Time and the Work of Anthropology

Critical Essays 1971-1981

Johanne Fabian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9783718652228
• eBook ISBN: 9781134347292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The development of the dialogical approach, the autobiographical perspective and the central role of text-interpretation are all seen as characteristics of post-modern ethnography, arising from the daily chores of field research. The breakthrough into time and history, away from the timeless theorizing of structuralism and functionalism, is seen as inevitable when anthropology is forced to think about its own epistemology. Another current concern is taken up with reflections on the politics of representing the other. In the later essays, he opposes post-modern fashions and re-asserts the need to continue with a truly critical agenda.

PART ONE

Ethnography, communication and texts

CHAPTER ONE

Language, history and anthropology [1971]

[By the mid-sixties post-war growth in Anglo-American anthropology came to a halt, intellectually, if not demographically. The end of colonization—contradicted by a colonial war in Vietnam—at first caused confusion and doubt. A crisis was upon us. Many believed that it was about the ethics of anthropology. If the sins of collaboration with Western imperialism were exposed and repented, it was thought, our discipline might be able to go about its business as usual. Others felt that the crisis went much deeper. Not proper conduct was at issue, but the legitimacy of what we offered as anthropological knowledge.]

The possibility should be explored that the critical situation in which our discipline seems to be caught is due to a general and largely uncritical acceptance of a positivist-pragmatist philosophy of science in American Anthropology.¹ By positivist-pragmatist philosophy I mean a view of the social-scientific activity which acknowledges these two criteria: (a) whatever truth may be found is equated with the logical flawlessness of theories generating testable propositions;² (b) the meaning of such knowledge is its success in ‘accounting for,’ ‘predicting’ and, generally, giving evidence of the manipulability of ‘data.’ What this orientation does not imply (at least not in any radical way) is a critique of the working of reason and of the factuality of facts. It is an approach in which methodology (the rules of correct and successful procedure) has taken the place of epistemology (reflection on the constitution of communicable knowledge).

One of the implications of a positivist-pragmatist approach is that its contempt for radical epistemology and its veneration of the factuality of data situates it intellectually in the period of pre-Kantian metaphysics. Since it has largely neglected the development in the line of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx and modern phenomenology, dominant social theory has hopelessly lagged behind the philosophical discussion and has become—as many a ‘liberal’ social scientist had to realize—a prime target of anti-establishment critique.

Jürgen Habermas, who seems to emerge out of the virulent stage of European academic protest as the most powerful critic of the social sciences, has given a convincing analysis of the failure of positivism-pragmatism (1967, 1968). But he is also the one who has pointed out that it would be unrealistic to cite social science before the court of Kant’s critique of reason; a reform must come from within,³ from, as I understand him, a confrontation with the epistemological problems of today’s social research. To attempt, or at least to approximate, such radical critique from within is the intention of this essay. Inasmuch as it attempts to do this for an actual piece of ethnography and for a community of practitioners, however, it faces a serious problem: It must speak the language of the tradition it intends to criticize. This will make our task extremely difficult and open to misunderstanding. One point should be made clear at the outset: whatever terms will be used to signify alternatives to a positivist-pragmatist position are not meant to be final, nor to replace one established language with another. They are to be judged in the context of the arguments in which they appear.

THE PROJECT: UNDERSTANDING A RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT

In 1965 I chose as a project for field work the Jamaa movement in Katanga [now the Shaba Region of Zaire]. Before I started my research on the Jamaa I knew some facts about it which made it interesting to me. The movement was founded by Placide Tempels, a Belgian missionary who had become famous in the late forties as the author of Bantu Philosophy (1959), a little book which—whatever its faults or merits were—had an important impact on African movements toward cultural independence. In the fifties he began to preach Christianity in the terms of his ‘Bantu Philosophy’ and attracted to his message large numbers of followers among the industrial workers in the copper mines of Katanga. These followers became known as Jamaa (‘family’ in Katanga Swahili). They joined the movement as married couples, recruited among Catholic Mission Christians. While they acted in many ways as a distinct group, they had never separated from the mother church.

This much I knew and in my application for research grants I proposed to study the Jamaa as a ‘movement,’ because that was what it looked like. Of course, at that time I had no proof whatsoever that these various phenomena, reported by several more or less involved observers, really constituted a distinct entity in their sociocultural context or that they could be linked to a specific historical process, maintaining identity trough time. Such lack of the most elementary certainty regarding my object of study did not bother me too much since I had been taught to be concerned about my ‘problems’—not about ethnographic cases. Presumably I was let into the field because my theory appealed to those who made the decisions and this guaranteed the scientific value of my enterprise. A good theory is always worth a test; the worst thing that can happen is that it is falsified by empirical research. This would still constitute a contribution to knowledge (although I am not aware of a PhD in anthropology earned with a falsified theory).

Confidence in the intrinsic value of a theory goes together with confidence in the availability of empirical data. But the extraordinary thing about the Jamaa is that it offers very little in the way of external characteristics. There are no ritual paraphernalia, none of the insignia, biblical attire, communal buildings, etc., typical for so many African religious movements. The few visible social activities—regular weekly meetings—are highly localized in organization and context and, for an outsider, very hard to distinguish from the activities of other associations in a mission parish. Membership in Jamaa groups is intertribal and does not reveal any cultural bias. Elements of formal organization (membership records, leadership hierarchy) do not seem to exist, especially not on the supralocal level. Talking to the founder and prominent followers was not very helpful either. They squarely denied having founded a movement. Jamaa, they argued, was a way of life, an attitude, not an organization. What is more, they would not admit that the message of the Jamaa called for new ways of acting. On the contrary, the principles of Jamaa teaching were said to be the oldest and purest doctrines of the church and more than once informants told me that I was wasting my time trying to find out what was so special about the Jamaa. In other words, an approach working on the classical assumption that externally observable behavior (e.g. ritual) should constitute the primary data would have failed at this point. Fortunately, ‘deeds’ were not the only thing to go on. It turned out that much more than with external activities and organization, the Jamaa was concerned with ‘words’ embodying the ideas of Tempels’s message. The better I got to know members of the movement, the more impressed I was by the sheer length of time they devoted to preaching, reciting, and discussing what they called mawazo—ideas, thoughts. I then concentrated on these mawazo and managed to record an impressive body of linguistic information: formal and informal instructions in the doctrine, hymns, guidelines for initiation, testimony by leaders and people from the ranks. All of them bearing the distinct mark of an integrated system of beliefs and norms. The anxieties caused by my failure to find the sort of hard social ‘facts’ which my training in ‘scientific’ sociology had led me to expect seemed to be resolved now that I had found an objective medium: language. With the application of linguistic methods (for which I had seen many examples) my study seemed to be saved, theoretically and methodologically. But this turn toward linguistics, so typical for current anthropology, is, as I can see now, bound to remain on the level of scavenging as long as the importance of language is accepted as a matter of practical expedience in a situation where other orientations fail. Language-oriented anthropology will emerge as an alternative out of the present crisis of the discipline only if we reflect radically upon its theoretical implications. There is no need to point to the importance gained in recent years by various branches of sociolinguistics and ethnoscience. It is my impression that a critical confrontation of these approaches with established behaviorist tendencies has not yet taken place. Closest to it is, still, Dell Hymes’ introduction to ‘The Ethnography of Communication’ (Gumperz and Hymes 1964). I will return to this important paper later on.

IDENTIFICATION AND COMMUNICATION

The first encounter between the researcher and a movement such as the Jamaa takes place on the level of common language and common understanding. However remote the phenomenon or persons may be at that stage, through common language and common understanding they become part of the anthropologist’s concrete social context. The attribute ‘common’ is to be understood in terms of its two connotations: common as opposed to extraordinary, and common as ‘shared.’ Hence the presence of these persons and phenomena is for the anthropologist, as yet, no more ‘reflected’ than his foodstore or his university colleagues. However, it is not the mere presence of things in the environment. A complex interaction of motives (pursuit of his profession with its emphasis on doing fieldwork) and cognitive patterns (concern with phenomena of ‘change,’ of the formation and working of ideologies) has singled them out as relevant, even before they were related to a specific scientific interest. At this point the positivistpragmatist ethos calls for a conscious ascetic withdrawal as the result of which the scientist should be free from any ‘subjective’ involvement as well as from the commonsense immediacy of the phenomena. The researcher attains objectivity by surrendering to a ‘theory,’ a set of propositions chosen and interrelated according to the rules of a super-individual logic, and by subsuming under this theory those data of the external world which he can retrieve by means of the established procedures of his craft.⁴ According to this approach, the task of establishing the Jamaa in its social and historical identity would be solved by starting out with a theory and then subsuming observed data (qualitative or quantitative) under whatever hypotheses are to be tested. This is easily said (especially in research proposals) but in practice it faces difficulties of such importance that the entire procedure, not only some of its modalities, becomes doubtful.

As precisely as I can at this stage I should like to summarize these difficulties as follows:

1. Presumably the largest relevant context in which an anthropologist deals with the emergence of new religious movements is ‘socio-cultural change.’ However, as I have argued elsewhere (1969a: 160) this concept has lost its analytical usefulness to the extent that ‘change’ became recognized as an omnipresent process and a characteristic of all social phenomena. Moreover, attempts to incorporate explanation of change in strictly system-orientated theories have, except for a higher level of formal sophistication, hardly gone beyond the stage formulated by Talcott Parsons almost two decades ago.⁵ Again I am inclined to seek the reasons for this aporia in the natural-scientific bias of the social sciences. The very terms and categories that go into the construction of theories are devised to deal with established, regularly occurring social phenomena. To this it could be objected that probabilistic calculations of shifts and trends in regularities are a major concern of research. These calculations, which often pose as explanations of social change, may indeed have a predictive and manipulative value but they have yet to show how they help us to understand the genesis and transformation of those ‘entities’ whose indicators they are measuring. In any case, most of these techniques can be used in the study of movement-phenomena only at the expense of an utter atomization of the realities on the ground.⁶

2. One might think that it would help to narrow down the scope of the problem. But the specific theory of religious movements (charismatic, messianic, etc.) can only be qualified as an unholy mess. I refer to I.C. Jarvie (1964) who has taken ‘explanations’ of cargo cults as a case on which to demonstrate that classical structural-functionalists are unable to cope with these phenomena because they are unable to explain change. A similar critique of the work on African religious movements does not exist. Probably it would be much more difficult to undertake because of the complexity of data and because different authors have taken independent and often original approaches and produced some excellent monographic and synthetic descriptions.⁷ With the exception of Barrett (1968), none of them was sworn to a ‘scientific’ view in the positivist-pragmatist sense. The majority have worked out of their own concrete situation, most often a missionary situation, and their primary motive was a necessity to understand what was going on among prospective and former mission Christians. There have been attempts to bring some order into all this by constructing typologies of movements (Fernandez 1964, Kopytoff 1964, Turner 1966). But a typology is a descriptive device, not a theory. Apart from that, typologies are bound to be of limited use as long as the identification of movements and of traits in movements is based on unreflected commonsense categories. Kopytoff, for example, gives a very elegant typology, but he applies it to ‘religious’ movements without so much as a hint to what he means by religious. Similar unreflected definitions are implicit in such current labels as ‘independent,’ ‘separatist,’ ‘revivalist,’ and so forth. Presumably authors who attach their explanations of movements to these concepts feel entitled to do so because they have observed organizational separation (from the Mission Church or other churches), or some ill-defined relapse into non-Christian practices. But what is the value of these classifications if the terminus a quo, that is, ‘orthodox’ Mission Christianity and ‘traditional’ religion remain largely unknown? How can we impute dissatisfaction, anxiety, and similar reactions to prospective members of new movements if we do not know what exactly they are dissatisfied and anxious about? As long as attention is focused on organizational rather than intellectual and emotional processes and as long as we do not see these processes in a total context (one that treats traditional religion and Christian penetration as one empirical domain) we will continue to produce catalogues of social facts of doubtful historical and almost no intellectual significance.⁸

One way of dealing with this hopeless situation would be to try improving it through better fieldwork and more sophisticated theory. Another way could be to stop and question the entire ‘scientific’ approach and its reliance on the theory-data dichotomy. How does one get an objective grasp of a phenomenon such as the Jamaa if one does not believe that objectivity is attained by the mere act of positivist-pragmatist withdrawal from subjectivity and immediacy of life? I shall formulate my tentative answers in two theses.

First Thesis: In anthropological investigations, objectivity lies neither in the logical consistency of a theory, nor in the givenness of data, but in the foundation (Begründung) of human intersubjectivity.

My use of the term intersubjectivity should not create the impression that I am taking Durkheim’s point of departure in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (see 1965: 25ff). For him the necessity of intersubjective communication resulted in positing ‘society’ as the supreme reality to which cognitive and emotional (‘moral’) patterns may be reduced. This was, as many others have noted, plainly an ontologization of the social or, at least, a reduction of the cultural. Once vaguely perceived functional necessities were translated into social realities (‘society,’ ‘needs,’ ‘structures’), the dominant view of society became metaphysical rather than historical; society was seen as the real reality behind the modalities of communication, not as a reality realized through communication.

In his interpretation of Comte’s ‘sociological program’ Kolakowski makes the following observation:

Underlying all theories of social contract is a philosophy that ascribes reality to individuals only and regards the collectivity either as a mechanism devised for convenience or as a theoretical abstraction. Positive sociology will show, however, that the opposite is true: it is the ‘individual’ that is a mental construct, and society is the primordial reality. Social life as such is as ‘natural’ as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE Ethnography, Communication and Texts
• PART TWO Anthropology of Religion and Colonial History
• PART THREE How Anthropology Makes Its Object
• Bibliography
• Index