Of Life and Health

The Language of Art and Religion in an African Medical System

Alexis Bekyane Tengan

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789201024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An anthropological study of the health system of the Dagara people of northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, Of Life and Health develops a cultural and epistemological lexicon of Dagara life by examining its religious, ritual, and artistic expressions. Consisting of ethnographic descriptions and analyses of six Dagara cultic institutions, each of which deals with different aspects of sustaining and transmitting life, the volume gives a holistic account of the Dagara knowledge system.

CHAPTER 1

Scientific Language, Knowledge Frameworks and Ways of Reasoning

Language in Indigenous Knowledge Construction

Every knowledge system has its specific language and jargon as a created symbolic order that it uses to see and understand the reality that it chooses as its focus of study. Whereas knowledge as self- and environmental awareness¹ mainly through perception starts in infancy and prior to the acquisition of language as a way of knowing, scientific knowledge is initiated and developed as part of the human language – the innate generating ability to learn to speak and create meaningful signs, symbols and gestures and to understand them. According to some linguists, particularly those who favour the structural approach, and as we can observe from the variety of human languages and types, the innate quality of the generative schemes of language does not lead to or dictate a common system of signs and symbols for all human societies and cultures, but to the development of unique language systems based on arbitrary selection of signs and symbols, and a unique but consistent construction of grammatical rules and syntactic structures peculiar to each language. This is not withstanding the fact that in terms of speech, all human voices are limited to a common set of phonetic alphabets permitting us to learn different languages and to code-switch in the use of languages. Based on this understanding, the growth of knowledge in each society and culture begins with a certain indigenous understanding of science as peculiar knowledge awareness. In other words, the term ‘indigenous knowledge’, as used here, would therefore refer to that scientific knowledge belonging to a unique language and culture as it develops its own arbitrarily selected signs and symbols based on the physical and social environment from which it has emerged and developed. Indeed, I will define ‘indigenous’ in general as knowledge that is innate to a social group and comes with the group’s development of speech as the foundation of their linguistic competence to symbolize and further systematize their thoughts and ideas about themselves and their living environment into a body of knowledge

The correlation between the development of language and the culture of science, both in terms of methodology and theory and cultural practice, is difficult to understand (see Tengan 1994). Is the culture of science a distinct human endeavour that is separate from the development of language as a codification of human creativity? Is scientific culture embedded in language and lodged in the human mind or thought faculties and responsible for reasoned order (Sahlins 1976)? On the other hand, is language simply a structure and structuring mode via which the human mind tends to make things intelligible for us to understand (Lévi-Strauss 1953) or is it just the generating capacity of the various linguistic competences that come with human nature (Chomsky 1966, 1986, 2006)?

Inasmuch as it is important to establish the theoretical basis for the subject of my study, namely, language use in the study of Africa (Dagara) art, religion and medicine as one common discipline within an indigenous knowledge system, it seems to make more sense if I were to combine theory with the presentation of the ethnographic material, since the theoretical and philosophical reflection of this peculiar knowledge system seems embedded in cultural practice. Moreover, it is also the case that ‘scientific colonialism’, as Galtung (1967) puts it, on African indigenous knowledge as science has led to a distortion of the language and culture used to understand African knowledge generally and, by extension, to the theoretical and philosophical thoughts underpinning them. The distortion is most prevalent in the very three knowledge areas that are the focus of my current study, namely, indigenous medicine, religion and art. Hence, it is not uncommon to read such ill-defined terms as herbal, divinatory and therapeutic practices as canons for the study of indigenous medicine, or for one to encounter such negative terms as ‘sorcery’, ‘witchcraft’, ‘satanic’ and ‘magical’ in the literature on African religion and art.

