bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Colonialism from the Middle: African Clerks as Historical Actors and Discursive Subjects
Authors: Austen Ralph A. 
Published: March 2012

In a review of my first published book one of the founding figures of african historical studies suggested that instead of giving so much attention to European colonial administrators and African traditional chiefs I should have focused upon “the clerks, the schoolmasters and the evangelists, who were to take the lead when indirect rule had failed.” The terms in which this admonition was expressed implies a confidence in the nationalist project of “educated elites” that is less tenable today than it was during the 1960s. Nonetheless, in the late stages of my own career I have come to the conclusion that of the various occupational categories cited by Roland Oliver, African clerks do deserve greater examination than they have received so far in the historiography of colonial Africa. However, if they do prefigure the political leadership of postcolonial Africa, it is less in the heroic and innovative mode of “nation-building” than in the more problematic and continuous role as “gate-keepers,” or “brokers” (honest or not) between subject populations and external sources of power/patronage.I am not alone in this concern and an entire recent volume of essays has been dedicated to the study of such colonial “African intermediaries.” I contributed a chapter to this book and have continued to pursue a study of colonialism from “the middle” (as opposed to the “above” of my previous work as well as the social history “from below” that emerged in more recent decades). The focus of my research on this topic is upon two figures who are of both historical and literary significance: Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900-1991), the very renowned Malian writer and scholar who produced a memoir about his early career as a colonial clerk; and “Wangrin,” a clerk and interpreter of an earlier generation, who is the subject of Hampâté Bâ's most widely read book.
History for Timbuktu: Aḥmad Bul‘arāf, Archives, and the Place of the Past
Authors: Jeppie Shamil 
Published: March 2012

Aḥmad Bul‘arāf died in September 1955 and was buried in his adopted Timbuktu. He was laid to rest in the town's Sīdi al-Wāfi al-Amīr al-Arawāni cemetery but it would be hard to identify his grave. Gravestones soon disappear into their natural sandy settings. At the time he was widely eulogized for his life's work as a man of religion, culture, and knowledge. Well-known scholars and copyists of his era composed panegyric verses in his honour. One wrote:What a pity on the sciences and their books/On their owners when this calamity occurred/Their schools and places have become deserted/There's no one in them except crows and vultures/Suddenly today there is a caller and no one to respond/Except the echoes and the tunes of the winds/By Ahmad Bui ‘arāf they were granted a gift/How many lessons were conducted and/You have upheld their loftiness, established their origin/You maintained their essence with your honorable books.Decades later he still lives on in the memories of scholars as a “great hero and famous scholar, reviver of Islamic culture,” as a young writer described him in 1986, in a carefully handwritten essay in a local calligraphic style devoted to his achievement. Composed in “Sudani” script in blue ink with headings in red, when the typewriter, if not the PC, had long ago arrived in the region, this encomium to Bui‘arāf was a fitting tribute to a man who loved the written word. He cared for ideas expressed on paper, for their circulation, and how books could be stored for use in the present and in the future. He was devoted to conserving the manuscript heritage of Timbuktu. His own calligraphy in various regional variants was widely recognized and he practiced it without hesitation in the print age.
Literacy and the Decolonization of Africa's Intellectual History
Authors: Brizuela-Garcia Esperanza 
Published: March 2012

In his book In My Father's House Anthony Appiah made a powerful argument for historians and intellectuals at large to recognize the diverse and complex nature of Africa's cultural and historical experiences. He stated, for instance, that: “ideological decolonization is bound to fail if it neglects either endogenous ‘tradition’ or exogenous ‘Western’ ideas, and that many African (and African American) intellectuals have failed to find a negotiable middle way.”During the past fifty years, Africanist historians have focused much of their efforts on the goals of decolonizing or Africanizing the study of the African past. These have been guided by the need to produce a more authentic and relevant history of the continent. The search for such authenticity has shown that African cultures and societies are often the result of a broad range of influences and that the notions of what is indigenous or authentically African needs to take into account this historical complexity. Intellectual historians, in particular, have faced this question with regards to written sources. The question of literacy and its impact on the intellectual development of Africa is an interesting example of how historians have made some strides towards redefining the notion of a decolonized African history.
Fieldwork, Orality, Text: Ethnographic and Historical Fields of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Gabon
Authors: Cinnamon John M. 
Published: March 2012

I can claim no direct pedigree from African Studies at Wisconsin, but one of my own graduate school mentors, Robert Harms, benefitted from David Henige's and Jan Vansina's influence; all three have profoundly marked my own approaches to the historical anthropology of equatorial Africa. In this paper I draw on David Henige's illuminating and still relevant insights into the problem of “feedback,” in light of a key methodological preoccupation in my own discipline of anthropology – “fieldwork.” In particular I want to suggest how ethnographic fields are formed over time through a layering process that involves ongoing cycles of intertwined oral and written traditions.Henige's 1973 article, “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition,” prefigures by a full decade Terence Ranger's highly influential essay on “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In that 1973 article, Henige argued that given traditions were “dynamic over time.” British Indirect Rule had led the Fante of the Gold Coast to devise new oral traditions in order to take advantage of opportunities of British Colonialism. In particular, he cites the ways printed sources, especially the Bible, but also the Qur'an, colonial sources, publications, and later scholarly works, have all found their way back into oral accounts. Henige also suggests that pre-colonial oral traditions also would have been continually reworked; present practices suggest considerable adaptability and flexibility in the past.
The Intimacy of Belonging: Literacy and the Experience of Sunjata in Mali
Authors: Jansen Jan 
Published: March 2012

Literacy is a personally acquired skill, and the way it is taught to a person changes how that person thinks. Thanks to David Henige historians of Africa are much more aware of how literacy influences memory and historical imagination, and particularly how literacy systems introduce linear concepts of time and space. This essay will deal with these two aspects in relation to Africa's most famous epic: Sunjata. This epic has gained a major literary status worldwide—text editions are taught as part of undergraduate courses at universities all over the world—but there has been little extensive field research into the epic. The present essay focuses on an even less studied aspect of Sunjata, namely how Sunjata is experienced by local people.Central to my argument is an idea put forward by Peter Geschiere, who links the upheaval of autochthony claims in Africa (and beyond) to issues of citizenship and processes of exclusion. He analyzes these as the product of feelings of “belonging.” Geschiere argues that issues of belonging should be studied at a local level if we are to understand how individuals experience autochthony. Analytically, Geschiere proposes shifting away from ”identity” by drawing from Birgit Meyer's work ideas on the aesthetics of religious experience and emotion; Meyer's ideas are useful to explain “how some (religious) images can convince, while other do not.”
“Watch the Waves of the Sea”: Literacy, Feedback, and the European Encounter in Elmina
Authors: Holsey Bayo 
Published: March 2012

On 19 January 1482, a Portuguese fleet of ships under the command of Captain Don Diego d'Azambuja landed at Elmina (a small town on the Gold Coast, what is now Ghana). D'Azambuja immediately set up a meeting with the king of Elmina. King Kwamena Ansa, dressed in all of his finery, met with the Portuguese captain, and during this meeting d'Azambuja asked for permission to build a permanent settlement. At first, Ansa denied his request, stating that he should watch the waves of the sea. Just as they come to the shore, reach the shore, and go back, so too should he continue to come to Elmina, trade, and go back to Portugal. After persistent requests however, Ansa finally agreed and allowed the Portuguese to build a fort known today as Elmina Castle.I first heard this story from men and women in Elmina during field research there in 2001. When I asked people to tell me about the history of the town and gave them free rein to discuss any topic of their choosing, this was often the story that they chose to tell. Kwamena Ansa, it seems, is a local legend. His fame has extended beyond Elmina however, and into Western scholarship. In particular, David Henige has tracked the emergence of Ansa within Elmina's oral tradition. Henige argues that, while this historical figure can be traced through written sources reaching all the way back to the early sixteenth century, his recognition as a past king by local residents in Elmina has a much shorter history. Indeed, Ansa first emerged in kinglists dating back only to the 1920s and 1930s. During this time, Henige argues, local residents began reading European texts about Elmina's history in order to negotiate colonial courts. The inclusion of Ansa on kinglists represents, therefore, an example of feedback, which is the process of the integration of information from the written record into the oral tradition.
The Effect of Alex Haley's Roots on How Gambians Remember the Atlantic Slave Trade
Authors: Wright Donald R. 
Published: March 2012

Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries-long commerce that connected people living along the Gambia River to a vast Atlantic economic system, the heart of which was the sale and transportation of humans.To my disappointment, with only a few exceptions, Gambian informants did not recall much about the slave trade. In Albreda and Juffure, the two Gambia-River villages where people were most involved in dealings with Europeans during the slave-trading era, the best informants could say little beyond noting ruins of old buildings and mentioning vague doings of “the Portuguese.” In the end, only three informants were able and willing to say anything beyond the most banal generalities about the capture, movement, and sale of slaves that occurred in the Gambia River. My assessment was that in the body of stories that Gambians held in their collective memory, a vast void existed between tales of the long-ago, and likely mythical, origins of a clan, village, or state and events that occurred much more recently, in this case after the British settled Bathurst, near the river's mouth, in 1816.
Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive
Authors: Hamilton Carolyn 
Published: March 2012

