Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
Gender, as broadly construed by Bantu-speaking peoples, is not fixed in the same way that it is in the West. This kind of gender flexibility is counter to binary gender concepts which classify gender into two separate, opposite, and rigid fo…
To document an inclusive and comprehensive queer history means to write about queer femininity and queer femmes. Depending on their perceived outward form, queer femmes are often the most hypervisible and overtly queer, yet at other juncture…
This article is an exploratory study of the history of carnival as a popular festival in late colonial Lourenço Marques (contemporary Maputo), the capital of Mozambique. Drawing on archival sources and on oral history interviews, it explores…
Over the long term, Africans socially constructed time and gender through struggle and invention, the stuff of history. But to get at this broad salience we must toggle between scales of region and period, among different kinds of evidence, …
This article explores how multiple gendered times are brought to bear on the present in Yaawo oral history-telling about female leaders and gendered power in a more distant past. The dominant research narratives about gender and power in Afr…
This article takes its point of departure in the author’s research experience in matrilineal northern Mozambique in the early 1980s as an employee of the National Women’s Organization, the OMM (Organização da Mulher Moçambicana). Confronted …
This contribution to the special issue develops an argument about time and gender in African history in relation to historical sound recordings. Revisiting a case study from the Namibian sound archive I demonstrate innovative methodological …
This article explores the cultural significance of initiation rites among the Northern Sotho in South Africa, with a particular focus on the blending of symbolic gender motifs in rock art. Scholars on Northern Sotho rock art have associated …