Affect and Society in Precolonial Africa
By Kathryn M. de Luna
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Abstract: The emerging historical scholarship on emotions in other world regions has inspired work on this theme by anthropologists and historians studying twentieth and twenty-first century Africa. The historical study of emotions certainly poses complicated methodological challenges for historians and archaeologists of Africa’s early past, but it offers the unique opportunity to return subjectivity to our narratives of Africa’s earliest societies. This essay explores some central themes of the emerging field of emotions history in Africa and beyond with an eye towards understanding what contribution the study of affect might make to the study of precolonial African history. Drawing on the ethnographic record and several reconstructed lexis from Bantu, the essay argues that not only can we access affective life in the early past, but that it may well transform our understanding of problems and processes to which we commonly assign great causal weight: the development and spread of technologies of metallurgy, cereal farming, cattle-keeping, the creation of novel social and political collectivities like lineages, therapeutic networks, and the House, and the expansion of Bantu languages.