Living with
Africa
Jan Vansina
"Jan Vansina's academic career is virtually simultaneous
with the field of African history itself. His centrality in the
burgeoning field in the 1950s and 1960s was so intense that he
was actually called a 'Culture Hero' in print, after the anthropological
concept that a single figure epitomizes in the collective memory
an entire epoch." —David Henige, University of Wisconsin
In 1952, a young Belgian scholar of European medieval history
traveled to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) to live in a remote
Kuba village. Armed with a smattering of training in African
cultures and language, Jan Vansina was sent to do fieldwork for
a Belgian cultural agency. As it turned out, he would help found
the field of African history, with a handful of other European
and African scholars.
"I'm not an ethnologist, I'm a historian!" Vansina
was to repeat again and again to those who assumed that people
without
written texts have no
history. His discovery that he could analyze Kuba oral tradition
using the same methods he had learned for interpreting medieval
dirges was a historiographical breakthrough, and his first book, Oral Tradition as History, is considered the seminal work
that gave the study of precolonial African history both the scholarly
justification and the self-confidence it had been lacking.
Living with Africa is a compelling memoir of Vansina's
life and career on three continents, interwoven with the story
of African history as a scholarly specialty. In the background
of his narrative are the collapse of colonialism in Africa and
the emergence of newly independent nations; in the foreground
are the first conferences on African history, the founding of
journals and departments, and the efforts of Africans to establish
a history curriculum for the schools in their new nations.
Jan Vansina is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Professor and the Vilas Professor in History and Anthropology
at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was elected to
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983 and was the
first scholar chosen as "Distinguished Africanist"
by the African Studies Association of the United States. His
many books include Paths in the Rainforest, Oral Tradition as History, Kingdoms of
the Savanna (winner of the 1967 Herskovits Prize), and The
Children of Woot, all published by the University of Wisconsin
Press.
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
|
|
June 1994
LC: 94-000588
DT
328 pp. 6 x 9
|
