Date: Sun, 25 Jun 1995
From: barry c morton <bmorton@indiana.edu>
Hoping to move H-Net away from its never ending
[from HGM: we seem to have ended or at least slowed down.]
debate on ethnicity, please allow me to bring up one of my pet peeves
about African history.
This issue, which I have seen for some time, has finally hit me directly
during the writing of my dissertation. I would maintain that the
customary "Introductory chapter" in all Africanist monographs ought to be
eliminated.
These so-called introductory chapters generally cover two topics--the
social structure of the people/ethnic group/nation/tribe that is the
focus of the study, and [b] environmental/ecological descriptions of the
region in which the people/ethnic group/nation/tribe live in.
Without going into any long explanation, it can be said that such
chapters are anachronistic. Firstly, they present the impression that
African's lives are determined by kinship and by their environments. More
importantly, they divorce the Africanist entirely from the people covered
in the monograph--that is, those who are both the subject of the study
and those who SHOULD form the largest component of its readership.
Does the typical history book on American or European history go to any
lengths to describe the rainfall or soil type of those continents? Have
we ever seen such introductions as "The American people are the
descendants of farmers who migrated by boats from Europe....they owned
land on a freehold basis, which they could sell for either gold or other
forms of currency....they reckonsed their descent bilaterally, but passed
property through the male line. Generally they married persons of the
same wealth and status, though they could not marry their sisters."
The fact that such introductions are not seen as necessary for Western
history but are seen as important for Africanists only tells me that
Africans are seen as more "exotic" than Europeans. Getting rid of such
introductions will serve to make them look far more ordinary. Africanists
are always complaining about misrepresentations of Africa in the "media",
yet all of us get roped into these chapters.
I would like to hear a defense of such work, especially by those who
direct dissertations or who edit journals.
Barry Morton