Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of Africa's Past (review)

Abstract

Ann B.Stahl. Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of Africa's Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 268 pp. The publication of Eric Wolf's path-breaking volume Europe and the People Without History in 1982 inspired many scholars with burgeoning interests in historical archaeology and anthropology to focus their attention on illuminating the pasts of the history-less peoples of Africa, the Americas, and other parts of the globe. Despite the initial swell of enthusiasm and the enormous potential, archaeology's contributions have been modest. Ann Stahl's Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of Africa's Past is among the notable exceptions. Reasoning that archaeology offers a crucial strand of evidence that supplements knowledge derived from written and oral histories, she explores the theoretical and methodological issues that arise in constructing Africa's past, and in addition, provides insights into the lives of an African people who have endured colonialism's legacies. As such, her book will interest Africanist historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists, as well as a variety of other researchers who have taken on the challenges of redressing colonialism's consequences in ways that communicate its scope, pervasiveness, and resistances. The study centers on Banda, a region in west central Ghana, where Stahl has conducted archaeological research for more than twenty years. The book traces this intellectual journey by offering personal reflections on changing theoretical perspectives and research directions that, along with interpretation and evidence, help the reader appreciate scholarly work and especially the task of assembling a many-sided and more comprehensive story of the past such as Stahl has done in Making History in Banda. For the non-African specialist, these observations complement the text's thick description of political regimes and cultural geography, and occasional lapses into heavy-handed, though lucid, theorizing. The book unfolds over eight chapters. In the first of these, Stahl provides an overview of how ethnographers, historians, and archaeologists have envisioned Africa's past. She outlines the intellectual traditions and research agendas within each discipline and the ways these have shaped understandings that depart from the long-standing opinion that the continent existed outside of history. Efforts aimed at correcting these misconceptions have yielded conflicting, and perhaps equally troubling, images of Africa that are not easily reconciled. Although the epistemological differences that underwrite these characterizations may be the result of circumstances that are as divisive and complicated as those responsible for partitioning the continent itself during its recent history, Stahl is optimistic about interdisciplinary engagement. The methodology she advocates, and indeed practices, entails working in interdisciplinary spaces, instead of forging collaborations across discrete disciplines. The approach anticipates that researchers drawing on multiple strands of evidence, including archaeology, may be able to see interpretive possibilities not previously imagined and gauge the limits of particular systems of knowledge. Accordingly, archaeology's ability to reveal mundane routines provides a means of invigorating interpretations of Africa's past. Stahl next discusses the methodological consequences of these epistemological legacies. Her criticisms about establishing direct historic baselines echo ones expressed by other scholars, as do her comments about problems with the concept of invented traditions. Although such criticisms resonate in the literature, her reiteration of the mantra lends compelling arguments against the false dichotomies between real and invented, then and now, and before and after, that continue to inform anthropological reasoning despite evidence to the contrary. Rejecting strict essentialist and constructionist views of history, she tacks back-and-forth between ideas about contemporary culture-making and glimpses of past cultural practices through an analytical lens sighted on political-economic processes. …