Ethnography And The Historical Imagination

John Comaroff, Jean Comaroff

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429719318
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Scienze sociali
• Thema: Antropologia

Over the years John and Jean Comaroff have broadened the study of culture and society with their reflections on power and meaning. In their work on Africa and colonialism they have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) effaced, empowered and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated? How does the social imagination take shape in novel yet collectively meaningful ways? Addressing these questions, the essays in this volume–several never before published–work toward an "imaginative sociology, " demonstrating the techniques by which social science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction, the authors offer their most complete statement to date on the nature of historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade.

Part One
Theory, Ethnography, Historiography

1
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination

I

MYSTIC WARRIORS GAINING GROUND IN MOZAMBIQUE WAR." The headline was exotic enough to make the front page of the Chicago Tribune one Sunday.¹

"Call it one of the mysteries of Africa," the report began. "In the battle-ravaged regions of northern Mozambique, in remote straw hut villages where the modern world has scarcely penetrated, supernatural spirits and magic potions are suddenly winning a civil war that machine guns, mortars and grenades could not." The account went on to describe an army of several thousand men and boys, sporting red headbands and brandishing spears. Named after their leader, Naparama—who is said to have been resurrected from the dead—they display on their chests the scars of a "vaccination" against bullets. Their terrain is the battle-scarred province of Zambesia, where a civil war, with South African support, has been raging for some fifteen years. Now heavily armed rebels flee at the sight of the Naparama, and government troops appear equally awed. Western diplomats and analysts, the report recounts, "can only scratch their heads in amazement." The piece ends in a tone of arch authority: "Much of Naparama's effectiveness can be explained by the predominance of superstitious beliefs throughout Mozambique, a country where city markets always have stalls selling potions, amulets and monkey hands and ostrich feet to ward off evil spirits."

Faced with such evidence, anthropologists might be forgiven for doubting that they have made any impact at all on Western consciousness. It is more than fifty years since Evans-Pritchard (1937) showed, in the plainest prose, that Zande magic was an affair of practical reason, that "primitive mentality" is a fiction of the modern mind; more than fifty years of writing in an effort to contextualize the curious. Yet we have not routed the reflex that makes "superstitious" most aptly qualify African belief. No, the straw huts and magic potions are as secure in this text as in any early nineteenth century traveler's tale. There is even the whiff of a traffic in flesh (the monkey hands; the ostrich feet). No matter that these wayward warriors are in fact the victims of a thoroughly modern conflict, that they wear civilian clothes and file into combat singing Christian songs. In the popular imagination they are fully fledged signs of the primitive, alibis for an evolutionism that puts them—and their fascinating forays—across an irretrievable gulf from ourselves.

These sensationalized savages, thrust across our threshold one snowy Sunday, served to focus our concerns about the place of anthropology in the contemporary world. For the "report" told less of the Mozambican soldiers than of the culture that had conjured them up as its inverted self-image. Despite the claim that meaning has lost its moorings in the late capitalist world, there was a banal predictability about this piece. It relied on the old opposition between secular mundanity and spectral mystery, European modernism and African primitivism.² What is more, the contrast implied a telos, an all too familiar vision of History as an epic passage from past to present. The rise of the West, our cosmology tells us, is accompanied, paradoxically, by a Fall: The cost of rational advance has been our eternal exile from the sacred garden, from its enchanted ways of knowing and being. Only natural man, unreconstructed by the Midas touch of modernity, may bask in its beguiling certainties.

The myth is as old as the hills. But it has had an enduring impact on post-Enlightenment thought in general and, in particular, on the social sciences. Whether they be classical or critical, a celebration of modernity or a denunciation of its iron cage, these "sciences" have, at least until recently, shared the premise of disenchantment—of the movement of mankind from religious speculation to secular reflection, from theodicy to theory, from culture to practical reason (Sahlins 1976a; n.d.). Anthropologists, of course, have hardly ignored the effects on the discipline of the lingering legacy of evolutionism (Goody 1977; cf. Clifford 1988). Nonetheless, it remains in our bones, so to speak, with profound implications for our notions of history and our theories of meaning.

