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E-book Poverty and Wealth in East Africa : A Conceptual History

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Penilaian

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overty and Wealth in East Africa is a conceptual history of poverty and wealth and of the poor and the wealthy over the past two millennia. It demonstrates the dynamism and diversity of people’s thinking about inequality in the region long before colonial conquest or incorporation into global trade networks. Sub-Saharan Africa’s economic woes and the poverty of its inhabitants have become familiar narratives.1 But how did African people understand wealth and poverty and how have those understandings changed across time? In this book, I ask that question for people living in eastern Uganda and examine how they sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and its absence. Drawing on the methods of historical linguistics alongside others, I have been able to reconstruct some of the ways in which people conceived of economic difference over the past two thousand years and more, and I have been able to do so for a region for which the written record is only a little more than a century old. The answers I lay out here challenge much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in East Africa’s deeper past. In eastern Uganda, a region that is roughly the size of Switzerland, and only a little larger than Guinea-Bissau, people had—and still have—a startlingly wide array of concepts about poverty and wealth and about the poor and the rich. For example, speakers of one language, Lunyole, use fifteen different word roots to talk about poverty. We can compare that to the one root that speakers of Welsh, a language of similar antiquity, use for the same purpose.2 More importantly, the different roots found in Lunyole reflected different conceptualizations of poverty, from connecting poverty and bereavement to conceiving of the poor as deceitful. In reconstructing the conceptual history of poverty and wealth in eastern Uganda, I show the complexity of people’s intellectual engagements with these concepts. I also demonstrate that this kind of history can be written for periods long before those for which we have documentary archives.Extremes of poverty and wealth appear to have preoccupied the thoughts of many people in eastern Uganda for a very long time. That preoccupation has not been static. In fact, people’s understandings and framings of these economic concepts have changed significantly over time, even while some understandings have endured across centuries. In the following chapters, I explore the diverse and dynamic ways that people conceived of poverty and wealth across the longue durée and across communities that differed in the languages they spoke, in the kinds of economic activities they prioritized, and in the ways that they orga-nized their political lives. This study focuses on thirteen modern languages that belong to two of Africa’s major language families: Bantu and Nilotic. Lugwere, Lusoga, Rushana, Lunyole, Lugwe, Lusaamia, Lumasaaba, Lubukusu, and Lu-dadiri make up the Bantu languages, and Ateso, Ngakarimojong, Kupsabiny, and Dhopadhola make up the Nilotic languages (see map i.1). Historically the economic foci of communities in the area ranged widely, from transhumant pastoralism to mixed agriculture to fishing, hunting, and gathering. They also traded in products such as iron tools or ceramic pots, in foodstuffs such as grain and fish, and in wild resources such as honey.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

338.96 STE p

Penerbit

California : Duke University Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

313 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781478024514

Klasifikasi

338.96

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Economic Development and Growth in Africa

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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