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

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Duke University Press, Jul 12, 2001 - Science - 376 pages
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.
 

Contents

The Water Follows the Stream
1
Contexts and Chronologies
22
Archetypal Experiences
39
The Laboratory in the Field
75
A Lady and an American
115
Atop the Central African Volcano
150
Africanizing Anthropology
188
The Culture of Fieldwork
225
Epilogue
258
Notes
261
Bibliography
337
Index
361
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About the author (2001)

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

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