pastoral Fulbe Family in Gwandu. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.
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A complement to the study Stenning 1959, Hopen presents an account of the pastoral ecology and social life of one group of Fulbe (Fulani) in Northern Nigeria. As of the mid-1950s, despite all the historical and political shifts and ecological difficulties these cattle herders had persisted in their herding life and the maintenance of their distinctive identity and self-reliance. Hopen describes a people devoted to and dependent on cattle for status, participants in the “cattle complex” portrayed earlier by Herskovits.
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Hutchinson, Sharon. Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
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Hutchinson presents a new look at the Nuer a half-century after Evans-Pritchard’s famous work, based on more than two years of fieldwork among two different Nuer groups. The author brings a processual and actor-oriented approach to a study of the changed world and fundamental conceptions of these people who had endured major economic and political changes, religious proselytizing, and fierce civil war in the intervening decades.
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Schneider, Harold K. “Pakot Resistance to Change.” In Continuity and Change in African Cultures. Edited by William Bascom and Melville J. Herskovits, 144–167. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
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Harold Schneider, a student of Herskovits, draws upon his fieldwork and on his teacher’s delineation of the “cattle complex” to explain the reasons behind the resistance of the Pakot of Kenya to change their ways—as of the mid-1950s.
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Spencer, Paul. Nomads in Alliance: Symbiosis and Growth among the Rendille and Samburu of Kenya. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
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This study contrasts the camel-herding Rendille and the cattle-herding Samburu and demonstrates the complex social and economic relationships (symbiosis) between them, as individuals employ complex strategies and choice-making as they play off the differing elements of the two cultures and subsistence systems.
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Stenning, J. Derrick. Savannah Nomads: A Study of the Wodaabe Pastoral Fulani of Western Bornu Province Northern Region, Nigeria. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
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After a discussion of the history of the pastoral Fulani of Northern Nigeria and the various wars and political vicissitudes that affected them, Stenning presents an ethnography of their pastoral movements, family life, and social organization. He ends the book with a discussion of various reforms and the future of pastoralism in that area.
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Farming Systems and Economics

Most peoples of Africa practice farming of some sort and to some extent. It was—and still is—the primary basis for food production and general subsistence. Ethnographies of rural peoples will necessarily present material about horticulture, but here are a few studies of specific farming systems, several of which involve production for the markets as well. Berry 1975 and Hill 1963 demonstrate both the enterprise of certain West African farmers and the continuing importance of ethnic and kinship relations, while the authors of Bohannan and Dalton 1962 and Bohannan and Bohannan 1968 are committed to a perspective from economic anthropology (the “substantivist,” associated with Karl Polanyi) that denies the universality of the profit motive. There was a lively debate in anthropology for decades from the 1950s: the “formalists” contend that in any culture there will be a scarcity of valued goods and the necessity for individuals to choose between desirable ends, in order to maximize their interests. The substantivists argue that this notion is itself a product of capitalist and market society and that members of other cultures—like the Tiv—may not feel that imperative and will not operate in that manner. Netting 1968, on the intensive cultivation by the Kofyar of a highland zone in Nigeria, was inspired by another American anthropological concern of the time, cultural ecology, while Shack 1966 reports on the Gurage, a society in Ethiopia dependent on intensive cultivation of an unusual plant related to the banana and known as ensete. Hoben 1973 presents a totally different agricultural, social, and political situation from another part of Ethiopia.

Berry, Sara. Cocoa, Custom, and Socio-economic Change in Rural Western Nigeria. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.
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One of the important works by a rare economist who does research with farmers. Berry sees the Yoruba cocoa farmers as full of initiative and enterprise, comparable to that which Hill 1963 found in Ghana, and in a finely detailed study found the continuing importance of ethnic and kinship ties for success in cocoa growing and similar enterprises.
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Bohannan, Paul, and Laura Bohannan. Tiv Economy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
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This study of the Tiv of Nigeria exemplifies the “substantive” (vs. “formal”) approach in economic anthropology applied to a people with a subsistence economy, lacking external trade, and without a “market” for land or labor. The Bohannans portray the Tiv as an egalitarian people lacking a general profit motive, denying the contention of the formalists that the reality of “scarcity and choice” in any society demands a degree of “maximizing” behavior.
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Bohannan, Paul J., and George Dalton, eds. Markets in Africa. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962.
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An enormous grab bag, twenty-eight articles about various sorts of trade and exchange in Africa, especially the markets that are so important throughout much of the continent. Can be a source of information and ideas about markets, exchange systems, trade, etc.
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Hill, Polly. The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana: A Study in Rural Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1963.
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A groundbreaking study of economic change, of migrant farmer-entrepreneurs who took advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the world market for cocoa as of the beginning of the 20th century. She sees their economic behavior consonant with the spirit of capitalism, but that their “traditional” social structures are able to accommodate them rather than either break down or hamper the farmers in their pursuit of wealth, as conventional wisdom of the time foresaw.
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Hoben, Allan. Land Tenure among the Amhara of Ethiopia: The Dynamics of Cognatic Descent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
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At once a study of land tenure, a descent system, and the dynamics of decision-making in a complex stratified sociopolitical system, this is one of the few anthropological works about the numerous and important Amhara people of Ethiopia.
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Moore, Henrietta L., and Megan Vaughan. Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990. London: James Curry, 1994.
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This richly detailed study of gender, nutrition, agricultural change, and “the colonial construction of knowledge” began as a re-study of Audrey Richards’ 1930s research on food production, culture, social relations, and nutrition among the Bemba (Richards 1939, cited under Early Works Directed to Problems of Change). Moore and Vaughan consider the intellectual context of Richards’ research and the impact of her writings on subsequent views of the Bemba.
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Netting, Robert M. Hill Farmers of Nigeria: Cultural Ecology of the Kofyar of the Jos Plateau. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.
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Robert Netting, inspired by the notion of cultural ecology of Julian Steward, produced a study of the techniques (including terracing and fertilizing) and the social organization of an intensive farming system adapted to hills on the Jos Plateau of Nigeria. He demonstrates the functional interrelationship between the ecosystem and population density, division of labor, and rights to land and labor.
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Shack, William. The Gurage: A People of the Ensete Culture. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
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The Gurage are a distinctive ethnic group in south central Ethiopia who depend heavily for subsistence on a plant distinctive to their area known as ensete, or “false banana.” William Shack discusses the ecology and economics based on this unusual staple crop. (The Gurage people live not far from Addis Ababa and have been known for their urban economic activities for many generations.)
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Social Organization

Social organization (sometimes called social structure) is of primary concern to both social and cultural anthropologists. From the observation of the complex ongoing relationships among a people the researcher attempts to discover the regularities and abstract the principles that appear to organize and pattern group and individual interactions. Although these patterns are manifest in all realms of life, including the familial, economic, political, and religious, it is often possible to identify general social organizational principles that may structure much of what occurs in a given society.

