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©
1987-2002 Wim van Binsbergen
Does
anthropology have a future in Africa?
Divination — and by what other means could this question be
answered — has been a significant, persistent topic in the
anthropological study of Africa, recently acquiring new depth by
the fascinating work of such researchers as Werbner and Devisch.[2] As
an anthropologist, and coming — matrilaterally, as these cases
go — from a European family background that has a tradition in
herbalism, interpretation of dreams and visions, and
psychotherapy, I have extensively worked with diviners in various
parts of Africa, seeking to understand their trade. Yet no degree
of anthropological expertise or congeni(t)ality would allow me to
answer the above question at a fundamentally different level than
the way it tends to be discussed, in Africa as elsewhere, among
social scientists: after work, over beers. I take it the question
is meant to provoke stimulating and contentious statements and to
generate discussion, in the overall context of stock-taking that
defined the Edinburgh conference on African futures at which the
present paper was first presented. I shall do my best to oblige,
in the awareness that dreams about the future are often
unmistakable indications of problems and contradictions such as
exist in the present or existed in the past. The essence of the
diviner’s task is not to predict or stipulate an unchangeable
future, but to re-attach the distressed client (anthropology? the
international community of Africanists?) to a pattern of symbols
and relations; to restore — at least for the duration of the
session — meaning and direction to that pattern (often through
somewhat cheap theatrical means which however should be
vindicated by the formal virtuosity of the diviner’s
praxeological performance); and to confront the client, on the
basis of the sense of illumination that is produced by the
session, with a limited number of alternative courses of action,
each evaluated in terms of the symbols that have been evoked...[3]
One thing should be clear from the start: much as I am flattered
by the organizers’ invitation, I consider myself not the right
person to be addressing our leading question, and to officiate in
this divinatory session.
For one thing, despite my anthropological training I am not so
sure that I still qualify as an anthropologist — having done
research, published and carried administrative responsibilities
in the emphatically multi-disciplinary environment of the Leiden
African Studies Centre for more than ten years now. Inevitably,
my views on the future of anthropology wherever in the world will
be influenced by my assessment of both the limitations and the
potential of anthropology in the presentday intellectual
environment of the North Atlantic region, as brought out in the
course of my own career.
Much more important, the time is past that others than Africans
could be in a position to define and advocate whatever is good or
bad for Africa and its future: imposing research priorities,
identifying blind spots and issuing exhortations and directions.
As intellectuals operating in an international context, our
‘dual mandate’ (!),[4] with regard to the
maintenance and development of our discipline, concerns
(a)
our home institutions, and
(b)
international scholarly exchange, through conferences,
publications, and institutional facilities for research and
writing open to colleagues on a world-wide basis.
Let it be
Africans who define the future of scholarship in Africa, and when
in doing so they subject their views to the international
academic community, then is the proper moment for others, like
myself, to comment. There are many African colleagues with whom I
feel united in our love both for the people of Africa and for
anthropology. I trust that those, who do have the mandate to
speak on the future of African institutions and contributions,
will raise the present discussion above the plane on which I, as
a well-meaning outsider, must operate; and I hope that what
little is offered here will give them inspiration and moral
support, rather than causing them irritation.
Meanwhile, the leading question, such as put before us by our
distressed client (still in the metaphor of a divination
session), in itself needs to be taken apart before an answer can
be attempted. What is anthropology? What is it doing in Africa?
Anthropology is
not necessarily what anthropologists do, nor are anthropologists
to be defined as members of those subsystems of formal
organization known as anthropology departments.
Like over half a century ago when the discipline was being
established, anthropology departments in the North Atlantic
region are once again peopled by researchers from a wide variety
of disciplinary backgrounds. But now the movement would appear to
be centrifugal rather than centripetal. Those lawyers, engineers,
linguists, musicologists and geographers of the past were drawn
into the fold in order to make rather converging contributions to
an emerging common cause, anthropology, which they believed to be
more meaningful than their own original professions. At present,
however, the development economists, agronomists, sociologists,
historians, political scientists, feminist and Marxist activists,
educationalists, statisticians etc. that have come to rub
shoulders with the anthropologists are so many signs that the
profession (now firmly established in the North Atlantic academic
structures, and with an ever increasing impact on the arts, mass
culture and the media in this part of the world) has greatly
diversified and fragmented in its contents, theoretical
orientation and underlying philosophy.
A series of rapidly alternating new paradigms, each with an
active life span of hardly a decade, has sought to remedy the
main weaknesses of the now classic anthropology of the 1940s and
’50s.[5] We
still owe a very great deal of intellectual inspiration and
aesthetic satisfaction to the anthropological classics and their
authors. If I sum up subsequent innovations and transformations
of anthropology as responses to ‘failures’, negative points,
of the classical model, this must be seen in the light of this
positive overall assessment.
These points on which the classic model was claimed to be capable
of improvement included:
(a)
Its failure to situate the anthropological endeavour, as an
intellectual movement, within the totality of evolving political,
economic, military, cultural and intellectual relations between
the North Atlantic region (the cradle of anthropology) and the
rest of the world.
(b)
Its failure to embark on an anthropology of North Atlantic
society, including its peripheral, rural aspects but also its
urban life and major ideological orientations.
(c)
Its failure to arrive, with regard to societies outside the North
Atlantic region, at meaningful statements above the local and the
regional level.
(d)
Its failure to historicize and periodicize such structure as
anthropology did attribute to the institutions of societies
outside the North Atlantic region — and to take a relative view
of such structure in the face of the historicity of micro
processes of power and conflict.
(e)
Its failure to subject such institutions (bureaucracies, towns,
peripheral capitalism etc.) as were imposed upon, or spread to,
areas outside the North Atlantic region since the last century,
to the same methodological and analytical treatment as was given
to pre-existing (‘traditional’) autochthonous institutions,
and to grasp the reality of contemporary societies outside the
North Atlantic region as a complex dialectical interplay between
neo-traditional and North Atlantic elements, each transformed
away from their respective initial models.
(f)
Its failure to offer a ready, usable, instrumental grip on
societies outside the North Atlantic region, in other words to
offer a method and a perspective through which plans for social
and economic change could be designed, and legitimated, while
observing the constraints of minimal inputs of time, finance and
specialist academic conceptualization that development agencies
favour. Below I shall argue, of course, that the latter
‘failure’, leading to current attempts to mobilize
anthropology for development, is of a different order than the
others, and attempts to address this ‘failure’ (that was not
one) have resulted, not in a positive transformation of the
anthropological discipline, but in its decline, acerbating some
of its major built-in shortcomings.
What appeared to
be a crisis, throughout the second part of the twentieth century,
of the young discipline of anthropology has in fact been an
intensive process of growth, in all these (and many more)
different directions of innovation and correction. The best that
could happen to the innovative paradigms was that they were
caught into the orbit of main-stream anthropology, and henceforth
came to belong to the standard textbook package. This seems to
have happened to the Manchester school heritage[6] (an
early, and formidable, response to the shortcomings of the
classic model, initiated and vigorously led by Max Gluckman), to
network theory[7] and to historical
anthropology,[8] and did also happen —
in which which few could foresee in 1987 when this paper was
drafted — to the paradigm of the articulation of modes of
production.[9] Other attempts, like the
peasants paradigm[10] of the 1960s and the
mobilization paradigm[11] of the early 1970s,
were less successful from the start, never succeeding to
penetrate to the lasting core of the anthropological discipline.
The result is no longer a unified discipline with classic
overtones, but a composite of schools and partial paradigms.
Because of the massive, and deliberate, contributions from
adjacent and auxiliary disciplines such as sociology, history and
political economy, the boundaries between them and anthropology
have become blurred, particularly in the field of African
studies. Yet it is meaningful to speak of anthropology as a
distinct subject, in so far as certain elements have remained
constant in the discipline since the beginning:
(a)
A set of basic theoretical instruments: the thesis of the
biological unity of humanity; the thesis of human cultures as
man-made, with an enormous range of choice cross-culturally, and
enormous capacity for change and exchange, and transmitted (from
generation to generation and across cultural boundaries) by the
learning process of socialization; a built-in sense of cultural
relativism,[12] in terms of which all
human cultures are essentially of equal value and worthy of the
anthropologist’s professional and personal respect.
(b)
On the methodological plane, these basic ideas have stipulated
fieldwork[13] as the standard method
through which anthropology acquires its principal data:
sufficiently prolonged to acquire some limited mastery in local
systems of language and symbolism, etiquette and subtle
micro-political maneuvering; and sufficiently personal, exposed
and humble to enable the researcher to emulate, within the span
of a year or two and with reference to selected aspects of the
culture, the complex learning process that people born into that
culture normally have to go through.
(c)
Largely because of the methodological preference for participant
observation, anthropology has continued to lay emphasis on the
face-to-face dimension of social life, such as enacted in
villages and neighbourhoods, urban wards and families, and inside
formal organizations. It is on this primary level that
anthropology has developed most of its skills of observation,
analysis and theory. For the modern anthropologist, the analysis
no longer stops short at that level but it now includes such
wider social-structural and politico-economic contexts as inform,
constrain or determine the level of immediate social interaction;
yet it is a basic position in anthropology that its subjects have
a face, that the researcher’s face is reflected in their gaze,
and that they be best approached for information through sharing
their day-to-day life within the confines of the local setting.
The emphasis on
cultural relativism makes anthropology an illuminating and
critical element in any modern society, potentially threatening
all established ideological and political positions, all claims
of hierarchy and legitimacy, as exist in that society. If we
cannot refute the allegation (by such authors as Asad, Leclerc
and Copans)[14] that anthropology was
nurtured — some say even sired — by North Atlantic
imperialism, the discipline has since long shown its potential to
take apart and expose the ideology even of imperialism, and of
the formal organizational structures of domination that served,
and still serve, the latter. Anthropology almost by definition
sides with the peripheral, the non-vocal, that which is outside
the political and economic power in the modern world. If
anthropology does not actually champion the cause of peripheral
groups, their members and institutions (it has been known to do
just that, in the anthropology of advocacy),[15]
it does at least document their existence, painstakingly and
usually with love.
Anthropology is perhaps as far as we can go[16]
in the development of an intellectual meta-language that allows
us to speak, reflexively, objectively and comparatively, about
human actions and institutions, including our very own.
Admittedly, it has not taken us very far. Even anthropology is
made by actors, and they have their own specific class positions
and interests at, at least, three different levels:
(a)
The micro level of the relations of production by which
anthropology itself is being made; is there not some Primal Scene[17] here — repressed as it were from
consciousness for the sake of our professional sanity — as
regards
•
the forms of appropriation and control that constitute the
habitual anthropological strategies of information gathering and
data processing, working transculturally with informants and
interpreters;[18] or
•
the processes of research topic selection and intellectual
censorship that govern the relations between junior researchers,
directors and funding agencies, etc.?
(b)
Anthropologists, as members of their society, have tended to be
middle-class academic workers, implicitly relying on the modern
state for the maintenance of the institutional framework
(buildings, libraries, computers, salaries) within which the vast
majority of their work is carried out. The mass unemployment that
hit North Atlantic anthropologists in the 1970s still does not
(yet) seem to have given rise to a fundamentally new,
extra-institutional, intellectually defiant or subversive Lumpen
-type of anthropology; if it has, my own establishment blinkers
have prevented me from spotting it. How much of the specific
rationality of the modern state and its institutions, — how
much of our class dependence as a professional group —, has
been incorporated in our anthropology without us realizing this
or taking critical precautions? Clearly, anthropology could only
arise, as a critical and comparative reflection, in a complex
industrial society whose ideological tissue had been torn by
secularization, capitalism and the rise of new classes and
political structures, in the course of the eighteenth and
nineteenth century. But did anthropology’s subsequent
professionalization further increase this critical distance to
North Atlantic society and its power structure, or did it amount
to a paralyzing incapsulation, neutralizing anthropology by
bringing it back under the hegemony and control of the state, its
institutions and its flow of material resources? Did not
anthropology lose its bite once it became enshrined in the
vulnerable middle-class careers of anthropologists? The current
pressure to redefine anthropology in terms of development
relevance, to which I shall come back below, suggests that these
questions have taken on a new relevance today.
