Joan Vincent Papers

Summary: Joan E. Vincent (November 18, 1928-April 21, 2018) was an anthropologist and professor at Barnard College known for her ethnographic fieldwork and research on British colonialism and its impact on colonized peoples' social, economic, and political relations. Most of her research was focused on Uganda and Northern Ireland, resulting in publications such as African Elite: The Big Men of a Small Town (1971), and Teso in Transformation: The Political Economy of Peasant and Class in Eastern Africa (1982). In 1995, she was granted the title of Professor Emeritus at Barnard and continued producing research until she died in 2018.

Joan Eveline Vincent was born in Surrey, England, on November 18, 1928. Her parents were involved in the war effort during World War I; her father, from Alsace-Lorraine, was employed by the anti-fascist French government under Charles de Gaulle, and her mother, born in India, was a former teacher turned civilian volunteer member of the Air-Raid Wardens Service. She remarked that her father’s Alsatian identity and antiquarian interests influenced her focus on questions of ethnic identity and history (Nugent 1999, 531). Vincent attended teacher training college at Whitelands College in London before she traveled to the British protectorate Northern Rhodesia, modern-day Zambia, where she wrote and published fiction. She lectured in history for the remainder of her time in Northern Rhodesia before she obtained a B.Sc. in Economics at the London School of Economics in 1957, the first in her family to receive a university degree.

After graduation, she taught at the Teacher Training College of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, modern-day Tanzania. While in Zanzibar, she and her students, whom she noted were not segregated by race, conducted oral history interviews in the field, capturing perspectives of a soon-to-be former British protectorate. Outside of her teaching, she encountered violence and death as a member of a reserve British police unit, the “B Specials,” and a hospital volunteer (Nugent 1999, 532). These experiences informed her later approach to fieldwork, which was grounded in historical analysis. She left Zanzibar in 1963 to earn her master's degree in political science from the University of Chicago. While in Chicago, Vincent was critical of the representation of Africa in anthropology and focused on comparative politics and class analysis to study phenomena like labor migration and military force. In 1964, she published her MA thesis, “The Social Bases of Party Conflict in Zanzibar, 1956-1963,” and began a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Columbia University (Vincent 1996, 127).

In 1966, Joan Vincent returned to Africa as a doctoral candidate and took a faculty position at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, funded by a grant from the UK's Ministry of Overseas Development. During her tenure, she transitioned from a teacher and observer to a formal ethnographer, conducting extensive fieldwork in the Teso region. This research shaped her understanding of agrarian social systems, colonialism, and political economy, themes that would permeate her later works. Her first major publication, African Elite (1971), is a case study of societal change in sub-Saharan Africa. While organized around conventional anthropological themes—such as settlement, ethnicity, and political dynamics—it was novel in its attention to the historical impacts of monetization, colonial rule, and the development of class relations. Vincent's second book, Teso in Transformation (1982), marks a significant evolution in her analytical approach, drawing from Marxist and neo-Marxist theories. In this work, she investigates how the British colonial cash crop economy established a dependent relationship between the Teso people and the colonial state, exacerbating local inequalities and fostering a rural bourgeoisie. Vincent’s analysis reflected her shift towards a historically conscious anthropology that engages with capitalist dynamics. This self-described “Africanist” period, spanning from 1966 to 1973, ultimately laid the foundation for her later research on the colonial situation in Ireland.

In the early seventies, the regional focus of Vincent’s research shifted when military dictator Idi Amin took power over Uganda in 1971. In 1973, Vincent began to research the roots of the continued political conflict in Northern Ireland after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship (Nugent 1999, 534). In an interview, she expressed that as an Englishwoman, studying Northern Ireland allowed her work to take on a critical perspective on the history of British colonialism in Irish territory (Nugent 1999, 535). Vincent’s research in this area focused primarily on Fermanagh, a county in Northern Ireland characterized by a population with political and demographic affiliations with the South (Karakasidou 1996, 2). Vincent’s contributions to this subject include a critical examination of the religious arguments that have traditionally explained Ireland’s conflict and political analysis of the role of British colonialism in Ireland’s Great Famine (Nugent 1999, 536). Vincent also studied twentieth-century political hunger strikes in Ireland as a form of resistance to imperial domination (Karakasidou 1996, 3). In an unpublished book tentatively titled "Seeds of Revolution: The Culture and Politics of the Great Famine in the Irish Northwest," she argues that British relief policy in Ireland had underlying political motives and established new class divisions in the area.

After she completed her PhD at Columbia in 1968, Vincent became an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College that fall. Over the next three decades, Vincent served as a professor of anthropology at Barnard. She was also a visiting professor at several institutions, including Hunter College, the New School for Social Research, and the University of Cape Town. She was granted the title of Professor Emeritus at Barnard in 1995, when she became less active in teaching at Barnard and Columbia but continued writing, editing, and presenting her research well into the 2010s. Following a short illness, Vincent died on April 21, 2018 (New York Times, 2018).

Sources: Joan E. Vincent Papers. Barnard Archives and Special Collections, Barnard Library, Barnard College.

Karakasidou, Anastasia. “Joan Vincent: The Identity of a Scholar.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 19, no. 2 (1996): 1–3. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24497847. Note: Anastasia Karakasidou was one of Vincent’s students and mentees.

The New York Times (New York, NY). Obituary of Joan Vincent. May 6, 2018. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nytimes/name/joan-vincent-obituary?id=16942813.

Nugent, David. “A Conversation with Joan Vincent.” Current Anthropology 40, no. 4 (1999): 531-41. https://doi.org/10.1086/200050. Note: David Nugent was one of Vincent’s students and mentees.

Vincent, Joan. “CURRICULUM VITAE.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 19, no. 2 (1996): 127–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24497860.