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Abstract
This article examines the rise of interdisciplinary research in Northern Rhodesia (colonial Zambia). It does this by exploring path-breaking research conducted by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute since its founding in 1937 up to the country's attainment of independence from Britain in 1964. The article argues that the rationale for the establishment of the research institute was due to the pressing need for knowledge owing to the emergence of social problems related to urban growth and labour migration by the 1930s. While not pretending to be an exhaustive survey of the work of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, the article notes that research outcomes from the Institute were utilised by the colonial administration and other stakeholders such as mining companies on the Copperbelt in order to understand the human situation in the country. By the 1950s, however, the Institute had become at variance with Government officials as the latter suspected many researchers of being sympathetic to the African political cause.
1. Introduction
Many attempts have been made to define the term 'interdisciplinarity' in research (Berger, 1972; Mayville, 1978; Stember, 1991) although none seems satisfactory. Most attempts at the definition of the term tend to sub-divide interdisciplinarity into several categories such as multi-disciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. In this article, interdisciplinarity follows the definition by Nissani (1997: 203). It implies a research approach involving a combination of two or more disciplines In the search or creation of new knowledge, operation or artistic expressions. For example, historians of the field sciences have shown how the practices associated with tourism partly formed the basis of astronomers' solar eclipse expeditions in the Victorian period and how the practices of painters, mining engineers, and prospectors came to be employed by geologists (Schumaker 1996: 237).
Interdisciplinary research in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) began in the late 1930s following the establishment of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI). It was noted that disciplinarians often commit errors which could be best detected by people familiar with two or more fields of specialisation. Anthropologists dominated research at the newly established Institute, but scholars from disciplines such as History, Ethnography, Economics, Political Science, and Geography were also fused in. These scholars came to be known as the Manchester School, after the university whose seminars were intense and testing fora for...