Like stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such a birth. It asks a
fundamental and compelling question: How did societies first coalesce from the small foraging
communities that had roamed in West Central Africa for many thousands of
years?Jan Vansina continues a career-long effort to reconstruct the history
of African societies before European contact in How Societies Are Born. In this
complement to his previous study Paths in the Rainforests, Vansina employs a
provocative combination of archaeology and historical linguistics to turn his scholarly focus to
governance, studying the creation of relatively large societies extending beyond the foraging groups
that characterized west central Africa from the beginning of human habitation to around 500 BCE, and
the institutions that bridged their constituent local communities and made large-scale
cooperation possible.The increasing reliance on cereal crops, iron tools, large
herds of cattle, and overarching institutions such as corporate matrilineages and dispersed
matriclans lead up to the developments treated in the second part of the book. From about 900 BCE
until European contact, different societies chose different developmental paths. Interestingly,
these proceeded well beyond environmental constraints and were characterized by "major
differences in the subjects which enthralled people," whether these were cattle, initiations
and social position, or "the splendors of sacralized leaders and the possibilities of
participating in them."
Copyright:
2004
Book Details
Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9780813934181
Related ISBNs:
9780813922805
Publisher:
University of Virginia Press
Date of Addition:
05/08/13
Copyrighted By:
the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia