Nar Re Th Nog Africa

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NARRATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY IN AFRICA, 1850-1920:THE CREA TION AND CAPTURE OF AN

APPROPRIA TE DOMAIN FOR ANTHROPOLOGYROBERT THORNTON

University ojCape Town

The ethnographic monograph has its roots in tw o traditions. While its format and rhetoric arestrongly influenced by the natural science monograph, its content derives largely from genres oftravelogue and missionary letters and bulletins. In the period 1850-1900 , ethnographic writingwas addressed to tw o audiences, but by the turn of he century it had been 'captured' by theoreticalsocial scientists and became the appropriate and legitimate domain of he ne w academic disciplineof anthropology. Academic anthropology could no t claim small-scale societies, bu t could claimthe ethnographic description of small-scale societies, as its professional domain.

The early ethnographic monographs that dealt with southern and easternAfrican peoples depended on, and were partly shaped by, European concepts ofmorality and identity on the one hand, and the market for ideas and books on theother. Ethnography was at first written chiefly by missionaries who lived in thecolonial periphery. Their work was 'captured', in a sense, by metropolitanscholars who wrote finished ethnological treatises derived from the rawmaterial of missionaries' monographs, letters and reports. In the struggle tocreate an institutional basis for anthropology, the early ethnography constituteda body of work which, for the first time, the discipline could claim as itsappropriate, legitimate and exclusive domain. This accumulated intellectualproduct was an essential pre-requisite to the establishment of university departments and the furthering of research in the field.

The experience of travelling to a distant place in order to be there, not merelyin the course of other activities (such as trade), but specifically to experience andto interact with that place, is strongly Romantic in both the historical and theemotional sense. The great Victorian travellers and the evangelical Christianmissionaries who began to describe Africa and Africans intensively werenurtured by their reading of imaginary travel literature such as Coleridge's Rimeoj the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, or Longfellow's Hiawatha (based on H. R.Schoolcraft's ethnographic reportage of the North American Indians). Theauthors of the first ethnographies were clearly in this tradition. Historians ofanthropology, and anthropologists writing about the history of their discipline,have ignored these literary roots of the monograph and have focused instead onthe positivistic tradition of the university-trained scholars who made use ofthese materials for their own intellectual purposes. We must distinguish,

.\1,," (N.S.) 18. 502 - 20


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NARRATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY IN AFRICA, 1850-1920:THE CREA TION AND CAPTURE OF AN

APPROPRIA TE DOMAIN FOR ANTHROPOLOGYROBERT THORNTON

University ofCape Town

Th e ethnographic monograph has its roots in tw o traditions. While its format and rhetoric arestrongly influenced by the natural science monograph, its content derives largely from genres oftravelogue and missionary lettcrs and bulletins. In the period 1850-1900 , ethnographic writingwas addressed to tw o audicnces, bu t by the turn of he century it had been 'captured' by theoreticalsocial scientists and became the appropriat e and legitimate domain of he ne w academic disciplineof anthropology. Academic anthropology could no t claim smal l-scale societies, bu t could claimthe ethnographic description of small-scale societies, as its professional domain.

The early ethnographic monographs that dealt with southern and easternAfrican peoples depended on, and were partly shaped by, European concepts ofmorality and identity on the one hand, and the market for ideas and books on theother. Ethnography was at first written chiefly by missionaries who lived in thecolonial periphery. Their work was 'captured', in a sense, by metropolitanscholars who wrote finished ethnological treatises derived from the rawmaterial of missionaries' monographs, letters and reports. In the struggle tocreate an institutional basis for anthropology, the early ethnography constituteda body of work which, for the first time, the discipline could claim as itsappropriate, legitimate and exclusive domain. This accumulated intellectualproduct was an essential pre-requisite to the establishment of university departments and the furthering of research in the field.

The experience of travelling to a distant place in order to be there, not merelyin the course ofother activities (such as trade), but specifically to experience andto interact with that place, is strongly Romantic in both the historical and theemotional sense. The great Victorian travellers and the evangelical Christianmissionaries who began to describe Africa and Africans intensively werenurtured by their reading of maginary travel literature such as Coleridge's Rimeof the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, or Longfellow's Hiawatha (based on H. R.Schoolcraft's ethnographic reportage of the North American Indians). Theauthors of the first ethnographies were clearly in this tradition. Historians ofanthropology, and anthropologists writing about the history of their discipline,have ignored these literary roots of the monograph and have focused instead onthe positivistic tradition of the university-trained scholars who made use ofthese materials for their own intellectual purposes. We must distinguish,

.HUIl (N.S.) 18, 502-20


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ROBERT THORNTON 503therefore, between these scholars of the metropole (such as M'Lennan, Morgan, Tylor, Lang, Frazer) and the authors of the ethnographic materials onwhich they depended.

If he mode of he nineteenth-century ethnographer's experience was Romantic, the mode of the century's ethnographic theory was Ironic. The theoreticallyinformed ethnographic writings succeeded in applying universal systems ofclassification to the particularities of human behaviour and environment.Consequently, in the view of the ethnographic monograph, no behaviour,event or place was ever simply what it might appear to be to the native since theuniversal categories deployed by the European social scientist were neverentirely commensurate with those of the native speaker. This vision of incomparable realities nonetheless compared, and the profound sense of irony thisoccasions, is essential to the ethnographic view, and is made possible by therhetorical strategies of the ethnographic text.

The distinction between writing and experience, between the ethnographicmonograph and the ethnographer's fieldwork, is important though little recognised. The ethnographic monograph is not self-defined. The authors of ethnographic monographs sought to distinguish their writing from the contemporarygeneric types of travelogue, missionary letter, diary and journalism, while theysought to emulate the monographs of the natural sciences. The format andrhetorical conventions of the ethnographic monograph must be examined,then, in the context of other types of writing whose content was often verysimilar.