Emphasizing Kinship

The two competing founders of British anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, began their careers studying what were called “primitive” societies, in the Andaman Islands, among Australian Aborigines, and on small islands in Melanesia. Kinship played central roles in these “small-scale societies” with few members, minimal division of labor, and no central authorities (before colonial rule). When they began work in Africa, their students became involved with very large populations, many with highly complex social and political organizations, in which extensive systems of kinship and lineage organization played important roles, and the study of descent and kinship continued to play a central role in British ethnography in Africa. The volume Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950 presents “classic” studies of a number of African societies by the “classic” anthropologists of the first generation. The essays by Richards and Fortes in that volume focus on the structure and dynamics of kinship and descent in societies in which matrilineality plays a major role. The collection Middleton and Tait 1958 features authors of the next anthropological generation and focuses on the role of descent in maintaining society and social order in “acephalous” societies, as does that of Mayer 1949. Colson 1960, a book on the Gwembe Tonga, established the baseline for the author’s later studies of the consequences of their displacement by the flooding of their territory along the Zambezi River. James 1979 reports on a relatively new formation of a matrilineal system developing from a time of great troubles, while Parkin 1978 stresses the continuity of kinship and patrilineage among Luo in cities.

Colson, Elizabeth. Social Organization of the Gwembe Tonga. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press for Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1960.
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This 1956 study of the Gwembe Tonga of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), before the Kariba Dam flooded their territory, forms the background to her Social Consequences of Resettlement (Colson 1971, cited under Studies of Change). Before their displacement, the Gwembe were among the most independent peoples of Central Africa and were the most closely connected to their earlier culture and social organization.
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Fortes, Meyer. “Kinship and Marriage among the Ashanti.” In African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. Edited by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, 252–284. London: Oxford University Press, 1950.
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The Ashanti are noted for their powerful kingdom and for the way their society, including their political system, is structured through matrilineal kinship—with due recognition of patriliny as well. Fortes presents a detailed picture of family life and social organization and the tensions arising from a variety of inevitable contradictions that arise.
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James, Wendy. ‘Kwanim Pa—The Making of the Uduk People: An Ethnographic Study of Survival in the Sudan-Ethiopian Borderlands. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979.
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James presents an unusual case of survival and reconstitution of a society that has been devastated by slavers and the depredations of other more powerful outsiders whose social stability and continuity is based on matriliny, on the women who are mothers and cultivators.
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Mayer, Philip. The Lineage Principle in Gusii Society. Memorandum 24, International African Institute. London: Oxford University Press, 1949.
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A brief account of the way in which the Gusii, a people in Kenya who numbered 200,000 in 1948, could maintain the territorial integrity of all its lineages without any indigenous authority. It was an important work in the canon of studies of “segmentary societies.”
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Middleton, John, and David Tait, eds. Tribes without Rulers: Studies in African Segmentary Systems. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958.
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Contains a long introduction and six articles, each about a different people who, in precolonial days, lacked overarching political authority: in other words “acephalous” or, in the more specific but inaccurate terminology of the time, “segmentary.” The societies discussed are the Tiv of Nigeria, the Mandari and the Western Dinka of the Southern Sudan, the Bwamba, the Konkomba of Ghana, and the Lugbara (“of the Nile-Congo Divide”).
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Parkin, David. The Cultural Definition of Political Response: Lineal Destiny among the Luo. New York: Academic Press, 1978.
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This is a study of kinship and lineage in a major urban area—and its extensions into the rural homeland of the Luo people in Kenya. According to Parkin, the Luo of Nairobi, resident for over a generation in Kenya’s capital, remained deeply involved in their own system of lineages and polygyny, which has many associated concepts, behaviors, and implications for work, education, political activity, and social life.
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Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., and Daryll Forde, eds. African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. London: Oxford University Press, 1950.
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Radcliffe-Brown provided a very long theoretical introduction to this volume laying out his overall approach to the important subject of kinship and marriage. This was a key source for British anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s, consisting of chapters by leading ethnographers presenting and analyzing the systems of the peoples they studied. These included the Swazi, the Tswana, the Zulu, the Nuer, the Ashanti, the Yakö, and Nuba groups of the Sudan.
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Richards, Audrey I. “Some Types of Family Structure amongst the Central Bantu.” In African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. Edited by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, 207–251. London: Oxford University Press, 1950.
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Richards discusses the family and kinship organization of Bantu-speaking peoples in the so-called “matrilineal belt” of the Belgian Congo, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. Reckoning descent in the matrilineal line, they present a different picture from those who follow only patrilineal lineage reckoning. Richards considers the various solutions that each group developed to deal with the complexities of such systems.
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Beyond Kinship

It was not long before some anthropologists working among African peoples began to react against what they saw as an undue emphasis on kinship and descent, stressing that there were other important principles of association and bases for action as well—perhaps even more important in any given society. Goody 1957 responded to the oversimplification of social solidarity by virtue of “segmentary lineages,” and joined Brown 1951 (cited under Overall Perspectives), Forde 1961 (cited under Stateless or Acephalous Societies), and Lewis 1974 in pointing out other bases for organization and balance—neighborhood groups, age-grades, secret societies, and voluntary associations. Similarly, Green 1964 showed the multiple origins of order in Ibo villages, while Little 1951 stressed the importance of the secret societies to the Mende, and Gulliver 1971 demonstrated the importance of bilateral kin forming “action sets” around ambitious men. Wilson 1951 presented a more unusual system of settlement and social life based on villages of age-mates.

Goody, Jack. “Fields of Social Control among the LoDagaba.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 87.1 (1957): 75–104.
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As a contribution to the then-current discussion of the maintenance of order in “segmentary societies,” Goody pointed out that the acephalous LoDagaba society (Goody’s name for this group without a definite name of its own) did not have the sort of lineages that were said to be required for social control, and yet they maintained order through other mechanisms.
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Green, M. M. Igbo Village Affairs. 2d ed. London: Frank Cass, 1964.
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This rich ethnography by a teacher of West African languages is based on research carried out between 1934 and 1937. Green follows the numerous complex ways in which social order was maintained in Igbo villages lacking recognized authority figures through multiple rules, activities, associations, and sentiments.
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Gulliver, Philip H. Neighbours and Networks: The Idiom of Kinship in Social Action among the Ndendeuli of Tanzania. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
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Gulliver was critical of the structural-functionalist credo that the basis of small-scale societies had to be unilineal kinship producing corporate groups. Social and political life among the Ndendeuli was not organized that way but by the mobilization of bilateral kin, by ambitious men, into “action sets” that were formed for particular purposes and then disbanded. Gulliver follows individuals as they strive to attract supporters.
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Lewis, Herbert S. “Neighbors, Friends, and Kinsmen: Principles of Social Organization among Cushitic-Speaking Peoples of Ethiopia.” Ethnology 13 (1974): 145–157.
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Lewis points to the relative unimportance of kinship and descent as organizing principles for activity and political organization among numerous peoples of southern Ethiopia for whom locality, friendship, and formal associations play more of a role.
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Little, Kenneth L. The Mende of Sierra Leone: A West African People in Transition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951.
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This volume is of particular interest because it portrays one of those peoples in West Africa for whom secret societies (poro, in particular) are of primary importance. These organizations provide the sanctions for nearly every sphere of life and behavior, including educational, ritual, sexual, military. They are central to social control and the dynamics of chiefship among the Mende and others.
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Wilson, Monica (Hunter). Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages. London: Oxford University Press, 1951.
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Monica Wilson’s study of the Nyakyusa north of Lake Nyasa based on research she and her late husband, Godfrey, carried out in 1934–1938. The Nyakyusa have (or had) an interestingly different arrangement of villages of age-mates composed without regard to kinship and descent but putting the highest value on “good company” and the wisdom that comes from discussion among equals.
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African Political Systems and Politics

The British anthropologists working in Africa encountered chiefs, kings, and complex political entities and structures unlike any that Radcliffe-Brown or Malinowski had to deal with. These, and their alternate counterparts, the stateless or “segmentary” systems, without evident sources of power and authority, became a major early theoretical concern. In the late 1960s it became fashionable to consider British (functionalist) anthropological interest in the maintenance of order as in the service of colonial rule. It is doubtful, however, that many colonial officers read such papers, but it is certain that the subject owes its origins to the theoretical problem set for sociology—and Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski—by Emile Durkheim, no tool of colonial rule. The following publications are but the slightest sample of the extensive literature that resulted, some of which concentrate on trying to understand the systems as they were before colonial rule while others are concerned with change under colonialism.

Overall Perspectives

The works in this section represent attempts to bring some order to the subject. Balandier 1970 presents an overview of anthropological work and ideas about politics and the growth of inequality drawing primarily on African materials, while Mair 1977 gives a synthetic view of political systems only in East Africa, and Schapera 1956 draws upon the author’s long experience with governments and politics in southern Africa. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940 produced the edited work that set the terms for political anthropology in British anthropology for the next two decades, while Brown 1951 and Gluckman 1963 complicate the story presented by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, each in their own way. The extensive bibliography compiled in Lewis 1972 may still be of use. The books Comaroff and Roberts 1981 and Moore 1986 focus on the related issue of “law.”

Balandier, Georges. Political Anthropology. New York: Pantheon, 1970.
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A leading French anthropologist’s contribution to the understanding of power and inequality in societies with particular reference to African cases.
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Brown, Paula. “Patterns of Authority in West Africa.” Africa 21.4 (1951): 261–278.
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Brown points out that there are more systems of societal regulation, authority, and political structure among stateless societies than the segmentary lineage systems featured in Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940. Drawing upon material from West African states and stateless societies, Brown presents a broader view of sources of sanctions and authority including kin groups, associations such as craft guilds, market women, cooperative work groups, village councils, and secret societies.
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Comaroff, John L., and Simon Roberts. Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981.
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This study of disputes and conflict processes, based on long research in two Tswana areas, is a general contribution to the “anthropology of law,” challenging some of its basic tenets. The authors present a model of a dynamic social world marked by both ideology and practice, by system and human intentions.
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Fortes, Meyer, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, eds. African Political Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press (for the International African Institute), 1940.
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The editors of this most influential volume in the corpus of British social anthropology in Africa categorize political systems into states and stateless societies (“segmentary systems”). The former have rulers and governmental structures that provide sources of power and authority while the latter do not. Acephalous societies, without overall integration, were said to maintain order through the balance of equivalent kin-based “segments.” The book presents the political systems of five states and three stateless societies.
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Gluckman, Max. Custom and Conflict in Africa. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963.
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These essays present Gluckman’s theoretical modification of structural-functionalism, adding the element of conflict to complicate the picture of social cohesion. His thesis: people quarrel in terms of various allegiances but are restrained from violence through still other allegiances and customs. Such conflicts may even lead to increased social solidarity. He discusses “the feud,” hostility to authority, family relations, witchcraft accusations, and even “the colour-bar.”
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Lewis, Herbert S. “African Political Systems: A Bibliographical Inventory of Anthropological Writings—I & II.” Behavior Science Notes 7.3–4 (1972).
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An extensive bibliography including many of the works relevant to the topic at the end of the 1960s.
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Mair, Lucy. Primitive Government: A Study of Traditional Political Systems in Eastern Africa. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.
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Despite the now-unacceptable title, Mair’s work was a shrewd assessment of the variety of political systems to be found in East Africa.
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Moore, Sally Falk. Social Facts and Fabrications “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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Moore’s book is at once a rich and detailed history of a century of changes in economy, politics, and law among the Chagga and a contribution to understanding of processual analysis and “legal anthropology.” She tells “a tale of competition for property and progeny, a tale of perjury, posturing, and violence” (p. 12).
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Schapera, Isaac. Government and Politics in Tribal Societies. London: Watts, 1956.
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Schapera compares both formal structures and the play of politics and power among a number of societies of different sizes and scopes in southern Africa. Despite numerous problems with the analysis, the author added new dimensions to the then-current discourse on African political systems, recognizing politics as more than a matter of maintaining order.
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Stateless or Acephalous Societies

The works in this section deal with the processes of politics in stateless societies. Of these, only Lewis 1963 on the Somali presents a largely kin-based system dependent on lineages and clans (as well as compacts between descent groups). A related pastoral group, the Borana Oromo of Ethiopia, have quite a different way of political life, as reported by Bassi 2005, while Spencer 2004 describes yet another set of dynamics from a third pastoral group in East Africa. Douglas 1963, Forde 1961, and Ottenberg 1971 discuss political processes and structures among three different farming communities in Central and West Africa.

Bassi, Marco. Decisions in the Shade: Political and Juridical Processes among the Oromo-Borana. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2005.
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Marco Bassi presents a vivid picture of politics and juridical proceedings in the 1980s among the pastoral Borana (a major group of the widespread Oromo people who inhabit the Ethiopia-Kenya borderlands). Although under the ultimate rule of two states, they rule themselves through assemblies, ritual and elected leaders, and the generational class system often called gaada.
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Douglas, Mary. The Lele of the Kasai. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.
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Although under Belgian rule in the Congo, the Lele are another example of a people whose own society lacked people of authority and power—in contrast to their neighbors, who had powerful chiefs. Mary Douglas’s study deals with the reasons for and dynamics of this sociopolitical phenomenon and presents a well-rounded ethnography of the social, economic, and religious life of the Lele.
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Forde, Daryll. “The Governmental Roles of Associations among the Yakö.” Africa 31.4 (1961): 309–323.
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Forde’s paper added an important corrective to the overly simple dichotomy of political “types” proposed by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard by pointing to the significance of associations—societal organizations based primarily neither on kinship nor on the authority of a state or even a paramount chief. Political activity can be achieved through various sorts of associations.
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Lewis, Ioan M. A Pastoral Democracy: A Study of Pastoralism and Politics among the Northern Somali of the Horn of Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.
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A study of the principles and dynamics of social and political life among Somali herders, in arid country with unreliable water sources, whose clans, political alliances (contracts), and feuds continue to have importance even in the current tumultuous times in that country.
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Ottenberg, Simon. Leadership and Authority in an African Society: The Afikpo Village-Group. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971.
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A detailed study of the complex (but nonstate) social and political system that includes age organization and double descent, significant topics in African social anthropology.
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Spencer, Paul. The Maasai of Matapato: A Study of Rituals of Rebellion. London: Routledge, 2004.
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This is both a detailed study of age organization and its rituals among the Maasai of southern Kenya, and a study of “rituals of rebellion” inspired by Gluckman 1963 (cited under Overall Perspectives). Spencer discusses the centrality of the age organization for the relations between men and women, younger men and seniors, and the management of economic life and social order.
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African Kingdoms and Chiefs

There were a great many states (kingdoms, powerful chiefdoms) in precolonial Africa, and while some were overthrown others were maintained or even strengthened by colonial rule—often through “indirect rule.” Smith 1960 is a major study of a Hausa chiefdom and its varying fortunes over 150 years, while Lewis 1965 offers a less detailed account of a kingdom taken over by the Ethiopian Empire rather than the British or French. The studies Busia 1951, Fallers 1956, and Richards 1960 deal with “traditional” authorities coping with the demands of their constituents and their own colonial overlords, while Krige and Krige 1943 and Kuper 1947 deal with two political systems in southern Africa ruled by different styles of rule (but under South African and British overlords).

Busia, Kofi Abrefa. The Position of the Chief in the Political System of the Modern Ashanti. London: Oxford University Press, 1951.
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A pioneering problem-oriented study by one of Radcliffe-Brown’s first PhD students at Oxford. Busia was Ashanti himself; both an academic and a politician, he became prime minister of Ghana in 1969.
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Fallers, Lloyd A. A Bantu Bureaucracy: A Study of Integration and Conflict in the Political Institutions of an East African People. Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer, 1956.
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A study of political structure and dynamics among the Soga of Uganda. Fallers is concerned with the complex relationships between corporate lineages, chieftainship, and patron-client relations in the traditional polities, on the one hand, and the way these related to the colonial bureaucracy on the other.
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Krige, Eileen J., and Jacob D. Krige. The Realm of a Rain-Queen: A Study of the Pattern of Lovedu Society. London: Oxford University Press, 1943.
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The Lovedu (Lobedu) sociopolitical system represents a variant of “divine kingship” (often discussed in evolutionary anthropology), as a largely hidden monarch, hedged about with taboos, exercises considerable power through rituals and belief. In this case power comes from the belief in the queen’s power to control rain for the benefit of her supporters and to the detriment of her enemies.
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Kuper, Hilda. An African Aristocracy: Rank among the Swazi. London: Oxford University Press, 1947.
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Based on fieldwork begun in 1934–1936, Hilda Kuper presents a detailed ethnography of a complex kingdom whose ruling elite and royal family enjoyed great power under colonialism—and still do as the elite of the independent country of Swaziland.
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Lewis, Herbert S. A Galla Monarchy: Jimma Abba Jifar, Ethiopia, 1830–1932. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.
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A study of a kingdom incorporated into the Empire of Ethiopia in 1932, stressing the political dynamics that produced the state and those conducive to strong central rule. Employs ideas of Max Weber about dynamics of rule in monarchical (patrimonial) states. The ethnonym “Galla” is now rejected but it was the only acceptable one at the time of publication. Republished with an afterword as Jimma Abba Jifar: An Oromo Monarchy, Ethiopia 1830–1932 (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2001).
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Richards, Audrey I., ed. East African Chiefs. London: Faber & Faber, 1960.
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Fourteen essays detailing the changes in the political system wrought by the colonial administrations and the contemporary situation of “chiefs” in British East African colonies, shortly before independence. These accounts show the various complexities of the situations both the chiefs and the administrations faced (cf. Busia 1951 and Fallers 1956).
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Smith, Michael G. Government in Zazzau, 1800–1950. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.
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This study of government in the Hausa chiefdom of Zaria in Northern Nigeria is a remarkably detailed comparative historical and anthropological study of the political change over a century and a half, first as part of a Hausa state, then as a vassal of the Fulani sultanate of Sokoto, and then as a Native Administration under the British. It is also intended as a work of theory regarding the nature of politics and political change.
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Southall, Aidan W. Alur Society: A Study in Processes and Types of Domination. Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer, 1956.
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This is a study of the processes by which a political entity on the border of Uganda and the Belgian Congo expanded as more peoples accepted Alur chiefs. Noted for the introduction of the notion of “segmentary state” as a corrective to the overly simple dichotomy found in Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, Southall introduced ideas from Max Weber, which was then uncommon.
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Individuals, Education, Psychology