(c)
When at home and when out doing fieldwork, North Atlantic
anthropologists implicitly share in the privileges and the power
of the northern part of the world, as against the South.
Anthropologists’ professional (and ultimately state-protected)
access to intimate aspects of social life outside the North
Atlantic, when reported in the idiom of discourse of the colonial
era, did represent a form of intellectual appropriation and
humiliation against which, e.g., Africans in the nationalist era
rightly protested.[19] Has anthropology since
managed to shed these connotations?
With the
exception of the intercontinental class dimension, these class
limitations of anthropology are left implicit if not swept under
the carpet, in most discussions of the profession. They are of
immense importance however, when we try to assess the possible
place, and the future, of anthropology outside the North Atlantic
region. Our leading question (‘What is the future of
anthropology in Africa?’) can only be answered positively, to
the extent to which we manage to argue the possibility of
shedding this threefold class bias of North Atlantic
anthropology, and to arrive at something that is politically and
ideologically as universalist as anthropology has always claimed
to be.
What
anthropological actor could emulate the legendary Baron of
Munchhausen,[20] and raise herself or
himself (intuitively, women — who have always contributed to
anthropology at a par with men — would seem to stand a better
chance, because of the class-like implications inequality of
their own gender position) by the hairs out of this swamp?
Certainly not I.[21] But there are a number
of considerations which yet seem to argue, if inconsistently and
inconclusively, in favour of anthropology.
One positive point could be inspired by that genial
misinterpreter of early (Australian) anthropology, Emile
Durkheim.[22] The social sciences are
based on the insight, most clearly formulated by him, that the
social represents a mode of factuality external to, distinct from
and not to be reduced to, the individual. As a systematic,
organized and enduring set of ideas and actions, as an
intellectual institution, anthropology inevitably has its roots
in the petty class interests of anthropologists, yet may
represent something capable of ultimately transcending these
interests.
Inevitably, the class implications of anthropological actors have
partly determined the contents of modern anthropology. But
precisely how? Apart from rather general and sweeping
allegations, we have frankly not progressed very far in
identifying these ideological biases in detail and correcting
them explicitly. Allegations of a politically mercenary attitude
among main-stream anthropologists of the colonial period[23] appear to be rather anachronistic, except in
some isolated cases, such as the utilization of anthropological
notions in the ideology of South African apartheid (as exposed by
Sharp).[24] Meanwhile, on the
positive side, the various transformations from classic to modern
anthropology, as summarized all too briefly above, suggest that
over the past few decades an enormous amount of sincere creative
energy has been invested in producing an anthropology that at
least takes some deliberate critical distance from the class
ideologies of anthropologists of the classic era, such as we
perceive them now. Someday our successors may hopefully do the
same for us. African colleagues, such as Mafeje, Magubane, Okot
p’Bitek[25] — to mention only a
few —, have contributed significantly to the contemporary
transformations. Their work is a indication that at least the
intercontinental class biases in anthropology can be made
explicit, and can be corrected, without immediately destroying
the anthropological discipline as an intellectual institution as
a whole; its contents cannot be entirely reduced to North
Atlantic intellectual domination, hence its critical appeal to
academic minds outside that region. These authors were clamouring
for a better anthropology, not for the abolition of anthropology.
Their efforts clearly show that anthropology as a mode of thought
is not really ‘owned’ by the North.
Nor could it be. Ultimately, the appropriation of academic
knowledge by specific class interests is challenged, at least
partially, by the fact that there is a limit to the extent to
which the main instruments of academic production, books, can be
kept from free and wide circulation. Moreover, no one is born a
scholar, so scholarship is reproduced by constant recruitment
(through education) from among non-scholars. Despite some
well-known cases of auto-reproduction of anthropological
positions of privilege from generation to generation,[26] most contemporary anthropologists were
recruited from milieus that had not produced anthropologists
before — nor academics in general, for that matter.
Particularly in the anthropological discipline, which has
internalized so fully the notion that human culture is not
acquired by birth but only transmitted through a learning
process, the catchment area for recruitment has always tended to
be very wide, including members of societies outside the North
Atlantic region. Perhaps, their earlier crossing of
(sub-)cultural and social-class boundaries in the course of the
process of becoming an anthropologist, has helped colleagues from
the Third World — or colleagues from working-class milieus in
the North Atlantic (like myself), for that matter — to cross
similar boundaries again, professionally, in fieldwork, once they
had become anthropologists.
Possibly, also, anthropologists of the latter types may have been
less prone to completely entrench themselves in the class
implications that yet attach to all anthropology. More
importantly, participatory fieldwork, which has continued to form
the hallmark of anthropology, puts the researcher in position
that is, both politically and epistemologically, absolutely
unique among academic disciplines. As the standard research
praxis stipulated by the profession, fieldwork contains the basic
philosophical tenets of anthropology: culture is learned;
therefore research means learning a culture that is perceived as learnable
much more than as exotic; and that culture comes ever closer
to the researcher, revealing its internal structure, meaning and
beauty ever more fully; therefore anthropological research is an
initially painful but ever more gratifying dependence relation
between the humble role of the researcher and the dominant role
of the informant.
All this means that on the interactional, practical level
anthropological fieldwork in itself offers a process of
transcultural encounter that at least partially resolves and
transcends the class implications of anthropology. This is very
clear at the intermediate and the intercontinental level; it is
rather less obvious at the micro level of the relations of
anthropological production in fieldwork, about which each
anthropologist has interminable private tales to tell but about
which we as a profession have far too little systematic and
public knowledge — which is largely avoided as a topic in
published anthropological discourse. In fact, the temporary
resolution of the class tensions implied in fieldwork is among
the basic skills of the anthropologist: if he or she falls short
in this transcultural interaction management, the productive
field relations (the ones that combine instrumentality with
intimacy, trust with social calculation) from which most valuable
information is to come, will never be established. The social
control that the profession exercises over its members in this
connexion should not be underestimated: the fieldwork process is
both too subtle, and too recognizable even from the finished
ethnographic product, than that too many bad fieldworkers could
get away with failure on this point. At the same time we had
better admit that many anthropologists, during a spell of
fieldwork or during their periods of absense from the field, have
experienced major conflicts between themselves and their local
research participants precisely when they could no longer
dissimilate the class contradiction in fieldwork (the
contradiction between informants more or less freely offering
information and services, and researchers building, upon these
spoils, academic careers that — however uncertain and despised
from the point of view of North Atlantic altenatives — from the
perspective of most Third World research participants can only
appear as unbelievable lucrative).
Desite such tensions it is a common anthropological experience
that many informants greatly enjoy the personal exchange at the
boundary between cultures in the context of fieldwork. The class
implications of anthropology are nowhere more effectively
dissimulated, even dispelled, than in the field, by both
researcher and informants. Here a perspective of transcultural
communication is gradually agreed upon, in the course of one’s
fieldwork, in which the anthropologist’s work takes on a
specific significance also in the eyes of the informants: to put
on record fading institutions that are dear to the latter, to
express an emerging ethnic identity in such a form (academic
discourse in an international language) as carries weight with
the powers that be at the national level, etc. Here the
anthropologist is most appreciated by the people if she acts in
accordance with their expectations and viewpoints; thus she can
interpret their culture to the outside world, but it will be much
harder for her to translate the outside world to the local
people, if such messages from the outside threaten established
perceptions, values, and identity constructs. For fieldwork, a
receptive humility is professionally encouraged, and in such a
frame of mind the fieldworker may not be able to explode a local
stereotype, deceptive identity construction, patently wrong
reading of regional history — as I experienced when in the
course of decades of fieldwork contact with the Nkoya people of
western central Zambia, the publications that contained my
academic attempts at radical deconstruction of their recent and
vulnerable ethnic self-identity were turned, by them, into ethnic
propaganda.[27]
It is not in the field that anthropology is being written.
Another basic anthropological skill is to take a radical distance
from the intimacy of field participation, and to selectively
rearrange and transform the field information so as to make the
written product acceptable within the formal patterning of
academic production, rendering that product conducive to academic
goals (degree, career, competition between departments, paradigms
and national schools of anthropology etc.) that are completely
irrelevant to the informants and often almost betray the terms of
their initial co-operation. The payoffs the informants had
envisaged during fieldwork, become much delayed by-products of
the project’s main output — if they materialize at all. In
pursuance of middle-class security as a professional, the
anthropologist tends to sacrifice the transcultural intimacy of
his or her fieldwork. So, while the anthropological encounter
contains the potential for a resolution of the built-in class
conflict at the micro level, it fails in the end, in the final
product.
Meanwhile, despite the discipline’s cognitive emphasis on
cultural relativism and universalism, the intercontinental class
dimension continues to be reproduced in contemporary anthropology
on the organizational side. The production and reproduction even
of a transformed and critical, post-classic anthropology has been
largely monopolized by North Atlantic academic institutions. In
the nationalist era, anthropology on African soil had often to
disguise as either sociology or history. This situation has
somewhat changed now, and we could cite hundreds of names of
African colleagues engaged in the pursuit of anthropology in
Africa today. Yet it is not by virtue of some perspectival
distortion that anthropology as a field of academic interaction,
where power is generated and resources are allocated, still
appears to be largely ‘owned’ by the North. Anthropological
training institutions, collections, libraries, research funds,
chairs, journals are in great majority situated in, or initiated
and controlled from, the North Atlantic. Our colleagues who are
permanently living and working in Africa are almost by definition
peripheral to the main-stream of the discipline.[28]
We are already
approaching the end of our divination session. While I have
attempted to refine our client’s question as put before the
oracle, and to show some of its less manifest implications, I
have surely not been able to captivate your attention
sufficiently to effectively conceal from your perception my own
deliberate juggling with the divinatory apparatus, and to put
you, praxeologically, in such a susceptible state of
consciousness that my next pronouncements will appear to you as
eminently true and illuminating. My limited language skill, and
the fact that many of you are not anthropologists, may have
something to do with this failure. However, many African diviners
manage to exercise their trade across cultural and linguistic
boundaries, and to convey, in the course of their session, a
sense of relevance that initially would not seem possible
considering the great difference in cultural background and
language use between themselves and their clients; in
anthropology as elsewhere, there is nothing like the original.
I have, meanwhile, tried to evoke a set of symbols that may
appeal to you and that may add heightened meaning to our initial
question: the image of anthropology as a meta-language for the
detached appreciation of human action and human institutions,
with a well-developed sense of relativism, equality,
understanding and admiration. Such anthropology is not the
intellectual possession of North Atlantic academics but may come
to be recognized among the positive universal achievements of
mankind. It enshrines a substantial part of the reflection,
comparison and criticism that have constituted the proper domain
of intellectuals in a changing society whenever and wherever. It
makes anthropology a subject worthy of our love and dedication,
in Africa as elsewhere. With its built-in emphasis on the local
and regional level, its claims to represent the non-vocal and the
peripheral in their own right, and its well-developed methods to
approach these subjects and arrive at valid statements about
their actions and institutions, anthropology can be expected to
have a positive role to play in some of the most significant
social and ideological processes going on in African societies
today: the accommodation between peasants and urban proletarians
on the one hand, the state and its formal bureaucratic
organizations on the other; and also among the educated elites of
Africa — to whom the finished products of anthropology are as
available as the international book trade allows (which is not
good enough by far) — anthropology offers some of the means to
come to terms with their own background and heritage.
So much for the exalted symbolic vision. I have proceeded by
indicating the negative elements that yet taint this
anthropology: its threefold class implications, which may be
temporarily and partially resolved — but only subjectively —
and transcended in the concentrated situation of anthropological
fieldwork yet form part and parcel of the praxis of anthropology
at our North Atlantic institutions of learning, primarily because
of the way in which the discipline is organized and in which its
resources and power are unevenly distributed across the
continents.
