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© 1997-2002 Wim
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., eds., Globalization and idenity: Dialectics of flow and closure, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 273-303; also published as: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1998, ‘Globalization and virtuality: Analytical problems posed by the contemporary transformation of African societies’, in: Meyer, B., & Geschiere, P., eds., Globalization and identity: Dialectics of flows and closures, special issue, Development and Change, 29, 4, October 1998, pp. 873-903
Towards the end of the first international
conference to be organised by the Dutch national research
programme on ‘globalisation and the construction of communal
identities’, Ulf Hannerz took the opportunity of stressing the
need for further conceptual development, not just in the case of
the Dutch programme but in that of globalisation studies in
general. The present paper is an attempt on my part to take up
that challenge. While situated against the background of a
rapidly growing social-science literature on globalisation,[ii] my
aim is not to review that literature in its impressive scope and
depth; rather more modestly, and perhaps non inappropriately in
the present stage of our programme, I have let myself be inspired
by a series of recent discussions and presentations within the
programme and within the wider intellectual framework of Dutch
anthropology.
I concentrate on virtuality, which I have come to regard
as one of the key concepts for a characterisation and
understanding of the forms of globalisation in Africa; sections I
and II are taken up defining virtuality and globalisation and
provisionally indicating their theoretical relationship. The
problematic heritage of a locality-obsessed anthropological
tradition (as explored in the third section) provides the
analytical framework within which virtuality makes an inspiring
topic. The fourth sections offers a transition from the theory to
the empirical case studies, by examining the problem of meaning
in the African urban environment. In the fifth section I evoke an
ethnographic situation (urban puberty rites in Zambia today) that
illustrates particular forms of virtuality as part of the
globalisation process.
True to the Manchester/ Rhodes-Livingstone tradition by which it
was largely fed, my field-work career has oscillated between
urban and rural African settings, and I realise of course that
African towns have always been a context for cosmopolitan meaning
which does not stem from the villages in the rural region
surrounding the town, but reflects, and is reflected in, the
world at large. Yet I have decided to dwell here upon problems of
meaning which — under the heading of virtuality — can only be
formulated (even if their solution calls for a much broader
geographical scope) when we look upon globalisation from the
vantage point of the African village and its largely internal
processes of signification.
Seeking to illuminate virtuality as an aspect of globalisation
requires that we set the scene by taking a closer look at the
latter concept.
In the final analysis, globalisation is a
consequence of the mathematical properties of the shape of the
earth’s surface. Taken at face value, globalisation is
primarily a spatial metaphor (the socio-cultural implications of
the mathematical properties of the earth’s surface, notably the
fact that from any spot on that surface any other point can be
reached, while (provided the journey is continued for long enough
in the same direction) the ultimate destination will be the point
of departure, ultimately in other words the entire surface will
be covered. Yet it is important to also investigate the temporal
dimension of the globalisation metaphor: the compressing of time
and of time costs[iii] in
relation to spatial displacement, as well as the meaning and the
effects of such displacement. It is the interplay between the
temporal and the spatial dimension which allows us to pinpoint
why globalisation has taken on a substantially new shape in the
last few decades. The shape of the earth has not noticeably
changed over the few million years of man’s existence on earth,
and therefore human culture, or cultures, could perhaps be said
to have always been subject to globalising tendencies.[iv] But
before the invention of the telegraph, the railroad, and the
aeroplane the technology of time and space was in most parts of
the world so limited that the effective social and cultural life
world tended to be severely bound by geographical propinquity.
Most people would thus live in a world where localising
tendencies would greatly outweigh whatever globalisation took
place or came along. People, ideas, and goods did travel, and
often across wide distances, as the archaeological and historical
record demonstrates. If writing and effective imperial
organisation then created a continuous and more or less stable
orientation across space and time, the conditions would be set
for early or proto-globalisation, characteristic of
the communication technology of the mounted courier and the
sailing boat. Where no such conditions prevailed, movement
inevitably meant dissociating from the social setting of origin,
and establishing a new local world elsewhere — a world usually
no longer connected, through effective social interaction, with
the one left behind, initially strongly reminiscent of the latter
but decreasingly so — even in the case of nomadic cultures
whose persistence in the face of spatial mobility has depended on
their comparatively low investment in spatial attachment as an
organising principle.
If today we have the feeling that globalisation expresses a real
and qualitative change that uniquely characterises the
contemporary condition, it is because of the hegemonic nature of
capitalist technology, which has brought about unprecedented
levels of mastery of space and time. When messages travel at
light speed across the globe using electronic media, when
therefore physical displacement is hardly needed for effective
communication yet such displacement can be effected within one or
two days from anywhere on the globe to anywhere else, and when
the technology of manufacturing and distribution has developed to
such levels that the same material environment using the same
objects can be created and fitted out anywhere on the globe at
will — then we have reduced the fees that time and space impose
on the social process, to virtually zero. Then we can speak of
globalisation in the true sense.
Globalisation is not about the absence or dissolution of
boundaries, but about the dramatically reduced fee imposed by
time and space, and thus the opening up of new spaces and new
times within new boundaries that were hitherto inconceivable.
Globalisation as a condition of the social world today revolves
on the interplay between unbounded world–wide flow, and the
selective framing of such flow within localising contexts; such
framing organises not only flow (of people, ideas and objects)
and individual experience, but also the people involved in them,
creating more or less enduring social categories and groups whose
collective identity as supported by their members’ interaction
creates an eddy of particularism, of social localisation, within
the unbounded global flow.
In my view virtuality is one of the major
underlying themes in the context of globalisation.
The terms virtual and virtuality have a
well-defined and illuminating history, which in its broad sweep
of space and time, its multi-lingual aspect and its repeated
changes of meaning and context, reminds us of the very
globalisation process we seek to illuminate by the use of these
terms. Non-existent in classical Latin (although obviously
inspired by the word virtus there), they are late-medieval
neologisms, whose invention became necessary when, partly via
Arabic versions of Aristotle’s’ works, his Greek concept of du\na±mi?
(‘potentiality, power, quadrate’) had to be translated into
Latin.[v]
While the Scholastic/ Aristotelian philosophy, with its emphasis
on general potential to be realised in the concrete, gradually
retreated from most domains of North Atlantic intellectual life,
the terms found refuge in the expanding field of physics, where
virtual velocity, virtual moment, virtual work became established
concepts around 1800. This was a century after optics had
formulated the theory of the ‘virtual image’: the objects
shown in a mirror image there do not really exist, but they are
merely illusory representations, which we apparently observe at
the end of the light beams connecting the object, the surface of
the mirror, and our eye. In our age of information technology the
term ‘virtual’ has gained a new lease of life,[vi]
which takes its cue from the meaning given to the term in optics.
In the globalisation perspective we frequently refer to products
of the electronic industry, and the furtive, intangible
projections of texts and images on electronic screens is an
obvious example of virtuality. Virtual reality has now
become a cliche of the post-modern experience: computer games and
simulations which — with extreme suggestions of reality —
conjure up, for the consumer, vicarious experiences in the form
of illusions. As electronic media, like television and video,
march on in contemporary Africa, it is also in that continent
that we can make out this form of virtuality in the context of
the globalisation process.
But the applicability of the concept of ‘virtuality’ extends
further. Drawing on a notion of ‘virtual discourse’ which
while inspired by Foucault (1966) is in fact equivalent to that
of performative discourse in analytical philosophy,[vii]
Jules Rosette (1996) in a splendid recent paper reserves the
notion of virtuality for a specific discursive situation: the
‘symbolic
revindications of modernity’s broken promise’ (1996: 5),
which play a central role in the
construction of postcolonial identity:
‘When a virtual
discourse becomes a master cultural narrative [ e.g. authenticite,
negritude ] , individuals must accept it in order to
validate themselves as members of a collectivity’ (1996: 6).
This allows her to link the specific form of
postcolonial political discourse in Zaire (for a strikingly
similar example from Nigeria under Babangida, cf. Apter 1996) to
the macro-economic predicament of Africa today, of which the
elusive magic of money then emerges as the central symbol.
