bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Islam or Christianity? The choices of the Wawa and the Kwanja of Cameroon
Authors: Gausset Quentin 
Published: April 2006

AbstractThis article addresses two questions. First, it seeks to explain why the Wawa and the Kwanja (two neighbouring groups of Cameroon) converted to Islam and Christianity in the 1960s, and argues that they did so in order to adopt a respected identity which was seen as ‘modern’ and was associated with national citizenship. Secondly, it analyses the reasons why the Wawa converted to Islam while most Kwanja chose Christianity, and argues that their choices depended primarily on how they interact with, and define their own identityvis-à-visthe neighbouring Fulbe.
Development, demarcation and ecological outcomes in Maasailand
Authors: Homewood Katherine 
Published: April 2006

AbstractThe article begins by setting out the position of the Maasai, their territory and social organisation at the advent of the colonial period. It documents the progressive erosion of territory and the imposition of new boundaries on the Maasai from the 1880s to the present. It then uses the author's studies of the current Maasai land use and production system in Tanzanian Maasailand, together with comparative material from Kenyan Maasailand, to show how Maasai communities have dealt with these constraints. Data on livestock performance, wealth holdings, settlement size, diet and nutritional status are used as direct ecological indicators of the effects of boundary formation. It discusses the nature and extent of the response of the Maasai communities, whether in circumventing imposed boundaries, exploiting and in some cases attacking the resources the boundaries were designed to protect, or in developing strategies to incorporate and use to good effect the opportunities that boundaries can present.
On the creation and dissolution of ethnomedical systems in the medical ethnography of Africa
Authors: Pool Robert 
Published: April 2006

AbstractBetween the mid-1970s and mid-1980s a number of publications appeared in which earlier ethnographies of illness and misfortune in Africa were criticised for placing too much emphasis on supernatural causation and neglecting natural causation and practical medical behaviour. Indeed, following Warren's (1974) first criticism of Field, there was what almost amounted to a crusade to prove that Africans traditionally recognised a separate medical domain in which they interpret illness primarily in empirical and practical rather than in social and moral terms.This article criticises the attempt to cast African aetiologies in a new light. Proceeding from a discussion of the distinction between naturalistic and personalistic aetiologies, around which the whole issue revolves, it examines the critics' claim that ethnographers have placed too much emphasis on supernatural causation in African aetiologies, that once these aetiologies are viewed more broadly they can in fact be seen to be largely naturalistic, and that one of the reasons for this bias is that earlier ethnographies, in particular Evans-Pritchard'sWitchcraft, Oracles and Magic, have been wrongly interpreted. A discussion of Evans-Pritchard's own description of Zande aetiology leads to the conclusion that the recent reinterpretations of Zande aetiology are mistaken. This raises the question: why the sudden desire to delineate discrete medical systems, and why so much emphasis on natural causation and practical activity?Following a discussion of Wimbum aetiology and the concept of medicine, based on fieldwork in the Grassfields of Cameroon, the author argues that the emphasis on naturalistic causation and practical activity in the definition of African medical systems does not make them broader, as the protagonists claim, but narrower, and that the ‘broader’ descriptions of medical systems are not more accurate representations of how Africans interpret and cope with illness but biomedically determined constructs imposed on African culture through medical ethnography. The article concludes with a plea for the dissolution of the concept of ‘ethnomedical systems’.
The political economy of video marketing in Ogbomọṣọ, Nigeria
Authors: Lawuyi Olatunde B. 
Published: April 2006

AbstractThis article examines the character of Yoruba video viewers, the style of marketing and the politics of choice in Ogbomọṣọ, a Nigerian town on the northern fringe of Ọyọ State. As an itinerant trading community Ogbomọṣọ is a place where production is not the source of wealth; instead, big wealth is always repatriated from outside, raising a doubt, stemming from its largely invisible productive base, about human ability and achievements. The vocation of selling videos is growing, even if it is not successful yet as a money-making enterprise. But the business itself, by the attractiveness of its market culture, seems to be inviting gradual, systematic and progressive patronage. The business attracts customers, especially the young, by its guarantee of choice and a promise of negotiable power. Consumers can pick and choose among a variety of goods. They are free to collect or construct their relationships with the marketers, depending on what emphasis they place on cost, quality and quantity of goods. For the people of Ogbomọṣọ, whose craving for freedom and success have taken them far afield into other countries, the market enacts a self that can play many roles. The argument is that a local ideology of marketing promotes the sale of videos in their productive contexts and that those who buy them within those contexts act within the framework of the same ideology. Videos deal with knowledge and the various levels of its acquisition. The producers, the marketers and the consumers are engaged in a consideration of the political economy of their time. And, as a form of brokerage, the videos merge all expectations into a conception of history seen from a moralistic standpoint. They are also an illusion for sale when in the Nigerian context they talk about progress.
Second-hand clothing encounters in Zambia: global discourses, Western commodities, and local histories
Authors: Hansen Karen Tranberg 
Published: April 2006

