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2004-2005 Fellows

2004-2005 Fellow Barnes

Sandra T. Barnes

University of Pennsylvania
Faculty of Humanities
Department of Anthropology

Sandra T. Barnes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, is President of the African Studies Association and Founding Director of Penn's African Studies Center. She is the author of three books, numerous articles, and most recently an expanded, edition of Africa's Ogun: Old World and New, an interdisciplinary study of West African religious culture and its continuing vitality in diaspora. Her book, Patrons and Power won the Amaury Talbot Prize for best book on Africa awarded by the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Current research focuses on pre-colonial social and cultural life along West Africa's Guinea Coast and post-colonial popular culture.

Project Summary

Barnes' book, "Culture in Motion: Coastal West Africa, 1760 - 1860," describes how people created cultures of belonging in West Africa amidst movement and upheaval during the period from c. 1760 to 1860 - a time when the slave trade reached its zenith and then declined. It challenges notions of indigenous parochialness by showing ways the social world handled cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity long before people were brought together in the diaspora to the New World.