K Little
Biographic Data
| ID | 10359 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Little |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Little |
| SIGNATURE | LITTLE K |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6390-3712 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 85 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 332 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 85 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1942 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Program logic of a mental health outreach service for socially anxious youth
Youth mental health is a major concern both in Australia and internationally. Identifying at-risk young people is a core service priority. This report describes a "Youth Social Inclusion Program" developed in Australia to assist young people identified as having social difficulties that prevent them linking into formal mental health services. This report describes the Australian service context and uses the "program explication" methodology to do…
Grace's paradise requiem beast-time love story: Belize 2022
This story is part of a special section in honor of Kathleen Stewart, who is ever mindful of how we language what we world. My story is written as an exercise in poetic force, generating the life of beast-signs and backtalk, which were fundamental concepts in Stewart's early writing. In this "hundreds," Miss Grace tells a disaster story meant to encourage a scanning for signs of "the beast" in the trauma of a deadly Caribbean hurricane that destr…
Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches
It is hard to imagine tourism without the creative use of seductive, as well as restrictive, imaginaries about peoples and places. These socially shared assemblages are collaboratively produced and consumed by a diverse range of actors around the globe. As a nexus of social practices through which individuals and groups establish places and peoples as credible objects of tourism, “tourism imaginaries” have yet to be fully explored. Presenting inn…
The Role of Voluntary Associations in West African Urbanization
Reprinted from American Anthropologist, 59 (1957): 579–94. The thesis expounded in this article has been elaborated in Professor Little’s West African Urbanization: A Study of Voluntary Associations in Social Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965). Kenneth Little is Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. His principal research has been conducted in West Africa, and he is especially interested in problems of urbani…
A Mutual Parody of Meaning in Circus Clown and Ethnographic Discourse
This article traces some of the conversations between a European circus clown named Pipo and myself in order to draw out the characteristics of intertextuality that I argue are key features of the ethnographic endeavour. Central to our conversations was a concern with our mutual productions of identity as clown artist and ethnographer. I explore how ambiguous, parodic, and subversive such productions can be. Along the way Pipo taught me a few goo…
Clown Performance in the European One-Ring Circus
An attempt is made to interpret a clown act, a musical entree, as it was performed in various European one-ring circuses during the earlier part of this century. This interpretation relies on the fact that clowns, as circus actors, attempt to re-create the ordinary, everyday world in a ludic form by scrutinizing our expressions of what is ordinary and everyday. In effect, clowns “defamiliarize” many of our habits of perception. In this way clowns…
On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise: Affect, Tourism, Belize
There are beastly forces in Belize. Forces that are actively involved in making paradise impossible. On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise is a collection of seven stories about local lives in the fictional village of Wallaceville. They turn rogue in the face of runaway forces that take the form and figure of a Belize beast-time, which can appear as a comic mishap, social ruin, tragic excess, or wild guesses. Inciting the affective politi…
Sociology of Urban Women's Image in African Literature
Development and psychometric properties of the Reported and Intended Behaviour Scale (Ribs): A stigma-related behaviour measure
Background. Although stigma in relation to mental health has been defined as including components of knowledge, attitudes and behaviour, no psychometrically tested instrument to assess behavioural discrimination at the population level has been developed. This paper presents details of the development and psychometric properties of the Reported and Intended Behaviour Scale (RIBS), an instrument based on the Star Social Distance Scale, to assess r…
Paradise from the other side of nowhere: Troubling a troubled scene of tourist encounter in Belize
When Shaky was run over by a drunken tourist one night in April of 2003 on the main street of Placencia, one of several coastal ‘tourist paradises’ in Belize, the image and stories of his mangled body stimulated a flow of narrative that conjured a nervous dread troubling the smooth, laid-back, tropical vibe of the place. In such a moment of shock and impact, images of a Caribbean dream-world suddenly enter the senses like a nightmare to agitate t…
On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Tropics
There is not a day that goes by that someone in Placencia, a beach front village in Belize that has “gone crazy” for tourism, doesn’t say something about how life is becoming impossible. Impossibly smooth and beautiful, impossibly cruel and corrupt, impossibly laid-back and seductive, impossibly transformed socially and ecologically, impossibly out of control and violent, impossible to live. This paper tracks the impacts and intensities of “life …
The Circus in Ruins: A Comment on "Lion on Display: Culture, Nature, and Totality in a Circus Performance," by Yoram Carmeli
This article comments on Yoram Carmeli's stimulating analysis of the narrative structure of Captain Sidney Howes's lion act performed in Gerry Cottle's British circus. I begin by discussing Carmeli's analysis of how the act functions socially and semiotically. According to him, this act plays on a formative underlying nature/culture structural opposition that is then subverted by circus culture only to be shown, in the end, to be part of the very…
Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference. Deborah Root. Boulder
Surveilling Cirque Archaos: Transgression and the Spaces of Power in Popular Entertainment
Talking Circus, Not Culture: The Politics of Identity in European Circus Discourse
This article examines the production of circus talk as an ambiguous, even eccentric, form of identity formation. By situating this talk within the larger contexts of the ironies of representation, especially the given authoritative discourses concerning the invention of culture, I discuss how a circus artist, Luciano Bello, and an ethnographer, me, struggled over the production of meaning and the uses of circus identity concepts. The course of th…
The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. John Urry
Masochism, Spectacle, and the “Broken Mirror” Clown Entrée: A Note on the Anthropology of Performance in Postmodern Culture
The Sociology of Urban Women's Image in African Literature
The Sociology of Urban Women’s Image in African Literature
Courtesans and Prostitutes
The question of how one distinguishes specifically between courtes-anship and prostitution is considered later. In this chapter we refer arbitrarily to some characters as courtesans and to others as prostitutes. They all depend for their livelihood wholly or largely upon the exchange of sexual services for money or other material rewards. That is the common denominator.
