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All movies to be shown on Wednesdays at 6:30 pm:
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To see a list of past lectures, click here: January 28: Ellen Messer (Tufts University) February 4: William F. Miles (Northeastern University/Wharton Institute) February 11: Rodolfo Fattovich (University of Naples, L'Orientale) February 18: Presidents Day (no seminar) February 25: Susanne D. Mueller (Harvard University) March 3: Vincent K. Machozi (Boston University) March 17 - Spring Break
March 24: Cynthia Becker (Boston University) April 7: Yesim Tozan (Boston University) 12 Noon – 1:30 pm The African Studies Center Please join us ! |
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Bradford Morse Distinguished Lecture
Latest lecture information and a list of past lectures.RESOURCES
African Studies Center Outreach Program
What's new in Outreach?
Here's
some good news. Our poster, "How Big Is Africa?"
can now be purchased on line with a credit card, making us
the first academic dept. at the university offering on-line
purchasing. Come see for yourself how easy it is. Please let
interested colleagues and friends know too.
Click here to order poster
International Journal of African Historical Studies
Books and Papers
Francophone
Africa Research Group (GRAF) Newsletter
African Presidential Archives and Research Center (APARC) at Boston University
Read a description
here.
PSAE Presentation
INTERNET COURSE
The Environmental History of Africa James McCann
Congratuations to Barbara Cooper (Ph.D., History, 1992) who teaches at Rutgers
University, is Director of the African Studies Program at Rutgers, and the author of Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel. For this book Barbara Cooper received the Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the Best Book in African Studies for 2006 from the African Studies Association.
Congratulations to James A. Pritchett, Associate Professor of
Anthropology,
on the publication of Friends for Life, Friends for Death: Cohorts and Consciousness among the Lunda-Ndembu (University of Virginia Press, 2007 - upress.virginia.edu/books). From the University of Virginia Press… “Breaking away from the limiting theoretical frameworks and rhetorical styles of traditional ethnographic accounts, Friends for Life, Friends for Death offers an insider's view into the day-to-day lives of a self-selected group of male friends within this society in northern Zambia. During his two decades of fieldwork in this region, James Pritchett followed a group of Lunda-Ndembu males, here called Amabwambu (the friends), learning about the importance of the clique both as a principal agent for receiving and interpreting information from and about the world and as a place where strategies could be hatched, tested, and applied. Pritchett offers new insights into the ways social structures are able to stay viable even in the face of radical change. The book is divided into two parts. The first half examines the friends' vicarious experience with and orientation to the world through stories heard from their grandfathers and fathers, and the second half represents a compilation of their own direct experience in the world.” (Review)
Congratulations to Parker Shipton, Associate Professor of Anthropology on his recently published book The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007 - yalepress.yale.edu/book) Drawing on his years of research among Luo people in western Kenya, Parker Shipton provides a general ethnography with a new theme and theoretical approach. In particular, he focuses closely on non-monetary forms of exchange and entrustment, moving beyond anthropology's traditional understanding of gifts, loans, and reciprocity and taking into account not just movements of inanimate goods and services but also exchanges and offerings of animals and humans. Shipton proposes a rounder view of the social and symbolic dimensions of economy over the full life course, encompassing transfers between generations and shows why the enduring cultural values and aspirations of East African people -- and others around the world -- complicate issues of credit, debt, and compensation. The book examines how Luo people assess obligations to intimates and strangers, including the dead and the not-yet-born. Shipton shows that borrowing, lending, and serial passing along have ritual, religious, and emotional dimensions no less than economic ones and also that insight into these connections demands a broad rethinking of international aid plans and programs.
James C. Scott, Yale University states "Shipton's concept of entrustment is artful, engaging, and intellectually powerful. He moves us from quotidian observation to high theory with beguiling prose and rigor. If I could press this book on every World Bank economist, every formal theorist of political economy, every practitioner of cost-benefit analysis, and everyone who wants to understand how social 'structure' is created and sustained, I would be very happy."
Congratulations to Cynthia J. Becker, Assistant Professor of Art History, on her recently published book Amazigh Arts in Morocco – Women Shaping Berber Identity. (University of Texas Press, Austin, 2006-utexas.edu/utpress). The University of Texas Press writes "In southeastern Morocco, around the oasis of Tafilalet, the Ait Khabbash people weave brightly colored carpets, embroider indigo head coverings, paint their faces with saffron, and wear ornate jewelry. Their extraordinarily detailed arts are rich in cultural symbolism; they are always breathtakingly beautiful – and they are typically made by women. Cynthia Becker spent years in Morocco living among these Ait Khabbash women and, through family connections and female fellowship, achieved unprecedented access to the artistic rituals of the Ait Khabbash. The result is more than a stunning examination of the arts themselves, it is also an illumination of women’s roles in Islamic North Africa and the many ways in which women negotiate complex social and religious issues.”
Congratulations to Jim McCann, Professor of History and recipient of the 2006 George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History and also Honorable Mention 2006 Melville J. Herskovitz Award, African Studies Association. His book is Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New Crop, 1500-2000 (Harvard University Press, 2005 - hup.harvard.edu/catalog/)
“Maize and Grace shows how a New World crop contributed to the emergence of modern-day Africa. Some parts of Africa now have higher maize consumption per capita than Mexico and Guatemala, where the crop originated…Rather than describing sweeping historical currents, the book offers the reader a series of vignettes that provide opportunities to appreciate the paradoxes of maize development policy and to contemplate some enduring themes in agricultural history.” —Robert Tripp, NATURE see poster.
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