The International African Institute (IAI warmly invites you to the
book launch and symposium discussion of

Among the Mende in Sierra Leone: the letters from Sjoerd Hofstra (1934-36)

Edited and translated by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra. Published 2014 by
the African Studies Centre, Leiden

Panel discussion with:

Paul Basu, Krijn Peters, Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Paul Richards

Thursday 19 June 2014, 5.30-7pm, Room 116, SOAS

Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG

Al welcome - rsvp/enquiries to [log in to unmask]

Sjoerd Hofstra was one of three anthropologists sent to British West
Africa in the 1930s by the International African Institute to
implement a programme of 'deep immersion' fieldwork, mentored by
Bronislaw Malinowski. Hofstra's fieldwork in Panguma, Lower Bambara
chiefdom in eastern Sierra Leone, was cut short by Blackwater Fever.
The monographs by his peers, Frederick Nadel and Meyer Fortes, which
appeared in the 1940s, became much better known. But Hofstra's letters
from the field written to his adoptive mother are of considerable
interest as ethnographic output. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra (a former
professor of social history at University of Amsterdam, and authority
on European witchcraft) has newly edited and translated them from
Dutch. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra will introduce the work of Sjoerd
Hofstra and discuss the detailed project of translating and editing
his letters. Krijn Peters, author of the IAI's War and the Crisis of
Youth in Sierra Leone (Cambridge Univ. Press 2001) will contribute a
current anthropological perspective on the Lower Bambara region in
Sierra Leone.

'...deserves to become a key reference in debates in anthropology about
the nature and purpose of ethnographic writing.  Here is the
anthropologist unadorned - frank, straightforward, subtle and humane.'
- Paul Richards

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