Tempels generalized Luba religious conclusions to all Africans, overwriting local voices

Evidence

Through analyzing conversations, Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy reflects on Bantu philosophy and the function of religion in it. Language is the most important instrument in Tempels’s research, which can be determined retrospectively as a narrative method. However, critics of narrative analysis argue that the voice of the other is absent and only interpreted by the researcher (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Tempels draws his religionist arguments from the Luba to make generalized conclusions about all Africans. He was not familiar, of course, with today’s understanding of discursive analysis which recognizes philosophy as a conflict of interests, in which the Western interpretation of reality dominates the field. A discursive analysis of philosophical, religious and cultural interpretations is pleaded, because this method emphasizes the positions of the researcher and the informant in relation to discourse. A key aspect of discourse is that it constructs hegemony. Like all forms of hegemony, it tends to be used by those already in power (religious institutes, academia, states, multinationals, etc.) to reinforce and cement their position even further. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 844

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to postcolonial critique of ethnography—similar to debates about who speaks in missionary accounts and to discourse-theory readings (Foucault) of scholarship as power.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: which other ‘authentic’ African philosophical categories turn out to be partly European in genealogy, and how does that affect Ubuntu’s legitimacy claims?