Therefore, if anthropology is to realize its potential future in
Africa, it has to become truly intercontinental not just in
theory and thought (it has been that from the beginning) but
particularly in organizational structure: in the location of
resources (books, research money, vehicles, computers, Internet
access, opportunities for publication), initiatives, power,
institutions.
Ever since the majority of African territories gained
independence in the 1960s, North Atlantic Africanist
anthropologists have sought to protect their own and their
students’ access to research sites in Africa, trading logistic
support, prestigeous invitations and appointments for African
colleagues, assistance in publishing and occasional teaching at
African universities, for that much coveted piece of paper: the
research clearance. In doing so we have implicitly perpetuated
the intercontinental class dimension of anthropology. At the back
of our minds there has lingered the assumption that, when all is
said and done, the anthropology of African societies is best left
in the hands of North Atlantic anthropologists.
So far, our African colleagues, their research institutions and
boards, and the national immigration departments, have been
rather patient with us, and have by and large tolerated our
continued presence — occasionally even praising our
publications when and if they came out, and when and if they
happened to be made available to our African counterparts. Yet,
in the long run, the best way to eradicate Africanist
anthropology, first in Africa itself, and soon also in the North
Atlantic, is to hold on to the North Atlantic initiative and
professional power in Africanist research. If the discipline is
to make all the positive contributions to African society, and so
to the global society, we pretend it could make, then it must
attune itself to the political and economic realities of the
African continent today and of its relations with the rest of the
world.
This reality is immensely complex and contradictory, but even so
it should be clear that, after decades of North Atlantic cultural
and ideological domination largely brought about by other
institutions than anthropology, the necessary reconstruction of a
viable and dynamic self-image among Africans and African
societies has to be primarily undertaken by Africans themselves.[29] Here intellectuals from the North Atlantic
can at best perform such ancillary roles as assigned to us, or
requested from us, within the framework of research plans and
priorities drawn up by African institutions. In so far as our
North Atlantic Africanist research seeks justification in terms
of a claimed contribution to contemporary and future African
society, the most obvious touchstone for that justification lies
in the confrontation with such plans. This is not to say that
such anthropological research in Africa as primarily derives from
North Atlantic research priorities, is automatically unjustified.
Much research was, and still is, proposed by reference to fine
points of anthropological theory as developed at North Atlantic
centres of learning. Sometimes such projects do contribute to the
theoretical development of the anthropological discipline in
general, and should therefore be encouraged. But in the context
of obtaining research clearances such research should not pretend
to be primarily contributing to current intellectual
responsibilities and priorities within Africa; research
permission in this context is an intercontinental, bilateral
prestation from the South to the North, and it should be traded
off against similar or related services extended from the North
to the South.
Turning now to the potential of anthropology to represent
peripheral regional and ethnic groups and institutions (such as
chieftainship, puberty initiation), whose position and status in
contemporary African nation-states may be, somewhat irreverently
(and with the same implications of self-imposed global
responsibility), compared to those of endangered species: Yes,
anthropology can do this, and time will tell whether in specific
cases it was a good thing to do — or rather amounted to
championing antiquarianism and obscurantism (as certain African
and Marxist critics would certainly claim). But here again,
considering the threefold class implications of anthropology, it
it to be preferred that our African colleagues occupy themselves
with these tasks, at their own discretion, on the basis of their
own assessment of political necessities and room for maneuvering,
yet with our unwavering moral and material support.[30]
Such support is not entirely without risks, if our main goal
remains, mercenarily, to safeguard our own direct access to
African research sites. The aloofness of peripheral or otherwise
muted groups in Africa is not an accident of nature or history,
but part of contemporary politics. The African continent has
become characterized by the weakness if not downright repression
of extra-governmental foci of organization, opinion, knowledge
and criticism, cultural and institutional creativeness.
Post-colonial states seek to impose their political and
ideological control upon the individuals and groups residing
within their territory, streamlining their experience and their
performance into controlled uniformity and submission. African
anthropologists now constitute the main (not the only) group to
which the implementation of the positive promise of African
anthropology is to be entrusted, but their attention for certain
groups, themes and problems is bound to touch on political
sensitivities. As concerns the relation vis-a-vis the state, the
class position of African intellectuals including anthropologists
may not — in terms of financial and institutional dependence
— fundamentally differ from that of their North Atlantic
colleagues, but there is certainly an enormous difference in
degree: as regards options and alternatives, but also as regards
proximity and access to politicians and policy makers. Given the
reality of this dependent (if not altogether uncomfortable) class
position, representing peripheral groups should be taken in a
scholarly, not a political sense. Anthropology has a role to
play, not primarily because research can generate political
support or consciousness (a rather rare occurrence), but because
of the discipline’s basic philosophical outlook as outlined
above. The prolonged and humble exposure to a specific local
interaction setting is not only salutary and illuminating to the
individual researcher no matter from what continent — it may
also help to restore a general respect for peasants and urban
proletarians in the intellectual and political debates concerning
the planning and implementation of development in Africa today.[31] (Whether the anthropological contribution in
the development context could go further than this, is a question
I shall address at the very end of this paper.) The politically
relevant questions can readily be translated (without losing much
of their critical relevance) into an agenda for future Africanist
anthropological research. Lest I too, after all, should encroach
on a domain which can only be properly demarcated by my African
colleagues, let me briefly indicate that such an agenda would
include the following items, among many others:
(a)
In an attempt to enrich the existing studies (by political
scientists and administrative lawyers) with specific
anthropological approaches (intimate personal detail,
transactional historicity and connections with other life sphere:
kinship, patronage, friends and neighbours) one should address
more systematically the ethnography of modern bureaucracy and of
state penetration at the local level — including the
transformation and manipulation of pre-existing notions of power
into modern political, administrative and religious
organizational bodies.
(b)
The ethnography of peripheral capitalism, with emphasis not only
(as hitherto) on the economic aspect of capitalist relations of
production and their articulation to pre-existing modes (cash
cropping, migrancy, the urban informal sector etc.), but also on
the ideological and experiential dimensions of peripheral
capitalism: e.g. the radical reconstitution of time, space,
person, body and self that springs from the commodification of
labour and its products, and from participation in the formal
bureaucratic organizations by which peripheral capitalism is
increasingly patterned.
(c)
The ethnography of peripheral identity formation, addressing such
fundamental issues as: ethnography as a basis for historiography;
ethnicity and incapsulated so-called traditional rulers; and the
manipulation of tradition and neo-tradition as ideological
constructions in the context of nation building.
When it comes to the class position of African intellectuals as
compared with the peasants and proletarians who, if already by
sheer force of numbers, should continue to constitute the main
subjects of future Africanist anthropological research, we need
not resort to populist myopia, as did the negritude movement some
decades ago; of course our African colleagues occupy a
middle-class position in their national society — but theirs is
at least not tainted by intercontinental class implications as
ours is, while the fact that the African anthropologists’
research praxis is embedded in an incomparably wider general
participation and societal (including linguistic) competence in
the national society attenuates and sometimes even takes away the
class implications of the production of anthropology at the micro
level. In other words: they might do fieldwork without needing
interpreters and extensive clearances, and in their home area...
Our professional commitment should concentrate on building a
strong, African-based anthropology, with all the trimmings of
first-class libraries and collections, material research
facilities, international and intercontinental academic
leadership. If we love Africanist anthropology, we should create,
much more consistently and wholeheartedly than we have done so
far, the conditions under which African colleagues can take over
the subject, or most of it. Once that has happened, we need not
to worry about our own occasional access; as Africanists, we all
know African hospitality from experience!
Probably to the
surprise of my audience, I have failed to link the future of
anthropology in Africa to the study of development and to the
implementation of development projects. Contrary to the many
other omissions in my argument, this one was deliberate.
Yet the dominant discourse within which Africanist research from
the North Atlantic area is now being proposed, funded, executed
and written up is that of development, development co-operation,
policy relevance.[32] Often the issues
concerned have some theoretical basis in the anthropological
tradition, or could be linked to such a basis, but neither
detached ethnographic description nor theory formation feature
any more as manifest primary motives in Africanist
anthropological research. Even if there is an implicit
orientation towards anthropological theory and description, the
idiom of development relevance tends to be adopted in
applications for research funding since that forms now simply an
absolute condition for sheer admittance to the very strong
competition over research funds.
It would have been praiseworthy if behind this trend there was an
awareness (based on open and passionate intellectual debate) of
the obvious intellectual limitations of anthropology. But the
real driving force behind this trend seems to lie in the growing
disenchantment, and subsequent financial dissociation, between
North Atlantic political elites and the universities; academic
freedom in the selection and execution of research requires a
context of material security, but in stead researchers are forced
to operate as entrepreneurs on a partly non-academic market of
research funds voted in a context of development co-operation.
Even in specific cases where the actual financial pressure is not
particularly acute, subtle mechanisms of self-censorship and
mutual social control at work among the academic community make
sure that research proposals tune in with the dominant ideology
of developmentalism — the current ideological framework for
North Atlantic dealings with the rest of the world. As
researchers and academic administrators we have become rather
good at identifying and selecting research topics whose
development potential and societal relevance is unmistakable, and
at re-phrasing our academic pipe-dreams, pruning the theoretical
and ethnographic interest and processing an original inspiration
into the jargon of fundable proposals.
Over the past quarter of a century we have seen plenty of
anthropologically-inspired missions, explorations, surveys,
reconnaissance studies, feasibility studies, etc., all conceived
within a context of development co-operation. Their logic, time
schedule, perception of the local societies under study shows a
wide range of variation, and often the professional idiom and
even the fieldwork praxis of anthropology may have been adopted.
Still, I cannot think of these attempts as anthropology in terms
of the definition offered above. The role of intercontinental
dependency relations in development cooperation; the mediating
and often exploitative role of post-colonial states and their
bureaucratic and political elite in the implementation of
development projects; the pragmatic, goal-orientated, routinized,
level of intellectual production in development contexts; the
massive consensus as to the primacy of the capitalist and
bureaucratic logic and the desiderata they prescribe — all this
may constitute an increasingly dominant, competent, complex,
perhaps even a legitimate, intercontinental discourse,[33] but it is not the discourse of anthropology.
To the development discourse anthropology remains an auxiliary
subject, offering among other things ready-made, digestable and
respectable (but already obsolete) models of interpretation for
impatient and overworked development workers.
To claim a more central position for anthropology in the
development context, — to advocate climbing the development
band-wagon as anthropologists, would simply mean to leave the
intercontinental class implications of anthropology unanalysed,
and trading them for another, now more fashionable version of
intercontinental domination. The best anthropology could offer in
this context is a profound and systematic critique of the
development discourse; however, considering the impressive amount
of political power and material resources that is invested in the
development industry, it is hardly realistic to base the future
of anthropology on such a desirable critical role.
Some indication of the future relations between anthropology and
development can already be gleaned from the debate on ‘culture
and development’, now gaining impetus in many European
countries:[34] without context,
ideological history or critique, without any situational analysis
of the multiplicity of culture nor any perspective on the
politico-economic conditions under which culture may, or may not,
take on a relative autonomy, a dated, fossilized concept of
(other people’s) culture is now being proposed as a panacea
when it comes to the explanation of the relative failure of a
quarter of a century of development aid: ‘they may not have
developed as stipulated, but that is because all the time they
had their own culture, and that may yet be a positive sign of
identity...’ Anthropology ought not to lend itself, but to
challenge, to such a new form of paternalism and ideological
mystification.
However, the situation is not always so clear-cut as I suggest it
to be here. For often it is not distant outside agencies, but
African institutions and the informants themselves, who expect
‘development action’ from the anthropologist, during or after
the fieldwork. Then the anthropologist is in a position to bring
to bear the best his profession has to offer, in terms of local
knowledge, systematic analysis and communication skills, and use
that to negotiate between development agencies and bureaucracies,
and the people who extended their hospitality and co-operation in
the course of fieldwork. They should not become the victims of an
intellectual quest for purity such has dominated the present
argument.
