Disciplining the archive: African history, John M. Weatherby's Soo data, and language archives

In the mid-20th century, Africanist historians who had turned to oral tradition as a source of evidence about the past began advocating for a project of oral data archiving. The stated goals of this project bore striking resemblance to those put forth in theorizations of the language archive emerging from the field of language documentation in recent decades. Both projects have posited that archives’ main purposes are to make scholars claims reproducible by providing access to the source material on which those claims are based and to provide a multipurpose record that could benefit scholars from disciplines beyond that of the original data collector. However, these surface similarities belie underlying differences in the disciplinary contexts of the two projects that have shaped both the nature of the materials that participants in these projects collected and the reception that each research agenda found in its discipline.

This paper elucidates the unique disciplinary context of one particular corpus of audio recordings and field notes collected in the 1960s and 1970s. The corpus documents Soo (Uganda: Kuliak/Nilo-Saharan); collected by Makerere University history PhD student John M. Weatherby, it was intended to serve as the data underlying his doctoral thesis. Working as a historian and trying to make his work relevant to historians and anthropologists as well, Weatherby repeatedly watched his work get lost in the interstices between disciplines; his corpus was nearly lost despite decades of effort to find an institutional home for it. This account of how his research products were nearly lost and of my experience finding value in them as a linguist is a contribution to theorizations of language archiving and to the study of the history of linguistics in Africa.

Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change. Acknowledgement and citation: Beer, Samuel. 2021. Disciplining the archive: African history, John M. Weatherby's Soo data, and language archives. Talk given at the Rift Valley Network Webinar Series. 19/05/2021.