Book contents
Foreword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
Summary
‘For it is the attempt both to generalise and at the same time take on board the intensity of the fieldwork experience, that is at the heart of anthropology. There is a middle ground which is not just a compromise, and which is absolutely central to the subject.’
The study of vigilantism is a relatively recent development in social anthropology, and a substantial body of new fieldwork-based material has been amassed since my own (1987) and Suzette Heald's (1982, 1986) first discussions of the subject. Prior to these, most accounts were by historians dealing with vigilante movements in North America, and especially those operating in San Francisco and Montana and the southern USA (the Ku Klux Klan) during the second half of the 19th century. This material became the subject of an important pioneer survey by Richard Maxwell Brown (1975), who had himself studied early vigilantism among South Carolina settlers (1963). My own book, Vigilant Citizens (1998), was a broader comparative study of such cases along with many others from South America, south-east Asia, Africa and Europe.
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- Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa , pp. x - xxPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010