Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-qxdb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T07:48:39.264Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Crafting Early African Histories with Jan Vansina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2018

David L. Schoenbrun
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

The introduction explores the ways in which Jan Vansina wrote Africa’s earlier history. It argues that he overturned paradigmatic knowledge in part through policing boundaries between disciplines, but always in search of new knowledge. The boundaries enclosed different kinds of labor in producing evidence about the past. Each kind of labor teaches the scholar something about place, responsibility, and imagination. These afterlives of working in Africa informed Vansina’s interdisciplinarian publishing strategies, shape-shifting them into the imaginative, and prompting new generations of scholars to chart their own paths.

Résumé:

Cette introduction explore les différentes manières utilisées par Jan Vansina pour écrire l’histoire ancienne de l’Afrique. Elle montre que, tout en continuant sa quête de nouveaux savoirs, Vansina a bouleversé connaissances et paradigmes en redéfinissant les frontières entre les disciplines. Ces nouvelles frontières définissaient le contour de différents types de méthodologie dans la production de savoirs sur le passé. Chaque type de méthodologie enseigne ainsi au chercheur quelque chose sur le lieu, la responsabilité et l’imagination. Ces dimensions supplémentaires de son travail en Afrique ont éclairé les stratégies de publication interdisciplinaires de Vansina, en les rendant créatives, incitant ainsi les nouvelles générations de chercheurs à tracer leur propre voie.

Type
Jan Vansina Remembered
Information
History in Africa , Volume 45 , June 2018 , pp. 99 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2018 

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

Àjàyí, Jacob A., “The Continuity of African Institutions Under Colonialism,” in: Ranger, Terence O. (ed.), Emerging Themes of African History (Dar es Salaam: East African Publishing House, 1968), 189–200.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991).Google Scholar
Bleek, Wilhelm H.I., A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages Part I: Phonology (Cape Town, 1862).Google Scholar
Chirikure, Shadreck, “Heritage Conservation in Africa: The Good, the Bad, and the Challenges,” South African Journal of Science 109–1/2 (2013), 1–3.Google Scholar
Chirikure, Shadreck, Manyanga, Munyaradzi, Pikirayi, Innocent and Pollard, Mark, “New Pathways to Sociopolitical Complexity in Southern Africa,” African Archaeological Review 30 (2013), 339–366.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
de Luna, Kathryn M., Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
de Moraes Farias, Paulo F., Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles, and Songhay-Tuareg History (Oxford: Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 2003).Google Scholar
Denbow, James, “A New Look at the Later Prehistory of the Kalahari,” Journal of African History 27–3 (1986), 3–28.Google Scholar
Denbow, James, Klehm, Carla and Dussubieux, Laure, “The Glass Beads of Kaitshàa and Early Indian Ocean Trade into the far Interior of Southern Africa,” Antiquity 89 (2015), 361–377.Google Scholar
Dubow, Saul, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Ehret, Christopher, “The Southern Nilotes to 1600 A.D.: A Linguistic Approach to East African History,” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University (Evanston IL, 1969).Google Scholar
Ehret, Christopher, “Bantu History: Big Advance, Although with a Chronological Contradiction,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) 114–44 (2015), 13428–13429.Google Scholar
Ekeh, Peter, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17–1 (1975), 91–112.Google Scholar
Etherington, Norman, “Barbarians Ancient and Modern,” American Historical Review 116–1 (2011), 31–57.Google Scholar
Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).Google Scholar
Geschiere, Peter, and Nyamnjoh, Francis, “Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging,” Public Culture 12–2 (2000), 423–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gosselain, Olivier P., “The World is Like a Beanstalk: Historicizing Potting Practice and Social Relations in the Niger River Area,” in: Roddick, Andrew P. and Stahl, Ann B. (eds.), Knowledge in Motion: Constellations of Learning Across Time and Place (Tucson AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 36–66.Google Scholar
Grollemund, Rebecca, et al., “Bantu Expansion Shows That Habitat Alters the Route and Pace of Human Dispersals,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) 112–43 (2015), 13296–13301.Google Scholar
Heimlich, Geoffroy, “The Anthropology and History of Rock Art in the Lower Congo in Perspective,” Antiquity 353 (2016), 1270–1285.Google Scholar
Hunt, Nancy R., A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Jimenez, Raevin F., “Rites of Reproduction: Gender, Generation and Political Economic Transformation among Nguni Speakers of Southern Africa, 8th–19th Century CE,” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University (Evanston IL, 2017).Google Scholar
Keita, Shomarka O. Y., “History in the Interpretation of the Pattern of p49a, f Taql RFLP Y-Chromosome Variation in Egypt: A Consideration of Multiple Lines of Evidence,” American Journal of Human Biology 17 (2005), 559–567.Google Scholar
Kinahan, John, “A Ritual Assemblage from the Third Millennium B.C. in the Namib Desert and its Implications for the Archaeology and Rock Art of Shamanic Performance,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 53–1 (2018), 40–62.Google Scholar
Klieman, Kairn, ‘The Pygmies Were Our Compass:’ Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to c. 1900 C.E. (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann Publishers, 2003).Google Scholar
Kodesh, Neil, “Networks of Knowledge: Clanship and Collective Well-Being in Buganda,” Journal of African History 49–2 (2008), 197–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liyai, Hudson A., “Bethwell A. Ogot: A Bio-Bibliography,” Africana Journal 17 (1998), 332–362.Google Scholar
McIntosh, Susan Keech, and Fagan, Brian M., “Re-dating the Ingombe Ilede Burials,” Antiquity 91 (2017), 1069–1077.Google Scholar
McMaster, Mary, “Language Shift and its Reflection in African Archaeology: Cord Rouletting in the Uele and Interlacustrine Regions,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 40–1 (2005), 43–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ndoro, Webber, Chirikure, Shadreck and Deacon, Jeanette, Managing Heritage in Africa: Who Cares? (London: Routledge, 2017).Google Scholar
Ochonu, Moses, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Ogot, Bethwell A., History of the Southern Luo: Volume 1, Migration and Settlement, 1500–1900 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967).Google Scholar
Reid, Richard, A History of Modern Uganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skoglund, Pontus, et al., “Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure,” Cell 171 (2017), 59–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoenbrun, David L., “Representing the Bantu Expansions: What’s at Stake?” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34–1 (2001), 1–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoenbrun, David L., “Mixing, Moving, Making, Meaning: Possible Futures for Africa’s Distant Past,” African Archaeological Review 29–3 (2012), 293–317.Google Scholar
Schoenbrun, David L., “Words, Things, and Meaning: Linguistics as a Tool for Historical Reconstruction,” in: Dimmendaal, Gerrit and Vossen, Rainer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of African Languages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), forthcoming.Google Scholar
Stahl, Ann B., “Africa in the World: (Re)centering African History Through Archaeology,” Journal of Anthropological Research 70–1(2014), 5–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vansina, Jan, “Bantu in the Crystal Ball, I,” History in Africa 6 (1979), 287–333.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan, “Bantu in the Crystal Ball, II,” History in Africa 7 (1980), 293–325.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan, “Is Elegance Proof? Structuralism and African History,” History in Africa 10 (1983), 307–348.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan, “Historians, Are Archaeologists Your Siblings?,” History in Africa 22 (1995), 369–408.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan, “Is a Journal of Method Still Necessary?,” History in Africa 36 (2009), 421–438.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan, Living With Africa (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Wagner, Michele, “Obituary – Jan Vansina (14 September 1929 – 8 February 2017),” History in Africa 44 (2017), 5–9.Google Scholar