Routledge
182 pages
Originally published in 1958, this book discusses how marriage and Fulbe family life, the economy and the whole organization of society is centred on cattle; how the welfare of the herd and its increase, the balance betweent he size of the herd and the size of the family are major preoccupations in the life of a Fulani herd-owner.
1. Significant Ethnic and Sub-cultural Divisions
2. History and Traditions of Origin of Fulani in Northern Nigeria
3. The Environmental Setting
4. Fulɓe Interest in their Cattle
5. Patterns of Transhumance
6. The Gwandu Fulɓe During the 'Time of War'
7. The Period of Transition
8. The Family and Its Herd
9. Households and Herds: A Quantitative Analysis
10. The Creation of the Family
11. Economic Aspects of Marriage Gifts
12. The Husband-Wife Relationship 13. Relationships Between Father and Son, and between Brothers 14. Pattern of Inheritance
15. Polygyny
16. The Family in its Wider Setting
17. Inter-Family Relations and the Clan
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.