Igor Kopytoff

Women’s Roles and Existential Identities

A commonplace yet puzzling phenomenon has given rise to this exploration. Why is it that in many changing “traditional” societies, where the burdens of inequality so obviously rest on women, we see women claiming and assuming positions of political power with relative ease? One thinks of Indira Gandhi in India, Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka, Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Khalida Zia Rahman and Skeikh Hasina Wazed in Bangladesh, Shirley Kuo in Taiwan … the list is a long one. By contrast, in the United States, with its long-standing egalitarian ideology and progressivist tradition, the election of a women president remains elusive and the reality of women cabinet members rare. Moreover, what occurs at the top of the political pyramid in these “traditional” societies also happens at lower political levels and in bureaucracies and the professions. One encounters innumerable cases of women smoothly pursuing independent careers that put at their beck and call unresentful male subordinates.

THE TRAINING OF AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGISTS AS AFRICANISTS

My subject suggests two different approaches. One may be phrased as “the training of anthropologists who will be doing work in Africa”; the other as “the training of anthropologists who will become members of that expanding group of scholars known as Africanists.” Among the purely technical aspects of preparation for anthropological work in Africa, there are few that are specifically “Africanist” with the possible exception of languages. All students, it is agreed, must be acquainted with their region, be it southeast Asia, Polynesia, or Africa. All should know standard and some specialized field methods. All must have a minimal knowledge of the political situation so as to avoid costlyfuux pas. Where the difference lies is in the special emphases that may be given to the same methods, depending on whether one is in the Chad or in the Amazon. These emphases may have to differ because of different social and political situations of practical as well as theoretical importance, or because of the need of filling what may be felt to be important gaps in our knowledge or, finally, because a greater burden of the work usually done by other social scientists continues to lie, although decreasingly so, on the anthropologist in .4frica. That the need for these special emphases must be recognized is made clear elsewhere in this symposium. In this paper I shall concentrate on the second topic suggested by the title, namely, the training of the anthropologist as an Africanist scholar. In the more distant past the anthropologist, while pursuing his professional interests, was occasionally called upon to supply information to other disciplines, for it was in many cases to be found nowhere else. More recently, however, he has all too often found himself in the position not only of having to supply such material but to interpret it as well, as scholarly and popular interest in Africa suddenly began to grow. This role he has, on the whole, fulfilled rather well, because of the holistic tradition of anthropology and its lack of hesitation in dealing with and analyzing many aspects of human behavior. However, let us recognize the fact that, partly, the success lay also in the lack of competition from other social scientists. This competition is now rising and fortunately so, for, necessary though his varied interests remain, the anthropologist cannot hope to match all by himself the combined methodological sophistication of a historian, an economist, a political scientist, and a psychologist, among others. A scholar may hope to span several disciplines, and that in a limited sense, but scarcely all. The entrance of other social scientists into the African field will increasingly put the anthropologist back where he should be, a scholar among others, with his own unique contribution to make. Nevertheless, concomitant with this welcome development, a certain dilemma has apparently arisen, one that anthropologists sometimes openly express in terms of whether they should be “anthropologists first” or “Africanists first.’’ Rightly or wrongly, the dilemma must be there, for it is talked about; rightly

Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897-1936

List of maps List of tables Preface 1. Slavery and the British conquest of Northern Nigeria 2. Fugitive slaves and the crisis in slavery policy 3. The debate on legal-status abolition 4. Emancipation and the law 5. Upholding proprietary rights to land 6. The role of taxation in the reform of slavery 7. The colonial economy and the slaves 8. The persistence of concubinage 9. Legal-status abolition: the final phase Appendix Notes Glossary Bibliography Index.

George Peter Murdock's Contributions To African Studies

To speak of George Peter Murdock’s contributions to African anthropology is to speak of paradoxes and incongruities. It is to speak of the problematic relationship between the substantive content of a work on the one hand and, on the other, of the value of that work’s impact on a field of scholarship. In this case, it is also to speak not of a body of contributions over a long period of time but rather of a single book: Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History, published in 1959. Consequently, what I say here is a kind of retrospective book review, in which one can talk not only of the book itself but also of what others said about it and of what the book did for African studies.

Mark W. DeLancey and Virginia H. DeLancey, A Bibliography of Cameroon, (Africana Bibliography Series No. 4), New York, Africana Publishing Co., 1975, pp. 673,

This is the fullest available bibliography of Cameroon, from &dquo;the beginning,&dquo; so to speak, and through the early 1970’s. The special problems the compilers had to contend with included not only the usual one of boundaries cutting across ethnic groups but also some shifts in frontiers and, not least, a succession of colonial regimes resulting in sources being scattered through German, French, and English publications and archives. The bibliography includes over 6,000 items books, articles, pamphlets, and some documents. Approximately half of the items are accompanied by brief annotations and, particularly valuable, when an abstract of the work has