When I went
through the above text in order to add, fifteen years later, the
bibliographical references it lacked it its originally published
form, I was torn between two impressions. On the one hand the
text seemed to survive as a summary of the beauty and the
pitfalls of anthropology. On the other hand the text appeared as
remarkably dated, throwing in relief the many developments which,
over the past one and a half decades, have taken place in Africa
and in Africanist anthropology. A full account on these points
would mean a new paper. Let me merely indicate a number of points
that readily come to mind.
In my 1987
argument I sketched a positive picture of the unique contribution
of anthropology as giving a voice to the voiceless, representing
peripheral institutions and people who otherwise would perish
unnoticed. I am afraid that this well-intended position, largely
inspired by my experiences among the Zambian Nkoya, carried more
of the ‘White man’s burden’ than I cared to admit at the
time.[35] Subsequent developments
have shown that many African institutions, even those peripheral
to the postcolonial state and its imported rationality, can
surprisingly well take care of themselves and show a remarkable
power of resilience, even without of any preservation attempts on
the part of anthropologists. If we may concentrate on the two
topics mentioned in my article: chieftainship and puberty, far
from disappearing under modern conditions, have made a remarkable
come-back in the 1990s, and the main contribution of North
Atlantic research on these topics has been to record this
resilience and identify its probable causes. The available
research suggests two major factors among others: the fact that
these institutions are time-honoured ways, of proved
effectiveness, to deal with perpetual central issues local
societies (authority, order, the management of conflict role
preparation, gender and age differences, the acquisition of an
effective social identity); and the fact that they draw on
sources of cosmological meaning and self-identity whose continued
relevance may have been eroded by modernisation, the advent of
capitalism etc. in the course of the twentieth century, but far
from destroyed.[36]
Also in the
beginning of the third millennium, it remains difficult for a
scholar working in Africa, to compete with those stationed in the
North Atlantic. Yet, since the late 1980s a number of positive
developments have taken place concerning the localisation of
African anthropology, and largely in the direction indicated in
my 1987 paper, with African anthropologists’ having Internet
access, attending intercontinental conferences, obtaining
temporary fellowships in the North Atlantic, being the objects of
positive discrimination on the part of well-intending government
agencies in the North, and especially developing their own
continental and regional platforms of scholarly co-operation,
such as CODESRIA, with their own fairly localised and independent
systems of funding, publication, awards, definition of
continental and regional research priorities, international
conferences etc. And there is much more. African academic
philosophy, having started in the 1950s with the works of Kagame
and Diop,[37] has further established
itself as a globally recognised expression of self-identity.[38] Cosmopolitan philosophers from Africa,
foremost Mudimbe and Appiah, have successfully broken through the
continental boundaries of African philosophy’s orientation,
illuminating both Africa’s predicaments as (especially in
Mudimbe’s work) providing a sound epistemological critique of
North Atlantic knowledge production on Africa.[39]
Afrocentricity[40] and the Black Athena
debate[41] (intellectual
developments independent both African philosophy and frowned upon
by the cosmopolitan philosophers from Africa) have created a
framework in which new and inspiring questions can be asked about
Africa’s place in global cultural history — questions which
have since been picked up in the political arena around the
concept of the African Renaissance (first formulated by Diop, now
reformulated by the South African president Mbeki).[42] This last points reminds us of the fact that,
in ways totally unpredictable in 1987, South Africa’s
attainment of majority rule in the early 1990s has in principle
put the most developed material and intellectual national
infrastructure of the African continent at the serve of Africa as
a whole — albeit at the risk of a South African hegemony. The
blessings of the Internet have been appropriated African
intellectuals so that they can participate in these developments
much more directly and centrally.
In my 1987
article I wrote:
The prolonged and
humble exposure to a specific local interaction setting is not
only salutary and illuminating to the individual researcher no
matter from what continent — it may also help to restore a
general respect for peasants and urban proletarians in the
intellectual and political debates concerning the planning and
implementation of development in Africa today.
On second
thought, this passage (directly inspired by my own
research among the Zambian Nkoya) seems unrealistically utopian.
In the 1980s the international development industry and the World
Bank discovered the local aid recipients’ culture (conceived in
a remarkably reified and fragmented format) as the black box that
explained why North Atlantic development projects seldom produced
the intended results. But instead of adopting the standard
anthropological methods of prolonged and profound,
methodologically informed local immersion, the development
industry decided it would have cultural knowledge without paying
the usual anthropological price. Rapid Rural Appraisals and
similar quick assessment methods were to convey the illusion of
valid knowledge of, and about, local peasants, without any danger
of upsetting the development experts’ time-table, comforts,
preconceived ideas, and other forms of North Atlantic one-way
intervention.[43] The appeal to
anthropology has thus become counter-productive, serving to
conceal the continued reliance on an one-sidedly imposed
hegemonic rationality from the North. And although in recent
years the World Bank has employed anthropologists and has been
inspired by an actor-orientated approach like Sen’s at the
centre of its models of South poverty and economic action, there
is still no coherent vision as to how anthropology is to be
combined with the kind of knowledge production needed to underpin
policy decisions like the World Bank’s, which profoundly affect
the economic situation of many hundreds of millions of people.
In my 1987 paper
I gave a bleak picture of the relations between anthropologist
and the development industry, which then was largely dominated by
government ministries to which non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) were affiliated, both in the North and in the South. Soon
NGOs were to become a hot topic in development studies and
policy,[44] without however
far-reaching effects on the relations between governments and
anthropologists. It is my, no doubt myopic, impression that this
situation has undergone considerable improvement over the past
decade and a half. If we may take the, relatively ideal,
situation of the African Studies Centre, Leiden (the national
institution for Africanist social research in the Netherlands) as
indicative of more general trends in the North Atlantic, a number
of interesting points may be made. The Netherlands government
support for professional Africanist research has grown, rather
than dwindled. But whereas in the late 1980s government saw such
research as more directly and recognisably ancillary to its own
bilateral development endeavours in the Third World (a situation
little conducive to academic independence, and breeding a
mercenary genre of research proposals predictably geared to the
research priorities known to be temporarily in fashion at the
ministry for development co-operation), in the course of the
1990s relations between researchers and the government became
much more relaxed and trustful at the personal level, while at
the same time government pressure upon researchers to pursue
readily applicable forms of research gave way to the awareness,
among civil servants, that more fundamental and theoretically
orientated research defined primarily by academic priorities had
a far greater power of inspiration and illumination for them. The
trend of disenchantment between academia and government,
signalled in the main text for the 1980s, has not persisted in
the next decade, or at least not consistently for Africanist
research. I believe that here specific praise is due to Stephen
Ellis and Gerti Hesseling, the two directors of the African
Studies Centre in the 1990s, who each in their own very different
way contributed to effective state/ research relations without in
the least sacrificing academic independence.
My 1987 paper
depicts an anthropology that is still liberating itself from the
limitations of the classic model as emerged in the second third
of the twentieth century. In this form of anthropology, fieldwork
was all-important, and many of the nice and the critical things I
say about anthropology revolve on fieldwork. Since 1987 however,
the tradition of extensive, prolonged fieldwork has considerably
declined in anthropology, for a number of reasons:
•
increased health risks (especially AIDS, ebola, cholera etc.),
•
lack of funding,
• the
increased actual globalisation of the contemporary world, which
makes repeated short visits to the field much easier than in
previous decades, but also creates the illusion of recognisable
similarity across cultural situations world-wide and is less
conducive to an massive investment, spanning several years
minimum, in the investigation of cultural specificity
•
the rapidly increasing spread of world-wide linguae francae,
especially English, adding to this illusion and making it
possible to conduct fieldwork in local settings yet through the
time-saving medium of a lingua franca which implies the
distortion of a double translation filter: both on the part of
the researcher and of the research participants
•
the overestimation of theory at the expense of empirical studies
in the social sciences today
•
the emergence of globalisation as a field of study, stimulating
multi-sited field research which follows culturally and
linguistically accessible, for globalised, participants in their
peregrinations, but which in each location achieves less than
extensive and prolonged exposure
•
the revival of comparative and diffusionist studies,[45] which cannot possibly rely on the results of
extensive fieldwork in any one place.
One could
appreciate this decline of fieldwork as a timely methodological
adjustment of the anthropological discipline to an unmistakably
changing research object; or regret this development for the
furtive superficiality it occasionally allows to pass for decent
research. Meanwhile, however, we have become aware[46] of theoretical and epistemological
disadvantages of the classic fieldwork format. When a foreign
researcher has to invest years of her life in mastering a local
linguistic and cultural domain, chances are that this
disproportionate investment (often at great personal costs of
frustration, conflict, health risks, broken relationships at
home, etc.) leads to personal reification of that domain and its
perceived boundaries -- hence a reification of culture, ethnicity
and identity, rather than an awareness of the way in which
cultural and ethnic identity claims are political statements
within a politics of difference, against the background of
multiplicity of identities, and far greater cultural similarity
and continuity that such politics of difference could gainfully
accommodate.[47]
In 1987 I had
been one of the two academic directors of the African Studies
Centre, Leiden, for six years. My being invited to the
sister-institution at Edinburgh, in 1987, to officiate on the
future of anthropology of Africa, was in itself a sign that by
then I was recognised, at the age of 40, as a leading European
anthropologist. There had been other such signs, such as my
election to the highly prestigious Simon professorship at
Manchester, which even had to be postponed because I was younger
than the stipulated thirty years old. Yet my 1987 paper reveals,
on re-reading, a tremendous uncertainty of my identity as an
anthropologist: that identity is said to have been exploded by
the interdisciplinary nature of my pursuit of African Studies;
more important, Africanist anthropology is better left to those
who, as Africans, have a birthright no North Atlantic
anthropologist can ever claim; and, at the personal level, the
built-in contradictions of the anthropologists’ role can only
temporarily overcome in the concrete interaction during
fieldwork, but continue to add an almost unbearable burden of
hegemony and exploitation to any North Atlantic anthropological
professional practice. No wonder that soon after this was
written, when I undertook prolonged fieldwork in a new setting,
in urban Botswana, those contradictions landed me in a personal
crisis . From this crisis I emerged, first as a Southern Africa
diviner-priest (thus seeking to transform myself into a honorary
African, for whom the problem of birthright in Africanist
knowledge production would be solved in an effective though
unexpected way), and subsequently (resigning myself that I could
not revolve the unbearable contradictions of anthropology from
within that discipline) as a professor of intercultural
philosophy seeking to develop a theory of interculturality where
I use philosophy to critique anthropology, and anthropology to
critique philosophy.[48] That trajectory, and
its possible relevance for others than myself, is not the point
here. But I may be forgiven for signalling, with reference to my
1987 paper, a temporarily forgotten landmark that makes my
subsequent itinerary much clearer at least to myself.
That I was not
the only one to suffer under the contradictions of the
anthropological discipline including the shallow, largely
neo-positivist epistemology underlying much mainstream
anthropological work, was already obvious by the late 1980s.[49] As a result, the orientation of anthropology
has somewhat changed since then, and not only because of the
demise of then flourishing paradigms (such as that of the
articulation of modes of production) and the decline of prolonged
fieldwork.