Inspiring as this is, it is not necessary to limit the concept of
virtuality to that of explicit, verbal discourse, and there is
much to be said for a much wider application, encompassing
implicit beliefs, the images on which the electronically-inspired
use of the concept of virtuality would concentrate, and object.
Here we may allow ourselves to be inspired by a recent paper by
Rudiger Korff (1996) even if our emphasis is to be on the
cultural and symbolic rather than — as in Korff’s case — on
the technological and economic side:
‘Globalization
is accompanied by virtuality. The financial markets gained
autonomy by producing the goods they trade among themselves and
thereby developed into speculators’ ‘Monopoly’. Virtuality
is well shown by the information networks in which the hardware
determined the possibilities for person to person interaction.
This allows an anonymity in direct interaction. All personality
features are hidden, and virtual personalities take over the
conversation. Even the world of commodities is virtualized. While
for Marx a commodity had two aspects, use- and exchange value,
today a ‘symbolic’ value has to be added. Traditions and
cultures are created as virtual realities and states offer
imaginations in their search for political subjects. This
indicates a new stage in the dialectic of disenchantment and
mystification. While capitalism disenchanted morality and
substituted it with the magic of commodities and technology (Verdinglichung),
today commodity fetishism is substituted by post-modern virtual
realities. (...) Appadurai (1990) mentions in a similar vein
ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and
ideoscapes. (...) As with commodities, these ‘imagined
worlds’ and virtual realities develop their own dynamics and
start to govern their creators for whom it is impossible to
distinguish reality from virtuality. Just like Goethe says in the
Magician’s apprentice: ‘Die Geister, die ich rief, die
werd ich nicht mehr los.’[viii]
Ultimately, virtuality stands for a specific relation of
reference as existing between elements of human culture (A1, A2,
..., An). This relation may be defined a follows.:
Once, in some
original context C1, Avirtual referred to (i.e. derived its
meaning from) Areal; this relationship of reference is still
implied to hold, but in actual fact Avirtual has come to function
in a context C2 which is so totally dissimilar to C1, that Avirtual
stands on itself; and although still detectable on formal grounds
to derive from Areal, has become effectively meaningless in the
new context C2, unless for some new meaning which Avirtual may
acquire in C2 in ways totally unrelated to C1.
Virtuality then is about disconnectivity,
broken reference, de-contextualisation, through which yet formal
continuity shimmers through.
Applying the above abstract definition, we
may speak of virtuality when, in cases involving cultural
material from a distant provenance in space or time or both,
signification is not achieved through tautological,
self-contained, reference to the local, so that such material is
not incorporated and domesticated within a local cultural
construct, and no meaningful contemporary symbolic connection can
be established between these alien contents and other aspects of
the local society and culture.
That geographical nearness, propinquity should be considered of
main importance to any social structure was already stated by
that pioneer of legal anthropology, Maine (1883: 128f). Kroeber
(1938: 307f) reiterated the same point of view when reviewing the
first decades of scientific anthropology. Or in
Radcliffe-Brown’s words (1940: xiv):
‘Every human
society has some sort of territorial structure. (...) This
territorial structure provides the framework, not only for the
political organisation (...), but for other forms of social
organisation also, such as economic, for example. The system of
local aggregation and segregation (...) is the basis of all
social life.’
Before the development of contemporary communication technologies
(which also includes such inventions, already more than a century
old, as the telephone and the motorcar, and railway which is even
considerably older) the coincidence between interactive, social
space and geographical space could conveniently be taken for
granted for practical purposes. If horse-riding and the talking
drum represent the paroxysm of technological achievement, the
effective social horizon coincides with the visible horizon. It
is only the invention of modern technologies which has revealed
this time-honoured coincidence as accidental and not inevitable.
For complex reasons which indirectly reflect the state of
communication technology by the end of the nineteenth century,
anthropology in its formative decades concentrated on social
contexts outside the industrial North Atlantic, where such
technologies was not yet available so that social space and
geographical nearness continued to be two sides of the same coin.
For the geographically near to become the local in the classic
anthropological sense, we need to add an appeal to the systemic
nature of local culture. This refers to the claim (usually
highly exaggerated) that its elements hang together
systematically, so that it is possible to reduce the culture to a
far smaller number of elements and informing principles than the
astronomical number of separate cultural events that take place,
and material cultural objects that exist, among the set of people
involved within a fairly limited space and time. Creolisation
(cf. Hannerz 1987) then means, not that the systemic nature of
local culture has been abandoned by the actors or destroyed by
the onslaught of outside influences, but that it only accounts
for appreciably less than the entire culture: a considerable part
falls outside the system. Such creolisation can be argued to be
merely a specific form of virtuality: as a departure from the
systemic nature of local culture. If culture produces reality in
the consciousness of the actors, then the reality produced under
conditions of such departure is, to the extent to which it is
virtual, only... virtual reality.
This is ground covered by Appadurai in his well-known paper on The
production of locality. A merging of two notions of locality
(‘geographical space of nearness, neighbourhood’
versus ‘social space of identity, home’) was an
ingredient of earlier versions of Appadurai’s argument but
fortunately he has dropped that element in the final, published
version, in favour of a view of locality not only as social
space regardless of geographical contiguity, but also as
problematic, as to be actively constructed in the face of the
standard situation of non-locality (Appadurai 1995).
Under modern conditions of both communication technology and the
social engineering of self-organisation for identity, the
socially local is not any longer, necessarily, the geographically
near. We need a concept of social, culture and identity space
which (especially under conditions of ‘zero time-fees’, i.e.
electronic globalisation) is carefully distinguished from
geographical space — even although even the latter is, like
that other Kantian category time, far less self-evident and
unchangeable than Kant, and naive contemporary consumers of
secondary school physics, would tend to believe. In the same way
as the Euclidean two-dimensional geometry of the flat plane can
be demonstrated to be only a special case of the immense variety
of n-dimensional geometries which modern mathematics has come to
conceive, the insistence on geographical propinquity as a prime
determinant of social relations is merely a reflection of the
state of communication technology prevailing, during much of
man’s history, in the hunting and herding camps and the farming
villages that until only a few millennia ago were the standard
human condition. As such it has been built into classic
anthropology. Meanwhile, the distinction between social space and
geographical space does not mean that the material technologies
of geographical space have become irrelevant or non-existent in
the face of the social technology of locality construction — a
prudent approach to globalisation has to take account of both.
As advocated by Appadurai, we have to study in detail the
processes through which localisation as a social process takes
place. The local, in other words, is in itself a problem, not a
given, let alone a solution. We need to study the process of the
appropriation globally available objects, images and ideas in a
local contexts, which more often than not constitutes itself in
the very process of such appropriation. Let us take our clue from
the history of a major family of divination systems found
throughout Africa, under conditions of ‘proto-’ globalisation
(with the intermediate technology of seafaring, caravan trade and
elite-restricted, pre-printing literacy).
This history is basically that of localisation
processes involving astrological and numerological
interpretational schemes as current in the medieval Arabian
culture of North Africa and the Middle East, where they are known
under the name of geomancy or Ailm al-raml (‘the science
of sand’).[ix] This
process produced the interpretative catalogues for all African
divination systems based on a material apparatus producing 2n
different configurations, such as Fa, Ifa, Sixteen
Cowries, Sikidy, Four Tablets: illiterate
African versions so elaborate and so saturated with local African
imagery that they would appear to be authentically, autochthonous
African. In the same way it can be demonstrated that the actual
material apparatuses used in this connexion (tablets, divining
boards, divining bowls), although ultimately conceived within an
African iconography and carving techniques, and clad in awesome
African mystery and imputed authenticity, in fact are extreme
localisations of the intercontinentally mediated scientific
instruments (the sand board, the wax board, the lode compass, and
the square wooden simplification of the astrolabe) of Greek,
Arabian, and Chinese nautical specialists and scribes. The
example has considerable relevance, because here some of the main
factors of globalisation and universalism (notably literate
scholarship, empirical research and long-distance sea-faring),
have rather ironically ended up as forms of the most entrenched,
stereotypical African localisation and particularism. The hardest
analytical nut to crack is to explain why, and as a result of
what ideological, social, economic, and technological mechanisms,
such extreme localisation seems to be more typical of sub-Saharan
Africa than of other parts of the Old World in the second
millennium CE. Whatever of the original, distant contexts still
clings to these localised African precipitates (the overall
format of the apparatus, immutable but locally un-interpretable
formal details such as isolated astrological terms and
iconographic representations) amounts to virtuality and probably
adds much to these systems’ charisma.[x]
Such extreme localisation of outside
influences, rendering them practically imperceptible and
positioning them within the rural environment, although typical
for much of Africa’s history, is however no longer the dominant
form globalisation takes in Africa. Present-day virtually
manifests itself through the incomplete systemic incorporation of
cultural material which is both alien and recognised by the
actors to be so, and which circulates not primarily in remote
villages but in cities.
