Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T04:16:13.607Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Case Study of Migrant Labor in Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

James D. Graham
James D. Graham*
Affiliation:
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

One of the most attractive and stimulating features about research in African history has been its eclecticism. Grounded particularly in the extensive and fertile field of social anthropology, Africanists have explored the implications of cultural relativism and the techniques of structural-functional analysis. Now, when some of the basic assumptions which have undergirded social sciences are being questioned, historians might re-examine their own orientations toward the men and societies about which they write.

Claude Lévi-Strauss has suggested that Westerners have been taught to identify subjectively with the “we” of the West, in subconscious opposition to the “other” of the rest of the world. European historians have often encompassed basic contradictions within the Western heritage by opposing that heritage, as a package, to historical experience elsewhere (Lévi-Strauss 1967, p. 258 f.n.). Intensive studies in local history throughout the world, on the other hand, can contribute immensely to reaching a fuller understanding of various ways in which men have related to one another. According to Lévi-Strauss,

each of the tens or hundreds of thousands of societies which have existed side by side in the world or succeeded one another since man's first appearance, has claimed that it contains the science of all the meaning and dignity of which human society is capable and, reduced though it may have been to a small nomad band or a hamlet lost in the depths of the forest, its claim has in its own eyes rested on a moral certainty comparable to that which we can invoke in our own case (p. 249).

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , April 1970 , pp. 23 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1970

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES CITED

Graham, James D. Changing Patterns of Wage Labor in Tanzania: A History of the Relations Between African Labor and European Capitalism in Njombe District, 1931-1961. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 1968.Google Scholar
Kimambo, Isaria N. “Historical Research in Tanzania.” Paper presented at Northwestern University, September 1968.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967.Google Scholar
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Moore, Wilbert. Social Change. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963.Google Scholar
Njombe District Files. Files 22/5, folio 124; 24/4, folios 423, 426, 429, 430, 436, 445, 451; A2/2/I, folio 164; A2/2/II, folios 42, 76; L1/5, folios 2, 88B, 93; L1/5/III, folio 44; L1/5/IV, folios 25, 97; L1/14, folios 376-435; V2/2/II, folio 99. National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.Google Scholar
Nyerere, Julius. “The Policy of Self-Reliance.” Africa Report, XII, 3 (March 1967a), 12–13.Google Scholar
Nyerere, Julius. “Ujamaa—The Basis of African Socialism.” In Freedom and Unity: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1952-65. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967b.Google Scholar
Tanzania Secretariat Files. Files 11168, folio 286; 19368, folio 262; 23544, F. Longland, “Report on Labour Matters in Sisal Areas,” p. 205; 24693, folios 29, 100; 24693/II, folios 181, 182, 198; 25294, folio 27. National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.Google Scholar