Systems of belonging, including ethnicity, are not static, automatic, or free of contest. Historical contexts shape the ways which we are included in or excluded from specific identifications. Building on an amazing array of sources, David L.Schoenbrun examines groupwork - the imaginative labor that people do not constitute themselves as communities- in an iconic and influential region in East Africa within the past millennium. He shows Africans formed groups beyond the face-to-face, working from shrines,without writing. Legal culture and ideologies of fertility blended with the expansion of the Buganda state. Women's creative embrace of cultural work and procreation blunted the dislocations of that state's expansion. Literate Christian men writing Uganda's history in a time of colonial rule debated belonging in more than ethnic terms.

Grounded in Schoenbrun's skillful mastery of historical linguistics and vernacular texts, Beyond Ethnicity supplements and redirects current debates about ethnicity in Africa and beyond. This timely volume carefully distinguishes past from present and shows the many possibilities that still exist for the creative cultural imagination.