Product Description

"Africanizing Anthropology" tells the story of the anthropological fieldwork centred 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 places anthropologists' assistants and informants in a central role in the making of anthropological knowledge. Schumaker shows how local conditions and local ideas about culture and history, as well as local people's previous experience of outsiders' interest, shape their 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 places emphasis on the daily practices of researchers, demonstrating how these are as centrally implicated in the making of anthropological knowledge as the discipline's recognised methods. Using a prominent group of anthropologists - The Manchester School - she reveals, in particular, 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1204288 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

Review
"Schumaker's work, which takes a completely different approach to the study of anthropology, is by far the most revealing account I have ever read, not only of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute but of anthropology in Africa. Both highly innovative and extremely convincing, it sets new standards for Southern African intellectual history."- Terence Ranger, University of Zimbabwe "This book will be revolutionary to anthropologists and will be one of those rare books that is capable of shaping basic understandings among several disparate audiences at the same time. Schumaker takes familiar questions and replaces vapid generalities with textured descriptions based on excellent sources. This is a major book."- Steven Feierman, University of Florida "Lyn Schumaker's splendid history provides a balanced and sensitive account of the growth of a particular form of the discipline in the hands of the men and women who believed they were acting to reveal the workings of the colonial dispensation and to foster a critical vision which would fuel the imagination of the independence movement that grew around them. Schumaker's intent is to reveal how social anthropological procedures were "Africanized" by their setting, and how the Africans who were involved with the enterprise influenced the fieldwork culture of the Institute and later brought their anthropological learning to serve new demands after independece."--Peter Fry, Times Literary Supplement, 17 January 2003