From the 1930s to the 1960s, British social anthropology eschewed works focused on individuals and psychological concerns to a great extent, though it was much more common in American anthropology. Therefore, the literature is less rich in these cases, but here are a few works—generally not by British anthropologists. LeVine 1966 was based on the then-current notion of “achievement motivation” in studies of “modernization,” while Raum 1997 and Read 1959 focus on education in two different societies. Smith 1981 and Shostak 1981 recorded the very different lives of two women in Africa, while Field 1960 called on the author’s experiences as a psychiatrist to report on culture and mental illness in Ghana.

Field, M. J. Search for Security: An Ethno-Psychiatric Study of Rural Ghana. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1960.
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This work is by a teacher-turned-psychiatrist with long experience in Ghana and the ability to speak the Ashanti language. It is a study of mental illness, featuring case studies of disturbed people who brought their problems to shrines to have them tended to by Ashanti healers.
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LeVine, Robert A. Dreams and Deeds: Achievement Motivation in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
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LeVine surveyed student essays and dream reports of Hausa, Yoruba, and Ibo secondary school boys, drawing on McClelland’s “achievement motivation.” He found differences in reported values and motivations among members of the three groups that he connected to variations in the “status mobility system” of each people. These systems were linked to other aspects of culture, including child-rearing practices.
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Raum, Otto F. Chaga Childhood: A Description of Indigenous Education in an East African Tribe. London: James Curry, 1997.
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This is a detailed study of the process of education among a people in colonial Tanganyika, following the individual through the life cycle. Raum takes “education” in the broadest sense, involving all aspects of preparation for life in that society and culture. Originally published in 1940, this edition has an introduction by Sally Falk Moore.
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Read, Margaret. Children of Their Fathers: Growing Up among the Ngoni of Nyasaland. London: Methuen, 1959.
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According to Read’s study, the Ngoni people of Nyasaland (now Malawi) in the era before independence, had a strong sense of themselves as a people with distinctive values and ethics and were determined to train every child to live by these precepts. This is a study of how Ngoni adults go about training their infants to grow up with the desired cultural qualities.
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Riesman, Paul. Freedom and Social Life in Fulani: An Introspective Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
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The first half of this “reflexive” work consists of an ethnographic portrait of Fulani culture and structure—more discursively and emphasizing the author’s own role in the collection of the material than usual. The second half, “Life as Lived,” deals more deeply with feelings and realities of social interaction, and especially with what the author sees as attitudes toward “freedom”—his own and theirs. Riesman frequently draws on French writers and psychological approaches.
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Shostak, Marjorie. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
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Conversations between a !Kung (Bushman) woman and an American woman, inspiring to some readers, heavily criticized by others, but widely used in anthropology and women’s studies courses.
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Smith, Mary F. Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
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An early example of a “personal document” in African anthropology, Mary Smith recorded the life story of an old woman who could recall the days of slave raids and inter-kingdom warfare before British colonialism. She tells of her own life and marriages and about the lives of other Hausa women. Originally 1945.
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African Religions

There is no end to the works concerned with African worship, spirituality, belief, cosmology, ritual, magic, witchcraft, and all the other manifestations that we connect with that word. In addition to articles and books that focus primarily on belief and practice, any ethnography is likely to include discussions of these topics—that can impinge on any aspect of life. The works Lienhardt 1961, Middleton 1961, Griaule 1965, and Turner 1968 report on central aspects of religion among the Dinka, Lugbara, Dogon, and Ndembu, respectively, while the collection Forde 1954 contains essays on “the cosmological ideas and social values” of nine different peoples by as many authors. Similarly, Middleton and Winter 1963 and Behrend and Luig 1999 contain numerous articles about the important topics of witchcraft and sorcery as well as the modernity of spirit possession in Africa today. Sundkler 1948 and Peel 1968 address the important subject of independent Christian churches in Africa.