‘Political’ Women and Workers
In respect of the political arena it is chronologically appropriate to begin with Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood. The scene is the Senegalese railwaymen’s strike in Dakar, Bamako and Thiès from October 1947 to March 1948. In his Foreword, Ousmane writes that ‘the men and women who took part in this struggle for a better way of life owe nothing to any one; neither to any civilising mission, nor to any parliament or parliamentarian’.
‘Free’ Women
In Chapter 6 we describe the role of Penda in the Senegalese railway men’s strike in Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood. We indicate that against the traditional background of much of this novel Penda stands out as a most unusual character. She refuses to be bound by convention and, instead of having a husband, goes with any man who pleases her.
Explanation and individual lives: A reconsideration of life writing in anthropology
Comment on Chiñas' Review of African Women in Towns
Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change
The Role of Voluntary Associations in West African Urbanization
Urbanization and Social Change in Africa [and Comments and Reply]
In recent years anthropologists have been taking an increasing interest in the process of urbanization in Africa, usually seen as an aspect of the wider issue of social and/or cultural change. As individual studies accumulate, we need to develop a framework within which to examine the variables that shape the structure of social relations in modern African towns and cities. Three main determinants of urban social structure are isolated and analyz…
The Political Function of the Poro. Part I
Opening ParagraphOne of the most interesting problems of pre-colonial history is the relation of so-called secret societies to indigenous government. In West Africa they are concerned mainly with the ownership and use of supposedly supernatural medicines and the propagation of certain cults.These are the functions also of other associations, but what principally distinguishes secret societies from the ordinary medicine society or cult is the esot…
The Role of the Secret Society in Cultural Specialization1
The Mende of Sierra Leone
Negroes in Britain. A Study of Racial Relations in English Society
Urbanization of an African Community: Voluntary Associations in Bamako
Creoledom. A Study of the Development of Freetown Society
Journal Article Creoledom. A Study of the Development of Freetown Society Get access Creoledom. A Study of the Development of Freetown Society. Arthur T. Porter. O.U.P. 21s. Kenneth Little Kenneth Little Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 63, Issue 250, January 1964, Pages 79–80, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a095184 Published: 01 January 1964
Surveilling Cirque Archaos: Transgression and the Spaces of Power in Popular Entertainment
Masochism, Spectacle, and the “Broken Mirror” Clown Entrée: A Note on the Anthropology of Performance in Postmodern Culture
Ethnology and Ethnography: Social Implications of Industrialization and Urbanization in Africa South of the Sahara
Structural Change in the Sierra Leone Protectorate
Opening ParagraphIn recent centuries indigenous West African society has experienced the impact of two external cultural forces, the one personified by Moslem invaders and migrants from the north, the other by European colonists from the West. With the spread of Islam, the way of life of whole peoples has been largely transformed, but the main changes which have occurred in the structure of African society are the result of Western and Westernizi…
The Mende Farming Household
Social Change and Social Class in the Sierra Leone Protectorate
The main factor promoting change in African society today is the desire for a higher standard of living than is attainable under the tribal system. Having had a few years at school places the individual on the fringe of a new society. In the Sierra Leone Protectorate the Europeanized African "Creole" from the original Sierra Leone Colony is the main cultural medium and, alogn with the European official, sets the princiapl social standars. "Creoli…
Voluntary Associations and Social Mobility among West African Women
In urbanized areas of West Africa voluntary associations play an important role in the socialization of West African women. Many West African women form voluntary associations in an attempt to raise their social status. Among educated women the clubs tend to be modelled after high class European clubs. Sociologically the clubs provide opportunities for status seekers to observe proper etiquite of sophisticated women. Social status is also enhance…
West African Urbanization: A Study of Voluntary Associations in Social Change
Some Trends in Modern Marriage among West Africans
Opening Paragraph This article describes and attempts to analyse the nature and content of marital relationships in the ‘modern’ West African family. To an increasing extent educated young people apparently want a companionate marriage on Western lines (Marris, 1961). Evidence comes from interviewing and from studies made of the attitudes of students and of secondary school boys and girls in a number of countries, including Ghana, Nigeria, and Si…
The Study of 'Social Change' in British West Africa
Opening ParagraphA visitor to West Africa today will find most of the conventional trappings of a western civilization. He can travel on trains and in motor-cars and airplanes, and stay at rest-houses equipped with electric light and a flushed toilet. He can visit African homes furnished in the latest western style in which there is refrigeration and cooking is done by electricity. He will see Africans working in shops, offices, and factories, gr…
Voluntary Associations
