Paths in the Rainforests.

It’s been over four years since I bought Jan Vansina’s Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa; I was excited about it at the time, but then (you know how it is) it sank to the bottom of the stack and I never got around to reading it. Well, now that I’m editing a book on Africa and seeing it in the reference lists, I’ve hauled it out and started it, and it’s absolutely terrific. I haven’t even gotten to the meat of it, the history of Western Bantu expansion, but I’m so struck by the preliminary methodological sections that I’m just going to quote some passages I’ve marked in the margin:

A living cell testifies to its ancestors of long ago. And so, too, language and specifically words carry an imprint from the past in the present, an imprint that can be put in its proper time perspective.

To achieve that goal much of the recovery of the past in equatorial Africa must be based on the evidence of language and especially words. […] The techniques involved in such a study are not novel. Linguists have used them to reconstruct the history of languages themselves. But the methodology is new in the sense that the conclusions drawn from the technical analysis are different. The goal for which the techniques are to be used is different. Here one wants to reconstruct the past of a society and culture, not language itself. The methodological approach, then, is new. If the methodology is valid, all will be fine. The story to be told in later chapters will be credible “fact.” But if the methodology is wrong, the tale is fiction and heavy-fisted fiction at that.

[. . .]

A convention of the ethnographic genre was that peoples constituted territorial groups called “tribes,” which were the given units of observation. Tribes were of almost indeterminate age. Within a tribe everyone held the same beliefs and practices, and observations made in any part of the tribal territory were valid for any other part. Moreover, by definition, every tribe differed from its neighbors. […]

Actually, ethnic identities change over time. They are not givens and they do not necessarily correspond to homogeneous units of social institutions or culture. The study of ethnic identity over time belongs to the history of ideas. In practice many modern ethnonyms were of colonial vintage. The Bondjo ethnic group on the shores of the Ubangi River seems to have existed only in the minds of French administrators. In the 1920s Belgian administrators argued for years about the status of “the Ngando”: Should they be included in the Mongo ethnic group or kept separate? They concluded that Ngando were Mongo. As a result, by the 1950s the Ngando of Equateur province felt themselves to be Mongo. They had adapted their vision of ethnic identity to colonial reality.

[. . .]

Observers often left out of their accounts anything that referred to an obvious colonial practice. This applied even to photographs: no bicycles, no kerosene lamps, no office buildings, no policemen, etc. And, naturally, “traditional” clothing and housing was a must. The authors seem to have believed that they had thus expunged any influence of the colonial conquest. They did not realize that the foundations of every local community had been drastically altered by the colonial conquest or that substantive culture was no longer a “pristine” precolonial culture.

[. . .]

Language competence is also fundamental. How well did the outsider really know the local vernacular or the lingua franca that was being used? Did he or she in fact use the vernacular, a lingua franca, a European language, or did he or she employ an interpreter? Many writers do not tell you. The prefatory statements of those who do are often empty boasts or leave unclear what level of competence they had achieved. Most residents had only a rudimentary knowledge of African languages, except for missionaries who had to preach in the vernacular. And even they were not always fluent. Transients were not very proficient. They used interpreters, as did most anthropologists, at least for the first year or so of their stay. Often the text of the report reveals more about language competence than any statement does. The transcriptions of items, even proper names in the local or regional language, are often dead giveaways. The writer reveals even more when indulging in etymological reasoning or in general statements about the language. In such ways one can often infer some information in this matter. […]

One usually thinks that the academic specialist, especially the anthropologist, is infinitely better qualified and hence more reliable than others. An article about the X by an anthropologist must rank higher than even a short book about the X by the local missionary or administrator. Such reasoning fails to take into consideration that academics too have their biases and fads, their preferred topics, and their taboos. One scholar may be a devotee of kinship systems and will see ambiance only in local music or dance, another is enthralled by cosmologies and does not care for kinship terminology. Anthropologists, moreover, are not the only trained observers. It is easy to forget that others, such as physicians or students of law, or indeed Pecile, the farmer servant of P. de Brazza, were also trained to observe, albeit to observe different things. As a result the rarity of writings by professional anthropologists is not nearly as great a handicap as one would think. Just like any other text their reports must be confronted whenever possible with the whole available record, whether emanating from specialists or not.

Last but not least, gender is given for every named writer. There are very few female authors and hence the corpus shows an obvious lack of data about women, their lives, and their points of view. Not a single text about women’s associations in Cameroon, Gabon, or Congo comes from a woman, and, in consequence, very little is known about them, since men were prevented by their gender from learning about them.

I could go on, but you get the idea. This guy seems to have thought about every conceivable source of error, to have done his best to compensate for them where possible, and otherwise to at least remain aware of the inevitable blind spots. An admirable scholar; I’m sorry he died in February.