I begin with a discussion of some aspects of the audience for writing aboutAfrica and Africans (though the conclusions are generalis able for other placesand peoples), and focus especially on the travelogue, the missionary report,missionary linguistic studies and translations. They contributed to the development of the ethnographic monograph by helping to provide a specialisedvocabulary, by defining both the 'field' of study and some of its essentialorganising concepts (such as 'tribe' and 'language'), and by setting the moralparameters of the discourse. It is a complex subject, incompletely surveyed, andI attempt here only to limn and illustrate some critical features of a neglectedfield.

A discovery on paperWhen we think of the so-called nineteenth-century discovery of Africa, weusually think of the professional explorer and soldier, the handful of men whomConrad called 'militant geographers'. Yet ordinary literate people also discovered Africa, through their churches, mission societies and a number of writtengenres that were offered primarily as entertainment. As entertainment, thesepopular accounts found their place among the 'cabinets of natural history' thatmany upper-class Europeans maintained as adjuncts to their libraries, and thatwere specifically recommended by books on domestic economy (Anon. 1824;Miller 1974). The popular travel tales added another dimension to the symbolism of rank and status implicit in such collections. The reviewer of Barth'sTravels in central Africa (1849-1855) in the Athenaeum, for example, praised the


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504 ROBERT THORNTONextravagance of the volume: 'The books are got up in the most expensive styleby the publishers, accompanied by an unexampled number of maps, andadorned by beautiful plates and wood cuts' (Athen. 16 May 1857).

The heroic character of the African explorer was frequently emphasised incontemporary reviews in journals such as the Athenaeum, which catered to anaudience of academics and clerics. A review of Krapf's Travels, researches andmissionary labours, during e(f?hteen years' residence in east Africa (1856) stressed theheroic dimensions of the task and the inexhaustible mystery of the continent.

Our generation has been rich in African explorers, who have penetrated far and wide across lakesand rivers, through forest and defile. yet the horizon recedes as we follow it. Thecosmographer who should at length announce that Africa had been finally laid open, mapped,divided into territories, with its languages and religions catalogued.... might as well tell us thathe had decomposed the zodiacal light, searched the profoundest fire-galleries of Vesuvius,extracted th e last diamond from the mines of Gramm ago a, or flitted like a spectre over the surfaceof th e silent moon. The African continent would appear all bu t infinite in comparison with theactual progress of discovery (Athol. 19 May 1860).

All the travelogues 'got up in the most expensive style' were directed towards anaudience consisting primarily of the well-educated and well-to-do. A popularbookshop in London, Mudie's Select Library, ordered two thousand copies ofLivingstone's Travels, almost as many as they had ordered of Macaulay'simmensely popular History. By comparison, George Eliot recorded in her diaryon 6 February 1857, that Mr Mudie had ordered only five hundred copies ofAdam Bede (Cruse 1935).

There was, however, a considerable audience among the poorer workers andfarmers of England and Europe whose primary social and cultural activitiescentred on their churches. Some of the most accomplished linguists, writers andethnographers of Africa in the nineteenth century came from these classes ofworkers and journeymen. T ~ e y were members of the Wesleyan Methodistchurches, for example, or Quakers or other Dissenters. Missionaries such asRobert Moffat, David Livingstone, Charles Appleyard, Henry Callaway andJohn Roscoe came from such backgrounds and wrote for those audiences inchurch bulletins, Missionary Appeal tracts and letters to the press, and whenthey were 'home' spoke to large audiences in church halls and Sunday schools allover England (Smith 188 I; Walten 1885, Benham 1896; Du Plessis 191 I; Huxley1978). In many cases the reportage of the missionaries presented a ratherdifferent picture of Africa. In contrast to the portraits of cruel slave-raiders anddespotic kings that clearly sold the well-appointed travelogues, we see onoccasion some close and affectionate relationships between lonely Europeansand African catechists, converts, 'back-sliders' and even respected ritual expertsand chiefs. 6n the other hand, the missionary reportage was often franklycritical of African beliefs and life-ways. They were often narrow-minded andpriggish in their judgements, but it is worth while remembering that they wereas often bitterly critical about British society and culture as well. Indeed, formany of them, it was exactly their sense of disappointment, loss and injusticesuffered in the tenements of London or Glasgow that pushed them towardsAfrica in the first place.

The Athenaeum's review of Burton's Lake regions ofcentral Africa pointed to the


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ROBERT THORNTON 505differences that existed between the two modes of discourse about Africa in theprinted media.

It is certain. . that the explorers oflanguages and nations, the men who add lines and colours toour maps, arc surrounded by bewilderments and temptations. If they doubt, they may missimportant facts; if they believe, they may dig pit-falls for geography. Like the hero in the Arabianromance, they hear strange voices on every side; the mirage and the lake appear alternately; thereis onejargon of the mission house, and another in the dialect of the forest (Athm. 1860).This contrast between the narratives of the mission house and the romantic

portraits of the forest was very clearly focused when Livingstone returned toEngland in 1856 as a national hero in order to raise more funds for hisexploration. One means of doing this was to write. He discovered, however,that others had already sought to capitalise on his life and adventures. Livingstone wrote a vehement protest over one such volume that had been 'pirated' bypiecing together his letters and reports in missionary bulletins and printingin the format of the well-established travelogue literature. He wrote to theAthenaeum on March 21 1857 to say that

The principal object of my prolonged sojourn in this country is to prepare a narrative of my travelsand discoveries for general information. Great has been my surprise to fmd a host of pirates startup and upon the strength of some few extracts from certain letters of mine, collected without myconsent or knowledge, have published what they please to call a 'Narrative of my Travels'(Livingstone 1857).

