Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance

The Culture and History of a South African People

Jean Comaroff

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226160986
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In this sophisticated study of power and resistance, Jean Comaroff analyzes the changing predicament of the Barolong boo Ratshidi, a people on the margins of the South African state. Like others on the fringes of the modern world system, the Tshidi struggle to construct a viable order of signs and practices through which they act upon the forces that engulf them. Their dissenting Churches of Zion have provided an effective medium for reconstructing a sense of history and identity, one that protests the terms of colonial and post-colonial society and culture.

1

Introduction

This study examines the relationship of social practice, historical process, and cultural mediation in an African society, that of the Barolong boo Ratshidi (Tshidi) of the South Africa-Botswana borderland. Within the span of one hundred and fifty years, this independent Tswana chiefdom has become a part of the rural periphery of the South African state, its predicament being a typical instance of the contradictory relationship between the First and Third Worlds aptly termed “neocolonialism.” My concern is with the social and cultural logic of this relationship, with Tshidi history as a dialectical process in a double sense: the product of the interplay between human action and structural constraint, and between the dominant and the subordinate in the colonial encounter. I set out to explore the role of the Tshidi as determined, yet determining, in their own history; as human beings who, in their everyday production of goods and meanings, acquiesce yet protest, reproduce yet seek to transform their predicament.

The Tshidi of the late twentieth century occupy a position in southern Africa similar to that of other peripheral peoples in the underdeveloped world. While they have been drawn systematically into the labor market over the past eighty years, they are compelled to remain dependent upon nonmonetarized agricultural production, a condition referred to by Parson (1980) as that of the “peasantariat” (see also Palmer and Parsons 1977; Amselle 1976; Meillassoux 1975). A century and a half ago, Christian missionaries served as the vanguard of colonialism among the peoples of the southern African interior, introducing a mode of thought and practice which became engaged with indigenous social systems, triggering internal transformations in productive and power relations, and anticipating the more pervasive structural changes that were soon to follow. The innovations of the mission not only exacerbated internal contradictions within the Tshidi system itself, they also instituted a set of categories through which such tensions could be objectified and acted upon. But these categories bore with them the imprint of the industrializing society that had given them birth: evangelical Methodism was to prove an efficient teacher of the values and predispositions of the industrial workplace. Indeed, Christian symbols provided the lingua franca through which the hierarchical articulation of colonizer and colonized was accomplished. At the same time, however, the interchange of Protestantism and proletarianization also concretized an awareness of inequality, creating a new basis for challenge and resistance. Where state coercion stifled manifest political expression, the polysemic metaphors of the Old and New Testaments offered a haven for the critical imagination. As has occurred elsewhere in the Third World, the submission to authority celebrated by the Christian faith was transformed into a biblically validated defiance (cf. Ileto 1979 on the Philippines and Post 1978 on Jamaica). Yet such defiance had, of necessity, to remain concealed and coded; and a central concern of this study is to arrive at an understanding of its cultural logic and its long-term historical significance.

Of course, there are certain parallels here with the cultural changes that accompanied the industrial revolution in Europe; for, in an important sense, the colonial process involved the making of an African working class (Marks and Rathbone 1982). Yet, as the ethnographic record shows, the extension of capitalism into the Third World was by no means a replay of the history of the modern West. The transformation of preexisting modes of production has seldom been a smooth, unidirectional process (Meillassoux 1972); and, far from sweeping all before it, and replacing indigenous cultural forms with its own social and ideological structures, the advancing capitalist system has clearly been determined, in significant respects, by the local systems it has sought to engulf (Foster-Carter 1978; Marks and Rathbone 1982).

The modern Tshidi are living embodiments of such contradictory processes of articulation.¹ Most participate in the labor market to a greater or lesser degree, and are acutely aware of their unequivocal role as black workers in a repressive, racist regime. Yet they also engage in productive and exchange relations that perpetuate significant features of the pre-colonial social system, one in which human relations were not pervasively mediated by commodities and dominant symbols unified man, spirit, and nature in a mutually effective, continuous order of being. Such a sociocultural order stands in contrast with the mode of production of industrial South Africa, its dominant ideology, and its underlying semantic design—a world in which social and cultural continuities appear to be fractured and individuals, abruptly wrenched from their human and spiritual contexts, are no longer able to recognize or realize themselves. I shall examine the ways in which persons thus decentered strive to reconstruct themselves and their universe. But I shall also show that the movement from nonmarket to market-dominated relations is not an all-or-none, unidirectional process; it entails a complex oscillation whose cultural dynamics still challenge our understanding (Mauss 1966; cf. Phimister and van Onselen 1979:43 on the South African case).

