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Intro -- Editor's Preface -- Contents -- Foreword -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction -- Comparative Politics, History, and Political Anthropology -- Encapsulated Political Systems -- Are the Poor Politically Dangerous? Some Thoughts on Urbanism, Urbanites, and Political Consciousness -- Room for Manoeuvre: The Political Role of Small Towns in East Africa -- Minor Prophets and Yombe Cultural Dynamics -- The Family and Social Change -- Witchcraft in Africa: A Hardy Perennial -- From Segmentary Lineage to Ethnic Association - Luo, Luhya, Ibo, and Others -- Rural Economic Development -- Selected Bibliography of Lucy Mair -- Name Index -- Subject Index.

InApril 1992, after nearly 11 years of military rule in Ghana, a draft democratic constitution of the Fourth Republic was overwhelmingly approved in a national referendum.1The ban on multi-party politics was lifted by the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) Government in the following month. An independent interim National Electoral Commission was established, and a hotly contested presidential election in 200 constituencies monitored by teams of international observers was held in November 1992. After multi-party parliamentary elections to the National Assembly, boycotted unfortunately by opposition groups, the democratically elected Government of Ghana's Fourth Republic was inaugurated in January 1993.2

The fact that this new nation has succeeded in fostering economic growth and democracy under the aegis of equalitarian values holds out hope for the rest of the world. For prosperity, freedom, and equality cannot be for white men only. If they are, then they will prove to have been as illusory and impermanent as the slave-based democracies of ancient Greece.

Since the military coup that toppled the government of Sylvanus Olympio in Togo, West Africa, no less than seventy African leaders throughout sub-Saharan Africa have been overthrown by the armed forces. In the first two decades of independence alone, there were forty successful coups, not to mention the countless coup attempts (Meredith, 1984; Kitchen, 1985)

The rich empirical and historical evidence available on the various popular movements that arose in the Gold Coast, especially since the turn of the nineteenth century, mainly in order to demand political and economic reforms,1 as well as the implications of the post-colonial cycle of military coups d'état and counter-coups in Africa, is critically re-analysed and reinterpreted to advance the following related theses:

Am Beispiel der postkolonialen politischen Entwicklung in Ghana wird die These vertreten, daß Staatsstreiche und Unruhen im afrikanischen Kontext wesentlich stärker auf traditionelle, kulturelle und historische Ursachen zurückgehen, als es den Erfahrungen der euro-amerikanischen Nationen entspricht. Diskutiert werden die Zusammenhänge von Gewohnheitsrecht und Konflikt, die Ursachen der oft instabilen Stellung der Herrschenden, das Auftreten zivilen Ungehorsams und die Rolle der Gerichte und Rechtsprechung im Prozeß des Nation Building. Kulturelle Faktoren haben in der Analyse der politischen Entwicklung Afrikas bisher zuwenig Aufmerksamkeit gefunden. (DÜI-Hlb)

The complex epistemological and methodological problems of data‐quality control or ethnographer bias in anthropological research as they relate to the use of the native languages and/or the use of native‐interpreter informants are critically reexamined. Summarizing the 1939–1940 Mead‐Lowie debate, the paper suggests, on the basis of a close review of selected classic ethnographies of Africa, various ways by which the quality of comparative cross‐cultural data could be meaningfully improved. [methodology of cross‐cultural research, epistemological issues in anthropology, use of native languages in fieldwork, ethnography of Africa, history of anthropology]

Policy research involves two acts of translation: translation of the problem from the world of reality and policy into the world of scientific method, and then a translation of the research results back into the world of reality and policy.1Since the political scientist, David Easton, commented critically in 1959 on the state of the study of politics by anthropologists,2 many interesting changes have taken place in the analyses of African politics – in fact, of politics of non-western societies in general.