Family Identity And The State In The Bamako Kafu
Regular price
€61.50
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=B. Marie Perinbam
Author_B. Marie Perinbam
Bamako Region
borgnis
Borgnis Desbordes
Category=JBSL
Category=NHH
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTQ
Category=NHTR
Collateral Succession
colonial encounter studies
Constitutional Protocols
desbordes
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic identity formation
Facing North North West
Futa Jallon
Inland Niger Delta
Kin Daws
kinship politics
Kola Nut
mande
Mande Dialects
Mande Identity
Mande Style
Mande World
Middle Niger
Military Headquarters
myth and power in Mali
northern
Northern Paradigm
oral tradition analysis
Pagan Bambara
paradigm
region
Rio Pongo
Sacrifice Episode
Sahelian state systems
samorian
Samorian Wars
style
Sumanguru Kante
Turban Wearers
Variable Ethnic Identity
Vice Versa
wars
West African history
world
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9780813336299
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Oct 1998
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This groundbreaking book explores the history and the cultural context of family claims to power in the Bamako kafu, or state (located in contemporary Mali in West Africa), primarily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perinbam argues that the absence of precise information on the Bamako kafu's political status during this period empowered families to manipulate the myths, rituals, and ancestral legends?as well as belief systems?so that their claims to state power appeared incontrovertible. The French, on reaching the region, accepted these representations of power.Although the author's historical data focus mainly on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mythical recountings beyond this historical grid?ranging across approximately one thousand years and including large-scale migrations throughout the West African Sahel?provide insights into the processes by which many of these ethnic identities were subject to reconfiguration and reinvention. Within this historical-mythical matrix, Perinbam offers new insights into the reconstruction of Mande identities, their cultures (material and otherwise), political systems, and various social fields, as well as their past. Instead of rigid ethnic identities?sometimes identified in the historical and anthropological literature as ?Mandingo,? ?Malinke,? or ?Bambara??the author argues that variable ethnographic identities were more often than not mediated in accordance with a number of mythic and historical contingencies, most notably the respective states into which the families were drawn, as well as state formation, maintenance, and renewal, not to mention meaning sensitive to political, generational, and gender challenges. With the arrival of the French in the late nineteenth century and the Mande incorporation into the French colonial state, familial identities once more readjusted.The careful research and original scholarship of Family Identity and the State in the Bamako Kafu make it a significant contribution to the histories of West Africa, the African Diaspora, and the United States.
The late B. Marie Perinbam taught history at the University of Maryland at College Park.
