The Kuranko. Dimensions of Social Reality in a West African Society

1982 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Marion Kilson ◽  
Michael Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Social Reality ◽  
West African ◽  
African Society

A Further Note on Joking Relationships

Africa ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Considerable Importance ◽  
African Society ◽  
The People ◽  
Joking Relationships ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphProfessor Griaule's article on ‘L'Alliance cathartique’ in Africa of October 1948 raises a methodological point of considerable importance. If we wish to understand a custom or institution that we find in a particular society there are two ways of dealing with it. One is to examine the part it plays in the system or complex of customs and institutions in which it is found and the meaning that it has within this complex for the people themselves. Professor Griaule deals in this way with the custom by which the Bozo and the Dogon exchange insults with each other. He considers it as an element in a complex of customs, institutions, myths, and ideas to which the Dogon themselves refer by the term mangou. He shows us also what meaning the natives themselves attribute to this exchange of insults (p. 253). As a piece of analysis the article is admirable, and is a most important contribution to our growing knowledge of West African society.

Islam and Trade in the Bilād AL-Sūdān, Tenth-Eleventh Century A.D.

1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Brett
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
West African ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
African Society ◽  
Western Sahara ◽  
Legal Opinions ◽  
The Law ◽  
Muslim Communities

Two fatwā-s or legal opinions of the jurist al-Qābisī at Qayrawān about the year A.D. 1000 show the way in which the Law of Islam was used to protect the Muslim against the hazards of trans-Saharan trade with the Bilād al-Sūdan. Trade was to be conducted as far as possible in accordance with the Law, and approval was given to the establishment of Muslim communities in the Bilād al-Sūdān under the authority of a nāzir or ‘watchman’, with the consent of the pagan king of the country. The formation of Muslim communities on this legal basis, and their incorporation into the pattern of West African society, were important for the subsequent character of Islam in West Africa. Meanwhile, among the ‘stateless’ Berber peoples of the Western Sahara, the doctrines of the Malikite school were subject to a different interpretation by Ibn Yasln, which came into open conflict with the views of al-Qābisī when the Almoravids sacked the Muslim city of Awdaghast for submitting to the pagan king of Ghana. This conflict of attitudes to paganism remained a feature of West African Islam down to the twentieth century.

An Anthropological Case Study on the Relation of Space, Language, and Social Order: The Bisa of Burkina Faso

10.1068/a345 ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (12) ◽  
pp. 2189-2203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Dafinger
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
West African ◽  
African Society ◽  
Spatial Order ◽  
Linguistic Research ◽  
Order Language ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Theoretical Frame

This paper outlines certain benefits that spatial analysis offers to anthropological research, and shows how anthropology and related linguistic research may in turn contribute to the understanding of the social determinants of spatial order. It presents a case study of spatial order in a rural West African society. Although the examples are from a particular setting, the theoretical frame is a general one: the analysis will focus on the connections between social order, language, and the perception of space.

Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. D. Fage
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
African Society ◽  
Relevant Evidence ◽  
Central Sudan ◽  
Contrary View

This paper examines three views which have been widely held about slavery and the slave trade in West Africa, and which have tended to mould interpretations of its history, especially for the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. These are:(1) That the institution of slavery was endemic in, and a natural feature of, indigenous West African society, so that when foreigners arrived in West Africa with a demand for slaves, West Africans were able immediately to organize an export trade in slaves on an ever-increasing scale.(2) A contrary view, that it was the external demands for labour which led to a great growth of the institution of slavery in West Africa, and so corrupted its indigenous society.(3) A view which may or may not be combined with (2), namely that the external demand for slaves became so considerable that there was a disastrous effect on its population.Relevant evidence is touched upon from about the eleventh century onwards, and a fourth interpretation is developed which seems better to fit the economic and social realities which can be ascertained.In essence this is that economic and commercial slavery and slave-trading were not natural features of West African society, but that they developed, along with the growth of states, as a form of labour mobilization to meet the needs of a growing system of foreign trade in which, initially, the demand for slaves as trade goods was relatively insignificant. What might be termed a ‘slave economy’ was generally established in the Western and Central Sudan by about the fourteenth century at least, and had certainly spread to the coasts around the Senegal and in Lower Guinea by the fifteenth century.The European demand for slaves for the Americas, which reached its peak from about 1650 to about 1850, accentuated and expanded the internal growth of both slavery and the slave trade. But this was essentially only one aspect of a very wide process of economic and political development and social change, in West Africa. The data recently assembled and analysed by Curtin for the volume and distribution of the export slave trade do not suggest that the loss of population and other effects of the export of labour to the Americas need have had universally damaging effects on the development of West Africa. Rather, it is suggested, West African rulers and merchants reacted to the demand with economic reasoning, and used it to strengthen streams of economic and political development that were already current before the Atlantic slave trade began.

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