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Title: Personhood and Agency: The Experience of Self and Other in African Cultures (Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, 14) by Michael Jackson, Ivan Karp ISBN: 1-56098-029-X Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press Pub. Date: February, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent collection of papers
Comment: Although I am mainly a neurobiologist by training, I started out in the humanities and social sciences. I still have an interest in them, and occasionally tackle impressive sounding tomes like this in those fields. I didn't have much of an idea about personality issues like this in African cultures compared to Oceania, Asia, and Europe, and this book helped to fill in some of those gaps. Prior to this I'd read Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's study of the Kalahari Bushmen and Colin Turnbull's The Forest People, about the pgymies, so I had some previous background in a couple of African cultures.

As my specialty is perception and sensation, I can't resist making a comment about the Turnbull book that I found interesting. At one point Turnbull goes with a small group of pygmies to the edge of the forest, something they rarely do, since they are truly a forest people, and their enemies, the Blue Men, inhabit the more arid plains adjacent to the forest. They look out over the plain and see water buffalos in the distance. One of the pygmies remarks on how small they are. Turnbull realizes the pygmies, who never see animals at a distance of more than 50 feet or so in the dense forest, don't realize that the buffalos are hundreds of yards away, and so visually misjudge their actual size, since their normal environment doesn't provide them with the experience of learning size relationships at greater distances.

I've also read and studied somewhat on African art, which contributed importantly to artists such as Picasso and Cubism in his famous, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. As such, African, especially western African art, shows similar characteristics of formal fragmentation and distortion for expressive effect. Tribes like the Senufo, for example, who live along the northern border of the Ivory Coast in western, sub-Saharan Africa, have separate castes for artisans and artists. Most of the tribe is involved with agriculture and raising livestock, but artists have high prestige similar to a wealthy farmer. There are three of these special castes, one which makes household furniture and intricate carved doors that are highly prized, another that makes wooden figurines mostly used for ceremonial purposes, and goldworkers who make fine ornaments and jewelry.

This book is more on the psychology and personality side, of course, than the aesthetic. This collection of papers by a number of researchers will give you a better background in the issues of identity and self with respect to both male and female roles in different African cultures. Although I'm not an expert in this area and can't say for sure, this is the only scholarly collection I've seen on this topic for Africa.