Nancy J. Jacobs's Birders of Africa: History of a Network, which is published in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, is a major study that sets the social history of ornithology in Africa in a global framework. In it, Jacobs attends to both African and European vernacular ways of knowing birds, and she analyzes how these forms of knowledge combined to form a would-be universalizing science for the study of birds around the world. Jacobs considers ‘birders’ to be all the participants in these networks of knowledge production, including in some cases the birds themselves, like the remarkable Greater Honeyguide (Indicator indicator), a bird that leads honey hunters to bee hives and that also guides the reader through the introduction. One of Jacobs's key arguments is that ways of knowing include ways of doing that are inextricably linked to broader divisions of labor. Thus ways of knowing, and ultimately scientific knowledge, are inescapably political, shaped by social inequalities at every level.
Drawing on case studies based mainly in eastern, central, and southern Africa, Jacobs's analysis is organized into two main parts: ‘Vernacular Birding and Ornithology in Africa’, which explores unequal exchanges of knowledge about birds, followed by ‘Lives of Birders’, which uses a focus on individuals to explore the micro-politics of knowledge.
Part One, which consists of four chapters, begins with an overview of ‘African Vernacular Birding Traditions’ (Chapter One). ‘Early Birding Contact, 1500–1700’ (Chapter Two) addresses the ways of knowing that Europeans brought to their interactions with African vernacular birders. ‘Ornithology Comes to Southern Africa, 1700–1900’ (Chapter Three) is organized around an illuminating analysis of diverse naming systems and the changing significance of dead and living birds as specimens. ‘Authority in Vernacular Traditions and Ornithology’ (Chapter Four) tracks differences in relations of authority in African vernacular and European ornithological traditions in the early twentieth century while also considering how colonial power relations shaped the circulation of knowledge about birds.
The second half of the book uses finely detailed case studies to study the politics of collaborative relationships that included both Africans and Europeans. ‘The Boundaries of Birding’ (Chapter Five) analyzes the forms of racialization that structured the relations between white ornithologists and African vernacular birders in various contexts. ‘The Honor of Collecting’ (Chapter Six) is a fascinating study of Jali Makawa, an expert fieldworker who was crucial in integrating vernacular knowledge into ornithological research in regions that ranged from Malawi and Mozambique to Kenya and the Comoros. ‘The Respectability of Museum Work’ (Chapter Seven), focuses especially on Saul Sithole, a museum technician in apartheid South Africa. ‘Birding Revolutions’ (Chapter Eight) documents the emergence in the twentieth century of recreational birdwatching, an activity that was, and still is, limited almost wholly to Euro-African and expatriate elites. Throughout, Jacobs's analysis draws on a strikingly wide range of sources, including memoirs, oral interviews, and photographs, an approach that is in keeping with her previous work. (See Nancy Jacobs, African History Through Sources: Colonial Contexts and Everyday Experiences, c. 1850–1946, 2014.)
Birders of Africa is at the forefront of scholarship on how the collaborative production of knowledge in Africa contributed to the history of science. Early studies, notably Lyn Schumaker's Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (2001) analyzes networks of anthropologists, assistants, and informants at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in the mid-twentieth century. Andrew Bank's Pioneers of the Field: South Africa's Women Anthropologists (2016) is a more recent contribution in this area. A few scholars, mainly in South Africa, have explored the interactions of expertise among Africans and Europeans in botany (for example, Elizabeth Green Musselman) and the natural history of emotion (for example, Robert Shanafelt). Jacobs and Bank recently edited a special issue of Kronos: Southern African Histories (41:1 [2015]) on ‘The Micro-Politics of Knowledge Production’, which considers research networks that cut across divides of race, class, gender, and nationality.
The most distinctive feature of Jacobs's contribution to this literature is the attention she brings to the ecological dimensions of knowledge production. Jacobs's exploration of this dynamic grows out of her previous study that traces three centuries of political-ecological transformations in the pastoral-agrarian economies of peoples in the Kalahari Thornfeld in the northwestern Cape (Environment, Power and Injustice: A South African History, 2003). The attention that Jacobs gives to political-ecological factors in shaping knowledge about birds is one of the most unusual and valuable features of Birders of Africa. Jacobs's insights illuminate not only the history of ornithology in Africa, but also provide a sorely needed comparative perspective on the history of ornithology and related sciences in Europe and North America, where comparable studies tend to be more narrowly focused.
Jacobs's Birders of Africa: History of a Network stands as a model for future scholars of science and technology studies, history, anthropology, political ecology, and animal studies, in Africa and beyond.
