''African Political Systems'' is an academic anthology edited by the anthropologists

Meyer Fortes Meyer Fortes FBA FRAI (25 April 1906 – 27 January 1983) was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana. Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "perso ...

and E. E. Evans-Pritchard which was published by

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

on the behalf of the

International African Institute The International African Institute (IAI) was founded (as the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures - IIALC) in 1926 in London for the study of African languages. Frederick Lugard was the first chairman (1926 to his death in 19 ...

in 1940. The book contains eight separate papers produced by scholars working in the field of

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...

, each of which focuses in on a different society in

Sub-Saharan Africa Sub-Saharan Africa is the area and regions of the continent of Africa that lie south of the Sahara. These include Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa. Geopolitically, in addition to the list of sovereign states and ...

. It was the intention of the editors to bring together information on African political systems on a "broad, comparative basis" for the first time.

Background

Describing the purpose of ''African Political Systems'', Fortes and Evans-Pritchard related that it offered "both an experiment in collaborative research and an attempt to bring into focus one of the major problems of African sociology. Many dogmatic opinions are held on the subject of African political organization and are even made use of in administrative practice; but no one has yet examined this aspect of African society on a broad, comparative basis." They expressed their hope that the anthology would prove to be "the first stage of a wider enquiry into the nature and development of African political systems", which would ultimately include not only "native political systems" but also "the study of the development of these systems under the influence of European rule."

Synopsis

Radcliffe-Brown's "Preface"

The preface to ''African Political Systems'' was authored by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), then Professor of Social Anthropology at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

, who argued that the "comparative study of political institutions, with special reference to the simpler societies, is an important branch of social anthropology which has not yet received the attention it deserves." Proceeding to argue that the "comparative method" can be used "as an instrument for inductive inference", he believed that doing so would allow scholars to "discover the universal, essential, characters which belong to all human societies, past, present and future". Despite this, he did note that scholars must be careful not to "pass directly from empirical observations to a knowledge of general sociological laws or principles", believing that before this, all known societies must be "reduced to some order of classification". Radcliffe-Brown 1940. p. xi.

References

Bibliography

* * {{refend 1940 non-fiction books Anthropology books Sociology books