The globalisation of the world has led to
a globalisation of anthropology, with new questions and new
challenges.[50] The 1990s saw a spate
of social-science research on globalisation. While the specific
theoretical harvest in terms of new concepts and theories to
understand a multicultural, globalising, meta-local world has
been limited, a number of interesting trends have either been
initiated in the context of globalisation studies, or have been
strengthened by them:
•
The critique of fieldwork as a naively localising strategy
•
The rise of neo-diffusionism
•
The emphasis on global religious movements as important vehicles
for the movement of ideas, people and organisational forms
•
The elaboration of (problematised, and actively constructed) locality
as a critical concept in the light of which to re-read and
re-analyse much of the pre-existing anthropology
•
The elaboration of virtuality as a new focus on the relation
between the imaginary, the ritual, and the social organisational
•
The increased emphasis on commodities and commodification (hence
consumption) as a key to understanding processes of localisation
and globalisation
•
The closer approchement between anthropology and contemporary
philosophy (critique of the concept of culture; increased
epistemological sophistication; the adoption of
post-structuralist models for thought)
•
The acknowledgement of other, para-academic forms of globalising
knowledge construction and representation, facilitated by the
technologies of globalisation (ICT, international travel etc.),
with an increasing impact on identity, performance and conflict
(Afrocentricity, Islam, diasporic ethnic networks etc.)
After a decade in which globalisation has
been a major shibboleth for the organisation and funding of
research, we are faced with the challenge of defining the
priorities, blind spots, red herrings and dead ends of social
research, especially of research with a regional more
specifically Africanist focus. And with increasing globalisation,
cultural relativism, while remaining the cornerstone of the
anthropological discipline, has come under attack for political,
intercultural philosophical, and epistemological reasons.[51] In this overall climate of internal
contradictions and external changes, intercultural philosophy has
emerged as a major critique of and step forward from
anthropology, ready for me to step into and to further develop
there, under new inspiration, with a new set of colleagues and a
new context of ongoing debates, the older and more persistent
questions of anthropology whose perplexing nature led to a
stalemate when I wrote my 1987 article.[52]
[1] This is a revised version of
an argument originally presented at the African Futures
Conference, Centre of African Studies, Edinburgh, 9-11th December
1987, celebrating that institution’s 25th anniversary. The
original version was published as: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1988,
‘Reflections on the future of anthropology in Africa’, in:
Fyfe, C., ed., African futures: Twenty-fifth anniversary
conference, Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, Seminar
Proceedings, No. 28, pp. 293-309. The present version has been
slightly revised, extensive references have been added whereas
the original version had none, and whereas the original 1987
postscript has been incorporated in the main text now, a new
postscript has have been added to comment on the 1987 situation
from the perspective of 2002. The title was set by the conference
organisers and therefore represents no choice on my part; yet no
anthropologist could consider such a title without being reminded
of: Levi-Strauss, C., 1965, The future of kinship studies,
Huxley Memorial Lecture, London: Royal Anthropological Institute.
[2] Cf. de Boeck, F., & R.
Devisch, 1994, ‘Ndembu, Luunda and Yaka divination compared:
From representation and social engineering to embodiment and
worldmaking’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 24: 98-133;
Devisch, R., 1978, ‘Towards a semantic study of divination:
Trance and initiation of the Yaka diviner as a basis for his
authority’, Bijdragen: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie en
Theologie, 39: 278-288; Devisch, R., 1985, ‘Diagnostic
divinatoire chez les Yaka du Zaire: Les axes etiologiques et le
sujet de l’enonciation’, L’Ethnographie, 81, 96-97:
197-216; Devisch, R., 1985, ‘Perspectives on divination in
contemporary sub-Saharan Africa’, in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J.
& Schoffeleers, J.M., eds., Theoretical explorations in
African religion, London/ Boston: Kegan Paul International,
pp. 50-83; Devisch, R., 1991, ‘Mediumistic divination among the
northern Yaka of Zaire’, in: Peek, P.M., ed., 1991, African
divination systems: Ways of knowing, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, pp. 112-132; Devisch, R., 1995, ‘The slit
drum and the birth of divinatory utterance in the Yaka milieu
(Zaire)’, in: de Heusch, L., ed., Objects: Signs of Africa,
Tervuren: Musee Royal de l’Afrique Centrale; Devisch, R., 1997,
‘Divination and oracles’, in: Middleton, J.M., ed.,
Encyclopaedia of Africa south of the Sahara, New York: Scribners,
vol. 1: 493-497; Devisch, R., & Vervaeck, B., 1985,
‘Auto-production, production et reproduction: Divination et
politique chez les Yaka du Zaire’, Social Compass, 1984,
ed. M. Schoffeleers, special issue on ‘Meaning and power’;
Werbner, R.P., 1973, ‘The superabundance of understanding:
Kalanga rhetoric and domestic divination’, American
Anthropologist, 75: 414-440; Werbner, R.P., 1989, ‘Making
the hidden seen: Tswapong wisdom divination’, in: Werbner,
R.P., 1989, Ritual passage sacred journey: The process and
organization of religious movement, Washington/ Manchester:
Smithsonian Institution Press/ Manchester University Press, ch.
1, pp. 19-60. When this was written in 1987, my own preoccupation
with divination was still only academic. A few years later I
became a Southern African diviner-priest myself, cf. van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1991, ‘Becoming
a sangoma: Religious anthropological field-work in Francistown,
Botswana’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 21, 4: 309-344, also at: http://come.to/african_religion , and greatly
revised version forthcoming in my book Intercultural encounters;
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1998, ‘Sangoma in Nederland: Over
integriteit in interculturele bemiddeling’, in: Elias, M.,
& Reis, R., eds., Getuigen ondanks zichzelf: Voor
Jan-Matthijs Schoffeleers bij zijn zeventigste verjaardag,
Maastricht: Shaker, pp. 1-29; English version: Sangoma in the
Netherlands: On integrity in intercultural mediation, at: http://come.to/african_religion, and greatly
revised version forthcoming in my book Intercultural encounters.
[3] On these characteristics of
the diviner’s craft, cf. the work of Devisch and Werbner as
cited above, and: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & J.M.
Schoffeleers, 1985b, ‘Theoretical explorations in African
religion: Introduction’, in: Binsbergen, W.M.J. van, & J.M.
Schoffeleers, 1985a, red., Theoretical explorations in African
religion, Londen/ Boston: Kegan Paul International, pp. 1-49; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, ‘Divinatie met vier tabletten:
Medische technologie in Zuidelijk Afrika’, in: Sjaak van der
Geest, Paul ten Have, Gerhard Nijhoff en Piet Verbeek-Heida,
eds., De macht der dingen: Medische technologie in cultureel
perspectief, Amsterdam: Spinhuis, pp. 61-110; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1995, ‘Four-tablet divination as
trans-regional medical technology in Southern Africa’, Journal
of Religion in Africa, 25, 2: 114-140,
also at http:// come.to/ african_religion; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996, ‘Transregional and historical
connections of four-tablet divination in Southern Africa’,
Journal of Religion in Africa, 26, 1: 2-29, also at http:// come.to/ african_religion.
[4] An ironical reference to:
Lugard, F.J.D., 1922, The dual mandate in British tropical
Africa, [ place, publisher ], at the time an influential
text on enlightened colonial policy. Lugard was in principle
convinced on the inevitability of African self-government, yet
his efforts were directed at protecting Africans from
exploitation than helping prepare themselves for a return to
self-government (cf. Bull, M., 1997, ‘Lugard, Frederick John
Dealtry’, in: Middleton, J.M., ed., Encyclopaedia of Africa
south of the Sahara, New York: Scribners, vol. 3, pp. 60-61). I
would wish the situation of North Atlantic anthropology of Africa
were fundamentally different.
[5] Risking an accusation of
myopia, I see the Africanist anthropology of the mid-twentieth
century as emblematic for the whole of anthropology, and would
reserve the epithet ‘classic’ specifically for: ;
Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 1937, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among
the Azande (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1937); Evans-Pritchard, E.E.,
1940, The Political System of the Anuak of the Anglo-Egyptian
Sudan. London: London School of Economics, Monographs on Social
Anthropology no. 4; Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 1948, The Divine
Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan. Cambridge:
University Press; Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 1949, The Sanusi of
Cyrenaica. London: Oxford University Press; Evans-Pritchard,
E.E., 1951, Kinship and marriage among the Nuer, Londen: Oxford
University Press; Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 1951, Social
Anthropology. New York: Free Press; Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 1956,
Nuer Religion, Clarendon Press, 1956., ; Evans-Pritchard, E.E.
& Fortes, M., 1940, African Political Systems. International
African Institute. London: Oxford University Press; Fortes, M.,
1945, The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi, London: Oxford
University Press for International African Institute; Fortes, M.,
1949, The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi, London: Oxford
University Press for International African Institute; Fortes, M.,
1953, ‘The structure of unilineal descent groups’, American
Anthropologist, 55: 17-41.
[6] Werbner, Richard P.,
1984, ‘The Manchester School in South-Central Africa’, Annual
Review of Anthropology, 13: 157-185; Van Teeffelen, T., 1978,
‘The Manchester School in Africa and Israel: a critique’, Dialectical
Anthropology, 3 : 67-83; both with extensive references.
[7] Cf. Boissevain, J., 1974,
Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalition, Oxford:
Blackwell; Boissevain, J.F., & Mitchell, J.C., 1973,ed.,
Network analysis, Den Haag/ Paris: Mouton; Mitchell, J.C., 1969,
ed., Social Networks in Urban Situations: Analyses of Personal
Relationships in Central African Towns, Manchester: Manchester
University Press; Hannerz, U., 1992, ‘The global ecumene as a
network of networks’, in: A. Kuper, ed., Conceptualizing
society, London: Routledge, pp. 34-56; Long, N., van der Ploeg,
J., Curtin, C. and Box, L., 1986, The Commoditization Debate:
Labour Process, Strategy and Social Network, Vol 17. Wageningen,
The Netherlands, Agricultural University.
[8] Cf. Kroeber, A.L., 1935,
‘History and Science in Anthropology’, American
Anthropologist, 37: 539-69; Boas, F., 1936, ‘History and
Science in Anthropology: A reply’, Race, Language and Culture.
New York: Macmillan, 305-11; Driver, H. E., 1956, An Integration
of Functional, Evolutionary, and Historical Theory by Means of
Correlations. Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and
Linguistics. Memoir 12; Cunnison, I.G., 1957, ‘History and
genealogies in a conquest state’, American Anthropologist, 59:
20-31; Schapera, I., 1962, ‘Should anthropologists be
historians? (Presidential address), Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, 92, 2: 143-156; Levi-Strauss, C.,
1963, ‘History and anthropology’, in : Levi-Strauss, C.,
Structural anthropology, [ place, publisher ] , p. 1-27; Kroeber,
A.L., 1963, An Anthropologist Looks at History. Berkeley:
University of Califomia Press; Harris M., 1969, The rise of
anthropological theory: A history of theories of culture, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, first published New York: Crowell,
1968; Vansina, J., 1970, ‘Cultures through time’, in: Naroll,
R., & Cohen, R., eds., A handbook of method in cultural
anthropology, Garden City (N.Y.): Natural History Press, pp.
165-179; Finley, M.I., 1975, ‘Anthropology and the classics’,
in: Finley, M. I., 1975, The Use and Abuse of History. New York:
Viking. Reprinted, New York: Penguin, 1987; Godelier, M., 1978,
‘Infrastructures, societies and history’, Current
Anthropology, 19, 4: 763-771; De Certeau, M., 1980, ‘Writing
vs. Time: History and Anthropology in the Works of Lafitau.’
Yale French Studies 59: 37-64. ; Cohn, B.S., 1982, ‘Towards a
rapproachment’ [ between history and anthropology ] , in: A.
Rabb & R.J. Rothberg, eds, The new history: The 1980s and
beyond, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Sahlins, M.D.,
1983, ‘Other times, other customs: The anthropology of
history’, American Anthropologist, 85, 3: 517-544; Tonkin, E.,
McDonald, M., & Chapman, M., 1989, red., History and
ethnicity, Londen/ New York: Routledge; Kelly, J.D. & M.
