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Book Details
Abstract
Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa's historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like "work," "marriage," and "land" take shape.
"This edited volume offers an interesting example of what can be gained by applying novel methodological and analytical approaches to aspects of African history that are sometimes taken for granted. It will be particularly informative reading for students and scholars concerned with the availability of sources, with the use of language in historical study, and with the task of recovering the intellectual lives of past actors." · Journal of African History
"The volume offers conceptual historians of other world regions a rich trove of new sources and methods (rituals, historical linguistics, proverbs, songs, and patterns in the combination of lexical items, to name a few) for doing conceptual history in areas and for time periods for which we have few written records." · The International Journal of African Historical Studies
"This pioneering volume is the first to apply the methods of conceptual history to the languages and cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, and as such will be welcomed by a wide variety of scholars. It is a major achievement." · Willibald Steinmetz, Bielefeld University
"As the first book to examine conceptual history in Africa, this is a significant contribution that takes us beyond discourse analysis and other comparable approaches. Historians, anthropologists, and linguists will all benefit from its theoretical and methodological insights as well as its illuminating examples of application." · Inge Brinkman, Ghent University
Table of Contents
| Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Doing Conceptual History in Africa | iii | ||
| Contents | v | ||
| Maps, Figures and Tables | vii | ||
| Acknowledgements | viii | ||
| Notes on Language | x | ||
| Introduction Theories and Methods of African Conceptual History | 1 | ||
| Chapter 1 ‘Wealth’, ‘Poverty’ and the Question of Conceptual History in Oral Contexts | 21 | ||
| Chapter 2 Conceptual Continuities | 49 | ||
| Chapter 3 Tracking the Concept of ‘Work’ on the North-Eastern Cape Frontier, South Africa | 73 | ||
| Chapter 4 Understanding the Concept of ‘Marriage’ in Afrikaans during the Twentieth Century | 91 | ||
| Chapter 5 Male Circumcision among the Bagisu of Eastern Uganda | 115 | ||
| Chapter 6 The Concept of ‘Land’ in Bioko | 138 | ||
| Chapter 7 Conceptualizing ‘Land’ and ‘Nation’ in Early Gold Coast Nationalism | 162 | ||
| Chapter 8 Ujamaa | 185 | ||
| Chapter 9 An Untimely Concept | 213 | ||
| Index | 237 |