African Political Systems

The book African Political Systems (“Political Systems of Africa”) was published in London in 1940 by the British anthropologists Meyer Fortes and Edward Evans-Pritchard and is one of the modern classics of ethnosociology and political ethnology (areas of ethnology or ethnology). Well-known ethnologists contributed to the work and subjected the various political systems of ethnic societies in Africa to a comparative analysis .

The book is the result of field research in eight traditional societies carried out in widely separated areas of Africa. It is a document of social anthropology and political anthropology that attempts a first classification of systems and proposes a theorization of models. It describes the different types of social and political organization found in a number of African peoples at that time: the Zulu , Nuer , Ngwato , Bemba , Ankole , Kede , Bantu von Kavirondo and the Tallensi .

Meyer Fortes wrote about the Tallensi people, Evans-Pritchard about the Nuer, Max Gluckman about the Zulu, Audrey Richards about the Bemba, Isaac Schapera about the Ngwato, Kalervo Oberg about the Ankole, Siegfried Ferdinand Nadel about the Kede, Günter Wagner about the bantu of Kavirondo ( Logoli and Vugusu ). Alfred Radcliffe-Brown contributed the foreword, while Fortes and Evans-Pritchard wrote the introductory chapter.

Work editions

• Meyer Fortes , Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (Eds.): African Political Systems. Oxford University Press, London 1940 (English; 4th edition from 1950 online at archive.org).

literature

• Kathryn Firmin-Seller: The Politics of Property Rights. In: The American Political Science Review. Volume 89, No. 4, December 1995, pp. 867-881 (book review of a reprint from 1987; PDF; 503 kB; 16 pages; archive version ( memento of July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) on revenuewatch.org).