The world of the Swahili : an African mercantile civilization / John Middleton.
1992
DT429.5.S94 M54 1992 (Mapit)
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Details
Title
The world of the Swahili : an African mercantile civilization / John Middleton.
Author
Middleton, John, 1921-2009.
ISBN
9780300060805 paperback
0300060807 paperback
9780300052190
0300052197
0300060807 paperback
9780300052190
0300052197
Imprint
New Haven : Yale University Press, c1992.
Language
English
Description
xii, 254 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm.
Call Number
DT429.5.S94 M54 1992
Alternate Call Number
73.06
Dewey Decimal Classification
306/.089/96392
Summary
"The Swahili of East Africa have a long and distinctive history as a literate, Muslim, urban, and mercantile society. In this book a leading Africanist presents the first full-length anthropological account of the Swahili and offers an original analysis of their little-understood and unusual culture." "Swahili towns, some urban with elegant stone buildings and others more rural with palm-leaf-matting houses, are spread along the thousand-mile East African coast. Because each local community is culturally different from its neighbors, previous historians and anthropologists have viewed the Swahili as a series of isolated and "detribalized" groups. John Middleton argues, on the contrary, that beneath the cultural variation is a single structure, that of a well-defined and complex trading society that has shown little change through the ages. Drawing on his own field research and on earlier writings on the Swahili, Middleton describes this centuries-old mercantile culture--its local and descent groupings, marriage patterns, religion, and values. He traces the history of their colonized past as subjects to Arabs, portuguese, British, and others and shows that, although their economic and political role has continually been a subordinate one, their sense of unique identity enables then to persist as an ongoing civilization."--BOOK JACKET.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 231-247) and index.
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Table of Contents
The Swahili people and their coast
The merchants and the predators
Towns
Kinship, descent, and family
Perpetuation and alliance
Transformation of the person
Power, ritual, and knowledge
Civilization and identity.
The merchants and the predators
Towns
Kinship, descent, and family
Perpetuation and alliance
Transformation of the person
Power, ritual, and knowledge
Civilization and identity.