Bruce J Berman
Biographic Data
| ID | 140489 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bruce J Berman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bruce J |
| FAMILY NAME | Berman |
| SIGNATURE | BERMAN B J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 477 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Custom, modernity, and the search for Kihooto
Jomo Kenyatta and Bronislaw Malinowski met in December 1934, soon after the latter had told Princess Marie Bonaparte he was to meet 'real experts' on the Kikuyu people. The book, Facing Mount Kenya, was one of the first anthropological monographs by an African. Kenyatta met Britain's African affairs community on his first visit to London in 1929-30. Malinowski forwarded Kenyatta's application for a London School of Economics (LSE) library card, r…
The Moral Economies of Ethnic and Nationalist Claims
At a time when states, armed insurgent movements, and ethnic and nationalist political parties make claims based on the defence of communal interests and political and religious ideologies – with often deadly consequences – it is important to understand the discourses and actions that are used to legitimize these claims. This book argues that competing moral economies – the beliefs and practices that normatively regulate and legitimize the distri…
Moral Economies of Ethnic and Nationalist Claims
Ethnic Territory, Land Tenure, and Citizenship in Africa
Nationalism in Post-Colonial Africa
Self-conscious efforts at nation building, while only partially successful, created a clear presence of the nation in the social imaginary and, along with often quite successful state-centred development strategies, focused politics on the state as the source of the resources of modernity and access to the market. One-party states and military autocracies provided opaque carapaces within which patronage networks could be negotiated among ethnic e…
Secular States and Religious Diversity
Contemporary nation-states have seen the rise of religious pluralism within their borders, brought about by global migration and the challenge of radical religious movements. Secular States and Religious Diversity explores the meaning of secularism and religious freedom in these new contexts. The contributors chart the impact of globalization, the varying forms of secularism in Western states, and the different kinds of relations between states a…
Nationalism in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa
Africa has often been omitted from general histories of nationalism since Western scholars have seen the European powers’ strategies of decolonization to be historically more important than the emergence of African nationalism and because post-colonial Africa appears to be, uniquely, a continent of false nations and failing states, cut off from world history. This introduction places Africa back into world history by highlighting how Africa’s mod…
Ethnic politics, economic reform and democratisation in Africa
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Ethnic Diversity and Economic Instability in Africa
There is growing consensus in the development economics literature that ethnic diversity is a very significant factor in explaining Africa's poor economic performance. Ethnic Diversity and Economic Instability in Africa challenges this conventional wisdom. Drawing on the insights of historians, anthropologists and political scientists as well as development economists, this book questions whether ethnicity is the most useful organising principle …
Patrons, Clients, and Constitutions
The euphoria that followed the 2002 elections in Kenya and the end of the increasingly authoritarian regime of Daniel arap Moi, soon dissipated as the regime of Mwai Kibaki slid into the business as usual of corruption, patronage and cronyism of politics in Africa's most strongly articulated informal system of ethnic-based patronage, one that originated in the colonial period and was refined and extended under the Kenyatta and Moi regimes. Kibaki…
Ethnic Politics and the Making and Unmaking of Constitutions in Africa
The crisis of governance and wave of democratization that swept Africa over the past twenty years was accompanied by repeated efforts to revise national constitutions. With blame for civil conflicts placed on Africa's ethnic diversity, a lengthy debate ensued among Western political scientists over whether integration or accommodation of ethnic communities should guide constitutional reform. However, understanding of the process of institutional …
The Ordeal of Modernity in an Age of Terror
Sometime during the increasingly tense European summer of 1938, the Anglo-Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski sat down to write an introduction to a new book by one of his students, Jomo Kenyatta-a book based on the graduate thesis the latter had written under his supervision at the London School of Economics. A scientific rationalist and atheist, as well as an antiracist, antifascist, and anticommunist, Malinowski was most of all in that …
Ethnicity, Bureaucracy & Democracy
Conclusion African Ethnic Politics & the Paradoxes of Democratic Development
I Introduction Ethnicity & the Politics of Democratic Nation-Building in Africa
A Palimpsest of Contradictions
John Lonsdale's use of the striking metaphor, palimpsest of contradictions, to describe the colonial state in Kenya in our first joint paper sent me running to the dictionary. A palimpsest is simply manuscript written over a partly erased older manuscript in such a way the old words can be read beneath the new.1 It vividly makes a similar point to two of Karl Marx's most famous aphorisms. The first deals with the relationship between social struc…
Multiparty Politics in Kenya
Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State
Recent research has revealed that modern African ethnicity is a social construction of the colonial period through the reactions of pre-colonial societies to the social, economic, cultural and political forces of colonialism. Ethnicity is the product of a continuing historical process, always simultaneously old and new, grounded in the past and perpetually in creation. Colonial states were grounded in the alliances with local ‘Big Men’, incorpora…
The Perils of Bula Matari
(1997). The Perils of Bula Matari: Constraint and Power in the Colonial State. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des etudes africaines: Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 555-570
Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography
(1996). Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines: Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 313-344
Unhappy Valley. Conflict in Kenya and Africa. Book One
African Capitalists in African Development
African Capitalists in African Development, C. Leys The Ivoiren J. Rapley Domestic Capitalists and the State in Kenya, D. Himbara The African Petty Bourgeoisie and the Struggle for Acceptance in Zimbabwe, S. Nicholas Industrial Policy in Zimbabwe - the Role of the National Bourgeoisie, T. Ostergaard Accumulating Wealth, Consolidating Power - Renterism in Senegal, C. Boone The Alliance of Oil and Maize - the Response of Indigenous and State Capita…
African Capitalists in African Development
Guide to Archives and Manuscripts Relating to Kenya and East Africa in the United Kingdom, Volume 1
African Capitalists in African Development
Breaking new ground in the study of a key dimension of African development, the authors explore the variations in the technical and political capacities of the continent's diverse indigenous entrepreneur classes.
Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State
Recent research has revealed that modern African ethnicity is a social construction of the colonial period through the reactions of pre-colonial societies to the social, economic, cultural and political forces of colonialism. Ethnicity is the product of a continuing historical process, always simultaneously old and new, grounded in the past and perpetually in creation. Colonial states were grounded in the alliances with local ‘Big Men’, incorpora…
Coping with the Contradictions
By drawing on the current Marxist debate about the nature of the capitalist state, this article argues that the colonial state was obliged to be more interventionist than the mature capitalist state in its attempts to manage the economy, since colonies were distinguished by the way in which they articulated capitalism to local modes of production. This posed severe problems of social control, since the capitalist sector required the preservation …
Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya
Crises of Accumulation, Coercion and the Colonial State
RÉSUMÉLes analyses structurales et instrumentales ont tendance à surestimer le déterminisme des forces sociales externes pour les formes et les politiques de l'État colonial. La spécificité de l'État colonial vient de l'articulation particulièrement contradictoire entre le capitalisme et les modes de production locaux. Au Kenya, l'articulation entre le domaine foncier du colon blanc et la production paysanne africaine a été basée sur l'extraction…
Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya
Professor Berman argues that the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies. North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP
Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography
(1996). Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines: Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 313-344
Louis Leakey's Mau Mau
Bureaucracy and Incumbent Violence
In the twenty-odd years since the declaration of a state of emergency in Kenya in October 1952, the analysis of the phenomenon known as ‘Mau Mau’ has undergone a fundamental revision. The initial interpretation, advanced by the colonial authorities and their apologists and by a few (mostly British) scholars, explained ‘Mau Mau’ as a fanatic, atavistic, savage religious cult consciously created and manipulated by a group of unscrupulous, power-hun…
Multiparty Politics in Kenya
African Capitalists in African Development
Structure and Process in the Bureaucratic States of Colonial Africa
African Capitalists in African Development
African Capitalists in African Development, C. Leys The Ivoiren J. Rapley Domestic Capitalists and the State in Kenya, D. Himbara The African Petty Bourgeoisie and the Struggle for Acceptance in Zimbabwe, S. Nicholas Industrial Policy in Zimbabwe - the Role of the National Bourgeoisie, T. Ostergaard Accumulating Wealth, Consolidating Power - Renterism in Senegal, C. Boone The Alliance of Oil and Maize - the Response of Indigenous and State Capita…
Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Modernity
RésuméLe facteur au centre de l'intérêt que l'on continue de porter aux Mau Mau est sa relation paradoxale avec le nationalisme au Kenya. Les deux interprétations dominantes des Mau Mau—culte religieux démoniaque et nationalisme militant—étaient toutes deux basées sur les espérances de la théorie de la modernisation concernant le développement inévitable d'états-nations séculaires. Mais elles mettaient en valeur soit respectivement les aspects cu…
Clientelism and neocolonialism
A Palimpsest of Contradictions
John Lonsdale's use of the striking metaphor, palimpsest of contradictions, to describe the colonial state in Kenya in our first joint paper sent me running to the dictionary. A palimpsest is simply manuscript written over a partly erased older manuscript in such a way the old words can be read beneath the new.1 It vividly makes a similar point to two of Karl Marx's most famous aphorisms. The first deals with the relationship between social struc…
The Ordeal of Modernity in an Age of Terror
Sometime during the increasingly tense European summer of 1938, the Anglo-Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski sat down to write an introduction to a new book by one of his students, Jomo Kenyatta-a book based on the graduate thesis the latter had written under his supervision at the London School of Economics. A scientific rationalist and atheist, as well as an antiracist, antifascist, and anticommunist, Malinowski was most of all in that …
The computer metaphor
(1989). The computer metaphor: Bureaucratizing the mind. Science as Culture: Vol. 1, No. 7, pp. 7-42
Patrons, Clients, and Constitutions
The euphoria that followed the 2002 elections in Kenya and the end of the increasingly authoritarian regime of Daniel arap Moi, soon dissipated as the regime of Mwai Kibaki slid into the business as usual of corruption, patronage and cronyism of politics in Africa's most strongly articulated informal system of ethnic-based patronage, one that originated in the colonial period and was refined and extended under the Kenyatta and Moi regimes. Kibaki…
Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya
The Perils of Bula Matari
(1997). The Perils of Bula Matari: Constraint and Power in the Colonial State. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des etudes africaines: Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 555-570
