On Socially Composed Knowledge: Ritual, Oral History, and Modernist Omniscience in Eastern AfricaSteven
Feierman Abstract: This paper will be published in a Festschrift for Isaria Kimambo, a historian at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. The paper opens with a paragraph that gently teases my colleagues there by pointing out that they (like me) are working as ethnographers, even when they write about the social practices of their own ancestors. The larger argument of the paper is that historians of the 1960's and 1970's, like development planners of the same period, engaged in a kind of epistemological violence. We assembled fragmented bits of locally produced culture and integrated them into larger structures of knowledge. Our own cultural grammar -- the rules of combination -- had radically different purposes from those of the people about whom we were writing. To acknowledge this, however, is not to say that we should abandon the enterprise. In this particular case, the fragmented oral narratives that I wrote down can be combined to form a coherent picture. A reflection on the difference between my rules of combination and theirs opens up important questions about historical configurations of power/knowledge in eastern Africa and in the academic world of the past forty years. |