Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention

ISBN-13: 9780312224059 / Angielski / Twarda / 2000 / 236 str.

Carola Lentz; Paul Nugent

Opis

Although African ethnicity has become a highly fertile field of enquiry in recent years, most of the research is concentrated on southern and central Africa, and has passed Ghana by. This volume extends many of the distilled insights, but also modifies them in the light of the Ghanaian evidence. The collection is multidisciplinary in scope and spans the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial contexts. A central contention of the volume is that, while there were significant regional variations, ethnicity was not purely a colonial invention'. The boundaries of we-groups' have constantly mutated from pre-colonial times, while European categorization owed much to indigenous ways of seeing. The contributors explore the role of European administrators and recruitment officers as well as African cultural brokers in shaping new identities. The interaction of gender and ethnic consciousness is explicitly addressed. The volume also examines the formulation of the national question in Ghana today - in debates over language policy and conflicts over land and chieftaincy.

O autorze

Carola Lentz is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Frankfurt, Germany.

Paul Nugent is Senior Lecturer in African history at the University of Edinburgh.