Sociology Book List ·

West African Challenge to Empire

Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War

West African Challenge to Empire examines the anticolonial war in the Volta and Bani region in 1915-16. It was the largest challenge that the French ever faced in their West African colonial empire, and one of the largest armed oppositions to colonialism anywhere in Africa.…

Witchcraft Dialogues

Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges

Witchcraft Dialogues analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the “occult.” It brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, to engage the metaphysical properties of “witchcraft” and “sorcery” and to explore their manifestations in people's lived experiences.…

Empire State-Building

War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–1952

This history of administrative thought and practice in colonial Kenya looks at the ways in which white people tried to engineer social change. It asks four questions:Why was Kenya's welfare operation so idiosyncratic and spartan compared with that of other British colonies?Why did a transformation from social welfare to community development produce further neglect of the very poor?Why was there no equivalent to the French tradition of community medicine?If there was a transformatory element of colonial rule that sought to address poverty, where and why did it fall down?The answers offer revealing insight into the dynamics of rule in the late colonial period in Kenya.…

Stolen Life

The Journey of a Cree Woman

The award-winning Stolen Life is a remarkable collaborative work between a distinguished novelist and a Cree woman who broke a lifetime of silence to share her story. Imprisoned for murder at the age of twenty-seven, Yvonne Johnson sought out Rudy Wiebe, the chronicler of her ancestor Big Bear, as a means of coming to terms with her self, her past, and the crime that defines her future.…

The Poor Are Not Us

Poverty and Pastoralism in Eastern Africa

Eastern African pastoralists often present themselves as being egalitarian, equating cattle ownership with wealth. By this definition “the poor are not us”, poverty is confined to non-pastoralist, socially excluded persons and groups.…

Controlling Anger

The Anthropology of Gisu Violence

Controlling Anger examines the dilemmas facing rural people who live within the broader context of political instability. Following Uganda's independence from Britain in 1962, the Bagisu men of Southeastern Uganda developed a reputation for extreme violence.…

Picturing Bushmen

The Denver African Expedition of 1925

The Denver African Expedition of 1925 sought “the cradle of Humanity.” The explorers returned claiming to have found the “Missing Link” in the Heikum bushmen of the Kalahari—and they proceeded to market this image.…

Gender Violence and the Press

The St. Kizito Story

On the night of Saturday, July 13, 1991, a mob of male students at the St. Kizito Mixed Secondary School in Meru, Kenya, attacked their female classmates in a dormitory. Nineteen schoolgirls were killed in the melee and more than 70 were raped or gang raped.…

Transgressing Boundaries

New Directions In Study Of Culture In Africa

Transgressing Boundaries includes some of the most interesting debates informing cultural politics in South Africa today. To do so, it brings together renowned contributors from Africa, North America and the United Kingdom.…

The Cape Herders

A History of the Khoikhoi of Southern Africa

The Cape Herders provides the first comprehensive picture of the Khoikhoi people. In doing so, it fills a long-standing gap in the resources of Southern African studies, and at a time when interest in the indigenous populations of South Africa is growing daily.…

Kampala Women Getting By

Wellbeing in the Time of AIDS

What do ordinary women in an African city do in the face of “serious enough” infections in themselves and signs of acute illness in their young children? How do they manage? What does it take to get by? How do they maintain the wellbeing of the household in a setting without what would be considered as basic health provision in an American or European city?Professor Wallman focuses on women in a densely-populated part of Kampala called Kamwokya.…

Jua Kali Kenya

Change and Development in an Informal Economy, 1970–1995

Kenya was where the term “informal sector” was first used in 1971. During the 1980s the term “jua kali”—in Swahili “hot sun”—came to be used of the informal sector artisans, such as carworkers and metalworkers, who were working under the hot sun because of a lack of premises.…

Language, Power, and Ideology in Brunei Darussalam

Contrary to modern theories of developing nations, Brunei Darussalam, which has a very high rate of literacy, is also one of the few countries where the traditional elite retains absolute political power.…

Language Use and Language Change in Brunei Darussalam

The oil-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam is located on the northern coast of Borneo between the two Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah. Though the country is small in size and in population, the variety of language use there provides a veritable laboratory for linguists in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, bilingual studies, and sociolinguistic studies, particularly those dealing with language shift.…

Custodians of the Land

Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania

Farming and pastoral societies inhabit ever-changing environments. This relationship between environment and rural culture, politics and economy in Tanzania is the subject of this volume which will be valuable in reopening debates on Tanzanian history.…

Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing

André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee

The representation of pain and suffering in narrative form is an ongoing ethical issue in contemporary South African literature. Can violence be represented without sensationalistic effects, or, alternatively, without effects that tend to be conservative because they place the reader in a position of superiority over the victim or the perpetrator? Jolly looks at three primary South African authors—André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J.…

Forests of Gold

Essays on the Akan & the Kingdom of Asante

The Asante had unique conceptions of time and motion, and the relationships between the unborn, the living and the dead. This study suggests that awareness of their past has much to do with the survival of their culture in this century.…

Colonialism in the Congo Basin, 1880–1940

This exceptional study of the Mongo people of the upper Congo River basin focuses on the evolution of Mongo work patterns from the period of the late nineteenth century to 1940, the high-water mark of the colonial period.…

A Bed Called Home

Life in the Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town

In the last three years the migrant labor hostels of South Africa, particularly those in the Transvaal, have gained international notoriety as theaters of violence. For many years they were hidden from public view and neglected by the white authorities.…

Swahili Origins

Swahili Culture and The Shungwaya Phenomenon

Kiswahili has become the lingua franca of eastern Africa. Yet there can be few historic peoples whose identity is as elusive as that of the Swahili. Some have described themselves as Arabs, as Persians or even, in one place, as Portuguese.…