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Traditions of Invention in Equatorial Africa*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Jane I. Guyer
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Extract

The straightforward logic of experience and the long route along the highways and byways of ethnography and theory have brought me to the same point: a conviction that in Africa in the centuries before its conquest social and cultural life was far more inventive from day to day than we can now easily imagine, steeped as old intellectual frameworks are in the equation between non-literacy and a repetitive “tradition,” and framed as our own social life has been by the organized repositories, routinized access and incremental growth patterns that ensure order and longevity to our own legacies of knowledge. Alongside the kinship, kingship and cult of classic social organizational analysis, attentive reading of African sources suggests another and different social project: the creation of variety amongst people in their skills and intellectual reach, not only reproducing a finite set of known roles and functions with respect to a “system of thought” but also endorsing a constant and volatile engagement on its boundless frontiers.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , December 1996 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1996

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this paper have been read and generously critiqued in detail by Caroline Bledsoe, Bill Murphy, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Achille Mbembe, Olufemi Taiwo and Christopher Davis. A presentation of my co-authored paper (Guyer and Eno Belinga 1995) to the African Studies Seminar at the University of Chicago provided stimulation for some of the ideas developed here. I have not done justice to scholarship in French; those connections remain to be made.

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