Interdisciplinary Perspectives in African Linguistic Research

Extract

Ours is an association organized on an areal basis. What we have in common is an interest in a particular portion of the earth's surface. Yet every member of the society whether a practicing academician or not bears an affiliation of a different order, namely, membership in one of the standard academic disciplines--sociology, history, anthropology, or some other. This is formally acknowledged by the placing of an appropriate letter abbreviation after each name in our membership list, and it can normally be assigned without hesitation. The latter basis of group identification, that of discipline rather than area, seems in a real sense to be primary. It is older and better established, and, above all, it supplies the very framework of American academic organization, that into departments which normally are distinguished along the lines of division of the disciplines.

True, there are programs of African studies in a number of universities, just as there are other programs, both areal and nonareal. But after a period of initial enthusiasm in some quarters following World War II for the training of areal specialists as such and without primary reference to traditional disciplinary affiliation, it became evident that if a scholar was to be, for example, an Africanist and a sociologist, he should receive his higher degree in a sociology department. He would thus be a sociologist in the broadest sense of the word, but one with a special interest in Africa rather than an Africanist with a greater interest in the sociological than the other aspects of African life. Area study programs thus failed to shake the fundamental organizational basis of American academic life. In fact, today most African programs are interdepartmental as well as interdisciplinary and their staff members are usually at the same time members of established academic departments.