Intimacy in and out of the Domestic Sphere: Kinship in Africanist Historiography

Africanists had once given much thought to how the domestic field has been constituted and changing. The deep influence of Christianity on the continent—particularly but not exclusively through colonial-era missionaries—was an important development that was seen to have shaped domestic practices as well as scholarly categories used in studies of African social relations. Indeed, critical analyses of domesticity challenged static and Eurocentric models of the family to reshape debates beyond African studies. Yet it seems that domesticity, like family, has become conceptually limited, although interest in power in “intimate relations,” through the work of scholars like Ann Laura Stoler, has grown considerably without much consideration of how domesticity shapes definitions of intimacy. This paper maps domesticity in Africanist historiography, reviewing how studies of this concept expanded family, gender, women's, and slavery history while being constrained by them. In particular, the paper looks at how the very imagination of domestic space has limited scholars in their rethinking of the relations operating within it. The paper also maps “borderlands,” areas of study that may help us think of intimate relations beyond a narrow definition of the household space and of relationships as defined by reproduction: important examples can be drawn from medical history and societies in which homosocial relations condition daily life more obviously than male-female ones (some include school dormitories, female headed households). The paper proposes that family and domestic histories have been stymied by normative assumptions about the nature and practice of intimate relations; it also suggests that insights be taken from the emerging field of body histories to rethink the relationships that define social kinship and avoidance.