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- Title
History and Culture, Culture and History: A Short Account of a Fifty-Year Quest to Understand Asante.
- Authors
McCaskie, Tom
- Abstract
This paper reviews the author’s evolving research experience in Asante from the late 1960s to the present. It situates and discusses his ever deepening involvement with Asante individuals over the intervening decades, and traces the ways in which some of these interlocutors played a vital role in expanding his knowledge of Asante history and culture. The argument is made that sustained personal interaction over time with both place and people is the fundamental key to the recuperation and understanding of the Asante past, and indeed of African history more generally. It is further argued that current academic conditions, and notably the lack of research time and funding, militate against the kind of deep investigation described in this autobiographical paper. One consequence is that research into and publishing on Africa’s past sometimes now tends towards the superficial, with the publication of work that is short on new information and its analysis in specifically historical and cultural terms, and long on “theorizing” about and “positioning” within the present concerns of the academy and its personnel.
- Subjects
AFRICA; HISTORICAL analysis; CULTURE; AFRICAN history
- Publication
Africa (2612-3258), 2023, Vol 5, Issue 2, p99
- ISSN
2612-3258
- Publication type
Article