| Preface | |
| Acknowledgments | |
| Introduction: Africa in Perspective | |
| 1 | The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups | 11 |
| 2 | The Nuer: Time and Space | 24 |
| 3 | The Illusion of Tribe | 38 |
| 4 | Ethnicity in Southern African History | 52 |
| 5 | Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practice and the Signs of Inequality | 69 |
| 6 | Lele Economy Compared with the Bushong | 101 |
| 7 | Some Principles of Exchange and Investment among the Tiv | 119 |
| 8 | Research on an African Mode of Production | 129 |
| 9 | Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana | 142 |
| 10 | Bitter Money: Forbidden Exchange in East Africa | 163 |
| 11 | The Cattle of Money and the Cattle of Girls among the Nuer | 190 |
| 12 | The Lesson of the Pygmies | 218 |
| 13 | Houses in the Rainforest: Gender and Ethnicity among the Lese and Efe in Zaire | 228 |
| 14 | Land Filled with Flies: The Evolution of Illusion | 246 |
| 15 | Foragers, Genuine or Spurious?: Situating the Kalahari San in History | 269 |
| 16 | Conversations on Rain-making | 299 |
| 17 | The Notion of Witchcraft Explains Unfortunate Events | 303 |
| 18 | Understanding a Primitive Society | 312 |
| 19 | African Traditional Thought and Western Science | 327 |
| 20 | Kinship, Witchcraft and the Market | 340 |
| 21 | Conversations with Ogotemmeli | 366 |
| 22 | African Philosophy, Myth and Reality | 379 |
| 23 | How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes Towards the Orisa | 392 |
| 24 | Ancestors as Elders in Africa | 412 |
| 25 | Humorous Masks and Serious Politics among Afikpo Ibo | 433 |
| 26 | Principles of Opposition and Vitality in Fang Aesthetics | 450 |
| 27 | The Cycle and Stagnation of Smells: Pastoralists-Fishermen Relationships in an East African Society | 461 |
| 28 | In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre | 482 |
| 29 | The Economics of Polygamy | 506 |
| 30 | Women and Men, Cloth and Colonization: The Transformation of Production-Distribution Relations among the Baule (Ivory Coast) | 518 |
| 31 | "Sitting on a Man": Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women | 536 |
| 32 | Body Politics: Sexuality, Gender, and Domestic Service in Zambia | 550 |
| 33 | The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa: Methods of Ruling Native Races | 574 |
| 34 | How Europe Underdeveloped Africa | 585 |
| 35 | The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa | 597 |
| 36 | Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary | 613 |
| 37 | Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century | 629 |
| 38 | On National Culture | 637 |
| 39 | Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Modernity: The Paradox of Mau Mau | 653 |
| 40 | The Invisible Face: Masks, Ethnicity, and the State in Cote d'Ivoire | 671 |
| 41 | Africa Observed: Discourses of the Imperial Imagination | 689 |
| 42 | Ethnography of Africa: The Usefulness of the Useless | 704 |
| 43 | The Meaning of Our Work | 724 |
| 44 | Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism | 728 |
| Resource Guide: I Journals | 732 |
| Resource Guide: II Bibliographies | 733 |