Tiger in an African palace, and other thoughts about identification and transformation

Download or read book Tiger in an African palace, and other thoughts about identification and transformation written by Fardon, Richard and published by Langaa RPCIG. This book was released on 2014-06-13 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tiger in an African palace collects eight essays about kinship and belonging that Richard Fardon wrote to complement his monographs on West Africa. The essays extend those book-length descriptions by pursuing their wider implications for theory in social anthropology: exploring the relationship between comparison and historical reconstruction, and questioning the fit between personal, ethnic and cosmopolitan identities in contemporary West African nations. In an Introduction written specially for this Langaa collection, Richard Fardon retraces the career-long development of his preoccupation with concepts of identification and transformation, and their relevance to understanding West African societies comparatively and historically.