By: Caroline Bledsoe
Jane Isabel Guyer, who served as PAS Director and NU Professor of Anthropology from 1994—2001, died in Davis, California on January 17, 2024 from complications from dementia. Born on New Year’s Eve in 1943, she had just turned 80. Jane is survived by her husband Bernie and their three children Sam, Nathan, and Kate; five grandchildren; many other family members; and legions of friends and admirers throughout the world. A brilliant and accomplished academic, Jane taught at many universities, including Harvard, Boston University, and after leaving Northwestern at Johns Hopkins University from 2002 until her retirement in 2015. Here I describe some key aspects of Jane’s career, especially in her roles at Northwestern as PAS director and cherished friend to so many.
Jane was born in Scotland, where her father was stationed in the Royal Navy during the World War II. She was the second of four children of Walter and Isabel Mason. She grew up near Liverpool, and trained in sociology at the London School of Economics, where she earned first class honors in 1965. After marrying Bernard Guyer, an American student, she moved to the US with him, and earned a PhD in anthropology in 1972 at the University of Rochester, where he had enrolled in medical school. Eventually she converted from her family’s “low church” Anglicanism to Bernie’s religion, Judaism, and attained dual citizenship.
For Jane’s university-educated middle-class British parents, the devastation wreaked on European economies by the Great Depression and World War II had sharply curtailed their career chances. And yet, as was true for so many of that generation, these experiences seemed to intensify their determination that their children would not face the same restrictions they had endured. Both Jane and her older brother Tim, a Marxist social historian of Nazi Germany at Oxford, went on to become distinguished university academics. By contrast, their no less talented younger sister Elizabeth converted to Catholicism and entered a Carmelite convent dedicated to prayer, silence, and solitude, where family members had to speak across a barrier when they visited.
Jane’s main periods of fieldwork in Nigeria and Cameroon, inspired her lifelong interests in economic transformation in West and Equatorial Africa: farming, trade, the creation of wealth and currencies, the division of labor, the impact of devaluation and structural adjustment policies, and the interface between informal and formal economies. Her meticulously documented individual as well as collaborative works emphasized people’s capacity for adaptation and invention in the face of economic challenge. Rather than extrapolate from given economic theories, she worked “upstream,” looking for empirical patterns from which theory could be drawn, then pressing on toward further discovery, while keeping a close eye on inconsistencies and anomalies. Rejecting generalizations that had cast African practices as mired in farming and trading traditions, she insisted that attentive readings of historical sources pointed instead to African societies’ constant engagement with novelty on every conceivable economic frontier. She also was careful to note the frequent centrality, in people’s explanations, of the role of spiritualism in economic life: a combination she captured in an evocative phrase, “the mystiques and the modes of life” (from “Prophesy and the Near Future…” American Ethnologist, 2007)
Jane’s “extraordinarily profound and extensive contributions” (J. Ferguson) have been hailed as among the most seminal contributions to all of Africanist scholarship as well as to economic and social anthropology in general. Her books themselves became the subjects of many special scholarly seminars and volumes: among them perhaps her most acclaimed book, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (2004), which she began at Northwestern.
Among her many formal honors and recognitions: Jane was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (2008)
Jane Isabel Guyer, who served as PAS Director and NU Professor of Anthropology from 1994—2001, died in Davis, California on January 17, 2024 from complications from dementia. Born on New Year’s Eve in 1943, she had just turned 80. Jane is survived by her husband Bernie and their three children Sam, Nathan, and Kate; five grandchildren; many other family members; and legions of friends and admirers throughout the world. A brilliant and accomplished academic, Jane taught at many universities, including Harvard, Boston University, and after leaving Northwestern at Johns Hopkins University from 2002 until her retirement in 2015. Here I describe some key aspects of Jane’s career, especially in her roles at Northwestern as PAS director and cherished friend to so many.
Jane was born in Scotland, where her father was stationed in the Royal Navy during the World War II. She was the second of four children of Walter and Isabel Mason. She grew up near Liverpool, and trained in sociology at the London School of Economics, where she earned first class honors in 1965. After marrying Bernard Guyer, an American student, she moved to the US with him, and earned a PhD in anthropology in 1972 at the University of Rochester, where he had enrolled in medical school. Eventually she converted from her family’s “low church” Anglicanism to Bernie’s religion, Judaism, and attained dual citizenship.
