The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

1930s, with decreasing institutional legitimation and declining intellectual stature as a
result of charges that it was ‘too subjective’ and ‘unscientific’, life history research, as a
“seemingly individualist method” eventually came to occupy a marginal research
position alongside quantitative and survey methods as well as social theory in the field
of sociology, “a discipline that was fundamentally collectivist”. 20
Biography has featured in the discipline of anthropology as well. 21 One form that
anthropological writing has taken has been the life history, an “extensive record” of a
person’s life told to and recorded by another, who then edits and writes the life, even in
the form of the autobiography. 22 The beginnings of rigorous anthropological biography
are seen to lie with Paul Radin’s study of a Native American life published in 1926.
Subsequent studies by Dyk (1938), Ford (1941) and Simmons (1942) also used biography
as a means to study Native American culture and the problems of ‘acculturation’ while
Oscar Lewis’s work on life history (1961) focused on the family in Mexico. 23 Life
histories, conceived in this framework, came to be seen as important in illustrating or
portraying culture or some aspect of culture change. 24
In spite of the popularity of some of the above biographical studies, as with sociology,
life history has occupied an ambiguous place in anthropology and has been on the
periphery of the discipline. The life history was seen as “more ‘literary’ than ‘scientific’”
and “saccharine in its sentimentality”. According to Crapanzano, the ability of the life
history to mediate the tension between the “intimate” field experience and the
20 Ken Plummer, Documents of Life, pp 57‐59.
21 For a discussion of biographies written in the field of anthropology, see Lewis L Langness and Gelya
Frank, Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography (Novato, California: Chandler and Sharp, 1981),
and Lawrence C Watson and Maria‐Barbara Watson‐Franke, Interpreting Life Histories: An Anthropological
Inquiry (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1985); see also Vincent Crapanzano,
‘Life‐Histories’, American Anthropologist, 86, 1984 for a critical discussion of anthropological biography.
22 See for example Marjorie Shostak, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981).
23 Paul Radin, Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian (New York: D Appleton & Co,
1926), Walter Dyk, Son of Old Man Hat (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1938), C.S. Ford, Smoke
From Their Fires (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1941), Leo Simmons, Sun Chief: The
Autobiography of a Hopi Indian (New Haven: Yale University, Institute of Human Relations, 1942); Oscar
Lewis, Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Randon House, 1961).
24 Lewis L Langness and Gelya Frank, Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography, p 24.
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