Dahomey and the Dahomans PDF Download

Author: Frederick E. Forbes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Author: J. A. Skertchly
Publisher: Literary Licensing, LLC
ISBN: 9781498114592
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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This Is A New Release Of The Original 1874 Edition.

Author: Stanley B. Alpern
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814707726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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The only thoroughly documented Amazons in world history are the women warriors of Dahomey, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western African kingdom. Once dubbed a 'small black Sparta,' residents of Dahomey shared with the Spartans an intense militarism and sense of collectivism. Updated with a new preface by the author, Amazons of Black Sparta is the product of meticulous archival research and Alpern's gift for narrative. It will stand as the most comprehensive and accessible account of the woman warriors of Dahomey.

Author: Edna G. Bay
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813923864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Wives of the Leopard explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and managed state functions. Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts, from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems, effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without exoticizing it.

Author: Polanyi Karl
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781737276036
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The death of Karl Polanyi in 1964, at seventy-seven, curtailed a productive life in the fields economic history and economic anthropology. Some of his students-impressed with his erudition and disregard for the ordinary-described him as "otherworldly". He was founder of the Galilei Society in Budapest, the cradle of the liberal revolutions in Hungary in the first decades of the 20th. century. In the first World War, he was a cavalry officer and after that war he went to Vienna. There he became a columnist and commentator for the Oesterreichische Volkswirt, in charge of analysis of international affairs. For years he read daily The Times, Le Temps, the Frankfurter Zeitung, all the Vienna papers and those from Budapest and others as they were relevant. He emigrated to England where he became a tutor for Oxford University and the University of London and wrote re-analysis of English economic history: The Great Transformation. After World War II, Polanyi came to Columbia University to teach economic history. His courses were always popular and well attended. During his last years at Columbia, and during his early years of retirement, Polanyi was joined by Conrad Arensberg in heading a large interdisciplinary project for the comparative study of economic systems. The volume that resulted was Trade and Market in the Early Empires, a landmark in economic anthropology and economic history. Polanyi's interest in Dahomey stems from one of his students who had contributed two papers on Dahomey to Trade and Market. Polanyi grew interested and, with characteristic thoroughness, read the literature on that West African kingdom. The present book resulted from these last years of productive scholarship. Dahomey and the Slave Trade was prepared for the press by his widow, Ilona Duczynska Polanyi. Foreword vii This book is of vital importance to anthropology for several reasons, the most compelling being that the concerns of history and of anthropology are overlapped in it. Besides making available the economic history of one of the great West African kingdoms, it sets forth some new theory for economic anthropology-particularly Part III, in which Polanyi makes sense of the intricacies of trade between a people with a fully monetized economy, and one without, and those passages in which he adds "house-holding" as a concept to his ideas about the principles of economic integration. Polanyi's position in economic anthropology-not to mention the status he achieved as economic historian, translator of Hungarian literature, man of action, and inspiring teacher-is secure. He has enabled anthropologists to focus their studies of economy on processes of allocation rather than on processes of production, thereby bringing the studies into line with economic theory without merely "applying" economic theory to systems it was not designed to explain. The "release" that resulted from this great stride forward can be compared, for economic anthropology and studies in comparative economics, with the importance of the discovery in the late nineteenth century of the price mechanism itself. The more we know about the workings of other, and strange, economies, the more we can know of our own. Polanyi's work will stand as a major source of comparative insight-the core of anthropological purpose.

Author: J. Cameron Monroe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107040183
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This volume examines political life in the Kingdom of Dahomey, located in the Republic of Bénin.

Author: Teejay LeCapois
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1105662063
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Samira Diallo is a young woman living in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she studies at Cadmus College. As the only African-American gal on the swim team, Samira wows them with her prowess. Opposing her is her rival Lynn Wellington, the blonde queen of the swim team. Lynn sets out to expose Samira, and discovers that she's much more than she seems. As it turns out, Samira has extraordinary powers, and was once one of the Gods and Goddesses of Dahomey ( present-day Benin ). The Gods of West Africa are back, and they've definitely got major plans for the beautiful, wayward Samira, and the rest of Mankind. Opposing the West African Gods are their ancient enemies, the Primordial Ones, and their mortal agents. Will the modern world survive this Divine conflict ?

Author: Jude Shaw
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781979525084
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Leaving Dahomey is set in Dahomey (currently the Republic of Benin), West Africa, in the year 1840. The story follows a year in the life of a hammock-borne fifteen-year-old girl named Adeoha. While her childhood was spent getting into and out of mischief, as she approaches adulthood, she is an outspoken critic of the Dahomean social structure and the Dahomean Kings stricture that the path to ultimate joy is constant work. She says it was a measure to keep the people's minds averted from what's going on about them: the constant slaving wars, the high taxes, and the elimination of all means to express discontent. Through her first friend Sewextu, Adeoha inexplicably joins an ancestor cult of the drum language. She only remains with the group two months through the initiation process. After leaving a rapid set of events begins to unfold in her life; good fortune and artistic. As these seemingly ordinary events occur, it is being bandied about by some; they are connected to the cult of the Language of the Drums and the ancient prophecy of a magic oracle.

Author: Patrick Manning
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521523073
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
This book integrates into a single framework Dahomey's pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial economic history.

Author: Robert Edgerton
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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When looking for historical examples of women who have fought as soldiers, one can refer--with disappointment--to the words of John Keegan, one of the world's most well-known military historians: "Women look to men to protect them from danger, and bitterly reproach them when they fail as defenders...Women do not fight."In this book, anthropologist and historian Robert Edgerton disagrees, taking as his centerpiece the women warriors of Dahomey, a West African kingdom that reached its heyday during the height of the African slave trade. In this land (now the Republic of Benin), women eventually became the elite force of the kingdom's standing army, the prime fighting force faced by the French when they defeated and colonized the region in the 1890s. This book is both a narrative history of these women and their role in Dahomian society as well as a more far-ranging refutation of the argument that warfare has always been a club "for men only."