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This lecture on the Igbo “family and home” is at once a detailed study of the core components, complexity, and values of Igbo social organization, and at the same time a lecture in anthropological theory and a study in dialectical anthropology. In his introduction, the author who was himself an insider of Igbo culture, points to the challenge of interpreting Igbo society to its custodians and culture bearers . Reflecting on ethnography and interpretations of culture, he illustrates his comments with an Iranian folk tale as well as references to Susanne Langer, Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Gilbert Ryle, Alfred N. Whitehead, and Chinua Achebe Uchendu begins with the general possibility of profiling a culture along two clusters of culture traits such as Ezi and Ulo, as separately identifiable units of Igbo cultural organization against anthropological theories, proposed by Clyde Kluckhohn, Clifford Geertz, Max Weber, Victor Uchendu, Ralph Linton. Margaret Mead, and Chinua Achebe, In his next step, Uchendu profiles Igbo culture specifically, as complex and holistic, and immediately warns against two type of academic pitfalls evoked by the culture’s specifics: I) Foreign scholars’ surprise and fascination with an open, decentralized society whose “strength and resilience under stress” is found in features other than “a single over-arching institution,” that is monolithic state power, 2)... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of anthropology is a growing field of study within the discipline itself. Our series 'Key Informants on the History of Anthropology' contributes to the discussion of how anthropology, as it is understood and practised today, evolved and took shape. In the following invited contribution Marc Augé, Professor of Anthropology at École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, reflects back on his work in Africa, in light of his more recent explorations of contemporary global issues. He observes how history intervenes also with previous research 'as if the facts which I observed in former times were only taking on their full meaning today'. This relationship between past and present research reinforces his faith in social anthropology as a discipline that is particularly well suited to address contemporary issues of globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African influence in a nation must be examined within the framework of the nation' s formation of diversity, ethno-racial paradigm, and particular history. Based on the paradigmatic cases of Brazil and the United States, I contend here that racial attitudes and the position and role of African traditions in a nation are interrelated. Discerning racial conceptions, perceptions, and patterns of discrimination in a nation provides us with strong clues about the place and role assigned to the African presence in that context. Racisms may not differ much in intensity, but they do in the cognitive operations they imply, because they are grounded in encoded ethnic knowledge accumulated through specific historical experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]