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Class, Endogamy, and Urbanization in the “Three Towns” of the Sudan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Richard A. Lobban Jr.
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Extract

The geographical context of this article is the Sudanese Three Town agglomeration embracing Khartoum, Khartoum North, and Omdurman. The main social content is that of the socio-historical process of class formation and urbanization. In an effort to measure effects of this process in this region a focus is made on changing patterns in the institutions of marriage as barometers of wider social change. The basic hypothesis to be tested is that the rise of more complex systems of class stratification is associated with a decline of former patterns of endogamy.

The data presented here are analyzed within the epistemology of dialectical and historical materialism which assumes, inter alia, that (1) there is an integration of the component parts of society, (2) that changes in the material (empirical) basis of the organization of society will have effects in other social spheres, and (3) that the cumulative effects of social change eventually lead to qualitative changes in social relations. Another theoretical assumption unifying this research and analysis is (4) that data must be viewed in a processual rather than in a mechanical, synchronic, or ahistorical functionalist manner. Nevertheless the empirical studies of the urban anthropologist only permit the researcher to segment a portion of social reality for closer scrutiny taking maximum care that the living, changing society is kept in the fertile medium of history and in the context of changing political and economic relations. Finally it is assumed that (5) a measure of class differentiation is essential inasmuch as urban patterns of socio-cultural variation have a class content.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , December 1979 , pp. 99 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1979

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