Examples of this form of virtuality are to be found all over
Africa today, and in fact (in a way which would render a classic,
holistic anthropological analysis nonsensical) they constitute
the majority of cultural expressions: from world religions to
party politics mediating world-wide models if formal
organisation, development and democracy;[xi] from specialist
production of contemporary art, belles lettres and philosophy
inspired by cosmopolitan models, to the production — no longer
self-evidently but, self-consciously, as a deliberate performance
— of apparently local forms of music and dance during an ethnic
festival like Kazanga in western central Zambia (van Binsbergen
1992a, 1994); from fashionable lingerie to public bodily prudery
demonstrably imposed by Christianity and Islam.
These symbolic processes are accompanied by, in fact carried by,
forms of social organisation which (through the creation of new
categories and groups, the erection of conceptual and
interactional boundaries around them, and the positioning of
objects and symbols through which both to reinforce and to
transgress these boundaries) create the socially local (in terms
of identity and home) within the global. Such categories and
groups are (in general) no longer spatially localised, in the
sense that they do no longer create a bounded geographical space
which is internally homogeneous in that it only inhabited by
people belonging to the same bounded organisation (‘village’,
‘ward’, ‘neighbourhood’). We have to think of such
organisations (whose membership is typically geographically
dispersed while creating a social focus) as: ethnic
associations, churches, political parties, professional
associations, schools, hospitals, etc. If they are geographically
dispersed, this does not mean that their membership is
distributed all over the globe. Statistically, they have a fairly
limited geographical catchment area commensurate with the
available transport technology, but within that catchment area,
the vast majority of human inhabitants are non-members — it
does therefore not constitute a contiguous social space.
Their typical, although not exclusive, abode is the town, and it
is to African towns that we shall finally turn for the case study
of urban puberty rites that is to add a measure of descriptive
and contextual substance to the above theoretical exercises.
However, virtuality presents itself in that case study in the
form of an emulation of the village as a virtual image; so let us
first discuss that unfortunate obsession of classic anthropology,
the village.
The classic anthropological image of
‘the’ African culture as holistic, self-contained, locally
anchored, effectively to be subsumed under an ethnic name, was
deliberately constructed so as to constitute a local universe of
meaning — the opposite of virtuality. For such a culture was
thought to form an integrated unity, so all its parts were
supposed to refer to that same coherence, which in its entirety
gave the satisfactory illusion of localised meaningfulness.
It is necessary to dwell on this point,
since (as I found out when presenting an earlier version of the
present argument) it is capable of producing considerable
confusion. Although there are notable exceptions,[xii]
and although the research programme of which the present book is
a first product is prompted by the determination to change that
situation, it is true to say that most of the existing literature
on globalisation was not written by established ethnographers of
African rural life. The typical focus for globalisation studies
is the metropolis, the self-evident access to international
life-styles mediated by electronic media, with a dominant
presence of the state and the culture and communication industry.
However, people born in African villages are now also being
globalised, and an understanding of their experiences requires an
analytical and descriptive grip on African rural social
formations.
Not infrequently, Marxist studies of the 1970s and ’80s,
including my own, are claimed to have demonstrated the deficit of
earlier mainstream anthropology. This is largely a spurious
claim. Modes-of-production analysis, as the main contribution of
Marxism to contemporary anthropology, has done a number of
essential things:
• reintroduce
an emphasis on material production and appropriation;
• dissolve
the assumed unitary nature of the local rural society into a
handful of subsystems ‘modes of production’) , each with
their own logic of exploitation and ideological legitimation, and
linked together (‘articulated’) within the ‘social
formation’, in such a way that the reproduction of one mode
depends on the exploitation of another mode; and finally,
• provide
a theoretical perspective which could account for the persistence
and relative autonomy (also as ‘logics’ of signification and
legitimation) of these various modes and their articulations,
even under conditions of capitalism and the colonial or
post-colonial state.
This revolutionary reformulation of the
classic anthropological perspective therefore could accommodate
internal contradictions, multiplicity of fields of symbolic
reference (notably: as many fields as there were modes of
production, while the articulation process itself also generated
a field of symbolism of its own (van Binsbergen 1981), and
outside functioning within the world system; but it did not
discard the essentially local nature of the social formation, nor
its systemic nature even if the latter was no longer conceived as
unitary, holistic integration, but came to be represented as a
dialectic composite of contradictions between the few specific
‘logics’, each informing a specific mode of production. The
Marxist approach did not render the notion of local integration
obsolete: to the extent to which the articulation of modes of
production under the hegemony of one dominant mode has succeeded,
the resulting social formation is effectively integrated by its
very contradictions.
So even from a Marxist perspective it appears to be true to say
that African historic societies in the present millennium have
invariably displayed cleavages in terms of gender, age, class,
and political power, while containing only partially integrated
elements deriving from and still referring, beyond the local
society, to other cultural complexes which were often remote in
space and time. Yet they have offered to their members (and
largely in order to accommodate those very contradictions) a
fairly coherent universe, in which the human body-self,
interpersonal relations, the landscape and the supernatural all
featured in one composite, comprehensive world-view, whose
symbolism and ritual elaboration was to reconcile and conceal,
rather than articulate, such internal contradictions as
constitute the whole and render it dynamic.
In this context, the meaning of an element of the local
society and culture (to attempt a definition of a word used too
loosely in the argument so far) consists in the network of
referential relations at the centre of which such element is
perceived and conceptualised by the participants; through this
relational network the element is taken, by the actors, and
explicitly or implicitly, as belonging to that general
socio-cultural order, cognitively and emotively linked to many
other aspects of that order — a condition which produces a
sense of proper placement, connectivity and coherence,
recognition, identity as a person and as a group, aesthetics,
bodily comfort and even healing.
In Africa, village society still forms the
context in which many[xiii] present-day urbanites were born, and where
some will retire and die. Until recently, the dichotomy between
town and village dominated Africanist anthropology. Today we have
to admit that, considering the constant movement of ideas, goods
and people between town and village, the dichotomy has lost much
of its explanatory value. In terms of social organisation,
economic and productive structures, goals and evaluations town
and village have become complementary, even converging options
within the social experience of Africans today; their difference
has become gradual, and is no longer absolute. However, while of
diminishing value in the hands of us analysts, the dichotomy
between town and village remains relevant in so far as it informs
African actors’ conceptualisations of their life-world and
social experience. Here the idealised image of the village stands
for an imaginary context (no longer to be found in the real
villages of today) where production and reproduction are viable
and meaningful, pursued by people who — organised along the
lines of age and gender divisions, and historic
(‘traditional’) leadership — are turned into an effective
community through an un-eroded kinship system, symbolism, ritual
and cosmology. Vital in this set-up is that — typically through
non-verbal means — ritual manages to construct the bodies of
the members of the residential group as charged or inscribed with
a shared meaning, a shared identity, and while the body moves
across time and space this indelible mark is carried to new
contexts yet remains.
