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Ethnographic Appropriations: German Exploration and Fieldwork in West-Central Africa1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Extract
German voyages of ‘discovery’ and field research in that part of Africa which, politically or linguistically, has been subject to Portuguese influence in past centuries, and still is so—an area which therefore corresponds for the most part (and also sufficiently so) to present-day Angola—has so far received only sporadic attention in corresponding historical writings. Nor for the most part have they been taken into account as ethnographic sources, language barriers above all being responsible for this. This is hardly because they are negligible in terms of either their numbers or the information they contain. In the last third of the nineteenth century especially, west-central Africa, in which Portuguese had been a lingua franca for centuries, became a special area of attraction for German travelers. Admittedly, the published results are far from even. One, Augspurger's, is interesting above all for the early date of his report. The scientific reputation of others, like the Jaspert brothers, is extremely dubious. For yet others, like Baum and Jessen, ethnographic documentation was of only marginal interest. The greater part of Wilhelm's sketches have been lost.
On the other hand, one cannot write knowledgeably about the Loango coast without consulting Brun's and Pechuël-Loesche's reports. Any statement on northeast Angola in the last quarter of the nineteenth century will lose in value if one fails to use Pogge, Lux, Buchner, and Schütt. Studies on the Kisama without Mattenklodt or on the Cokwe without Baumann's great monograph would at best be a skeleton, at worst a distortion, in the context of what is possible.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1999
Footnotes
This is a greatly reduced version of the introduction Per aspera ad astra to my book Ethnographische Aneignungen: Deutsche Forschungsreisende in Angola (Frankfurt, 1999). In this article, “German” is also to be understood as meaning German-speaking. I warmly thank Dr Robert Parkin, Oxford, for translating this text into English. All quotations from German texts are his translations.
References
Bibliography of Ethnographic Sources on Angola (Including the Loango Coast) in German from the Seventeenth to the Middle of the Twentieth Centuries
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