Rhiannon Stephens, Presidential Fellow 2005-2007
History

My dissertation explores how political discourse, agricultural change, and motherhood shaped each other in east-central Uganda from ca. 1000 to ca. 1860 CE. With an interdisciplinary approach, I use linguistic, ethnographic and oral historical evidence to excavate the history of motherhood, recasting it as a long-standing site of ideological struggle in African societies. Using developments in food production and the rise of political complexity as key loci of struggles over motherhood and reproduction I examine how such contests shaped social life for Great Lakes Bantu peoples. Central to the study is that motherhood is as much a social and ideological entity as it is biological fact. This allows me to draw connections between the ideology of motherhood at the lineage and community level and the elaborate institution of queen mother which emerged along with states in the region. Motherhood, political centralization and innovations in food production are closely intertwined. Mothers were responsible for producing food for their families, and aspirant leaders thus needed mothers as both producers and reproducers, that is as social reproducers. I am therefore writing a history of motherhood in the region, something never before achieved, and am shedding light on aspects of wider social life over eight centuries. It is only possible to write this kind of history by combining historical linguistics, ethnography, and oral and archival history both because the societies studied were oral societies until the mid-nineteenth century and because women’s voices are too often absent in the first writings which privilege elite men. In addition to the final dissertation that will result from my research I am producing a new body of linguistic evidence that other scholars will be able to draw on for both linguistic and historical purposes.

Extract from The Graduate School Quarterly, Spring 2005:
"Whereas other scholars [are] more interested in agricultural change, or in how agriculture shapes gender, Stephens wants to look directly at motherhood to reverse the flow of causality and see how a gendered institution might have directed changes in agricultural history," says advisor David Schoenbrun. He adds that he believes Stephens "will make significant contributions to the historiography of gender and reproduction, the methodology of working with both historical linguistic and oral testimonies in precolonial African history and to the historiography of African states and societies beyond the royal court."