Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4hhp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T17:12:35.241Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Systems, Games and History: Models for the Study of Africa's Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Robert Harms
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

John Maynard Keynes (1936: 383) once wrote that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” We historians are practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking reconstruction of detail. And yet our criteria for deciding which data are relevant, our categories for arranging data, and our approach to interpreting data are often influenced by models drawn from the social sciences. The social sciences, in turn, have borrowed many of their models from the natural sciences. And models in the natural sciences, it turns out, are often based on analogies to machines. Like the practical men referred to by Keynes, we often apply these models in an intuitive, almost unconscious, fashion, but they are no less influential for being unacknowledged. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wisconsin African Studies Program provides us with an opportunity to pause and look at some of the models that have influenced us.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 30 , Issue 2: African History Research Trends and Perspectives on the Future , June 1987 , pp. 25 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bailey, F.G. 1969. Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bates, Robert. 1983. Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, G.A. 1982. “Reply to Elster on ‘Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory,” Theory and Society 11: 483–95.Google Scholar
Goldschmidt, Walter. 1969. “Game Theory, Cultural Values, and the Brideprice in Africa,” pp. 61–74 in Buchler, Ira and Nutini, Hugo (eds.) Game Theory in the Behavioral Sciences. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elster, Jon. 1982. “Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory,” Theory and Society 11: 455–82.Google Scholar
Harms, Robert. 1987. Games Against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jewsiewicki, Bogumil. 1985. “Un Débat, un Paradigme, une Epistème,” pp. 2–8 in Jewsiewicki, Bogumil (ed.) Mode of Production: The Challenge of Africa. Sainte Foy: Safi Press.Google Scholar
Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace.Google Scholar
Lewontin, R.C., Rose, Steven, and Kamin, Leon. 1984. Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Leys, Colin. 1975. Underdevelopment in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Leys, Colin. 1978. “Capital Accumulation, Class Formation, and Dependency: The Significance of the Kenyan Case,” pp. 241–66 in Miliband, Ralph and Saville, John (eds.) The Socialist Register, 1978. London: Merlin Press.Google Scholar
Leys, Colin. 1980. “Kenya: What Does ‘Dependency’ Explain?” Review of African Political Economy 17: 108–13.Google Scholar
Lloyd, P.C. 1968. “Conflict Theory and Yoruba Kingdoms,” pp. 25–61 in Lewis, I.M. (ed.) History and Social Anthropology. London: Travistock Publications.Google Scholar
Prigogine, Ilya, and Stengers, Isabelle. 1984. Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Roemer, John E. 1982. “Methodological Individualism and Deductive Marxism,” Theory and Society 11: 513–20.Google Scholar
Shubik, Martin. 1964. “Game Theory and the Study of Social Behavior: An Introductory Exposition,” pp. 3–77 in Shubik, Martin (ed.) Game Theory and Related Approaches to Social Behavior. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Trevor-Roper, Hugh. 1965. The Rise of Christian Europe. New York: Harcourt Brace, and World.Google Scholar
Vansina, , Jan. 1980. “Lignage, Idéologie, et Histoire en Afrique Equatoriale.” Enquêtes et Documents d'Histoire Africaine 4: 133–45.Google Scholar
Vansina, . 1983. “The Peoples of the Forest,” pp. 75–117 in Birmingham, David and Martin, Phyllis (eds.) History of Central Africa, vol 1. New York: Longman.Google Scholar