Ambiguous Africa Cultures in Collision (Hardcover) - Balandier, Georges

Ambiguous Africa is built on the simple opposition between tradition and modernity, a trope that Balandier abandoned in his following research. We may put to his credit the attention he pays to the modern, to the urban and to the young. In doing so, he was crossing disciplinary boundaries and escaping the traditional focus of anthropology on village customs and rural communities. Hence his choice to title one of his books as the sociology of Black African cities. But rural areas were not less exposed to the forces of modernity than the urban environment. The Africa that Balandier visited was a continent on the move. Migrations were commonplace, building on a past of itinerant herding and trans-regional commerce. Cash crops further encouraged these migrations, giving poor peasants the opportunity to offer their labour in richer regions. They held clientelist relations with land owners, who often allowed them to move from paid labour to land ownership. It is only in the mid-century that observers began to talk about an agrarian revolution, blind to the fact that powerful evolutions had already transformed the rural landscape. It is the whole of Africa, not just its cities, that can claim its place in the here and the now.

Hardcover. English. Chatto & Windus. 1966. ISBN: 0. 276 pp. Good with tatty dw in protective plastic. Book No: 2505788