SO, WHY ARE WE HERE?

We’ve been getting this question a lot. A lot of you know that I am working on my PhD in History (specifically, African history) at Northwestern University in Chicago. The short answer is that to produce new knowledge about African history, you have to go to Africa (would you expect good archives, museums, and interviewees about the American Cherokee Indians in Tokyo???).

To be more specific, my dissertation is about ancient food systems and their impact on the political economy over the course of 3000 years (1000 BC to 1800 AD) in the region of South Central Africa (Zambia, northern Botswana and the Caprivi Strip area of Namibia). Let me restate that: I am producing information to recover a history that was never recorded. This history is about how people over the last several thousand years in Africa drew on wild animals, fruits, nuts, grains, and medicines to try to exert some control over politics in communities whose economies supposedly focused on farming domestic plants and animals. Scholars have ignored how people used wild resources to support families, gain political followings, summon powerful spirits and other forms of affecting change and that is precisely what I am researching.



Now, if you have made it this far, you might have already wondered about sources- Africa doesn’t have written records that stretch back 3000 years (save for Egypt). I look at archaeology and work by other people who have reconstructed the history of the climate in this region. But my main source of historical evidence is vocabulary. That is to say, I collect lists of Africans’ words for political institutions, foods, tools, medicines, etc in many different but related languages. When I have all these words, I compare them across languages. Because these languages are related (much like French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, etc.), I can trace how far back in the family tree of these languages a word (and, presumably, its referent object or idea) was invented. Basically, I am writing history by reconstructing dead languages (like reconstructing Latin from the languages listed above- although, Latin was recorded so this is not necessary). Then, if I can reconstruct a word to a point in the language family tree (at a historical moment when a particular ancestral language existed), I can make historical arguments about people inheriting that word, inventing it or borrowing it from a neighboring language. This is called historical linguistics- the writing of history from word histories traced back through the language family tree of a set of related languages.

Ok, lesson over.

-Kate