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Friendship, descent and alliance are basic forms of relatedness
that have received unequal attention in social anthropology.
Offering new insights into the ways in which friendship is
conceptualized and realized in various sub-Saharan African
settings, the contributions to this volume depart from the recent
tendency to study friendship in isolation from kinship. In drawing
attention to the complexity of the interactions between these two
kinds of social relationships, the book suggests that analyses of
friendship in Western societies would also benefit from research
that explores more systematically friendship in conjunction with
kinship.
An unprecedented overview of anthropological and political science
research on vigilantism in Africa which makes an important and
innovative contribution to current discussions on the relationship
between violent self-justice andstate and non-state agencies.
Self-justice and legal self-help groups have been gaining
importance throughout Africa. The question of who is entitled to
formulate 'legal principles', enact 'justice', police 'morality'
and sanction 'wrongdoings' has increasingly become a subject of
controversy and conflict. These conflicts focus on the strained
relationship between state sovereignty and citizens'
self-determination. More particularly, they concern the conditions,
modes and means of thelegitimate execution of power, and in this
volume are seen as a diagnostics as to how social actors in Africa
debate and practise socio-political order. State agencies try to
bring vigilante groups under control by channelling their
activities, repressing them, or using them for their own interests.
Vigilante groups usually must struggle for recognition and
acceptance in local socio-political spheres. As several of the
contributions in the volume show, legal self-help groups in Africa
therefore 'domesticate' themselves by, among other things, seeking
legitimation, engaging in publicly acceptable non-vigilante
activities, or institutionalizing what often began as a rather
unrestrained and 'disorderly' social movement. Thomas G. Kirsch is
Professor & Chair of Social & Cultural Anthropology at the
University of Constance, Germany; Tilo Gratz is Senior Research
Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Germany & Associate
Lecturer at the University of Halle-Wittenberg.
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