Expressions and Transformations of Gender, Family, and Status in Eastern and Central Africa 500-1800 CE

FAIN: RZ-249953-16

Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005)
Catherine Cymone Fourshey (Project Director: December 2015 to May 2021)
Rhonda M. Gonzalez (Co Project Director: February 2016 to May 2021)
Christine A. Saidi (Co Project Director: February 2016 to May 2021)

Collection, analysis, digital mapping, and interpretation of historical linguistic data relating to 55 societies across Bantu-speaking Africa, and co-authoring a book about social life and gender roles in precolonial Africa.

This collaboration is centered on questions about lineage and gender as dimensions of authority, identity, belonging, and worldview historically. It builds on the esteemed work of colleagues who have undertaken historical studies of gender in Africa to interrogate epistemological assumptions. Words are a portal into how people lived in past societies. We study the history and meanings of words people spoke to understand what they did, produced, and valued. We will collect a new set of linguistic data focused on spheres related to the above inquiries for approximately 55 societies across Zambia, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique. Our aim is to produce a monograph examining how historically matrilineages underpinned the way communities determined organization, inheritance, and social authority. We leverage our prior individual work in Africa for a comparative trans-regional analysis and expand the geographic and linguistic scope.

Associated Products

Perspectives on History: WHEN HISTORIANS COLLABORATE, SCHOLARSHIP BENEFITS (Blog Post)
Title: Perspectives on History: WHEN HISTORIANS COLLABORATE, SCHOLARSHIP BENEFITS
Author: Christine Saidi
Author: Catherine Cymone Fourshey
Author: Rhonda M. Gonzales
Abstract: We are three historians who’ve collaborated in a variety of ways on several historical projects over the course of seven years. In the process, our intellectual work has taken turns we never envisioned. We hope that our discussions and approaches can push us all as historians to think about what collaboration looks like in our field, the expansive kind of work it can produce, and how we might infuse worth into undervalued aspects of collaboration.
Date: 08/14/2017
Blog Title: WHEN HISTORIANS COLLABORATE, SCHOLARSHIP BENEFITS
Website: http://blog.historians.org/2017/08/when-historians-collaborate-scholarship-benefits/

Perspectives on History: COLLABORATIVE HISTORICAL RESEARCH (Blog Post)
Title: Perspectives on History: COLLABORATIVE HISTORICAL RESEARCH
Author: Catherine Cymone Fourshey
Author: Christine Saidi
Abstract: Editor’s Note: This piece is second in a series of two posts on collaborative historical research. The first post can be found at blog.historians.org/2017/08/when-historians-collaborate-scholarship-benefits/ Between 1880 and the early 1960s, all of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, was under colonial occupation by European powers. Colonial rule came with political and economic domination and contentious struggles between the colonized and colonizers over cultural and social values. Gender relations, in particular, were strikingly impacted by colonial norms and needs.
Date: 08/05/2018
Blog Title: COLLABORATIVE HISTORICAL RESEARCH
Website: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/april-2018/collaborative-historical-research-notes-from-eastern-and-central-africa

African Social History & Data Across Bantu Matrilineal Communities (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: African Social History & Data Across Bantu Matrilineal Communities
Author: Christine Saidi
Author: Catherine Cymone Fourshey
Author: Julie Hagenbush
Author: Troy Spier
Author: Ronda Gonzales
Abstract: The primary aim of this project has been to reconstruct early precolonial histories of gender, family, and status in Bantu speaking communities that have historically developed matrilineal institutions. These historical reconstructions, stretching back at times three thousand years, are rooted in understanding people’s ideas and values captured in the words communities developed. Thus language data are the core of this historical record. In addition to language data collected from modern day speakers and in dictionaries compiled over the last 150 years - consulted in libraries, archives, and personal collections - ethnographic surveys, oral traditions (written and orally recounted) have been important in contextualizing verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech. These materials provide critical context for comparative analyses and broader reconstructions. The more recently collected research materials compliment the linguistic, ethnographic, oral, and archaeological data each of the collaborators has collected since the mid-1990s. Collectively the materials provide concrete material aspects of life as well as more abstract, metaphorical that capture the real meanings of words and ideas. Literal speech can often confuse native speakers while metaphorical speech expresses layers of expansive meaning and captures the imaginations and hearts of native speakers.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: africanmatrilinealhistories.org
Access Model: Open Access

African Matrilineal Histories Database (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: African Matrilineal Histories Database
Author: Rhonda M. Gonzales
Author: Troy Spier
Author: Catherine Cymone Fourshey
Author: Christine Saidi
Abstract: This project involves collection, analysis, digital mapping, and interpretation of historical linguistic data relating to more than seventy Bantu-speaking societies living across Eastern and Central Africa. It is an examination of the structures and cultural ideas underpinning the world's Bantu speakers constructed across time and space. Our own work has focused on family relations and generational education and status. This project in particular is funded by an NEH collaborative grant: Expressions and Transformations of Gender, Family, and Status in Eastern and Central Africa 500-1800 CE (RZ-249953-16). This has culminated in several scholarly products, including a book entitled Family before Gender: A History of Central and Eastern Africa, c. 500-1900 and how historically matrilineages underpinned the way communities determined organization and inheritance. This collaboration is centered on questions about lineage and gender as dimensions of authority, identity, belonging, and worldview historically. It builds on the esteemed work of colleagues who have undertaken historical studies of gender in Africa to interrogate epistemological assumptions. We collected new sets of linguistic data and focused on spheres related to the above inquiries for approximately seventy societies across Zambia, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique. We have produced a history examining how historically matrilineages underpinned the way communities determined organization, inheritance, and social authority. We leverage our prior individual work in Africa for a comparative trans-regional analysis and expand the geographic and linguistic scope. This website invites curious people, scholars, teachers and students to explore our language evidence along with oral traditions, photos of relevant art, dictionaries, missionaries’ reports, archaeological studies and ethnographic collections of the Bantu speaking people in the Bantu Matrilineal Belt.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: http://africanmatrilinealhistories.bucknell.edu
Access Model: Open Access

Gender, Authority, and Identity in African History (Book Section)
Title: Gender, Authority, and Identity in African History
Author: Christine Saidi
Author: Catherine Cymone Fourshey
Author: Rhonda M. Gonzales
Editor: Yacob-Haliso O.
Editor: Falola T.
Abstract: This chapter covers categories that have historically shaped authority, responsibility, and identity among Bantu-speaking communities in Africa’s Bantu Matrilineal Belt from the precolonial to the contemporary era. The societies that contribute to this analysis were primarily matrilineal. In such societies, women were hardly excluded from positions of authority, but rather maintained considerable authority even where and when patrilineal models or even patriarchy crept into the social system. Through practices of heterarchy, familial relations, and lifestages, women welded authority equal to and often greater than men.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-319-77030-7_151-1#citeas
Access Model: Open Access
Publisher: Palgrave
Book Title: The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies
ISBN: 978-3-319-7703

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