REQUIRED TEXTS:
1) Achebe Arrow of God 2) Bohannan and Curtin Africa and Africans
3) Bowen Return to Laughter 4) Schloss Hatchet's Blood
5) Uchendu The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria 6) Amadiume Male Daughter and Female Husbands: Gender
7) Photocopy Book and Sex in an African Culture

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
The goal of this course is to convey a sense of the cultural diversity of Africa, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, while also highlighting cultural continuities. Because I have spent a year of anthropological fieldwork in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau, living among the Manjaco, much of our readings will focus on West Africa. We will focus on societies which participated in the transatlantic slave-trade and the impact of that trade on those societies. Students, however, will also be assigned to groups which will research and present material about Africans who live throughout the continent.
What we will learn about the people of such societies and about the cultures that inform their world-views, we receive second-hand, largely through the writings of outsiders. In order to understand and make use of this material in the fullest possible sense, we must supply a cultural context for what motivated the creators of these written materials. Thus this course on African cultures is also, to a degree, a course on how certain, at times stereotyped, images of African culture cannot help but frame even the best of anthropological studies of African cultures. To highlight the deficiencies and strengths of such works, students will compare them to accounts written by African intellectuals.
We will explore classic themes--five of which are the effects of colonialization on indigenous culture, the African notions of "personhood" as opposed to Western ideas of the individual, gender relations in African society, African notions of community, and African beliefs about the spirit. These themes will be the guiding topics for this course.

COURSE ASSIGNMENTS:
The class will be run as a seminar. Students are required to attend every class session and to have read the week's material before the session. I will begin each class period with an informal summary of some of the key ideas that relate to the readings. The rest of the class will be devoted to directed discussion.
Students will be evaluated on the following:
(1) Class Participation and weekly paragraphs on key topics--10% of grade
(2) Map test--Worth 15% of grade
(3) Midterm essay exam worth--25% of grade
(4) Final essay exam worth--30% of grade.
(5) Class presentation & 10 page paper worth--20% of grade.
HONOR SYSTEM: Every piece of written work presented by individual students must have the honor pledge and the student's signature on it.
OFFICE HOURS: I hope that the readings and issues we'll be dealing with in this class will excite you. I'll be in my office each week for the sole purpose of chatting with you--please feel free to come by just to talk. If the regular times are impossible for you, we can try to find a better time that's convenient for both of us. Periodically during the semester I will have scheduled meetings with you.