Behrend, Heike, and Ute Luig, eds. Spirit Possession, Modernity, and Power in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
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Belief in the power of spirits to possess individuals—and to harm and help them—is currently undergoing a worldwide diffusion. These ten papers deal with a wide variety of recent manifestations of this phenomenon in Africa as beliefs and practices respond to new influences, problems, and circumstances.
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Forde, Daryll, ed. African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples. London: Oxford University Press (for the International African Institute), 1954.
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Studies of the ideas, beliefs, traditions, myths, and worldviews of nine different and distinctive peoples: Lele of the Congo, Abaluyia of Kenya, Lovedu of the Transvaal (South Africa), Dogon of Mali (then the French Sudan), Mende of Sierra Leone, Shilluk of the Sudan, the kingdom of Ruanda, the Ashanti of Ghana (then still the Gold Coast), and the Fon of Dahomey.
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Griaule, Marcel. Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. With an introduction by Germaine Dieterlen. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
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The French ethnographer Marcel Griaule and his collaborators built an elaborate “key” to Dogon culture, social life, belief, and cosmology—and much more—based on interviews with a Dogon sage named Ogotomêlli. This origin and style of this work are generally at odds with the Anglophone tradition represented in the bibliography and has been widely criticized from many perspectives.
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Lienhardt, Godfrey. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
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This influential work about an African religion contains implications for understanding belief and practice in any culture. Lienhardt presents a rich and nuanced description and analysis of the beliefs, thought, and ritual practices of this egalitarian cattle-keeping people who live an insecure existence in a harsh land. The author deals with aspects of skepticism and ambiguity as well as faith.
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Middleton, John. Lugbara Religion: Ritual and Authority among an East African People. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
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A classic of British “structural-functionalism” from the 1950s, Middleton’s study examines ancestor cults and political dynamics in a society that lacked central control before colonial rule in the late 19th century. The author is able to follow the dynamics of competition for authority in families and lineages by ambitious men as this is worked out through rituals and manipulations of the ancestor cults.
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Middleton, John, and E. H. Winter, eds. Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.
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Essays about these important phenomena, comparing similarities and differences in their manifestations in ten different East African societies.
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Peel, J. Y. D. Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.
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Peel presents a wide-ranging and detailed study of two of the many independent Christian churches found among African people as a contribution to the sociology of religion. Peel investigates and stresses the beliefs, understandings, and motivations of individuals in the origins and development of the churches, as well as culture and historical circumstances.
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Sundkler, Bengt. Bantu Prophets in South Africa. London: Lutterworth, 1948.
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The classic early study of separatist Protestant churches, by a missionary with sociological interest and sophistication.
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Turner, Victor. The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.
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One of Turner’s numerous works on ritual, symbols, social organization, and social dramas, employing the “extended case” method as well as analyses of symbols. A ritual of affliction involves a crisis arising when a sick or unlucky or unfortunate person is assumed to be “afflicted by a shade,” calling for divination and ritual to restore well-being.
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Studies of Change

We recognize that societies and cultures are always changing, at some times more quickly than at others, and African historiography has thrived since the middle of the 20th century as this fact was brought to center stage. We realize that what we think of as “traditional” because it was described by an outsider in 1888 or 1928 may have been a relatively recent development. Nevertheless, we are also in a position to witness—or reconstruct—changes that have been occurring since anthropologists first encountered and recorded the lives of peoples. There is no limit to the causes of changes and varieties of outcomes. Here are a number of studies of change selected from the hundreds that could be cited. The edited volumes Bascom and Herskovits 1959 and Southall 1960 contain a variety of articles dealing with various aspects of change, while Melville Herskovits himself attempted a synthetic statement about the nature and course of change, foregrounding “the human factor”: Herskovits 1962. Colson 1971 published the author’s first findings regarding the impact of the Kariba Dam on the Tonga people she had been studying, and David Brokensha published his findings on change in a Ghanaian town in Brokensha 1966. Schapera 1947 is a study of the impact of migrant labor on tribal life in Bechuanaland, while Watson 1958 is a more detailed study of the impact of migrant labor in Northern Rhodesia. Lan 1985 reports on the use of spirit possession and belief in a revolution.

Bascom, William, and Melville J. Herskovits, eds. Continuity and Change in African Cultures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
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Fifteen students of Melville J. Herskovits contributed essays to this volume that consider the problem of stability and change. Of particular interest are the essays by Simon Ottenberg, “Ibo Receptivity to Change,” and Harold K. Schneider, “Pakot Resistance to Change.”
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Brokensha, David W. Social Change at Larteh, Ghana. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966.
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Based on observations over a three-year period, beginning in 1960, Brokensha reports that despite schools, Christianity, cash crops, and independence, in this Ghanaian town “old and new forms have blended, achieving accommodation in nearly all areas of social life”(p. 269).
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Colson, Elizabeth. The Social Consequences of Resettlement: The Impact of the Kariba Resettlement upon the Gwembe Tonga. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press for Institute for African Studies, University of Zambia, 1971.
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In this volume, Elizabeth Colson presents her findings on the changes in the lives of the Gwembe Tonga that resulted in their resettlement in the wake of the flooding of their homeland. (See Colson 1960, cited under Emphasizing Kinship, for the “before” to which this is the “after.”) This was a contribution to the growing literature on resettlement by Colson, who carried out long-term research among the Tonga for many decades.
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Herskovits, Melville J. The Human Factor in Changing Africa. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.
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This was an unusual one-man attempt to generalize about the state of Africa on the verge of independence. From 1931, his first visit to Africa under full-blown colonialism, until 1962, as African countries became independent and he was invited to their celebrations, Herskovits had been deeply absorbed in the subject of Africa and its peoples.
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Lan, David. Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. London: James Curry, 1985.
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During the struggle to overthrow the white settler government of Southern Rhodesia (1966–1980), the Shona guerillas of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) were aided by the ancestral spirits of the chiefs of the past through the mediation of spirit mediums. Without that cooperation, the rebels would not have gotten the support of the people.
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Mitchell, J. Clyde. The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1956.
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Based on observation of the popular organization and performance of dances by African men working in the towns of Northern Rhodesia in the 1950s, Mitchell published this essay considering the extent to which “tribe” was meaningful as the basis for identification and social action in the towns versus its importance in the rural areas. This was, and perhaps still is, an important topic in African anthropology.
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Schapera, Isaac. Migrant Labour and Tribal Life: A Study of Conditions in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. London: Oxford University Press, 1947.
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A multifaceted study of the realities and results of the migration of men for work in the mines and industries of South Africa. The men—up to 40 percent of a community at any one time—are driven to migrate in order to earn money for taxes and the goods they want and need, and because of the poverty and lack of opportunity at home. The author discusses the impacts of migration on their home communities and society.
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Southall, Aidan W., ed. Social Change in Modern Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.
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This volume consists of a collection of papers prepared for an international conference on the topic of “kinship, status, and neighborhood under modern economic conditions in Tropical Africa.” After an introductory summary by the editor, there are eighteen pieces dealing with various cases of social change throughout the continent, in both English- and French-speaking countries.
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Watson, William. Tribal Cohesion in a Money Economy: A Study of the Mambwe People of Northern Rhodesia. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1958.
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Where earlier observers had stressed the destructive aspect of migrant labor that removed men from their farming families and communities, Watson found that the patrilineal Mambwe of Northern Rhodesia were able to maintain their cohesion and their institutions. They could effectively farm without the wage-earning men, who would return to work the land, and their ethnic identity and institutions, including the position of the chiefs, remained strong.
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Life in Cities

Africans are living increasingly in urban agglomerations—cities—as is true of populations all over the world. There is a rich literature dealing with African urbanization and life in cities. Aronson 1978, Barnes 1986, and Cohen 1969 all offer different perspectives on the life of newcomers to Nigerian cities, while Epstein 1958 and Powdermaker 1962 do something similar for urban life in the “Copperbelt” of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in the 1960s. Little 1965 studied social change via voluntary associations in West African cities, while Oppong 1981 tells us about the life of senior civil servants in Ghana. Marris 1961, a study of the effects of “urban renewal” in Lagos, offers yet another cautionary note.