The mystic warriors underscored our own distrust of disenchantment, our reluctance to see modernity—in stark contrast to tradition—as driving a "harsh wedge between cosmology and history" (Anderson 1983:40). To be sure, we have never given any analytic credence to this ideologically freighted opposition or to any of its aliases (simple:complex; ascriptive:achievement-driven; collectivist:individualist; ritualist:rationalist; and so on). For, dressed up as pseudohistory, such dualisms feed off one another, caricaturing the empirical realities they purport to reveal. "Traditional" communities are still frequently held, for instance, to rest upon sacred certainties; modern societies, instead, to look to history to account for themselves or to assuage their sense of alienation and loss (cf. Anderson 1983:40; Keyes, Kendall, and Hardacre n.d.). What is more, these stero-typic contrasts are readily spatialized in the chasm between the West and the rest. Try as they might, the Naparama will never be more than primitive rebels, rattling their sabers, their "cultural weapons," in the prehistory of an African dawn. As Fields (1985) has noted, their "milleniary" kind are seldom attributed properly political motives, seldom credited with the rational, purposive actions in which history allegedly consists. In the event, the Western eye frequently overlooks important similarities in the ways in which societies everywhere are made and remade. And, all too often, we anthropologists have exacerbated this. For we have our own investment in preserving zones of "tradition," in stressing social reproduction over random change, cosmology over chaos (Asad 1973; Taussig 1987). Even as we expose our ethnographic islands to the crosscurrents of history, we remain fainthearted. We still separate local communities from global systems, the thick description of particular cultures from the thin narrative of world events.

The bulletproof soldiers remind us that lived realities defy easy dualisms, that worlds everywhere are complex fusions of what we like to call modernity and magicality, rationality and ritual, history and the here and now. In fact, our studies of the Southern Tswana have long proved to us that none of these were opposed in the first place—except perhaps in the colonizing imagination and in ideologies, like apartheid, that have sprung from it. If we allow that historical consciousness and representation may take very different forms from those of the West, people everywhere turn out to have had history all along.

As it has become commonplace to point out, then, European colonizers did not, in an act of heroism worthy of Carlyle (1842), bring Universal History to people without it. Ironically, they brought histories in particular, histories far less predictable than we have been inclined to think. For, despite the claims of modernization theory, Marxist dependisteis, or "modes of production" models, global forces played into local forms and conditions in unexpected ways, changing known structures into strange hybrids. Our own evidence shows that the incorporation of black South Africans into a world economy did not simply erode difference or spawn rationalized, homogeneous worlds. Money and commodities, literacy and Christendom challenged local symbols, threatening to convert them into a universal currency. But precisely because the cross, the book, and the coin were such saturated signs, they were variously and ingeniously redeployed to bear a host of new meanings as non-Western peoples—Tswana prophets, Naparama fighters, and others—fashioned their own visions of modernity (cf. Clifford 1988:5-6). Neither was (or is) this merely a feature of "transitional" communities, of those marginal to bourgeois reason and the commodity economy.

In our essays, as we follow colonizers of different kinds from the metropole to Africa and back, it becomes clear that the culture of capitalism has always been shot through with its own magicalities and forms of enchantment, all of which repay analysis. Like the nineteenth-century evangelists who accused the London poor of strange and savage customs (see Chapter 10), Marx insisted on understanding commodities as objects of primitive worship, as fetishes. Being social hieroglyphs rather than mere alienating objects, they describe a world of densely woven power and meaning, enchanted by a "superstitious" belief in their capacity to be fruitful and multiply. Although these curious goods are more prevalent in "modern" societies, their spirit, as Marx himself recognized, infects the politics of value everywhere. If, as Chapter 5 demonstrates, we cast our gaze beyond the horizon where the so-called first and third worlds meet, concepts like the commodity yield useful insights into the constitution of cultures usually regarded as noncapitalist. And so the dogma of disenchantment is dislodged.

