This is the first ethnographic study of the farmers and foragers of northeastern Zaire since Colin Turnbull's classic works of the 1960s. Roy Richard Grinker lived for nearly two years among the Lese farmers and their long-term partners, the Efe (Pygmies), learned their languages, and gained unique insights into their complex social relations and ethnic identities. By showing how political organization is structured by ethnic and gender relations in the Lese house, Grinker challenges previous views of the Lese and Efe and other farmer-forager societies, as well as the conventional anthropological boundary between domestic and political contexts.

Roy Richard Grinker is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University.

"While a growing number of publication exist on relations between foragers and farmers in central Africa, there are very few which focus on the farmers. Grinker's volume represents a major attempt to redress this balance."—Social Anthropology

"This book differs from other studies of farmer-forager relations in that it looks at the issue from the perspective of the Lese farmers and examines how the Efe foragers are symbolically and structurally incorporated into Lese society on a basis of inequality."—Journal of Political Ecology

"Theoretically, Houses in the Rainforest is a very sophisticated and a very important book."—International Journal of African Historical Studies

"Roy Richard Grinker, writing about the relationship between Pygmies and their farmer counterparts, breaks new ground in the theory of social institutions and ethnicity."—Jan Vansina, University of Wisconsin, Madison