David Henige Research Articles

THE “FEEDBACK EFFECT” IN MODERN DOGON CULTURE (MALI)

The ‘Feedback effect’ is a phenomenon of a ‘feedback’, repeatedly described for discussing the oral tradition: Back in 1982, German ethnologist David Henige noted that researchers of African traditional cultures more and more often encounter the practice when they are recounted the results of the field materials of their predecessors. In all such cases, informants reproduce the works of anthropologists, but the authenticity of recorded traditions in general is beyond doubt. That is not the case with Dogon. The example of this people shows that the phenomenon of ‘feedback’ can not only complicate the work of anthropologists, but also contribute to the growth of ethnic and national identity. Myths borrowed from anthropological literature began to penetrate rural folklore with the development of tourism in the 1990s– 2000s. But the purposeful imposition of a united mythology ‘according to Griaule’ began to play a very important role in the development of ethnic and national identity. The most important role belongs here to the festivals of Ogobagnia. Thus, using the example of the Dogon, one can see a kind of a ‘secondary’ mythology version based on the phenomenon of feedback. The imposition of this ideology is still opposed by local traditions and local folklore, which are very different from the “Dogon mirage” introduced by intellectuals, as well as local customs and rituals, sometimes having little in common with each other; so far, the linguistic and cultural diversity of the ethno-social organism of the Dogon has resisted the pressure of these myths, but perhaps the day is not far off when not only in the Sangha, but also in Semari and Tintan, visitors will be told about Nommo and Sirius names which do not exist (sigu tolo or pô tolo), and the mythology of the Dogon will really turn into a harmonious, but artificial system.

Making History in Africa: David Henige and the Quest for Method in African History

My own history with David Henige goes back to 1985, when I had just finished a master's degree in African studies at the Centre of West African Studies in Birmingham, England, and was looking for a place and a supervisor for a planned doctoral dissertation involving a historiographical study of Nigeria. One of my supervisors, Tom McCaskie, suggested getting in touch with Henige, to see if he could assist me. The reply was elaborate and positive, which I appreciated much. Circumstances for graduate students at the time being quite different from the present, and funding systems for study abroad still in their infancy, the plan came to nothing. The connection with Henige and his work was there to stay, however.This article is an effort to give a reflection on David Henige's career and his impact on the discipline of history in Africa, through his work as editor of History in Africa. The scope of the reflection is limited, as we concentrate on David's own contributions, rather than setting him and his work in a comparative framework. When David Henige started History in Africa in 1974, it was yet another scholarly journal on Africa, in an ever-growing series, counting already more than two hundred titles, as Henige pointed out himself. And indeed, in such circumstances, a new journal needs ‘to justify itself to the audience it addresses.’

Fieldwork, Orality, Text: Ethnographic and Historical Fields of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Gabon

I can claim no direct pedigree from African Studies at Wisconsin, but one of my own graduate school mentors, Robert Harms, benefitted from David Henige's and Jan Vansina's influence; all three have profoundly marked my own approaches to the historical anthropology of equatorial Africa. In this paper I draw on David Henige's illuminating and still relevant insights into the problem of “feedback,” in light of a key methodological preoccupation in my own discipline of anthropology – “fieldwork.” In particular I want to suggest how ethnographic fields are formed over time through a layering process that involves ongoing cycles of intertwined oral and written traditions.Henige's 1973 article, “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition,” prefigures by a full decade Terence Ranger's highly influential essay on “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In that 1973 article, Henige argued that given traditions were “dynamic over time.” British Indirect Rule had led the Fante of the Gold Coast to devise new oral traditions in order to take advantage of opportunities of British Colonialism. In particular, he cites the ways printed sources, especially the Bible, but also the Qur'an, colonial sources, publications, and later scholarly works, have all found their way back into oral accounts. Henige also suggests that pre-colonial oral traditions also would have been continually reworked; present practices suggest considerable adaptability and flexibility in the past.

