The Tiv:An African People from 1949 to 1953

An ethnographic monograph by

Paul Bohannan & Gary Seaman

ISBN # 1-878986-13-9; LC Catalog Card # 00-106009. viii+209 pp. Bibliography. 2000

Getting photographs developed and printed was impossible in the part of Nigeria where I was working. The local missionaries and district officers sent their photographs to South Africa to be processedÑand did not take pictures during the rainy season. I did my own processing, under extremely primitive conditions, even during the rainy season. During the wet season in Tivland, film cannot be left in a camera over-nightÑit will grow mold. Therefore, whatever pictures were taken during the day had to be developed that evening... Forty-five years after the fact, I wish I had kept as good notes on my photographs as I did on the rest of the field job. However, I did not. Therefore, the photographs are left with woefully inadequate documentation. Nevertheless, they do form a record of what things were like in Tivland back in the colonial daysÑwhen Tiv numbered about 800,000 (today as I write, there are over three million of them).

CONTENTS
1. Selecting the Tiv
2. Liverpool to Lagos to Makurdi
3. Getting to MbaDuku
4. Learning the Language
5. Compounds
6. Farming
7. Hunting and Fishing
8. Cooking and Eating
9. Marketing and Marketplaces
10. Dancing and Music
11. Making it Yourself: Cloth, Mats, Baskets
12. Making it Yourself: Pots, Bridges, Mouse-traps and Hair-dos
13. Painting and Carving
14. God, Supernatural Principles and Divination
15. Ritual
16. Colonial Impact: Buildings, Schools, Chiefs, Taxes, and Courts
17. Fieldwork and Triangulation
18. Paul Bohannan's Tiv Ethnography
19. Publications on the Tiv by Paul Bohannan
20. Notes

Paul Bohannan, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California, received his D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1951. After serving as an Oxford Don, he taught at Princeton University, Northwestern University, and at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has served as president of the African Studies Association, and in 1960 received the August Volmer Research Award of the American Society for Criminology for his study African Homicide and Suicide. Bohannan has conducted field research among the Tiv, and among the Wanga of Kenya. His published works about the Tiv and African peoples include The Tiv of Central Nigeria (with Laura Bohannan, 1953), Tiv Farm and Settlement (1954), Justice and Judgement among the Tiv (1957), Markets in Africa (co-editor with George Dalton, 1962), African Homicide and Suicide (1960), Social Anthropology (1963), African Outline (1964),Tiv Economy (with Laura Bohannan, 1968), and Africa and Africans (1971). He did ethnographic fieldwork among the Tiv of Central Nigeria along the Benue fork of the Niger River from 1949-1953. He took over a thousand black and white photographs, from which the more than three hundred which make up this volume were selected. He wrote the accompanying text in 1996.

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