Livingstone castigated the publishers ofLondon for their perfidy, and enclosed asample advertisement:

The Life and Adventures of this remarkable Missionary Explorer must needs be full of interest,and replete with incidents far more intense than any to be found in the wide range of novelliterature; so true is it that in his case 'truth is stranger than t!ction'. . The book is most profuselyillustrated by Sargant, Wood, Harvey, Thomas, and other artists of celebrity; and the price,s s.,places it within the reach of all classes (Livingstone 1857).Livingstone's protest and the text of the quoted advertisement make it clear

that the two domains of reportage about Africa were very distinct. A translationofformat from the genre of the missionary letter to the other genre, travelogueswith pictures, maps and bindings, verged on the immoral, at least for Livingstone. His point was not an insignificant one either. The sales of Livingstone'sauthentic volume went a long way towards financing his next decade ofexploration, since the London Missionary Society had declined to support himonce exploration and writing, rather than converting Africans to Christianity,had become the consuming passion of his life.

The discovery of Africa, then, was a discovery on paper. In this respect it wasunlike the 'discovery' of speciation through natural selection, for example, or ofthe anthrax bacterium-discoveries that were made at about the same time. Thelatter depended to an important degree on the quality of argument by whichthey were presented to a sceptical audience as discoveries. The evidence wasavailable in principle to everyone who cared to take an interest, even though forall practical purposes the authority of the written report was acceptable asevidence enough for those persuaded by the argument. This was not so with the


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506 ROBERT THORNTONdiscovery of Africa, a discovery no less profound in its intellectual and practicaleffects. In the early nineteenth century, relatively few people actually hadexperience with the continent and its peoples. Africa was not 'available forexamination' in the same way that a bacterial culture or a fossil was available tothe scholar in Europe. Its 'availability' to the experience of the scholar or theeducated layman depended on the existence of a text that described Africa, orsome aspect of it.

A few intellectuals, often with institutional support in the major universitieswere primarily concerned with the first class ofliterature which I have character-ised as books bound in leather. The authors of these sturdy volumes on 'nativecustoms', however, were often missionaries who participated in the other, lesswell-known networks of information built around the mission press ephemera.Deep sectarian cleavages between various missionary groups divided Africa in away entirely different from the political divisions effected by the Europeangovernments during the well-documented 'scramble for Africa'. Although weare aware today that the political boundaries of the colonial powers affected thequality and distribution of knowledge about Africa, the intellectual effects of itspartition among the many missions, divided among themselves by nationality,rite and dogma, are still virtually unexplored.

Two audiences, two genresThe best-known and most widely-read writers of ethnographic and linguisticstudies addressed at least two distinct audiences. One of these was the formalacademic or literary audience that we tend today to see as the 'mainstream'leading to 'modern' anthropology: Morgan, Tylor, Frazer, Marett, Lang,Rivers and so on (e.g. Lowie 1935; M. Harris 1968; Herskovits 1965). Thisaudience, though not entirely 'positivistic' in its epistemological orientations,consisted nonetheless of intellectuals who saw themselves as methodologicalempiricists (see Wendell Harris 198 I: 7- 13 where the empiricist position isdefined in more general terms with respect to nineteenth-century writing). Theother audience consisted of the leaders and membership of churches andevangelical mission societies who stood in a completely different intellectualtradition. A personal appeal to the imagination and an argument developed fromtranscendental and" a priori assumptions was, for them, completely legitimate.Their intellectual ancestors included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, the Liberal Anglican historians such as Richard Whately, ConnopThirlwall, Thomas Arnold, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, and literary figures including Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley and Charles Dickens(Forbes 1952; W. Harris 1981; Willey 1949). The methods of argument reliedmore heavily on Whately's Elements oj rhetoric (1823), written expressly for thepurpose of Christian apologetics (Ehringer 1963), than on positivist or utilitarianmethods of argument, exemplified by Mill, Bentham or Herbert Spencer. Theirintellectual debts were to the German 'Higher Critics' , to classical philology andthe transcendentalism of Kant and Herder, and to Alexander and Wilhelm vonHumboldt, rather than to the French rationalist tradition of Condorcet andComte.


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ROBERT THORNTON

The existence of the dual audience, addressed in many cases by the samewriters, resulted in different narrative techniques, especially with respect to thenarrative stance of the author and his point of view. In the collection of disparatewritings that can be characterised as 'missionary letters' and reports thatappeared in the evangelical and mission society bulletins, the narrator addressedthe reader directly, in the first person; and, while not self-reflective, neverthelessrevealed the European observer in the context and process of observation (cf.Nash & Wintrob 1972; Marcus 1982). In the ethnographic monograph. however, patterned after 'objective' scientific genres, the reader lost sight of thenarrator, the observer himself, and was presented only with a kind of disembodied narrative.

Presented thus in the guise of an objective scientific report, it was not longbefore the genre provoked a crisis concerning its own validity since it could not,in principle, be observed in process nor ever be replicated. On the other hand,the missionary letter and journals, often presented with considerable literaryskill in a way that evoked both place and process most vividly, were usuallyconsidered to be without theoretical import. The first person narrative of themissionary was often explicit about preconceptions and aims; the author of theethnographic monograph usually was not. Yet the same people often wroteworks of both types which differed little in actual ethnographic content.

The mission literature also had an important bearing on the definition ofa unitof study. In most cases, this was the 'tribe' or 'nation', Biblical historians,philologists and theologians who had been influenced by the romantic traditiontook this to be the only natural unit of society. There appeared to be a more solidjustification for the 'naturalness' of this unit in the very existence of linguisticand ethnographic texts themselves. The 'existence' or identity of Africanpeoples depended, for most European readers, on the existence or non-existenceof something written about them, or something written in their language (forexample, a translation of part of the Bible). Thus, current classifications ofAfrican languages were (and still are) taken to be classifications of Africanpeoples, when in fact. they can only be classifications of (largely) missionproduced lexicographical texts.