The Intimacy of Belonging: Literacy and the Experience of Sunjata in Mali

Literacy is a personally acquired skill, and the way it is taught to a person changes how that person thinks. Thanks to David Henige historians of Africa are much more aware of how literacy influences memory and historical imagination, and particularly how literacy systems introduce linear concepts of time and space. This essay will deal with these two aspects in relation to Africa's most famous epic: Sunjata. This epic has gained a major literary status worldwide—text editions are taught as part of undergraduate courses at universities all over the world—but there has been little extensive field research into the epic. The present essay focuses on an even less studied aspect of Sunjata, namely how Sunjata is experienced by local people.Central to my argument is an idea put forward by Peter Geschiere, who links the upheaval of autochthony claims in Africa (and beyond) to issues of citizenship and processes of exclusion. He analyzes these as the product of feelings of “belonging.” Geschiere argues that issues of belonging should be studied at a local level if we are to understand how individuals experience autochthony. Analytically, Geschiere proposes shifting away from ”identity” by drawing from Birgit Meyer's work ideas on the aesthetics of religious experience and emotion; Meyer's ideas are useful to explain “how some (religious) images can convince, while other do not.”

Is a Journal of Method Still Necessary?

Thirty-four years ago David Henige launchedHistory in Africa(hereafterHA) at a time when scholars often cut corners in their rush to construct a history of Africa, and disregarded rules of evidence, thereby running the risk that many of their reconstructions would prove to be unsound. The question was not that these scholars were wholly indifferent to methodology, but that the precolonial history of the continent was the cynosure of the field at the time, and hence that all eyes were turned towards the use of oral sources to overcome the perceived scarcity of written sources for that period and to provide voices from the continent. In their haste to fill huge voids in the story of Africa's past, scholars debated the rules of evidence in relation to such unconventional sources. They often disregarded almost every methodological canon when it came to written data. Crucial differences between primary and secondary sources were ignored, archival research was scanty, new editions of older publications were mere reprints accompanied or not by new introductions that were so uninformed as to be useless, while issues about authenticity, authorship, chronology, or translation were all brushed aside as quibbles. Thus, in the days before 1974, methodological concerns focused exclusively on oral tradition and oral history to the detriment of everything else. As its initial editorial made clear,HAwas launched as a forum where scholars interested in method could publish articles about all the facets of the historical method—from epistemology to heuristics, rules of evidence, and historiography. The journal was founded and the contributors came.

The three ages of African studies reference works

The three ages of African studies reference works John McIlwaine (bio) John McIlwaine Emeritus Professor of the Bibliography of Asia and Africa, University College London. References Africana Librarians Council. 'Bibliographies and other reference works which need to be updated', <http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/afs/alc/bibpr.html>, consulted May 2007. Henige, David (1979) 'African historical dictionaries: through the looking glass', Africana journal, 10, 120-128. Google Scholar Lauer, Joe (2006) 'Reference books as false idols', Africana libraries newsletter, 119. 3pp. <http://www.indiana.edu/~libsala/african/ aln119carmudgeon.html>. Limb, Peter (2006) 'African studies bibliography: a state-of-the art review', Africa bibliography 2005 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. vii-xv. Google Scholar McIlwaine, John (2001) 'Plus ça change: four decades of African studies bibliography', Africa bibliography 1999 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. vii-xix. Google Scholar Walsh, Gretchen (2004) '"Can we get there from here?" Negotiating the washouts, cave-ins, dead ends and other hazards on the road to research on Africa', pp. 5-96 in Research, reference service and resources for the study of Africa, ed. Deborah M. Lafond & Gretchen Walsh (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press. Published simultaneously as Reference librarian, 87/88, 2004). Google Scholar Walsh, Gretchen (2006) 'Wikipedia: can we beat it? Should we join it? Is it the end of the world as we know it?', Africana libraries newsletter, 118. 2pp. <http://www.indiana.edu/~libsala/african/aln118carmudgeon.html>. Zell, Hans (2005) 'The perilous business of reference publishing in African studies', pp. 199-226 in Africanist librarianship in an age of change, ed. Victoria K. Evalds & David Henige (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press). [End Page xviii] Google Scholar Copyright © 2007 International African Institute

V. A Publisher's perspective

In your interesting series of articles “Reviewing reviews” in ARD (no. 102, 2007) you invite further contributions to this debate, and so may I be permitted to add some observations from the perspective of a publisher or, more particularly, a publisher of African studies reference works.In his article in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing David Henige states “unfortunately, most reference works are never reviewed outside the library literature, if there.” This is not our experience, even though we now make it a practise not to send out unsolicited review copies of our reference works to African studies or any other journals unless editors specifically request a copy, and provide some indication when a review might appear. We invite journal editors to request review copies by mailings of press releases, and email notifications of new books when published.