Aronson, Dan R. The City Is Our Farm: Seven Migrant Ijebu Yoruba Families. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1978.
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A view of adaptation to urban life in Ibadan, Nigeria through the use of “personal documents,” reports by and about individuals’ lives and reactions. Aronson chose seven families to portray the variety of responses and conditions of these newcomers to city life.
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Barnes, Sandra T. Patrons and Powers: Creating Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press (for the International African Institute), 1986.
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A study of the pragmatic politics of ordinary people and aspiring political leaders making their way through the complexities of urban life and the vagaries of changing and unstable political regimes.
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Cohen, Abner. Custom and Politics in Urban Africa. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
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A theoretically rich study of networks of Hausa traders in Ibadan and other towns (cities) of Northern Nigeria. Viewing ethnic groups as interest groups, Cohen presents the case of a group drawing upon and further developing its “traditional customs,” norms, symbols, and ideologies in such a way as to enhance its identity and exclusiveness—and its power—within the ethnically and politically complex society.
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Epstein, A. L. Politics in an Urban African Community. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1958.
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One of a series of studies of economic, political, and social change on the Copperbelt from the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, this one dealing with developing political institutions and class and other distinctions in Luanshya, (then) Northern Rhodesia. A work rich in accounts of numerous activities and organizations (municipal and mine administrations, unions, councils, welfare societies, court, African National Congress, and “tribal” interests), Epstein emphasizes inconsistencies and the complex ways in which these played out.
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Little, Kenneth L. West African Urbanization: A Study of Voluntary Associations in Social Change. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1965.
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This volume deals with the significance of voluntary associations as adaptive mechanisms aiding immigrants from rural areas to adjust to and settle in the heterogeneous cities. Such associations include tribal associations, new religious groups, “friendly societies,” and associations organized by occupations or for recreation and entertainment. Little considers the significance of age, the position of women, and ethnicity and social class.
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Marris, Peter. Family and Social Change in an African City: A Study of Rehousing in Lagos. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.
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A study of cultural change based on the impact of a slum clearance project in Lagos, Nigeria. Marris writes of the way that “the design of a house, the layout of a street, mould social behavior, and influence very directly the way in which people live” (p. ix).
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Oppong, Christine. Middle Class African Marriage: A Family Study of Ghanaian Senior Civil Servants. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981.
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A study of marriage among Akan elites in Ghana in the 1960s involving the tensions that arise between the demands of the powerful matrilineal kinship system and the changing expectations and desires of professional men and women. Oppong presents realities different from those of rural agricultural life. The situation of wives—their “struggle for security,” their resources and decision-making—is of special interest. First published 1974.
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Powdermaker, Hortense. Copper Town: Changing Africa: The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt. New York and Evanston, IL: Harper and Row, 1962.
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Powdermaker, an American, was a member of the first cohort of students of Malinowski at the LSE. She carried out research in Melanesia, the “Deep South,” “Hollywood the Dream Factory”—and in the terrain of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute on the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). Her “humanistic” approach is rather different from that of Gluckman and his colleagues.
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The Question of Colonialism and Anthropology Under Fire

After 1968 it became conventional wisdom that anthropology was the child and handmaiden of colonialism and that British anthropology served colonial governments. But this is was not generally the case. As Asad 1973 averred, “it is a mistake to view social anthropology in the colonial era as primarily an aid to colonial administration, or as the simple reflection of colonial ideology” (p. 18) and “the role of anthropologists in maintaining structures of imperial domination has, despite slogans to the contrary, usually been trivial.” With relatively few exceptions, the contributions of anthropologists to the study of the peoples of Africa were motivated primarily by the drive for knowledge, by efforts to contribute to the professional development of a new discipline, and by the desire for personal advancement in academia. More studies were done in the hope of alleviating distress and suffering of people under colonial rule than were done with the intention of maintaining empire. The sympathies of these students were with the peoples they studied and they were frequently opposed the policies of the colonial powers if not to colonialism itself. But there is a substantial literature affirming the guilt. The article Apter 1999 is a relatively late variation on the theme, while the edited volume Asad 1973 and the article Lewis 1973 were among the earliest. The view of Mudimbe 1988 is more complex and theoretical but has inspired other critics, while Burton 1992, Lewis 2014, Moore 1994 (cited under General Overviews), and Tilley 2011 offer a variety of exculpatory arguments. Obbo 2006 has a more recent discussion of the value of anthropology, addressing skeptical African scholars.