AbstractThe rapid expansion in commercial exports of second-hand clothing from the West to the Third World and the increase in second-hand clothing consumption in many African countries raise challenging questions about the effects of globalisation and the meanings of the West and the local that consumers attribute to objects at different points of their journey across global space. This article draws on extensive research into the sourcing of second-hand clothing in the West, and its wholesaling, retailing, distribution and consumption in Zambia. Discussing how people in Zambia are deahng with the West's unwanted clothing, the article argues that a cultural economy is at work in local appropriations of this particular commodity that is opening space for local agency in clothing consumption. Clothing has a powerful hold on people's imagination because the self and society articulate through the dressed body. To provide background for this argument, the article briefly sketches recent trends in the global second-hand clothing trade that place the countries of sub-Saharan Africa as the world's largest importing region. There follows a discussion of Zambians' preoccupation with clothing, both new and second-hand, historically and at the present time. It demonstrates that the meanings consumers in Zambia attribute to second-hand clothing are neither uniform nor static but shift across class and gender lines, and between urban and rural areas. Above all, they depend on the cultural politics of their time. In dealing with clothing, people in Zambia are making sense of post-colonial society and their own place within it and in the world at large.
Trading on inequality: gender and the drinks trade in southern Tanzania
Authors: Green Maia 
Published: April 2006

AbstractThis article explores the economic logic of the domestic drinks market and its place in the subsistence strategies of men and women in a rural district of Ulanga in southern Tanzania, where women's brewing coexists with men's monopolisation of the sap alcohol market. The seasonal availability of sap alcohols, combined with the district's integration into national grain markets, creates a short-lived opportunity for some women to supplement their income from the production and sale of maize beer, an opportunity made possible oy the unequal economic interdependence of men and women and of different regions of Tanzania. The seasonal expansion of the market in maize beer occurs at a time when maize prices are high and household grain stocks are low. Brewers must choose between their immediate consumption needs and investing their small reserves of cash or grain in beer production in the hope that it will generate longer-term profit. As in other parts of Tanzania, the choice is idiomatically expressed through the contrast between ‘eating’ (kulia) and ‘generation’ (zalisha) through which grain, and the money to which it is explicitly compared, can be made to reproduce itself through careful investment.
Wartime forest energy policy and practice in British West Africa: social and economic impact on the labouring classes 1939–45
Authors: Cline-Cole Reginald A. 
Published: April 2006

AbstractThe recent resurgence of interest in the impact of World War II on African populations has, to date, neglected the theme of forest energy (firewood and charcoal) production, consumption and exchange. This needs to be rectified, for several reasons: (1) wood fuel accounted for the lion's share of wartime forestry output by volume and value, prompting (2) an unprecedented degree of intensity in, and variety of, state emergency intervention in wood fuel ‘markets’ which had (3) important equity implications, which have gone largely unreported, with the risk that (4) current and future attempts at (emergency) wood fuel resource management may be deprived of the lessons of this experience. This article is thus an essay in the dynamics and consequences of crisis management in colonial forestry. It evaluates wartime forest energy policy and practice in British West Africa, with special reference to their ‘invisible’ social consequences. The regional political, economic and military context of forest energy activity is first summarised. This is followed by detailed case studies, which assess policy impacts on the labouring classes in the Sierra Leone colony peninsula and the Jos Plateau tin mines in northern Nigeria. The main aim of these studies is to show how war-induced demands on subsistence products like firewood and charcoal weighed inordinately heavily on the poor. Even those who belonged to sectors of society which benefited from preferential treatment in the allocation of scarce supplies of consumer products were not spared. Recently, concern has increased over the equity implications of current and proposed (peacetime) domestic energy policy and practice in Africa. This suggests that the issues of distributive justice raised by this study are of wider relevance than the specific historical context within which they have been discussed.
Toward a new understanding of Akan origins
Authors: Klein A. Norman 
Published: April 2006

AbstractRecent evidence from archaeology and human population biology indicates two major demographic periods in the prehistoric and early historical settlement of the forest of southern Ghana. The earlier period began during the early part of the Common Era. The greatest material problem confronting early forest populations in West Africa was the need to counteract extraordinarily high rates of infant and childhood mortality and adult morbidity. This demographic drain resulted from the new disease ecologies—the relationship between the pathogens, notably malaria, their hosts and their mutual environment—that had confronted prehistoric and early historical peoples in the forest. The heavy price they paid in lives and productivity led these new forest communities to value the reproductivity of foreign women (slaves). The second period of demographic adjustment came between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries CE as West Africans responded to slaving, wars and Eurasian viral, bacterial and spirochetal diseases such as tuberculosis and syphilis, by developing a defensive clustering pattern of settlement. It was during this period, when refugees were being incorporated into forest communities in large numbers, including slave women brought in as reproducers, that the tradition of outsiders falsifying Akan genealogies probably became widespread and thus helped ensure the social reproduction of Akan lineages.
Fathering, mothering and making sense ofntamoba: reflections on the economy of child-rearing in colonial Asante
Authors: Allman Jean 
Published: April 2006