Historical evidence and argument

Historians know about the past because they examine the evidence. But what exactly is evidence, how do historians know what it means - and how can we trust them to get it right? Historian David Henige tackles such questions of historical reliability head on in his skeptical, unsparing, and acerbically witty Historical Evidence and Argument. Systematic doubt is his watchword, and he practices what he preaches through a variety of insightful assessments of historical controversies for example, over the dating of artifacts and the textual analysis of translated documents. Skepticism, Henige contends, forces us to recognize the limits of our knowledge, but it is also a positive force that stimulates new scholarship to counter it.

Writing African History

FORTY years ago Daniel McCall published a book about the sources for African history—Africa in Time Perspective: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources (Oxford, 1964). It was a brisk, no-nonsense little book, a mere 175 pages long. Now John Phillips has edited a huge book as a tribute to McCall which runs to over five hundred pages. The book maintains the spirit of the original. It, too, is no-nonsense. Phillips tells us that ‘this book is about the practice of African history’; that only ‘a minimum of theory is necessary for a historian’; and that ‘the very mundane fact is that history is a job’. But it is hardly brisk. The difference between McCall's day and ours, which calls for a book three times the size, arises partly from the fact that over the last forty years much more has been done on African archaeology, African linguistics, African oral tradition, etc., than had been achieved in 1964. We know much more. Yet this book is not triumphalist, except perhaps in the chapter on historical linguistics by Christopher Ehret which essentially says that we know how to do it, are doing it and need to do more of it. Elsewhere, though, as historians know more the less confident and optimistic they have become. Susan McIntosh writes that ‘archaeology is today a much more contentious and diverse discipline than it was in the 1950s and early 1960s’ (p. 51). Here it is certainly not merely a matter of doing more of it, even though there are still huge gaps in Africa's archaeological record. David Henige is still more cautious about oral tradition as a reliable source and in his very lively chapter lambasts various simplistic ways of practising it as well as a general sloppiness in failing to make the data available.

A Tale of Two Journals: Comment

David Henige 1 has blown dust off of an old and indigestible chestnut in the manner of a morality play. Grossly overpriced journals are common in many fields, yet they are also usually successful in attaining a wide circulation (mainly to libraries), which seems illogical. Although Henige casts doubt on at least some of the criteria that librarians employ to determine their ‘retained list,’ there is little doubt that they usually ‘know their constituencies [of faculty and students] and collect the most in-demand items first.’ 2 It is the demand for these journals by the ‘constituencies’ that really promotes their success (or otherwise). My experience in my own field, palaeontology, is that many journals provide a similar product, but that publishinghouse journals explore particular facets of the speciality, making them essential reading to a (commonly large) subset of the potential audience. Although Henige concentrates on the aspect of value for money, many criteria can be identified to support the continuation of subscriptions to expensive journals on the library budget, although I accept that cost is usually the most important. Among these criteria, I propose that two factors particularly act to maintain the status quo, one intrinsic – the high profile such journals have among researchers – and the other extrinsic – the resistance (one might say apathy, in some cases) of the ‘constituencies’ to change.

Pyrrhon, Pyrrhus and the Possibility of the Past: A Response to David Henige

To a significant degree David Henige’s commentary on selected sections of one of my essays on historiography suffers from a lack of clarity, misses the point of my argument or misrepresents it, or is otherwise puzzling. It further displays an unfortunate modern prejudice against faith vis-à-vis ‘knowledge’, and to that extent it is muddled from an epistemological point of view as well as deficient in its understanding of the nature of religion and of the religious worldview. To the extent that it does with clarity and conviction engage with my argument, it is unconvincing in its objections to it, not least because its philosophical foundation in Scepticism is unstable. Indeed, Henige’s characterization of himself as a ‘Pyrrhonian’, after the Greek philosopher Pyrrhon of Elis (the father of Scepticism), is misleading. Like other historians who claim to employ methodological scepticism, Henige more resembles ancient Pyrrhus than ancient Pyrrhon; for the sceptic’s argumentative ‘victories’ are too costly to be worth the winning (Pyrrhic victories indeed), and the arguments that produce them ‘prove’ too much to be taken seriously. As Berkeley once put it, they at one and the same time ‘admit of no answer and produce no conviction’.

Reviewing Reviewing

David Henige reports on the nature of reviewing scholarly publications and explores the psychological positioning and the political bargaining that can shape the manner in which this review process is conducted.

