Norbert Elias's African Processes of Civilisation: On the Formation of Survival Units in Ghana

In 1962 Norbert Elias was invited as a temporary professor at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. He taught, employed fieldwork, travelled, and met many people in postcolonial Africa. When Elias left Ghana in 1964, he had laid the basic groundwork for a fundamental sociological argument on human societies.

The volume on hand is a selection of his unpublished writings based on these experiences. Together they touch upon not only the well-known criticism of Eurocentrism and a developmenta...