Even in the village context the effective construction of
community cannot be taken for granted. Central African villages,
for instance, have been described[xiv] as the scene of an
uneasy truce between strangers, only temporarily constructed into
community — at the expense of kinship rituals which take up an
enormous part of available resources and even so barely conceal
or negotiate underlying contradictions among the village
population. Such rituals of kinship (those attending pregnancy,
birth, adolescence, marriage, and death) not only transform
biological human individuals into competent social persons with a
marked identity founded in the local community (or in the case of
death transform such social persons in the face of physical
decomposition); such rituals thus construct, within that overall
community, specific constituent identities, e.g. those of gender
and age. They refer to, and to a considerable extent reproduce
and perpetuate, the productive and social organisation of the
village society. Perhaps the central characteristic of the old
(nineteenth-century) village order was that the construction of
community was still so effective that in the villagers’
consciousness their actual residential group self-evidently
appeared as the realisation of that ideal.
It is crucial to realise that in the twentieth century, even with
reference to rural settings, we are not so much dealing with
‘real’ communities, but with rural folks’ increasingly
problematic model of the village community. Perhaps we could say
that the village was becoming a virtual village. Rural
ideological change in Africa during the twentieth century (van
Binsbergen 1981) can be summed up as a process of people actively
confronting the erosion of that model, its becoming irrelevant
and impotent in the face of political economic realities.
Throughout the twentieth century, rural populations in Africa
have struggled, through numerous forms of organisational,
ideological and productive innovation combining local practices
with outside borrowings, to reconstruct a new sense of community
in an attempt to revitalise, complement or replace the collapsing
village community in its viable nineteenth century form. In fact
the entire ideological history of twentieth century Africa could
be written from this perspective. Peasants have been constantly
engaged in the construction of new, alternative forms of
community on the basis of rather new principles as derived from
political, cultic, productive and consumerist ideas introduced
from the wider world. Many of these movements have sought to
re-formulate the notion of the viable, intact village community
in new terms and with new outside inspiration and outside
pressure. Ethnicity, healing cults, prophetic cults, anti-sorcery
movements, varieties of imported world religions and local
transformations thereof e.g. in the form of Independent churches,
struggles for political independence, involvement in modern
national politics including the recent wave of democratisation,
involvement in a peripheral-capitalist cash economy with new
symbols of status and distinction, — these have been some of
the strategies by which villagers have sought (often against many
odds) to create and bring to life the image of a new world, and a
continued sense of meaning and community, when the old village
order was felt, or said, to fall apart. And that old village
order, and the ethnic cultures under which it was usually
subsumed, may in itself have been largely illusory, strategically
underpinned by the ideological claims of elders, chiefs,
first-generation local intellectuals, colonial administrators and
missionaries, open to the cultural bricolage of invented
tradition of the part of these vocal actors (Hobsbawm &
Ranger 1983; Vail 1989).
If the construction of community in the rural context has been
problematic, the village yet represents one of the few models of
viable community among Africans today, including urbanites. It is
the only model which is part of a collective idiom pervading all
sections of contemporary society. As such it features massively
as a nostalgic reference in ethnic identity construction.
Whatever alternative models of community are available, are
shallowly rooted and reserved to specific sections of the
society: Christians or Muslims (the local religious congregation
as a community; and by extension the abstract world-wide
collective of co-religionists), cult members (the cultic group as
a community), members of a specific ethnic group (where the
ethnic group is constructed into a community, but typically
constructed by emphatic reference to the village model as a focal
point of origin and meaning), the elite (patterns of consumerism
which replace the notion of community through interaction with
the notion of virtual or vicarious global community through media
transmission and the display of appropriate manufactured symbols
— status symbols in clothing, transport, housing etc.).
We are now ready to step into African urban life as an obvious
locus of globalisation, and explore virtuality there.
Globalisation theory has stressed the
paradoxical phenomenon that, in the world today, the increasing
unification of the world in political, economic, cultural and
communication terms does not lead to increasing uniformity but,
on the contrary, goes hand in hand with a proliferation of local
differences. It is as if myriad eddies of particularism (which
may take the form of ethnic, linguistic and religious identities,
consumerist life-styles etc.) are the inevitable accompaniment of
the swelling stream of globalising universalism. Anthropologists
have — in theory, that is — long ceased to define their
research object primarily by reference to a more or less
demarcated part of the global landscape assumed to be the habitat
of a bounded, integrated ‘culture’ supposedly shared by a
people, tribe or ethnic group. While the time-honoured technique
of participant observation still favours their focusing on a set
of people who are more or less tied together by enduring social
relations and forms of organisation, such a set need no longer be
localised (for modern technology— not just fax machines and
E-mail, but also simple telephones and rural buses — enables
people to effectively maintain relationships across wide
distances: as members of the same ethnic group, as employees of
the same multinational corporation, as members of a cult, as
traders etc.) nor do the individuals which constitute that set
(as a statistical conglomerate, or a social network of dyadic
ties) necessarily and as a dominant feature of their social
experience construct that set as an ideal community with a name,
an identity, moral codes and values. Fragmentation,
heterogeneity, alienation and cultural and organisational
experiment are characteristic of the global condition, not only
in North Atlantic urban society but also, for much the same
reasons, in the rapidly growing towns of Africa today.
In essence, the aspect of globalisation which we seek to capture
by concentrating on virtuality, revolves around issues of African
actors’ production and sustaining of meaning. The notion of
virtuality is hoped to equip us for the situation, rather more
common than village anthropology prepared us to believe, that
meaning is encountered and manipulated in a context far removed,
in time and space, from the concrete social context of production
and reproduction where that meaning was originally worked out in
a dialectical interplay of articulated modes of production;
where, on the contrary, it is no longer local and systemic, but
fragmented, ragged, virtual, absurd, maybe even absent. The study
of such forms of meaning is of course doubly problematic because
anthropology itself is a globalising project, and one of the
first in western intellectual history. African towns, with their
usually recent history, heterogeneous migrant population, and
full of social, political and economic structures apparently
totally at variance with any village conditions in the
surrounding countryside, are laboratories of meaning. What can
the anthropologist, and particularly the variety of the
rurally-orientated anthropologist unfashionably favoured in this
paper, learn here about virtuality?
To what extent has the contemporary urban environment in Africa
managed to produce and nurture symbols which selectively refer to
the state and the world economy, yet at the same time negotiate
dilemmas of rural-derived identity and of urban-rural relations?
It is here that one can begin to look for the stuff that African
urbanism is made of. Is it true to say that these towns have
engendered collective representations which are strikingly urban,
and which offer partial and tentative yet creative solutions to
such typically urban problems as incessant personnel flow,
ethnic, class and religious heterogeneity, economic and political
powerlessness, and the increasing irrelevance, in the urban
situation, of historic, rural-derived forms of social
organisation (kinship, marriage, ‘traditional’ politics and
ritual)? Mitchell’s Kalela dance (1956) still offers a
classic paradigm, stressing how at the city boundaries elements
of rural society and culture (such as a rural-based ethnic
identity, a minority language, expressive forms of music and
dance, specific ways to organise production and reproduction in
localised kin groups) may be selectively admitted onto the urban
scene, yet undergo such a dramatic transformation of form,
organisation and function that their urban manifestations must be
understood by reference to the urban situation alone. Or, in
Gluckman’s (1960: 57) famous words,
‘the African
townsman is a townsman’[xv]
In other words, the African townsman is not
a displaced villager or tribesman — but on the contrary
‘detribalised’ as soon as he leaves his village (Gluckman
1945: 12) These ideas have evidently circulated in African urban
studies long before 1960.
Statements of this nature have helped to free our perception of
African urbanites from traditionalist and paternalistic
projections; for according to the latter they continued to be
viewed as temporarily displaced villagers whose true commitment
and identity continued to lie with their rural societies of
origin. The stress on the urban nature of African urbanites even
amounted to a radical political challenge, in a time when the
colonial (and South African) economy was largely based on the
over-exploitation[xvi] of rural communities through circulatory
migration of male workers conveniently defined as bachelors while
in town. We can therefore forgive these authors their
one-sidedness, but there is no denying that they failed to
address the fundamental problems of meaning which the
construction of a town-based culture in the (by and large) new
cities of Africa has always posed.[xvii]
But what happens to meaning in town? It is particularly in the
context of meaning that we see African towns as the arena where a
migrant’s specific, disconnected and fragmented rural-based
heritage is confronted with a limited number of
‘cosmopolitan’ socio-cultural complexes, each generating its
own discourse and claiming its own commitment from the people
drawn into its orbit in exchange for partial solutions of their
problems of meaning.
Before discussing these complexes, it is useful to realise that,
as a source of meaning, the historic rural background culture of
urban migrants is not necessarily as fragmented as the
multiplicity of ethnic labels and linguistic practices in the
town may suggest. Ethnic groups have a history (Chretien &
Prunier 1989), and while some ethnic groups can be said to be
recent, colonial creations, underlying their unmistakable
differences there is in many cases a common substratum of
regional cultural similarities and even identities: continuities
such as a patrilineal kinship system, emphasis on cattle,
similarities in the marital system, the cult of the land and of
the ancestors, patterns of divination and of sacrifice, shared
ideas about causation including witchcraft beliefs, converging
ideas about conflict resolution and morality. The result is that
even urban migrants with a different ethnic, linguistic and
geographical background may yet find that they possess a cultural
lingua franca that allows them to share such historic meanings as
have not been mediated through the state and capitalism.
Sometimes specific routinised modes of inter-ethnic discourse
(such as joking relations) explicitly mediate this joint
substratum. Traditional cults and independent Christian churches
in town, which tend to be trans-ethnic, derive much of their
appeal from the way in which they articulate this historic
substratum and thus recapture meanings which no longer can be
communicated with through migrants’ direct identification with
any specific historic rural culture. Moreover, partly on the
basis or these rural continuities, urban migrants creatively
develop a new common idiom not only for language communication,
but also for the patterning of their everyday relationships,
their notions of propriety and neighbourliness, the
interpretation and settlement of their conflicts, and the
evaluation of their statuses.
After this qualification, let us sum up the principal
cosmopolitan complexes:
•
The post-colonial state: a principal actor in the struggle
for control of the urban space; a major agent of social control
through its law-and-order institutions (the judiciary, police,
immigration department); a major mediator of ‘cosmopolitan’
meaning through the bureaucratically organised services it offers
in such fields as education, cosmopolitan medicine, housing, the
restructuration of kinship forms through statutory marriage etc.;
a major context for the creation of new, politically
instrumental meaning in the process of nation-building and
elite legitimation; and through its constitutional premises the
object (and often hub) of modern political organisations.
•
A variety of manifestations of the capitalist mode of
production, largely structuring the urbanites’ economic
participation and hence their experience of time, space,
causation, personhood and social relations; involving them in
relations of dependence and exploitation whose ideological
expression we have learned to interpret in terms of alienation
(the destruction of historic meaning); but also, in the process,
leading on to modern organisational forms (e.g. trade unions)
meant to counter the powerlessness generated in that process; and
finally producing both the manufactured products on which mass
consumption as a world-wide economic and cultural expression —
in other words, as another, immensely potent form of
‘cosmopolitan’ meaning — depends, as well as the financial
means to participate in mass consumption.
•
World religions, which pursue organisational forms and
ideological orientations rather reminiscent of the post-colonial
state and the capitalist mode of production, yet tending to
maintain, in time, space and ideological content, sufficient
distance from either complex to have their own appeal on the
urban population, offering formal socio-ritual contexts in which
imported cosmopolitan symbols can be articulated and shared
between urbanites, and in which — more than in the former two
complexes — rural-based historic symbols can be mediated,
particularly through independent churches.
•
Cosmopolitan consumer culture, ranging from fast food
shops to hire-purchase furniture stores displaying the whole
material dream of prospective middle-class life-style, and from
video outlets and record shops to the retail shops of the
international ready-made garment industry, and all the other
material objects by which one can encode distinctions in or
around one’s body and its senses, and create identity not by
seclusive group-wise self-organisation but by individual
communication with globally mediated manufactured symbols.
These four cosmopolitan repertoires of meaning differ
considerably from the ideal-typical meaning enshrined in the
rural historic universe. While historically related, they are
present on the urban African scene as mutually competitive,
fragmented, optional, and more or less anomic or even — when
viewed from a competitive angle — absurd. Yet together, as more
or less elite expressions, they constitute a realm of symbolic
discourse that, however internally contradictory, assumes
dominance over the rural-orientated, local and historic
repertoires of meaning of African migrants and workers.
The ways in which African urbanites, in their interactions and
conceptualisations, construct, keep apart, and merge as the case
may be, cosmopolitan and rural idioms, are ill understood for
several reasons. Those who, as social scientists, are supposed to
study these patterns of interaction are, in their personal and
professional lives, partisans of cosmopolitan repertoires and are
likely to be identified as such by the other actors on the urban
scene. Much of the actors’ juggling of repertoires is evasive
and combines the assumption of rigid subordination with the
practice of creative challenge and tacit symbolic resistance in
private spheres of urban life where few representatives of the
cosmopolitan repertoires have access. And whereas anthropology
has developed great expertise in the handling of meaning in one
spatio-temporal context (e.g. rural African societies) whose
wholeness and integration it has tended to exaggerate, the
development of a sensitive approach to fragmented and incoherent
multiplicity of repertoires of meaning, each assaulted and
rendered more or less meaningless by the presence of the other,
had to wait till the advent of Postmodernism as an attempt to
revolutionarise, or to explode, anthropology.[xviii] Our classic
predecessors in African urban studies worked on the assumption
that the African urban situation was very highly structured —
by what they called the ‘colonial-industrial complex’
imposing rigid segregation and class interests, by voluntary
associations, by networks.[xix] In the contemporary world, such structure is
becoming more and more problematic, and the town, especially the
African town, appears as the post-modern social space par
excellence. My greatest analytical problem here is that as a
social space the town lacks the coherent integrated structure
which could produce, like the village, a systematic (albeit
internally segmented and contradictory) repertoire of meaning
ready for monographic processing; but this may not merely be one
researcher’s analytical problem — it appears to sum up the
essence of what the urban experience in Africa today is about, in
the lives of a great many urbanites.
Postmodernism is
not the only, and deliberately unsystematic, analytical approach
to multiplicity of meaning within a social formation consisting
of fundamentally different and mutually irreducible
sub-formations. As a paradigm that preceded Postmodernism by a
decade in the circulation of intellectual fashions, the notion of
articulation of modes of production is in principle capable of
handling such a situation.[xx] However, the emphasis, in this approach, on
enduring structure and a specific internal logic for each
constituent ‘mode of production’ renders it difficult to
accommodate the extreme fragmentation and contradiction of
meaning typical of the urban situation. The various cosmopolitan
and local historic repertoires of meaning available in the
Francistown situation as discussed here cannot convincingly be
subsumed under the heading of a limited number of articulated
modes of production. Yet while deriving inspiration from the
post-modern position, my argument in the present paper is a plea
for rather greater insistence on structure, power and material
conditions than would suit the convinced post-modernist.
The work of Ulf
Hannerz[xxi] is exemplary for the kind of processes of
cultural production, variation and control one would stress when
looking at African towns (or towns anywhere else in the modern
world, for that matter) from the perspective of the modern world
as a unifying, globalising whole. However, it is significant that
his work, far from problematising the concept of meaning as such,
takes meaning rather for granted and concentrates on the social
circulation of meaning, in other words the management of meaning.[xxii]
Hannerz’s position here is far from exceptional in
anthropology, where we theorise much less about meaning than
would be suggested by the large number of anthropological
publications with ‘meaning’, ‘significance’,
‘interpretation’ and ‘explanation’ in their titles. And I
am not doing much better here myself. I did offer, above, a
homespun definition of ethnographic meaning, but must leave the
necessary theoretical discussion for another paper, or book.
Also for Hannerz the African townsman is truly a townsman, and
even the analyst seems to be entirely forgotten that ‘many’
(see note 13) of these urbanites, even today, have been born
outside town under conditions of rural, localised meaning evoked
today, and that this circumstance is likely to be somehow
reflected in their urban patterns of signification.