AbstractThis article explores the changing dynamics of child-rearing in Asante (Ghana) through the problematic concept ofntamoba. In the historical record, and in popular memory,ntamobahas survived in a number of forms—as a marriage payment, as a rite connected with birthing and naming and as an indemnification paid to a father by a child's matrikin to signify the termination of a father's rights in that child. This article seeks to historicise and explain the multiplicity of meanings and the eventual disappearance ofntamobaby examining the ways in which a father's rights of use in his children were transformed into rights of ownership. It foregrounds time and social place/status as key variables in its investigation, demonstrating how the disappearance ofntamobawas connected with the conflation of subordinate social categories in twentieth-century Asante.
Pastoralism, biodiversity, and the shaping of savanna landscapes in East Africa
Authors: Little Peter D. 
Published: April 2006

AbstractEast Africa possesses a rich historical and archaeological record documenting the significant influences of pastoral land use on savanna habitats. In this article the author explores the heterogeneity of savanna landscapes and its effects on local resource use. It is suggested that fundamental misunderstanding of key resources—in this case, wetlands—and their importance to local social and economic systems has misdirected arguments about environmental degradation in pastoral savanna areas. By focusing on a region of northern Kenya—the Lake Baringo basin of Baringo District—where global concern about biodiversity loss and ‘desertification’ are both strongly voiced, the article argues that the causal connection of local social practice with either phenomenon has been vastly exaggerated. In the case of Baringo it shows (1) how the value of the basin's swamps is constantly misunderstood by the state and other outside interests, and (2) how the perceived role of African herding in creating environmental degradation (‘desertification’) contradicts the recent acknowledgement of pastoralism's positive contribution to maintaining biodiversity.
Agro-diversity on a farming frontier: Kofyar smallholders on the Benue plains of central Nigeria
Authors: Netting Robert McC. , Stone M. Priscilla 
Published: April 2006

AbstractThis article examines the proposition that levels of agro-diversity decline with increasing intensification of agricultural systems. Much of the literature on swidden farming highlights the great numbers of both cultivated and wild species of plants these systems incorporate, while descriptions of mechanised intensive agriculture point to the small number of species managed. The article reports on an agro-eco-system that is known for its intensity—that of the Kofyar of central Nigeria—yet which maintains high levels of diversity. The article explores more generally, the role of biodiversity in systems of smallholder agriculture and makes the case that these systems, like that of the Kofyar, foster biodiversity as part of environmental and economic sustainability even as they adapt to new agricultural conditions.
Diversity at different levels: farm and community in western Nigeria
Authors: Guyer Jane I. 
Published: April 2006

AbstractThe difficulty of applying the concept of diversity to empirical research can be mitigated by empirical specificity. By applying it to the particular question of how cropping patterns in a community within the food supply hinterland of Ibadan have changed over twenty years of increasing market orientation one can both illuminate agricultural dynamics and also subject the concept of diversity to critique. This Nigerian case study argues that individual farmers have developed more weighted (‘specialised’) production patterns, but differently from one another, so that the community as a whole has retained a similar diversity profile to that of the past. Yoruba concepts and practices with respect to individuation and social diversity should be at the heart of an understanding of these patterns of change.
African and Africanist biodiversity research in a neo-liberal context
Authors: Cline-Cole Reginald A. 
Published: April 2006

AbstractThis article situates African(ist) biodiversity research in its wider neo-liberal context. It argues that the ‘africanisation’ of biodiversity as concept and practice must, of necessity, take place within a neo-liberal context of globalisation and localisation, and against the background of continually evolving relations between civil society, the market and the state. For this reason, the article concludes, African(ist) biodiversity strategies need to be understood as attempts at ‘holding down the global’, although they must not be allowed to degenerate into crude Africa-centrism or potentially reactionary relativism.
The Potential of Nonverbal Communication Research for Research in Dance
Authors: Davis Martha , Andreasen Lois 
Published: April 2006