Save in the assertions of our own culture, in short, assertions that have long justified the colonial impulse, there is no great gulf between "tradition" and "modernity"—or "postmodernity," for that matter. Nor, as others before us have said, is much to be gained from typological contrasts between worlds of gesellschaft and gemeinschaft, or between economies governed by use- and exchange-value. But we are less concerned here to reiterate this point than to make a methodological observation. If such distinctions do not hold up, it follows that the modes of discovery associated with them—ethnography for "traditional" communities, history for the "modern" world, past and present—also cannot be sharply drawn. We require ethnography to know ourselves, just as we need history to know non-Western others. For ethnography serves at once to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, all the better to understand them both. It is, as it were, the canon-fodder of a critical anthropology.

In respect of our own society, this is especially crucial. For it is arguable that many of the concepts on which we rely to describe modern life— statistical models, rational choice and game theory, even logocentric event histories, case studies, and biographical narratives—are instruments of what Bourdieu (1977:97f), in a different context, calls the "synoptic illusion." They are our own rationalizing cosmology posing as science, our culture parading as historical causality. All this, as many now recognize, calls for two things simultaneously: that we regard our own world as a problem, a proper site for ethnographic inquiry, and that, to make good this intention, we develop a genuinely historicized anthropology. But how exactly are we to do so? Contrary to some scholarly opinion, it is not so easy to alienate ourselves from our own meaningful context, to make our own existence strange. How do we do ethnographies of, and in, the contemporary world order? What, indeed, might be the substantive directions of such a "neomodern" historical anthropology?

II

Both history and ethnography are concerned with societies other than the one in which we live. Whether this otherness is due to remoteness in time ... or to remoteness in space, or even to cultural heterogeneity, is of secondary importance compared to the basic similarity of perspective [I]n both cases we are dealing with systems of representations which differ for each member of the group and which, on the whole, differ from the representations of the investigator. The best ethnographic study will never make the reader a native. ... All that the historian or ethnographer can do, and all that we can expect of them, is to enlarge a specific experience to the dimensions of a more general one.

—Claude Levi-Strauss (1963a:16-17)

These questions parse into two parts, two complementary motifs that start out separately and, like a classical pas de deux, merge slowly, step by step. The first pertains to ethnography, the second to history.

As we have noted, the current status of ethnography in the human sciences is something of a paradox. On the one hand, its authority has been, and is being, seriously challenged from both within anthropology and outside; on the other, it is being widely appropriated as a liberalizing method in fields other than our own—among them, cultural and legal studies, sociology, social history, and political science.³ Are these disciplines suffering a critical lag? Or, more realistically, is a simultaneous sense of hope and despair intrinsic to ethnography? Does its relativism bequeath it an enduring sense of its own limitation, its own irony? There does seem to be plenty of evidence for Aijmer's (1988:424) recent claim that ethnography "always has been . . . linked with epistemological problems." To wit, its founding fathers, having taken to the field to subvert Western universalisms with non-Western particularities, now stand accused of having served the cause of imperialism. And generations of journeyman anthropologists since have struggled with the contradictions of a mode of inquiry that appears, by turns, uniquely revelatory and irredeemably ethnocentric.

The ambivalence is palpable also in critiques of anthropology, which accuse it both of fetishizing cultural difference (Asad 1973; Fabian 1983; Said 1989) and—because of its relentlessly bourgeois bias—of effacing difference altogether (Taussig 1987). In a recent review, for example, Sangren (1988:406) acknowledges that ethnography does "to some degree, make an object of the 'other.'" Nonetheless, he goes on to assert, it was "dialogic long before the term became popular." Similar arguments, one might add, are to be heard in other scholarly fields that rely on participant observation: Surveying the growing literature in cultural studies, for instance, Graeme Turner (1990:178) remarks that "the democratic impulse and the inevitable effect of ethnographic practice in the academy contradict each other."

