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Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa

Posted on: Wednesday, 3 December 2003, 06:00 CST

LYN SCHUMAKER, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001, 376 p.

In Africanizing Anthropology, Lyn Schumaker offers an approach to the historiography of anthropological research that is bold, yet surprising in its obviousness: she studies it anthropologically. Drawing on the research domains of the ethnography of science and the history and sociology of technology, Lyn Schumaker carries out a historical ethnography of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI) of Northern Rhodesia (colonial Zambia), examining the work of the anthropologists and their assistants in and out of "the field" as a set of historically situated practices or "work culture." One aspect of her approach attends to the roles of African research assistants of anthropologists like Gluckman, Mitchell and Epstein, their diverse uses of the anthropological fieldwork experience, and their impacts on the anthropological research of their employers. It is this attention to what Schumaker calls "local [African] actors" which comprises the "Africanizing" in the title. While there is much to commend in such an approach and in this empirically rich book, its one shortcoming, for this reviewer, is the type of anthropology upon which it relies.

Despite this intended emphasis on the "Africanizing" of anthropology, the first six of the work's eight chapters attend to the anthropologists themselves. Schumaker closely examines the RLI's bureaucratic establishment, the research and political activities of its anthropologists and assistants, as well as the various contexts within colonial Zambia, southern Africa, Britain and the United States shaping these practices. She makes the important point that the "field" should not be viewed by historians and genealogists of the discipline as simply the source of materials out of which anthropologists mould their theories. Rather, she takes it as a setting of meaningful practices and interactions that shape both the lives of everyone involved and the anthropological texts produced out of these activities.

The book focusses on the first three "field generations" of RLI anthropologists, that is, the groups of researchers that entered the field at the same time, shared a similar social network, and were influenced by a common experience of historical events. These anthropologists, Schumaker argues, helped to create a unique institutional culture that directed important social research for over two decades, until events surrounding Zambia's independence in 1964 led to fundamental changes in the institute's orientation. She looks engagingly at intellectual, social and political influences on everything from dress style to moral and practical orientations to fieldwork. She also insightfully discusses the ways in which research and social bonds amongst anthropologists, as well as between them and their assistants, were forged, while highlighting racial, gendered and class identifications at work in the RLI's research activities.

Schumaker adds significant details to the already rich historiography of the RLI. Furthermore, similar to most of the other scholarly examinations of the RLI (e.g., Ben Magubane, Richard Brown, James Ferguson), as well as the self-presentations of many of the RLI scholars themselves, Schumaker uses this institute to make arguments about the place of anthropology in the colonial field.

Schumaker argues that a unique "social identity" emerged for the RLI researchers, setting them apart from others in the colonial social field. For her, the RLI was an "exemplary interracial project within a hostile colonial society" (238), largely because of the relatively equal relationships between blacks and whites within its "work culture" and because it provided a meaningful activity for the Africans involved. But the latter, the core of her "Africanizing" argument, comes down to one chapter's discussion of how individual assistants helped to play a "broker" role for individual RLI anthropologists at various sites, using the employment and fieldwork activities for their own social projects (which she glosses, at one point, as "African purposes"). She also (too briefly) comments on the anthropological books written by a few of them. These are important points, but, given the title of the book, they are not sufficiently developed. They more resemble ammunition in her implicit stance on what she alludes to as the "territorial wars" in which "postcolonial" anthropologists discredited colonial anthropology to create academic space for their own analytical strategies.

Schumaker makes the important point that one should not simply dismiss colonial anthropology, such as that produced at the RLI. But in making that point, and thus disregarding critical historical analyses of the RLI, she overstates her case. Let me give three quick examples. She minimizes what she notes as the status, power and economic differences between anthropologists and assistants (which, of course, is not merely a colonial phenomenon) to stress a commonality between the two, comparing them, at one point, to "master craftsmen and apprentices" (240). Secondly, Schumaker claims, contra the post-colonial critics, that RLI anthropologists considered "tribes" as "political entities" rather than as reified units of analysis (114-15). Although this is a tendency in their works, she also shows that "tribe" acted as a key social marker for such RLI anthropologists as Mitchell in distinguishing urban Africans (212) or for Gluckman in identifying RLI anthropologists as working in different "tribes" (253). She herself occasionally substitutes the equally reified term "local society" to identify the communities in which RLI researchers worked (e.g., 92, 97). Finally, Schumaker emphasizes the distinctions between the RLI anthropologists and colonial administrators, approvingly noting the former's "territorial wars" against the latter (in contrast to her appraisal of those by post-colonial anthropologists). But she also provides evidence of how RLI anthropologists were not merely "constrained" by colonialism, but also empowered by it, through such examples as Gluckman deciding witchcraft cases with the district commissioners (199).

My points here serve not to condemn RLI anthropologists as so- called colonial handmaidens but rather to note that, as Schumaker herself states, they, like all, were shaped by the contexts in which they operated. That she, at times, glosses over some of these speaks more to her anthropology of the RLI as a functional "small society" with a normative "work culture" and its own "rules and rituals, practices of inclusion and exclusion, and traditions and customs" (238). Such an anthropological premise tends to emphasize normative practices over the complex issues of power, leading to a sometimes too simple defense of the "natives" of the declared "small society" and working against the incredibly rich detail provided in this otherwise strong historical ethnography of the RLI.

Blair Rutherford Carleton University

Copyright Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, c/o Concordia University Department of Sociology and Anthropology Aug 2003

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