For many Africanist historians, traditional religion is simply a starting point for measuring the historic impact of Christianity and Islam. In Tongnaab, Jean Allman and John Parker challenge the distinction between tradition and modernity by tracing the movement and mutation of the powerful Talensi god and ancestor shrine, Tongnaab, from the savanna of northern Ghana through the forests and coastal plains of the south. Using a wide range of written, oral, and iconographic sources, Allman and Parker uncover the historical dynamics of cross-cultural religious belief and practice. They reveal how Tongnaab has been intertwined with many themes and events in West African history―the slave trade, colonial conquest and rule, capitalist agriculture and mining, labor migration, shifting ethnicities, the production of ethnographic knowledge, and the political projects that brought about the modern nation state. This rich and original book shows that indigenous religion has been at the center of dramatic social and economic changes stretching from the slave trade to the tourist trade.

Tongnaab: The History of a West African God

History

Allman, Jean

Parker, John.

Africa

Indiana University Press

For many Africanist historians, traditional religion is simply a starting point for measuring the historic impact of Christianity and Islam. In Tongnaab, Jean Allman and John Parker challenge the distinction between tradition and modernity by tracing the movement and mutation of the powerful Talensi god and ancestor shrine, Tongnaab, from the savanna of northern Ghana through the forests and coastal plains of the south. Using a wide range of written, oral, and iconographic sources, Allman and Parker uncover the historical dynamics of cross-cultural religious belief and practice. They reveal how Tongnaab has been intertwined with many themes and events in West African history—the slave trade, colonial conquest and rule, capitalist agriculture and mining, labor migration, shifting ethnicities, the production of ethnographic knowledge, and the political projects that brought about the modern nation state. This rich and original book shows that indigenous religion has been at the center of dramatic social and economic changes stretching from the slave trade to the tourist trade.

I Will Not Eat Stone: A Women's History of Colonial Asante (Social History of Africa)

This long awaited and definitive work on gender in Asante during the early twentieth century provides a needed balance to emphasis on chiefship and external relations evident thus far in the historical scholarship on colonial and pre-colonial Asante. I am certainly looking forward to using this book in every possible African studies course I teach. - Gracia Clark, Department of Anthropology, Indiana UniversityBy bringing women into the mainstream of Asante historiography, the authors move us towards that singularly elusive goal: the realization of a comprehensive Asante social history. - Ivor Wilks Professor Emeritus, African History Northwestern University 
In an admirable collaborative effort, Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian focus on commodity production, family labor and reproduction in colonial Asante. The authors demonstrate how broader social and economic forces - cash cropping, trade, monetization of the economy, British rule, and Christian missions - recast the terms of domestic struggle in Asante and how ordinary men and women negotiated that ever shifting landscape. By centering their analysis on women, Allman and Tashjian recover the broader history of a society whose past has largely been understood in terms of the state, political evolution, trade, and the careers of political elites. Based on the recollections of Asante women and men born during the years 1900 to 1925 and on rich archival sources,I Will Not Eat Stone captures the resilience and tenacity of a generation of Asante women and their struggles in defense of social and economic autonomy.

Tashjian, Victoria B

Heinemann

I Will Not Eat Stone captures the resilience and tenacity of a generation of Asante women and their struggles in defense of social and economic autonomy.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Allman, Jean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Allman, Jean

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Allman, Jean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Tongnaab: The History of a West African God

Tongnaab: The History of a West African God

I Will Not Eat Stone: A Women's History of Colonial Asante (Social History of Africa)

I Will Not Eat Stone: A Women's History of Colonial Asante (Social History of Africa)