Africa in historiography and the history of Anthropology: reflections on “African nature” and epistemological proposals

Abstract

The production of knowledge about Africa, with the methodology of what has been called “scientific rigor”, is confused with the development of human sciences in Europe and the United States between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. As a production of human knowledge, these studies are also confused with the events of their time that shaped not only the experiences of these scientists, but also the expectations about themselves and their objects - in this case, the populations of the African continent. Therefore, the objective of this article is to understand, in the development of these sciences, the discursive practices that demarcated the supposed “African nature”.