Out of Our Minds: Reason & Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa

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Description

Explorers and ethnographers in Africa all over the period of colonial expansion are on a regular basis assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new view of those early European explorers and their encounters with Africans. Out of Our Minds shows explorers were far from rational–continuously meeting their hosts in abnormal states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence. Johannes Fabian presents fascinating and little-known source material, and points to its implications for our understanding of the beginnings of modern colonization. At the same time, he makes a very powerful contribution to current debates about the intellectual origins and nature of anthropological inquiry.



Drawing on go back and forth accounts–most of them Belgian and German–published between 1878 and the start of World War I, Fabian describes encounters between European travelers and the Africans they met. He argues that the loss of keep an eye on experienced by these early travelers in fact served to toughen cross-cultural understanding, allowing the foreigners to make sense of odd facts and customs. Fabian’s provocative findings contribute to a critique of narrowly scientific or rationalistic visions of ethnography, illuminating the relationship between go back and forth and intercultural understanding, as well as between imperialism and ethnographic knowledge.

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