Kings and Kinsmen The Imbangala Impact on the Mbundu of Angola

EB. Good+. Hardcover. Hardcover. 4to. Published by University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. 1973. Xxiii, 553 pgs. Single sided pages. Dissertation. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. Although historians customarily work with imperfectlyrecorded data, imperfect at least for their own private purposes, the data which support this study have special qualities which require a preliminary statement of the ways in which they were collected and the techniques used to analyse them. Professor Jan Vansina has written a pioneering study of the use of certain kinds of orally transmitted information* but no similarly systematic statement examines the theoretical implications of combining diverse data drawn from ethnographic, linguistic, documentary, and orally transmitted 2 materials. Since knowledge of the Imbangala impact on the Mbundu depends on all these types of source, and especially since some of the data were recorded long before any of these disciplines reached their present level of sophistication, the problem of methodology assumes more importance than it ordinarily might. The data collected during my 1969-1970 fieldwork in Angola require the most extensive discussion. These data consist of approximately thirty hours of recorded testimony in Kimbundu and Portuguese; in addition, there is a relatively little amount of written EB; 8vo 8" - 9" tall .