African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change

Michael J. Sheridan and Celia Nyamweru edited this Ohio University Press volume, an academic collection of comparative scholarship on African sacred groves as living, actively governed institutions rather than as passive relics of an earlier belief system. Its strength, for the chapters covering the Mijikenda kaya forests specifically, is that they are written in direct engagement with the kaya elders' own account of who controls access to the groves and why, rather than an outside observer's assumption about traditional authority. Its limit, as with any edited volume, is that its geographic and thematic coverage depends on which contributor wrote a given chapter, so a claim about a sacred grove tradition outside the specific case studies included here needs a source focused on that particular tradition and region.