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African Studies: A New Tradition?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2019

Jane I. Guyer
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Extract

Christopher Waterman quotes a Yoruba popular performer: “Our tradition is a very modern tradition.” The Study of Africa in the U.S. is a very modern tradition in several senses. In the great scale of things, it is very recent. During the presentation of a National Academy of Sciences project on The Population Dynamics of Sub-Saharan Africa last year, it was pointed out that only ten years ago the Academy had postponed work on this topic simply because the data were judged insufficient for a scientific synthesis. And it is a modern tradition in the sense of lively expansion and mutation. Most notably, over those same ten years or so the participants in both academic and non-academic study, and in popular culture, have become far more diverse.

Type
African Studies; Past, Present and Future
Information
African Issues , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Spring 1995 , pp. 13 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1995

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References

Notes

1 Waterman, Christopher, “Our Tradition is a very Modern Tradition: Popular Music and the Construction of Pan-Yoruba Identity,” Ethnomusicology, vol. 34, no. 3, 1990, 367-79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Kaplan, Robert D., “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 273, no. 2, 1994, 487–506.Google Scholar

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6 Seidman, Ann and Seidman, Robert B., State and Law in the Development Process: Problem Solving and Institutional Change in the Third World, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar