Description: David Schoenbrun examines groupwork--the imaginative labor that people do to constitute themselves as communities--in an iconic and influential region in East Africa. The Names of the Python supplements and redirects current debates about ethnicity in ex-colonial Africa and beyond.
Review Quotes: "A classic for anyone interested in the long-term roots of group formation in Africa. Schoenbrun's mastery of linguistic, oral, ethnographic, and archaeological sources provides a deep and wide history of different forms of belonging, including ethnicity, for the Buganda state and its neighbors over the last thousand years."--Jan Bender Shetler, Goshen College