How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600 |
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How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600
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by Jan Vansina
Sales Rank: 1036962
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List Price: $24.50
$24.50
At Amazon
on 6-17-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 325 pages
Published by: University of Virginia Press July 20, 2005
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0813922801
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0813922805
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6.2 x 0.5 inches
Weighs: 12 ounces
David Schoenbrun, Northwestern University, author of 'A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity between the Great Lakes to the 15th Century'
"Vansina possesses rare and unmatched skills in marshaling a recalcitrant and multilingual body of historical sources."
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Book Description
Like stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such a birth. It asks a fundamental and compelling question: How did societies first coalesce from the small foraging communities that had roamed in West Central Africa for many thousands of years?
Jan Vansina continues a career-long effort to reconstruct the history of African societies before European contact in How Societies Are Born. In this complement to his previous study Paths in the Rainforests, Vansina employs a provocative combination of archaeology and historical linguistics to turn his scholarly focus to governance, studying the creation of relatively large societies extending beyond the foraging groups that characterized west central Africa from the beginning of human habitation to around 500 BCE, and the institutions that bridged their constituent local communities and made large-scale cooperation possible.
The increasing reliance on cereal crops, iron tools, large herds of cattle, and overarching institutions such as corporate matrilineages and dispersed matriclans lead up to the developments treated in the second part of the book. From about 900 BCE until European contact, different societies picked different developmental paths. Interestingly, these proceeded well beyond environmental constraints and were characterized by "major differences in the subjects which enthralled people," whether these were cattle, initiations and social position, or "the splendors of sacralized leaders and the possibilities of participating in them."
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How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600
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Price: $24.50
Updated on 6-17-2008.
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