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Title: The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies by Igor Kopytoff ISBN: 0-253-20539-5 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: August, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.25

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Landmark Edited Collection in African Studies {4 1/2 stars}
Comment: Many collectively-written, edited books are published and, except for a few worthy chapters, quickly forgotten. This is especially true if the editor's introduction merely summarizes the various contributions, rather than try to develop a more ambitious interpretive or comparative perspective based on the chapters. "The African Frontier" stands out as a major work because Kopytoff actually constructs a (mostly) convincing theory about state and community formation. He argues that as Africans migrated into unsettled areas, they sought to reproduce the political and social structures of the societies from which they came, and in so doing created new societies. This emphasis on the tendency to conserve values and institutions sheds light on many important aspects of cultural transformation in African life. It also complements his earlier work on slavery in Africa, which stressed accumulation of wealth through "rights-in-people." The argument, however, seems more convincing for largely Bantu-speaking areas (east from Nigeria and south from Central African Republic, Uganda and Kenya) than for points west and north.

While the book is most helpful concerning state formation and maintenance, it actually contributes more on the subject of the origins of ethnicity than most works explicitly focused on that topic. The individual chapters, all by skilled historians and anthropologists, are generally excellent. Case studies come from West, Central and East Africa. There is nothing quite like it in the literature on Africa, though some fundamental issues addressed here are taken up, in rather different ways, by J. Vansina, "Paths in the Rainforests," J. Iliffe, "Africans," and C. Ehret et al in "The International Journal of African Historical Studies" (2001).