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- Title
Towards a History of Lost Corners in the World.
- Authors
Vansina, Jan
- Abstract
This article focuses on the lack of knowledge about the pre-industrial economic and social histories of the world. Historians have not found many conventional written, or even oral, sources in Equatorial Africa. They were discouraged, moreover, by the prevalence of an anthropological model that presented the societies of that area in static terms. According to this model, kinship groups were the basis of society. They grew, split, grew again and so on without any institutional development at all. This theory of segmentary lineage organization practically precluded any social or even economic change for centuries, perhaps for millennia. That view is in error. As the model is discarded, different realities appear. The existence of such huge blanks in the historical landscape points in fact to methodological problems. Even where conventional sources exist, they often document a limited portion of the field only, as anyone concerned with Merovingian history, or the history of the High Middle Ages in the Balkans and even in western Europe, knows.
- Subjects
ECONOMIC history; ANTHROPOLOGY; HISTORIANS; SOCIAL history; KINSHIP; MEROVINGIANS; WORLD history
- Publication
Economic History Review, 1982, Vol 35, Issue 2, p165
- ISSN
0013-0117
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/2595013