You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book aims to reconstruct the religious history of the Anlo-Ewe peoples from the 1850s.
Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition...
Brings together the fields of gender studies and ethnic studies to examine precolonial Africa.
Dr Nukunya is one of the few Africans who have worked as trained anthropologists among their own people. His book is a study of the Anlo, the most numerous of the Ewe peoples who are divided between Ghana and Togo. Their descent is remarkable in that a patrilineal ideology is balanced by unusually strong matrilineal ties, and descent is traced from genitor whether or not he is the mother's legal husband. Dr Nukunya describes the complex system of landholdings that the high densisty of population make necessary. Adjustments are made by the exercise of claims through maternal kin; his conclusion contradicts the argument that patrilineal claims are asserted more strongly where there is pressure on land. He also discusses the changes in household structure that result from the absence of parents on trading or fishing expeditions or in wage employment.
It's an awful story. It's an awful story. Why do you want to bring this up now'--Chief Awusa of Atorkor For centuries, the story of the Atlantic slave trade has been filtered through the eyes and records of white Europeans. In this watershed book, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana-once famously called "the Old Slave Coast"--Share stories that reveal that Africans were traders as well as victims of the trade. Bailey argues that, like victims of trauma, many African societies now experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the blanket of silence and shame around the slave trade. Capturing scores of oral histories that were handed down through generations, Bailey finds that, although Africans were not equal partners with Europeans, even their partial involvement in the slave trade had devastating consequences on their history and identity. In this unprecedented and revelatory book, Bailey explores the delicate and fragmented nature of historical memory. From the Trade Paperback edition