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Africanists and the Challenge of the Mission Veranda
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 May 2019
Extract
I returned to the United States in 1988 in order to get a graduate education in the social sciences. Three years in rural Kasulu, Tanzania, had taught me that how western social science framed development problems was inadequate. I had some hopes that good social science could address how relief and development workers viewed the African society that surrounded them. To me the close relationships that should exist between the two seemed obvious. I had seen enough PhD. students and consultants to know that their Swahili skills and bush savvy were lacking. But I had also seen enough savvy field workers whose inability to generalize beyond their own project, or systematically frame a problem within a broader context meant that their knowledge would never contribute to a broader understanding of anything outside their small corner of the world.
- Type
- Problematics of Africanist Practice
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © African Studies Association 1995
References
Notes
1 Barley, Nigel, Adventures in a Mud Hut: An Innocent Anthropologist Abroad, New York: Vanguard Press, 1984.Google Scholar
2 Hyden, Goran, No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 Google Scholar; Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
3 I know of what I speak, having recently published two papers applying social theory to questions of African development. Both papers had only a minimum of new data. The reasons that the papers got past the assorted referees and editors must have been that what little new empirical data they contained was more than what other submissions had to offer. Nevertheless, I have received more reprint requests for these papers than anything that I have yet written. On the other hand something I wrote that was thick with description has, as far as I know, been read by only one other person, a graduate student from Minnesota.
4 Vansina, Jan, Paths in the Rainforest; Toward a History of Political Traditions in Equatorial Africa, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.Google Scholar