This edited collection includes a brief introduction and six papers from a conference held at Porto, Portugal in 2007. As with many such collections, the papers vary in quality, lack an overall theoretical or analytical framework, and fail to engage common themes or one another. Taken as a whole, the authors primarily seek to historicize ethnicity, with little historical or theoretical discussion of the long-standing debate on ethnicity itself.

The editor's introduction provides a generalized overview of the topic, focusing initially on recent well-known instances of ethnic violence to the neglect of the complex, varied, and nuanced ways in which ethnicity is expressed in everyday life. The focus then shifts to primordialist colonial assumptions and social constructionist critiques by Jean-Loup Amselle, Leroy Vail, and others, based on the ‘invention of tradition’. I have published a broad critique of this literature in this journalFootnote ¹ and will not repeat it now, but suffice it to say that the analysis here generally lacks acknowledgement of earlier critiques of primordialism, including instrumentalist approaches; fails to engage with the subsequent anthropological, historical, and political literature on the ‘limits of invention’; and neglects how these literatures have changed over time. In the end, the editor sees ethnicity as simply one of many alternative identities, rather than as a complex, multifaceted phenomenon of its own.

The first section consists of three papers on southeastern Africa. Drawing on the extensive documentation of the lower Zambezi over 500 years, Malyn Newitt provides a characteristically detailed study of repetitive historical processes of ethnogenesis, in which demographic instability, trade, and raiding facilitated the rise of new men based on their acquisition and redistribution of resources; social incorporation of women, captives, and slaves; political alliances with local chiefships and spirit shrines; and creative adaptation of local rituals combined to continually create and recreate local polities and ethnicities. A second paper on the lower Zambezi, by Eduardo Medeiros and José Capela, however, is characterized by such sweeping and unsubstantiated generalizations concerning abstract social processes that it adds little to Newitt's account. Felicitas Becker completes this section with a perceptive study of changing ethnic stereotypes long salient in local discourse within similar ongoing historical and social processes in southern Tanzania, concluding, contrary to popular thought, that they were less important in the colonial period than in either the precolonial or postcolonial eras.

The second section consists of three papers on coastal West Africa. The first, by Paul Nugent, is the continuation of an earlier paperFootnote ² closely analyzing two pairs of cross-border ethnicities – Ewe/Agotime in Ghana/Togo and Mandinka/Jola in the Senegambia – to compare the differing fates of colonial and postcolonial ethnic projects across colonial and national boundaries. In the Ewe/Agotime case, Nugent finds people reformulating ethnicities throughout the nineteenth century as their activities shifted between agriculture, militarism, and trade, and subsequently in the twentieth century, between the twin poles of British/Ghanaian and German/French/Togolese rule. Such ethnic projects were often undertaken with great difficulty, as the vagaries of slave raiding and the subsequent imposition of shifting colonial and national boundaries impinged on local agendas and brought about the failure of Ewe irredentism. Yet, while many of the same factors were operative in the Mandinka/Jola case, widespread conversion to Islam there tended to limit some ethnic differences while bringing out others.

The final two papers on West Africa focus not on ethnicity but on chieftaincy, and thus fit only tangentially into the collection as a whole. After demonstrating fairly conclusively that Portuguese authorities in Guinea-Bissau were prone to appoint foreigners or colonial servants lacking any claim to ‘traditional’ legitimacy as chiefs, Philip Havik concludes, not surprisingly, that their appointment and imposition of colonial demands for taxes, labor, and cash crops eroded colonial authority. And while Alexander Keese insists on the salience of ethnicity in the surrounds of Freetown, he focuses on fluid ‘big man’ polities for which ethnicity was merely one means of mobilization among many, such that the resulting ephemeral ‘kingdoms’ did not really constitute ethnic groups in any meaningful sense.

The chief merits of this slim volume thus reside in a few carefully historicized and contextualized case studies of enduring long-term processes of ethnic reproduction, reformulation, and recreation, rather than in any larger contributions to our understanding of ethnicity generally.