Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation by Roy Grinker, Christopher Steiner, Christopher Steiner

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Synopsis

The second edition of the popular reader Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation offers valuable new chapters showing the progress and continuity in the field of African studies.  Forty five articles illustrate the dynamic processes by and through which scholars have described and understood African history and culture over the past several decades, and show how profoundly the ethnography of Africa has influenced the direction and development of anthropological and social theory.  This new edition offers 14 new selections as well as two entirely new sections, “Conflict and Violent Transformations” and “Development, Governance, and Globalization,” in which the authors reveal processes that have had a vital influence on the historical trajectory and the daily experience of African people in the modern world. 

Selections include distinguished anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and Africanists.  Collectively they show the multiplicity of voices in African studies, and reveal the interpenetration of ideas and concepts within and across disciplines, regions, and historical periods.

Biography

Roy Richard Grinker, Ph.D. is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University, Director of the GW Institute for Ethnographic Research, and Editor-in-Chief of Anthropological Quarterly.  He is author of four other books, including In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull, Houses in the Rainforest:  Ethnicity and Inequality Among Farmers and Foragers in Central Africa, and Unstrange Minds:  Remapping the World of Autism.

Christopher B. Steiner is the Lucy C. McDannel ’22 Professor of Art History and Director of Museum Studies at Connecticut College.  He is the author of the award-winning book African Art in Transit, and co-editor (with Ruth Phillips) of Unpacking Culture:  Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds. 

Stephen Lubkemann is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University.  He is author of Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War and is associate editor for Anthropological Quarterly and a co-founder of GWU’s Diaspora Research Program.