The Swahili of East Africa have a long and distinctive history as a literate, Muslim, urban, and mercantile society. This book presents an anthropological account of the Swahili and offers an original analysis of their little-understood and unusual culture. Swahili towns, some urban with elegant stone buildings and others more rural with palm-leaf matting houses, are spread along the 1000 mile East African coast. Because each local community is culturally different from its neighbours, previous historians and anthropologists have viewed the Swahili as a series of isolated and "detribalized" groups. John Middleton argues, on the contrary, that beneath the cultural variation is a single structure, that of a well-defined and complex trading society that has shown little change through the ages. Drawing on his own field research and on earlier writings on the Swahili, Middleton describes this centuries-old mercantile culture, its local and descent groupings, marriage patterns, religion, and values.
He traces the history of their colonized past as subjects to Arabs, Portuguese, British, and others and shows that although their economic and political role has continually been a subordinate one, their sense of their unique identity enables them to persist as an ongoing civilization.
- ISBN10 0300052197
- ISBN13 9780300052190
- Publish Date 24 June 1992
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 5 September 2000
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Yale University Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 320
- Language English