Villages Of West Africa

Art and especially architecture are often seen as the exclusive realm of formally trained experts. Award-winning architects Steven and Cathi House explore the other side of that reality in a part of the world that has been at the crossroads of history for thousands of years. With more than 500 photographs and insightful commentary, they reveal the remarkable beauty of the people, land, villages, textiles, and vernacular architecture across seven countries of West Africa, situated between the Sahara Desert and Atlantic Ocean. The book celebrates the artisanship of tribal people who use building methods that are both practical and ingenious and that respond not just to local climate, materials, and topography, but also to the needs of the inhabitants with poetic insight, creating environments that are stimulating and sustainable. With their clarity, function, and beauty, these villages are living models of what community life can be.

At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic "out of the way" African culture—subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything "indigenous" or local. Through analyses of everyday and ceremonial social practices, Piot illustrates the intertwining of modernity with tradition and of the local with the national and global. In a striking example of the appropriation of tradition by the state, Togo's Kabre president regularly flies to the region in his helicopter to witness male initiation ceremonies. Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, Remotely Global aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion.

Short stories revealing various aspects of life among the Serers in the West African village of Bikole.

People, industries, resources, religion, education, customs, and governments are described to show the mingling of age-old tribal ways with the society in modern cities.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

A boy discovers and takes pride in the customs of his people when he visits his family's village.

This volume surveys archaeological data from West Africa, examining sites from the Senegambia to the Cameroon. The focus is on the archaeological record of the past 500 years, a period that witnessed dramatic transformations in African political and social systems, as well as the consequences of European expansion, the advent of the Atlantic slave trave, and the expansion of Islamic polities in the West African Sahel. While historians have examined many aspects of this period, the written record provides only limited insight into the history and development of many areas. Archaeology has the potential to provide unique information not accessible through documentary records or oral traditions. Thus, the material record offers the most valuable means of evaluating both change and continuity in African societies over the past 500 years.The geographical and topical scope of this volume is extremely timely. Historical archaeology, particularly aspects dealing with European interactions with indigenous populations, is an area that has received increasing attention over the past decade. There has also been a growing interest in studies of Africa and the African diaspora. This volume, the first to draw together archaeological syntheses of various parts of West Africa, will be an important resource for West Africanists and all researchers interested in the indigenous response to European expansion, as well as for those examining African continuitites in the Americas.>