ABSTRACT
I When I first considered the task you have assigned to me, the obvious course seemed to be to review the research on the subject of our seminar that has accumulated in the past thirty or forty years. But it quickly became apparent to me that this would be a monumental undertaking. What is more, it seemed to me that it could only result in a tedious catalogue many items of which would be better known to other participants in this seminar than to myself, and I decided therefore to risk a more limited and personal approach, in the expectation that the record of research I might have chronicled would certainly be covered by other members of our seminar. Looking back on my forty years of anthropological engagement with West Africa, what, I asked myself, could I contribute to the seminar from a distinctively anthropological—as opposed to a demographic or even sociological—point of view?
