"Anthropology conducted in Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of the discipline since it was first institutionalized in the late 19th century. Sadly, the earliest anthropologists were predisposed to imagine that sub-Saharan Africa consisted of relatively isolated peoples, as were European explorers, colonial administrators, and colonists. They overlooked much of what they witnessed on the ground - including complex states, migrant labor, the proliferation of vernacular Christianities, and urbanization - and often neglected obvious evidence of Islamic influence and the slave trade. Well into the twentieth century, most anthropologists working in Africa studied small-scale, rural communities, and represented them as static and bounded. Anthropologists either ignored change or viewed change as a by-product of external forces, such as colonialism or Christian evangelism. The topics anthropologists selected for study reflected this ahistorical predisposition: local rather than long-distance trade; rural rather than urban communities; so-called traditional religions rather than Islam or Christianity; ritual performance rather than violent struggle; reproduction of kinship and marriage systems rather than social transformation"--