This book takes the view that scholars of African indigenous knowledge and science, as areas of study, have hardly begun to tackle the issue of scientific decolonization in these fields, much less to generate and understand the scientific lexicon via which this knowledge system has come into existence. Thus, it is important, first, to deal properly with the events that have led to the colonial distortions before attempting to decolonize and reroute the mode of access to indigenous knowledge. Two forms of distortions that need to be tackled include the old missionary practice of wanting to replace African religion with Christianity through negative representation, and the old colonial educational pedagogy of presenting Western science as intrinsically objective and as a universal knowledge system unmediated by any cultural tradition are issues that continue to impede the development of any African scientific language. It is my belief that a re-examination of ethnographic material within a culture-specific paradigm would open up new perspectives to deal properly with indigenous science. Hence, throughout this book, ethnographic data from the Dagara people of northern Ghana will be used to draw attention to the fact that African (Dagara) religion and art contain the basic lexicon that needs to be developed as a scientific language for any proper study of the Dagara Medical knowledge system. The ethnographic material comes from my many years of research into Dagara religion, art and medicine as a common area of study (Tengan 1999, 2006, 2012) and into their culture of hoe-farming (Tengan 2000). The supporting data is basically a cultural study of four knowledge based institutions in Dagara culture that are often presented as cultic institutions of some sort within anthropological literature. They consist of the cult of the ancestors (kpîîn) and the cult of reasoned order (bagr), both commonly found in each Dagara homestead, and the cult of primitive being and spirit of nature (kɔntɔn) and the cult of the universal living structure of the cosmos (tibr). The last of these has two other associated cults attached to it, namely, the Earth cult (tengan tibr) and the Rain cult (sàdug). The correlation of these six institutions is best visualized as four concentric circles that map out the worldview of each individual and the community at large. Before I can deal with this aspect, let me first deal with the position of indigenous knowledge within the history of science in Africa.

African Indigenous Knowledge and the History of Science in Africa

There is a long history regarding the study of African indigenous knowledge systems, even though the term indigenous as used here might appear to be recent. This long history has always been intimately linked to the way in which foreign minds have encountered the African mind and system of thought. The two main most significant foreign contacts with indigenous Africa are the Arabic culture and Islamic religion, and the European culture that came along with Christianity. I shall not dwell in detail here on the impacts these contacts have had on the growth of indigenous knowledge in Africa, but I will mention that they both had a common perception about black Africa and its populations, which impacted enormously on the way in which indigenous knowledge is perceived and studied even today. In both traditions, prior to contact with Africa, the notion had already developed that the canons of knowledge (especially scientific knowledge) were divinely revealed as written text and recorded in a holy book such as the Bible, the Torah and the Quran. Each known human race and population, as perceived at that time, had its own ‘holy book’ and as such was on the path towards human civilization. Written language became the mark of rational reasoning and writing and rationality became the main distinctive features of scientific thinking and cultural progress. It is beyond the scope of this book for me to attempt to trace here the historical evolution that these ideas have had on the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the impact it has had on indigenous knowledge in general. In order to deal with this important and complex issue, I will make an ethnographic description of the Dagara indigenous knowledge system and Dagara frames of mind or rationalizing reasoning as developed by the culture. However, I will first like to put the broader issue into an anthropological perspective.

Anthropology, African Studies and Indigenous Knowledge

Notwithstanding the above, it is still essential that I put the approach to scientific knowledge in Africa into perspective. Fifty years ago, the first modern African Studies institute was established in the University of Ghana in Accra. It is heartening to note that the founders of this institute spelt out very achievable goals within a focused area and discipline, namely to ‘study the history, culture and institutions, languages and arts of Ghana and of Africa in new African centred ways’ and to ‘reassess and assert the glories and achievements of our African past and inspire our generation, and succeeding generations, with a vision of a better future’ (Nkrumah 1963). For the past fifty years, the institute and, indeed, most other similar institutes that followed in its footsteps stuck to these goals, and much has been achieved, mainly in the fields of African historical reconstruction, cultural aesthetics and African contemporary socio-political institutions and practices – we have at least gone beyond the conception that African political systems are all about kinship. Though the method and conceptual frameworks have largely followed Western academic norms, the studies made in these fields have shaped a new and positive understanding of the African experiences in these domains. However, the same cannot be said of such major areas of African indigenous knowledge as art, religion and medicine, and the scientific language used for their study. As an introduction to this book, I will first outline the impediments that have hindered progress in these knowledge areas. Next, I will discuss briefly the nature and character of African knowledge frameworks and how the distinct separation between religion, art and medicine as unique knowledge disciplines leads to their mischaracterization and their false understanding as true scientific knowledge.