Unhappy Valley. Conflict in Kenya and Africa. Book One
Only a glancing blow
(1993). Only a glancing blow: Roger Penrose and the critique of artificial intelligence. Science as Culture: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 404-426
A History of the Igbo People
The Concept of 'Articulation' and the Political Economy of Colonialism
Bruce J. Berman, The Concept of "Articulation" and the Political Economy of Colonialism, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1984), pp. 407-414
Clientelism and neocolonialism
Bureaucracy and Incumbent Violence
In the twenty-odd years since the declaration of a state of emergency in Kenya in October 1952, the analysis of the phenomenon known as ‘Mau Mau’ has undergone a fundamental revision. The initial interpretation, advanced by the colonial authorities and their apologists and by a few (mostly British) scholars, explained ‘Mau Mau’ as a fanatic, atavistic, savage religious cult consciously created and manipulated by a group of unscrupulous, power-hun…
Livres/Books
Livres/Books
Explaining colonialism in Kenya
A History of the Igbo People
Men in the Middle
Reaching the Peasant Farmer
Reaching the Peasant Farmer: Organization Theory and Practice in Kenya Get access Reaching the Peasant Farmer: Organization Theory and Practice in Kenya, by David K. Leonard. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1977. 297pp. £13.30. Self Reliance in Kenya: The Case of Harambee, by Philip M. Mbithi and Rasmus Rasmusson. Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1977. 177pp. No price given. B. J. BERMAN B. J. BERMAN Queen'…
Coping with the Contradictions
By drawing on the current Marxist debate about the nature of the capitalist state, this article argues that the colonial state was obliged to be more interventionist than the mature capitalist state in its attempts to manage the economy, since colonies were distinguished by the way in which they articulated capitalism to local modes of production. This posed severe problems of social control, since the capitalist sector required the preservation …
Crises of Accumulation, Coercion and the Colonial State
RÉSUMÉLes analyses structurales et instrumentales ont tendance à surestimer le déterminisme des forces sociales externes pour les formes et les politiques de l'État colonial. La spécificité de l'État colonial vient de l'articulation particulièrement contradictoire entre le capitalisme et les modes de production locaux. Au Kenya, l'articulation entre le domaine foncier du colon blanc et la production paysanne africaine a été basée sur l'extraction…
The Concept of “Articulation” and the Political Economy of Colonialism
is most distinctive and important concept to emerge from Marxist critique of dependency theory in so-called of production controversy. It has become, however, increasingly controversial and must be approached with care to sort out various meanings attributed to and serious conceptual problems which some of them present. Articulation was initially developed from structuralist concept of a social formation consisting of hierarchic linkage of severa…
Structure and Process in the Bureaucratic States of Colonial Africa
The Concept of 'Articulation' and the Political Economy of Colonialism
Bruce J. Berman, The Concept of "Articulation" and the Political Economy of Colonialism, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1984), pp. 407-414
Strukturen und Prozesse in den bürokratischen Staaten des kolonialen Afrika
Zeitgenössische Studien des europäischen Kolonialismus in Afrika zeigen uns zwei sehr verschiedene und offenbar widersprüchliche Bilder des Kolonialstaates. Auf der einen Seite gibt es den ,starken Staat', den mächtigen bürokratischen Agenten des Imperialismus. Durch Zwang, indirekten Druck und materielle Anreize zerschmetterte er die Selbstgenügsamkeit der einheimischen vorkapitalistischen Gesellschaften und brachte ihre untergeordneten Verbindu…
Books/Livres
On the Redfoot Trail
The computer metaphor
(1989). The computer metaphor: Bureaucratizing the mind. Science as Culture: Vol. 1, No. 7, pp. 7-42
Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya
Control And Crisis In Colonial Kenya The Dialectic Of Domination
Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Modernity
RésuméLe facteur au centre de l'intérêt que l'on continue de porter aux Mau Mau est sa relation paradoxale avec le nationalisme au Kenya. Les deux interprétations dominantes des Mau Mau—culte religieux démoniaque et nationalisme militant—étaient toutes deux basées sur les espérances de la théorie de la modernisation concernant le développement inévitable d'états-nations séculaires. Mais elles mettaient en valeur soit respectivement les aspects cu…
Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya
Professor Berman argues that the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies. North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP
Louis Leakey's Mau Mau
Artificial intelligence and the ideology of capitalist reconstruction
Unhappy Valley
Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya
Political science (45 works) · Law (38 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Politics (29 works) · African history and culture studies (25 works) · Law (21 works) · Economics (18 works) · Colonialism (17 works) · History (17 works) · Ethnic group (13 works)