Many modern African languages are standardised. Thus the first grammarsand dictionaries of Swahili were the product of missionaries who worked overlarge areas of the east African coast and near-hinterland over a period ofdecades.Linguistic data from a wide provenance and temporal range were combined tocreate a 'standardised' Swahili. The same is true, to varying degrees, of Lingala,Nyanja, Shona, Zulu and others. Their linguistic identity is to some extentcreated and legitimated through the linguistic text. This was, in part, theconscious intent of the missionary linguists who intended to give Africanpeoples just such an identity through literature in and about their language (seeShepard 1945 for a South African example, though virtually every missionarysociety produced similar statements). The model and justification for thisderived in part from a widely held idea that the self-concept and political unity ofthe Old Testament Jews depended on or was guaranteed by the existence of atext. This was a concept that they took with them from their reading of theinfluential philologists, theologians and Biblical critics in Europe.


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508 ROBERT THORNTONIn particular, a group of historians whom Forbes has called the Liberal

Anglican Historians, and other critics and theologians such as Thomas andMatthew Arnold and Frederick Dennison Maurice, having discovered textualcriticism of the Bible and other ancient texts, presented the history of theJews asparadigmatic of all history, and considered their social and political organisationa model for all societies (Forbes 1952: 65,69,76, etc.). Examples include A. P.Stanley's The Jewish Church (1863: vol. I: 467, vol. 3: 43), Milman's History of heJews (1829), or Thomas Arnold's 'An Essay on the right interpretation andunderstanding of the Scriptures' (183 I). Milman, for example, wrote that

Nothing is more curious or more calculated to confirm the veracity of he Old Testament historythan the remarkable picture which it presents of the gradual development of human society; theancestors of he Jews and the Jews themselves pass through every stage ofcomparative civilization(r829: vol3: iii).Matthew Arnold, in a conservative critique of mid-century English thought

(1869), drew a distinction between Hellenism, characterised as 'perfection ofconsciousness' and Hebraism, characterised as 'strictness of conscience'. It isclear that the missionaries who went to Africa, both from the EstablishedChurch, and from non-conformist or evangelical denominations, fell into the'Hebraic' camp. They tended therefore to see and to report on the prescriptiveand proscriptive aspects of African society, and to ignore aspects such as ease ofmobility, multi-lingualism, and the presence of numerous religious cults in thesame communities, all of which indicated a degree of freedom and ease in thosesocieties.

Discovery for paper: the rise ofagenreFor most Europeans in the nineteenth century, knowledge about Africa, and anintellectual, or direct and personal involvement with this continent, seems tohave come mainly through the churches that organised, financed and managedhundreds of mission stations all over the world. The effect of these earliermission writings is not easily analysed. First of all, they provided a channel forinformation and comment that was in many ways opposed to the interests ofcommerce and political imperialism. 'Low' and 'Broad' churchmen, Methodists and evangelical Christians of other denominations rarely participated inpolicy-making. With the exception of a few men such as Lord Acton, RomanCatholics were also almost entirely excluded. This meant that British publicopinion, influenced by evangelical mission groups, constituted a separate andindependent force sometimes counterposed to official government policy andto the interest of large-scale capitalists. Both Carlyle and Macaulay werehighly sceptical of the colonial enterprise. Though neither was primarily anevangelical Christian, they had a wide readership among that group, and werealso influential among the ruling elites of their times (see Clive 1973), onMacaulay, and Carlyle (1849).

Ethnography emerged out of a tradition that in many cases ran counter toimperial domination and intensive capital development (althougli. colonisationof new lands was usually strongly supported). Carlyle or Thomas and Matthew


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ROBERT THORNTON 50 9Arnold were by no means entirely convinced of the value of the endemicVictorian idolatry of Progress. Their pessimism was profound, but theirunderstanding of the irrational and 'religious nature' of man was often moreacceptable and rang more true for Europeans in Africa than the rationalism andpositivism of the universities that assumed a universal sameness of man'smotives and understandings.

The content of the ethnographic monograph was in most cases not radicallynew in appearance, but its identity as a distinct genre cannot be denied. Themonograph was physically presented in a way distinctly different from themissionary reportage that preceded and accompanied it. The authors of the firstmonographs (Callaway I 868-70; Junod I898; I9I2; Roscoe I911) sought tojustify ethnography as truly scientific. Under the influence ofEuropean intellec-tual and moral concerns, on the one hand, and the response of the newly literateAfricans, their students and clients, on the other, ethnographic writing wastransformed into an abstracted discourse on a restricted realm of experience,formally defined and conventionally presented. It functioned consequently assymbolic capital that at once permitted rationalisation of a particular form ofadministrative practice and provided the basis for the emergence of a newprofession.

Schorer (1967) has pointed out that writing itself, the technique and practice,is really a process of discovery, not merely a means for organising materialwhich is given. Accordingly, the discovery of Africa was also a discovery Jarpaper. Had the great Victorian travellers not written anything, it would not besaid today that they had 'discovered' anything. Livingstone, Stanley, Burton,Grant, Speke and others entered into the enterprise for the sake of the text,although few were explicit about this. There were travellers before them whodid not write (e. g. Osman, who guided Livingstone-see Huxley 1978) andwriters who did not travel (though they wrote as if they did: e.g. Defoe). HenryMorton Stanley was probably the only one who was fully explicit about hismotives, and he was condemned for just this (e.g., by Conrad 1970 [1902]: 17;see Huxley 1978). For all of them, however, their lives were the tools thatwrought these narrative artifacts, the commodities of an industry and thefoundation of an intellectual establishment.

Conrad expressed the significance of the written narrative for the Europeanexperience of Africa in Heart oJDarkness. Marlow, the narrator and seeker-afterKurtz, the white man in the dark interior, made a significant discovery when atlast he found him:

I learned that most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of SavageCustoms had entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he hadwritten it too. I've seen it, I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence ... It gave methe notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle withenthusiasm.... There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless akind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, maybe regarded as the exposition of method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appealto every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in aserene sky:

'Exterminate all the Brutes'.(Conrad 1902)


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510 ROBERT THORNTONAccording to Marlow, Kurtz was confident that 'i t was sure to have in the futurea good influence upon his career', and later, Marlow had to assure Kurtz that his'success in Europe is assured in any case'. Marlow surrendered the document tothe Company Agent who demanded it.

He [the Agent] invoked then the name of Science. 'I t would be an incalculable loss iC etc., etc. Ioffered him the report on the 'Suppression ofSavage Customs' with the postscriptum torn off. Hetook it up eagerly. bu t ended bv sniffing at it with the air of contempt. 'This is not what we had aright to expect'. he remarked (Conrad (902).

Kurtz had done his duty by creating a text. By a single gesture, Marlowremoved the taint of ts context and the anguish of ts author, just as he removedit physically from Kurtz's darkness: he tore the damning epigram off thebottom, and handed the manuscript to the Company Agent.This, of course, is the privilege and the most salient characteristic of thewritten text compared with speech. The written text is independent of itscontext, the chief reason why Morgan thought of writing as the prime criterionof civilisation (1964: 17-18). In his evolutionary time-frame, writing stood forthe possibility of transforming the limits of Barbarism' into the possibilities of'Civilization'. Wundt expressed much the same idea when he described writingas the bridge between the 'psychology' or 'individual culture' of speech, and the'world culture' marked by a transcendence of'spatial and temporal bounds thatlimit oral communication'. For Wundt, 'communication in writing is the firststep from folk culture to world culture' (1916: 487). More than a discovery,however, writing is a bridge that connects the limited context of speech andexperience of primitive society to the larger world through the narrative thatcaptures the experience of the particular and makes it available to a universalscrutiny. A new kind of understanding becomes at least possible. Although theethnographic monograph, and other genres shaped around similar content,marks no new age in Morgan's or Wundt's sense, it does provide the crucialcommunicative link between cultures and between audiences that is the hallmark of anthropology.

The bibliographic tradition and the moral motiveThe concerns of the British audience included evolution, religion, changingmoralities and economic and political upheaval such as the suppression ofslavery or the Anglo-Boer War. Many of these were shaped and given fuel bythe popularisers of Darwinism, by continuing waves of revivalism, by missionappeals and serialised missionary reports, by newspaper men such as H. M.Stanley and missionaries such as Livingstone. It was enough to move many tosacrifice their lives on the African continent in following their callings to missionwork, or as soldiers in the service of the Empire.

Some results of this interest can be seen in the remarkable library of Sir GeorgeGrey, Governor of the Cape Colony from 1854 to 1862. He amassed a largecollection of the publications and manuscripts that were produced over most ofthe sub-Saharan Africa, and from Borneo, Papua, Australia, Tasmania, NewZealand and the Pacific Islands as well. This library, now part of the South


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ROBERT THORNTON .\ I IAfrican Library in Cape Town, reveals a tremendous surge of writing onAfrican linguistics and ethnology in the period I ~ 2 0 - 1 8 5 0 (Bleek 1858-9). Thisburgeoning store of information allowed for the possibility of a modernanthropological perspective based on fieldwork. Linguistic studies, from 1850-1890, in particular, laid the foundations for linguistic competence. Missionariescould learn the languages of their 'people' more efficiently and have time leftover for ethnological fieldwork and writing. Native speakers of these languagesprofited, too, often using grammars of their own language, written in English,to learn more of both languages. This earlier mission output helped to create amarket for information about Africa since it whetted interest. Moreover, itbegan to accumulate in public and private libraries. A bibliographical traditionwas born.

While this new category of writing on and in the many languages of theworld's peoples established itself as an independent genre (or set of relatedgenres), it also helped to provide a vocabulary for the emerging tradition of theethnographic monograph . A new subject matter and a new rhetoric demanded anew vocabulary with which to describe social and cultural phenomena.

The vocabulary that we work with today derives from roughly three sources.First, neologisms were coined from Greek and Latin forms by social philoS(i)phers and popular writers throughout the nineteenth century. Comte'scoining of the word 'sociology' is a well-known example. 'Stratification','ethnography' and 'exogamy' also appeared for the first time in the period fromthe 1830'S to 1860'S. A second source of vocabulary was the writer's ownlanguage of everyday use, but words such as 'family', 'race', 'myth', 'marriage','nation', 'state', 'king', 'slave' were often given special definitions by those whoused them and they began to acquire a new set of connotations Others such as'gens', 'sib', 'tribe' and 'clan' were gleaned from texts that reflected earlierusages of these words in European languages, or usages in more or less distinctcontemporary dialects. The nineteenth century's discovery of the primitive,communicated through numerous textual genres, clearly had a strong effect onthe semantic ranges of many such terms as they were appropriated into newwritten contexts. A third source of vocabulary that gave the ethnographicmonograph much of its real distinctiveness of style and organisation was themission-generated literature itself. This literature contributed the vocabularythat the ethnographic monograph eventually employed to structure and tohighlight its material and argument. This discovery of native terms, such asmana, totem, hau ('the spirit of the gift') and taboo, and their wide usage inethnological and other literature, has been well documented (e. g. Henson 1974:30). These terms were borrowed to express efficiently what the Europeanlanguages had no words to express. Their original, 'native' meanings, however,were often distorted in order to answer European moral questions: Freud'sTotem and taboo is an example.

