Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T20:46:02.150Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Contribution of Anthropology to African Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2016

Aidan Southall
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The African Studies Association (ASA) was born in a blaze of anthropological glory with Melville Herskovits, the celebrated anthropologist and “universally recognized dean of American Africanists in the United States” (Greenberg, 1963: 3) as its Founder President in 1957. In all, six ASA presidents have been anthropologists, a number exceeded only by political science. Of the forty-eight founding Fellows, ten were anthropologists, eight were political scientists, and four were geographers, while history, economics, and sociology had three each. This numerical predominance of anthropological membership continued until 1963 when political science equalized and then drew ahead. Other possible indicators, such as membership of the Executive Board, winners of the Herskovits prize, recipients of travel awards, and numbers of Ph.D. dissertations, are in conformity with this general picture of early anthropological prominence and later eclipse. When the ASA commissioned a comprehensive survey of African research (The African World, published in 1965), the editor (Lystad) was an anthropologist and over one-third of the chapters were by anthropologists. It was the most ambitious single publication ever produced by the ASA.

Such quantitative indicators are crude, and we must ask what lies behind them. There are some problems in the fact that the disciplines are not clear cut. This paper includes public administration with political science and archaeology with anthropology. Some linguists and ethnomusicologists, especially in the early period, definitely identified themselves as anthropologists, whereas at the present time most would not. Some anthropologists have acquired the identity of sociologists for circumstantial reasons. Generally speaking, social anthropologists who have taught in African universities from the 1950s until now have had to do so in departments of sociology and frequently as heads of such departments.

Type
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Panel Papers
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 26 , Issue 3-4 , December 1983 , pp. 63 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Africa Research Group. 1969. African Studies in America: The Extended Family. A Tribal Analysis of U.S. Africanists: Who They Are; Why to Fight Them. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal (ed.). 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.Google Scholar
Bergmann, Barbara. 1982. “The Failures of a Chair-Bound Science,” New York Times. Business section, December 12th.Google Scholar
Berndt, R. M. (ed.). 1977. “Anthropological Research in British Colonies: Some Personal Accounts.” Anthropological Forum, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Western Australia, Perth.Google Scholar
Chilungu, Simeon. 1976. “Issues in the Ethics of Research Method: An Interpretation of the Anglo-American Perspective.” Current Anthropology 17/3: 457–81.Google Scholar
Chilver, Sally. 1977. “The Secretaryship of the Colonial Social Science Research Council.” In Berndt, R. M.. Clark, J. Desmond, (ed.) 1982. The Cambridge History of Africa Vol. I: From the Earliest Times to c. 500 B.C. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Copans, J. 1971. Critiques et Politiques de L'Anthropologie. Maspero, Paris.Google Scholar
Dike, K. Onwuka. 1963. “In Memoriam: Melville Jean Herskovits,” African Studies Bulletin. VI, 1.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1982. Conjuring with Islam. New York Review of Books, 27th May, 25–28.Google Scholar
Gough, Kathleen. 1968. “New Proposals for Anthropologists.” Current Anthropology 9/5: 403–07.Google Scholar
Greenberg, J. H. 1963. “In Memoriam: Melville Jean Herskovits,” African Studies Bulletin VI, 1.Google Scholar
Gulliver, P. H. (ed.) 1969. Tradition and Transition in East Africa: Studies of the Tribal Element in the Modern Era. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Herskovits, M. J. 1924. “A Preliminary Consideration of the Culture Areas of Africa.” American Anthropologist 26: 50–64.Google Scholar
Herskovits, M. J.. 1926. “The Cattle Complex in East Africa.” American Anthropologist 28: 230–72; 361–80; 494–528; 633–44.Google Scholar
Horowitz, Irving, (ed.) 1967. The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot. M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Hymes, Dell, (ed.) 1972. Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Isaac, Glynn and McCown, Elizabeth R.. (eds.) 1976. Human Origins: Louis Leakey and the East African Evidence. Menlo Park, CA: W. A. Benjamin, Inc.Google Scholar
Johson, Paul. 1983. New York Times Book Review, 25th September, 35.Google Scholar
Kenyatta, Jomo. 1938, 1953. Facing Mount Kenya. The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu. “Introduction,” by Malinowski, B.. London: Seeker and Warbury.Google Scholar
Lewis, Bernard. 1982. “Orientalism: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books, 12 August, 46–8.Google Scholar
Lewis, Diane. 1973. “Anthropology and Colonialism.” Current Anthropology 14/5: 581–602.Google Scholar
Lystad, Robert A. (ed.) 1965. The African World. A Survey of Research. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Magubane, Bernard. 1971. “A Critical Look at Indices used in the study of Social Change in Colonial Africa.” Current Anthropology 12, 4/5: 419–45.Google Scholar
Mead, M. 1939. “Native Languages as Fieldwork Tools.” American Anthropologist 42, 2, 189–205.Google Scholar
Meillassoux, Claude. 1964. Anthropologie Economique des Gouro de Côte d'Ivoire. Paris: Mouton.Google Scholar
p' Bitek, Okot. 1970. African Religions in Western Scholarship. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau.Google Scholar
Owusu, Maxwell, (ed.) 1975. Colonialism and Change: Essays presented to Lucy Mair. The Hague. Mouton.Google Scholar
Owusu, Maxwell, (ed.). 1978. “Ethnography of Africa: The Usefulness of the Useless.” American Anthropologist 80/2: 310–34.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York. Pantheon.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1982a. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How we see the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1982b. “Orientalism: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books. 12 August: 44–6.Google Scholar
Sofue, Takao. 1973. “Comment on Lewis.” Current Anthropology 14/5: 597.Google Scholar
Strathern, Andrew. 1983. “Research in Papua New Guinea: Cross Currents of Conflict.” Royal Anthropological Institute News 58: 4–10.Google Scholar