Who Knows Tomorrow?

Uncertainty in North-Eastern Sudan

Sandra Calkins

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781789200898, 9781785330155
• eBook ISBN: 9781785330162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Although uncertainty is intertwined with all human activity, plans, and aspirations, it is experienced differently: at times it is obsessed over and at times it is ignored. This ethnography shows how Rashaida in north-eastern Sudan deal with unknowns from day-to-day unpredictability to life-threatening dangers. It argues that the amplification of uncertainty in some cases and its extenuation in others can be better understood by focusing on forms that can either hold the world together or invite doubt. Uncertainty, then, need not be seen solely as a debilitating problem, but also as an opportunity to create other futures.

Chapter 1

TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF UNCERTAINTY

Uncertainty is important. It is an integral part of human doings, ‘a generic feature … of the human condition in general’ (Jenkins et al. 2005: 12). It can concern life and death. At the same time, uncertainty is an elusive notion. It has generated a prolific literature in various disciplines, particularly in philosophy and sociology, and to some extent also in economics and recent management studies (see, for example, Dewey 1929; Parsons 1991 [1951]; Beck 1986; Luhmann 2005, 2011: 277ff; Bauman 2007; Renn 2008). However, in spite of the relevance of the notion with regard to human activity and these extensive theorizations, uncertainty has long received insufficient, ambivalent attention in anthropological scholarship.

In recent years, a heterogeneous literature on uncertainty has emerged. Some ethnographic studies have devoted themselves to exploring the sensory, making more room for the felt indeterminacies of being. These studies paid attention primarily to how ordinary people deal with uncertainty. Studies in this scholarly tradition tended to concentrate on the phenomenology of suffering, body politics and individual ways of engaging uncertainty (Whyte 1997, 2005; Steffen et al. 2005; Geissler and Prince 2010). The experience of suffering has been the object of studies, which have taken affliction as the moment where moral ideas, meanings and the quality of relationship are revealed (Kleinman 1999: 29; see Kleinman et al. 2003). The experience of sufferers can be used to caution against a tendency in anthropology ‘to interpret contingency as “a problem” for humanity; that is, as an experience to be avoided at all costs’ (Honkasalo 2006: 30). To gain a fuller understanding of risk and daily sufferings, uncertainty should, according to this view, be treated as an experience of openness and indeterminacy without valuations. Accordingly, this study emphasizes an uncertainty that is lived, experienced, felt – at times debilitating, at other times liberating.

More recent literature in medical anthropology often places at centre stage the perspectives of experts – health practitioners, organizations and governments with their therapeutic regimes and ideas of health management. The focus of such work ranges from investigating issues such as the entanglements between anticipated harms and their management through traditional healers to the introduction of new high-tech diagnostic technologies, therapeutic experimentation, risks in epidemiology and other security technologies at the state level (Janzen 1978; Geissler 2005; Rottenburg 2009b; Nguyen 2010; Livingstone 2012; Samimian-Darash 2013). Work in STS has often observed the growth of uncertainty in connection with scientific and technological developments, the rise of socio-technical controversies, such as genetic modification or nuclear power, and a tendency of policy makers and scientists to depict public mistrust as irrational and emotional, underestimating the intellectual substance of public concerns while authorizing different forms of expert knowledge to deal with unknowns (Wynne 2001; Callon et al. 2009).

There is an older body of anthropological work that in various ways prepared the ground for the study of uncertainty. Scholars mostly working with a structural functionalist paradigm that endorsed stability, solidarity and equilibrium relegated uncertainty to a marginal position as a sort of residual of social experience (Radcliffe-Brown 1971a; Gluckman 1968). While often not discussing uncertainty directly, important scholarship in anthropology dealt with witchcraft and magic as a means of enquiring about unknowns and of devising ways of dealing with them. This literature highlighted the rationality of these institutions of knowledge production and their role in preserving a society’s social order; it also explained cultural patterns of perception and interpretation of misfortune and danger (see, for instance, Evans-Pritchard 1968 [1937]; Lienhardt 1954; Douglas 1966, 1990). Early Sudan ethnography, especially Evans-Pritchard’s work on Zande witchcraft, made an original contribution to debates about knowledge production and institutions. These debates migrated to other disciplines, such as philosophy and the social studies of science, where new insights were made but somehow failed to find their way back into modern Sudan ethnography. I attempt to reintegrate these insights into Sudan scholarship and anthropology but seek to give them a new twist by reconceiving what classical sociology/anthropology termed ‘institution’ in light of recent pragmatist revisions. These revisions explore the links between uncertainty and order, that is, how predictability, which is central to social ordering, is established through various investments of forms. This approach allows for a focus on practices through which forms with different ranges and on different scales of ordering are un/made and gain in/stability; it can render the notion of institutions or ‘invested forms’ useful for empirical work, and also for ethnographic analyses outside of Europe and North America.

