Lyn Schumaker AFRICANIZING ANTHROPOLOGY

390 Pages·2009·4.19 MB·English

Lyn Schumaker
AFRICANIZING ANTHROPOLOGY
Duke University Press
Africanizing Anthropology

Lyn Schumaker
AFRICANIZING ANTHROPOLOGY
Fieldwork, Networks, and the
Making of Cultural Knowledge
in Central Africa
Duke University Press Durham & London 2001
∫ 2001 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Sabon by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data appear on the last printed page of this
book.
Frontispiece art: The Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute aims, engraved on a stone placque at
the Lusaka headquarters. The Africans in the
rli’s urban survey team sometimes carried a
copy to explain their work to their
research subjects. (Photo by author.)
To Theresa Valentine Hughes,
Nellie Schumacher, and Edwin Darwin Hughes,
who taught me oral history.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
1 ‘‘The Water Follows the Stream’’ 1
2 Contexts and Chronologies 22
3 Archetypal Experiences 39
4 The Laboratory in the Field 75
5 ‘‘A Lady and an American’’ 117
6 Atop the Central African Volcano 152
7 Africanizing Anthropology 190
8 The Culture of Fieldwork 227
Epilogue 260
Notes 263
Bibliography 339
Index 363
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is based on oral history and archival work conducted in
Zambia, Britain, the United States, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanza-
nia, the Netherlands, and Malawˆi. This included twenty-two months
of fieldwork in Zambia in 1991–92, six months of work in South
Africa and Britain in 1993, subsequent visits to Zambia in 1995 and
1996, and follow-up interviews and archival work in Britain from
1995 to 1999. Several foundations provided financial support for this
project: Fulbright (IIE), the Social Science Research Council, the Na-
tional Science Foundation, Mellon, the University of Pennsylvania,
Sigma Xi, and the University of Cape Town African Studies Centre. In
addition, the Wellcome Trust provided me with travel funds for re-
search into the links between Manchester School anthropology and
the origins of medical sociology in Zambia. I am also grateful to the
editors of Duke University Press, especially Ken Wissoker and Pam
Morrison, for their support and encouragement during the transfor-
mation of this work from manuscript to finished text.
I cannot possibly name all of those who deserve thanks for the sup-
port and intellectual stimulation that have made this book possible.
My greatest debt of gratitude is to the former Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute people and their associates, family, and friends, African and
European, who contributed interviews, insights, and criticism to the
writing of this book. To those in later generations of the Manchester
School who have been neglected in this history, my sole excuse is that
the Manchester School’s far-flung network became too large for me
to encompass in one book. I hope to write another based on the
interviews I have not yet used and on private papers as yet unavail-
able to scholars. For the names of people in a few of the photo-