Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past

Materiality, History, and the Shaping of Cultural Identities

Francois G Richard, Kevin C MacDonald, Francois G Richard, Kevin C MacDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781629580081
• eBook ISBN: 9781315428994
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The collective inquiries in this volume address ethnicity in ancient Africa as social fact and political artifact along numerous dimensions. Is ethnicity a useful analytic? What can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions which scholars have asked of identities in Africa? Eleven authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade. They examine how these intersect with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning from prehistory to the colonial period.

1 From Invention to Ambiguity: The Persistence of Ethnicity in Africa

François G. Richard and Kevin C. MacDonald

Reinventing Ethnicity

[Historians] have to free themselves from the illusion that the African customs recorded by officials or by many anthropologists is any sort of guide to the African past. (Ranger 1983: 262)

One may thus wonder whether the classifications registered by colonial administrations, in spite of their obvious mistakes of interpretation, were not already operating among the populations concerned. (de Heusch 2000: 106)

Since the late 1960s, for both anthropology and archaeology, ‘ethnicity’ has become an increasingly contested and at times unfashionable concept. The erosion of ethnicity as an essentialist category began with anthropologists such as Barth, challenging the ‘one-to-one relationship between ethnic units and cultural similarities and differences’ (1969: 14). At the same time, particularly within the American version of the ‘New Archaeology’ or ‘processualism’, there was a move to sideline the old ethnic concerns of Boasian ‘culture history’ in favour of a more culture-neutral, functionalist approach emphasising subsistence, ecology, and socioeconomic systems (Trigger 2006). Thus, the ground was well and truly laid for a more systematic challenge to the ‘reality’ of ethnicity, particularly in Africa, and an assertion of its colonial ‘invention’ (for example, Amselle 1990; Amselle and M’Bokolo 1985; Ranger 1983). Amselle described ethnic taxonomy as a means for the coloniser to bound populations and therefore better control them (1985: 38–39). He noted three types of ethnic ‘invention’: creations ex nihilo (for instance, the Bété); the transformation of morphable identity terms into concrete ethnicities (such as the Bambara and Dioula); and the transformation of political units into ethnicities (for example, Malinké and Gurma). Ethnicity was now a notion to be deconstructed and hardly the sort of attribute that archaeologists could engage with, even hesitantly, at one (temporal) remove.

However, since the 1990s, scholarship has seen a retreat from the initial, radical characterisations of the ‘ethnicity as invention’ school, and there has been a wide-ranging reassessment of ethnicity that does not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Only 10 years after the publication of The Invention of Tradition, Ranger (1993: 82–83) was already ‘rethinking the invention of ethnicity’, regretting that he had portrayed such categories as European constructions that Africans had meekly accepted—leaving no room for the fact that ‘a sense of ethnic identity could hardly be imposed from outside or above’. Indeed, some African scholars, such as J. Tanden Diarra (2007), have wryly observed and commented on this ‘well-meaning’ theft of cultural initiative from Africans themselves. In his book Et si l’ethnie Bo n’existait pas? he writes: ‘Indeed, it is during the peopling of a space by one or more populations coming from elsewhere that an ethnic identity is constructed. The modalities of settlement as well as those of “ethnicization”, the process whereby different groups fuse together through different modalities, are in permanent interaction. Even if it today proves difficult to expose these processes, they once existed’ (ibid.: 32; authors’ translation).¹

To this end, part of the problem of the initial ‘invention’ enterprise was its lack of accounting for the considerable time depth of ethnic interrelations, however malleable and shifting, such as those cited in the edited collections in Peuls et Mandingues (de Bruijn and van Dijk 1997) and Les ethnies ont une histoire (Chrétien and Prunier 1989). As Peel (1989) noted concerning Yoruba ethnogenesis, the evolution of ethnic identity depends on the realities of the past as well as contemporary sociopolitical contexts. What had been lost was the fluidity of such identities—although we must not flatter ourselves that our generation somehow discovered this phenomenon: both fluidity and ambiguity in identity were clearly recognised by many colonial-era savants (see, for example, de Heusch 2000 on Delafosse, Le Moal, and others, and MacDonald, this volume, on Mage). Rather, we must acknowledge the utility of critically employed ethnographic archives while building a new understanding of changing traditions of identity. As another critic of the invention school, Thomas Spear (2003: 6) has written: ‘Traditions thus have their own histories, histories that can be recovered by careful excavation of their successive representations’. In other words, not all ethnic categories began to crystallise in the colonial moment (for instance, Glassman 2011; Mark 2002).

Ethnicity’s ‘reality’ both as a ‘social fact’ and political artefact forms the starting point for this book. Indeed, in putting it together, our intent has been to critically explore this proposition and heed its implications for archaeological research in Africa. More specifically, our collective inquiries seek to address two sides of ethnicity along the following lines: First, why is ethnicity still ‘good to think with’ in Africa and elsewhere? To what ends, and for what purposes, is it a useful analytic? And, second, what can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions that scholars have asked of identities in Africa?

In answer to these questions, this book gathers a number of case studies to present ways in which archaeologists can inform our understanding of ethnicity’s ambiguities on the African continent. Building on written, oral, and archaeological sources, the essays explore how material remains can illuminate, challenge, or complicate our knowledge of processes of cultural identification in the African past. Authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical, and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade in their intersection with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning prehistory and the colonial period. These juxtaposed perspectives paint a unique portrait of the diverse social dynamics and strategies that have shaped African communities in the long and short term. One prominent outcome of these studies is the plurality of social and historical forces that fuelled the formation and transformation of social identities. This variability reinforces the need for analytical nuance, careful contextualisation, and cultural sensitivity in archaeological analysis of the African past.

Part of the motivation for this endeavour stems from the relative rarity in African archaeology of explicit debates concerning ethnicity. Despite the impressive forays made by historians and anthropologists in such analyses, and a number of exceptions notwithstanding (to be explored shortly), archaeologists have contributed comparatively little to broader scholarly conversations on ethnic identities in Africa. This situation is so, even as archaeologists in many areas of the globe have acknowledged the indisputable importance of identity as a terrain of contemporary engagement and domain of inquiry. In one of many recent reviews, Tim Insoll, for instance, labels identity a ‘hot topic’, adding that ‘if we as archaeologists seek for a contemporary relevance for our work …, this would appear to offer one area at least in which this could be found’ (2007: 1). In fairness, Africanist archaeologists’ hesitation (or pessimism) in intervening in the field of ethnicity may partly lie in this field’s loaded history and perceived elusiveness. Ethnicity often appears to be a political quagmire, an intractable historical issue, an endlessly slippery construct that may at best be studied only obliquely and at worst leaves no conclusive material correlates at all. Moreover, one may also feel the cooling effect of our discipline’s own fraught political past, which has shown that, when placed in the wrong hands, archaeological knowledge can be misappropriated to justify violence and exclusion, shore up dubious claims to heritage and territory, and legitimise racist or discriminating ideologies. At the same time, one might argue, as others have, that it is precisely because of ethnicity’s everyday salience and its centrality to social life in Africa that archaeologists cannot afford to ignore it or the problems it raises (see Meskell 2002; Meskell and Preucel 2006; Thomas 2004).

If archaeology once felt epistemological reassurance in an objectivist stance, as a purveyor of neutral facts suspended above the messy realm of politics (Rowlands 1998), it is now largely accepted that our discipline is inherently social. The knowledge we produce, consciously or not, is entwined with broader fields of power, discourse, and politics, and ignoring these factors does not encourage accountability, let alone relevance, for the discipline in a complex and changing world. Part of the context for our historical inquiries is defined by conditions in the present: not only are the questions we ask informed by current considerations, but the pasts we study archaeologically can also clarify, complicate, and critique some of the representations that structure Africa’s postcolonial present (cf. Jones and Graves-Brown 1996). Archaeology’s analytical usefulness seems in many ways buttressed by the preponderant role that (re)interpretations of the past play in the construction of today’s political identities.²

The rest of this introduction lays out a conceptual map to a complicated, multid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• 1. From Invention to Ambiguity: The Persistence of Ethnicity in Africa
• 2. Shapen Signs: Pottery Techniques, Indexicality, and Ethnic Identity in the Saalum, Senegambia (ca. 1700–1950)
• 3. ‘The Very Embodiment of the Black Peasant?’ Archaeology, History, and the Making of the Seereer of Siin (Senegal)
• 4. ‘A Chacun son Bambara’, encore une fois: History, Archaeology, and Bambara Origins
• 5. The Uses of the Past: Indigenous Ethnography, Archaeology, and Ethnicity in Nigeria
• 6. What Was the Wandala State, and Who Are the Wandala?
• 7. Who’s Who? The Case of the Luba
• 8. Political and Theoretical Problems for the Archaeological Identification of Precolonial Twa, Tutsi, and Hutu in Rwanda
• 9. Ethnicity, Archaeological Ceramics, and Changing Paradigms in East African Archaeology
• 10. Ethnic Ambiguity: A Cultural Evolutionary Perspective
• Index
• About the Authors