Mis/Adventures in Mis/Quoting

David Henige, a librarian and historian, explores the principles and practices of accurate quoting. Using the examples of quotations attributed to Charles H. Duell, Joseph Lister, J.E. Erichsen, and Albert Michelson, Henige discusses the ways in which inaccurate quotations and the repeated use of common editorial modifications, including ellipses and bracketed alterations, have altered the original material over time. The author urges researchers to take care to seek the original source of citations in an effort to ensure the accuracy of their own quotations.

New worlds, imaginary spaces and contingent reality: Columbus and astrology

New worlds, imaginary spaces and contingent reality: Columbus and astrology In this week when it seems the whole world is either mourning or celebrating the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas some 500 years ago, I have taken some pains to devise a paper which attempts to negotiate the Atlantic squalls which the Columbus quincentenary has been so successful in generating. Last Wednesday, which was 12 October, Quincentenary Day, the Australian carried a story with the headline, 'Ideology hijacks Columbus anniversary', lamenting the attacks on Columbus, the 'Renaissance man' and a 'weaver's son from Genoa' by the liberal establishment and aggrieved native Americans.1 Even Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, whose latest biography of Columbus2 paints a far from flattering portrait of the great discoverer as a 'representative figure of his day',3 feels the countermovement has gone too far. Fernandez-Armesto describes the claim that Latin America was created by a "crime of genocide initiated by Columbus' to be 'a wicked lie'.4 Sydney's own Renaissance M a n and explorer, Jonathon King, has weighed into the Columbus debate in the Australian press, based on his experience as a participant on the recent re-enactment of the Columbus crossing,5 not to mention the published conclusions of generations of Columbus scholars. For King, and the aforementioned scholars and sailors, the wind conditions confirmed that Columbus was a cheat and a liar. Not only did he deliberately deceive the satiors on his original voyage as to the number of leagues travelled, he also concealed the route taken, which was not due west due to the prevailing winds, but south into the latitudes of Portuguese monopoly where he could pick up north-east trade winds. All the media coverage has as an implicit assumption the belief that there is a real Columbus and a real voyage across a distinct spatial route that awaits uncovering. And yet it is just this which is most open to doubt. All 1 The Australian, 12 October 1992: original story by Richard Caseby of the Sunday Times, additional reporting by Philip Wedme and others. 2 Felipe Femandez-Armesto, Columbus, Oxford, 1992. 3 Ibid., p. 21. 4 Ibid. 5 The Australian Weekend Review, 10-11 October 1992. P A R E R G O N ns 12.2 (January 1995) 30 H. M. Carey our information about the first Columbus crossing is riddled with difficult hidden behind layers oftextual,navigational, instrumental, and historical problems. That Columbus may have lied deliberately about the route of the first voyage is really the least of the matters obscuring this peculiarly significant past. To the images of Columbus the cheat and liar, the perpetrator of genocide, and the hero of the N e w World, one might add the multiple other identities concocted for him by scholars, politicians, admirers, and detractors and, not least of all, himself. A m o n g so many images of the discoverer available for construction and deconstruction, can we doubt that w e are in the realm of 'contingent reality', which is in the tide of m y paper? The purpose of m y paper is not to attempt to add anything to the vast flood of Columbus scholarship, both extant and generated for this year of commemorations, but to explore some ideas about the nature of exploration and contingency, both spatial and temporal, in thefirstvoyage of Columbus and in medieval astrology. For some of these ideas, I acknowledge a debt to Paul Carter's seminal study of Australian exploration.6 I thought it might be simplest to begin by demonstrating the various layers of obscurity which overlay thefirstColumbus voyage. I stress, of course, that all of this information is well known to scholars.7 All Columbus scholars struggle with the limitations of the texts. David Henige's monograph on the sources for thefirstvoyage is particularly sceptical.8 This, in brief, is the state of affairs. Columbus's shipboard account of the voyage, both the secret 'daily' log, in which he recorded his own grossly inflated estimate of the distances covered, and the readings he gave out for the supposed deception of the sailors, are no longer extant. Nor is the manuscript of the fine...

The Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle.Jonathan Sumption

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsThe Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle. Jonathan Sumption John Bell HennemanJohn Bell Henneman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 69, Number 1Jan., 1994 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2864876 Views: 7Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1994 Medieval AcademyPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:David Henige Being Fair to the Hounds: The Function and Practice of Annotation, History in Africa 28 (May 2014): 95–127.https://doi.org/10.2307/3172210

Goodby Columbus and all that: history and textual criticism

[First paragraph]Columbus. FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. xxvii + 218 pp. (Cloth US$ 16.95, Paper US$ 6.99)The Worlds of Christopher Columbus. WILLIAM D. PHILLIPS, JR. &amp; CARLA RAHN PHILLIPS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xii + 322 pp. (Cloth US$ 27.95)In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage. DAVID HENIGE. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991. xiii + 359 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.95)Columbus and the Golden World of the Island Arawaks: The Story of the First Americans and Their Caribbean Environment. D.J.R. WALKER. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1992. 320 pp. (Cloth US$ 12.95)By the time this review appears in print, the Quincentenary celebrations and/or deprecations of the event will be slowly fading into most welcomed oblivion. There will be, of course, the unavoidable local commemorations of specific events: the discovery of such and such island, the anniversary of some European misdeed, the struggle for the valley of Mexico; but the collective remembrance of the Encounter/Discovery will have been allowed to run its course. In truth, after a veritable flood of publications, seminars, operas, protests, and ghastly movies, one is not too sorry to see the whole affair put safely away for another century. If there is any consolation to this continuous process of recovered memories and history, it is that a good number of sensible and scholarly works have been published - including some of those reviewed here - which demolish the idealization and glorification of the Atlantic enterprise and set the history of the Encounter/Discovery within a proper historical context.

&lt;sc&gt;David Henige&lt;/sc&gt;. &lt;italic&gt;In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage&lt;/italic&gt;. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 1991. Pp. xiii, 359

Journal Article David Henige. In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 1991. Pp. xiii, 359 Get access Henige David. In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 1991. Pp. xiii, 359. Pauline Moffitt Watts Pauline Moffitt Watts Sarah Lawrence College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 97, Issue 4, October 1992, Page 1181, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/97.4.1181 Published: 01 October 1992

In search of Columbus: the sources for the first voyage

Everyone knows Columbus reached the New World in October of 1492. But where? Now David Henige here subjects Columbus' diario to rigorous analysis to conclude that modern attempts to fix the site of Columbus's first landfall can only be speculative at best.

The Undefining of Oral Tradition

This paper points to flaws in formalist definitions of which have the capacity to affect reconstructions of the African past. Historical knowledge in regions such as Busoga, Uganda, is not lodged in a distinctive series of texts read as but is engaged in and derives from the everyday critical, lively intelligence which surrounds status, activities, gestures, and speech. Reflections on the organization of knowledge of past in Busoga may help scholars overcome a rigidity of thinking about the pasts of oral societies which the attempts to formalize definitions of oral have produced. African historiography has made great leaps forward in the past twentyfive years, and much of the progress rests on the extensive incorporation of oral material into the reconstruction of the African past. has become the tag of the enterprise, and with two meanings: one referencing the material available and one the process by which such material came into our present. Over time, oral has been privileged as some specific, distinctive cultural form and process within African society past and present. Oral has been taken as having specialized characteristics and its own separate processual and cultural life. A reified oral tradition, whether explicitly defined or consensually understood, has become a part of the conceptual equipment of African historians. And it has become so at a heavy cost. In a paper published in I980, David Henige (I980: 240-42) takes to task historians of the interlacustrine region of eastern Africa who treat materials as tradition when they do not formally qualify as such. In his guide to research, Oral Historiography, published in I982, Henige (I982a: z) insists on a proper, fixed and formal definition of tradition. He writes, Strictly speaking, oral traditions are those recollections of the past that are commonly or universally known in a given culture. Versions that are not widely known should rightfully be considered as Ethnohistory 36:1 (Winter I989). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc 0014-1801/89/$I.SO. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:09:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Oral Historiography

Journal Article Oral Historiography Get access Oral Historiography, by David Henige. Longman: London, New York and Lagos, 1982. viii+150 pp. £3.95, paperback. The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History, edited by Joseph C. Miller. Wm Dawson and Sons, Folkestone, and Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1980. xii+284 pp. £17 in UK, cloth cover. Luganda Proverbs, compiled by Fedinand Walser. Dietrich Reimer Verlag: Berlin, 1982. xi+510 pp. DM 65, limp covers. MICHAEL TWADDLE MICHAEL TWADDLE Insitute of Commonwealth StudiesLondon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 83, Issue 333, October 1984, Pages 571–572, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a097651 Published: 01 October 1984