Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone
"[This] is an extraordinary combination of ethnography and history that promises to reshape our understanding of West African cultures and the ways in which their insertion into history has affected such quotidian matters as gender and ideas about the person. Shaw provides an elegant analysis that shows how aspects of culture, such as ideas about secrecy and local concepts of agency, were fashioned under historical circumstances that are both transmitted and rethought in the present." - Ivan Karp, Emory University