Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa - Hardcover

Schumaker, Lyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822326787 ISBN 13: 9780822326786

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Africanizing Anthropology tells the story of the anthropological fieldwork centered at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) during the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on collaborative processes rather than on the activity of individual researchers, Lyn Schumaker gives the assistants and informants of anthropologists a central role in the making of anthropological knowledge.
Schumaker shows how local conditions and local ideas about culture and history, as well as previous experience of outsiders' interest, shape local people's responses to anthropological fieldwork and help them, in turn, to influence the construction of knowledge about their societies and lives. Bringing to the fore a wide range of actors--missionaries, administrators, settlers, the families of anthropologists--Schumaker emphasizes the daily practices of researchers, demonstrating how these are as centrally implicated in the making of anthropological knowlege as the discipline's methods. Selecting a prominent group of anthropologists--The Manchester School--she reveals how they achieved the advances in theory and method that made them famous in the 1950s and 1960s.
This book makes important contributions to anthropology, African history, and the history of science.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lyn Schumaker is Wellcome Research Lecturer at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Manchester.

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"This is one of those rare books that is capable of shaping basic understandings among several disparate audiences at the same time--among anthropologists, for whom it will be a revelation about the role of research assistants in shaping the discipline, among historians of science, who will gain important new insights about colonialism and the field sciences, and among historians, who will see anthropology and history in a new light. Schumaker addresses familiar issues concerning anthropology and colonialism, and replaces pious generalizations with textured descriptions based on excellent sources."--Steven Feierman, University of Pennsylvania

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Africanizing Anthropology - CL

By Lyn Schumaker

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Lyn Schumaker
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822326786

Chapter One

"The Water Follows the Stream"

Historical Ethnography, History of Anthropology, and Indigenous Anthropologists

Matshakaza Blackson Lukhero grew up in Feni, the Ngoni paramount chief's village in eastern Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). While still a child in 1935, he saw the British anthropologist Margaret Read, while she was doing a short period of fieldwork in Northern Rhodesia to supplement her main work on the Ngoni of Nyasaland (now Malawi). She wore leather riding breeches, he recalled, and, because she did not speak the local language and stayed such a short time in Feni, she was "not close to the people." Read was his first anthropologist.

Recruited for war service in 1941 when only fifteen, Lukhero served in Kenya in the Seventh Northern Rhodesia Field Ambulance Corps, trained in first aid by Desmond Clark, archeologist and first curator of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum. Clark couldn't pronounce "Matshakaza" and so he nicknamed the young African "Matchbox," a name that didn't survive Lukhero's war service. Back in Feni in 1946, Lukhero became an interpreter for a newly arrived anthropologist, Max Marwick, a Colonial Social Science Research (CSSRC) fellow attached to the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI). Marwick soon left the Ngoni to do fieldwork on the Chewa people. J. A. Barnes, an RLI research officer, then arrived in the Ngoni area and hired Lukhero as interpreter and research assistant for the duration of his fieldwork. With only a few breaks after that, Lukhero continued to work for the RLI and its anthropologists or former anthropologists in rural and urban fieldwork until 1966, a career as research assistant that spanned twenty years and included research in three countries.

From the later 1960s through the 1970s Lukhero worked for the copper mines on aptitude testing in the newly independent Zambia, taking up anthropology again in the 1980s when he became involved with the revival of the Ngoni Nc'wala traditional ceremony and wrote a book on it. When I met him in 1991, he was doing fieldwork for a second book on Ngoni chiefly succession. He answered my questions about the RLI fieldwork in which he had participated, as well as assisting my own interviews with people who had been Barnes's informants and attempting to train me in what he called "the RLI way" of fieldwork. It was during my second interview with him that I asked about the names local people gave to anthropologists and their assistants. According to Lukhero, people usually referred to Barnes as "one who learned (or studied) people's traditions." Lukhero himself they gave the nickname "Manzi okhonkha mkolo-the water follows the stream." "I am following Barnes's footsteps," he explained.

Lukhero did not say what he thought of this nickname. It suggests a dependency and loyalty-of African assistant to white anthropologist-that we are not comfortable acknowledging today. At the same time it describes, as well as contradicts, Lukhero's account of his work for Barnes and later research for his own books. In his description, "following" amounted to his leading Barnes to the people, introducing him, interpreting for him, teaching him the language, discussing local traditions, and afterward talking to people about their reactions to the anthropologist and assuring them Barnes was not a spy.

On the other hand, Lukhero also sometimes followed Barnes as they worked in the field together, learning (and helping to develop) "the RLI way" of doing research. Later, he continued asking questions and collecting material for the anthropologist after Barnes had left the field. And in subsequent years Lukhero followed the RLI way after his own fashion, using its style of titling for one of his books, claiming professional anthropological skills as a way of legitimating his part in the revival of the Nc'wala ceremony, and, especially, using the word "fieldwork" for his activities, something indigenous anthropologists do not generally do.

In the following chapters I treat Lukhero's nickname as suggestive in ways that its original speakers may not have intended, working with its different possibilities as a kind of thought experiment: how does the water follow the stream, or the research assistant the anthropologist? Indeed, does the water follow the stream-isn't it the water that makes the stream, or the assistant who shapes the anthropologist's knowledge? And how much does Africa itself-the land that the water flows through-determine the course of the stream, the anthropology that results? Here is a research agenda for telling the history of the RLI as a story of the coproduction of cultural knowledge. In other words, how did Africans and the African context shape the work of anthropologists there?

From History of Anthropology to Historical Ethnography

The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, founded in 1937 in Northern Rhodesia, was the first social science research institute in Africa. Until that country gained its independence as Zambia in 1964, the RLI carried out a coordinated research program involving several teams of anthropologists and their African assistants. The Institute also coordinated research in Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia-the other two countries of what was to become, between 1953 and 1963, the British Central African Federation. From 1949 when its second director, Max Gluckman, became chair of the University of Manchester's new department of sociology and social anthropology, the RLI acted as the locus of fieldwork for an evolving school of anthropology, later known as the Manchester School. The Manchester School became a major force in British social anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s and exerted a strong influence outside the British scene, as well.

This book is not a history of anthropology in the usual sense. Such a history of the Manchester School would focus on its place in the story of British functionalism, as in Kuper's Anthropology and Anthropologists (1983), or on its innovations in theory and method, as in Werbner's article, "The Manchester School in South-Central Africa" (1984). This book does not focus on the intellectual genealogy of theories or the intellectual connections of famous anthropologists that such a history would entail. Instead, this history focuses on the cultural and social factors in the particular historical situation of the Manchester School that were as important as the intellectual factors. It attempts to discover people, ideas, and practices that, though important at the time, have left no recognized disciplinary descendants. And it reveals the influences on anthropology that came from nonscientific activities that shared a location with it, whether in the fieldwork site, at the institute headquarters, or in the daily domestic life of the anthropologists in Northern Rhodesia. Thus, this history explores in detail the often acknowledged but rarely analyzed role played by colonial settler culture and mission and administrative practices in shaping the work of anthropologists.

This book places anthropology and anthropologists in multiple contexts-social, cultural, political, historical, and material-and discusses the forces that have mutually shaped both anthropology and the world around it. Social histories of this kind can provide a richer understanding of the processes involved in doing anthropology, useful to anthropologists as well as historians. The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822326787
• ISBN 13: 9780822326786
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 392
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar