The contribution of German ethnography to Australian anthropological scholarship on Aboriginal societies and cultures has been limited, primarily because few people working in the field read German. In recent decades, the term has been taken up in New Age movements and online fantasy gaming. Outstations, which dramatically increased in numbers in the s, are small, decentralised and relatively permanent communities of kin established by Aboriginal people on land that has social, cultural or economic significance to them.
For 31 months between and , James F. Following the historic popular referendum, East Timor emerged as the first independent sovereign nation of the 21st Century. In the Sepik Basin of Papua New Guinea, ritual culture was dominated by the Tambaran —a male tutelary spirit that acted as a social and intellectual guardian or patron to those under its aegis as they made their way through life.
The Duna live in a physical environment of steep slopes that are sometimes difficult to traverse. A stick of bamboo used as a prop goes a long way in assisting a struggling traveller. This publication of Remaining Karen is intended as a tribute to Ananda Rajah and his consummate skills as an ethnographer. This book offers another frame through which to view the event of the outrigger landing of 43 West Papuans in Australia in ANU Press is a globally recognised leader in open-access academic publishing.
We produce fully peer-reviewed monographs and journals across a wide range of subject areas, with a special focus on Australian and international policy, Indigenous studies and the Asia-Pacific region. Skip to main content. Home » Search titles » Monographs in Anthropology. Email Address. First Name. Both showmen, they apparently got on famously, seemingly sharing a prejudice in their dislike of Indians.
The book itself is a persuasive mix of detailed empirical description and the occasional more campaigning appeal to the dignity and cohesion of Gikuyu culture. The material is organized into the usual chapters on land tenure, kinship, economics, religion and marriage, as befitting the Malinowskian ethnographic genre, but each has a twist in the tail. Similar critiques of European missionaries and teachers are made at the end of chapters on education and initiation rates.
Thus like his friend and teacher--Malinowski--Kenyatta mobilizes anthropological knowledge to argue for an unpolluted Kikuyu polity, one that was best left alone if its cultural autonomy was to be preserved. It is too easy to judge a book by its author.
The book openly uses anthropology to challenge colonial rule. It could fairly be labeled as the first postcolonial ethnography.
Not simply one step on an academic career ladder, the brand of anthropology presented in Facing Mount Kenya contributed to, and built upon, a renewed interest in traditional African cultures.
Mirroring debates within the Negritude movement, this was a strategic reclamation and celebration of Africanity in ways that would challenge Western and colonial perceptions and constructions of Africa. Kenyatta increasingly prioritised his political campaigning for African rights, and his work with Padmore eventually led to the 5th Pan African Congress in Manchester in Amongst other African American activists, in attendance was WEB du Bois, the Classics professor whose work The souls of Black folk was a seminal text for those writing about racial discrimination and Pan-Africanism.
The event was a formative event for many of the African delegates who attended, including Kwame Nkrumah. Whilst Kenyatta chose to pursue a political career, he had recognised the progressive potential offered by anthropology. Nkrumah also took courses in the discipline at University College London, and as Ghanaian Prime Minister encouraged the Africanisation of the university curriculum, in which anthropology and African studies played a prominent role.
He established the Institute of African Studies at the University Ghana, Legon, and whilst rejecting the anthropological label, he called for a pan-African study of African cultural practice. This critique, we would argue, was not about the efficacy of anthropology as a discipline capable of understanding African social realities but about the abuse of that anthropological knowledge.
Both Nkrumah and Kenyatta knew the value of anthropology in defining an African ethos yet both took different paths with it. Alex Kyerematen, another Ghanaian, was also a student of anthropology with Busia at Oxford during this period, writing a thesis on Ashanti royal regalia. Busia continued to write about the implications of colonialism for African culture, and became the first Ghanaian to hold a Professorship at the University of Legon, the Chair in Sociology Goody First propounded by Lamine and Leopold Senghor, the negritude movement can again be too easily critiqued for its essentialist depictions of African culture.
Unsurprisingly, Anglophone African socialists like Busia were less convinced by such poetry. Where does it prevail? In the whole continent? In parts of the continent? Which parts? He too met George Padmore whilst in the US, and in his autobiography Azikiwe recalls how Padmore led a student protest against British colonial policy during the visit of the British Ambassador to Howard University. A key aspect of this history of anti-colonial intellectual debate is the space that the metropolitan universities offered to these young scholars.
