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In this study of the Biase, a small ethnic group living in Nigeria's Cross River State, David Uru Iyam attempts to resolve a long-standing controversy among development theorists: must Third World peoples adopt Western attitudes, practices, and technologies to improve their standard of living or are indigenous beliefs, technologies, and strategies better suited to local conditions? The Biase today face social and economic pressures that seriously strain their ability to cope with the realities of modern Nigeria. Iyam, an anthropologist and a Biase, examines the relationship between culture and development as played out in projects in local communities. Western technologies and beliefs alone cannot ensure economic growth and modernization, Iyam shows, and should not necessarily be imposed on poor rural groups who may not be prepared to incorporate them; neither, however, is it possible to recover indigenous coping strategies given the complexities of the postcolonial world. A successful development strategy, Iyam argues, needs to strengthen local managerial capacity, and he offers suggestions as to how this can be done in a range of cultural and social settings.
Using the Agwagune community in southeastern Nigeria as a case study, David Uru Iyam asserts that women are not stereotypically submissive, oppressed, or passive. Though women are often misrepresented in studies that fail to ask about their agency, Iyam highlights the overlooked contributions of women that uphold and change entire social systems.
Redirecting the Gaze is primarily concerned with the cinematic portrayals of women by women directors working outside corporate America and Europe. The book examines cinematic works of the 1980s and 1990s by women filmmakers from Argentina, Bolivia, China, Cuba, India, Mexico, Senegal, Tanzania, and Venezuela, as well as by independent Black American and Chicano women, most of whom are scarcely known in the United States and Europe.
This volume brings together insights from distinguished scholars from around the world to address the facts, fiction and creative imaginations in the pervasive portrayals of Africa, its people, societies and cultures in the literature and the media. The fictionalization of Africa and African issues in the media and the popular literature that blends facts and fiction has rendered perceptions of Africa, its cultures, societies, customs, and conflicts often superficial and deficient in the popular Western consciousness. The book brings eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines to sort out the persistent fictionalization of Africa, from facts pertaining to the genesis of powerful cultural, political or religious icons, the historical and cultural significance of "intriguing" customs (such as tribal marks), gender relations, causes of conflicts and African responses, and creative imaginations in contemporary African films, fiction and literature, among others.
Postcolonial literatures can be defined as the body of creative work written by authors whose lands were formerly subjugated to colonial rule. In previous volumes of this series, the research literature of former British colonies Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand have been addressed. This volume offers guidance for those researching the postcolonial literature of the former British colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Among the forty nations represented in this volume are South Africa, India, Pakistan, Ghana, Jamaica, Swaziland, Belize, and Namibia. With the exception of South Africa (which formed the Union of South Africa in 1910), this guide picks up its coverage in 1947, when both India and Pakistan gained their independence. The literature created by writers from these nations represents the diverse experiences in the postcolonial condition and are the subject of this book. The volume provides best-practice suggestions for the research process and discusses how to take advantage of primary text resources in a variety of formats, both digital and paper based: bibliographies, indexes, research guides, archives, special collections, and microforms.
This anthropological study of hoe-farming in West Africa outlines the cultural meanings involved in working the land and rearing/raising society. Unlike other studies which usually focus on the kin-group as the basic social unit, this piece of work considers the house society or community as the most appropriate focus by which the Dagara people themselves tend to structure their society and to work out their social relationship including cultural practices of different kinds. With many ethnographic details, the study shows how much the house figure functions as a physical and social institution in Dagara mode of thinking and also in the imagination including the intellectual sphere as an important concept. Therefore, the author sees hoe-farming and the figure of the house as linked themes which have to be jointly studied. Considered as such, the study uses them to outline Dagara mode of thinking about themselves and what they do in terms of social relations.
African Studies, contrary to some accounts, is not a separate continent in the world of American higher education. Its intellectual borders touch those of economics, literature, history, philosophy, and art; its history is the story of the world, both ancient and modern. This is the clear conclusion of Africa and the Disciplines, a book that addresses the question: Why should Africa be studied in the American university? This question was put to distinguished scholars in the social sciences and humanities, prominent Africanists who are also leaders in their various disciplines. Their responses make a strong and enlightening case for the importance of research on Africa to the academy. Paul C...
This collection of essays deals directly and compellingly with contemporary issues in African cinema. In particular, they address key aspects of post-colonialism and feminism - the two major topics of interest in current criticism of African films - but coverage is also given to spectatorship, national identity, ethnography, patriarchy, and the creation of key film industries in developing countries.
Provides an unrivelled overview of intellectual development in anthropology.