The debate on the notion of ‘indigenous peoples’ is one of the newest facing anthropology. Yet its theoretical foundation is not new. It is implicit in both Kalahari revisionism and its opposite, the ecological approach that treats hunter-gatherers as exemplars of primal culture. It is also reminiscent of the earlier views of Wilhelm Schmidt, whose vision of the earliest culture circle was represented by living hunter-gatherers. That said, the notion of ‘indigenous peoples’ is more complex than earlier models; and its opponents, such as Adam Kuper, must struggle against both philosophical premises (which are relatively easy to challenge) and practical arguments in favour of keeping the notion (which are more resilient). This paper focuses on the ‘indigenous peoples’ debate in Africanist anthropology, but its wider aspects include the interconnections of theoretical premises within diverse schools in the discipline and the general relation between anthropological theory and practical politics.

Alan Barnard presents a well considered critique of Kuper's rejection of the ‘indigenous peoples’ notion, by arguing a case for its validity, as a relational, legal concept – ‘a useful tool for political persuasion’ – and a concept that is contingent historically and situationally, and not capable of being captured within one nomothetic definition. The author's ‘third solution’ along such lines is as cogent as it is practical and provides a way out of the definitional conundrum that engulfs the ‘indigenous peoples’ concept. It is also sensitive to the political problems, needs and aspirations of indigenous groups and the anthropologists who work among and for them.

The past is not simply a present seen from the vantage point of its own futurity, but rather a social construct that only emerges referentially and selectively, inevitably formed and transformed by means of re-experience and interpretation. As Jan Assmann (1992) outlines, cultures of remembering represent the technologies by means of which we elaborate meaningful constructs from the experience of the past. Thus, while the past may structure the present to some extent, memory allows us to structure the past in relation to the present. This is not to say that we are free to mould history to our taste. To the contrary, the fact that we often cannot access the past again in any direct referential manner once it has been lived implies that it may gain an influence over us that escapes the normal mechanisms of remembering, objectification and forgetting. In this light, the slave trade is not only an empirical set of events from which we are shielded by the apparently unbridgeable distance of chronological time, but – in its untold horror and its traumatic impact – it is also a social reality that still reverberates on both sides of the Atlantic; an ineffable past–present, often elided from explicit discourse but insistently recurring in manifold non-discursive performative genres. European culture emphasises ‘memory work’ as an explicit means of coming to terms with traumatic pasts, allotting responsibility and expiating guilt as a means of achieving closure, while the American descendants of African slaves continue to revitalise inherited, remembered and reconstructed ritual practices and to elaborate a verbal discourse on the African origins of the Atlantic diaspora. But Africa itself remains doggedly silent on the issue of slavery.

This article examines the ful[ecy ]ga dance performed by the palace kwifn society in the Cameroon Grassfields chiefdom of Oku. The argument is made that many aspects of the dance evoke the capture and detention of slaves and the forced labour of the colonial era, and that while political elites use the dance to project the political violence of the palace onto exogenous forces, the young cadets re-appropriate it to draw connections between the past and present political role of the palatine elite. Highlighting the psychological effects of dissociation and belatedness in the light of the traumatic effects of the salve trade, the article proposes that the fragmentation of chronological time and linear history associated with trauma may not only represent pathological symptoms, but also a means of bearing witness to political violence and domination – be they historical or contemporary.

The transatlantic slave trade did not simply produce a history of dislocation and disruption in Africa. In the Cross River region, trade simultaneously inspired cultural innovation and transregional exchange. This contributed to the creation and dissemination of numerous associations and cult agencies. Not only did freemen own such institutions but also their slaves who had taken the knowledge of them along from their Grassfields homes. This paper explores the dissemination histories of some of these institutions as well as the relationship and mutual fears of both the slaves and their masters. While associations and cult agencies of the latter continue to be prominent in the Cross River region, the slaves institutions have largely disappeared.

The Grassfields of Western Cameroon have provided the coastal areas of the Bight of Benin with a constant flow of slaves and subsequently of migrant labour from the end of the 18th century onwards. The hierarchic organisation of the Grassfields kingdoms, the intensification of agricultural and craft labour, the slave trade and political violence combined with an ideology of benevolent protection by kings and notables to engross cadets and women with a working ethos that was carried by slaves all the way to the coastal societies where it has created an enduring stereotype to the present day.

The Cuban male esoteric sodality abakuá has long been interpreted as a transatlantically displaced version of the type of secret society known as ekpe or ngbe in the Cross-River region of south-eastern Nigeria and south-western Cameroon. While not disputing such attributions of African origins, this essay seeks to trace the contours of an alternative history of abakuá. My aim is to confront “objectivist” accounts of the diffusionary history of ekpe and abakuá with the ways in which contemporary members of Cuban abakuá ritually produce relations to an African past which they create by performing it into being in the New World present.

When I had the honour of acting as the discussant at the panel that was at the origin of this collection of essays (at the African Studies Association in Boston, 2004), I was already impressed by the quite surprising ways in which these four texts about different areas were connected. It is, of course, a beautiful quartet, each article making crucial points in its own right. But the special merit of this issue is that the texts complement each other in such seminal ways that, together, they evoke a challenging vista of hidden but none the less global currents in the dark world of the slave trade, tightly connecting the two sides of the Atlantic. In their interconnectedness the texts show that it is possible to follow secret cults and associations from the areas where people were captured to be sold as slaves, through the homelands of their captors, all the way to the other side of the Atlantic. They also show that the ambiguities of these cults and associations offer an optimal vantage point for understanding all the complexities of the slave trade configuration – especially if one wants to try and go beyond the history as passed on by the discourse of those in power (that is, the captors). Apparently the power of the secret and the ways in which it was passed on can offer quite surprising glimpses of the view-from-below, from among those who appeared to have been forced out of history.

This monumental biography is a labour of love by a distinguished anthropologist who is thoroughly at home in the regions where Malinowski carried out his most famous fieldwork. Yet more than 300 pages pass before the subject first sets foot in Melanesia. Part I of this volume deals with the formative years in Poland, where Malinowski was born in 1884, the son of a Cracow University professor who died when ‘Bronio’ was only 14. Young has a penchant for Freudian diagnoses and attaches considerable significance to this early loss; Bronio repressed his father and was mollycoddled by his mother right up to his fieldwork career (her main worry seems to have been his early baldness). The intellectual significance of his Polish background has already been widely appreciated in recent decades. Rather like Franz Boas a little earlier, Malinowski was torn between an austere natural-science method, represented in his case primarily by the ‘economism’ of Ernst Mach, and expansive literary, humanistic sympathies which he cultivated at the resort of Zakopane in the company of the ‘diabolical’ (and increasingly paranoid) Staś Witkiewicz (Witkacy) and other Bohemian decadents. The basic tensions are worked out, sometimes in lurid psycho-sexual detail, in the episodic diaries, on which Young relies heavily in this volume. The first derives from the year Malinowski spent with his mother in the Canaries, ostensibly as a health cure following the completion of his thesis on Mach. Bronio was already cultivating the obsessive preoccupation with himself and the need for self-discipline and ‘purity’ which recur in the famous diaries he kept in the Trobriand Islands. He could seldom conform for long to ‘the monogamous urge’, falling hopelessly in love with attractive Polish women who already had husbands. He also maintained a long liaison with a generous South African woman some ten years his senior (like others later, she could not always satisfy his craving for ‘subjective depth’ in correspondence).