Self-exiled activists like Azikiwe, Kenyatta and Nkrumah used the opportunity of studying abroad to both develop their ideas and their political networks. Nkrumah and Azikiwe specifically chose to study in the US because of the African-American tradition of nationalism and self- empowerment. Anthropology was part of their education, even if they subsequently disowned the discipline.
Whilst one may wish to dismiss anthropology as an intimate part of a colonial knowledge structure, one also has to acknowledge the interstitial space that the discipline offered to those of a critical bent, and the first steps in Africanising the discipline.
In their written work both Kenyatta and Busia were percipient about the potential for a postcolonial anthropology. The history of academic disciplines is the story of both ideas and institutions.
How did anti-colonial politics gradually intersect with the establishment of universities in Africa? Before the second world war, there were already a number of Colleges scattered across British-controlled Africa, such as Fourah Bay College in Freetown, first established in s.
Makerere in Uganda, and Achimota in the Gold Coast both offered post-secondary vocational education by But most African Higher Education institutions were developed after the war, with colleges being formed in Ibadan and Legon in , and Makerere being upgraded to university status in As with new provincial universities in the UK, they initially had to teach to London University curricula and maintain the same entrance standards.
This meant that often places went unfilled — there were vacancies in University College Ghana in As Tadesse notes, these universities were lavishly funded, often located on campuses away from urban centres. Several of the universities were regional in ambition, and only later became national institutions. The initial focus on standards was gradually replaced by a call for relevance and usefulness.
The situation in Francophone Africa was rather different. The French did not support the early creation of African universities, and the only university founded prior to independence was in Dakar. Both Mamadiou Diouf and Achille Mbembe, founders of the Senegal school of cultural philosophy, and leaders of a movement to develop an autochthonous African scholarly project, were trained in France Diouf and Mbembe The picture is complex and country-specific. Nkwi and Messina describe the teaching of Ethnology within Sociology at the University of Yaounde in Cameroon, firstly led by a French anthropologist in the s, and gradually evolving till anthropology become, in , a recognised degree in its own right.
Anthropological work in Anglophone Africa was both aided and abetted by British support for social research, through the funding provided by the Colonial Social Science Research Council Mills, this volume. Couched in a paternalist rhetoric of colonial development and welfare, two hundred different social research projects were established across British Africa in the s, many of which were anthropologically informed.
Yet the very prestige and visibility of such projects led, in the minds of many African observers, to the discipline being closely associated with colonial administrations. The original purpose of the centres had been to build research-capacity and train local researchers; this did not always materialise. Schumaker describes how many of the research assistants employed at the RLI were never offered permanent appointments within the institute, despite developing a strong commitment to the discipline, and went on to develop non-academic careers.
Like Kenyatta however, they made anthropology their own, making use of their nationalist political credentials to gain access to sensitive urban contexts, and also using their research appointments to further their own political careers.
In Makerere, Ugandan research assistants left for careers in journalism and politics. These research institutes were plagued by their history and their semi- autonomous status in relation to the new universities, few of which established departments of anthropology. Not one of the universities in English-speaking Africa, save for South Africa, created a single-discipline anthropology department, though a number of joint departments of anthropology and sociology were created, including in Nigeria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia.
Nigeria was one exception to this general relegation of anthropology in the post- colonial period. A strong tradition of anthropological research was begun when Nathaniel Fadipe became the first Nigerian to receive a PhD in social anthropology in There followed a succession of scholars, who whilst calling themselves sociologists for tactical reasons, trained in social anthropology in Europe and America.
From the mid s onwards flourishing universities like Makerere came under increasing state control, and growing social pressure to Africanise their workforce. This was also a time during which dynamic new schools of thought emerged within the radical social sciences, such as the Dar es Salaam school of political economy Rodney ; Shivji and new schools of thinking within history. Viewed historically, the omens for anthropology in late-colonial Africa were never auspicious, born as it was amidst a rising tide of anti-colonial sentiment and the increasingly scholastic and metropolitan concerns of academic social anthropology.
The inevitable consequence of being associated with Colonial office funding was that anthropology in Anglophone Africa became the scapegoat. With the exception of South Africa, most African anthropologists adopted new identities and taught in cognate disciplines. With neither a presence in the new universities nor support from African intelligentsia, the rejection of the discipline in the s and s was almost complete.
