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Early Expatriate Society in Northern Nigeria: Contributions to a Refinement of a Theory of Pluralism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Frank A. Salamone
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Extract

Primary among the criticisms that third-world scholars and “radical” social scientists have directed against applied social sciences in general and social anthropology in particular has been their alleged failures to study the colonial context in which much of its field work has been carried out (Cf. Asad, 1975; Lewis, 1973, for examples.) Although these critics usually exaggerate their arguments and typically do not prove that early scholars were either overt or covert racists, it is true, nonetheless, that social scientists have paid relatively little attention to the colonial milieu, Condominas's (1973) preterrain.

A number of scholars, including Pitt (1976) and Stavenhagen (1971), have urged that social scientists “study upwards” in order to discover the social and cultural foundations of the colonizing agency in the contact situation which determine its motivations and constrain its actions. Failure to do so entails serious theoretical and methodological consequences because it both narrows the range of societies among which we are able to make comparisons and masks a course of systematic bias. Although I have been deeply concerned with the problem of systematic bias (Salamone, 1976a, b), in this paper I address the issue of describing and analyzing a colonial society, of “studying up.” The reason is quite simple. It is necessary to know the nature of a systematic source of bias before deciding on whether and how to control it.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , September 1978 , pp. 39 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1978

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