African ethnonyms : index to art-producing peoples of Africa /

Sub-Saharan Africa has been the home for hundreds, if not thousands, of distinct traditional cultures. Anyone doing research on Africa has faced the difficulty of identifying the most appropriate name for any of those cultures. This confusing diversity of "ethnonyms" can result from many factors: alternative spellings or even misspellings, differing concepts of cultural self-identity within African communities, and the way that early Euro-Americans recorded (or simply assigned) names to the peoples they met. The compilers have combined and organized as many of these culture name variations as they could find in the research literature (their bibliography exceeds 1,000 titles) into a single alphabetically arranged, cross-referenced resource. The use of the qualifier "art-producing people" in the subtitle is something of a misnomer, since the book appears to include all known African peoples. Biebuyck, Kelliher, and McRae have rendered the African studies research community a valuable service by compiling this work, which will immediately become a standard reference resource. Upper-division undergraduates and higher. E. C. Burt; Art Institute of Seattle