Another use of native terms deriving directly from missionary texts was thecoining of words to name and to classify the various languages and people withwhich ethnography attempted to deal. Thus, 'The Baganda' became the name ofa conquered congeries of linguistically diverse peoples, agriculturalists, ironsmiths, pastoralists, fisher-folk and even hunters who fell under the rapidly


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5[2 ROBERT THORNTONgrowmg military kingdom of the Kabaka. The same was true of 'Zulu','Thonga' and others, especially in southern Africa in the wake of Shaka'sconsolidation of his empire and its subsequent collapse.

On a larger scale, the coining of the term Bantu had even further-reachinghistorical effects, both intellectual and political, since it came to designate,ambiguously, an imagined 'race', a conjectured common history, a family oflanguages, a zeitgeist or worldview, a 'stage ofcivilisation', or a culture (Vansina1979-80). The term was coined by Wilhelm Bleek, librarian to the Governorof he Cape Colony, in the course ofhis philological work on African languages.He applied it for the first time to his classification of the linguistic andethnological works in Sir George Grey's Library (Bleek 1858-9). His catalogueof these works was at the same time the first thorough classification of Africanlanguages then known (i.e. written about) that was worked out from carefullinguistic comparisons. Bleek's classification was strictly a bibliographicalclassification of linguistic works, but once these languages had been named,'Bantu' was taken into the service of many racialist and evolutionist theories ofthe time. Like 'Aryan', a hypothetical construct of philologists, the word'Bantu' began to acquire a poorly defined set ofnear-mystic connotations. Whatwas now called 'The Bantu-speaking peoples', 'The Bantu race', or, morecommonly, just 'The Bantu' became a valid subject for European intellectualconcern. And in the same way as 'Aryan' in Europe, it entered the everydayvocabulary of the European languages, especially as these were spoken inAfrica, with similar political consequences.

The words that we have been discussing fulfilled, in large part, a moral need.Comte, for example, had hoped to found a civil religion that would reflect anideal of reason and replace established religions which he felt were corrupt andmorally bankrupt. He created words to accomplish these goals. The borrowing of terms such as 'stratification' from the prestigious and practical field ofgeology was motivated by hope that sociology could achieve the success andlegitimacy of a natural science. 'Totem', 'taboo', 'safari' and 'tribe', and others,deriving from the emerging ethnographic, missionary and travel literature,found their way into a wide range of popular literature from as early as thebeginning of the 19th century inJane Austen's novels, through the romances ofRudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and G. W. Henty(Street 1975; Sinclair 197T I IS). The coining or borrowing of these words wasultimately motivated by the broad moral currents and concerns of the day, justas the similar wide usage of today's neologisms and linguistic borrowings suchas 'ecology', 'macho' or 'nirvana' is a response to a different set ofmoral needs andsensitivities.

Near the end of his life Frazer, who did so much to shepherd these terms intothe fold of everyday usage, was aware of the moral motive that lay behind thisnew lexicon. He was also aware of the impact that his own works had had onideas concerning morality and social usage in European circles (Vickery 1973).Frazer wrote to Malinowski in 1936 to say,

It is an immense satisfaction to me to learn from you that my works have been useful to you bothin the inception and in the carrying out of your life-work. I count you with Baldwin Spencer,Howitt and Roscoe among the great field workers of anthropology whom I have had the honour


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ROBERT THORNTON 5 I 3to know and to number among my friends. Your work, like theirs, is eternal, because it is built onthe rock of observation and fact. The work of the anthropologists of the study, like mine, istemporary and transitory, because it rests on the shifting sands of heory and is liable to be blownaway with every fresh wind of doctrine (Frazer Corresp. I3 August I936).

The moral tone of this retrospective assessment is evident in his use of phrases'your life-work', 'the honour to know', 'eternal', 'doctrine', and in the images ofbuilding on 'rock' or 'shifting sand' which evoke the language of the NewTestament. Somewhere among the shifting sands and rocks of uncertainty inBritish thought in the latter part of the nineteenth century among those beset bythe problems and moral quagmires attendant upon war, industrialisation,empire and world trade, ideas summed up in words such as 'totem' and 'taboo'and images of the customs and beliefs' of other peoples truly found their mark.

Another impetus to ethnography was European and African concerns withmorality in situations of social flux and frequently also of war. Since theevolutionism in vogue at the time was, in practice, a moral classification ofnature and society, other moral concerns of missionaries and colonialists easilytook their place beside it. The still-smouldering debate between 'creationists'and 'evolutionists' continues to focus on the linkage of mankind to naturethrough a hypothetical pre-historic common ancestor. This was a relativelysmall point in the great evolutionist scheme shared by virtually all socialphilosophers of the day. More important for both Darwinists and theologians,however, was the essentially non-temporal and non-scientific moral classification implicit in both Biblical creationism or social Darwinism which gaveEuropeans an identity and justified their actions.

While an intellectualised civil and religious morality was the motive for mostearly ethnography, the monograph was the privileged medium circulating in aworld-wide forum of ideas. But it is clear that what we might call moral issuesdid not exert their influence on theory alone, nor were they only spiritual andintellectual. There were serious practical considerations as well. Warfare, forinstance, both a moral and a practical concern, exerted an influence on ethnography whose effect has scarcely been considered.

