The World of the Swahili

by Middleton, John

• ISBN13: 9780300060805
• ISBN10: 0300060807
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-08-01
• Publisher: Yale Univ Pr

Summary

The Swahili of East Africa have a long and distinctive history as a literate, Muslim, urban, and mercantile society. In this book a leading Africanist presents the first full-length anthropological account of the Swahili and offers an original analysis of their little-understood and unusual culture. Swahili towns, some urban with elegant stone buildings and others more rural with palm-leaf-matting houses, are spread along the thousand-mile East African coast. Because each local community is culturally different from its neighbors, previous historians and anthropologists have viewed the Swahili as a series of isolated and "detribalized" groups. John Middleton argues, on the contrary, that beneath the cultural variation is a single structure, that of a well-defined and complex trading society that has shown little change through the ages. Drawing on his own field research and on earlier writings on the Swahili, Middleton describes this centuries-old mercantile culture--its local and descent groupings, marriage patterns, religion, and values. He traces the history of their colonized past as subjects to Arabs, portuguese, British, and others and shows that, although their economic and political role has continually been a subordinate one, their sense of unique identity enables then to persist as an ongoing civilization.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vi
Preface	vii
The Swahili People and Their Coast	1	(26)
The Merchants and the Predators	27	(27)
Towns	54	(29)
Kinship, Descent, and Family	83	(37)
Perpetuation and Alliance	120	(21)
Transformation of the Person	141	(20)
Power, Ritual, and Knowledge	161	(23)
Civilization and Identity	184	(17)
Endnotes	201	(26)
Glossary	227	(4)
References	231	(18)
Index	249