There is a growing body of knowledge about movement behavior (as it is variously called--kinesics, nonverbal communciation, expressive movement, body language, etc.). Increasingly anthropologists, psychologists, researchers in child development, etc. are attending to body movement. One could argue that although this is still a relatively underdeveloped area of research and that studies we have now will probably be rendered quite obsolete in five years, there is enough of a picture of what can be done and may be discovered to talk about it as a field in its own right. Further, one could argue that the preliminary research techinques and findings of movement research may, even at this point, be useful and relevant to research in dance. As an introduction to the topic a survey of some of the most important behavioral studies of body movement will be presented, followed by a discussion of a dance film and then implications of a practical, methodological, empirical, and theoretical nature that may be of interest to dance researchers.For purposes of discussion, this survey is divided into three parts according to those studies which deal with (1) movement and expression of emotions, (2) movement style (from individual to cultural), and (3) movement in interaction.It seems that the most common assumption about body movement is that it reveals inner emotions or attitudes. Darwin first made this idea the subject of serious scientific study in 1872 when he published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Social Skill Performances of Learning Disabled, Non-Learning Disabled, and Delinquent Adolescents
Authors: Schumaker Jean Bragg , Hazel J. Stephen , Sherman James A. , Sheldon Jan 
Published: April 2006

Two controversial issues in the field of learning disabilities concern whether LD adolescents exhibit social skills deficits when compared to their nonhandicapped peers, and whether such deficits have a negative impact on the lives of LD adolescents and young adults. The purpose of this study was to address the first issue by comparing LD adolescents' social skills performances on eight general social skills to the performances of two other groups of youths: a group of nonhandicapped adolescents who were members of a high-school band (non-LD) and a group of court-adjudicated juvenile delinquent adolescents who had been referred for social skills training by their probation officers (JD). Social skills were tested individually in role-playing situations. The results showed that the non-LD youths performed significantly better than the other two groups of youths on seven of the eight skills. The LD youths were found to perform significantly better than the JD youths on only one skill, resisting peer pressure. A discriminant analysis demonstrated that the LD group in this study was heterogeneous with regard to social skills. The results of the study point to a cause for concern on behalf of those LD youths who perform significantly lower than the non-LD youths, as well as those LD youths who exhibit deficits similar to those of youths who have been referred by society for social adjustment problems (the JD group). One implication of these results is the urgent need for curricula and procedures for social skills training at the secondary level.
The Development and Validation of an Interactive Hypermedia Program for Teaching a Self-Advocacy Strategy to Students with Disabilities
Authors: Lancaster Paula E. , Schumaker Jean B. , Deshler Donald D. 
Published: April 2006

Educators agree that students with disabilities need to acquire self-advocacy skills. Despite the existence of validated methods to teach these skills, evidence suggests that they are seldom explicitly taught. Time and opportunities to teach these skills in both the general and special education setting are minimal. One possible solution is to use instructional technology. The purpose of this project was to develop and validate an Interactive Hypermedia Program (IHP) to teach a self-advocacy strategy to secondary-level students with disabilities. The strategy for which the IHP was developed and tested is the Self-Advocacy Strategy (Van Reusen, Bos, Schumaker, & Deshler, 1994). The instruction for the strategy was originally validated by Van Reusen, Deshler, and Schumaker (1989). With input from student, teacher, design, and technical consultants, the IHP was created. Students who had learning disabilities, behavior disorders, and other health impairments learned the strategy via the IHP or through live instruction. A multiple-baseline design was used to show the effects of the instruction. In addition, a no-treatment comparison group was included for comparative purposes. At the conclusion of instruction, each student ran his or her own IEP conference. Results showed that the IHP was as effective in teaching students with learning disabilities to use the strategy as live instruction. Further research is warranted to determine if this medium is effective in teaching students other types of strategies.
Archaeological Explorations in Southwestern Idaho
Authors: Swanson Earl H. 
Published: April 2006

AbstractField work in southwestern Idaho in 1959 has led to definition of a boundary zone between the Great Basin and Plateau culture areas. Around A.D. 1300, this boundary lay along the Snake River in southwestern Idaho, but in the 19th century it lay nearly 100 miles to the north of the Snake River. It is suggested that the contemporary environment of southwestern Idaho was established about 1000 B.C.
Spring Creek Cave, Wyoming
Authors: Frison George C. 
Published: April 2006

AbstractSpring Creek Cave, a single-component, habitation site in the Big Horn Basin near Ten Sleep, Wyoming, yielded an assemblage of stone artifacts diagnostic of the Late Middle Prehistoric period in context with a considerable variety of hitherto undescribed perishable items. Charcoal produced a radiocarbon date of A.D. 225 ± 200. The Spring Creek material considerably amplifies present knowledge of Late Middle period technology and economy in the Northwestern Plains and provides opportunities for comparison of Late Middle period perishable items with similar items in Basketmaker assemblages of the Southwest and in other assemblages from various parts of the Basin-Plateau region.