Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories brings together intellectuals from a variety of fields, backgrounds, generations, and continents to deepen and reinvigorate the theoretical and intellectual integrity of African studies. Building on recent debate within African studies that has revolved about the role of Africanists in the Unit

This book offers detailed ethnographic studies from Africa and the Caribbean to explain AIDS in a global and comparative third-world context. The essays move beyond medical or epidemiological models, explaining the epidemic in its economic, social, political, and historic contexts.

Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories brings together intellectuals from a variety of fields, backgrounds, generations, and continents to deepen and reinvigo-rate the theoretical and intellectual integrity of African studies. Building on recent debate within African studies that has revolved around the role of Africanists in the United States as "gatekeepers" of knowledge about Africa and Africans, this volume of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the contested character of the production of knowledge itself. In every chapter, case studies and ethnographic materials, drawn from such regions as South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the Malagasy Republic, Angola, Ghana, and Senegal, demonstrate the application of theory to concrete situations.

This book offers detailed ethnographic studies from African and the Caribbean to explain AIDS in a global and comparative third-world context. The essays move beyond medical or epidemiological models, explaining the epidemic in its economic, social, political, and historical contexts.

"Witchcraft Dialogues" analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the "occult." It brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, to engage the metaphysical properties of "witchcraft" and "sorcery" and to explore their manifestations in people's lived experiences.
While many Africanist scholars shun the analysis of "witchcraft" as an appropriate domain of investigation, the experiences, thoughts, activities, and powers that "witchcraft" encompasses have become increasingly the source of interest and debate. Concepts of witchcraft and the phenomena to which they are applied express something fundamental to the human condition and have their equation in the logic of other human practices such as racism and its various crafts. Thus, the focus on "witchcraft" is not just a concern with the occult, but a manifestation of the convergence of interest in mediating and transcending disciplinary domains.
The contributors to this volume embrace the challenge of exploring "witchcraft" as a mode of experiencing and explaining human circumstances as well as confronting the limitations of their own intellectual traditions and paradigms. The range of their explorations takes us in new directions, making use not only of their academic training but also of their personal experiences, to reframe the conceptual terrain of the "occult" and the epistemological orientations of their various academic fields of inquiry.

After the pioneers, the second generation of African American anthropologists trained in the late 1950s and 1960s. Expected to study their own or similar cultures, these scholars often focused on the African diaspora but in some cases they also ranged further afield both geographically and intellectually. Yet their work remains largely unknown to colleagues and students. This volume collects intellectual biographies of fifteen accomplished African American anthropologists of the era. The authors explore the scholars' diverse backgrounds and interests and look at their groundbreaking methodologies, ethnographies, and theories. They also place their subjects within their tumultuous times, when antiracism and anticolonialism transformed the field and the emergence of ideas around racial vindication brought forth new worldviews. Scholars profiled: George Clement Bond, Johnnetta B. Cole, James Lowell Gibbs Jr., Vera Mae Green, John Langston Gwaltney, Ira E. Harrison, Delmos Jones, Diane K. Lewis, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Oliver Osborne, Anselme Remy, William Alfred Shack, Audrey Smedley, Niara Sudarkasa, and Charles Preston Warren II