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Professor Akiwowo propounded the Asuwada Theory of Sociation in the 1980s as a contextual episteme to explain African social experience. The theory particularly attempts an indigenous postulation to social interactions among Africans in general and the Yoruba in particular. Its concepts attempt to emphasise contextual values of social beings who would contribute to social survival and community integration and development. This theory postulates that among Africans in general and the Yoruba in particular, the need to associate or co-exist by internalising and rightly exhibiting socially approved values of community survival and development, is integral to local social structure, as failure to co-exist potentially endangers the community. A deviant who defaults in sociating values is deemed a bad person (omoburuku), while the one who sociates is the good person (omoluabi). This theoretical postulation contrasts western social science theories (especially sociological Structuralist (macro) and Social Action (micro) theories), which rather emphasise rationality and individualism (at varied levels depending on the theory). Western social science ethnocentrically depicts African communal and kin ways of life as primitive and antithetical to development. Western social science theories have remained dominant and hegemonic over the years while Akiwowo’s theory is largely unpopular even in Nigerian social science curricula in spite of its potential for providing contextual interpretations for indigenous ways of life that are still very much extant despite dominant western modernity. This article examines the Asuwada Theory within the context of globalised social sciences and the complicated and multifaceted glocal challenges confronting the adoption of the Akiwowo’s epistemic intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on epistemological and methodological approach of South African scholar Archie Mafeje to the social sciences in Africa. It mentions a monograph titles "Anthropology in post-independence Africa" by Mafeje in which he takes stock of his contribution to the social sciences and his critique of anthropology. It informs about Herbert Vilakazi, one of Mafeje's critics, who has questioned the usefulness of substituting culture and society for ethnography and social formations.

The impending fiftieth anniversary of the African Studies Association offers the occasion for a historian to reflect on the maturation of the field as a historical process. The essay employs metaphors from human development to highlight the inevitably incremental, always partial, steps by which people—including professional Africanists—accomplish significant change. For African studies these steps have moved from an initial social-science orientation and reliance on the abstractions of the high modernity of the mid-twentieth century to more experiential ways of understanding that have opened the door to new epistemologically African sensibilities. Africanists based in the United States are already moving beyond the limits of the external and objectifying tendencies inherent in ‘studying’ anything and instead are listening to and learning from their full partners and collaborators in and from Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Presents abstracts of various articles and edited works on Africa in the field of the social sciences and the humanities. "The Quest of African Identity," by Simon Kofi Appiah; "Zetaheal Mission in Ghana: Christians and Muslims Worshipping Together?," by Abamfo Atiemo; "A Theological Journey," by Laurenti Magesa; "Conversion to Islam: Military Recruitment and Generational Conflict in a Sereer-Safen Village (Bandia), 1920-38," by James F. Searing; "Religious Revival in the Roman Catholic Church and the Autochthony-Allochthony Conflict in Cameroon," by Piet Konings.

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]

Rooted in the 1940s,the debate on African ethnophilosophy foreshadowed and preempted what was to become a global debate, whose tenets have now brought the natural and social sciences close together. Mediated by philosophers' skepticism toward objectivism ((also called realism), scientists on both sides clearly agree that all knowledge is human-centered or driven by human interests, and therefore indigenous in various respects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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]