Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation

In 1962 Norbert Elias was invited as a temporary professor at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. He taught, employed fieldwork, travelled, and met many people in postcolonial Africa. When Elias left Ghana in 1964, he had laid the basic groundwork for a fundamental sociological argument on human societies.

The volume on hand is a selection of his unpublished writings based on these experiences. Together they touch upon not only the well-known criticism of Eurocentrism and a developmental perspective but also what could be considered the core of Elias’s work: the concept of civilisation. In a foreword, Dieter Reicher and Adrian Jitschin have endeavoured to explain and break down the relations of Elias’s African experience to the rest of his work and biography. They also clarified some misleading interpretations of Elias’s time in Africa. Finally, Arjan Post has uncovered the previously unknown fascinating story of Elias’ encounter with Malcolm X in an epilogue.

Norbert Elias was an essential sociological theorist who coined the need for a ‘reality congruent’ orientation of big history.

The Editors

Prof. Dr Dieter Reicher teaches sociology at the University of Graz. Together with others, he has already edited works by Norbert Elias.




Dr Adrian Jitschin works at the FernUniversität in Hagen. He is Elias’s biographer. In addition to multiple biographical publications on Elias, his volume on the young Elias is the standard work on the subject.


Arjan Post is an independent sociologist and teaches ‘Big History’ at the University of Amsterdam. He is the secretary of the Norbert Elias Foundation.

Dr Behrouz Alikhani is teaching Sociology at the University of Münster and Pedagogy at the University of Hildesheim.