ANTH 222 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: African Nationalism, Oxymoron, Invented Tradition

• School: McGill University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH 222
• Professor: Ronald Niezen

Document Summary

Today, we will discuss something that should have been obvious even in the 1920s: that societies are not static, they change, especially under the influence of different regimes. We will look at a couple of scholars who pushed to the limit the idea of combining history and ethnography. Major force at harvard in the anthropology department and in the administration itself. Social facts and fabrications, which examines a century of customary law and leadership from 1880: she developed a methodology around that, which was astonishingly simple: ethnographic observation was complemented by archival research. She was formally trained as a lawyer, and this had an important influence on her methodology/approach. A(cid:374)d as she looked at a(cid:396)(cid:272)hi(cid:448)al (cid:396)e(cid:272)o(cid:396)ds, she (cid:396)ealized that (cid:373)a(cid:374)(cid:455) (cid:862)t(cid:396)aditio(cid:374)s(cid:863) (cid:449)e(cid:396)e (cid:374)ot i(cid:374) fa(cid:272)t (cid:862)ha(cid:374)ded do(cid:449)(cid:374) f(cid:396)o(cid:373) ge(cid:374)e(cid:396)atio(cid:374) to ge(cid:374)e(cid:396)atio(cid:374)(cid:863) (cid:271)ut pu(cid:396)posefull(cid:455) (cid:272)(cid:396)eated to p(cid:396)o(cid:373)ote politi(cid:272)al i(cid:374)te(cid:396)ests. The approach here is to look, not only for change, but also for agency. Pre-colonial chaaga: no centralized government, no paramount chief.