Nigerian Traditional Economy in the Ethnography of Paul Bohannan

Abstract

African traditional economics has attracted the interest of colonial hegemonic scholars who wanted to fathom the rationale behind the peasant socioeconomic structure. In Nigeria, there is a corpus of ethnographers who have studied some of the societies that make up Nigeria. In this article, my deliberately restricted aim is to reassess Bohannan’s studies on Nigerian peasant economies as a contribution to anthropological knowledge. Paul Bohannan studied the Tiv economy. In the literature on colonial knowledge and traditional economics in British Nigeria, Paul Bohanna’s Tiv economy has generated a whole lot of theoretical mainstreaming in economic anthropology.