Swahili Expressive Arts Digital Media Collection

The Swahili Expressive Arts collection represents the research and scholarship of Professor Rebecca Gearhart, Ph.D., Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Illinois Wesleyan University. Professor Gearhart has worked with members of the community of Lamu, Kenya for twenty years, and in this collection she has selected images that represent aspects of Swahili ceremonial life on the northern coast of Kenya. The Swahili Expressive Arts collection is meant to be a possible starting point for student and scholar research on some of the Sufi-inspired practices that contemporary Swahili communities in the Lamu archipelago and adjacent mainland carry on into the present.