Valenge women the social and economic life of the Valenge women of Portuguese East Africa

When first published in 1933, this monograph shed new light on the life of the Valenge women of Portuguese East Africa. It discusses their social organisations, family relationships, education, tribal customs, and contains detailed information concerning initiation rites, religion, magic and sorcery. The volume collects a large number of native texts, rituals and formulae, thereby converting oral tradition into material of great value not only to students of Africcan ethnography but also to anthropologists more widely. The aim of this book was to introduce the European to the art of West Africa. Many of the examples (extensively illustrated with black and white photos are from the regions between Senegal and Angola, primarily from Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Nigeria and the Cameroons. Although the art and sculpture of West Africa is coherent, there are tribal and territorial characteristics which are discussed as is the significance of masks in ritual ceremony Routledge is delighted to be re-issuing 79 volumes originally published between 1931 and 1988 in association with the International African Institute. Unavailable outside a few key libraries, many of these republished volumes were at the cutting edge of a fieldwork and ethnographic revolution in African anthropology in the decades after 1930. Originally published in 1977, this volume completes with a wealth of case material and against the background of a whole century, Monica Wilson's detailed study of the Nyakyusa-Ngonde people of Tanzania and Malawi. In this study of the Ndembu of Zambia, ritual is examined under two aspects: as a regulator of social relations over time and as a system of symbols. Social life is thereby given direction and meaning.