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Compelling Vansina: Contributions to Early African History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2018

Kathryn M. de Luna
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Abstract:

This short essay explores Jan Vansina’s contributions to the study of Africa’s early pasts. In particular, it explores the impact of sustained ethnographic fieldwork on Vansina’s narrative style, which often imagined for deeper pasts the sorts of small-scale social interactions definitive of most experiences of fieldwork. This narrative style produced a tension between Vansina’s interest in large-scale institutions and historical processes and the smaller-scale social interactions sustaining them, offering us new research topics. Attention to the historical significance of the sorts of intimate interactions imagined by Vansina requires new approaches to the variety of archives he compelled us to consider in the pages of this journal.

Résumé:

Ce court article explore les contributions de Jan Vansina à l’étude des passés distants de l’Afrique. En particulier, il explore l’impact du travail de terrain ethnographique de Vansina sur son style narratif. Ainsi il imaginait souvent pour des passés plus lointains les sortes d’interactions sociales à petite échelle issues de la plupart de ses expériences de terrain. Ce style narratif a créé une tension entre l’intérêt de Vansina pour les institutions à grande échelle et les processus historiques et les interactions sociales à plus petite échelle les soutenant, nous offrant de nouveaux sujets de recherche. L’attention à la signification historique des sortes d’interactions intimes imaginées par Vansina exige une nouvelle approche de la variété des archives qu’il nous a données à considérer dans les pages de cette revue.

Type
Jan Vansina Remembered
Information
History in Africa , Volume 45 , June 2018 , pp. 161 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2018 

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