General Analytic Issues

The focus of this study places it within the purview of several key concerns in modern social theory. At the most general level, it speaks of the essential interdependence of anthropology and history in the study of social systems, and attempts to span a series of stubborn dichotomies in the legacy of modern social analysis—the division between global and local perspectives; between materialist and semantic interpretations; between structuralist and processual models; and between subjectivist and normative methodologies. My account, in short, is an exploration of the viability of a dialectical approach to the life of a single social system over time. It sets out to examine the reciprocal interplay of human practice, social structure, and symbolic mediation, an interplay contained within the process of articulation between a peripheral community and a set of encompassing sociocultural forces.

Central to my project is the perennial problem of identifying the appropriate unit of analysis. The social field here is the product of the continuous and changing relationship between the “system” under observation and the “external” world (J. L. Comaroff 1982). Its scope, then, is not an a-priori assumption of this research; to wit, at each step I encountered difficulties in defining the widening universe that might be thought to have constructed the “Tshidi context.” What is more, the dynamics of this universe were themselves in question. In Africa, as elsewhere in the Third World, the relationship between local social orders and the agencies of the world system shows clearly the inadequacy of synchronic models that presuppose the “perpetuation” or “reproduction” of existing sociocultural structures. But they also belie the assumptions of teleological models of transformation (whether of “modernization” or “dependency”) which beg all the key questions about the nature and direction of historical processes. Both local and global systems are at once systematic and contradictory; and they became engaged with one another in relations characterized by symbiosis as well as struggle. It is the specific configuration of such forms and forces in the Tshidi case—its particular motivation—that concerns me here; and, inevitably, this has features both unique and more general.

Motivation, in turn, is to be conceptualized at two distinct levels with respect to such historical processes: the first concerns the determining force of sociocultural structures upon those processes; the second, the transformative practice of human actors. Both levels are entailed in an adequate conception of historical agency, and indeed, their principled interconnection is an important problem for modern social analysis in general. At issue here is the very constitution of social practice itself—and, with it, the connection of context, consciousness, and intentionality, an order of relations often treated within the more general debate on the nature of “ideology.” One aspect of that debate bears directly upon my treatment of historical motivation in the Tshidi case.

Where he dealt explicitly with the concept of ideology in his own writing, Marx related it to the exercise of specific group interests, thereby laying the basis for its association with “discourse,” or the conscious management of ideation (Marx and Engels 1970:64ff.). Yet, especially in his later work—on the notion of commodity fetishism, for instance—he envisaged consciousness as taking shape in the representations implicit in “lived experience” (Marx 1967:71ff; cf. Giddens 1979:183). These two dimensions of ideology—”theory” and practical consciousness—are seldom brought into satisfactory relationship in the work of subsequent writers in the critical tradition. Thus Williams (1977:55ff.) treats ideology and its role in human practice as a matter of “belief,” of the “conscious imagination” which rationally mediates all action upon the world. Consciousness, from this perspective, resides in contemplative rather than practical understanding.

Foucault (1980[a]:58) has noted that this stress upon a rationalizing consciousness implies a particular vision of the motivation of historical processes: “what troubles me with [those] analyses which prioritize ideology is that there is always presupposed a human subject on the lines of the model provided by classical philosophy, endowed with a consciousness which power is then thought to seize on.” Furthermore, the stress upon ideology as discourse also entails an essentialist theory of meaning, in terms of which ideas are either “true” or “distorted” representations of the real world; and these representations, in turn, are seen as concepts, their content to be determined by just so many specific interests. They are not understood as signs which, as elements in systems of signification, might have a meaningful logic of their own and hence can serve as the meeting ground of two distinct orders of determination—one material, the other semantic.