Apter, Andrew. “Africa, Empire, and Anthropology: A Philological Exploration of Anthropology’s Heart of Darkness.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 577–598.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.577Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The author condemns anthropologists who worked in Africa in pre-postmodern times in the strongest terms, building his case around the egregious little book by C. G. Seligman, The Races of Africa, and a nasty episode in the life of the 19th-century German/Russian explorer, Wilhelm Junker. Claiming guilt by association, he finds the image of “the heart of darkness” appropriate for anthropology’s involvement with Africa.
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Asad, Talal, ed. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press, 1973.
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This volume is usually cited when authors state that anthropology is the offspring of colonialism. Although several of the articles in it do argue for the complicity of anthropologists (Feuchtwang, Lackner, Faris, Ahmad), others offer exculpation (James, Brown, Willis).
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Burton, John W. “Representing Africa: Colonial Anthropology Revisited.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 27.3–4 (1992): 181–201.
DOI: 10.1177/002190969202700301Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
John Burton’s article presents a powerful case for the innocence of British anthropologists.
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Lewis, Diane. “Colonialism and Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 14 (1973): 581–602.
DOI: 10.1086/201393Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An early condemnation of anthropology for its presumed involvement with colonialism. As is the custom with major articles in Current Anthropology, Lewis’s piece is followed by a number of commentaries, some agreeing with her arguments, some disagreeing.
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Lewis, Herbert S. In Defense of Anthropology: An Investigation of the Critique of Anthropology. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Press, 2014.
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Chapter 4, “Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?” presents the case for the negative. British social anthropology arrived on the scene too late to be of use to empire and the colonial service was generally not interested in their help. American anthropologists didn’t arrive in Africa until after World War II, by which time colonial rule was coming to an end.
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Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
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A book in the mold of Foucault and Said by a professor of literature, about how “constructed” anthropological discourses distort ideas about Africans and “otherness.” A complex work, drawing a lot from French works but generalizing about “primitivist anthropology” and the author’s own view of “Africanity.” The author writes little about the works listed in this bibliography.
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Obbo, Christine. “But We Know It All! African Perspectives on Anthropological Knowledge.” In African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice. Edited by Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills, and Mustafa Babikar, 154–169. Dakar, Senegal: CODRESIA, 2006.
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An interesting recent work discussing the reaction of “educated Africans” to the idea of anthropology and responding to their concerns.
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Tilley, Helen. Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226803487.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Tilley analyzes various scientific enterprises in British-controlled Africa. Chapter 6 presents a well-researched and interesting account of the work of British ethnographers.
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Postmodern and Postcolonial Studies

Anthropology was deeply affected by the intellectual trends of postmodernism, postcolonialism, post-structuralism, women’s studies, and other identity studies that followed the great transformation of academia after 1968. This resulted in a denial of the validity—even the innocence—of approaches proclaiming themselves “scientific” or “positivist”; earlier work was seen as at least inspired and tainted by colonialism if not in league with it. This resulted in a prominent new discourse dedicated to the unmasking of other discourses—certainly those of earlier anthropology along with discourses about Africa of many sorts. When not unmasking the evils of earlier anthropology, the “post” studies have been devoted to the unmasking of domination wherever found and the celebration of “resistance.” This involves a greater emphasis on speech of various sorts, on “texts”—written or otherwise—and on the interpretation of symbols and rituals seeking evidence of hidden domination as well as acts and words signifying agency and resistance. There are many studies of the situations of women, and identity, and self-image, and the body, in preference to studies of systems of kinship or political structures for themselves. Other research involved studies of the works of earlier anthropologists and discovering how these works increased the power of the dominant at the expense of the poor, marginalized, women, “Other,” etc. The political and intellectual dislocations of the late 1960s and beyond left anthropologists with many dilemmas, none more troubling than question of fieldwork, the fundamental practice of ethnography: how could anthropologists justify going among a people lacking in equivalent resources and power, “study” them, take away information that makes the anthropologist’s career but may do nothing for the subjects, perhaps even harming them? This “crisis of representation” is well represented by Kevin Dwyer’s Moroccan Dialogues (Dwyer 1982). Ferguson 1994 is highly acclaimed as an original critique of “development discourse” drawing upon Michel Foucault’s notions, while Comaroff 1985 puts religious change into a postmodern form. Apter 1992, an analysis of “the hermeneutics of power in Yoruba society,” is a good example of postmodern style, as is Stoller 1995, a book about the well-worn subject of spirit possession which adds such postmodern and postcolonial elements as “embodied memories,” mimesis, power, and the discourses of resistance to colonialism. Boddy 1989 adds a detailed contribution to the discussion of spirit possession today, in the northern Sudan.

Apter, Andrew. Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
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Following a Yoruba kingdom from the 19th century to 1983, the author interrogates Yoruba ritual, and interpretations of ritual, and finds that that these can be critical practices capable of reconfiguring power relations and transforming dominant discourses. The author is keenly aware of the critique of anthropology and the problems of hegemony and resistance but argues that an interpretive strategy of “the hermeneutics of power” can illuminate the deep hidden discourses.
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Boddy, Janice. Wombs and Alien Spirits. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
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A postmodern and reflexive view of spirit possession among Muslims in the northern Sudan. More than just a “weapon of the weak,” Boddy presents the “Zar Cult” as a form of symbolic play and allegorical performance through which women express themselves, reflect and comment upon their world, as they are possessed by spirits of long-dead holy men, warriors, “Gypsies,” homosexual men, Europeans, and other exotic characters.
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Comaroff, Jean. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
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Jean Comaroff’s postmodern and postcolonial treatment of an old topic in South African anthropology: reaction to conquest. It is study of cultural domination and resistance, consciousness and agency, “human action and structural constraint,” with particular reference to ritual and the independent Zion Christian Church.
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Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff, eds. Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
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Essays from the “Africanist Circle” of the University of Chicago directed to ritual, power, and modernity. Ritual, rather than a conservative force for social continuity and political authority, as the editors believe “traditional” anthropologists believed, is re-envisioned as “a site and a means of experimental practice, of subversive poetics, of creative tension and transformative action . . .” (p. xxix). Cases of witchcraft, spirit possession, and secret societies follow
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Dwyer, Kevin. Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
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One of several similar contemporary books decrying the inequalities of power inherent in fieldwork in Africa and elsewhere, the author is deeply troubled by the matter of domination and the invocation of science and pretense to objectivity. It is a document in the development of the notion of “reflexivity” and the worry about “complicity” in current anthropological discourse.
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Ferguson, James. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
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Ferguson’s study of the efforts at “development” and, especially “development discourse” in Lesotho, unmasks various misunderstandings among the many players involved but, at a deeper level, uncovers the way in which the discourses and the development activities intensify rather than lessen inequalities in power and well-being.
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Stoller, Paul. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. London: Routledge, 1995.
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The Hauka are spirits that mimic European colonials through the Songhay performers who act as their mediums. Paul Stoller, himself an adept, considers the phenomenon of Hauka as spirit possession that embodies cultural memory and as a historical and political movement of resistance to colonialism that still exists as a source of power.