Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social

Power, Patronage, and the Local State in Ghana
By Barry Driscoll

This quantitative and qualitative account of Ghanaian development shows how closely fought elections drive subnational local state institutions to patronize party volunteers. Extrapolating from Ghana’s example, the author shows how locally salient varieties of patronage shape political competition in a variety of contexts.

A Language for the World
The Standardization of Swahili
By Morgan J. Robinson

Based on extensive archival research, this intellectual history of Standard Swahili—a dialect of the Swahili language written in the Latin alphabet—argues that attention to the intertwined processes of codification from 1864 to 1964 lends new perspectives on history, colonialism, time, and cultural representation in East Africa and beyond.

Africanizing Oncology
Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda
By Marissa Mika

Combining methods from African studies, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology, Marissa Mika considers the Uganda Cancer Institute as a microcosm of the Ugandan state and as a lens through which to trace the political, technological, moral, and intellectual aspirations and actions of health care providers and patients.

Environment, Power, and Justice
Southern African Histories
Edited by Graeme Wynn, Jane Carruthers, and Nancy J. Jacobs

With appreciation for both regional and chronological variation, this volume’s contributors track the global concept of environmental justice to analyze its influence in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho and to expand popular understandings of social-environmental harm.

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa
Ethnographic Encounters
Edited by Wale Adebanwi

Through ethnographic case studies of Africans’ quotidian encounters with state bureaucracy, infrastructure, discipline, citizenship, democracy, political economy, education, and health, this book demonstrates how the state not only enables but also constrains and complicates ordinary Africans’ daily struggles to live and live well.

Cargoes in Motion
Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean
Edited by Burkhard Schnepel and Julia Verne

Cargoes in Motion considers both the materiality and special trajectories of cargoes across the Indian Ocean world in order to better understand the processes of exchange and their economic, social, cultural, and political effects on the region.

Sports in Africa, Past and Present
Edited by Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, and Gerard Akindes

Through the prism of sports and from a range of scholarly perspectives, this anthology offers insight into the varied and shifting experiences of African athletes, fans, communities, and postcolonial states.

A History of Tourism in Africa
Exoticization, Exploitation, and Enrichment
By Todd Cleveland

This book—ideal for African and world history classes, as well as for potential travelers to the continent—takes readers on a journey through the dynamics of Africa’s tourist history from the nineteenth century to the present to illuminate and challenge deeply ingrained (mis)perceptions about the continent and its peoples.

Anxiety in and about Africa
Multidisciplinary Perspectives and Approaches
Edited by Andrea Mariko Grant and Yolana Pringle

This addition to the Cambridge Centre of African Studies Series presents multidisciplinary essays that demonstrate how individual and collective anxieties can unsettle dominant historical narratives, shape contemporary discourse, and appear across material culture.

Sports in Africa, Past and Present
Edited by Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, and Gerard Akindes

Through the prism of sports and from a range of scholarly perspectives, this anthology offers insight into the varied and shifting experiences of African athletes, fans, communities, and postcolonial states.

The Ever-Present Origin
By Jean Gebser
· Translation by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas

Gebser’s central thesis was that a potent “leap” in thinking was happening in the 20th century. This new mode of thought would be a holistic-centered, or integral one; an answer to the type of thinking responsible for economic and industrial crisis, two World Wars, and what many today consider a dire, global ecological crisis.

Making the Mark
Gender, Identity, and Genital Cutting
By Miroslava Prazak

Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition.In

Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic
By Wendy Wilson-Fall
· Foreword by Michael Gomez

Bridges history and ethnography to explore stories of Malagasy ancestry and African American identity.

The Politics of Morality
The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland
By Joanna Mishtal

The Politics of Morality is an anthropological study of the expansion of power of the religious right in postsocialist Poland and its effects on individual rights and social mores.

Twins Talk
What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society
By Dona Lee Davis

Twins Talk is an ethnographic study of identical twins in the United States, a study unique in that it considers what twins have to say about themselves, instead of what researchers have written about them. It presents, in the first person, the grounded and practical experiences of twins as they engage, both individually and together, the “who am I” and “who are we” questions of life. Here, the twins themselves are the stars.Dona

Switzerland
A Village History
By David Birmingham

Switzerland: A Village History is an account of an Alpine village that illuminates the broader history of Switzerland and its rural, local underpinnings. It begins with the colonization of the Alps by Romanized Celtic peoples who came from the plain to clear the wilderness, establish a tiny monastic house, and create a dairy economy that became famous for its cheeses.