front cover of Remains of Ritual
Remains of Ritual
Northern Gods in a Southern Land
Steven M. Friedson
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Remains of Ritual, Steven M. Friedson’s second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson’s careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.

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Smugglers Secessionists & Loyal Citizens
On The Ghana-Togo Frontier
Paul Nugent
Ohio University Press, 2002
The first integrated history of the Ghana-Togo borderlands, Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier challenges the conventional wisdom that the current border is an arbitrary European construct, resisted by Ewe irredentism.

Paul Nugent contends that whatever the origins of partition, border peoples quickly became knowing and active participants in the shaping of this international boundary. The study itself straddles the conventional divide between social and political history and offers a reconstruction of a long-range history of smuggling and a reappraisal of Ewe identity.

Addressing topics such as imperialism, cocoa, the Customs Preventive Service, Christianity, and Ewe unification, this study will be of interest to scholars and to others concerned with issues of criminality, identity, and the state.
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