For Jane’s university-educated middle-class British parents, the devastation wreaked on European economies by the Great Depression and World War II had sharply curtailed their career chances. And yet, as was true for so many of that generation, these experiences seemed to intensify their determination that their children would not face the same restrictions they had endured. Both Jane and her older brother Tim, a Marxist social historian of Nazi Germany at Oxford, went on to become distinguished university academics. By contrast, their no less talented younger sister Elizabeth converted to Catholicism and entered a Carmelite convent dedicated to prayer, silence, and solitude, where family members had to speak across a barrier when they visited.
Jane’s main periods of fieldwork in Nigeria and Cameroon, inspired her lifelong interests in economic transformation in West and Equatorial Africa: farming, trade, the creation of wealth and currencies, the division of labor, the impact of devaluation and structural adjustment policies, and the interface between informal and formal economies. Her meticulously documented individual as well as collaborative works emphasized people’s capacity for adaptation and invention in the face of economic challenge. Rather than extrapolate from given economic theories, she worked “upstream,” looking for empirical patterns from which theory could be drawn, then pressing on toward further discovery, while keeping a close eye on inconsistencies and anomalies. Rejecting generalizations that had cast African practices as mired in farming and trading traditions, she insisted that attentive readings of historical sources pointed instead to African societies’ constant engagement with novelty on every conceivable economic frontier. She also was careful to note the frequent centrality, in people’s explanations, of the role of spiritualism in economic life: a combination she captured in an evocative phrase, “the mystiques and the modes of life” (from “Prophesy and the Near Future…” American Ethnologist, 2007)
Jane’s “extraordinarily profound and extensive contributions” (J. Ferguson) have been hailed as among the most seminal contributions to all of Africanist scholarship as well as to economic and social anthropology in general. Her books themselves became the subjects of many special scholarly seminars and volumes: among them perhaps her most acclaimed book, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (2004), which she began at Northwestern.
Among her many formal honors and recognitions: Jane was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (2008) and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2009). In 2012, the US African Studies Association named her its Distinguished Africanist of the year, in recognition of her lifetime of outstanding scholarship on and service to the field, and she was awarded an honorary chieftaincy by the town of Idere, where she had conducted much of her Nigerian field work. In addition, she was invited to serve on numerous advisory committees for national and international organizations. Among them: an NAS study group on Adolescent Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993), an advisory group to the World Bank and the Chad and Cameroon governments for the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project (2001–09), the board and executive committee of the African Studies Association (2006–09), and the NAS-sponsored Lost Crops of Africa (2006-2008). To all these external roles, which she called “public service,” she invariably brought cheerful enthusiasm, the highest standards of scholarship, and insights that could fundamentally reshape an entire project.
Jane as PAS director
By the early 1990s, Jane’s remarkable career had taken off. Both in African studies and in anthropology, she was becoming known as a wonderful teacher and mentor to students and young scholars, and a generous and supportive colleague. Then, in 1993, Northwestern asked her to consider becoming director of its Program of African Studies, with a faculty position in anthropology. Previously, in 1998–2000, she held a joint appointment anthropology and African American studies at Northwestern.
For Jane, the possibility of becoming the director of a program of such historical importance and invaluable library resources must have had a strong appeal. But it would involve no small sacrifice on the personal front. She would have to commute from the comfortable family home in Baltimore, where Bernie served in leadership at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and she would have to set aside her own work for long stretches of time. Everyone did their part to try to help persuade her—faculty, administrators, a wily real estate agent, and even, eventually, Bernie himself, who knew his wife had the capacity to be an extraordinary academic leader. But we all knew that the real question was more difficult: Why should such a bold, pathbreaking scholar risk stepping off her meteoric scholarly rise to take up a program management job—a move virtually guaranteeing endless days of budgets, proposals, and committees?
Despite the conundrum we all worried about, I believe that two factors had already been playing out for Jane in the background of the early 1990s, quite independently of us, that would lead her to accept the job and shape the kind of leader she became. One was her conviction about the importance of sustaining quality Africanist research and teaching in the face of national funding crises; the other was a specific theme from the African ethnography—“wealth-in-people” — with which much of her research at the time had been preoccupied.