Why explore the life of an archive, and what might it mean to study its “life” as opposed to writing its history? The proposition of an archive having a life is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive. Once safely cloistered in the archive, we imagine that a record, an object or a collection is preserved relatively unchanged for posterity. Under those conditions does it even have an ongoing history worth investigating, let alone a life?The efficacy of archives in affording researchers a view of a past, our awareness of the incompleteness of the glimpse offered, our gratitude for the historical accident or deliberate act that preserved the fragments on which we depend, and our understanding that particular records reflect the biases and interests of their writers, all of these recognitions concentrate our attention on the status, possibilities and limitations of records as sources. The historical disciplines have a range of sophisticated methods for mining these sources, of attending to their biases, reading them against the grain, and filling in the gaps. As historians, we acknowledge our debts to the archives, or archival configurations which house these sources, thanking fulsomely the skilled professionals who facilitate our enquiries. We rue failing institutional contexts when the conditions of preservation and care deteriorate, and where we can, we organize interventions to support archives. Much of the disciplinary practice of history depends on ideas about archives as neutral, professional storehouses, committed to holding deposited records as far as is possible unchanged over time. Indeed, this is the understanding of archives that underpins the professional practice of the archivists. Thankfully, professional archivists mostly do an outstanding job in ensuring conditions of preservation.
Doubting Modernity for Madagascar's Cactus Pastoralists
Authors: Kaufmann Jeffrey C. 
Published: March 2012

Doubt persists in pastoralist studies, but not the kind that David Henige champions in his explorations of historical methods. Nostalgia for past glories, when pastoral nomads were mighty and fierce or healthy and wise, throws doubt on today's mobile livestock herders surviving for much longer in modern times. Scholars of this sort direct their skepticism not at how they came to such a conclusion, which Henige would urge them to do, but at how “traditional” herding ways of life can possibly survive vis-à-vis “modernity.” In such a “disappearing worlds” approach to change, where students of pastoralist cultures confront their subjects through their approaching demise, documenting the ways of life of pastoralist peoples before they disappear has deeply romantic overtones.Henige's pyrrhonist skepticism aids in exposing the assumptions behind such a romantic scholarly endeavor. “Pyrrhonists demand,” Henige reminds us, “that, to be successful, all inquiry must be characterized by rhythms of searching, examining, and doubting, with each sequence generating and influencing the next in a continuously dialectical fashion.” In his Montaigne-like essayistic book,Historical Evidence and Argument, doubting does not end inquiry like a one-man scorched-earth policy, but sets David on a journey with many twists and turns and no end in sight. Along the way, the implicit has a chance to become more explicit. Methods – the ways that we search for, examine, and doubt our evidence and eventual arguments – are thus revealed more effectively when made a subject of critical reasoning and their revelatory powers questioned.
Ndukwana kaMbengwana as an Interlocutor on the History of the Zulu Kingdom, 1897–1903
Authors: Wright John 
Published: March 2012

In the six years from October 1897 to October 1903, Ndukwana kaMbengwana engaged in scores of conversations in numerous different locations with magistrate James Stuart about the history and culture of the nineteenth-century Zulu kingdom. In the 1880s Ndukwana had been a lowranking official in the native administration of Zululand; at an unknown date before late 1900 he seems to have become Stuart's personalindunaor “headman,” to give a common English translation. Stuart's handwritten notes of these conversations, as archived in the James Stuart Collection, come to a total of 65,000 to 70,000 words. As rendered in volume 4 of theJames Stuart Archive, published in 1986, these notes fill 120 printed pages, far more than the testimonies of any other of Stuart's interlocutors except Socwatsha kaPhaphu. From 1900, Ndukwana was also present during many of Stuart's conversations with other individuals.In the editors' preface to volume 4 of theJames Stuart Archive, after drawing attention to the length of Ndukwana's testimony, Colin Webb and I wrote as follows:Since these were the early years of Stuart's collecting career, it is probable that Ndukwana exercised a considerable influence on the presuppositions about Zulu society and history which Stuart took with him into his interviews. No less likely, however, is the reverse possibility that Ndukwana in turn became a repository of much of the testimony he heard while working with Stuart, and that, increasingly over the years, the information which he supplied would have been a fusion of data and traditions from a variety of sources.
Bangladesh in 2011
Authors: D'Costa Bina 
Published: March 2012

Abstract
Bangladesh has achieved some impressive social and developmental goals in its health and education sectors. It has also effectively dealt with the adversities caused by the downturn of the global economy, and focused on strengthening its military capabilities to protect its national interests. However, environmental issues, growing international scrutiny about a fair war crimes trial, human rights concerns, the India-Bangladesh border, and transit and water sharing arrangements remain key challenges.
Myanmar in 2011
Authors: Turnell Sean 
Published: March 2012

