Abstract
King offers a necessary synthesis of how archaeology, history, and anthropology have investigated outlaws and disorder. Focusing on Africa, the chapter highlights relevant primary sources (texts, artefacts, environments) in this research, and explores the methodological implications of this evidence. King suggests that disciplinary frameworks condition scholars’ expectations of what disorder looked and felt like in the past, and that exploring outlaws in southern Africa demands breaking out of disciplinary silos. King concludes with an examination of several key inter-disciplinary concepts in this literature—including anxiety, affect, and epistemic objects—that can be used to follow habits of what she calls ‘thinking archaeologically’ through the book. This chapter also offers notes on spelling, orthography, and nomenclature used in the book.
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Notes
- 1.
Cape Archives, A.6-‘79, ‘Minutes of Evidence: Committee on Basutoland Hostilities’. Cape Parliamentary Papers.
- 2.
These collaborations are the subjects of not only the conference proceedings of the 500 Year Initiative (Swanepoel et al. 2008), but also special issues of the South African Historical Journal (2010, vol. 62), African Studies (2010, vol. 69), and the Journal of Southern African Studies (2012, vol. 38).
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King, R. (2019). Introduction: The Slow Regard of Unruly Things. In: Outlaws, Anxiety, and Disorder in Southern Africa. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18412-4_1
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