Enslaved peoples were brought to the Americas from many places in Africa, but a large majority came from relatively few ethnic groups. Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on her lifetime study of slave groups in the New World, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall explores the persistence of African ethnic identities among the enslaved over four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade. Hall traces the linguistic, economic, and cultural ties shared by large numbers of enslaved Africans, showing that despite the fragmentation of the diaspora many ethnic groups retained enough cohesion to communicate and to transmit elements of their shared culture. Hall concludes that recognition of the survival and persistence of African ethnic identities can fundamentally reshape how people think about the emergence of identities among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, about the ways shared identity gave rise to resistance movements, and about the elements of common African ethnic traditions that influenced regional creole cultures throughout the Americas.

"[Ernest Gellner] began the association with Morocco and the Berbers of the Central High Atlas that resulted in Saints of the Atlas. It was a study of how holy men kept a fragile and broken peace among the shepherds who moved each spring from the plains of the ante-Atlas into the high pastures, and back again each autumn: a hundred thousand people, a million or so sheep traversing the bottle-necks of the mountain passes twice each year. It was an ideal opportunity for theft and rustling, and the Saints were there to maintain the peace without establishing any acceptable claim to political control. His book, criticised by scholars who have worked in Moroccan archives, remains important reading because it analyses so clearly the ways in which pastoral peoples, who had been in contact with states for a couple of millennia, maintained an ideology of total rejection of the Moroccan state, and a determination not to make anything of the kind themselves. Their practice was more often than not in accord with the ideology."--Http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/gellner/JDavisObit.html (Feb. 23, 2011.).