Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Mwindo Epic from the Banyanga
The feats of the hero Mwindo are here glorified in the bilingual text of an epic which was sung and narrated in a Bantu language and acted out by a member of the Nyanga tribe in the remote forest regions of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Admirably structured, coherent, and richly poetic, the epic is in prose form, interspersed with song and proverbs in verse. An example of the classic tradition of oral folk literature, the tale has important implications for the comparative study of African culture, as the text provides profound insights into the social structure, value system, linguistics, and cosmology of this African people.
Lega
Les Lega vivent dans l'Est de la République démocratique du Congo. Il y a quelques décennies encore, ils créaient des sculptures que les scientifiques et les amateurs d'art considèrent comme un des sommets de l'art de l'Afrique noire. L'art Lega associe une apparente simplicité à une beauté conceptuelle. E est sobre et serein. Les masques et les statuettes sont faits de bois, d'ivoire, d'os ou d'une autre matière. Ils étaient utilisés dans le contexte du Bwami, une association initiatique dont l'objectif était l'élévation morale de ses membres. Les recherches menées auprès des Lega par l'anthropologue Daniel R. Biebuyck dans les années cinquante se sont révélées d'une imp...
From Trickster to Badman
To protect their identity and values, Africans enslaved in America transformed various familiar character types to create folk heroes who offered models of behavior both recognizable to them as African people and adaptable to their situation in America. Roberts specifically examines the Afro-American trickster and the trickster tale tradition, the conjurer as folk hero, the biblical heroic tradition, and the badman as outlaw hero.
African Agrarian Systems
Originally published in 1963 this volume surveys various aspects of the complex relations between rights in land, social organization and economic interests in tropical Africa. The papers - in English and French but with summaries in the other language - analyse case studies illustrating the various basic factors and problems connected with land in Tropical Africa. Indigenous systems of tenure and their adaptation to commercial agriculture, the balance between rights and obligations of groups and individuals, and the authority and duties of chiefs and headmen are discussed in detail for many different areas. Against this background important contributions are made towards the better understanding of problems raised by economic and political development, population increase, migration and scarcity of land.
African Art and Leadership
A scholarly analysis of the close relationships among the structure, function, and history of the sub-Saharan African arts.
Africa
None
Living with Africa
In 1952, a young Belgian scholar of European medieval history traveled to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) to live in a remote Kuba village. Armed with a smattering of training in African cultures and language, Jan Vansina was sent to do fieldwork for a Belgian cultural agency. As it turned out, he would help found the field of African history, with a handful of other European and African scholars. "I'm not an ethnologist, I'm a historian!" Vansina was to repeat again and again to those who assumed that people without written texts have no history. His discovery that he could analyze Kuba oral tradition using the same methods he had learned for interpreting medieval dirges was a historiographic...
The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore
This handbook offers the most comprehensive, analytic, and multidisciplinary study of oral traditions and folklore in Africa and the African Diaspora to date. Preeminent scholars Akintunde Akinyemi and Toyin Falola assemble a team of leading and rising stars across African Studies research to retrieve and renew the scholarship of oral traditions and folklore in Africa and the Diaspora just as critical concerns about their survival are pushed to the forefront of the field. With five sections on the central themes within orality and folklore – including engagement ranging from popular culture to technology, methods to pedagogy – this handbook is an indispensable resource to scholars, students, and practitioners of oral traditions and folklore preservation alike. This definitive reference is the first to provide detailed, systematic discussion, and up-to-date analysis of African oral traditions and folklore.
