Dialogue on history and anthropology with David W Cohen

APC Honorary Research Fellow David W Cohen will be speaking at seminar hosted by HUMA on Friday 21 October from 10am to 12pm. Cohen, who is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), will engage those present with his current thinking on intersections of history and anthropology, and reflect on his own involvements in the shifts, changes, and debates in the study of Africa.

Cohen's career spans various significant moments in the study of African history; from the early post-colonial attempts to recover pre-colonial African pasts to pioneering work that brings together ethnographic and historical methods.

It would be useful/enriching to read something from Prof. Cohen's oeuvre in advance of the seminar. His earlier works are, among others, The Historical Tradition of Busoga: Mukama and Kintu (Oxford 1972) and Womunafu's Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Community (Princeton, 1977).

His move to a different style of historiography is represented in his Siaya: A Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape (London, 1989) and Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa (London, 1992). Later books that represent his deepening interdisciplinarity are The Combing of History (Chicago 1994) and (with E.S. Atieno Odhiambo) The Risks of Knowledge (Oxford, 2004). He has also written a series of equally important articles and edited collections.

The session is likely to be particularly valuable to PhD students and others keen to talk about the making of a historian/humanities scholar, to talk about scholarly plans and contingencies, the method/s and the surprises and the styles of work chosen/not chosen.

Cohen's most recent essay, "The Pursuits of Anthrohistory: Formation against Formation," arose out of a series of self-examining conferences and workshops of the unique Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at Michigan (founded c.1989), within which he was an active participant and program director for a few years. The essay is published in Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). If you are interested in attending this event, please feel free to request an electronic copy of the chapter by emailing: info@tombouctoumanuscripts.org.