Many questions present themselves when considering the historical relationship between anthropology and empire following the Scramble for Africa. These include the extent of imperial fortunes in Africa, rising and falling with officials' knowledge of the people under their jurisdiction. This book looks at the institutional frameworks of anthropology, and shows that the colonial project to order Africa, intellectually and politically, was a messy and not-so comprehensive endeavor. It first considers the roles of metropolitan researchers and institutes such as the colonial ethnographers active in French West Africa, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Berlin, and the British-based International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. The book deals with the role of African ethnograpghers for their study on African teaching assistants and schoolmasters-cum-ethnographers, and the study of Jomo Kenyatta's journey to produce Facing Mount Kenya. Swiss missionaries undertook discovery and domestication first on European soil before it was transferred to African soils and societies. Primordial imagination at work in equatorial Africa is discussed through an analysis of Fang ethnographies, and the infertility scares among Mongo in the Belgian Congo is contrasted with the Nzakara in the French Congo. Once colonial rule had been imposed, administrators and imperial managers were often forced to consider those judicial and social rules that had governed Africans' lives and had predated colonialism. Studies of Italian Northeast Africa, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and French West Africa reveal the uneven ways in which ethnographic knowledge was pursued and applied in this respect.
Author(s): Helen Tilley; Robert J. Gordon
Series: Studies in Imperialism
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Year: 2007
Language: English
Tags: African ethnograpghers; Anglo-Egyptian Sudan; Belgian Congo; colonial ethnographers; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; equatorial Africa; ethnographic knowledge; European imperialism; Facing Mount Kenya; Fang ethnographies; French Congo; French West Africa; International Institute of African Languages; Italian Northeast Africa; Jomo Kenyatta; metropolitan institutions; Swiss missionaries
Front matter
Contents
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
General editor's introduction
Introduction: Africa, imperialism, and anthropology
PART I: Metropolitan agendas and institutions
The elusive bureau of colonial ethnography in France, 1907–1925
The advancement of African studies in Berlin by the ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’, 1920–1945
Internationalization and ‘scientific nationalism’: the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures between the wars
PART II: African ethnographers, self-expression, and modernity
Of conjunctions, comportment, and clothing: the place of African teaching assistants in Berlin and Hamburg, 1889–1919
Voices of their own? African participation in the production of colonial knowledge in French West Africa, 1910–1950
Custom, modernity, and the search for Kihooto: Kenyatta, Malinowski and the making of Facing Mount Kenya
PART III: Salvage anthropology, primordial imagination, and ‘dying races’
From the Alps to Africa: Swiss missionaries and anthropology
Colonial anthropologies and the primordial imagination in equatorial Africa
Colonial medical anthropology and the making of the central African infertility belt
PART IV: Colonial states, applied ethnography, and policy
The scripts of Alberto Pollera, an Italian officer in colonial Eritrea: administration, ethnography, and gender
Political intelligence, colonial ethnography, and analytical anthropology in the Sudan
Colonial ethnology and political rationality in French West Africa
Index
