Historical understanding of West Africa derives from archaeological investigations, oral traditions, the records of Arab travellers and African intellectuals, and, for the last four centuries, the writings of European travellers, explorers, traders and missionaries. From the late nineteenth century, these accounts became more systematic. The establishment of colonial rule in British colonies under the principle of †‘indirect rule’—that where possible African political institutions and customs should form the basis of colonial administration—created a requirement for documentation that was met in several ways: from the enquiries of European administrators with varying degrees of anthropological training, by the employment of official government anthropologists (e.g. †R.S.Rattray in Ghana; C.K.Meek, H.F.Matthews and R.C. Abraham in Nigeria), and—probably to a less significant degree—from academic anthropologists. The characteristics of the work of anthropologists derived from the conjunction of colonial, indirect rule, which made research possible and necessary, the ascendancy of structural *functionalism in British anthropology, the foundation of—what is now—the †International African Institute in 1926 under the headship of Lugard, and the ability of this institute to secure funding in significant amounts—especially from such American patrons as the Rockefeller Foundation.
‘French’ and ‘British’ traditions of ethnographic writing developed largely with respect to their colonial possessions with theoretical agendas that appear distinctive in retrospect. Africanists predominated among professional anthropologists at the same period with the result that issues of particular concern to the regional study of Africa enjoyed a prominent position within *British and *French anthropology more generally.
The British tradition was especially concerned with the sociological description of tribes and chiefdoms or states. In practice this meant amassing detailed documentation on patterns of residence, kinship, †lineage, membership, †inheritance and marriage that were held to explain the normal functioning of local units. Larger scale political formations were usually investigated in terms of the enduring features of their organization. The landmark collection African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940) defined the field of *political anthropology for a generation. It included analyses of the Tallensi of northern Ghana, which became a classic instance of an uncentralized society in West Africa (Fortes 1949; 1983), and of the Nupe kingdom in Nigeria, about which †S.F.Nadel wrote an enduring masterpiece of West Africanist ethnography (Nadel 1942). Under the guidance of †Meyer Fortes and then Jack Goody Cambridge became the major centre for Ghanaian studies in Britain. Like Fortes who also studied the Asante, Goody worked in both centralized and uncentralized societies, producing his most detailed descriptions of the uncentralized LoDagaa. University College London, under the headships of †Daryll Forde, whose ethnography concerned the Yakö of southeastern Nigeria, and then M.G.Smith, who wrote widely on the Emirates of northern Nigeria. became closely associated with studies in history, politics, economics and ecology—initially in Nigeria and later more widely. A nexus of interests in Sierra Leone developed in Edinburgh where Kenneth Little, James Littlejohn and Christopher Fyfe all taught. Not all ‘British’ West Africanist research emanated from these three centres—the influential work of the Oxford trained Americans Laura and Paul Bohannan on the †acephalous Nigerian Tiv is a clear exception-but these institutional specializations remained powerful beyond the period of African Independence. The literature of this period has attracted criticisms for its aim to reconstruct the lives of West African societies prior to colonialization, its relative neglect of contemporary events, normative bias consistent with the needs of indirect rule, reliance on male informants, and tendency to reify tribal units. This critique forms part of a general reaction to structural-functionalism, but is not equally applicable to all writers on West Africa before the mid-1960s.
The French tradition of the same period-exemplified by the written work of †M.Griaule and †G.Dieterlen (1991) and their collaborators on Dogon and Bambara, and by the *films of J. Rouch—was particularly concerned with the study of *religion and *cosmology among non-Muslim peoples of the western savanna. However, other writers shared the ‘British’ concern with the documentation of social organization, as for instance M. Dupire’s classic studies of Fulani. More recently, the application of Lévi-Straussian *alliance theory has been a relatively distinctive French interest.
An American tradition, cued in part by an interest in African cultures in the New World †diaspora can be identified in †M.J.Herskovits’s study of Dahomey, and in the work of his student W.R.Bascom on Yoruba.
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