Approaching Unknowns

In a work that has proven influential in the fields of anthropology, philosophy and the social studies of science, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard analysed Zande witchcraft and magic as institutions that produce knowledge, which in turn enables people to act. This knowledge concerns the causes, motives and supernatural interventions that lie behind a particular misfortune, a knowledge otherwise not readily available. It provides an opportunity to assess social relationships, assign moral responsibility and determine appropriate courses of action.

While a Zande wondered why a misfortune has affected her (‘why me?’), a Nyole in Uganda was more preoccupied with the question of why someone else has caused her a problem (‘why you?’) (Whyte 1997: 30–32). Susan Reynolds Whyte (1997) dealt with misfortunes and the actions that Nyole in Uganda took to address and manage them.¹ She asserted that Nyole are pragmatic and that their interest is on doing, on deliberating problems and dealing with them, on achieving security, not abstract and unattainable certainty (Whyte 1997: 3, 14). Yet, both the experience of being struck by misfortune and the ways in which it is managed involve uncertainty: a characteristic of eschewing misfortune is the generation of new uncertainties (ibid.: 19; Lock 1998: 7).

Both Azande and Nyole, according to these ethnographers, sought to explore who or what is behind a misfortune, that is, they sought post-hoc explanations of adversities. Similarly, I witnessed situations in which Rashaida referred to the evil eye as a causal force of misfortune, but these attributions were rare and only occurred after critical moments had passed. Exploring causes and motives was not of primary importance to my interlocutors. I am not claiming that Rashaida I met did not ask causal questions or theorize about misfortune, but instead that I could not discern a clear connection between these practices and the troublesome, disorienting circumstances when action had to be taken. The present study thus addresses primarily the experience of the principal openness of a situation and the lack of assured outcomes before such causal questions are raised, before adversity strikes, whereby its sting is the possibility of harm or ‘the perils of evil’ (Dewey 1929: 6).

For Evans-Pritchard (1968: 63) witchcraft offered security for acting but one founded on false beliefs; he claimed that ‘Witches, as Azande conceive them, cannot exist’. This is inconsistent with an otherwise strong ethos of rehabilitating ‘primitive societies’ from the accusation of irrationality. In this view, Zande witchcraft – while based on false presumptions – was congruent with Western conceptions of causality but reached beyond them, providing additional moral valuations.²

Evans-Pritchard explored what he perceived to be a logical error in the reasoning of Azande: being a witch is an inherited trait that manifests itself through a substance in the belly, namely, witchcraft-substance. Women inherit it from their mothers, men from their fathers. Post-mortem examinations of the opened belly can establish whether the substance is there and thus whether someone was a witch or not. Following the logical implications of this examination would either lead to entire clans being identified as witch clans or would establish that there are no witches at all. But this was not the case: Evans-Pritchard (1968: 24, 25) contended that Azande did not explore this logical contradiction – in fact they did not perceive any contradiction at all – because they had no theoretical interest in the issue at hand. More importantly, they would not have been able to bear the consequences of this insight – the collapse of the institution of witchcraft, which in his view was central to the maintenance of social order. Thus, they had blinded themselves to the logical error, ensnared within their institution: ‘in this web of belief every strand depends on every other strand, and a Zande cannot get outside its meshes because this is the only world he knows. The web is not an external structure in which he is enclosed. It is the texture of his thought and he cannot think that his thought is wrong’ (ibid.: 194–95).³