New academic fashions developed. Works by Amin , Cabral , Walter Rodney , Mafeje , Shivji and Mamdani captivated a growing community of African social scientists. Structural Marxism, revisionist histories and dependency theory analyses threw light on the history of colonialism and the structurally peripheral economic and political relationships Africa found itself in.
At the first International Congress of Africanists in , anthropology was attacked for its portrayal of African societies in a way that justified colonial rule Bown and Crowder Paul Nkwi notes that this critique was repeated at the Algiers Congress of African intellectuals Nkwi a. The focus was on nation-building as a means to development.
The paradox was that neither modernisation paradigm, nor its critique, engaged with the everyday reality of life on the continent. Applied anthropology continued during the s as Brokensha demonstrates , , but was primarily carried out by Western expatriate scholars. Debate over the epistemological and racial politics inherent in the Western academic study of Africa continue to this day, particularly in the US. This has lead established scholars to dismiss the work of African Americans and those in the diaspora who have moved from area specific to theme-specific studies of African studies.
DuBois, that explores Africa in relation to its diasporic communities. How are anthropologists being employed? There is a growing literature and debates about the history of the discipline and its teaching in Africa e. Gordon ; Nkwi ; Mamdani across Africa, and it is now possible to piece together a continent wide picture of disciplinary practice. Within Anglophone Africa there are very few university institutions with explicitly labelled Anthropology departments outside Southern Africa.
Exceptions include a number of joint Sociology and Anthropology departments in Nigeria, Moi university in Kenya, and the University of Khartoum. Sudan holds the record for the longest record of teaching within a department of anthropology, where it has been taught since Kameir and Elbakri In Nigeria there has also been a long tradition of anthropology teaching, either within sociology departments or joint departments of sociology and anthropology, with the particular emphasis of each dependent on the scholars founding the department Otite The University of Nigeria, Nsukka, founded by Nnamdi Azikwe, was one of the first to teach anthropology see Ezeh, this volume.
As Pankhurst demonstrates this volume Anthropology has also had a relatively unbroken record in Ethiopia, where it has been taught at the University of Addis Ababa since the late s. Each country and institution has a different and very specific history and relationship with the discipline. South Africa has a rather different history Gordon , Hammond-Tooke , both because of the early development of anthropology departments in South Africa - Radcliffe-Brown taught at UCT in the s - and because of its years of isolation under apartheid.
Yet even in Southern Africa, one often finds a contradictory situation. As leBeau and Gordon note, this has been primarily carried out by Western expatriates rather than local scholars. If there are relatively few universities teaching anthropology in Anglophone Africa, there are even fewer in Francophone Africa. Instead, as Abega shows in this volume, anthropologists were usually trained first in philosophy, often within the seminary.
An informal sample of the situation in Anglophone Africa can be taken from those staff listed as teaching in Sociology or Anthropology departments in the Commonwealth University Yearbook.
Of the or so academics listed, roughly two-thirds had a Masters or PhD degree from a non-African university. The sample is a casual one, potentially skewed by a selective listing of only the senior staff within departments, but it is nonetheless revealing.
African anthropology continues to be characterised by an imbalance in its disciplinary networks. The international networks that are a legacy of colonial rule outweigh the regional and national networks that one might have predicted to develop. This has both positive and negative consequences. African anthropology has thrived on its contacts and exchanges with British, French, American and other European anthropologies via scholarships and sabbaticals, workshops and conferences, exchange of teachers and students, research funding, and participation in joint research projects.
Although this has protected African anthropology from provincialism, it has been at the expense of forging similar contacts and exchanges among African anthropologists, even amongst those within a single country.
It is instructive that anthropologists in Africa communicate less across national boundaries than they do with colleagues in Europe and North America. The separation seems even greater between Anglophone and Francophone African anthropologists where language is a major hindrance. One example of this is the relative paucity of linkages between South African anthropologists and those from the rest of the continent. Two distinct traditions of anthropology also developed in South Africa, one catering to the intellectual interests and linguistic needs of Afrikaans intellectuals, and the other to the more liberal English-speaking anthropological community.
Neither addressed the interests or training needs of black academics. The issue today for African anthropology is not simply one of redressing the geo- political balance, but also one of sustaining its global networks, which have been seriously undermined by the more inward-looking economic and educational policies of the Western countries.
