Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa - Couverture souple

Fabian, Johannes

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0520221230 ISBN 13 : 9780520221239

Editeur : University of California Press, 2000

Synopsis

Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new view of those early European explorers and their encounters with Africans. Out of Our Minds shows explorers were far from rational--often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence. Johannes Fabian presents fascinating and little-known source material, and points to its implications for our understanding of the beginnings of modern colonization. At the same time, he makes an important contribution to current debates about the intellectual origins and nature of anthropological inquiry.

Drawing on travel accounts--most of them Belgian and German--published between 1878 and the start of World War I, Fabian describes encounters between European travelers and the Africans they met. He argues that the loss of control experienced by these early travelers actually served to enhance cross-cultural understanding, allowing the foreigners to make sense of strange facts and customs. Fabian's provocative findings contribute to a critique of narrowly scientific or rationalistic visions of ethnography, illuminating the relationship between travel and intercultural understanding, as well as between imperialism and ethnographic knowledge.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Johannes Fabian is Professor and Chair of Cultural Anthropology and Non-Western Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (California, 1996) and Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), among other works.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of California Press
• Date d'édition: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0520221230
• ISBN 13: 9780520221239
• Reliure: Broché
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 336
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible