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This book explores the roles of contemporary urban shrines and their visual traditions in Benin City. It focuses on the charismatic priests and priestesses who are possessed by a pantheon of deities, the communities of devotees, and the artists who make artifacts for their shrines. The visual arts are part of a wider configuration of practices that include song, dance, possession, and healing. These practices provide the means for exploring the relationships of the visual to both the verbal and performance arts that feature at these shrines. The analysis in this book raises fundamental questions about how the art of Benin, and non-Western art histories more generally, are understood. The book throws critical light on the taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin current interpretations and presents an original and revisionist account of Benin art history.

This book argues that scholars too often assume that the state is the most important force behind change in local political communities in Africa. Studies look to the state, and to the impact of government reforms, as ways of understanding processes of development and change. Using the example of Uganda, regarded as one of Africa's few ‘success stories’, the book chronicles the insignificance of the state and the marginal impact of Western development agencies. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a Ugandan village reveals that it is churches, the village court and organizations based on family and kinship obligations which represent the most significant sites of innovation and social transformation. The book offers a new anthropological perspective on how to think about processes of social and political change in poorer parts of the world, and should appeal to anyone interested in African development.

This book draws on two decades of research and provides a social and political history of North-Western Ghana. It traces the creation of new ethnic and territorial boundaries, categories and forms of self-understanding, and represents a major contribution to debates on ethnicity, colonialism, and the ‘production of history’. It explores the creation and redefinition of ethnic distinctions and commonalities by African and European actors, showing that ethnicity's power derives from a contradiction: while ethnic identities purport to be non-negotiable, creating permanent bonds, stability and security, the boundaries of the communities created and the associated traits and practices are malleable and adaptable to specific interests and contexts.

In a work that challenges the notion that fundamentalism is an appropriate analytical frame for understanding Muslim societies, Benjamin Soares explores different, and often seemingly contradictory, ways of being Muslim in Mali. In an innovative combination of anthropology, history, and social theory, he traces the transformations in ideas about Islam and authority and conventions of religious practice in a major Islamic religious centre from the late nineteenth century, through French colonial rule, and in the postcolonial period. Drawing on extensive ethnography, archival research, and written sources, he provides a richly detailed discussion of Muslim religious practice—Sufism, Islamic reform, and other ways of being Muslim—in Nioro du Sahel in western Mali and more broadly in the country. Using an original analytical perspective, he shows the historical importance of more standardized ways of being Muslim and the centrality of exceptional charismatic leaders, Muslim saints, in the development of 'the prayer economy' in the postcolonial period. He analyzes some of the contradictions and tensions in this economy of religious practice in which certain Muslim saints offer blessings and prayers in exchange for substantial gifts. In addition, he considers the implications of the recent expansion of the public sphere and increased global interconnections for the practice of Islam. This study is a major contribution to the study of Islam in Africa and will be welcomed by scholars and students in history, religion, and the social sciences, particularly those interested in anthropology, Islam, colonialism and the public sphere.

This book is an account of murder and politics in Africa, and a historical ethnography of southern Annang communities during the colonial period. Its narrative leads to events between 1945 and 1948, when the imperial gaze of police, press and politicians was focused on a series of mysterious deaths in south-eastern Nigeria attributed to the ‘man-leopard society’. These murder mysteries, reported as the ‘biggest, strangest murder hunt in the world’, were not just forensic but also related to the broad historical impact of commercial, Christian and colonial aid relations on Annang society.

How do those on the margins of modernity face the challenges of globalization? This book demonstrates that secrecy is one of the means by which a society on the fringe of modernity produces itself as locality. Focusing on initiation rituals, masked performances, and modern art, this study shows that rituals and performances long deemed obsolete serve the insertion of their performers in the world at their own terms. The Jola and Mandinko people of the Casamance region in Senegal have always used their rituals and performances to incorporate the impact of Islam, colonialism, capitalism and contemporary politics. Their performances of secrecy have accommodated these modern powers and continue to do so today. The performers incorporate the modern and redefine modernity through secretive practices. Their traditions are not modern inventions, but traditional ways of dealing with modernity. This book shows that secrecy, performed as a weapon of the weak, empowers their performers. Secrecy serves to mark boundaries and define the local in the global.

Studies of the media in Africa, incorporating both African and international perspectives, are few. The thirty chapters collected here were presented as papers at a seminar organised and hosted by the Kenya-based Twaweza Communications and the International African Institute in Nairobi in 2004. They demonstrate how media outlets are used to perpetuate, question or modify the unequal power relations between the North and the South. Focusing on east Africa, the chapters include discussions of the construction of old and new social entities, as defined by class, gender, ethnicity, political and economic differences, wealth, poverty, cultural behaviour, language and religion. The chapters illustrate how there is increasing control by local people of traditional and modern forms of media. Globalisation is being countered by local responses, within the context of social and cultural identities. Essentially, the book describes the tensions between the global and the local, tensions not often discussed in media studies, thus pioneering new debates.

Medicine murder involved the cutting of body parts from victims, usually while they were still alive, to be used for the preparation of medicines intended to enhance the power of the perpetrators. A startling increase in cases of medicine murder apparently took place in Basutoland (now Lesotho), in southern Africa, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It gave rise to a dramatic crisis of late colonial rule. Was this increase a real one? If so, why did it happen? How far does it explain the crisis? What other factors contributed? This book offers some comprehensive answers to these difficult, complex and controversial questions and a highly readable analysis of how the crisis arose and of how it fell away. The chapters draw sensitively and critically on many different and often conflicting sources of evidence.

This book examines the evolution of a distinctive Yoruba community, Remo, and the central role played in this process by the Remo-born nationalist and Yoruba leader Obafemi Awolowo (1909–87). Since the nineteenth century, popular participation has played an important role in challenging or confirming local hierarchies in Remo. This historical dynamic had a significant impact on Awolowo's vision both for Yoruba and Nigerian politics. When Awolowo moved into national politics in the 1950s, his career at the national level also gave him the opportunity to shape Remo's political identity. He was both a product and a producer of Remo politics. Based on a subtle analysis of local-level politics, the book argues that traditional and modern participatory structures play an important role both in Yoruba politics and in the African postcolonial state. At the same time, its focus on Awolowo makes an important contribution to the scholarly debate on one of Nigeria's most important politicians.

This book provides an approach to the anthropological study of philosophical discourses in the Swahili context of Mombasa, Kenya. In this historically established Muslim environment, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, philosophy is investigated as social discourse and intellectual practice, situated in everyday life. This is done from the perspective of an ‘anthropology of philosophy’, a project that is spelt out in the opening chapter. Entry points and guidelines for the ethnography are provided by discussions of Swahili literary genres, life histories, and social debates. From here, local discourses of knowledge are described and analysed. The social environment and discursive dynamics of the Old Town are portrayed, firstly, by means of following and contextualising informal discussions among neighbours and friends at daily meeting points in the streets; and secondly, by presenting and discussing in-depth case studies of local intellectuals and their contributions to moral and intellectual debates within the community. Taking recurrent internal discussions on social affairs, politics, and appropriate Islamic conduct as a focus, this study sheds light on local practices of critique and reflection. In particular, three local intellectuals (two poets, one Islamic scholar) are portrayed against the background of regional intellectual history, Islamic scholarship, and common public debates and private discussions. The three contextual portrayals discuss exemplary issues for the wider field of research on philosophical discourse in Mombasa and the Swahili context on the whole, with reference to the lives and projects of distinct individual thinkers.