African anthropology enters the 21st century not only fragmented, but also isolated from the international anthropological community. With universities declining in prestige and resources, intellectual outlooks are becoming narrow and provincial, and the best of staff and graduates emigrating.
These material constraints and inequities have been extensively explored in the literature Selassie and Kameir ; Ajayi ; Mamdani Consultancies are not in themselves problematic, but they can result in the confining of intellectual production and debate to routine reports, sacrificing scholarly creativity to survival necessities.
A particular problem for many African researchers has been the way they have ended up serving as local sources of information for their more fortunate colleagues abroad. A more positive aspect of the interaction between anthropology and its cognate disciplines has been the growing integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches within anthropological work.
Partly driven by the conventions of bio-medical research, anthropologists have increasingly found ways of using quantitative tools to analyse qualitative research. Whilst there has never been more potential for creative and collaborative linkages, between individuals, disciplines and countries, they are rarely in evidence. Examples of such collaborative research projects between institutions are increasing, but the relationship is not always an equal one.
Mwenda Ntarangwi this volume explores the complex relationship that attends between anthropology and study abroad. Yet given the international exchanges that do occur, African anthropology is inevitably torn between forging its own identity and building on the traditions of scholarship in the institutions where its practitioners are trained.
African scholars employed in the same national university who have trained in both the US and the UK bring very different experiences and perceptions of anthropology to their teaching. They also ask questions of the social identities and institutional locations of academics, and how these shape the questions they ask and the conclusions they make. In its practice African anthropology decentres Western epistemological traditions, creating its own traditions of reflexive anthropology and cultural critique cf Marcus and Fischer It marked a renaissance and recognition for the discipline in Africa.
During the Congress, these anthropologists assembled a steering committee, chaired by Prof. Paul Nchoji Nkwi Cameroon , and including Prof. Adama Diop Senegal , Dr. George Hagan Ghana and Dr. Ocholla Ayayo Kenya. The PAAA has also fostered a series of scholarly networks and, again with Wenner-Gren support, a mentoring and training programme for young African scholars. Training for the future: the role of regional research institutes A key concern for the discipline in Africa is the continued low status of anthropology amidst the social sciences.
Anthropology continues to occupy a marginal position within university departments, and is accorded little attention by planners and funders in comparison to the other social sciences. Tadesse points to the growth in these organisations and their role in forging a cumulative knowledge base and a culture of critical inquiry. But how autonomous are such organisations? The social sciences have always depended on state patronage and support, but in Africa anthropology is now reliant on funding from development agencies and international donors.
Their influence on the contemporary discipline is conditioning the very shape of anthropological writing, even within universities. This raises the question whether prioritizing ethnographic monographs, and the time needed to write them, is always appropriate in an environment dominated by the short-term demands of applied social research and the use of consultancies to augment meagre professional salaries.
Repeated consultancies in the same community or with the same group of people could result in an accumulated set of data that, over time, amounts to a critical ethnography. The relationship is not always one-way. Accepted techniques of academic research, such as those of participatory appraisal, first developed out of the world of consultancy. There is an increasing reliance by funders and donors on a standardisation of research procedures, particularly within short-term consultancies.
One consequence of this is a simplistic break-down of the research and writing process into methodology, data collection, results and conclusions. The genre of the consultancy report or project assessment equally serves to shape writing styles, privileging crisp analyses and succinct summaries rather than more subtle explorations of anthropological themes. Yet there is a tension between the expectations laid on the discipline by funding agencies and a lack of understanding of the time-frames and research conventions within which anthropological research operates.
Some of the independent Africa-based social science research institutes have been encouraged by funders to similarly conform to the expectations of a generic, evidence- based social science.
Such funding available is never long enough to help students through the complex and often lonely process of carrying out fieldwork and writing an anthropological PhD. Anthropological research is undercut by the demands of funding agencies that have little respect for a disciplinary identity based on extended fieldwork. Looking at research reports written by young researchers supported by one such organisation, one sees a discrepancy between the careful articulation of the research problem and the final output.
Why does a well-designed research programme end in a mediocre report? Is this a problem of inadequate research supervision; lack of seriousness in implementation; inadequate funds; or an insufficient time frame?
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