The Powerful Presence of the Past: Integration and Conflict Along the Upper Guinea Coast: 24 (African Social Studies Series, 24) - Tapa blanda

In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18:2, 466-510

'.......The chapters (by anthropologists David Berliner, James Fairhead, Christian Højbjerg, William Murphy, Krijn Peters, Ramon Sarró, Susan Shepler, and Elizabeth Tonkin, and historians Stephen Ellis, Bruce Mouser, Peter Mark, and Jodi Tomàs, plus the editors) are individually strong. Important new insights are frequent. Among the highlights on the anthropological side is a splendid essay by Ramon Sarró showing that identity among the
Baga of the coast of Guinea is at any one point in time the product of temporally and spatially variable processes of social incorporation and exclusion. This should be mandatory reading for any manipulator of a 'large N' conflict data set inclined to code 'ethnicity' as a single variable.
Excellent contributions by the historians include an especially significant chapter by Stephen Ellis on Liberian politics, since it expands and modifies his widely discussed earlier arguments about violence and the occult.
Space excludes further discussion of admirable contributions by Wilson Trajano Filho, Bruce Mouser, Krin Peters, and others, but it is safe to say that no anthropologist or historian interested in modern Africa or armed conflict and violence will want to be without this collection'......

Paul Richards Wageningen University and Research Centre,

This book conceptualizes integration and conflict as interrelated dimensions of social relationships and identity constructions within society at large. In order to reach an in-depth understanding of integrative and violent forms of interaction in the region of the Upper Guinea Coast, authors take into account the impact and repercussions of specific historical experiences as well as the continuities and changes of social patterns affected by the interaction of local and globalized values, institutions, and models of social organization. Rather than providing an(other) analysis of wars and violence as such, contributors aim at a better understanding of the social mechanisms that affect the processes of integration and conflict at the local, national and regional levels.