SCHUMAKER, Lyn(ette)

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: Michigan State University, B.A., 1986, M.A., 1988; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., 1994.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Mathematics Tower, The University, Manchester M13 9PL, England; fax: 44-161-275-5699. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Stirling, lecturer in history, 1994; Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, Manchester, England, Wellcome Research Lecturer, c. 1994—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Dissertation Prize, Forum for History of Human Science and History of Science Society, 1995, for "The Lion in the Path: Fieldwork and Culture in the History of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute."

WRITINGS:

Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (adaptation of Ph.D. dissertation "The Lion in the Path: Fieldwork and Culture in the History of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute"), Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2001.

Contributor of chapters to anthologies, including Colonial Subjects: Genealogies of Practical Anthropology, edited by Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, University of Michigan Press, 2000; Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts, edited by Penelope Gouk, Ashgate Publishing, 2000; and The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Medicine, edited by Roger Cooter and John Pickstone, Harwood Academic Publishers, forthcoming. Contributor of articles to scholarly periodicals.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Research in medicine in modern Africa, environmental history, and the history of anthropology.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lyn Schumaker's first book, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa, is a study of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, the oldest research institute for the social sciences in Africa. The book, a revised version of Schumaker's award-winning Ph.D. dissertation, traces the history of the institute from its founding in 1937 through 1964, when Zambia (where the institute was located) became independent. The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute was notable for having a number of African employees who took prominent roles in carrying out research, much to the consternation of the British colonial rulers of the area. Indeed, as Schumaker shows, both in the structure of their institute and in the research they did, the Rhodes-Livingstone anthropologists were hostile to the colonial system. "The treatment of the RLI researchers in Africanizing Anthropology thus avoids the standard simplistic interpretation of British social anthropologists as the ingenuous helpmate of colonial impression," commented Times Literary Supplement reviewer Peter Fry.

Several critics noted that Africanizing Anthropology should be read by people other than just anthropologists. The book "will be of substantial interest … to historians of science generally, and beyond to students of African history and the history of European colonialism," concluded American Historical Review contributor George W. Stocking. Similarly, a Choice reviewer wrote, "The author's original topic and analytical procedure (more ethnography than intellectual history) will influence many."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December, 2002, George W. Stocking, review of Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa, pp. 1679-1680.

Choice, March, 2002, W. Arens, review of Africanizing Anthropology, pp. 1283-1284.

International Journal of African Historical Studies, spring-summer, 2002, Jane L. Parpart, review of Africanizing Anthropology, pp. 516-518.

Isis, June, 2002, J. A. Barnes, review of Africanizing Anthropology, pp. 336-338.

Times Literary Supplement, January 17, 2003, Peter Fry, review of Africanizing Anthropology, p. 23.

ONLINE

Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine and Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine Web site,http://www.chstm.man.ac.uk/ (November 3, 2003), "Dr. Lynette Schumaker."

Forum for History of Human Science Web site,http://www.fhhs.org/ (June 14, 2004), "Prize Citations."*