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Systems, Games and History: Models for the Study of Africa's Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Robert Harms
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Extract

John Maynard Keynes (1936: 383) once wrote that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” We historians are practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking reconstruction of detail. And yet our criteria for deciding which data are relevant, our categories for arranging data, and our approach to interpreting data are often influenced by models drawn from the social sciences. The social sciences, in turn, have borrowed many of their models from the natural sciences. And models in the natural sciences, it turns out, are often based on analogies to machines. Like the practical men referred to by Keynes, we often apply these models in an intuitive, almost unconscious, fashion, but they are no less influential for being unacknowledged. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wisconsin African Studies Program provides us with an opportunity to pause and look at some of the models that have influenced us.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 30 , Issue 2: African History Research Trends and Perspectives on the Future , June 1987 , pp. 25 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1987

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