Panel 111: Production of Knowledge on African Realities: Ethnographic Gaze Back and Forward

Images of Africans that were constructed during the colonial period still guide scholars’ and development workers’ discourse today. Current representations of Africa draw on ethnographies and ethnology produced by researchers and theorists raised or trained within frameworks of western worldview. Earlier researchers relied on semiliterate and literate native informants with divergent linguistic and life world backdrops. Anthropological and historical foundation for current and past production of knowledge on Africans can not be separated from the tenets of Euro-American colonialism, imperialism, or neocolonialism. Ironically, both native and non African scholars still depend on classical ethnographies that depicted indigenous societies as static, in spite of the acculturation facts. This calls for initiatives to decolonize and reconstruct representations of African personality, culture and history for the sake of protection of authentic African identity. This panel intends to stimulate critical debate on the quality of existent African ethnography, ethnology and historical accounts. It seeks to highlight methodological issues and dynamics that confront both foreign and local researchers on African culture and experience. The ultimate objective is to evolve methodological innovations for the study and representation of African reality and experience in ways that can preserve self-identity of local people as active resources and mutual contributors to cultural unity-in-diversity in the context of irreversible globalization process. This panel will demonstrate how good quality ethnographic data and knowledge on Africa may be put to service of African societies. Philosophical and theoretical paradigms that can improve the scientific study of African culture and personality will also be discussed.