Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Study of Africa
- LAST REVIEWED: 30 July 2014
- LAST MODIFIED: 30 July 2014
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0141
- LAST REVIEWED: 30 July 2014
- LAST MODIFIED: 30 July 2014
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0141
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.
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.
Gulliver, Philip. “Anthropology.” In The African World: A Survey of Social Research. Edited by Robert A. Lystad, 57–105. New York: Praeger, 1965.
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.
Hammond-Tooke, W. D. Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists 1920–1990. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997.
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.
Hart, Keith. “The Social Anthropology of West Africa.” Annual Review of Anthropology 14 (1985): 243–272.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.14.100185.001331
Hart gives a useful overview of social anthropological research and publication in West Africa from the early days of professional anthropology until the 1980s.
Kuper, Adam. Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School, 1922–1972. New York: Pica, 1973.
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.
Moore, Sally F. Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994.
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.
Ntarangwi, Mwenda, David Mills, and Mustafa Babiker. African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice. London: Zed Books, 2006.
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.
Schumaker, Lyn. Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
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.
Werbner, Richard. “The Manchester School in South-Central Africa.” Annual Review of Anthropology 13 (1984): 157–185.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.13.100184.001105
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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Article
- Achebe, Chinua
- Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
- Africa in the Cold War
- African Masculinities
- African Political Parties
- African Refugees
- African Socialism
- Africans in the Atlantic World
- Agricultural History
- Aid and Economic Development
- Alcohol
- Algeria
- Angola
- Arab Spring
- Arabic Language and Literature
- Archaeology and the Study of Africa
- Archaeology of Central Africa
- Archaeology of Eastern Africa
- Archaeology of Southern Africa
- Archaeology of West Africa
- Architecture
- Art, Art History, and the Study of Africa
- Arts of Central Africa
- Arts of Western Africa
- Asante and the Akan and Mossi States
- Bantu Expansion
- Benin (Dahomey)
- Boer War
- Botswana (Bechuanaland)
- Brink, André
- British Colonial Rule in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Burkina Faso (Upper Volta)
- Burundi
- Business History
- Cameroon
- Cape Verde
- Central African Republic
- Children and Childhood
- China in Africa
- Christianity, African
- Cinema and Television
- Citizenship
- Cocoa
- Coetzee, J.M.
- Colonial Rule, Belgian
- Colonial Rule, French
- Colonial Rule, German
- Colonial Rule, Italian
- Colonial Rule, Portuguese
- Communism, Marxist-Leninism, and Socialism in Africa
- Comoro Islands
- Conflict in the Sahel
- Conflict Management and Resolution
- Congo, Republic of (Congo Brazzaville)
- Congo River Basin States
- Congo Wars
- Conservation and Wildlife
- Coups in Africa
- Crime and the Law in Colonial Africa
- Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire)
- Development of Early Farming and Pastoralism
- Diaspora, Kongo Atlantic
- Disease and African Society
- Djibouti
- Dyula
- Early States And State Formation In Africa
- Early States of the Western Sudan
- Eastern Africa and the South Asian Diaspora
- Economic Anthropology
- Economic History
- Economy, Informal
- Education
- Education and the Study of Africa
- Egypt
- Egypt, Ancient
- Environment
- Environmental History
- Equatorial Guinea
- Eritrea
- Ethiopia
- Ethnicity and Politics
- Europe and Africa, Medieval
- Family Planning
- Famine
- Farah, Nuruddin
- Feminism
- Food and Food Production
- Fugard, Athol
- Fulani
- Gabon
- Gambia
- Genocide in Rwanda
- Geography and the Study of Africa
- Ghana
- Gikuyu (Kikuyu) People of Kenya
- Globalization
- Gordimer, Nadine
- Great Lakes States of Eastern Africa, The
- Guinea
- Guinea-Bissau
- Hausa
- Hausa Language and Literature
- Health, Medicine, and the Study of Africa
- Historiography and Methods of African History
- History and the Study of Africa
- Horn of Africa and South Asia
- Igbo
- Ijo/Niger Delta
- Image of Africa, The
- Indian Ocean and Middle Eastern Slave Trades
- Indian Ocean Trade
- Invention of Tradition
- Iron Working and the Iron Age in Africa
- Islam in Africa
- Islamic Politics
- Kenya
- Kongo and the Coastal States of West Central Africa
- Language and the Study of Africa
- Law and the Study of Sub-Saharan Africa
- Law, Islamic
- Lesotho
- LGBTI Minorities and Queer Politics in Eastern and Souther...
- Liberia
- Libya
- Literature and the Study of Africa
- Lord's Resistance Army
- Maasai and Maa-Speaking Peoples of East Africa, The
- Madagascar
- Malawi
- Mali
- Mande
- Mau Mau
- Mauritania
- Media and Journalism
- Military History
- Mining
- Modern African Literature in European Languages
- Morocco
- Mozambique
- Music, Dance, and the Study of Africa
- Music, Traditional
- Nairobi
- Namibia
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
- Niger
- Nigeria
- Nollywood
- North Africa from 600 to 1800
- North Africa to 600
- Northeastern African States, c. 1000 BCE-1800 CE
- Obama and Kenya
- Oman, the Gulf, and East Africa
- Oral and Written Traditions, African
- Oromo
- Ousmane Sembène
- Pastoralism
- Police and Policing
- Political Science and the Study of Africa
- Political Systems, Precolonial
- Popular Culture and the Study of Africa
- Popular Music
- Population and Demography
- Postcolonial Sub-Saharan African Politics
- Religion and Politics in Contemporary Africa
- Rwanda
- Senegal
- Sexualities in Africa
- Seychelles, The
- Siwa Oasis
- Slave Trade, Atlantic
- Slavery in Africa
- São Tomé and Príncipe
- Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Study of Africa
- Somalia
- South Africa Post c. 1850
- Southern Africa to c. 1850
- Soyinka, Wole
- Spanish Colonial Rule
- Sport
- States of the Zimbabwe Plateau and Zambezi Valley
- Sudan and South Sudan
- Swahili City-States of the East African Coast
- Swahili Language and Literature
- Tanzania (Tanganyika and Zanzibar)
- Togo
- Tourism
- Trade
- Trade Unions
- Traditional Authorities
- Traditional Religion, African
- Transportation
- Trans-Saharan Trade
- Tunisia
- Uganda
- Urbanism and Urbanization
- Wars and Warlords
- Western Sahara
- White Settlers in East Africa
- Women and African History
- Women and Colonialism
- Women and Politics
- Women and Slavery
- Women and the Economy
- Women, Gender and the Study of Africa
- Women in 19th-Century West Africa
- Yoruba Diaspora
- Yoruba Language and Literature
- Yoruba States, Benin, and Dahomey
- Youth
- Zambia