The world of the Swahili : an African mercantile civilization
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The world of the Swahili : an African mercantile civilization
Yale University Press, 1992
- : cloth
- : pbk
Available at / 23 libraries
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Tokyo University of Foreign Studies LibraryAA
: cloth11/R/Mi141000025168,
: pbk大塚文庫/1160421000116042 -
Library, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization遡
: cloth||301.1||Mi15||30030290
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
"African studies."--P. 4 of cover
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
: cloth ISBN 9780300052190
Description
The Swahili of East Africa have a long and distinctive history as a literate, Muslim, urban, and mercantile society. This book presents an anthropological account of the Swahili and offers an original analysis of their little-understood and unusual culture. Swahili towns, some urban with elegant stone buildings and others more rural with palm-leaf matting houses, are spread along the 1000 mile East African coast. Because each local community is culturally different from its neighbours, previous historians and anthropologists have viewed the Swahili as a series of isolated and "detribalized" groups. John Middleton argues, on the contrary, that beneath the cultural variation is a single structure, that of a well-defined and complex trading society that has shown little change through the ages. Drawing on his own field research and on earlier writings on the Swahili, Middleton describes this centuries-old mercantile culture, its local and descent groupings, marriage patterns, religion, and values.
He traces the history of their colonized past as subjects to Arabs, Portuguese, British, and others and shows that although their economic and political role has continually been a subordinate one, their sense of their unique identity enables them to persist as an ongoing civilization.
Table of Contents
- The Swahili people and their coast
- the merchants and the conquerers
- towns
- kinship and descent
- perpetuation and alliance
- the transformation of the person
- power, ritual and knowledge
- civilization and identity.
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780300060805
Description
The Swahili of East Africa have a long and distinctive history as a literate, Muslim, urban, and mercantile society. In this book a leading Africanist presents the first full-length anthropological account of the Swahili and offers an original analysis of their little-understood and unusual culture. Swahili towns, some urban with elegant stone buildings and others more rural with palm-leaf-matting houses, are spread along the thousand-mile East African coast. Because each local community is culturally different from its neighbors, previous historians and anthropologists have viewed the Swahili as a series of isolated and 'detribalized' groups. John Middleton argues, on the contrary, that beneath the cultural variation is a single structure, that of a well-defined and complex trading society that has shown little change through the ages. Drawing on his own field research and on earlier writings on the Swahili, Middleton describes this centuries-old mercantile culture-its local and descent groupings, marriage patterns, religion, and values. He traces the history of their colonized past as subjects to Arabs, Portuguese, British, and others and shows that, although their economic and political role has continually been a subordinate one, their sense of their unique identity enables them to persist as an ongoing civilization.
Table of Contents
- The Swahili people and their coast
- the merchants and the conquerers
- towns
- kinship and descent
- perpetuation and alliance
- the transformation of the person
- power, ritual and knowledge
- civilization and identity.
by "Nielsen BookData"