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Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa’s historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like “work,” “marriage,” and “land” take shape.
“Especially in these times when debates continue over the “relevance” of earlier, non-western history, this edited collection offers examples of how African history indeed makes vital contributions to the field of conceptual history. For readers both new and seasoned, this volume provides a very important ‘explicitly anti-teleological approach,’ one that lies at the heart of conceptual history. In doing so, it provides a payoff valued by many: namely, highlighting the pluralities of African thought and practice found in both the deep past and the recent present.” • African Studies Review
“Translation [as this volume shows] is thus integral to conceptual history not only as the scholar’s burden but also as a matter of negotiation and contestation among language users. It is, along with other methodological considerations put forward in this rich volume, another domain for doing conceptual history in Africa.” • Africa
“The volume offers conceptual historians of other world regions a rich trove of new sources and methods (rituals, historical linguistics, proverbs, songs, and patterns in the combination of lexical items, to name a few) for doing conceptual history in areas and for time periods for which we have few written records.” • The International Journal of African Historical Studies
“This pioneering volume is the first to apply the methods of conceptual history to the languages and cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, and as such will be welcomed by a wide variety of scholars. It is a major achievement.” • Willibald Steinmetz, Bielefeld University
“As the first book to examine conceptual history in Africa, this is a significant contribution that takes us beyond discourse analysis and other comparable approaches. Historians, anthropologists, and linguists will all benefit from its theoretical and methodological insights as well as its illuminating examples of application.” • Inge Brinkman, Ghent University
Axel Fleisch is a Professor of African Studies at the University of Helsinki. His focus is southern Africa, including African languages and historical linguistics. He is the author of Lucazi Grammar: A Morphosemantic Analysis (2000) and the co-editor of Grandmother's Footsteps: Oral Tradition and South-East Angolan Narratives on the Colonial Encounter (1999).
List of Maps, Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Notes on Language
Introduction: Theories and Methods of African Conceptual History
Rhiannon Stephens and Axel Fleisch
Chapter 1. ‘Wealth’, ‘Poverty’ and the Question of Conceptual History in Oral Contexts: Uganda from c. 1000 C.E.
Rhiannon Stephens
Chapter 2. Conceptual Continuities: About ‘Work’ in Nguni
Axel Fleisch
Chapter 3. Tracking the Concept of ‘Work’ on the North Eastern Cape Frontier, South Africa
Anne Kelk Mager
Chapter 4. Understanding the Concept ‘Marriage’ in Afrikaans during the Twentieth Century
Marné Pienaar
Chapter 5. Male Circumcision among the Bagisu of Eastern Uganda: Practices and Conceptualizations
Pamela Khanakwa
Chapter 6. The Concept of ‘Land’ in Bioko: ‘Land as Property’ and ‘Land as Country’
Ana Lúcia Sá
Chapter 7. Conceptualizing ‘Land’ and ‘Nation’ in Early Gold Coast Nationalism
Pieter Boele van Hensbroek
Chapter 8. An Untimely Concept: Decolonization and the Works of Mudimbe, Mbembe and Nganang
Pierre-Philippe Fraiture
Index