Jane’s commitment to African studies can be seen throughout her writings, but nowhere more urgently than in a national report she had been commissioned to write by the Ford Foundation and the US African Studies Association, on the perilous state of African studies in the United States, when cold-war era federal support for area studies and foreign language training in general was suddenly in question, with potentially the most devastating consequences falling on Africa. To address this question, Jane had visited numerous universities across the country, consulting with faculty, students, and administrators, and analyzing the reams of data and documents they gave her. In her report, African Studies in the United States: A Perspective, eventually published in 1996, she directed most of her criticism to the field of international economics. She argued that not only was Africa being sidelined—a “special case” of poverty and stagnation—in development planning; it was being cast as a threat to the rest of the world’s otherwise optimistic economic future. Not only, she charged, were such assessments wrong on empirical grounds, they failed to observe the robust inventiveness and “originalities” long documented in the African historical record for constructing credible models of science. These assessments also failed to recognize the vibrant prospects Africa held as a vigorous development partner for the future.
The attention that this visionary report gained dramatically increased Jane’s scholarly profile. At the same time, it heightened her sense of the potentials that wider institutional resources might hold for shaping revisionist research on Africa.
The second factor that I believe had been playing in the background before Jane was asked to consider the PAS directorship was an idea from the African ethnography that she and others were describing as “wealth in people.” Against previous models of production in Africa that assumed efforts to produce similar skills and resources across rural economies, Jane and her Cameroonian colleague S. Eno Belinga argued, in their influential 1995 article, “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge” (Journal of African History), that for Equatorial Africa, individual identities had long reflected diverse “configurations” or “repertoires” of skill, knowledge, and social connection, even within kin and community groups. These diversities were intentionally cultivated among the young and trainees through the careful “composition” of education, nurture, and spiritual investment in each person. Whether the fruits of these efforts might benefit individuals or the collectives to which they belonged, each new achievement or relationship attained by this process became “catalytic,” capable of generating ever-more wealth in the forms of capacities and connections.
While Jane’s work for the Ford/ASA report, then, allowed her to see new institutional possibilities for shaping support for learning about Africa, the primary model she kept describing for creating knowledge within institutions seemed to come from African ideals of cultivating “originalities” among their participants.
“Federalism” at PAS
Once Jane agreed to come, it was her determination to build not on her own work as a world class scholar that others might be invited to join, but on what she saw as the potential “wealth” represented in the freshest and most experimental research of other PAS constituents. What, she asked, would other PAS member’s most compelling idea—the one they stayed awake at night thinking about—look like if it could be blown up to its greatest potential?
It was this model, what Jane called her “federalist” model of institution leadership, giving the initiative to participants that most began to define her leadership. Knowing we all had worlds outside of Northwestern that made us unique, Jane’s genius was to exploit the synergies that these ties could bring. She encouraged us to mine our individual scholarly worlds and bring them into PAS.
With support from the university and PAS staff (Akbar Virmani, LaRay Denzer, and others), Jane went into high “investment” gear, moving PAS resources and her own energies into position behind individual PAS members’ most provocative new ideas, helping to intellectually frame them and obtain outside funding for them. Such efforts might include creating special classes or training workshops or inviting leading experts and promising young scholars for talks and seminars. A new idea that resulted from this process could itself be stretched into imaginative new work, resulting in yet more winning proposals, papers, and collaborations with Africa-based scholars and institutions.
Despite the apparent simplicity of this term, of course, the federalist model of intellectual production and career enhancement for participants that Jane pursued so enthusiastically meant enormous work for her. She spent hours reading and commenting on endless drafts of our papers, book chapters, grants, and dissertations—always with rigor and insight. Whether via comments or coauthor-ships, or in late night phone conversations, she “embedded” herself with us, helping to bring together a few of those fleeting moments when our most exciting ideas might suddenly come into view: a time when time, money, and our “dream team” colleagues could most optimally be brought into the picture, to allow this idea to emerge and define new scholarship.
In many instances, this “federalist” strategy of facilitating the efforts of individual researchers to innovate and expand in both African studies and their own disciplines led Jane herself to enter a project’s picture as an idea generator and collaborator. This she did many times over during her directorship. With Karen Tranberg Hansen and Soyini Madison, she entered the debates at a conference they organized on startling new directions in contemporary African fashion. As for me, she and I spent literally hours on the phone, far into the night, wondering how to think about quantitative and qualitative data as the same thing, and how to wrest them into conversation in the same computer screen. Many of these substantive collaborations between Jane and PAS members are reflected in the authorships of the research papers, bibliographies, museum preparations, and debates reflected in many of PAS’s Working Papers (https:// africanstudies.northwestern.edu/research/publications/ papers.html). They can also be seen in the acknowledgement sections of subsequent books, papers, and dissertations of individuals who benefited from her help in shaping the work.
