Preface and acknowledgements

Summary

Although this book is short, it was hard to write, and I deleted more pages than I kept.

My first degree was in English, and this was at a time when New Criticism reigned supreme in British universities. I was trained in what I now think was one of the most exacting disciplines possible. Eyeball to eyeball with the “words on the page”, there was no escape into historical generalities, biographical details, or private personal emotions. We had to look at what was before us, and through an intensely concentrated exercise of attention we had to account for what we found. At its best, this approach showed a scrupulous respect for the otherness of textual forms which, as it turned out, was an oddly appropriate starting point for an anthropology of texts. At the time, though, I felt the need for more history and more social context. And as a returned volunteer from a pre-university year in Uganda, I was also interested in texts outside the English canon. I wanted to know about oral traditions, popular genres, writing in African languages.

So, with a view to doing research on African popular verbal arts, I went on to take a postgraduate course in social anthropology. It was called a “conversion course”, and conversion it certainly was – root and branch. This was long before the “literary turn” in anthropology. My literary background was no asset, and I was enjoined to “think like a scientist”.