The History of the Family in Africa and Europe: Some Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

One of the problems with interdisciplinary work is that the outsider to a discipline so often tends to join its discourse at points which seem irrelevant to its practitioners. The experience is not unlike that of the foreign visitor who watches with amazement and not a little sadness as the ‘natives’ abandon those items of their culture which seem to him to be of most value. And the ‘native’ has only impatience for advice to slow down the pace of change. African specialists on the history of the family seem to be entertaining a similar break with their past practices and present significant problems of orientation for the outside observer. The chief dissatisfaction appears to be with the legacy of the powerful generation of anthropologists who emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. They dealt with the organization of large corporate groups and interpreted action, belief and feeling in terms of a few principles derived from the structures of such groups.1 It has become an everyday criticism that this great work suffers from its ‘timelessness’, and of course historians have a professional interest in reiterating the point. More serious is the fact that the older constructs no longer seem to assist in analysing either the new problems that excite the historian aware of what his colleagues elsewhere are doing or the actual findings of new research. To the outside observer – in this case an historian of Europe, whose bedtime reading consists of ethnologies of Africa, Papua-New Guinea, and the like – a confrontation with current research on Africa helps focus issues and problems in his own work and suggests a few points where common discussion might be fruitful.

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