Kaplan, 1990, ‘History, structure, and ritual’, Annual Review
of Anthropology, XIX, 119-150; Vansina, J., 1993, [ Review of :
Binsbergen, W.M.J. van, 1992, Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and
history in Central Western Zambia, Londen/ Boston: Kegan Paul
International ] , Anthropos, 88: 215-217; Amselle, J.-L., 1993,
‘Anthropology and historicity’, History and Theory, Beiheft
32, pp. 12-31.
[9] Cf. Bloch, M., ed., 1975,
Marxist Approaches and Social Anthropology, London: Malaby Press,
ASA Studies, pp. 3-27; Caplan, Ann P., 1982, ‘Gender, ideology
and modes of production on the coast of East Africa’, in J. de
Vere Allen and T.H. Wilson (eds.), From Zinj to Zanzibar: Studies
in history, trace and society on the eastern coast of Africa, pp.
29-43. Paideuma 28. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag;
Gerold-Scheepers, T.J.F.A. & W.M.J. van Binsbergen, 1978,
‘Marxist and non-Marxist approaches to migration in Africa’,
in: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J. & H.A. Meilink, eds, 1978,
Migration and the Transformation of Modern African Society,
African Perspectives 1978/1, Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum, pp.
21-35; Geschiere, P.L., 1978, ‘The articulation of different
modes of production: Old and new inequalities in Maka villages
(Southeast Cameroon)’ in Buijtenhuijs, R., & Geschiere,
P.L., eds., Social Stratification and Class Formation, African
Perspectives 197812, Leiden: African Studies Centre, pp. 45-69;
Hindess, B., & Hirst, P.Q., 1975, Pre-Capitalist Modes of
Production, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Houtart, F.,
1980, Religion et modes de production precapitalistes Brussels:
Editions de l’Universite de Bruxelles; Houtart, F., &
Lemercinier, G., 1977, eds., Religion and Tributary Mode of
Production, Social Compass, 24, 2-3, Louvain: Centre de
Recherches Socio-Religieuses; Houtart, F., & Lemercinier, G.,
1979, ‘Religion et mode de production lignager’, Social
Compass, 26, 4: 403-16; Jewsiewicki, B., with Letourneau, J.,
1985, eds, Modes of Production: The challenge of Africa, Ste-Foy
(Can.): [ publisher ] ; Meillassoux, C., 1975, Femmes,
greniers et capitaux, Paris: Maspero; Mudzibganyama, N.S., 1983,
‘Articulation of modes of production and the development of a
labour reserve in Southern Africa, 1885-1944: The case of
Botswana’, Botswana Notes and Records, 15: 49-58; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1978, ‘Class formation and the penetration
of capitalism in the Kaoma rural district, Zambia, 1800-1978’,
paper read at the seminar on class formation in Africa, African
Studies Centre, Leiden, May 1978; revised version 2002 at: http://ethnicity.bravepages.com ; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1981, Religious change in
Zambia, London / Boston: Kegan Paul International; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., & P. Geschiere, 1985, eds, Old modes of
production and capitalist encroachment: Anthropological
explorations in Africa, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International;
Wolpe, Harold, ed. , 1980. The Articulation of Modes of
Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
[10] Cf. Buijtenhuijs, R., 1971, Le
mouvement ‘Mau-Mau’: une revolte paysanne et anti-coloniale
en Afrique noire, THe Hague / Paris: Mouton; Bundy, Colin, 1979. The
Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry. Berkeley:
University of California Press. ; Chayanov, A.V., Thoner, D
Kerbay, B & Smith, R.E.F, 1966, eds, The theory of peasant
economy. Homewood, Illinois; Cliffe L., 1987, ‘The debate on
African peasantries’, Development and Change, 18, 4: 625-635;
Geschiere P. L., 1984, ‘La paysannerie africaine
est-elle’captive’? Sur la these de Goran Hyden, et pour une
reponse plus nuancee’, Politique africaine, n° 14, pp. 13-33;
Hyden, G., 1980, Beyond ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and
an uncaptured peasantry, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University
California Press; Hyden, G., 1983, No shortcuts to progress:
African development management in perspective, Berkeley:
Univeristy of California Press; Migdal, J.S., 1974, Peasants,
Politics and Revolution. Pressures toward political and social
change in the Third World. Princeton University [ delete period
]. press; Palmer, R., & N.Q. Parsons, 1977, eds., The Roots
of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa, London:
Heinemann; Pitt-Rivers, J., 1963, ed., The mediterranean
countryman, The Hague / Paris: Mouton; Ranger, T.O., 1978,
‘Growing from the roots: Reflexions on peasant studies in
Central and Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 5: 99-133; Ranger, T.O., 1985, Peasant consciousness and
guerilla war in Zimbabwe, London: James Currey; Redfield, R.,
1947, ‘The Folk Society’, American Journal of Sociology, 52:
293-308; Redfield, R., 1956, Peasant society and culture: An
anthropological approach to civilisation, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press; Rey, P.-P., 1976, Capitalisme negrier: La marche
des paysans vers le proletariat, (together with E. Le Bris and M.
Samuel), Paris: Maspero; Saul, J.S., & R. Woods, 1973,
‘African peasantries’, in: Arrighi, G., & J.S. Saul,
1973, Essays on the Political Economy of Africa, New York/London:
Monthly Review Press, pp. 406-16; Saul, J.S., 1974, ‘African
peasants and revolution’, Review of African Political Economy,
I : 41-68; Wolf, E., 1966, Peasants. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall.
[11] Harries-Jones P., 1975, Freedom
and Labour: Mobilization and Political Control on the Zambian
Copperbelt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Sharp, J., 1996,
‘Ethnogenesis and ethnic mobilization: a comparative
perspective on a South African dilemma’, in E. Wilmsen and P.
McAllister, eds, 1996, The Politics of Difference: Ethnic
Premises in a World of Power, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. ; Snow, David A. and Robert D. Bedford, 1988, ‘Ideology,
frame resonance and participant mobilization’, in B.
Klandermans, H. Kriesi & S. Tarrow, eds, From Structure to
Action: Comparing Social Movement Research across Cultures,
International Social Movement Research, Vol. I, Greenwich CT: JAI
Press. ; Uyanne, F. U., 1990, ‘Extended Egoism, Situational
Imperatives and Mobilization for National Integration’, in J.I.
Obikwu et al (eds), Social Mobilization and National Development,
Onitsha: Kawuriz and Manilas Publishers.
[12] See below, Postscript 2002.
[13] See below, Postscript 2002.
[14] Leclerc, G., 1972, Anthropologie
et colonialisme, Paris: Fayard; Asad, T., 1973, ed., Anthropology
and the colonial encounter, Londen: Ithaca Press; Copans, J.,
1974, Critiques et politiques de l’anthropologie, Paris:
Maspero; Copans, J., 1975, ed. Anthropologie et imperialisme,
Paris: Maspero.
[15] Cf. Wright, R., 1988,
‘Anthropological presuppositions of indigenous advocacy’,
Annual Review of Anthropology, 17: 365-390; Gordon, R.J.,
Advocacy in Southern Africa: What lessons from the Bushmen?,
paper read at the Anthropology Association of Southern Africa
Annual Meeting, Durban-Westville, September 1992.
[16] See below, Postscript 2002.
[17] The Primal Scene, in Freudian
psychoanalysis, is the infant’s witnessing of the parents’
sexual intercourse, thought to start a train of infantile
interpretations and desires often conducive to mental disorders
later in life. Another Primal Scene was postulated by Freud at
the origins of human culture: as the sons’ murdering of the
tyrannical father monopolising women. Freud, S., 1918, Totem and
Taboo, New York: Random House, English tr. of German edition
Totem und Tabu, first published 1913.
[18] For an early discussion on these
topics, cf. Bleek, W. [ = J.D.M. van der Geest ] , 1979, ‘Envy
and inequality in fieldwork: An example from Ghana’, Human
Organization, 38, 2: 201-205; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1979b,
‘Anthropological Fieldwork: “There and Back Again” ‘,
Human Organization, 38, 2: 205-9.
[19] Mafeje, A., 1971, ‘The ideology
of tribalism’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 9: 253-61;
Mafeje, A., 1976, The Problem of Anthropology in Historical
Perspective An Inquiry into the Growth of the Social Sciences, in
Canadian Journal of African Studies, 10: 307-333; Magubane, B.,
1971, ‘A critical look at the indices used in the study of
social change in colonial Africa’, Current Anthropology, 12:
419-45.
[20] Burger, G.A., 1788, Wunderbare
Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande, Feldzuge und lustige Abenteuer des
Freiherrn von Munchhausen, second enlarged edition, first edition
1786, being the translation of R.E. Raspe, 1786, Baron
Munchhausen’s narrative of his marvellouos travels and
campaigns in Russia.
[21] See below, Postscript 2002.
[22] Durkheim, E., 1912, Les
formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France. Durkheim’s major source when writing
this book was the classic pioneer ethnography of Australian
Aboriginal social organisation: Spencer, [ initials ] &
[ initials ] Gillen, [ year, ca. 1900 ] , Northern
tribes of central Australia, [ place, publisher ] Durkheim’s
immensely influential theoretical interpretation of Australian
socio-ritual organisation in terms of society venerating itself
through the medium of arbitrarily chosen symbols has since been
criticised by anthropologists making reference to empirical
anthropological data concerning Aboriginal societies; e.g.
Goldenweiser, A., 1958, Religion and society: A critique of Emile
Durkheim’s theory of the origin and nature of religion, (1917),
in: Lessa, W.A., & E.Z. Vogt, eds., Reader in comparative
relgiion, Evanston (Ill), pp. 76-84; Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 1952,
Structure and Function in Primitive Society. London: Oxford
University Press, pp. 165f; Stanner, W.E.H., 1965, ‘Religion,
totemism, and symbolism’, in R., M., and C., H., Berndt (eds.,
), Aboriginal Man in Australia, Angus & Robertson, 1965;
Stanner, W.E.H., 1967, ‘Reflexions on Durkheim and aboriginal
studies’, in: Freedman, M., Social organization, London [
publisher ] , pp. 217-240; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1968,
‘Durkheim’s begrippenpaar “sacre/ profane” ‘, Kula
(Utrecht), 8, 4: 14-21; Worsley, P.M., 1956, ‘Emile
Durkheim’s theory of knowledge’, Sociological Review, 4:
47-62.
[23] Cf. Asad, o.c; Firth,
Raymond, et al. , 1977. ‘Anthropological Research in British
Colonies: Some Personal Accounts.’ Anthropological Forum 4
(special issue); Lewis, Diane, 1973, ‘Anthropology and
Colonialism’, Current Anthropology, 14: 581-602; Pels, P.,
1997, ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History and
the Emergence of Western Governmentality’, Annual Review of
Anthropology, 26: 163-183; Pels, P. & O. Salemink, 1994,
‘Introduction: five theses on ethnography as colonial
practice’, History and Anthropology, 8, 1-4: 1-34; Pels, P.
& Salemink, O. (Eds), 1995, ‘Colonial Ethnographies’,
History and Anthropology, 8, 1-4; PRAH, K.K., 1981,
Anthropologists, Clerics, Colonial Administration and the Lotuko.
Mimeograph. Juba: University Printing Unit; Trask H-K. 1991
Natives and Anthropologists: the colonial struggle. The
Contemporary Pacific, Spring: 159-176. This is not to deny that
there is a more diffuse way in which the classic anthropological
endeavour has been subservient to the North Atlantic hegemonic
project, cf. Fabian, J., 1983, Time and the other: How
anthropology makes its object, New York: Columbia University
Press. That this orientation has profound roots in the European
Enlightenment, and in the founding father of modern philosophy
Immaneal Kant, is argued by Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 1997, The
Color of Reason: The Idea of "Race" in Kant’s
Anthropology’, in: Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed., Postcolonial
African philosophy: A critical reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
103-140. To the extent that nineteenth- and twentieth-century
historicism, as a dominant facto in social and sociological
thought, owe a greater debt to Hegel than to Kant, see the
critique of Hegel’s anti-African frame of mind by the prominent
Hegel scholar Heinz Kimmerle: Kimmerle, H., 1993, ‘Hegel und
Afrika: Das Glas zerspringt’, Hegel-Studien, 28: 303-325; also
cf. Keita L., 1974, ‘Two Philosophies of African History: Hegel
and Diop’, Presence africaine, n° 91, pp. 41-49.
