Oral, but Oral What? : The Nomenclatures of Orality and Their Implications

Librarian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, David Henige has contributed significantly to the study of African oral tradition and history, especially in his 1974 volume, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera

How 'dynasty' became a modern global concept : intellectual histories of sovereignty and property

The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty. Hegel’s references to ‘dynasty’, read with Marx’s critique, further show how ‘dynasty’ encoded the intersection of sovereignty and big property, indeed the coming into self-consciousness of their mutual identification-in-difference in the age of capitalism. Imaginaries about ‘dynasty’ also connected national sovereignty with patriarchal authority. European colonialism helped globalize the concept in the non-European world; British India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates. The globalization of the abstraction of ‘dynasty’ was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, violence, and exploitation. Simultaneously, colonized actors, like Indian peasant/‘tribal’ populations, brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality, expressed through terms like ‘rajavamshi’ and ‘Kshatriya’. These concepts nourished new forms of democracy in modern India. Global intellectual histories can thus expand political thought today by provincializing and deconstructing Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern models of collective and polyarchic power.PostprintPeer reviewe

He came, he saw, we counted : the historiography and demography of Caesar's gallic numbers

In his account of his Gallic compaigns, Julius Caesar frequently provided numbers for his opponents. These ranged as high as 430,000 and often exceeded 100,000. In modem times, Caesar's figures have been widely used to suggest, and even to calculate, population levels for ancient Gaul. In this paper, I take issue with the notion that it is expedient to treat Caesar's numbers seriously, and even more inappropriate to use them to infer overall population levels. To do this, I use logistical and textual arguments, pointing out, for instance, that Caesar's matter-of-fact discursive style is hardly warrant to take his itherwise uncorroborated numbers at face value. Rather, they should be considered as typical examples of the genre of exaggerated wartime numbers, a genre with a history reaching back as far as Old Kingdom Egypt and as far forward as the Vietnam war and beyond.Dans son récit de la guerre des Gaules, Jules César fournit souvent les effectifs de ses adversaires. Ils dépassent fréquemment 100 000 combattants et peuvent mon¬ ter jusqu'à 430 000. Ces chiffres ont été largement mis à contribution pour imaginer, voire pour calculer, le niveau de population de la Gaule indépendante. Cet article s'interroge sur l'utilité de prendre au sérieux les déclarations de César ; il semble en outre particulièrement inadapté de s'en servir pour en déduire la population totale de la Gaule. La démonstration s'appuie sur des arguments tantôt logistiques, tantôt tirés des documents. Ceci permet notamment de montrer que le réalisme du style narratif de César ne constitue pas une garantie suffisante pour prendre pour argent comptant ces chiffres non confirmés par ailleurs. Les données du général romain doivent plutôt être considérées comme le type même des surestimations auxquelles on a généralement recours en période de guerre, une habitude dont l'histoire remonte aussi loin que l'Egypte de l'Ancien Empire et qui a perduré jusqu'à la guerre du Viet-Nam, voire au-delà.Henige David. He came, he saw, we counted : the historiography and demography of Caesar's gallic numbers. In: Annales de démographie historique, 1998-1. Le mariage, règles et pratiques. pp. 215-242

Oral History Interview, David Henige (351)

In 1988 and 2010, David Henige gives us his views regarding the library system at UW-Madison. Throughout the interviews he discusses his views regarding the administration of the library and his speculations on what the future of the library system would look like. To learn more about this oral history, download & review the index first (or transcript if available). It will help determine which audio file(s) to download & listen to.In his 1988 interview with Laura Smail, David Henige discusses his opinions of the library system at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He talks about recent efforts to automate library collections using databases, his views about the administration of the library, the decline of research among UW faculty, and his speculations on the future of the library system. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the UW-Madison Oral History Program