No abstract

It has been suggested that there is no such thing as a left-wing authoritarian, and that authoritarian attitudes do not correlate with authoritarian behaviors. Studies were done in the United States, England, and Hungary in order to obtain cross-cultural empirical data on these questions. An additional goal of the research was to use common measures across samples, which had not occurred in previous studies where comparisons were drawn. Left-wing authoritarians were not found in the United States or England, but were found in Hungary. An authoritarian attitude did not correlate positively with authoritarian behavior in any of the countries.

After two decades of research in East and East Central Africa on early precolonial history, the authors of this article began a collaborative project focused on gender and identity with an aim of addressing and rectifying categories that commonly appear in anthropological and historical studies. Our position is that present day gender and identity categories applied to the deep past are problematic because they too often miss the nuances of gender, identity, and power dynamics in Africa. This has resulted in a common perception that African women have been perpetual victims and that identity is universal and static. We acknowledge that the corpus of nineteenth and twentieth century anthropological and historical works are a rich resource for researchers if critically reexamined in light of more recent research on gender and Downloaded from identity. We posit new approaches that might inspire a conversation to create more culturally germane categories for particular African contexts. Anthropology and history have greatly influenced public understandings of women and ethnicity in Africa. Thus it is well worth a more vigorous reexamination of how we can construct more accurate historical representations both of African women's statuses in societies and identities as represented in ethnicity, traditions, or other relevant expressions.

In 2016, with the support of a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research Grant to research and write a precolonial African history of family, generations, and gender, we began building the Bantu Ancestral Roots Database (BARD). BARD is a digital repository of word-roots related to gender and life stage practices from over sixty Bantu languages. We developed it to assist us in our analysis of this large corpus of data that we used to write histories of people’s material and ideological inventions that cover the longue durée across multiple regions. BARD allows researchers with internet access to search for terms by entering at least three consecutive phonemes. If phonemes exist in that sequence in any of the 64 Bantu languages that BARD holds, those words and their meanings appear as results. In this article, we discuss the usefulness and complexities of Digital Humanities (DH) as research tools. We explain our methodology and research process using three reconstructed word-roots pertinent to our research on family and generations. The three word-roots we examine invite scholars to probe how to recover deep connections and linkages between people’s pasts in Africa and its Diasporas, particularly in ways that move beyond histories of the slave trade and enslavement. As we developed our open-access website African Social History and Data Across Bantu Matrilineal Communities (ASH-DABMC) and our database, BARD, we gained greater insight into the meanings encoded in our data even as we faced challenges. We hope the discussion of our experiences will provide an intellectual framework and inspire others considering digital projects.

No abstract