On the subject of whether Azande essentially had been hoodwinked by their institutions, Peter Winch (1997), a philosopher of science, suggested that Evans-Pritchard’s focus on the contradictions of witchcraft was misleading. He argued that the issue was not whether all Azande were witches or none of them were – Azande took it for granted that entire clans could not be witches. What is real according to this logic is rooted in languages of representation, which structure the experience of the world (Winch 1997: 326). Thus, instead of being a part of the whole as Evans-Pritchard suggested, Azande witchcraft was guided by its own logic, distinct from Western logic. Similar to Evans-Pritchard, Winch refrained from conceiving of Azande as irrational and refuted the accusation of irrationality by drawing a difference between them/us and their/our logic, which, however, turned out to be just as fallacious: while Azande were locked within the iron cage of their institutions, the outsiders – Evans-Pritchard and Winch – appeared to be endowed with a neutral and objective view, a view unqualified by history and location, a view from nowhere (Rottenburg 2013: 63).

But the ascribed distinction between true and false beliefs in this specific case was not problematized until a later intervention, which dissolved the difference. David Bloor (1991) confronted both Evans-Pritchard’s and Winch’s arguments with the demand that all knowledge be analysed symmetrically, without a priori distinctions concerning their truth or falsehood. He concurred that there is no contradiction at all between identifying someone as a witch and knowing that not all clan members can possibly be witches. Rather, such allegedly challenging logical contradictions could effortlessly be dissolved: ‘All that is needed is that a few cunning distinctions be drawn’ (Bloor 1991: 141). Bloor averred that Evans-Pritchard missed the opportunity to capitalize on Zande distinctions between hot and cold witches: hot witches were actual practising witches, while other clan members, the cold witches, bore an unrealized potential in them. He concluded: ‘logic poses no threat to the institution of witchcraft, for one piece of logic can always be met by another’ (ibid.).

Bloor (1991: 142–43) masterfully exhibited this by inviting an alien anthropologist to analyse Western metaphysical distinctions and reasoning. The alien anthropologist states:

[I]n your culture a murderer is someone who deliberately kills someone else. Bomber pilots deliberately kill people. Therefore they are murderers. We can no doubt see the point of this inference but would no doubt resist the conclusion. Our grounds would be that the alien observer did not really understand what a murderer was. He could not see the difference between the two cases he had conflated. Bomber pilots are performing a duty, and this duty is specifically sanctioned by governments.

[…]

The anthropologists might then ply us with more questions about (civilian) car-drivers who kill people. No doubt he would be fascinated by the intricate way in which the concepts of accident, manslaughter, chance, responsibility, mistake and intention have proliferated in our culture. The anthropologist might even conclude that we see the point of his arguments but attempt to evade their logical force by an ‘ad hoc’ and shifting tangle of metaphysical distinctions. In that culture, he would perhaps say, they have no practical interest in logical conclusions. They prefer their metaphysical jungle because otherwise their whole institution of punishment would be threatened.

The invention of subtle distinctions is not about protecting institutions from denunciation and critique; rather, the institutions remain stable as we perpetually adjust our reasoning, because we take the activities of bomber pilots and drivers for granted (Bloor 1991: 143). In other words, Bloor refuted the idea of a separate Zande logic: logic does not differ, institutions do (ibid.: 145; see Rottenburg 2013).

Older approaches used the concept of institution to explain how ‘false’ systems of belief perpetuated themselves as timeless regulative constructs, in spite of contradictions, due to their social functions in maintaining order. The capacity to fully understand the role of institutions and to critique them was regarded as the ethnographer’s privilege. Newer approaches, such as the French pragmatic sociology of critique, propose that the capacity to test and critically interrogate reality constructions is an inalienable part of all institutions. Institutions are understood as being based on a dialectic between confirmation and critique: the main task of institutions is to qualify and certify ‘what is’; this work of confirming things constantly anticipates critique, which explores the differential between the institutional qualifications of ‘what is’ and understandings of ‘what should be’ (Boltanski 2011). Without the threat of critique, there would be no need to confirm institutional orders.

The conceptual framework of the French pragmatic sociology of critique offers a useful toolbox to study and theorize the notion of uncertainty in anthropology. Taking uncertainty and the fragility of reality as starting points directs attention to the hard work needed to create a sense of predictability and stability in social life and to the crucial role of institutions in certifying realities (Wagner 1993: 466–67; Bogusz 2010: 35; Boltanski 2011). When what is unknown and what is real are engaged reflexively and critically, this allows for the conceptualizing of how people test and de/stabilize social arrangement. Thus, this approach opens up a space of possibility where actors – including people such as Rashaida at the margins of a dysfunctional and corrupt state – are no longer seen as trapped in their immutable, traditional institutions; rather, it exposes their arbitrary and coercive properties, which can change them and their situation because their institutions always entail the probability of critique. But they do not always criticize their institutions just because they can. My main emphasis here is on how dealing with uncertainties demands engaging them in some way, either denying indeterminacies or pushing them aside in order to act, translating radical uncertainties into something more calculable where at least some bases for action are posited as being stable; or using uncertainty about a state of affairs in order to imagine other possibilities and outcomes, to rally others behind a differential between what is and what should be, to critique the established order of things and extant normativities, and possibly to seize the moment of uncertainty as an opportunity to eke out fairer social arrangements in cumbersome negotiations.

Not surprisingly then, a particular emphasis of this work is on uncertainty with regard to action, that is, what people do in processing different kinds of uncertainty – from gruelling everyday uncertainties to the fear of exceptional harm. Jenkins et al. (2005: 10, 11) aver ‘that most people, most of the time, obstinately create and find some continuity in their lives, in the face of hostile circumstances and their own vulnerability, is perhaps the most significant story’. My findings agree with the thrust of this argument. Even in the most dismal conditions, people seem to be groping for something to hold on to, some cognitive and/or material supports to help identify stakes in the present situation – often creating these supports themselves or together with others – and to influence outcomes. But I tend to be cautious, not too quick to assume continuities as a given, as necessary for social life; rather, I investigate the techniques through which an impression of continuity or rather stability is created, which enables acting in spite of uncertainty.

Johnson-Hanks (2005) asserted that in view of uncertainty women in Cameroon forfeited planning their reproductive futures intentionally, preferring to let the future decide. Women were not depicted as devising ends but rather as seizing opportunities that presented themselves via the means at hand. But if we assume a wobbliness of foundations, how does a women know when an opportunity has arisen? An opportunity is something that a woman engages because she believes this will render a positive outcome for her. This does not imply uncertainty but requires much knowledge about the situation in order to engage it in a calculative manner, anticipating favourable results. Johnson-Hanks thus tends to downplay the enormous difficulties of interpreting a situation, what is at stake, what conditions are necessary to understand something as an option in the first place; the proposed approach to uncertainty is better at capturing this.

I draw on broader literatures developed in the social sciences (particularly Dewey, Douglas, Beck, Foucault, Luhmann and Boltanski) to analyse and theorize the processing of uncertainties. I seek to sensitize the reader to different qualities of uncertainty phenomena that are enacted in practice and to some extent also begin to mobilize actions. To reiterate, my proposition is that various types of uncertainty, while always overlapping and fluid, can be analytically differentiated based on their relation to reality, that is, between the epistemological questioning of reality as arbitrary construction and taking it for granted as the basis for calculations. Uncertainty is explored as a lived experience with semantic, deontic and epistemological dimensions. It refers to anticipated outcomes, harms and benefits, and is manifested as a disconcertment that can arise from a plurality of ways of dealing with a present situation. I conceive the processing of uncertainties through forms as a type of anticipatory knowledge production, a type of testing which forms can hold and which are fragile – a practice which allows one to know, organize and govern the future and to make it more calculable. With Boltanski,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Transliteration
• List of Abbreviations and Glossary
• Introduction Taming Unknowns in Sudan
• Chapter 1 Towards an Anthropology of Uncertainty
• Chapter 2 Contesting Forms: Translating Poverty and Uncertainty
• Chapter 3 Insisting on Forms: Bracketing Uncertainties in Gold Mining
• Chapter 4 Standardizing Forms: Uncertain Food Supplies
• Chapter 5 Establishing Urgent Forms: Uncertainties of Ill Health
• Conclusion Uncertainty and Forms: Asking New Questions
• References
• Index