An innovative cultural study of a major site of British anthropology

Africanizing Anthropology tells the story of the anthropological fieldwork centered at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) during the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on collaborative processes rather than on the activity of individual researchers, Lyn Schumaker gives the assistants and informants of anthropologists a central role in the making of anthropological knowledge.
Schumaker shows how local conditions and local ideas about culture and history, as well as previous experience of outsiders’ interest, shape local people’s responses to anthropological fieldwork and help them, in turn, to influence the construction of knowledge about their societies and lives. Bringing to the fore a wide range of actors—missionaries, administrators, settlers, the families of anthropologists—Schumaker emphasizes the daily practices of researchers, demonstrating how these are as centrally implicated in the making of anthropological knowlege as the discipline’s methods. Selecting a prominent group of anthropologists—The Manchester School—she reveals how they achieved the advances in theory and method that made them famous in the 1950s and 1960s.
This book makes important contributions to anthropology, African history, and the history of science.

"“Lyn Schumaker’s splendid history provides a balanced and sensitive account of the growth of a particular form of the discipline.”" - TLS

"It is the great virtue of Lyn Schumaker’s study that it forces readers to think in a more nuanced and case-specific manner about the ‘colonial situation’ of anthropology. . . . Throughout, Schumaker displays a wonderfully nuanced and wide-ranging contextual understanding of issues that are all too often assumed rather than ‘open for investigation.’ . . . Schumaker has produced a work that will be of substantial interest not only to anthropologists and their historians, but to historians of science generally, and beyond to students of African history and the history of European colonialism."
- American Historical Review