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Urban Symbolism
This volume deals with a hitherto largely neglected aspect of cities, namely the symbolic and ritual structure in which the urban community is rooted. This fascinating facet is explored in a combined effort by social anthropologists, sociologists, historians and philologists for cities like Jakarta, Padang, Bangkok, Beijing, Tokyo, Baghdad, Kathmandu, Lucknow, Francistown, Vitoria and Buenos Aires. Three perspectives on the study of symbolism in the urban arena are developed, namely the material, cultural and structural point of view. This results in a series of new concepts for comparative use and provides lively descriptions suffused by rich detail of the social processes by which urban symbols and rituals are constituted.
Early State Dynamics
This book is about the dynamics of the Early State. It is based on new theoretical insights into the evolution of socio-political organizations and on a number of carefully selected case studies. The dynamic aspects of the Early State considered here are the changes and transformations that occur in the socio-political organization once the Early State has come into existence.
The Early State in African Perspective
The essays in this volume are the product of an interdisciplinary research seminar on The Early State in Africa, conducted during the 1979-1980 academic year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This seminar was one of a series of seminars on comparative civilizations. The participants included historians, sociologists, political scientists, and specialists in comparative religion, who shared an interest in the emergence and dynamics of the state in Africa and were concerned with trying to understand its origins and its various manifestations on the continent.
Ideology and the Formation of Early States
Eighteen authors from 10 countries offer an assessment of the role of ideology in the emergence and development of early states. In a comparative perspective the significance of ideology in the processes that led to formation of states in Europe, Africa, Meso-America and Polynesia is discussed by specialists in the fields of anthropology, history and archaeology. Special attention is given to subjects such as the concept of ideology, regional comparison, the reconstruction of ideologies on the basis of archaeological data, gender relationships, coercion, legitimacy, sacred kingship, and ideology and change (in an introductory chapter) and a concluding discussion. The findings of this volume will not only be of interest to anthropologists, historians and archaeologists, but to all those interested in the complex interaction of ideological and political developments.
Kings of Disaster
This study of the rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan means a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from Rene Girard's theory of consensual scapegoating the author shows that the long standing distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victimary role of the king as compared with that of enemy victims. Kings of Disaster so proposes an uninvolved solution to the vexed problem of regicide. Recent cases occurring during the great drought of the mid-1980's are discribed and analyzed. Making simultaneous use of first-hand field data and archival sources, the book offers the first presentation of five Nilotic communities on the East Bank of the Nile. This study offers a new perspective on the role of violence in the structuring of society.
Connectivity in Motion
This original collection brings islands to the fore in a growing body of scholarship on the Indian Ocean, examining them as hubs or points of convergence and divergence in a world of maritime movements and exchanges. Straddling history and anthropology and grounded in the framework of connectivity, the book tackles central themes such as smallness, translocality, and “the island factor.” It moves to the farthest reaches of the region, with a rich variety of case studies on the Swahili-Comorian world, the Maldives, Indonesia, and more. With remarkable breadth and cohesion, these essays capture the circulations of people, goods, rituals, sociocultural practices, and ideas that constitute the Indian Ocean world. Together, they take up “islandness” as an explicit empirical and methodological issue as few have done before.
Private Politics
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Urban Anthropology in China
This book is based on the papers that were presented at the First International Urban Anthropology Conference, which was opened in Beijing on December 28, 1989. It contains twenty-two papers and six introductory contributions, dealing with the following subjects: 'Comparative Urbanism: Socialist and Asian Cities'; 'Chinese Urbanization'; 'Chinese Urban Ethnicity'; 'Chinese Urban Culture and Life Cycle'. These papers are written by Chinese and non-Chinese authors. The conference of 1989/1990 marked the beginning of urban anthropology in China. Before this, the objects of ethnological, sociological and anthropological research in China were rural, rather than urban. Besides, the attention of scholars was mostly directed towards the ethnic minorities in China. In the late 1970's however, contacts with Western anthropologists helped in redirecting part of Chinese anthropology towards the study of urban conglomerations. The congress of 1989/90 marked the acceptance of this new approach in China.
How to Become a Big Man in Africa
Can subalterns transform themselves into members of the elite, and what does it take to do so? And how do those efforts reveal the nature of ethnic politics in postcolonial Africa? How to Become a Big Man in Africa: Subalternity, Elites, and Ethnic Politics in Contemporary Nigeria examines these questions by revealing how, through ethno-regional conflict, violence and cultural activities, an artisan, Gani Adams, transformed himself into the holder of the most prestigious chieftaincy title among the Yoruba. Addressing persistent gaps in anthropological studies of the subaltern and of "big men" in politics through in-depth biography and rich social history, Wale Adebanwi follows Adams and othe...
Contradictions and Conflict
This work analyzes the history of conflict in one Indian university. Scholars representing Maharashtrian Brahman and non-Brahman castes embedded in the university's postgraduate campus and urban and rural colleges have fought for over forty years to control university government. The structure of these castes, institutional and regional contradictions, suggests that conflict will persist. The book explores the history of conflict from 1924 to 1989 and proposes a dialectical methodology to analyze the conflict. It examines the agents and dramatic conflicts that engaged them. Finally, it suggests a dialectical political anthropology for understanding politics anthropologically. The work suggests that a dialectical methodology focused on internal social contradictions provides a superior analysis of conflicts that impel historical agency, and that universities, largely ignored by anthropologists, are exciting reservoirs for ethnographic research.