In certain urban situations rural models of interaction and
co-residence tend to be more prominent than in others. We need to
remind ourselves of the fact that urban does not necessarily mean
global. For instance, as a fresh urban immigrant one can take
refuge among former fellow-villagers, in an urban setting. The
vast evidence on urban immigration in Africa suggests that the
rural-orientated refuge in a denial of globalisation tends to be
partial and largely illusory, in other words towns precisely in
their display of apparently rural-derived elements tend to high
levels of virtuality/ discontinuity/ transformation. Even so it
remains important to look at meaning in African towns not only
from a global perspective but also from the perspective of the
home villages of many of the urbanites or their parents and
grandparents. Our first case study deal with an urban situation,
and should help us to lend empirical and comparative insight in
the applicability of the virtuality concept.
With these theoretical considerations in mind, let us now turn to
our case study, in a bid to add further empirical detail and
relevance to the concept of virtuality.
When central reproductive institutions of
the old village order, including rituals of kinship, are already
under great pressure from new and external alternatives in the
rural environment, one would hardly expect them to survive in
urban contexts. For in town people’s life is obviously
structured, economically and in terms of social organisation, in
ways which would render all symbolic and ritual reference to
rural-based cults reproducing the old village order, hopelessly
obsolete. Who would expect ancestral cults to take place in urban
settings in modern Africa? What theory of change and continuity
would predict the continued, even increasing practice of ecstatic
possession ritual in urban residential areas, often in the
trappings of new formally organised cults posing as Christian
churches or Islamic brotherhoods, but often also without such
emulation of world religions. Why do people pursue apparently
rural forms when socially, politically and economically their
lives as urbanites are effectively divorced from the village? The
point is, however that rural symbolic forms are prominent on the
African urban scene; as such they represent a conspicuous element
of virtuality, since urban life is no longer informed by the
patterns of production and reproduction that corresponded with
these rural symbols in the first place.
Stressing the complementarity between a local community’s
social, political and economic organisation and the attending
religious forms, the Durkheimian heritage in the social science
approach to religion, however dominant, provided no ready answers
when applied to study of historic (‘traditional’) urban
ritual, at least in Africa.[xxiv] For how can there be
such continuity when African urbanites stage a rural ritual in
the very different urban context? What would be the referent of
the symbols circulating in such ritual? The relative paucity of
studies on this point stands in amazing contrast with the
prevalence and ubiquity of the actual practice on the ground. It
is as if the absence of an adequate interpretative framework has
caused anthropologists to close their eyes for the ethnographic
facts staring them in the face. At the same time they have
produced in abundance studies of such forms urban ritual in the
context of world religions (especially studies on urban
Independent and mainstream Christian churches), which of course
do ‘feel right’ in an urban setting, where (far more directly
than in the remote countryside) globalisation made its impact on
the African continent.
The relatively few researchers (including myself) who have
documented urban ‘traditional’ ritual in modern Africa and
sought to interpret it, have come up with answers which, while
persuasive in the light of the analytical paradigms prevalent at
the time, would now seem rather partial and unsatisfactory.
•
The most classic argument is that in terms of socialisation
and the inertia of culture: even if urbanites pursue new
forms of social and economic life especially outside their urban
homes, in childhood they have been socialised into a particular
rural culture which seeks continued acknowledgement in their
lives, especially where the more intimate, existential dimensions
are concerned; staging a rural kinship ritual in town would be
held to restore or perpetuate a cultural orientation which has
its focus in the distant village — by which is then meant not
in the intangible ideal model of community, but the actual rural
residential group on the ground.
•
A more sophisticated rephrasing of the preceding argument would
be in terms of broad, largely implicit, long-term cultural
orientations that may be subsumed under Bourdieu’s term habitus:
girl’s initiation deals with the inscribing, into the body and
through the body, of a socially constructed and mediated personal
identity which implies, as an aspect of habitus, a total
cosmology, a system of causation, an eminently self-evident way
of positioning one’s self in the natural and social world; in a
layered conception of the human life-world, it is at the deeper,
most implicit layer that such habitus situates itself, largely
impervious to the strategic and ephemeral surface adaptations of
individuals and groups in the conjuncture of topical social,
political and economic conditions prevailing here and now.
•
Then there has been the urban mutual aid argument:
economically insecure recent urban migrants seek to create, in
the ritual sphere, a basis for solidary so that they may appeal
to each other in practical crises: illness, funerals,
unemployment etc.; being from home, the traditional ritual may
help to engender such solidarity, but (a remarkably Durkheimian
streak again, cf. Durkheim’s theory of the arbitrary nature of
the sacred) in fact any ritual might serve that function,
and in fact often world religions provide adequate settings for
the construction of alternative, fictive kin solidarity in town.
•
The urban-rural mutual aid argument: A related argument
derives from modes-of-production analysis, and stresses the urban
migrants’ continued reliance on rural relationships in the face
of their urban insecurity; since rural relationships are largely
reproduced through rural ritual, urbanites stage rural-derived
ritual (often with rural cultic personnel coming over to town for
the occasion) in order to ensure their continued benefit from
rural resources: access to land, shelter, healing, historical
political and ritual office.
•
Having thus stressed the shared economic and ideological interest
between townsmen and villagers, it is only a small step to the
argument of ethnic construction. This revolves on the
active propagation of a specific ethnic identity among urban
migrants, which serves to conceptualise an urban-rural community
of interests, assigns specific roles to villagers and urbanites
in that context (the townsmen would often feature as ethnic
brokers vis-a-vis the outside world), and effectively re-defines
the old localised and homogeneous village community into a
de-localised ethnic field spanning both rural and urban
structures, confronting ethnic strangers and organising those of
the same ethnic identity for new tasks outside the village, in
confrontation with urban ethnic rivals, with the urban economy
and with the central state. In this ethnic context, the urban
staging of ‘traditional’ rural ritual would be explained as
the self-evident display of ethnically distinctive symbolic
production. But again, any bricolage of old and new, local and
global forms of symbolic production might serve the same purpose.
These approaches have various things in common. They assume the
urbanites involved in rural kinship ritual to be recent urban
migrants retaining still one foot in the village. They do not
make the distinction (which, I argued above, emerged as a
dominant feature of South Central African symbolic
transformations throughout the twentieth century) between the
actual rural residential group and the ideal model of the village
community, and hence cannot decide between two fundamentally
different interpretation of the ritual performance in town:
• does
it seek to recreate a real village and by implication to deny
urbanism?
• or
does it seek to create urban community, as (in South
Central Africa, at least) new form of social locality, open to
world-wide influences and pressures, merely by reference
to an inspiring village-centred abstract model of
community?
And finally, these approaches ignore such
alternative and rival modes of creating meaning and community,
precisely in a context of heterogeneity and choice which is so
typical for towns wherever in the modern world. If urbanites
stage rural kinship rituals in town it is not because they have
no choice. They could tap any of the four complexes of
cosmopolitan meaning outlines above, do as Hannerz and the many
authors he cites suggest, and completely forget about rural
forms. And if they do insist on selectively adhering to rural
forms in the urban context, further questions can be asked. Do
they retain firm boundaries vis-a-vis each other and vis-a-vis
the rural-centred model, or is there rather a mutual
interpenetration and blending? What explains that these
globalising alternatives leave ample room for what would appear
to be an obsolete, rural form, the puberty rite? How do these
symbolic and ideological dimensions relate to material
conditions, and to power and authority: do they reflect or deny
material structures of deprivation and domination; do they
underpin such power as is based on privileged position in the
political economy of town and state, or do they, on the contrary,
empower those that otherwise would remain underprivileged; to
what strategies do they give rise in the inequalities of age and
gender, which are symbolically enacted in the village model of
community and in the associated kinship rituals, but which also,
albeit in rather different forms, structure urban social life?
