Routledge
318 pages
This collection of R. E. Bradbury's papers, originally published in 1973 includes edited sections of his (then hitherto) unpublished thesis on the Benin village in Western Nigeria. The book is arranged in 3 parts: historical and political studies of the kingdom of Benin; Benin village organization and religion and art. An introduction by Peter Morton-Williams traces bradbury's development as an interpreter of the culture, society and art of Benin, beginning with his first studies in the filed and culminating in the important anthropological and historical essays.
Part 1. Historical Studies of the Kingdom of Benin
1. The Historical Uses of Comparative Ethnography with Special Reference to Benin and the Yoruba
2. Chronological Problems in the Study of Benin History
3. The Kingdom of Benin
4. Continuities and Discontinuities in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Benin Politics (1897-1951)
5. Patrimonialism and Gerontocracy in Benin Political Culture
Part 2. Benin Village Life
6. The Benin Village
Part 3. Religion and Art
7. Father and Senior Son in Edo Mortuary Ritual
8. Fathers, Elders and Ghosts in Edo Religion
9. Ezomo's ikegobo and the Benin Cult of the Hand
10. Ehi: Three Stories from Benin
Routledge is delighted to be re-issuing 79 volumes originally published between 1931 and 1988 in association with the International African Institute. Unavailable outside a few key libraries, many of these republished volumes were at the cutting edge of a fieldwork and ethnographic revolution in African anthropology in the decades after 1930. It involved the production of a wide body of fieldwork-based ethnographic documentation about the cultures of the different societies in Africa. Secondly, it saw a methodological turn to intense, localized investigations of cultural tradition and social change in a rapidly modernizing context. These investigations involved a more sustained and systematic, more professional and ‘scientific’ form of immersion and participant observation, than anything that had gone before. The sites of engagement were urban as well as rural; the pioneering researchers were female as well as male. No longer was the journal essay the repository of the latest research in the discipline, but rich ethnographies running into hundreds of pages.
The volumes are supplemented with maps, which will be available to view on https://www.routledge.com/ or available as pdfs from the publishers.