Needless to say, all these efforts to help cultivate individual potential allowed Africanist students, colleagues, and visitors to develop their best work to levels they could not have anticipated before. They also gave new directions to PAS itself, opening new doors for the program into new areas of research. Widely praised at the university and beyond, Jane’s efforts drew scholars from across the university and
the world. They also made fiercely committed “Jane” fans of us all.
The results were too numerous to list here. To take just a single slice in time: In its 2001(3) issue, when Jane’s most intensive program efforts were beginning to bear fruit, the PAS Newsletter announced several major programs and activities funded by a Ford grant she had secured for the program. Among them: a major planned expansion of two programs begun by previous PAS director David William Cohen: the new African Humanities Institute, and the Program of International Corporation in Africa [PICA], in collaboration with the University of Ghana-Legon. Also described in this newsletter were new collaborations with African and African American scholars, most notably an invitation to renowned Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne—later hired by the philosophy department with vigorous PAS support—to teach courses on legal and philosophical thinking in the Islamic world. Appearing as well was a new collaboration between PAS and the university’s Multimedia Learning Center, “Global Mappings: Political Atlas of the African Diaspora,” organized by political scientist Michael Hanchard, former PAS Interim Director Sandra Richards, and others, exploring linkages among transnational black politics, social movements, and world historical events in the 20th century. In addition, there was a mention of a recently concluded workshop organized by Caroline Bledsoe and Jane Guyer, on how Western medical science selectively remembers—and forgets—notions of the apparently universal “normal” body in its training, textbooks, and clinical practice (later published as PAS Working Paper no. 11).
But the big news in the 2001(3) newsletter was the announcement of the inception of the highly anticipated Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA): then, and now, the only research institute in North America specifically devoted to the study of Islam in Africa. Given the relevant faculty already in place at Northwestern, and the presence of one of the world’s greatest library collections in the field, ideas for such an enterprise had long been discussed. But it was under Jane’s leadership that the ideas, the proposals, and the funding finally came together to make it work. Since then, and under new leaders, ISITA has gone on to establish Northwestern as an international hub of research collaboration, publication, programming, and teaching in the field of Islam in Africa, facilitating intellectual exchange with Africa-based scholars, and bringing in a constant stream of visitors every year. To this day, ISITA connects a vibrant, constantly expanding international network of scholars with common interests in Islam and Africa.
Alongside with her work with individuals’ intellectual projects, Jane used PAS resources toward inspired reworkings of the PAS past. In 1998, Jane, together with David Easterbrook, then curator of the Africana Library, returned to print, with a new introduction, the classic 1958 volume Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (1998), by Melville Herskovits and his wife and collaborator Frances from their work in Dahomey [now the Republic of Benin]. In April 1998, she and Deborah Mack organized a major public exhibition in Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art, highlighting the 50th anniversary of PAS: “Living Tradition in Africa and the Americas: The Legacy of Melville J. and Frances S. Herskovits” https://africanstudies.northwestern.edu/docs/ publications-research/working-papers/guyer-mack-1998.pdf. And in her last major project with the program, Jane, with African historian LaRay Denzer, held a conference involving distinguished participants from Africa and the US that celebrated the program’s connection to Northwestern’s first African PhD, economist Pius Okigbo (1956), and re-engaged with some of his prescient challenges to economic development theory. (Later published as a collection: Vision and Policy in Nigerian Economics: The Legacy of Pius Okigbo, 2005).
How, then, can I best sum up Jane’s tenure as PAS director and friend? One was the extraordinary extent to which she went to promote a huge spectrum of the best of Africanist scholarship, both at Northwestern and in the world, whether from her own anchors lay in the social sciences, or in the humanities. But the contributions for which she was most appreciated here were her efforts to build PAS by investing so much of her time and insights in the careers of its constituents, turning all of us into eager collaborators in the quest for new understandings of Africa. Her scholarly brilliance was so big, it lifted our work far beyond its original moorings, and set it into worlds of significance we had never envisioned. In fact, the results of most of Jane’s efforts here, whether measured in time or in direct personal engagement, arguably did not appear on her own CV. Rather, they appeared on those of others, where they continue to multiply.
And yet —despite what we know were Jane’s extraordinary sacrifices of time and energy, and all the ideas she freely shared with us—it somehow seemed that the appreciation was mutual. After Jane died, her husband Bernie was unambiguous about how she had valued her time at Northwestern: It was her favorite job, he declared.
Caroline Bledsoe is professor emerita of anthropology at Northwestern University.