The Social System of the Zulus

Eileen Jensen Krige's The Social System of the Zulus, published by Longmans, Green and Co. in 1936, is a classic ethnographic study of Zulu social and political structure, kinship and ritual, based on fieldwork conducted in the early twentieth century. Its strength is that it remains a foundational reference in southern African ethnography, still cited by later scholars of Zulu society. Its limit is that it is a colonial-era ethnography written from an outside anthropological vantage point nearly a century ago, so its categories and framing should be read against more recent scholarship, including work by Zulu scholars themselves, rather than treated as a timeless or neutral account.