A history of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London from its foundation in 1916.

This book is an in-depth, comparative study of two of the most popular and influential intellectual and spiritual traditions of West Africa: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. Employing a unique methodological approach that thinks with and from—rather than merely about—these traditions, Oludamini Ogunnaike argues that they contain sophisticated epistemologies that provide practitioners with a comprehensive worldview and a way of crafting a meaningful life. Using theories belonging to the traditions themselves as well as contemporary oral and textual sources, Ogunnaike examines how both Sufism and Ifa answer the questions of what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how it is verified. Or, more simply: What do you know? How did you come to know it? How do you know that you know? After analyzing Ifa and Sufism separately and on their own terms, the book compares them to each other and to certain features of academic theories of knowledge. By analyzing Sufism from the perspective of Ifa, Ifa from the perspective of Sufism, and the contemporary academy from the perspective of both, this book invites scholars to inhabit these seemingly “foreign” intellectual traditions as valid and viable perspectives on knowledge, metaphysics, psychology, and ritual practice. Unprecedented and innovative, Deep Knowledge makes a significant contribution to cross-cultural philosophy, African philosophy, religious studies, and Islamic studies. Its singular approach advances our understanding of the philosophical bases underlying these two African traditions and lays the groundwork for future study.

First published in 2004. The purpose of this dictionary is to provide the student with a representative vocabulary of Pahlavi in which such uncertain words have been reduced to a minimum and marked. It includes the commonest 4,000 simple words.

“Maurice Bloch is so ferociously smart that one can always enjoy tangling with his ideas, even when—perhaps especially when—one doesn’t agree with him. This is an important and provocative book.” —Sherry Ortner Columbia University These essays by one of anthropology’s most original theorists consider such fundamental questions as: Is cognition language-based? How reliable a guide to memory are people’s narratives about themselves? What connects the “social recalling” studied by anthropologists to the “autobiographical memory” studied by psychologists? Now gathered in accessible form for the first time and drawing frequently upon the author’s fieldwork among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar for ethnographic examples, the twelve closely linked essays of How We Think They Think pose provocative challenges not only to conventional cognitive models but to the basic assumptions that underlie much of ethnography. This book will be read with interest by those who study culture and cognition, ethnographic theory and practice, and the peoples and cultures of Africa.

The only detailed study of the diacritical and vocalization system of Syriac.

Arab painting, preserved mainly in manuscript illustrations of the 12th to 14th centuries, is here treated as an artistic corpus fully deserving of appreciation in its own terms, and not as a mere precursor to Persian painting. The book assembles papers by a distinguished list of scholars that illuminate the variety of material that survives in scientific as well as literary manuscripts. Because of the contexts in which the paintings appear, a major theoretical concern is, precisely, the relationship of painting to text. It rejects earlier scholarly habits of analysing paintings in isolation, and proposes the integration of text and image as a more satisfactory framework within which to elucidate the characteristics and functions of this impressive body of work.

This book summarizes a wide range of recent literature on slavery for all of tropical Africa.

The third edition of Africana Studies: A Survey of Africa and the African Diaspora is an update of the second edition (1998) and incorporates new chapters that include expanded coverage of issues on women, health, terrorism, the African Union, and many others, as well as the most recent theories and methods in Africana studies. To date, Africana Studies remains the most comprehensive and most suitable text for both teachers and students interested in Africa and the Diaspora in the US, the Caribbean, Afro-Latin-America, and elsewhere. The book is divided into five parts: the state of the art of Africana studies; the evolution of the history of black people; analysis of the contributions of the black world; the present and future status of these peoples; and the societies and values of black people. The book also includes a chronology of significant events in the history of peoples of African descent and a number of maps. "[This book] attempts in one volume to present more accurately the experiences and contributions of the African world. It introduces readers to the most comprehensive account of black interdisciplinary subjects to date and summarizes the research of specialists in a variety of fields... The number of contributors, variety, and depth of coverage show that the work was carefully thought out." -- Insights, on an earlier edition