While the centrally-located farmer’s town
of Lusaka took over from the town of Livingstone in the extreme
south of the country as territorial capital, a series of new
towns was created in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) at the
northern end of the ‘Line of Rail’ as from the late 1920s, in
order to accommodate the massive influx of labourers in the
copper mining industry. As ‘the Copperbelt’, this is the most
highly urbanized part of the country, and the site of famous and
seminal studies in urban ethnicity, politics and religion. While
imposed on a rural area where ethnic identity was primarily
constructed in terms of the Lamba identity, the Copperbelt
attracted migrants from all over South Central Africa but
particularly from Northern Zambia; the Bemba identity (in itself
undergoing considerable transformation and expansion in the
process) became dominant in these towns, and the ‘town Bemba’
dialect their lingua franca.
If rural kinship rituals may seem out of place in town, they
would seem even more so in the context of mainstream urban
churches such as the Roman Catholic church. As a major agent of
globalisation, this world-wide hierarchical organisation has
sought to vigorously impose its particular conception of
cosmology, hierarchy, sanctity and salvation (through the image
of a community of believers and of saints), in short its system
of meaning, on the African population, and part of its project
has been the attempted monopolisation of the social organisation
of human reproduction and human life crisis ritual.
Throughout South Central Africa, female puberty ritual is one of
the dominant kinship rituals (even more so than the male
counterpart); its remarkably similar forms have been described in
detail in many rural ethnographic contexts from Zaire to Northern
Transvaal. For almost a century, female puberty ritual has been
banned as pagan and sinful in Roman Catholic circles in Zambia.
However, already during my research on urban churches in
Zambia’s capital Lusaka in the early 1970s I found women’s
lay groups within the formal organisation of mainstream churches
to experiment with Christian alternatives to female puberty
training. Therefore I was not surprised to learn that by the late
1980s, these experiments had grown into accepted practice. Nor is
the phenomenon strictly confined to urban churches; for instance
in the area of my main Zambian research, in Kaoma district in the
western part of the country, a limited number of women now claim
to have been ‘matured [ the standard expression for puberty
initiation in Zambian English ] in church’ rather than in a
family-controlled rural or urban kinship ritual.
The situation in the urban church congregations, as brought out
by Rasing’s recent research (1995), is of inspiring complexity.
On the one hand there is a proliferation of lay groups, each with
their own uniforms and paraphernalia, formal authority structure
within the overall church hierarchy, routine of meetings and
prayers, and specialised topics of attention: caring for the
sick, the battle against alcoholism, etc. Already in these groups
the organisational form and routine, and the social embeddedness
this offers to its socially uprooted members, would appear to be
an attempt at the construction of social locality. The latter
might be of greater interpretative relevance than the specific
contents of the religious ideas and practices circulating there;
the result is, to use this phrase once more, ‘a place to feel
at home’ — but at the same time a place to engage in formal
organisation. At first sight such voluntary organisational form
would appear to be an aim and a source of satisfaction and
meaning in itself, that is how, for instance, I looked at the
Independent churches which I first studied in Lusaka in the early
1970s, when my theoretical baggage was still totally inadequate
to appreciate them beyond the idea that they were contexts to
learn about bureaucracy and modernity. However, I am now
beginning to realise that it is such formal organisations which
create the bedding, and the boundaries, within which the
uncontrolled flow of goods, images and ideas as conveyed by
globalisation, can be turned into identity.
Some of these lay groups particularly specialise in girl’s
initiation. However, contrary to what might be expected on the
basis of comparative evidence from my own field research (Lusaka
early 1970s, western central Zambia 1980s-90s), the lay group’s
symbolic and cultic repertoire for puberty initiation has
incorporated far more than just a minimal selection of the rural
ritual, far more than just a mere token appendage of isolated
traditional elements to a predominantly Christian and foreign
rite of passage. On the contrary, the women lay leaders have used
the church and their authority as a context within which to
perform puberty ritual that, despite inevitable practical
adaptations and frequent lapses of ritual knowledge and
competence, emulates the historic, well-described Bemba kinship
ritual to remarkable detail, and with open support from the
church clergy.
Selected analytical and theoretical questions to which this state
of affairs gives rise have been outlined above by way of
introduction. Meanwhile the complexity of the situation calls for
extensive ethnographic research, not only on the Copperbelt but
also in present-day rural communities in Northern Zambia; in
addition, a thorough study must be made of the ideological
position and the exercise of religious authority of the clergy
involved, as mediators between a world-wide hierarchically
organised world religion (which has been very articulate in the
field of human reproduction and gender relations) and the ritual
and organisational activities of urban Christian lay women. A
secondary research question revolves around the reasons for the
senior representatives of the Roman Catholic church to accept,
even welcome, a ritual and symbolic repertoire which would appear
to challenge the globalising universalism of this world religion,
and which for close to a century has been condemned for doing
just that.
The crucial interpretative problem here lies in its virtuality:
in the fact that the Copperbelt women staging these rituals, as
well as their adolescent initiands, do not in the least belong,
nor consciously aspire to belong, to the ideal village world
which is expounded in the ritual. These rituals belong to a realm
of virtuality, very far removed from the Durkheimian
premise (1912) of a coincidence between religious form and local
group. Here we have to assess the various orders of reality,
dream, ideal, fantasy and imagery that informs a modern African
urban population in the construction of their life-world. For
while the kinship ritual emphasises reproductive roles within
marriage, agricultural and domestic productive roles for women,
and their respect for authority positions within the rural
kinship structure, these urban women depart very far from the
model of rural womanhood upheld in the initiation, where it is
formally taught through songs, through the supervising elders’
pantomimes, wall pictures specifically drawn for the purpose, and
especially by reference to clay models of human beings, their
body parts, and man-made artefacts. Admittedly, many of these
women still cherish their urban garden plots, but even if these
are not raided by thieves around harvest time, their produce
falls far short in feeding the owners and their families through
the annual cycle. These women have hardly any effective ties any
more with a distant village — and those that exist are mainly
revived in the case of funerals. In their sexual and reproductive
behaviour they operate largely outside the constraints stipulated
by the kinship ritual and the associated formal training; as
female heads of households are often without effective and
enduring ties with male partner; and not even all do subscribe to
the Bemba ethnic identity.
Very clearly this urban puberty ritual is concerned with the
construction of meaningful social locality out of the
fragmentation of social life in the Copperbelt high-density
residential areas, and beyond that with the social construction
of female personhood; but why, in this urban context, is the
remote and clearly inapplicable dream of the village model yet so
dominant and inspiring? Is the puberty ritual a way, for the
women involved, to construct themselves as ethnically Bemba? That
is not the case, since the church congregations are by nature
multi-ethnic and no instances of ethnic juxtaposition to other
groups have been noted so far in relation to this urban puberty
ritual. Is the communal identity to be constructed through the
puberty ritual rather that of a community of women? Then why hark
back to a rural-based model of womanhood which, even if part of a
meaningful ideal universe, no longer has any practical
correspondence with the life of Copperbelt women today — women
who do not till the soil, in their daily life including its
sexual aspects to not observe the rules of conduct and the taboos
to which they were instructed at their initiation, and who will
in many cases will not contract a formal marriage with their male
sexual and reproductive partners. Or is the social construction
of womanhood, and personhood in general, perhaps such a subtle
and profound process that foreign symbols (as mediated through
the Christian church) are in themselves insufficiently powerful
to bring about the bodily inscription that produces identity —
so that what appears as virtuality, as a lack of connectedness
between the urban day-to-day practice of womanhood today and the
ideological contents of the initiation, might mark merely the
relative unimportance of the details of the women’s day-to-day
situation (including the fact that this happens to be urban), in
the face of an implicit, long-term habitus?
I hope that after my theoretical
explorations, the case study I presented has set some descriptive
basis for a further theoretical elaboration of the concept of
virtuality in a context of globalisation in Africa today. The
kind of problems I have tried to pinpoint continue to stand out
in my mind as both relevant and tantalising, and I realise that
my own commitment to the study of globalisation is largely
fuelled by my hope that somewhere in that sort of perspective
these analytical problems which have haunted me for a long time
(cf. 1981: ch. 6) may come closer to a solution; but the present
paper makes only a small step towards such a solution, and in the
process reveals how difficult it is to capture, in academic
discourse whose hallmark is consistency, the contradictions which
exist in reality.
I have concentrated, as forms of virtuality, on phenomena of
dislocation and disconnectedness in time and space, and have al
but overlooked forms of disembodiment, and of dehumanisation of
human activity. As Norman Long remarked during a recent
conference,[xxv] under contemporary technological conditions
new questions of agency are raised. Agency now is more than ever
a matter of man / object communication (in stead of primary man /
man communication). This means that the formal organisation which
I have stressed so much, if based on such agency, are no longer
what they used to be. The images of Africa as conveyed in this
paper are rooted in years of anthropological participation in
African contexts, by myself and others, yet the mechanics of the
actual production of these images has involved not only human
intersubjectivity (both between the researcher and the
researched, and between the researcher and his colleagues), but
also solid days of solitary interaction between me and my
computer. There is also virtuality for you, of the
self-reflective kind so much cherished by our post-modernists.
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[i]
Earlier versions of this paper were presented on the following
occasions: at two meetings of the WOTRO (Netherlands Foundation
for Tropical Research) Programme on ‘Globalization and the
construction of communal identities’: in the form of an oral
presentation at the Bergen (Netherlands) conference, 15-16
February 1996, and as a paper at the programme’s monthly
seminar, Amsterdam, 6 May 1996; at the one-day conference on
globalisation, Department of Cultural Anthropology/ Sociology of
Development, Free University, Amsterdam, 7 June, 1996; and at the
graduate seminar, Africa Research Centre, Catholic University of
Louvain, 8 November, 1996. For constructive comments and
criticism I am indebted to all participants, and especially to
(alphabetically) Filip de Boeck, Rene Devisch, Martin Doornbos,
Andre Droogers, Mike Featherstone, Jonathan Friedman, Peter
Geschiere, Ulf Hannerz, Peter Kloos, Birgit Meyer, Peter Pels,
Rafael Sanchez, Matthew Schoffeleers, Bonno Thoden van Velzen,
Rijk van Dijk, Wilhelmina van Wetering, and Karin Willemse. Most
of all I am indebted to the editors of the present book, for
their encouragement, advice, and criticism.
[ii] Cf.
Fardon 1995; Featherstone 1990; Forster 1987; Friedman 1995;
Hannerz 1992; and references cited there. Some of the underlying
ideas have been expressed decades ago, e.g. Baudrillard 1972,
1981. Or let us remember that, on the authority of Marshal
McLuhan (1966), the world was becoming a ‘global village’ was
a truism throughout the 1980s. In fact, work by Toynbee (1952:
134-5) and his great example Spengler (1993) can be cited to show
that the idea of a global confrontation of cultures, with global
cultural coalescence as a possible outcome, has been in the air
throughout the twentieth century.
[iii] Notions
on space-time compression in globalisation are to be found with
Harvey and Giddens, e.g. Harvey 1989; Giddens 1990, cf. 1991:
16f. Some of my own recent work (1996b) suggests that we should
not jump to the conclusion that such compression is uniquely
related to the globalisation context. In fact, an argument
leading through African divination systems and board-games right
to the Neolithic suggests that such compression is an essential
feature of both games and rituals throughout the last few
millennia of human cultural history.
[iv] For a
similar view Friedman (e.g. 1995), who chides anthropology for
having relegated other cultures to the status of isolated
communities.
[v] Hoenen
1947: 326, n. 1; Little e.a. 1978 s.v. ‘virtual’.
[vi] E.g.,
IBM 1987 lists as many as 56 entries starting on ‘virtual’.
[vii] Cf.
Austin 1962: statements which cannot be true or false, e.g.
exhortations, or the expression of an ideal.
[viii] Korff
1996: 5. On virtuality and related aspects of today’s automated
technology, also cf. Cheater 1995; Rheingold 1991.
[ix] And,
incidentally, even in that Arabian culture such schemes were
already highly virtual in that their symbolism and iconography
did not derive from the local society of that time and age, but
carried (in clearly demonstrable ways, open to the patient
scrutiny of scholarship rather than to the brooding fantasies of
New Age) distant echoes of Hebrew, pre-Islamic Arabian,
Old-Egyptian, Northwest African, Sumerian, Akkadian, Indian,
Iranian and Chinese systems of representation...
[x]
Cf. van Binsbergen 1995c, 1995b, 1996c, 1996a.
[xi]
Cf. van Binsbergen 1995a, where a cultural relativist argument on
democracy is presented.
[xii]
Cf. the collections by Comaroff & Comaroff 1993 and Fardon
1995; moreover, Geschiere c.s. 1995; de Boeck, in press; Meyer
1995; Pels 1993; and perhaps my own recent work.
[xiii]
How many? That varies considerably between regions and between
countries. The post-independence stagnation of African national
economies, the structural adjustment programmes implemented in
many African countries, the food insecurity under conditions of
civil war and refugeeship, the implementation of rural
development programmes — all these conditions have not been
able to bring the massive migration to African towns to an end,
even if their continued growth must of course be partly accounted
for by intra-urban reproduction, so that even in African towns
that were colonial creations, many inhabitants are second, third
or fourth generation urbanites. Typical figures of village-born,
first generation urbanites available to me range from an
estimated 15% in Lusaka, Zambia to as much as 50% in Francistown,
Botswana.
[xiv]
Turner 1968; van Velsen 1971; van Binsbergen 1992b.
[xv] In other words, the African townsman is not a
displaced villager or tribesman — but on the contrary
‘detribalised’ as soon as he leaves his village: Gluckman
1945: 12. The latter reference shows that these ideas have
circulated in African urban studies long before 1960.
[xvi] Meillassoux 1975; cf. Gerold-Scheepers & van
Binsbergen 1978; van Binsbergen & Geschiere 1985.
[xvii]
Nor should we over-generalise. Mitchell’s seminal Kalela
dance should be contrasted with the work of Philip and Ilona
Mayer, which was far more subtle, and much better informed, on
rural cultural material as introduced into the towns of Southern
Africa; cf. Mayer 1971; Mayer 1980; Mayer & Mayer 1974.
[xviii] Cf. Geuijen 1992; Kapferer 1988; Nencel Pels 1991; Tyler 1987; and references cited there.
[xix] Cf. Mitchell 1956, 1969; Epstein 1958, 1967.
[xx]
E.g. van Binsbergen 1981; van
Binsbergen & Geschiere 1985.
[xxi]
Hannerz 1980, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1992a, 1992b.
[xxii]
Hannerz, 1992a: 17, 273; taking his clue from: Cohen &
Comaroff 1976.
[xxiii]
The following section is based on a text which I wrote in 1994 as
a statement of intent for the WOTRO Programme on globalisation
and the construction of communal identities, thus opening the way
for my student Thera Rasing to submit her own fully-fledged
application for Ph.D. research as based on her previous M.A.
work. This was approved, so that before long we may expect her
more detailed ethnographic and analytical answers to the
questions raised in this section. Meanwhile, cf. Rasing 1995. Of
the vast literature on puberty initiation in South Central and
Southern Africa, I mention moreover: Corbeil 1982; de Boeck 1992;
Gluckman 1949; Hoch 1968; Jules-Rosette 1979-80; Maxwell 1983:
52-70; Mayer 1971; Mayer & Mayer 1974; Richards 1982 (which
includes a ‘regional bibliography’ on girls’ initiation in
South Central Africa); Turner 1964, 1967; van Binsbergen 1987,
1992b, 1993b; White 1953.
[xxiv]
This embarrassment created by the dominant paradigm is probably
the main reason why the study of African historic urban ritual is
much less developed than the empirical incidence of such ritual
would justify. Such studies as exist have tended to underplay the
historic, rural dimension in favour of the modern dimension
(Mitchell 1956; Ranger 1975), or have drawn from other founts of
inspiration than the dominant Durkheimian paradigm (Janzen 1992;
van Binsbergen 1981).
[xxv] WOTRO
Programme on ‘Globalization and the construction of communal
identities’, Bergen (The Netherlands) conference, 15-16
February 1996.
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