Nationalism, Politics and Anthropology

Nationalism, Politics and Anthropology PDF Author: Ilana van Wyk
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956552437
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Africa is rich in (neo) traditional dances; yet, not much exists in the form of written literature on the subject. Even worse, existing documents date back to the colonial period and are often disparaging. Dance to Africans is what martial arts are to Asians. Embedded in them are some of the solutions to many of the problems wracking the African diaspora: gang violence, drug addiction, and high school dropout rates, etc. When Guinea's Ballets Africains first bursts on the international scene in the late fifties and sixties, the black revolution in the US was in full swing. The troupe's emancipatory message enkindled in African Americans a new sense of cultural pride and a return to their African roots. For once, dance became something else other than the ballet. With that burst of enthusiasm came the need to introduce African dances in the academia. Most of the research, however, focused mainly on dances which use drums (djembe). Departing from that tradition, in this detailed and richly choreographed ethnography on the Buum Oku Dance Yaounde, Thomas Jing's investigation into a xylophone-based dance opens up new research avenues and exposes the challenges involved. An Afrocentric theoretical framework to the research counters imperialist notions of African dances, thus setting them up as a tool for emancipation.

Nationalism, Politics and Anthropology

Nationalism, Politics and Anthropology PDF Author: Ilana van Wyk
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956552437
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
Africa is rich in (neo) traditional dances; yet, not much exists in the form of written literature on the subject. Even worse, existing documents date back to the colonial period and are often disparaging. Dance to Africans is what martial arts are to Asians. Embedded in them are some of the solutions to many of the problems wracking the African diaspora: gang violence, drug addiction, and high school dropout rates, etc. When Guinea's Ballets Africains first bursts on the international scene in the late fifties and sixties, the black revolution in the US was in full swing. The troupe's emancipatory message enkindled in African Americans a new sense of cultural pride and a return to their African roots. For once, dance became something else other than the ballet. With that burst of enthusiasm came the need to introduce African dances in the academia. Most of the research, however, focused mainly on dances which use drums (djembe). Departing from that tradition, in this detailed and richly choreographed ethnography on the Buum Oku Dance Yaounde, Thomas Jing's investigation into a xylophone-based dance opens up new research avenues and exposes the challenges involved. An Afrocentric theoretical framework to the research counters imperialist notions of African dances, thus setting them up as a tool for emancipation.

South African Anthropology in Conversation

South African Anthropology in Conversation PDF Author: Dickson, Jessica L.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
ISBN: 995679239X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
In the 1980s, the University of Cape Town's social anthropology department was predominantly oriented by an 'exposé' style of critical scholarship. The enemy was the apartheid state, the ethical imperative was clear and a combative metaphor for doing research motivated the department. Andrew David Spiegel, known affectionately as 'Mugsy' by his students and colleagues, has been a central, if understated, figure of this history and helped to frame the theoretical charge of a generation of students looking to counter apartheid from 'inside'. In a series of interviews between the senior professor and one of his students - Jessica Dickson - Spiegel offers a unique perspective from the centre of anthropology's recent history in South Africa.

Pioneers of the Field

Pioneers of the Field PDF Author: Andrew Bank
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107150493
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book traces the personal and intellectual histories of six remarkable women anthropologists, using a rich cocktail of archival sources.

Imperfect Interpreters

Imperfect Interpreters PDF Author: W. D. Hammond-Tooke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In this fascinating and accessible book, W.D. Hammond-Tooke takes a critical look at anthropology and anthropologists and examines the uneasy relationship between anthropological scholarship and national politics in a fundamentally divided and rapidly changing society. Imperfect Interpreters is an account of seventy years of professional anthropological study in South Africa. It is not a history of university departments or a who's who of the academic community. Rather it is a critical (and often very personal) examination of the protagonists, the theoretical ideas that guided their researches, and, especially their relationships to those in power.

Home Spaces, Street Styles

Home Spaces, Street Styles PDF Author: Leslie J. Bank
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745323275
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book revisits and updates some classic Anthropology -- the Xhosa in Town series -- based on research in the South African city of East London conducted during the 1950s. The original studies concluded that there were two opposed responses to urbanization in East London’s African locations, one embracing Westernization, European values and Christianity and another opposed to it. The studies have been the subject of intense anthropological debate. Leslie Bank returned to the areas of East London studied in the 1950s to assess how social and political changes have transformed these areas, in particular the apartheid reconstruction of the 1960s and 1970s and the struggle for liberation followed by the post-Apartheid period in the 1980s and 1990s. Bank has added important theoretical insights to this rich ethnography, and forged strong links with issues that transcend the particularities of his urban study.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa PDF Author: Roy Richard Grinker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119251486
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.

South Africa's Dreams

South Africa's Dreams PDF Author: Robert J. Gordon
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789209757
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
In the early sixties, South Africa’s colonial policies in Namibia served as a testing ground for many key features of its repressive ‘Grand Apartheid’ infrastructure, including strategies for countering anti-apartheid resistance. Exposing the role that anthropologists played, this book analyses how the knowledge used to justify and implement apartheid was created. Understanding these practices and the ways in which South Africa’s experiences in Namibia influenced later policy at home is also critically evaluated, as is the matter of adjudicating the many South African anthropologists who supported the regime.

Inside African Anthropology

Inside African Anthropology PDF Author: Andrew Bank
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107029384
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Inside African Anthropology offers an incisive biography of the life and work of South Africa's foremost social anthropologist, Monica Hunter Wilson. By exploring her main fieldwork and intellectual projects in southern Africa between the 1920s and 1960s, the book offers insights into her personal and intellectual life. Beginning with her origins in the remote Eastern Cape, the authors follow Wilson to the University of Cambridge and back into the field among the Mpondo of South Africa, where her studies resulted in her 1936 book Reaction to Conquest. Her fieldwork focus then shifted to Tanzania, where she teamed up with her husband, Godfrey Wilson. In the 1960s, Wilson embarked on a new urban ethnography with a young South African anthropologist, Archie Mafeje, one of the many black scholars she trained. This study also provides a meticulously researched exploration of the indispensable contributions of African research assistants to the production of this famous woman scholar's cultural knowledge about mid-twentieth-century Africa.

Have Your Yellowcake and Eat It

Have Your Yellowcake and Eat It PDF Author: Jack Boulton
Publisher: BASLER AFRIKA BIBLIOGRAPHIEN
ISBN: 3906927296
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Have Your Yellowcake and Eat It is a story of men, monsters and uranium in Swakopmund, a small coastal city in the west of Namibia. Founded by German settlers in the late nineteenth century, Swakopmund remains a popular holiday destination for Namibians and international visitors alike. How do young African men make their home in this peculiar town of pretty beaches and luxury hotels, a brutal colonial history and a large uranium mining industry? Are their close relations affected by global changes in the price of uranium? And how do we describe their life worlds which straddle many homes, neighbourhoods, and establishments – sometimes even existing beyond the limits of the post-colonial city? Employing a reflexive narrative and based on two year’s fieldwork, Jack Boulton explores the myriad ways in which intimacy develops and manifests for men in a city defined predominantly by racialised difference and local and global forces of inequality.

African Anthropologies

African Anthropologies PDF Author: Mwenda Ntarangwi
Publisher: Zed Books
ISBN: 9781842777633
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Publisher Description