Based on Cohen's fieldwork in the 60s among the Hausa migrants, a people of the Yoruba area, (then the western region of the Federation of Nigeria), this book looks at how ethnic groups use elements of tradition in jostling for power and privilege in new urban situations. This is a landmark work in urban anthropology and provides a comparative framework for studying political processes in African societies.

A discussion of the process by which some ethnic groups manipulate values, myths, symbols and ceremonials from their traditional culture in order to develop and control an informal political organisation.

This book examines the complex phenomenon of urban ethnicity; including Britain, the USA, Indonesia, Israel and East, West and Central Africa.

Carnival, that image of sensuous frivolity, is shown by Abner Cohen to be a masquerade for the dynamic relations between culture and politics. His masterful study details the transformation of a local, polyethnic London fair to a massive, exclusively West Indian carnival, known as "Europe's biggest street festival," which in 1976 occasioned a bloody confrontation between black youth and the police and which has since become a fiercely contested cultural event.

Cohen contrasts the development of the London carnival with the development of other carnivalesque movements, including the...