Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- One. Maps of Mankind -- Two. The World Turned Upside Down: Mandeville -- Three. Between Two Saddles: Montaigne -- Four. Climactic Harmonies: Bodin -- Five. St. Confucius: The Jesuits in China -- Six. Distant Relations: The Jesuits in New France -- Seven. Ancients, Moderns, and Others: Fontenelle and Temple -- Eight. The Specter of Despotism: Montesquieu and Voltaire -- Nine. Savage Critics: Lahontan, Rousseau, and Diderot -- Ten. From Savagery to Decadence: Ferguson, Millar, and Gibbon -- Eleven. Cultural Critique: Herder -- Twelve. "Others" Are Good to Think -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

This book is about Islam in a single neighborhood of a relatively large town in the West African country of Côte d'Ivoire. As a description of a small community in a corner of the globe remote from North America and Western Europe, it is typical of the work that anthropologists tend to undertake. Admittedly, the ethnography of small communities communities non-anthropologists might even be tempted to label "insignificant" might seem a curious approach to the study of a phenomenon of such global spread and significance as Islam. Yet it is the premise of this book that analysis of the religious beliefs and practices of Muslims in the neighborhood of Koko constitutes a reasonable, valid, and significant way of contributing to the understanding of the religion of Islam

The word dyula means 'trader' in the Manding language. It is also the name of certain Manding-speaking ethnic minorities in parts of northern Ivory Coast, who, for centuries before the advent of colonial rule, enjoyed a virtual trading monopoly over the local region. In the first part of this book Robert Launay describes two Dyula communities prior to the twentieth-century colonial period: he discusses the regional symbiosis between Dyula traders and Senufo farmers; the organization of Dyula activity; and the division of the communities into relatively small clan wards with high rates of in-marriage. The second part examines the ways in which both communities have adapted to the recent loss of their trading monopoly, and the strategies they have employed, such as emigration, the assimilation of Western education and the adoption of new occupations, to carve out a new economic niche for themselves. As an account of the incorporation of 'traditional' community into a modern town, the book will be of interest to anthropologists and others concerned with development and modernisation in Africa and the Third World

Ware's impassioned condemnation of the idea of Islam noir is a reaction to its unfortunate consequences for the scholarly study of Africa and of Islam: the marginalization of Islam in the study of Africa and of Africa in the study of Islam. On the other hand, if we attempt to historicize the emergence of the paradigm of Islam noir in terms of European attitudes toward Africa and toward Islam in the early twentieth century, we can reach a more nuanced appreciation of the ambivalences in European racial (though perhaps not always unequivocally racist) thinking. Early twentieth-century French attitudes toward Africa and blackness were by no means univocally negative, although they also relied on racial dichotomization. The French avant-garde, and even the general public, celebrated blackness in the fields of art, music, and dance, while anthropologists were engaged in the quest for "authentic" African cosmologies. The Negritude movement among francophone African intellectuals incorporated the very dichotomies that had earlier informed the elaboration of the paradigm of Islam noir. The British, by way of contrast, did not elaborate a concept of Islam noir, and the comparison with the French case is instructive.