virtuality 3

Wim van Binsbergen, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa

3. The virtual village

3.1. Characterising African village society

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,16 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,17 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.

3.2. The rural African community as problematic

In Africa, village society still forms the context in which many18 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 described19 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.).
In some of our subsequent chapter I shall take the opportunity of considering African urban life as an obvious locus of globalisation.

3.3. Applying the concept of virtuality

In general, I would speak of virtuality in all those cases where, in cultural phenomena, the suggestion of signification through tautological, self-contained, reference to the local, remains absent or is denied, so that we have to do with cultural material from a distant provenance in space or time or both; such material is only defectively, if at all, incorporated and domesticated within a local cultural construct - so that hardly a meaningful contemporary symbolic connection can be established between these alien contents and other aspects of the local society and culture.
Examples of this form of virtuality are all over Africa today, and in fact (in a way which would render a classic, holistic anthropological analysis nonsensical) the constitute the far majority of cultural expressions: from world religions to party politics mediating world-wide models if formal organisation, development and democracy;20 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 (see below); from fashionable lingerie to methods of divination which, as my current research demonstrates,21 in many parts of Africa are very far from being local, but - in ways of which even the most expert local actors have not the slightest awareness - constitute local versions directly derived from astrological and numerological interpretational schemes current in the medieval Arabian culture of North Africa and the Middle East, where they are known under the name of geomancy or Âilm al-raml ('the science of sand'). 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... (cf. Fig. 1, to be discussed below).

3.4. Non-locality as given, locality as an actively constructed alternative, virtuality as the failure of such construction

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.22 Kroeber returned to the same point of view when reviewing the first decades of scientific anthropology:

'Traits having to do with what we may call formal social organisation - clan, moiety, exogamy, unilateral [unilineal? check] descent reckoning, totemism - which theoretical ethnologists have been so excited about for two or three generations, form part of the secondary pattern of culture; (...) They are in a sense epiphenomena to other, underlying phenomena, such as place of residence. This is in one way inevitable, because while one must live somewhere, one can live without artificial exogamous groupings, descent reckoning, or totems; co-residence necessarily brings associations which have social influence: just as one must have kin, but need not have clans.'23

Radcliffe-Brown made the same point:

'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.'24

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 the even considerably older railway) 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 CE, 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 side 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. Creolisation25 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 earlier covered by Appadurai in his well-known paper on The production of locality. A somewhat facile play on 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 free of all assumptions of geographical contiguity, but also as problematic, as to be actively constructed in the face of the norm of non-locality.26
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.
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 context, which often constitutes itself in the very process of such appropriation. We have already alluded to two instances of such localisation: the laundering of cosmopolitan goods through religious organisations, under recent conditions of globalisation proper; and the spread of a major family of divination systems found throughout Africa, under conditions of a rather more diffuse context of proto-globalisation (with the intermediate technology of seafaring, caravan trade and elite-restricted, pre-printing literacy).
Thus the latter history is basically that of localisation processes, which translated the Arabian interpretative catalogues of (ilm ar-raml of c. 1000 CE (the origin of all African divination systems based on a material apparatus producing 2 raised to the power n different configurations, such as Fa, Ifa, Sixteen Cowries, Sikidy, Four Tablets) into 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 great relevance from a point of (proto-)globalisation, because here some of the main factors of globalisation and universalism (notably scholarship, empirical research and long-distance sea-faring), has 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.27

Fig. 1 The global pattern of formation and diffusion of geomantic divination systems, 1000 BCE-2000 CE.

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;28 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.

The typical, although not exclusive, abode of these instances of globalisation 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.