But why this enduring ambivalence? Is ethnography, as many of its critics have implied, singularly precarious in its naive empiricism, its philosophical unreflectiveness, its interpretive hubris? Methodologically speaking, it does have strangely anachronistic echoes, harking back to the classical credo that "seeing is believing." In this it is reminiscent of the early biological sciences, where clinical observation, the penetrating human gaze, was frankly celebrated (Foucault 1975; Lévi-Strauss 1976:35; Pratt 1985); recall, here, that biology was the model chosen, in the golden age of social anthropology, for a "natural science of society" (Radcliffe-Brown 1957). The discipline, however, never really developed an armory of objectifying instruments, standardizing strategies, and quantifying formulas.⁴ It has continued to be, as Evans-Pritchard (1950; 1961) insisted long ago, a humanist art, in spite of its sometime scientific pretentions. And while it has never been theoretically homogeneous, internal differences and disputes have seldom led to thoroughgoing revisions of its modus operandi.⁵ Indeed, the unsympathetic critic could claim that ethnography is a relic of the era of travel writing and exploration, of adventure and astonishment;⁶ that it remains content to offer observations of human scale and fallibility; that it still depends, disingenuously, on the facticity of first-hand experience.

Yet it might be argued that the greatest weakness of ethnography is also its major strength, its paradox a productive tension. For it refuses to put its trust in techniques that give more scientific methods their illusory objectivity: their commitment to standardized, a priori units of analysis, for example, or their reliance on a depersonalizing gaze that separates subject from object. To be sure, the term "participant observation"—an oxymoron to believers in value-free science—connotes the inseparability of knowledge from its knower. In anthropology, the observer is self-evidently his/her "own instrument of observation" (Lévi-Strauss 1976:35). This is the whole point. Even if they wanted to, ethnographers could not, pace the purifying idyll of ethnoscience, hope to remove every trace of the arbitrariness with which they read meaningful signs on a cultural landscape. But it would surely be wrong to conclude that their method is especially vulnerable, more so than other efforts, to know human (or even nonhuman) worlds.

In this sense, the "problem" of anthropological knowledge is only a more tangible instance of something common to all modernist epistemologies, as philosophers of science have long realized (Kuhn 1962; Lakatos and Musgrave 1968; Figlio 1976). For ethnography personifies, in its methods and its models, the inescapable dialectic of fact and value. Yet most of its practitioners persist in asserting the usefulness—indeed, the creative potential—of such "imperfect" knowledge. They tend both to recognize the impossibility of the true and the absolute and also to suspend disbelief. Notwithstanding the realist idiom of their craft, they widely accept that—like all other forms of understanding—ethnography is historically contingent and culturally configured.⁷ They have even, at times, found the contradiction invigorating.

Still, living with insecurity is more tolerable to some than to others. Those presently concerned with the question of authority fault (unenlightened) ethnographers for pretending to be good, old-fashioned realists. Thus Clifford (1988:43) notes that even if our accounts "successfully dramatize the intersubjective, give-and-take of fieldwork ... they remain representations of dialogue." As if the impossibility of describing the encounter in all its fullness, without any mediation, condemns us to lesser truths. Likewise, Marcus (1986:190) counterposes "realist ethnography" to a new "modernist" form that, because it "can never gain knowledge of the realities that statistics can," would "evoke the world without representing it."⁸ If we cannot have real representation, let us have no representation at all! Yet surely this merely reinscribes naive realism as an (unattainable) ideal? Why? Why should anthropologists fret at the fact that our accounts are refractory representations, that they cannot convey an undistorted sense of the "open-ended mystery" of social life as people experience it? Why, instead, should ethnographers not give account of how such experiences are socially, culturally, and historically grounded or argue about the character of the worlds they evoke, with the aim of fructifying our own ways of seeing and being, of subverting our own sureties (cf. van der Veer 1990:739). Ethnography, in any case, does not speak for others, but about them. Neither imaginatively nor empirically can it ever "capture" their reality. Unlikely as it may seem, this was brought home to us in a London School of Economics toilet in 1968. It turned out to be our first foretaste of deconstruction; perhaps it was where...