Negativity and Narrow-Minded Views

In the first year of my anthropological studies at Leuven, a distinguished African professor of linguistics jokingly reproached me for studying a discipline that was not scientific. In his words, anthropology limits its discourses, fields of research and study to specific substrata of human beings and their cultures. He made me feel that by opting to become an anthropologist, I was a sell-out in relation to my own continent and people. Since anthropology allows mainly Europeans to point their gaze at mainly Africans and their culture, but will not do the same to their own society, it is insulting to point my own gaze at my own people as if I were not one of them. A few months after my encounter with the African professor of linguistics, a well-known European professor of anthropology jokingly remarked that anthropology was no longer an interesting discipline because Africans had started to specialize in it; this was after he learnt that I was studying anthropology. I could deal with the two remarks by reminding myself that I had chosen to study anthropology out of my own interests and motivation, and any time one or two individuals made similar remarks, I would retort with the common saying that there are as many anthropologies as there are anthropologists.

As a discipline, anthropology, starting as ethnology, has throughout the decades thrived by appealing to the European consciousness that native cultures are ‘exotic’, very different from their own and, perhaps, bizarre and incompatible with Western technological and scientific culture. Native cultures, by being exotic, do not constitute components of the real world and have no scientific truth or value. At the same time, Europeans are given the impression that they have lost memory of their ‘primitive’ times and that in order to understand their own primitive culture that was one time in existence, they have to study African culture. Once this consciousness was created, ethnology then gave itself the task of documenting ‘exotic’ cultures and analysing ‘primitivity’, first to satisfy European curiosity about the exotic and second to inform them about their own past, a past that equally belonged to the realm of unreality. The fear that primitive cultures are being destroyed in a similar manner as the European past by modern civilization and the fact that, as oral cultures, they had no writing systems to effectively record their own traditions made the work of ethnography most urgent (see Tengan 1998, 2000).

An Anthropological Perspective on African Knowledge

For a long time (and this is the case today), many scholars of African studies, intellectuals and politicians have viewed engagement in the study of anthropology as openly agreeing with the premises upon which anthropology has thrived, and also as tacitly accepting to promote the ideals lying behind these premises. They unconsciously felt that anthropology, through its method of reductionism and ethnographic analysis, was consciously and systematically demystifying the core cultural components around which the African life-world has been built and, by the improper use of negative language, was destroying the scientific value embedded in those components constituting the African worldview. In other words, the anthropological analysis, by itself, threatens to destroy native cultures through the analytical practice of gaze and disclosure and through negative representation. As a result, and to preserve themselves and their societies from extinction, African intellectuals and politicians would, in theory, vehemently dismiss the conceptual notions, modes of practice and analytical powers associated with the discipline of anthropology. In practice, however, being trapped in the colonial educational paradigm, some would aggressively promote very few selected ideals constitutive to the world of the foreign anthropologist as a way of saving their own societies. Some of these ideals are not necessarily the most lucid or the most appropriate for the reconstitution of native societies. Most African intellectuals would, for example and in theory, try to argue that their cultures and societies are not primitive and backward, but in practice, they would make it impossible for all those still hanging on to their native cultures to participate fully in modern civilization as a process of remodelling society.

Broadly, there are two factors that have led to this situation: first, the old missionary practice of wanting to replace African traditional religion with Christianity through negative representation of African religion and culture, and thereby presenting the religion as belief in spirits and the worship of ancestors; and, second, an old educational pedagogy still very much in use that views Western science as intrinsically objective universal knowledge unmediated by any mythological tradition of thought and symbolization. According to Johan Galtung, Kwame Nkrumah as President of Ghana understood that Africa was not just colonized economically, but also culturally and scientifically. Hence, describing the struggle as depicted by a large painting, Galtung wrote:

the painting was enormous, and the main figure was Nkrumah himself, fighting, wrestling with the last chains of colonialism. The chains are yielding, there is thunder and lightning in the air, the earth is shaking. Out of all this, three small figures are fleeing, white men, pallid. One of them is the capitalist, he carries a briefcase. Another is the priest or missionary, he carries the Bible. The third, a lesser figure, carries a book entitled African Political System: he is the anthropologist, or social scientist in general. (Galtung 1967: 13)

For many years, the decolonization process focused on the political and the economic aspects, to the neglect of the cultural and the scientific nature of colonization. Indeed, it is now extremely difficult to appropriately learn the language via which African indigenous religious and scientific knowledge, especially medical scientific knowledge, was initiated and developed. This is mainly so because for African indigenous knowledge, art, religion and cosmology did not exist as unique disciplines separate from the science of medicine or healing, but acted as the symbolic and abstract language via which one views and understands the world of matter and living elements. The scholar of African science no longer has the cultural paradigm of his or her own that is required to view...