[24] Sharp, J.S., 1981, ‘The roots
and development of volkekunde in South Africa’, Journal of
Southern African Studies, 8, 1: 16-36; Boonzaier, E. and J.
Sharp, eds, 1988, South African Keywords, Cape Town: OUP.
[25] Mafeje, o.c; Magubane, o.c;
p’Bitek, O., 1970, African Religions in Western Scholarship,
Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House.
[26] The practice was somewhat endemic
at Leyden university, The Netherlands, in the first half of the
twentieth century; e.g. both father and son de Josseling de Jong
held the chair of general anthropology, and both father and son
Holleman the chair of customary law.
[27] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1984,
‘Can anthropology become the theory of peripheral class
struggle? Reflexions on the work of P.P.Rey’, in: W.M.J. van
Binsbergen & G.S.C.M. Hesseling, (eds), Aspecten van Staat en
Maatschappij in Afrika: Recent Dutch and Belgian Research on the
African State, Leiden: African Studies Centre, pp. 163-80, also
at: http://ethnicity.bravepages.com
; German version: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1984f., ‘Kann die
Ethnologie zur Theorie des Klassenkampfes in der Peripherie
werden?: Reflexionen uber das Werk von Pierre Philippe Rey’,
Osterreichische Zeitschrift fur Soziologie (Vienna), 9, 4:
138-48.
[28] See below, Postscript 2002.
[29] See below, Postscript 2002.
[30] See below, Postscript 2002.
[31] See below, Postscript 2002.
[32] See below, Postscript 2002.
[33] For a fundamental critique of
development from an anthropological perspective, cf. Hobart, M.,
ed., 1993, An anthropological critique of development: The growth
of ignorance, London/ New York: Routledge. For my own views, cf.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1991, ‘Religion and development:
Contributions to a new discourse’, Antropologische
Verkenningen, 10, 3: 1-17 — a greatly expanded version to be
found at: http://binsbergen.bravepages.com ; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, ‘Globalization,
consumption and development’, in: Fardon, R., van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., & van Dijk, R., 1999, eds., Modernity on a
shoestring: Dimensions of globalization, consumption and
development in Africa and beyond: Based on an EIDOS conference
held at The Hague 13-16 March 1997, Leiden/ London: EIDOS [
European Interuniversity Deveopment Opportunities Study group ] ,
pp. 1-7 [ check pages ] , also at http://ethnicity.bravepages.com
[34] Cf.: Banuri, T., 1990,
‘Modernization and its discontents: A cultural perspective on
the theories of development’, in: Marglin, F.A. & Marglin,
S.A., eds., Dominating knowledge: Development, culture and
resistance, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 29-101; Okolo Okonda
W’Oleko, 1986, Pour une philosophie de la culture et du
developpement: Recherches d’hermeneutique et de praxis
africaines, Presses Universitaires du Zaire, Kinshasa ;
Uhlenbeck, G.C., n.d. [ 1986] , ed., The cultural dimension of
development, Den Haag: Netherlands National Commission for
UNESCO; Verhelst, T., 1990, No life without roots: Culture and
development, Londen: Zed Books; Worsley, P., 1984, The
three worlds: Culture & world development, London:
Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
[35]
The expression ‘the White man’s burden’ summarised the
White colonialists’ legitimation for their involvement with
societies in Africa and Asia: given the privileged levels of
civilisation, social and political organisation, science and
technology, Europe simply had no choice to help bring the rest of
the world on its own exalted level; of course, this was an
elegant dissimulation of the North-South exploitation involved,
even though in individual cases (e.g. Lord Lugard) the ideology
of the White man’s burden, with all its condescension, may have
produced a respectable moral stance. Cf. Jordan, W. (1974) The
White Man’s Burden, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Davidson
B., 1992, The black man’s burden : Africa and the curse of
nation-state, London: Currey; Harlan L., 1988, ‘Booker T.
Washington and the White Man’s Burden’, in R. W. Smock, ed.,
Booker T. Washington in Perspective, Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, pp. 68-98.
[36] Cf. Rasing, T., 1995, Passing on
the rites of passage: Girls’ initiation rites in the context of
an urban Roman Catholic community on the Zambian Copperbelt,
Leiden/ London: African Studies Centre/ Avebury.; Rasing, T.,
2001, The bush burned the stones remain: Women’s initiation and
globalization in Zambia, Ph.D. thesis, Erasmus University
Rotterdam; Hamburg/ Muenster: LIT Verlag; van Rouveroy Van
Nieuwaal, E.A.B. & Van Dijk, R., 1999, eds., African
Chieftaincy in a new Socio-Political Landscape, LIT Verlag,
Hamburg.; Van Rouveroy Van Nieuwaal, E.A.B., & Ray, D.I.,
1996, eds., The New Relevance Of Traditional Authorities for
Africa’s future, special issue, Journal of Legal Pluralism and
Unofficial Law, 37-38; Nana K. Arhin Brempong, D.I. Ray, &
Van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, E.A.B., eds., Proceedings of the
Conference on the Contribution of Traditional Authority to
Development, Human Rights and Environmental Protection:
Strategies for Africa, Accra-Kumasi, 2-6 September, 1994, Leiden:
ASC; van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, E.A.B., & J. Griffiths, eds.,
Chieftaincy and the state in Africa, Journal of Legal Pluralism
and Unofficial Law, special issue, nos 25 & 26, 1987.
[37] Kagame, A., 1955, La philosophie
bantu-rwandaise de l'Etre, Bruxelles: Academie royale des
Sciences coloniales; Diop C. A., 1948, ‘Quand pourra-t-on
parler d’une Renaissance africaine ?’, Le Musee vivant, n°
36-37, novembre, pp. 57-65; Diop, C.A., 1955, Nations negres et
culture: de l’antiquite negre-egyptienne aux problemes
culturels de l'Afrique noire d'aujourd'hui, Paris: Presence
Africaine, 2d ed., first published 1954.
[38] Like for all the various domains
of academic production paraded in my 1987 article and the present
postscript, it is strictly impossible to give a reasoned
bibliography without writing another article, or book, on the
subject. My aim is merely to indicate a body of literature which
the reader may further explore. For African philosophy, cf.
Coetzee, P.H., & Roux, A.P.J., 1998, eds., The African
philosophy reader, London: Routledge; Eboussi Boulaga, F., 1977,
La crise du muntu: Authenticite africaine et philosophie, Paris:
Presence africaine; Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 1997, Postcolonial
African philosophy: A critical reader, Oxford: Blackwell, ;
Gyekye, K., 1995, An essay on African philosophical thought: The
Akan conceptual scheme, revised edition, Philadelphia; Temple
University Press, first published Cambridge University Press
1987; Gyekye, K., 1997, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical
Reflections on the African Experience, London: Oxford University
Press; Hallen, B. and J.O. Sodipo, 1986 Knowledge, Belief and
Witchcraft: Analytical experiments in African Philosophy, London:
Ethnographica; Hountondji, P.J., 1976. Sur la ‘philosophie
africaine’: critique de l’ethnophilosophie, Paris: Maspero. Translated
as African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1983, revised edition 1996; Keita, Lansana.
1985. ‘Contemporary African Philosophy: The Search for a
Method.’ Diogenes 130: 105-28. ; Masolo, D.A., 1994, African
philosophy in search of identity, Bloomington/Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, & Edinbrgh: Edinburgh University
Press; Mbiti, J.S., 1990, (1969) African religion and philosophy.
Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd.; Mudimbe, V.Y., 1988,
The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy, and the order of
knowledge, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press/London: Currey; Odera Oruka, H., 1975, ‘The Fundamental
Principles in the Question of African Philosophy’, Second
Order, 4, 1: [ add pages ] ; Odera Oruka, H., 1990, ed.,
Sage philosophy: Indigenous thinkers and modern debate on African
philosophy, Leiden: Brill; Okafor, F. U., 1993, ‘Issues in
African Philosophy Re-examined’, International Philosophical
Quarterly, XXXIII, 1: [ add pages ] ; Okere, T., 1983,
African Philosophy: A Historico-hermeneutical Investigation of
the Conditions of its Possibility, University Press of America,
Lanharn, MD, 1983.; Oluwole, S. B., 1992, ‘The Africanness of a
Philosophy’, in H. Nagl-Docekal and F. M. Wimmer (eds),
Postkoloniales Philosophieren: Afrika, Wien: [ publisher ]
; Ramose, M.B., 1999, African philosophy through ubuntu, Avondele
(Harare): Mond; Serequeberban, T., 1994, The hermeneutics of
African philosophy: Horizon and discourse, London: Routlegde;
Sogolo, G.S., 1993, Foundations of African philosophy, Ibadan:
Ibadan University Press; Tunde Bewaji, 1994, ‘Truth and ethics
in African thought: A reply to Emmanual Eze’, Quest:
Philosophical Discussions, 8, 1: 76-89; Wamba-dia-Wamba, E., 1992
(June), ‘Beyond Elite Politics of Democracy in Africa’, Quest
— Philosophical Discussions: An International African Journal
of Philosophy, VI, 1.; Wiredu, K., 1972, ‘On an African
Orientation in Philosophy’, in, Second Order, vol. 1, Nr. 2,
1972.; Wiredu, K., 1980, Philosophy and an African Culture: The
Case of the Akan, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980.;
Wiredu, K., 1990, ‘Are there cultural universals’, Quest:
Philosophical discussions: An International Africn Journal of
Philosophy, 4, 2: 4-19; Wright, R.A., 1977, ed., African
Philosophy. An Introduction, Washington.
[39] Cf. Appiah, K.A., 1992, In my
father’s house: Africa in the philosophy of culture, New York
& London: Oxford University Press.; Mudimbe V. Y,1994, The
Idea of Africa, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. ; Mudimbe,
V.Y., & Appiah, K.A., 1993, ‘The impact of African studies
on philosophy’, in: Bates, R.H., V.Y. Mudimbe & Jean
O’Barr, 1993, eds., Africa and the Disciplines: The
contributions of reseach in Africa to the social sciences and
humanities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 113-138;
Mudimbe, V.Y., 1988, The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy,
and the order of knowledge, Bloomington & Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press/London: Currey; Mudimbe, V.Y., 1997,
Tales of faith: Religion as political performance in Central
Africa: Jordan Lectures 1993, London & Atlantic Highlands:
Athlone Press; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2001, ‘An
incomprehensible miracle’: Central African clerical
intellectualism and African historic religion: A close reading of
Valentin Mudimbe’s Tales of Faith, paper read at the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, 1st February, 2001,
as the opening lecture in a series of four, entitled ‘Reading
Mudimbe’, organised by Louis Brenner and Kai Kresse; and again
at SOAS, 15 May, 2001, in the presence of an with stimulating
comments from, Mudimbe himself, also at: http://binsbergen.bravepages.com
[40] Seminal Afrocentrist writings
include: Diop, Nations negres et culture, o.c.; Diop C.A.,
1959, L’unite culturelle de l’Afrique noire: Domaines du
patriarcat et du matriarcat dans I’Antiquite classique,
Paris: Presence africaine; Asante M.K., 1982, ‘Afrocentricity
and Culture’, in : Asante, M.K., & Asante, K.W., eds, African
culture, Trenton, Africa World Press, pp. 3ff; Asante M.K.,
1987, The Afrocentric idea, Philadelphia: Temple
University Press; Obenga, T., 1990, La philosophie africaine
de la periode pharaonique: 2780-330 avant notre ere, Paris:
L’Harmattan; Obenga, T., 1995, Cheikh Anta Diop, Volney et
le Sphinx: Contribution de Cheikh Anta Diop a l’historiographie
mondiale, Paris: Presence africaine. For well-documented but
largely dismissive critical assessments, cf. Fauvelle, F.-X.,
1996, L’Afrique de Cheikh Anta Diop, Paris: Karthala;
Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., Chretien, J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H.,
2000, eds., Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des Africains entre
Egypte et Amerique, Paris: Karthala, English tr. in
preparation; Howe, S., 1999, Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and
imagined homes, London/ New York: Verso, first published
1998; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2000, ‘Le point de vue de Wim van
Binsbergen’, in: ‘Autour d’un livre. Afrocentrisme, de
Stephen Howe, et Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des Africains entre
Egypte et Amerique, de Jean-Pierre chretien [ sic ] ,
Francois-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et Claude-Helene Perrot (dir.),
par Mohamed Mbodj, Jean Copans et Wim van Binsbergen’, Politique
africaine, no. 79, octobre 2000, pp. 175-180, also at: http://come.to/black_athena
[41] Bernal, M., 1987, Black Athena:
The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I, The
Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1787-1987, London: Free Association
Books/ New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press; Bernal, M., 1991,
Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.
