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While recurrent drought, war with neighboring Ethiopia, and a staggering refugee crisis have recently propelled the African nation of Somalia into world headlines, remarkably little is known about the history of this East African country. For the first time, Lee Cassanelli makes available a book-length study of Somalia's precolonial heritage. A nation of nomads, the Somalis have through long experience adapted to a harsh, semidesert environment. While persistently divided by clan, sectarian, and regional loyalties in the past, they have nevertheless come to acquire a compelling sense of their cultural unity and national identity. The Shaping of Somali Society examines the historical experien...
Why did a country whose people shared a common language, religion, and culture fragment so deeply? Most explanations have stressed the divisive effects of personalities, clan affiliations, or Cold War competition, but in this book, the contributors examine issues of land and resources as key ingredients in the politics of modern-day Somalia and in the events that precipitated the civil war.
Scandinavia's most famous painter, the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944), is probably best known for his painting The Scream, a universally recognized icon of terror and despair. (A version was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, in August 2004, and has not yet been recovered.) But Munch considered himself a writer as well as a painter. Munch began painting as a teenager and, in his young adulthood, studied and worked in Paris and Berlin, where he evolved a highly personal style in paintings and works on paper. And in diaries that he kept for decades, he also experimented with reminiscence, fiction, prose portraits, philosophical speculations, and surrealism. Known as an artist wh...
Explores the balancing act of living as a Muslim in the west. It is a comparison of the Somali communities in London, England and Toronto, and is based on a series of in-depth interviews with over 80 Somali women, men and teenagers in those cities.
Three of the papers were presented to the Ethnohistory Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania during 1983-84; the others were presented at a Symposium on the Relationship between Commodities and Culture, held May 23-25, 1984, in Philadelphia. Includes bibliographies and index.
Issues of welfare access and ‘deservedness’ are increasingly permeating political debates in present-day Scandinavian welfare states, which are worldwide renowned for their comprehensive safety net. Across the region, the Somalis are oftentimes singled out in political debates about immigration and integration policies as the ‘least integrated’ group, if not as a ‘burden’ for public finances. Against this background, Horizons of Security accounts for historical patterns of integration from the specific point of view of welfare and security among the Somalis in Scandinavia. Drawing on qualitative interviews with the Somali diaspora, the book explores how the Somalis are experienci...
This study analyses the basic assumptions which,had informed the construction of the now,discredited Somali myth.,.
Following six years of extensive fieldwork, Weldemichael examines the international causes, internal dynamics, and domestic consequences of piracy in Somalia.
"This book explores France's complex history of integration and national identity by tracing the unique and historically significant political journey of the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, the French Antilles"--Provided by publisher.
Ethiopia and Eritrea are home to Africa's oldest written historical tradition, which began in the third century with the monuments and manuscripts of Aksum and has continued to the present day. This study explores the development of this rich tradition, focusing in particular on the dramatic lives and original thought of a group of early twentieth-century Ethiopian and Eritrean historians. James De Lorenzi examines how these scholars used historiography to not only record the past but also grapple with the changes of the modern era. Through their history writings, they made provocative political claims, explored the nature of their communal ties, assessed their inherited institutions and ideas, and critically evaluated the people and cultures of the wider world. Opposing the view that historiography is a uniquely Western intellectual pursuit, Guardians of the Tradition provides new evidence of an African historical consciousness and the vibrancy of history writing outside the West. James De Lorenzi is associate professor of history at John Jay College, City University of New York.