Indeed, war was almost never mentioned in the publications. This has beennoted, for example, apropos Evans-Pritchard's ethnographies of he Nuer of theSudan who were under serious threat from the British Colonial Government atthe time that Evans-Pritchard described them. Although this state of war wasonly fleetingly mentioned in his monographs, we arc told that lineage organisation is most salient in situations of conflict. We are not told, however, that theoverwhelming emphasis on lineage organisation in the ethnographic description may have been strongly influenced by the Nuer's parlous situation. O fcourse, Callaway, Junod or Roscoe also did not write of the background ofconflict to their own studies of the (apparently) morally and politically isolatedZulu, Thonga or Baganda. This lack is especially significant since all three wereliving and writing in major epicentres of bloody conflict. This lack of background has been ascribed to the authors' (apparently) implicit approval of thecolonial endeavour. The argument has some merit, but the generic constraintsof writing etll/IO/;yaphy (as distinct from journalism, travelogue or diaries), theinterests of the audience, and the inter-textual relationship of the ethnographic


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ROBERT THORNTON 5 [5I found from Rivers that what he doubted was no t the beliefof he natives in the transformation ofkings and queens into lions and leopards, bu t the existence of ame lions and leopards in the sacredforests. No doubt your informant believed in the existence of ame lions and leopards, but it mavhave been a superstition of his. . And as yo u did no t visit the forests in question, it might bewell to express yourselfmore cautiously as to the existence of the tame beasts. Hence the changes Ihave suggested (Frazer Corresp. 3June [907).Rivers's comment to Frazer about Roscoe's naivety in reporting the 'real'

existence of lions and leopards marks the emergence of an ironic mood thatpervaded ethnography from this time on: reality, among the primitives, wasnever what it appeared, and the outcome of events might not reflect theintentions of the actors themselves. Later, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown,for instance, tried to account for this by invoking the 'mechanism' (Malinowskipreferred the 'organism' metaphor) of institutional process as distinguishedfrom the psychological process of individual psychology, Despite such theories(or because of them), the different levels of reality continued to appearincommensurable, For Roscoe, however, the problem was merely a question ofmore careful observation and more cautious expression in what he wrote, ForFrazer, the irony was largely unperceived, because the facts of African life weremerely pieces of a puzzle that had little to do with Africa in the first place, Theyderived, instead, from problems in the interpretation of certain texts of theGreek Classics, and from the narrative that he himself had spun, In the lettersexchanged between Frazer and Roscoe until the appearance of his monograph, The BaRanda, an account of their native manners and customs (19 I I) , Frazercontinued to suggest changes, even insisting upon them at times when thereport did not correspond to the current theoretical stance (Frazer Corresp"14 November 1914),

In 1913 Rivers, Haddon, and others drew up a sizable report to the CarnegieInstitution of Washington, D. c., on the needs of anthropological research inorder to attract funds for the profession, Rivers, in his report on ethnology,surveyed research then current in Africa and singled out Roscoe for specialmention:

From Uganda we have now a large mass of ntensive work of the highest order from the Rev.JohnRoscoe. . and from others in the British East Africa possessions ... though there is still much tobe done, there is reason to hope that the British possessions in northern and central Africa maybecome one of the most thoroughly worked regions of the world from the point of view of theethnologists (Rivers [9[3: [5-[6).

In the same vein, he mentions the adequacy of reportage from Belgian andGerman possessions and deplored the dearth of material from the Portuguesepossessions, South Africa was likewise cited as a relative blank in the ethnological map of Africa, 'The Reverend H, A, Junod', he wrote, 'has recentlygiven us a work of extraordinary merit on the Thonga , , , but with thisexception, little intensive work has been done among the other peoples of SouthAfrica' (Rivers 1913: 16),

Frazer hoped that some of the expected Carnegie money could be used tosupport Roscoe, and wrote to him to say,

I have had a very satisfactory interview with Rivers today. He highly approves of my applying to


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516 ROBERT THORNTON[LordJames1Bryce, and if the Carnegie Institute, moved by Bryce, should consult him privatelyin the matter, he will heartily support your claim to a grant. He thinks youjust the sort of manwhom the Institute should aid. In fact in drawing up a Report on anthropology which he has sentto the Carnegie Institute, he had you specifically in mind in recommending them to have always afund devoted to the promotion of private enterprise apart from the men in regular employment ofthe Institute (Frazer Corresp. 8 October 1913).Emerging clearly from such reports and from letters and comments on the

methods of ethnology at the time is a sense in which the enterprise is like thecommercial manufacture and trade of utilitarian goods. There is a clear divisionof labour between the producers of information and the theory-smiths of theuniversities in Europe, Britain and America. Rivers listed the work ofJunod,Roscoe and others as a kind of stock on hand' which was offered as security forfurther financial assistance. From this point, anthropology began to attract moresupport. Roscoe was given financial support for a return trip to study parts ofUganda beyond the borders of the Kingdom of Buganda. An industrialist,Mackie, supported Roscoe as a full-time, independent ethnologist for two yearsin 1916-19 I 7. Three volumes of research emerged from this work in northernand western Uganda. Roscoe remained, however, within the tradition of the'division of labour' which did not permit the fieldworker to comment on hisfindings. He continued to think in terms of providing evidence for men such asFrazer to work into proper shape. The work that was produced continued toserve as an intellectual capital that eventually led to further financial assistance,and expansion of University departments. Malinowski, for example, uponreturning from the Trobriands subsequently held a post at the London School ofEconomics (where he lectured on 'primitive economy'). The South AfricaGovernment established a Department of African Life and Languages at theUniversity of Cape Town where Radcliffe-Brown held the first chair. Withappointments to university posts, the whole mode of ethnographic writing waschanged. The generators of raw materials and the manufactures of ethnologywere now combined in the same persons. This was the beginning of the researchtradition of modern anthropology.

