Tiger in an African palace, and other thoughts about identification and transformation

written by Richard Fardon

Tiger in an African palace collects eight essays about kinship and belonging that Richard Fardon wrote to complement his monographs on West Africa. The essays extend those book-length descriptions by pursuing their wider implications for theory in social anthropology: exploring the relationship between comparison and historical reconstruction, and questioning the fit between personal, ethnic and cosmopolitan identities in contemporary West African nations. In an Introduction written specially for this Langaa collection, Richard Fardon retraces the career-long development of his preoccupation with concepts of identification and transformation, and their relevance to understanding West African societies comparatively and historically.

Richard Fardon

Richard Fardon is a social anthropologist and ethnographer of West Africa whose interest in Cameroon and Nigeria stretches back to his doctoral studies in the 1970s. Since then he has published monographs on a variety of aspects of West African society and culture, including politics, history, religion and art. He was appointed to a Chair of West African Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, in 1996, and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004. He is currently Head of the SOAS Doctoral School.