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Means and Meanings: Methodological Issues in Africanist Interdisciplinary Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Ato Quayson
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Interdisciplinarity has become a sort of buzzword in academic circles. It is quite common to hear graduate students respond, in answer to a question as to what they are doing, that their work is “sort of interdisciplinary.” This answer might be construed as concealing some measure of confusion as to what exactly is being researched. But, on the other hand, there is little doubt that the most adventurous students are increasingly defining their areas of concern at the boundaries between disciplines. The matter seems to take on a particularly acute inflection in relation to Africanist research. This may be traced partly to the fact that from the very beginning of interest in African matters, much scholarly work on Africa in Western universities has been done under the rubric of “African studies.” Anthropology and history, arguably the disciplines most active in popularizing knowledge about Africa, have themselves always shared a common concern on the ways in which knowledge about Africa can be constituted. The monumental work of Jan Vansina and others in the 1960s in focusing on oral traditions and making them a respectable source for the construction of historical knowledge about Africa was thoroughly interdisciplinary in its own way.

Despite the implicit interdisciplinarity of African Studies, the theoretical implications of interdisciplinary study and the issues that it generates for questions about different types of knowledge does not seem to have engaged the attention of scholars. It is in this direction that I propose to go. I propose to engage with issues concering interdisciplinarity from the perspective of my own research on Nigerian literature. The issues that concern me relate to the question: what do specific configurations of disciplines within the interdisciplinary model have for the nature of the knowledge that is produced? But a series of subsidiary questions might be asked in relation to this major one, such as: are we being interdisciplinary when we borrow metaphors from other fields? or concepts? or whole paradigms? Or is it when we join different methods of analysis from two or more disciplines such that what finally emerges cannot be limited to any one of them?

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 25 , 1998 , pp. 307 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1998

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References

1 The thesis is now a forthcoming book entitled Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and Literary History in the work of the Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri, (Oxford, 1997).Google Scholar This paper represents a special attempt to ‘stand back’ from the research that I carried out and to attempt a careful analysis of my procedures. Based solely on the Ph.D thesis, it stands as a kind of prolegomenon to the book proper.

2 I was inspired here by the ideas of Kuhn, Thomas and his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2d ed.: Chicago, 1970).Google Scholar

3 Achebe's famous words in “The Novelist as Teacher” set the tone for the perception of African writing as predominantly an instrument of identitiy-formation in the face of misrepresentations of the Africa and its peoples. His notion of literature has been reproduced by several other writers and, most combatively, by Wole Soyinka in his introduction to Myth Literature and the African World, (Cambridge, 1975).Google Scholar

4 I am indebted to Karin Barber of the Centre of West African Studies in Birmingham for this brilliant metaphor about the constitution of oral materials in traditional cultures.

5 On ìjálá chants, see Babalola, Adeboye, The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala, (Oxford, 1966)Google Scholar and also his “A Portrait of Ogun as Reflected in Ijala Chants” in Africa's Ogun: Old World and Neiu, ed. Barnes, Sandra T. (Bloomington, 1989), 147–72.Google Scholar On ìrèmòjé see Bade Ajuwon, “Ogun's Iremoje: A Philosophy of Living and Dying” in ibid., 173-98

6 Babalola, , “Portrait,” 168.Google Scholar

7 See Barber, Karin, “Oríkì, Women, and the Proliferation and Merging of Orìsà,” Africa, 63 (1990), 317–18.Google Scholar

8 Van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of Passage, trans. Vizedom, Monika B. and Caffe, Gabriele L. (London, 1960 [1908]).Google Scholar

9 Turner's reflections on the issue were extensive. With specfic reference to the notion of liminality see his The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, (London, 1969)Google Scholar and “Variations on a Theme of Liminality,” in Secular Ritual, ed. Moore, Sally F. and Myerhoff, Barbara (Amsterdam, 1977), 36–52Google Scholar; and specifically on the relationship between ritual and drama, see his From Ritual to Theatre (New York, 1982)Google Scholar, and “Are there Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual and Drama?” in By Means of Peformance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, ed. Schechner, Richard and Appel, Willa (Cambridge, 1990), 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. (Berkeley, 1986).Google Scholar