II, The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. London: Free
Association Books; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press;
Lefkowitz, M.R., & MacLean Rogers, G., eds, 1996, Black
Athena revisited, Chapel Hill & London: University of North
Carolina Press; Berlinerblau, J., 1999, Heresy in the University:
The Black Athena controvery and the responsibilities of American
intellectuals, New Brunswick etc.: Rutgers University Press; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ed., Black Athena: Ten Years After,
Hoofddorp: Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, special
issue, Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and
Historical Society, vols 28-29, 1996-97; W.M.J. van Binsbergen,
2000, ‘Dans le troisieme millenaire avec Black Athena?’, in:
Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., Chretien, J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H., Afrocentrismes:
L’histoire des Africains entre Egypte et Amerique, Paris:
Karthala, pp. 127-150, also at: http://come.to/black_athena
[42] Cf. Diop , C.A., 1996, Towards
the African renaissance: Essays in African culture &
development 1946-1960, tr. from the French by E.P. Modum, London:
Karnak House; Mbeki, T., 1999, ‘The African Renaissance, South
Africa and the world’. In: Hadland, A., and J. Rantao, The life
and times of Thabo Mbeki, Rivonia (S.A.), 1999, 170-183)
[43] Cf. Geschiere, P.L., 1993, ‘Wetenschap en ontwikkeling. Scheiden of lijden?’, in: W. van Binsbergen, ed., Maatschappelijke betekenis van Nederlands Afrika-onderzoek in deze tijd, Leiden: Werkgemeenschap Afrika, pp. 63-80.
[44] Bratton, M., 1990, ‘Non-governmental Organizations in Africa: Can they Influence Public Policy?’, Development and Change, 21; Cernea, M.M., 1990, Non-governmental organisations and local development, World Bank Discussion Papers 40, Washington: World Bank; Fowler, A., 1985, ‘NGOs in Africa: Naming for what they are’, in: Kinyanjui, K., red., Non-governmental organisations’ contribution to development, Nairobi: Institute of Development Studies, University of Nairobi, pp. 7-30; Fowler, A., 1991, ‘The Role of NGOs in Changing State-Society Relations: Perspectives from Eastern and Southern Africa’, Development Policy Review, 9, 1; Fowler, A., 1993, ‘Non-governmental Organizations as Agents of Democratization: an African Perspective’, Journal of International Development, 5, 3; Kothari, R., 1988, ‘The NGOs, the state and world capitalism’, in Rajni Kothari, The State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance, Delhi: Ajanta; NGO Landenstudie, 1991, Impactstudie Medefinancieringsprogramma, n.p. [ The Hague ]; Shaw, T.M., 1990, ‘Popular participation in non-governmental structures in Africa: Implication for democratic development in Africa’, Africa Today, 36, 3: 5f; Thomas, A., 1992, ‘Non-governmental organizations and the limits to empowerment’, in M. Wuyts, M. Macintosh and T. Hewitt, eds, Development Policy and Public Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992, a , ‘ ‘‘NGO’s’’ tussen wetenschappelijke kennisproduktie en beleid: Enige sociaal-wetenschappelijke opmerkingen over niet-overheidsorganisaties in Afrika, inleiding voor de conferentie: ‘Het Medefinancieringsprogramma: Perspectieven en bevindingen’, Den Haag, 15 oktober 1992, georganiseerd door Interuniversitaire Onderzoeksschool CERES/CIRAN (Centre for International Research and Advisory Networks)/NRC-Handelsblad, reprinted in: Literatuur behorende bij de cursus ‘Ontwikkeling en debat/debatten in ontwikkeling: Problemen nu en perspectieven voor de toekomst’, georganiseerd door CEBEMO in samenwerking met de vakgroep Culturele Antropologie/ Studie der Niet-westerse Samenlevingen van de Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, deel II, pp. 68-84, Den Haag: CEBEMO; also at: http://come.to/van_binsbergen
[45] On this point, cf. Amselle,
J.-L., 2001, Branchements: Anthropologie de l’universalite des
cultures, Paris: Flammarion, who signals this recent development
(partly by reference to my own neodiffusionist studies) even
though he frowns upon it.
[46] Cf. my ‘Cultures do not
exist’, o.c.
[47] On these issues extensively in
my: ‘Cultures do not exist’, and my forthcoming Intercultural
encounters.
[48] Cf. my: ‘Cultures do not
exist’, and my forthcoming Intercultural encounters.
[49] Similar misgivings were phrased,
e.g., by Fabian, Time and the other, o.c.; whereas the
postmodernist critique of anthropology was to insist that
anthropology’s claim of constituting a science was in itself
part of its narrative conventions as, essentially, a genre of
creative literature, prone to levels of imagination and
psychoanalytical transference hitherto unsuspected and certainly
unmentionable in anthropological circles; cf. Clifford, J., &
Marcus, G., eds., 1986, Writing culture: The poetics and politics
of ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press;
Clifford, J., 1988, The predicament of culture: Twentieth-century
ethnography, literature and art, Mass.: Harvard University Press;
Sangren, P., 1988, ‘Rhetoric and the authority of ethnography:
‘‘Postmodernism’’ and the social reproduction of
texts’, Current Anthropology, 29, 3: 405-425; Pool, R., 1991,
‘Postmodern ethnography?’, Critique of Anthropology, 11:
309-332; Polier, N., & W. Roseberry, 1989, ‘Tristes tropes:
Postmodern anthropologists encounter the other and discover
themselves’, Economy and Society, 18: 245-264; Geuijen, K.,
1992, ‘Postmodernisme in de antropologie’, Antropologische
verkenningen, 11, 1: 17-36; Abbink, J., 1989, ‘Historie,
etnografie en ‘‘dialoog’’: problemen van het
antropologisch postmodernisme’, in: A. Bosboom, ed., Liber
Amicorum A.A. Trouwborst: Antropologische essays, Nijmegen:
Instituut voor Culturele Antropologie, pp. 3-24.
[50] Cf. Appadurai, A., 1997,
Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization, Delhi
etc.: Oxford University Press; first published 1996, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press; Bauman, Z., 1998, Globalisation:
The human consequences, London: Polity Press & Blackwell; Fardon, R., van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & van Dijk, R.,
1999, eds., Modernity on a shoestring: Dimensions of
globalization, consumption and development in Africa and beyond:
Based on an EIDOS conference held at The Hague 13-16 March 1997,
Leiden/ London: EIDOS (European Interuniversity Development
Opportunities Study network);
Featherstone, M., 1990, ed., Global culture: Nationalism,
globalisation and modernity, London/ Newbury Park: Sage;
Featherstone, M., 1995, Undoing culture: Globalization,
postmodernism and identity, London: Sage; Griffin, K., &
Rahman, A., 1992, Globalization and the developing world: An
essay on the international dimensions of development in the
post-cold war era, Geneva: United Nationals Research Institute
for Social Development; Hirst, R. & Thompson, G., 1996,
Globalization in question, London: Polity Press; Kearney, M.,
1995, ‘The local and the global: The anthropology of
globalization and transnationalism’, Annual Review of
Anthropology, 24: 547-565; King, A.D., 1991, Culture,
globalization and the World-System: Contemporary conditions for
the representation of identity, Binghamton: Macmillan; Meyer, B.,
& Geschiere, P., 1999, [check 1998] eds., Globalization and
identity: Dialectics of flows and closures, special issue,
Development and Change, 29, 4, October 1998, pp. 811-837; also
separately published, Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1999 [check 1998];
Nederveen Pieterse, J., 1994, Globalization as hybridization,
Institute of Social Studies Working Paper 152, The Hague:
Institute of Social Studies; Robertson, R., 1987,
‘Globalization theory and civilizational analysis’,
Comparative Civilizations Review, 17: [add pages]. [Louise niet
gevonden]; Robertson, R., 1992, Globalization: Social theory and
global culture, London: Sage; Robertson, R., & Lechner, F.,
1985, ‘Modernization, globalization, and the problem of culture
in world-systems theory’, Theory, Culture and Society, 2, 3:
103-117; Soares, L.E., 1997, ‘Globalization as a a shift in
intracultural relations’, in: Soares, L.E., ed., Cultural
pluralism, identity, and globalization, Rio de Janeiro: UNESCO/
ISSC/ Educam, pp. 363-392; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1995,
‘Popular culture in Africa: Dynamics of African cultural and
ethnic identity in a context of globalization’, in: van der
Klei, J., ed., Popular culture: Beyond historical legacy and
political innocence, Utrecht: CERES, pp. 7-40; also at: http://ethnicity.bravepages.com ; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997,Virtuality as a key
concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic
transformation of contemporary Africa, The Hague: WOTRO, Working
papers on Globalisation and the construction of communal
identity, 3, also at: http://come.to/van_binsbergen ; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1998, ‘Globalization and
virtuality: Analytical problems posed by the contemporary
transformation of African societies’, in: Meyer, B., &
Geschiere, P.L., Globalization and identity: Dialectics of flows
and closures, special issue, Development and Change, 29, 4,
October 1998, pp. 873-903; also separately published as Meyer,
B., & Geschiere, P., 1998, eds., Globalization and identity:
Dialectics of flow and closure, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 273-303,
also at: http://ethnicity.bravepages.com
; van der Veer, P., 1996a, Conversion to modernities: the
globalization of christianity, New York/ London: Routledge;
Warnier, J.-P., 1999, La mondialisation de la culture, Paris:
Decouverte; Waters, M., 1995, Globalization, London/ New York:
Routledge.
[51] Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999,
‘Culturen bestaan niet’: Het onderzoek van interculturaliteit
als een openbreken van vanzelfsprekendheden, inaugural lecture,
chair of intercultural philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam,
Rotterdam: Rotterdamse Filosofische Studies; English version:
‘Cultures do not exist’, in press in: Quest, also at: http://come.to/van_binsbergen ; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., forthcoming, Intercultural
encounters: African lessons for a philosophy of interculturality.
[52] Cf: Kimmerle, H., 1991,
Philosophie in Afrika. Annaherungen an einen interkulturellen
Philosophiebegriff, Frankfurt a. M. 1991; Kimmerle, H., 1994, Die
dimension des Interkulturellen , Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi;
Kimmerle, H., 1996, ed., Das Multiversum der Kulturen, Amsterdam/
Atlanta: Rodopi; Kimmerle, H., & Wimmer, F.M., 1997, eds.,
Philosophy and democracy in intercultural perspective, Amsterdam/
Atlanta: Rodopi; Mall, R.A., 1995, Philosophie im Vergleich der
Kulturen: Interkulturelle Philosophie, eine neue Orientierung,
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft; Mall, R.A., &
Lohmar, D., eds., Philosophische Grundlagen der
Interkulturalitat, Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi; my ‘Culturen
bestaan niet’ / ‘Cultures do not exist’, o.c., and
Intercultural encounters, o.c.
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