Some Traditionally Based Forms of Mutual Aid in West African Urbanization
Some Urban Patterns of Marriage and Domesticity in West Africa
The Changing Position of Women in the Sierra Leone Protectorate
Opening ParagraphWomen in the Sierra Leone Protectorate fulfil a role which, as in the case of the men, varies in accordance with their social age. In the early stages there is little distinction between the sexes either in training or in their relation to the rest of the community.Among the Mende, the arrival of a female child is greeted by the women with even greater delight than is that of a boy. They say that girls do not forget their mothers…
Mende Political Institutions in Transition
The Mende people occupy an area of something like 10,000 square miles in the central and south-eastern part of the Sierra Leone Protectorate. Comprising nearly 70 chiefdoms, they numbered, at the time of the last official census (1931), some 580,000 persons, including about 10,000 resident in the Colony. Available statistics suggest that their numbers are on the increase, and may be in the neighbour-hood to-day of one-third of the whole populatio…
The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. John Urry
The Origins of Modern African Thought: Its Development in West Africa During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Race Relations in English Society. Preliminary Report on a Community Survey
Loudoun Square: A Community Survey-II
Loudoun Square: A Community Survey-I
Some Anthropological Characteristics of Anglo-Negro Children
A Moslem 'Missionary' in M ndeland, Sierra Leone
Mende Political Institutions in Transition
The Mende people occupy an area of something like 10,000 square miles in the central and south-eastern part of the Sierra Leone Protectorate. Comprising nearly 70 chiefdoms, they numbered, at the time of the last official census (1931), some 580,000 persons, including about 10,000 resident in the Colony. Available statistics suggest that their numbers are on the increase, and may be in the neighbour-hood to-day of one-third of the whole populatio…
Land and Labour among the Mende
The point of departure in all programmes must, to a large extent, be the kind of society evolved by the local population. The writer, who is now Lecturer in Anthropology at the London School of Economics, spent a year in Sierra Leone in 1945–6 under the auspices of the Colonical Social Science Research Council, when William Wyse Student of Trinity College, Cambridge
The Mende Farming Household
The Changing Position of Women in the Sierra Leone Protectorate
Opening ParagraphWomen in the Sierra Leone Protectorate fulfil a role which, as in the case of the men, varies in accordance with their social age. In the early stages there is little distinction between the sexes either in training or in their relation to the rest of the community.Among the Mende, the arrival of a female child is greeted by the women with even greater delight than is that of a boy. They say that girls do not forget their mothers…
A Mende Musician Sings of His Adventures
The Function of 'Medicine' in Mende Society
Social Change and Social Class in the Sierra Leone Protectorate
The main factor promoting change in African society today is the desire for a higher standard of living than is attainable under the tribal system. Having had a few years at school places the individual on the fringe of a new society. In the Sierra Leone Protectorate the Europeanized African "Creole" from the original Sierra Leone Colony is the main cultural medium and, alogn with the European official, sets the princiapl social standars. "Creoli…
Significant Developments at the National Level
The Role of the Secret Society in Cultural Specialization1
Contributions to a Socio-economic Survey of the Gambia
Journal Article Contributions to a Socio-economic Survey of the Gambia Get access Contributions to a Socio-economic Survey of the Gambia. D. P. Gamble . London: Research Department, Colonial Office. 1949. Pp. 151 (roneoed). Maps, plans, tables. N.P. K. L. LITTLE K. L. LITTLE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 49, Issue 196, July 1950, Pages 255–256, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjourna…
The Significance of the West African Creole for Africanist and Afro-American Studies
The Negro in the United States. E. Franklin Frazier
Race and Culture
The Basuto
Race et biologie
Girard Alain. Dunn L. C - Race et biologie; Lévi-Strauss Claude - Race et histoire; Little Kenneth L - Race et société; U.N.E.S.C.O - Qu'est-ce qu'une race?. In: Population, 8e année, n°2, 1953. pp. 379-380
The Study of 'Social Change' in West Africa
The Study of 'Social Change' in British West Africa
Opening ParagraphA visitor to West Africa today will find most of the conventional trappings of a western civilization. He can travel on trains and in motor-cars and airplanes, and stay at rest-houses equipped with electric light and a flushed toilet. He can visit African homes furnished in the latest western style in which there is refrigeration and cooking is done by electricity. He will see Africans working in shops, offices, and factories, gr…
The African Elite in British West Africa
Structural Change in the Sierra Leone Protectorate
Opening ParagraphIn recent centuries indigenous West African society has experienced the impact of two external cultural forces, the one personified by Moslem invaders and migrants from the north, the other by European colonists from the West. With the spread of Islam, the way of life of whole peoples has been largely transformed, but the main changes which have occurred in the structure of African society are the result of Western and Westernizi…
The Gold Coast in Transition
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