ABSTRACT
This chapter examines imagination, however construed, as an object of anthropological analysis; imagination as part of an anthropological method. It focuses on the idea of imagination as an object of analysis, more specifically how French colonial officers' experiences of West Africa and its peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked upon their imaginations. The chapter outlines how one might use the idea of a historical imagination as method to interpolate between the fragments of an archive to construct a more rounded picture and a continuous narrative for the lives of colonial officers such as Henri Gaden. Although Robin G. Collingwood's method of historical imagination has been deployed to gain interpretative insights so as to reconstruct an account of historical events, there are limits to the scope of this method. The inclusion of madness in a historical narrative or biography may fracture the sense of coherence and rationality, and the ordered chronology of meaning.