ConclusionIn effect, the writer on Africa in the period 1850-1900 changed from hero tohandyman. The image of Africa itself changed from the immense and mysterious to the standardised though enigmatic. Writing about Africa was romanticand imaginative in the early nineteenth century, since writers of travelogue andmissionary bulletins were interested in attracting an audience for narrative abouta new place, new peoples, new problems. Travelogue writers sought tocapitalise on their experiences. Missionaries wrote to attract capital for theirenterprises. By the end of the century, however, writing reflected an ironicvision of people who had to be explained, both to themselves and to the rest ofthe world. Frazer's writing in particular reveals a satiric 'plot' in whichsuperstitions and dramatic roles such as divine kingship, scapegoats, witchesand priests were portrayed as protracted charades whose meaning couid onlybe guessed at. In 190 I , Francis Galton wrote to Frazer to thank him for the gift


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ROBERT THOHNTONof a copy of the GoldCll bough. In his reading, Galton was impressed by whathe perceived as Frazer's style and tact, and exclaimed that

The cleverness with which you [Frazer] indicate without expressing conclusions, no t to woundthe feelings of simple orthodox persons. is delightful. . What one generalizes from this, asfrom your 'l'ausanius', is 'what fools people are" (letter, 24 January 1901, Trinity CollegeLibrary, Cambridge; see also Vickery I\l7J: IS).In this consideration of the literature it has been necessary to take into account

a broad distinction between two audiences. The one was positivist andempiricist; the other, philosophically transcendentalist, was oriented moretowards knowledge of religion and language than towards economy andsociety. This sub-division, between religion and language on the one hand, andeconomy and society on the other, still bedevils the discipline. For the most partwriting about Africa in this period came from the pens of individuals solidly inthe tradition of romanticism and evangelical Christianity. Some writers, however, such as Callaway, Junod and Roscoe sought to distinguish their writingsfrom those of other missionaries and Europeans in Africa, and to attract theattention of university men. They were anxious, too, to present the genre asscience. This accounts, in part, for the genre's characteristic paradox: its contentis highly particularistic and derived from non-replicable experience, although ithas come to be part of a universal, ostensibly objective 'science'. There wasalmost immediately, and has been since then, a crisis of validity arising directlyfrom this conflict.The contradiction exists between the content of the text and the rhetoricalforms under which it is presented. Ethnographic descriptions are textualrepresentations, differing from pictures and direct experience. Through effec-tive use of textual format (chapter and section headings, captions, lists andtables), vocabulary, appropriate resonances with other genres (such as thenatural history monograph, scripture, novels, history), subtle metaphors andother rhetorical strategies, the textual discourse can effectively and convincinglyfuse the generalities ofcategories (,economy', 'animism', 'social structure') withthe particularities of perception.

Only the discursive text can present us with the possibility of such a fusionbecause it allows information to be extracted from the moral community inwhich it was written. Just as Kurtz's text could only reveal the beauty of the'exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence' once it had been separatedfrom the context of Kurtz's own moral failure, the ethnography becomesacademic when it is transformed by the rhetoric of classifying sciences. Itconceals its context of creation and the moral condition of its author.

Yet it is this limitation that makes it possible for the ethnography to convertparticularities of observation into the 'facts' of a scientific discipline. Themeaning of the ethnographic text is, as Conrad said, 'on the outside'-that is, itexists in the relationships between it and other texts and between the categoriesand ideas that emerge from it, and those imposed on it. This moral limitation, orisolation, is probably necessary in order that it might bridge cultures success-fully and make generalisation possible and productive. Indeed its own internalcontent would be forever inscrutable without both the possibility for generalis-ation and classification that writing presents, and the unique independence of he


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51H ROBERT THORNTONtext from the single and immediate moral context of the observer or theobserved, the reader or the writer.

I t was through a disciplined reading of these texts that anthropology acquiredthe terms and categories that make its special discourse on human behaviourpossible. European readers made selections out of ethnographic reportage inorder to serve their own moral and intellectual needs. Early linguistic documents and analyses, in particular, laid the groundwork for a more sophisticatedobservational discipline by providing still indispensable vocabulary and ideasabout structure. The experience of war during the writing of many of the mostinfluential ethnographic accounts of African peoples in this period provides anexcellent example of the characteristics of the text that have been outlined. Warhad the effect of emphasising the major points of division and solidarity withinthe observed societies. This was true especially of the Zulu, the Thonga and theBaganda, all of which serve today as paradigms of social organisation in Africa.In these cases, war influenced the nature of what was observed and thepossibility of observing it. The constraints of he genre that limited first-person,contextualised narrative, in favour of a universalised generic format, did notpermit treatment of the context of observation. This contextual information iseasily available to the historian, however, in parallel genres of journalism,missionary diaries, personal diaries and government reports that were sometimes written by the same people who wrote the deliberately decontextualisedethnographic monographs.The capture of this knowledge by persons who operated within an entirelydifferent institutional framework, and who reasoned from quite differentpremisses regarding this knowledge, was, in essence, a recontextualisation ofthis writing in terms of the intellectual and moral imperatives of the centres ofEuropean culture. The increasing intellectual impact of reportage on Africainitiated a process in which scholars sought to gain more direct access to thesources of information. It was this recontextualised writing on Africa thatconstituted part of the appropriate domain of anthropology, and resulted in thetransformation of romantic and particularistic narrative into a universalacademic discourse.

NOT EThis article is a revised and augmented version of a paper read at the 1980 meetings of the

American Anthropological Association in Washington, DC. I have received support during theperiod of research and writing from the University of Cape Town, from the Harry OppenheimerInstitute for African Studies (also of the University of Cape Town), from the Human SciencesResearch Council of South Africa, and from the National Endowment for the Humanities ofthe USA. I also wish to thank Clarion State College, Clarion. Pennsylvania. where, as VisitingScholar during my 1982 sabbatical leave from the University of Cape Town, I was given valuableassistance that permitted the completion of this article. Comments from Vincent Crapanzano,George Stocking, and James Urry have been especially helpful, and are gratefully acknowledged.

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I{OBERT THORNTONArnold, Thomas 183 I. An essay on the right interpretation and understanding of the Scriptures.

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