Originally published in 1949, this book discusses Umbundu social structure and education, with particular reference to how both of these adapted as Angola's contact with Western influences increased in the first half of the twentieth century. Using materials gathered in the field, this volume charts the rapid pace of change which caused social disintegration among the Ovimumbundu, a significant Bantu-speaking group in the Benguela Highland of Angola. Differing approaches to education including assimiliation and adaptation are examined and their merits discussed.
Originally published in 1962, this study discusses the changes in the life of the Ovimbundu from the time of their caravan trade in slaves, rubber, and ivory down to the more recent period when the organization of their chiefdoms was influenced by the Catholic missions, Portuguese administration and wage labour.
A groundbreaking investigation into the migration of martial arts techniques across continents and centuries The presence of African influence and tradition in the Americas has long been recognized in art, music, language, agriculture, and religion. T. J. Desch-Obi explores another cultural continuity that is as old as eighteenth-century slave settlements in South America and as contemporary as hip-hop culture. In this thorough survey of the history of African martial arts techniques, Desch-Obi maps the translation of numerous physical combat techniques across three continents and several centuries to illustrate how these practices evolved over time and are still recognizable in American culture today. Some of these art traditions were part of African military training while others were for self-defense and spiritual discipline. Grounded in historical and cultural anthropological methodologies, Desch-Obi's investigation traces the influence of well-delineated African traditions on long-observed but misunderstood African and African American cultural activities in North America, Brazil, and the Caribbean. He links the Brazilian martial art capoeira to reports of slave activities recorded in colonial and antebellum North America. Likewise Desch-Obi connects images of the kalenda African stick-fighting techniques to the Haitian Revolution. Throughout the study Desch-Obi examines the ties between physical mastery of these arts and changing perceptions of honor. Including forty-five illustrations, this rich history of the arrival and dissemination of African martial arts in the Atlantic world offers a new vantage for furthering our understanding of the powerful influence of enslaved populations on our collective social history.
This volume provides the origins and meanings of the names of genera and species of extant vascular plants, with the genera arranged alphabetically from A to C.
First Published in 1969. Building upon the author's previous work, Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, this title's findings are intended to produce for policy-makers a picture of the forces producing changes in family relationships and the instability of marriage to which legislators, civil or religious, could refer when deciding what practices to treat as permissible and what to forbid. For this reason it has laid more emphasis than is usual in works of theoretical anthropology on specific aspects of African marriage where it has been assumed that the divergence was most marked.
Marry Me in Africa is an invitation to discuss approaches and processes in African marriage ritual. As one crucial institution in African culture, marriage in its traditional African definition has helped many of the continents cultures maintain a sense of community and identity. This book invites especially students and researchers into exchanges on some African marriage traditions and their roles in African societies. It concerns those aspects that fascinate me and many other Africans that we believe will interest people in the New World, particularly the Caribbean. Researchers of the African Diaspora might want to use some of the marriage practices for reconstructing models for analysis and interpretation of the formation and transformation of the African heritage in the Diaspora. Marry Me in Africa is particularly useful for scholars not familiar with the different cultural practices among African societies, their sources of identity and diversity, and the implications of these for understanding African social systems. This book will be a useful companion for other scholars who know about some of the cultural practices but are unable to identify exactly their relationship to specific ethnic groups, traditional concepts, social, political, economic, technological, and other practices that have constituted the patterns of cultural behavior among African societies through marriage. Individual or local cultural traditions and practices are presented within the context of the general African cultural heritage, leading to cross-cultural comparison and generalizations. The convergence of traditional marriage patterns and continuities in specific aspects of traditional values and behavior of various societies are examined over the common-ground sense of community among Africans that may not be the same today as in the past. For this reason this book takes the liberty to discuss present manifestations of a transformed past in the present.
This important work examines in detail and depth how, as a consequence of changing technologies, diet, patterns of reproduction, and work, relations between children and parents have altered. The editors and contributors hold that biosocial science is particularly relevant to research on human family systems and parenting behavior. The family is the universal social institution in which the care of children is based and the turf where cultural tradition, beliefs, and values are transmitted to the young as they fulfill their biological potential for growth, development and reproduction. The biosocial perspective takes into account the biological substratum and the social environment as critical co-determinants of behavior and pinpoints areas in which contemporary human parental behavior exhibits continuities with and departures from, patterns evident throughout history. This work crosses disciplinary lines without ignoring their relevance to the broader themes of the book. School age pregnancy and parenthood is a powerful anchor for the dissection of large scale issues. The contributors deal in turn with ethnic and historical experience, examine normative and ethical issues, and cast new light on methodological concerns. What the editors call culturally-defined responses to basic needs helps explain both dramatic improvements in this area, and how they expand the challenge of teen reproduction. Contributors emphasize new demands for training and education to research this growing phenomenon. The book contributes to humane concerns as well as the scientific imagination. Jane B. Lancaster is professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She serves as editor of a major journal in the field, Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective. She also edited two related volumes: Child Abuse and Neglect (1987), Parenting across Life Span (1987). Beatrix A. Hamburg is at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, in the field of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She is recipient of the Gallagher Award for Outstanding Achievement in Adolescent Medicine, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration, and edits Behavioral and Psychosocial Issues in Diabetes.
Paul Spencer presents the definitive study of the ways of life of the cattle-herding peoples of East Africa, drawing on many years of research. This region has offered a prime example of a traditional culture resisting the inevitability of change; it provides the best-known and most extensive instance both of cattle-pastoralist society and of social organization based primarily on age. Pastoral peoples were once dominant in the East African interior, but development of the market economy has progressively polarized the region and forced them into the most marginal, drought-ridden areas; in this ecological trap they have become a peripheral underclass. The Pastoral Continuum examines the richness and resilience of their cultures and illuminates the role of indigenous practices and institutions in adaptation and survival. The pastoralists' systems of age organization in particular are notable for their resilience: it is demonstrated that these are bound up with problems of growth and succession in family enterprises, and that marriage is a critical link in the web of alliance that governs the problematic relations between old and young. Spencer's exploration of the development of the pastoralist phenomenon yields a unique view of its place in the modern world and its prospects for the future. This landmark work by a leading authority will be of lasting value to any reader interested in traditional social systems of this kind.
Attachment between an infant and his or her parents is a major topic within developmental psychology. An increasing number of psychologists, evolutionary biologists and anthropologists are articulating their doubts that attachment theory in its present form is applicable worldwide, without, however, denying that the development of attachment is a universal need. This book brings together leading scholars from psychology, anthropology and related fields to reformulate attachment theory in order to fit the cultural realities of our world. Contributions are based on empirical research and observation in a variety of cultural contexts. They are complemented by careful evaluation and deconstruction of many of the underlying premises and assumptions of attachment theory and of conventional research on the role of infant-parent attachment in human development. The book creates a contextual cultural understanding of attachment that will provide the basis for a groundbreaking reconceptualization of attachment theory.
