Routledge is delighted to be re-issuing 79 volumes originally published between 1931 and 1988 in association with the International African Institute. Unavailable outside a few key libraries, many of these republished volumes were at the cutting edge of a fieldwork and ethnographic revolution in African anthropology in the decades after 1930. It involved the production of a wide body of fieldwork-based ethnographic documentation about the cultures of the different societies in Africa. Secondly, it saw a methodological turn to intense, localized investigations of cultural tradition and social change in a rapidly modernizing context. These investigations involved a more sustained and systematic, more professional and ‘scientific’ form of immersion and participant observation, than anything that had gone before. The sites of engagement were urban as well as rural; the pioneering researchers were female as well as male. No longer was the journal essay the repository of the latest research in the discipline, but rich ethnographies running into hundreds of pages.
The volumes are supplemented with maps, which will be available to view on https://www.routledge.com/ or available as pdfs from the publishers.
By Jack Goody
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1975, this book presents the results of research into social change in Ghana. The book looks in detail at the problems of particular sub-groups and sectors in one single nation and they show that the field-worker with a wide comparative background in the range of ...
By Ann Patricia Caplan
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1975, this book examines property and power relations in a Swahili village on Mafia Island off Tanzania. It focuses on the cognatic descent groups which are important in many areas of village life such as land-holding, marriage, residence, Islamic activities and spirit ...
By Hugh Tracey
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1948 and updated with a new introduction in 1970 this book is a classic study on the musical life of a Bantu people in Mozambique. It discusses the poetry on which the music and dances are based and provides, both in original and translation, 50 Chopi songs which are related...
Edited
By C. G. Baëta
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1968 this volume discusses the issues and problems relevant to Christianity in Tropical Africa. It includes historical studies of the earlier Catholic and Protestant missions and their relationship with African communities, traders and colonial administrations; the social ...
By Monica Wilson
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1959, this book includes detailed accounts of Nyakyusa traditions of origin, osmology and moral values, often in direct quotations from informants, while part of the book is devoted to a description of Christian missions, the growth of African churches and the conflict...
By Hans Cory, M. M. Hartnoll
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1945, this book was written at a time when an increasing European influence was affecting customary law in what was Tanganyika and this volume records different aspects of customary law such as inheritance, matrimony, divorce, property and the courts. Tribal structure in ...
By Richard Thurnwald
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1932, this book discusses aspects of economic life in Africa. Detailed consideration is given to food production, population increase, hunting, herding, distribution of goods and wealth, ownership and property, trade, feudalism and slavery....
Edited
By Daryll Forde
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1956 this book contains extracts of the 18th century diary of an Efik chief and documents the activities of slave-traders, the rituals of the Egbo society and many details of domestic life of among the Efik. This volume includes an English translation to the diary which was ...
By Monica Wilson
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1977, this volume completes with a wealth of case material and against the background of a whole century, Monica Wilson's detailed study of the Nyakyusa-Ngonde people of Tanzania and Malawi. The unusual age-village system for which the Nyakyusa are well known has broken down...
By Robert Delavignette
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1950 and updated in 1968, this book discusses the functions and status of native chiefs in what were the French colonies in West Africa. It also examines the relation of the French legal code to native law and custom and the activities of Christian missions. Analysing ...
Edited
By Pierre Alexandre
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1973, this volume presents some of the main approaches that were developed by French Africanists during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The book covers social structure, kinship systems, economic change, ethnography, language, history and archaeology in West Africa....
By Monica Wilson
April 28, 2020
Originally published in 1951 this book is a study of village system in southern Tanzania, which at the time of publication was thought to be unique. Each village consisted not of a group of kinsmen but an age-set: a group of male contemporaries, together with their wives and young children. The ...