A Case Study of Migrant Labor in Tanzania

Extract

One of the most attractive and stimulating features about research in African history has been its eclecticism. Grounded particularly in the extensive and fertile field of social anthropology, Africanists have explored the implications of cultural relativism and the techniques of structural-functional analysis. Now, when some of the basic assumptions which have undergirded social sciences are being questioned, historians might re-examine their own orientations toward the men and societies about which they write.

Claude Lévi-Strauss has suggested that Westerners have been taught to identify subjectively with the “we” of the West, in subconscious opposition to the “other” of the rest of the world. European historians have often encompassed basic contradictions within the Western heritage by opposing that heritage, as a package, to historical experience elsewhere (Lévi-Strauss 1967, p. 258 f.n.). Intensive studies in local history throughout the world, on the other hand, can contribute immensely to reaching a fuller understanding of various ways in which men have related to one another. According to Lévi-Strauss,

each of the tens or hundreds of thousands of societies which have existed side by side in the world or succeeded one another since man's first appearance, has claimed that it contains the science of all the meaning and dignity of which human society is capable and, reduced though it may have been to a small nomad band or a hamlet lost in the depths of the forest, its claim has in its own eyes rested on a moral certainty comparable to that which we can invoke in our own case (p. 249).