A contrasting thesis holds that consciousness is embedded in the practical constitution of everyday life, part and parcel of the process whereby the subject is constructed by external sociocultural forms (Althusser 1971; Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1980[a] and [b]). “Ideology” here is the coercive dimension of society and culture, the medium through which particular relations of domination become inscribed in the taken-for-granted shape of the world—in definitions of the body, personhood, productivity, space, and time. Bourdieu exemplifies this approach in his notion of socialization as a dialectic between human experience and a conventionally coded context; a dialectic in which the world “appropriates” the person as social being by playing upon the physical organism as an order of signs, investing it with a preexisting repertoire of meanings and “presuppositions.” This process, he suggests, involves an apprenticeship never “attaining the level of discourse” (1977:87), for ideology is most effective when it remains interred in habit, and hence “has no need of words” (p. 188): “The principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit” (p. 94). For all its cogency, this formulation leads us so far into the domain of implicit meaning that the role of consciousness is almost totally eclipsed. In his effort to correct what he perceives to be a subjectivist bias in prevailing views of human practice, Bourdieu goes so far in the other direction that his actors seem doomed to reproduce their world mindlessly, without its contradictions leaving any mark on their awareness—at least, until a crisis (in the form of “culture contact” or the emergence of class division) initiates a process of overt struggle (p. 168f.). For this model, it is only with disenchantment, when the world loses its character as “natural phenomenon,” that its social constitution can be contested.

In the account that follows, I attempt to rethink the relationship between ideology as explicit discourse and as lived experience; to be sure, this is unavoidable in the Tshidi case. I examine their reactions to their changing context as a problem of symbolic mediation, tracing in detail the effects of the fracture of a precolonial cosmos, itself devoid neither of struggle nor of change. In the face of growing estrangement, the Tshidi sought to reestablish the coherence of their lived world and to render controllable its processes of reproduction; this process must be understood primarily in terms of signifying practice, which was only partially subject to explicit reflection. In order to make sense of these developments, therefore, I have focused primarily upon social action as communicative process, in which the pragmatic and semantic dimensions are fused. It is in practice that the principles governing objective orders of power relations take cultural form, playing upon the capacity of signs—their polysemic quality, for instance, and the meaning they acquire through their positioning in relation to each other in sequences or texts. But this process of construction is never totally witting or unwitting. It involves the reciprocal interaction of subjects and their objective context; and it may serve both to consolidate existing hegemonies (ruling definitions of the “natural”) and to give shape to resistance or reform.

This analysis, then, is an effort to do more than reexamine the relationship between idealist synchronic analysis and pragmatic determinism. It explores the interplay of subject and object as this occurs in the course of “signifying practice,”² that is, the process through which persons, acting upon an external environment, construct themselves as social beings. But this process is not locked in a cycle of mere tautological reinforcement. On the contrary, it is motivated by dynamic tensions which are inherent in a particular historical constitution of the world, which force themselves upon human experience and require reconciliation, thereby making of practice more than mere habitual repetition. Thus the dialectics of subject and object in all social contexts—whether of “simple” or more complex systems—generate both reinforcement and tension, reproduction and transformation (see Sahlins 1981); and such dynamic processes need not be reduced to the stuff of “consciousness” or “crisis” alone.

Nonetheless, as Sahlins (1981:68) has suggested, the simultaneous reproduction and transformation of historical systems becomes especially marked in their conjuncture with other social orders. In such circumstances, change and resistance themselves often become overt facts, for there tends to occur a process of argumentation between the bearers of distinct cultural forms. In the account that follows, I shall examine the continuities and discontinuities of the Tshidi system, from the “stifled debate” (Parkin 1978) of the precolonial epoch to the long and sometimes overt dispute of the colonial encounter. Throughout my empirical inquiry, however, the major focus of attention remains the realm of signifying practice itself, supplemented, wherever possible, by documentary and ethnographic evidence of Tshidi consciousness and reflection.

Bodies Social and Natural
The Constitution of “Signifying Practice”

The relationship between the human body and the social collectivity is a critical dimension of consciousness in all societies. Indeed, it is a truism that the body is the tangible frame of selfhood in individual and collective experience, providing a constellation of physical signs with the potential for signifying the relations of persons to their contexts. The body mediates all action upon the world and simultaneously constitutes both the self and the universe of social and natural relations of which it is part. Although the process is not reflected upon, the logic of that universe is itself written into the “natural” symbols that the body affords.

