Anthropology Professor and Director,
African Studies Center
The bulk of my research and publications to date have focused on urbanism, religion, politics, and history with an emphasis on West Africa. Although I have worked in several locations in Nigeria, most of the research has been in Lagos, the largest city in tropical Africa. Two current projects emanate from this work. One, nearing completion, is a major expansion and revision of a volume of edited essays on African religion in diaspora. It looks at specific aspects of a West African belief system in the Old World, Latin America, Caribbean, and US. The other is a book on cultural and social pluralism in precolonial West Africa which challenges notions that Africans who took part in the slave trade lived in relatively homogeneous, isolated societies, and suggest, instead, that the slave coast was a virtual melting pot of peoples, ideas, and social practices.
During the summer of 1994 I began research in southern Africa focusing on "Women, Property, and Power." This project grows out of previous publications on gender in West Africa which examined the structure of opportunities for women in political arenas and which found that opportunities were partly regulated by women's abilities to acquire economic assets, especially land and housing. South Africa presents a far more complex challenge because here black South African women were severely constrained under the laws of the apartheid state from accumulating economic assets, especially housing. With the end of apartheid, however, black South African women have begun to acquire urban property and to use the prestige and economic advantages gained therefrom as an entry point into community affairs.
Thus my goals are to learn a) how Black South African women are helping shape the urban locales in which they live, b) how their influence is expanding into the wider community, and c) what new roles they are playing in grassroots political activities. Ultimately the study has implications of understanding the avenues via which change is being instituted and implemented from bottom up in South Africa.
1986 Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos, Manchester University Press (UK) and Indiana University Press (US) for International African Institute, London. (paperback ed., 1988)
1997 Africas Ogun: Old World and New, Revised and Expanded Ed., with a new Introduction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
1990 "Ritual, Power, and Outside Knowledge," Journal of Religion in Africa, XX(3):248-68.
1990 "Women, Property, and Power," in Beyond the Second Sex: New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender, P.R. Sanday and R.G. Goodenough (eds), Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 255-80.
1994 "Political Representation in Yorubaland: Old States and New Nations," in Ethnographic Profiles: Original Readings, M. Ember, C. Ember, and D. Levinson (eds), Prentice Hall.
1996 "Political Ritual and the Public Sphere in Contemporary West Africa," in The Politics of Cultural Performance, D. Parkin, L. Caplan, Humphrey Fisher (eds), Oxford: Berghahn.
1997 "Gender and the Politics of Support and Protection in Pre-Colonial West Africa," in Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses and Power: Case Studies in African Gender, F. Kaplan (ed)., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 810.
Or e-mail me at sbarnes@sas.upenn.edu !