Please join Columbia's University Seminar on Contemporary Africa for:
‘Wealth’, ‘Poverty’ and the Question of Conceptual History in Uganda from c.1000 C.E
Abstract:
This paper draws on comparative historical linguistic methods and insights from cognitive linguistics to explore the history of the concepts ‘wealth’ and ‘poverty’ and ‘rich person’ and ‘poor person’ in the Eastern Nilotic and North Nyanza Bantu languages of eastern Uganda over the past millennium. This approach reveals both a strong diversity in these concepts, from associations of ‘wealth’ to power and gendered accumulation of property to associations of poverty to shame and contagion, but also to time. While much of the diversity in these concepts is only as old as the modern languages of the region, some can be shown to be of significant antiquity. Such dynamism reflects a long history of contestation and challenge around this economic binary.
Speaker's Bio:
Rhiannon Stephens is an Assistant Professor of African history at Columbia University. She specializes in the history of precolonial East Africa from the late first millennium CE through the nineteenth century. Her research interests include the intersection of gender with social and political organization; popular conceptualizations of poverty and wealth; and cultural and linguistic exchange in multilingual settings. She is the author of A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Columbia University Faculty House
Tuesday, September 22nd
6pm-8pm
Seminar Chairs: Abosede George and Rhiannon Stephens
Please RSVP to [email protected] if you would like to join the group for dinner at a nearby restaurant.