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How to Distil Words and Obtain Culture History*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Jan Vansina
Jan Vansina*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
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Nearly every historian of early African history has recently encountered studies that use the history of words as a source for history more generally defined, an approach also known as words-and-things. Indeed, by now a more or less elaborate use of words-and-things has become fashionable, especially in the Anglophone literature. A number of short presentations of the overall principles underlying this approach have been published, but they all lack an extended discussion of the methodological issues involved. Perhaps this is the main reason why words-and- things analyses are almost never subjected to critical scrutiny, while the conclusions of studies based on them, however weak or strong they might be, tend to be accepted as gospel—a most unsatisfactory situation. Hence a book-length study of the methodology involved in the application of words-and-things should be very welcome.

As Klein-Arendt's book is devoted exclusively to this subject, it should fill the gap. Yet it will disorient most readers of this journal because K-A is not concerned with the solution of smaller- or large-scale problems of history as understood by such readers, but focuses on the epistemology of the central European school known as Kulturgeschichte (more or less “Culture History”), to which he subscribes and which is likely to be largely unknown to most readers. Yet when the expression “words-and-things” was first coined in 1909. it was intended to be a tool to elucidate Kulturgeschichte. Indeed, the journal from which the label stems was called Wörter und Sachen. Kulturhistorische Zeitschrift für Sprach-und Sachforschung (Words and Things, a Journal of Culture History for Research in Languages and Things) and on its very first page Rudolf Meringer stated that “[linguistics is only a portion of the science of culture … We hold that the future of Kulturgeschichte resides in the union of the science of language with the science of things” in which “things” stood for what came to be better known as “culture traits.”

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 33 , 2006 , pp. 499 - 511
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2006

Footnotes

*

A review essay of Reinhard Klein-Arendt, Die traditionellen Eisenhandwerke der Savannen-Bantu. Eine sprachhistorische Rekonstruktion auf lexikalischer Grundlage (Frankfurt, 2004).

References

1 E.g., Schoenbrun, David, A Green Place, a Good Place (Portsmouth NH, 1998), 6–12Google Scholar; Vansina, Jan, Paths in the Rainforests (Madison 1990), 9–16Google Scholar, and the latest of several such pieces by Ehret, Christopher, “Writing African History from Linguistic Evidence” in Writing African History, ed. Philips, John E. (Rochester, 2005), 91–98Google Scholar.

2 Zwernemann, Jürgen, Culture History and African Anthropology (Stockholm, 1983)Google Scholar, is perhaps the best introduction to “Kulturgeschichte” for Africanists. Zwernemann shows that a number of scholars in Germany never wholly abandoned the fundamental theoretical tenets of the school. Indeed there has been a considerable revival of “Kulturgeschichte” during the last three or four decades under the influence of well-known scholars, of which the linguist Wilhelm J. Möhlig, Klein-Arendt's revered thesis director (7) is one.

3 Meringer, Rudolf, “Vorwort,” Wörter und Sachen. Kulturhistorische Zeitschrift für Sprach-und Sachforschung 1/1(1909)Google Scholar, as cited by Beyer, Klaus, Pferd, Schwerter und Macht, Ein historisch-vergleichende Studie zur Kulturwortfeldern in den Oti-Volta Sprachen (Cologne, 1998), 14Google Scholar.

4 Yet Klaus Beyer, another culture historian, used the tree-model most efficiently in his exemplary and impressive word-and-things book Pferde, Schwerter und Macht about the horses, weaponry, and notions of power that accompanied the creation of large-scale polities in the central Gur-speaking regions.

5 Guthrie, Malcolm, Comparative Bantu (4 vols.: Farnborough 1971), 2:28–64Google Scholar. This inventory is rather incomplete and sometimes wholly unreliable. Actually, K-A must have relied in many cases on the “method of obvious similarity.”

6 Möhlig's, strata were published as “Stratification in the History of the Bantu Languages,” Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 3(1981), 251–316Google Scholar. His hypothetical succession of sound shifts has not convinced any other linguists.

7 I refrain here from specific comments on K-A's case-study of ironworking. See my study of ironworking in Bantu speaking Africa in this journal.

8 Nurse, Derek and Hinnebusch, Thomas, Swahili and Sabaki (Berkeley, 1993), 644Google Scholar.

9 Vansina, Jan, How Societies are Born (Madison, 2004), 74–81Google Scholar.