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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.
In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a
conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have
sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and
poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a
powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce
economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in
contexts of relative material equality between households, people
invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the
poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to
write this history for societies without written records before the
nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in
different eras using the methods of comparative historical
linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate
science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the
dynamism of people's thinking about poverty and wealth in East
Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of
the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and
social inequality in the region's deeper past.
In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a
conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have
sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and
poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a
powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce
economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in
contexts of relative material equality between households, people
invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the
poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to
write this history for societies without written records before the
nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in
different eras using the methods of comparative historical
linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate
science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the
dynamism of people's thinking about poverty and wealth in East
Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of
the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and
social inequality in the region's deeper past.
This history of African motherhood over the longue duree
demonstrates that it was, ideologically and practically, central to
social, economic, cultural and political life. The book explores
how people in the North Nyanzan societies of Uganda used an
ideology of motherhood to shape their communities. More than
biology, motherhood created essential social and political
connections that cut across patrilineal and cultural-linguistic
divides. The importance of motherhood as an ideology and a social
institution meant that in chiefdoms and kingdoms queen mothers were
powerful officials who legitimated the power of kings. This was the
case in Buganda, the many kingdoms of Busoga, and the polities of
Bugwere. By taking a long-term perspective from c.700 to 1900 CE
and using an interdisciplinary approach - drawing on historical
linguistics, comparative ethnography, and oral traditions and
literature, as well as archival sources - this book shows the
durability, mutability and complexity of ideologies of motherhood
in this region.
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