A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

Roy Richard Grinker, Stephen C. Lubkemann, Christopher B. Steiner, Euclides Gonçalves, Roy Richard Grinker, Stephen C. Lubkemann, Christopher B. Steiner, Euclides Gonçalves

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119251491, 9781119251484
• eBook ISBN: 9781119251514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study

The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19 th -century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline's future.

Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.

PART I
Enduring Themes

CHAPTER 1
The Economic Anthropology of Africa

Jane I. Guyer

INTRODUCTION

The economic anthropology of Africa was founded on the European, nineteenth‐century, social evolutionary theory of general stages of development, the “earlier” stages of which still co‐existed on the African continent: hunting and gathering, pastoralism, shifting cultivation, settlements with intensive agriculture, merchant trade over long distances, and urban‐based city states with craft‐guilds. All these persisted within a world where industrial capitalism was advancing in Europe and the Americas. By the time that detailed ethnographic studies of particular societies and their economies were being undertaken in Africa, in the twentieth century, these “earlier stages” were seen as types of economy, adapted to specific ecologies and histories, rather than as phases in the progressive stages of a general human history. However, the concept of the early phases as “subsistence economies,” organized solely for the support of local communities for all their needs – from food to clothing to housing to support for social and ritual life – did persist into the typological phase of theory, and was occasionally invoked later for examining local economic histories, as attention to these processes intensified. Even in 1965, with its attention to Markets in Africa, a famous collection of eight case studies of, as the subtitle defines them, Subsistence Economies in Transition, edited by Bohannan and Dalton, draws on the older conceptual terms, such as provision of one’s own subsistence needs, with markets on the periphery of economic life. In the late colonial and immediate post‐colonial period in the mid‐twentieth century, the dynamics of economic change began to be attended to as “development” within the new field of development economics, and became a subject in the revival of political economy, now that communities were functioning within new national economies. At the same time, anthropologists were devoting increasingly close attention to understanding local systems in their own terms, and in a comparative typology which might be applicable to, or pose provocative questions about, the world at large. While field research in the present became increasingly detailed, there was a parallel expansion of very detailed economic histories of Africa, especially those focused on the era of the Atlantic slave trade (from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries). These studies recuperated data on prices, currencies, traded goods, and widespread and long‐lasting trade networks, all for inclusion in the study of African economies (Alpern 1995; Green 2016; Johnson 1970).

Thus, did the theory and method of study for African economies begin to configure multiple approaches and sources, changing through the twentieth century to move from a theory of sequential changes, through a typological approach to analysis of highly specific local and regional economies that would also be understood within their own ecologies, terms of knowledge and practices of the classic functions of production, distribution, and consumption. Attention to historical processes, from the distant past to the immediate present, returned in force during the period of de‐colonization in the mid‐century, which encouraged anthropologists to be increasingly attentive to works on political economy.

One theoretical innovation that allowed the works from all these approaches to meet on common ground was the opening up of intellectual space for neo‐Marxist approaches, which necessarily brought material base, social structure, history, and power together in addressing types, sequences, and processes in economic life, over time. The typological, rather than evolutionary, perspective was re‐launched in these new terms by Hindess and Hirst (1975) as PreCapitalist Modes of Production, in a framework that placed the relations, and forces (technologies), of production at the center of the conceptual scheme. The ownership of property, the supply of labor, and the distribution of the product defined the relations of production. The forces of production aligned with the old evolutionary categories. The earliest ethnographic work in Africa that drew on the same intellectual inspiration, with a historical approach to what was termed the articulation of modes of production, especially with capitalism, was by eminent French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux: first in his analysis of the transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture in the Ivory Coast (1964), and then in a more general theoretical book, published in French in 1975 and translated into English in 1981 as Maidens, Meal, and Money. Capitalism and the Domestic Community. The first comparative work on Africa that used this framework was edited by Crummey and Stewart (1981), and was entitled Modes of Production in Africa: The Precolonial Era. Most of the contributions were made by historians whose work crossed the whole typology from particular cases of “herders and farmers” to slavery, fishing, and states. The ethnographic commitment to deepening the case study approach, while conserving the focus on relations and technologies of production and distribution, in historical process, was taken up and nuanced into an insistence on regional specificity and on the ways in which different modes of production were locally “articulated” with one another. One such study was contributed by South African anthropologist Archie Mafeje (1991). He had already addressed the “articulation of modes of production” concept in a review article in 1981. In his study of the Central African lakes region, Mafeje argued that the relationship between politico‐social formation and economy was always an outcome of regional history, rather than general processes of evolution or a general political‐economic history. He argued for the importance of “detailed ethnographic knowledge (which) helps us to avoid mechanistic interpretations” and to be attentive to “the historical and ethnographic intricacies of African societies” (1991, p. 128, 129).

At the same time as Mafeje was writing, the gains of cross‐disciplinary work amongst historical, archeological, and ecological study in Africa were advancing, carried out by both Western and African scholars. Important examples are Glenn Davis Stone’s (1996) archeological and ecological study of the Kofyar in Central Nigeria and Elias Mandala’s (1990) political‐economic history of a peasant economy in Malawi. The decolonization process and the growth of African scholarship added substantial empirical knowledge of the intricate expertise of specialists in work that had not usually been merged into the criteria for the classic Western typology. Metallurgy, textile production, building, transport (including riverboats and seafaring vessels, which had been relatively unexplored until then), and other skills, had been practiced for centuries within variously organized productive systems. Eugenia Herbert (1984) wrote of metallurgy, currency, art, and religious symbolism in her study of the history of copper, Red Gold of Africa. From a continually enriched study of historical sources, we know that trade is very old in Africa: seeds, minerals, textiles, livestock, and many other items have been traded throughout history. Indeed, with its own metallurgy from a distant past, Africans were producing copper goods in the first millennium, and Africa may have been the main source of gold for European currency development, starting in the second millennium (Bovill 1958). The mutual enrichment of ethnography and local history thereby greatly expanded the knowledge of African pre‐colonial economies and societies, taking them beyond being seen as completely classifiable into the old evolutionary or typological frameworks. This theme has been explored most recently, for a public audience, in the television series authored by scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., entitled Wonders of the African World (2001). He introduces the libraries of Timbuktu, the architecture of Great Zimbabwe, and many other products of African expertise and organization, which he sees as fundamental to what is understood as “civilization” itself.

The presence of economic and political interests from outside of Africa started early, on all the coasts: the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean, and from port to port along the coastlines. Many of the items used as currencie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: Enduring Themes
• PART II: Critical and Decolonizing Themes
• PART III: Post‐colonial and Emerging Themes
• PART IV: Reflexivity
• Index
• End User License Agreement