This book discusses the pivotal role of African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS) in promoting, enhancing, and sustaining livelihoods in Africa. The authors argue that AIKS are of central importance in the development of sustainable livelihoods, particularly in rural communities. In their analysis, they draw on interdisciplinary research in the fields of agriculture, cultural and indigenous studies, development studies, education, geography, political science, and sociology. The objective is to make AIKS more applicable to mainstream educational and development agendas in Africa, a pressing issue in areas where Eurocentric scientific practices are cost prohibitive. The Dynamic of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems will be of interest to development professionals, policy makers, academics, students, and anyone interested in the field of AIKS and sustainable development in rural communities.

Cognitive cultural theorists have rarely taken up sex, sexuality, or gender identity. When they have done so, they have often stressed the evolutionary sources of gender differences. In Sexual Identities, Patrick Colm Hogan extends his pioneering work on identity to examine the complexities of sex, the diversity of sexuality, and the limited scope of gender. Drawing from a diverse body of literary works, Hogan illustrates a rarely drawn distinction between practical identity (the patterns in what one does, thinks, and feels) and categorical identity (how one labels oneself or is categorized by society). Building on this distinction, he offers a nuanced reformulation of the idea of social construction, distinguishing ideology, situational determination, shallow socialization, and deep socialization. He argues for a meticulous skepticism about gender differences and a view of sexuality as evolved but also contingent and highly variable. The variability of sexuality and the near absence of gender fixity-and the imperfect alignment of practical and categorical identities in both cases-give rise to the social practices that Judith Butler refers to as "regulatory regimes." Hogan goes on to explore the cognitive and affective operation of such regimes. Ultimately, Sexual Identities turns to sex and the question of how to understand transgendering in a way that respects the dignity of transgender people, without reverting to gender essentialism.

Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation focuses on nonprocreative and nonbiological kinship ties, revealing the importance of these relationships to debates and struggles over colonial governance and identities.Goldmark begins with one Dominican friar's polemic against Spanish abuses of Indigenous women's reproductive labor, which threatened to lead to maternal infanticide, the death of the Indies' populations, and the failure of evangelization. He consults texts from sixteenth-century Peru describing how Inca authorities thwarted marriages between nonelite Inca women and Spanish men in an attempt to preserve Inca political power. He uncovers Spanish and Criollo teachers' petitions, submitted in the early seventeenth century to the Archbishopric's Archive of Lima, that hoped to convince authorities that by following these petition authors' "good examples," an Indigenous person could claim Christian rights. Forms of Relation illustrates why we must and how we can interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how nonprocreative kinships proved critical to the creation of that regime.