This insight is, of course, not novel. Both Marx and Durkheim argued, if in somewhat different terms, for the continuing dialectic between “social” and “natural” classification, a dialectic routed through the forms of human experience, within which collective constructs appear both natural and ineffable (Marx 1967; Durkheim and Mauss 1963). In an extension of this insight, the human body has repeatedly been viewed as providing the primary “raw material,” the presocial “base,” upon which collective categories and values are engraved (van Gennep 1960; Turner 1967:93f.; Douglas 1970; Mauss 1973; Bourdieu 1977; Turner n.d.[a]). Through socialization, the “person” is constituted in the social image, tuned, in practice, to the coherent system of meanings that lies silently within the objects and conventions of a given world. In this view, once they have taken root in the body, acquired a “natural” alibi, such meanings assume the appearance of transcendent truth (Barthes 1973). The physical contours of experience thus come to resonate with the external forms of an “objective” reality.

In their concern to demonstrate the sociocultural construction of body and person, scholars have frequently treated the human physical form as a tabula rasa (van Gennep 1960; Mauss 1973; and, arguably, Bourdieu 1977); or, in a more determinedly structuralist view, as a repertoire of contrasts of largely arbitrary social implication (Needham 1973; Douglas 1966, 1970). The body is thus portrayed as the “simple piece of wood each has cut and trimmed to suit him” (van Gennep 1960:72); alternatively, it is depicted as “good to think” with because it provides a set of homologies of the social world, typically understood in terms of unidimensional oppositions (Needham 1973) and mediating anomalies (Douglas 1966). The ethnographic record, however, suggests that the effect of physical form upon cultural logic is more complex and pervasive than is allowed by either of these perspectives (cf. Ellen 1977; McDougall 1977). In an analogous domain, Sahlins (1977:166) has noted that the physiological facts of color discrimination have challenged both the arbitrariness of the sign and the sui generis character of culture. That these facts enter into the determination of culturally elaborated color categories is underscored by the universal tendency, in natural languages, for their lexical markers to follow a natural-perceptual logic. Yet, as Sahlins goes on to stress, such categories are themselves just one of a series of available cultural “implements”; whether they will be selected and how they will be used in a given cultural scheme is clearly a function of semantic rather than “natural” considerations. He thus concludes that it is only through the dialectic of natural facts and semantic projects that we can account for “the presence in culture of universal structures that are nevertheless not universally present” (1977:179).

Much the same may be said of the constraints imposed by physical facts upon the perception and cultural construction of the human body. Of course, the latter subsumes a highly complex constellation of elements, relations, and processes. Apart from all else, stable organic structures coexist with, and occur within, the temporal processes of the biological life-span. The former describes paradigmatic relations of contrast (left/right; front/back; head/foot; inside/outside; male/female) and combination (the taxonomies that order such contrasts into hierarchical series); and it is this aspect that has been the primary concern of anthropological analyses of the relationship between body metaphors and social categories (Griaule 1965; Ellen 1977). Much less attention has been paid to the relation, within the human organism, of synchrony and diachrony; to the embeddedness of categories and taxonomies, for example, in transformative bodily processes—in alimentation, in gestation and birth, in aging, and in death.

Taken together, these aspects of the “natural” constitution of human bodily form give it enormous potential for symbolic elaboration and representation—of structures in space, of processes in time, and, most significantly, of the interrelationship of the two. But the body is not merely capable of generating multiple perceptions; it also gives rise to contradictory ones. Thus, within corporeal confines, physical stability coexists with physical transience, stasis with disease and degeneration. It is hardly surprising, then, that, as biological metaphors come to represent sociocultural realities, they signify not merely relations and categories but also contradictions in everyday experience; it is very common, for example, for sociocultural conflicts to be apprehended in terms of the archetypical metaphor of contradiction, physical disease (Sontag 1977; Turner 1967:359ff.). It makes sense, therefore, that the effort to allay the debilitating effects of social disorder tends to involve exertions to treat and repair the physical body, and vice versa; the body social and the body personal always exist in a mutually constitutive relationship.

This study of...