Abstract
Overall, 2011 was a year of significant change in Myanmar. By year-end, there was hope that political and economic reforms—incomplete and fragile—were at last underway. Myanmar continued to be an important regional exporter of energy and resources, but in other areas underperformed. Myanmar's international relations improved, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited at the end of November.
Thailand in 2011
Authors: Dalpino Catharin 
Published: March 2012

Abstract
Although the pro-Thaksin Pheu Thai Party was favored to win Thailand's parliamentary elections in July, the party's 53% majority gave it a mandate that was stronger than expected. However, two months into her administration, the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was challenged by Thailand's worst floods in half a century. The crisis initially exacerbated the partisan political divide and gave a new twist to the urban-rural tensions that fueled Thailand's five-year political crisis.
Cambodia in 2011
Authors: Un Kheang 
Published: March 2012

Abstract
Cambodia's economy in 2011 recovered from the global economic downturn with a rise in garment exports. Hun Sen and the ruling Cambodian People's Party further consolidated power via the exercise of rule by law and patronage politics. Relations with Thailand returned to normal; ties with China strengthened with increased assistance and trade. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal proceeded amid allegations of political interference by the Cambodian government, making the further expansion of indictments unlikely.
Singapore in 2011
Authors: Tan Kenneth Paul 
Published: March 2012

Abstract
In 2011, Singaporeans voted in parliamentary and presidential elections. The social networking media, dominated by alternative reporting and commentary, played a significant role in generating political interest and mobilizing oppositional thinking and support. Faced with a stronger oppositional presence and a politically emboldened electorate, the People's Action Party government won the elections but achieved its worst results ever.
Taiwan in 2011
Authors: Chen Ming-Tong 
Published: March 2012

Abstract
Developments in Taiwan's politics, economy, society, and external relations in 2011 were closely tied to the presidential election contest. In the months leading up to the election, incumbent President Ma Ying-jeou held a slight lead in the polls over DPP Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen. James Soong's late entry into the race had little impact on the outcome, and Ma Ying-jeou was reelected.
Integration of the Draft Sequence and Physical Map as a Framework for Genomic Research in Soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) and Wild Soybean (Glycine soja Sieb. and Zucc.)
Authors: Ha Jungmin , Abernathy Brian , Nelson William , Grant David , Wu Xiaolei , Nguyen Henry T , Stacey Gary , Yu Yeisoo , Wing Rod A , Shoemaker Randy C , Jackson Scott A 
Published: March 2012

Abstract
Soybean is a model for the legume research community because of its importance as a crop, densely populated genetic maps, and the availability of a genome sequence. Even though a whole-genome shotgun sequence and bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) libraries are available, a high-resolution, chromosome-based physical map linked to the sequence assemblies is still needed for whole-genome alignments and to facilitate map-based gene cloning. Three independent G. max BAC libraries combined with genetic and gene-based markers were used to construct a minimum tiling path (MTP) of BAC clones. A total of 107,214 clones were assembled into 1355 FPC (FingerPrinted Contigs) contigs, incorporating 4628 markers and aligned to the G. max reference genome sequence using BAC end-sequence information. Four different MTPs were made for G. max that covered from 92.6% to 95.0% of the soybean draft genome sequence (gmax1.01). Because our purpose was to pick the most reliable and complete MTP, and not the MTP with the minimal number of clones, the FPC map and draft sequence were integrated and clones with unpaired BES were added to build a high-quality physical map with the fewest gaps possible (http://soybase.org). A physical map was also constructed for the undomesticated ancestor (G. soja) of soybean to explore genome variation between G. max and G. soja. 66,028 G. soja clones were assembled into 1053 FPC contigs covering approximately 547 Mbp of the G. max genome sequence. These physical maps for G. max and its undomesticated ancestor, G. soja, will serve as a framework for ordering sequence fragments, comparative genomics, cloning genes, and evolutionary analyses of legume genomes.
Gene Overexpression: Uses, Mechanisms, and Interpretation
Authors: Prelich Gregory 
Published: March 2012

AbstractThe classical genetic approach for exploring biological pathways typically begins by identifying mutations that cause a phenotype of interest. Overexpression or misexpression of a wild-type gene product, however, can also cause mutant phenotypes, providing geneticists with an alternative yet powerful tool to identify pathway components that might remain undetected using traditional loss-of-function analysis. This review describes the history of overexpression, the mechanisms that are responsible for overexpression phenotypes, tests that begin to distinguish between those mechanisms, the varied ways in which overexpression is used, the methods and reagents available in several organisms, and the relevance of overexpression to human disease.