Losing Culture

Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times

David Berliner, Dominic Horsfall

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978815377
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Soziologie

We're losing our culture… our heritage… our traditions… everything is being swept away. Such sentiments get echoed around the world, from aging Trump supporters in West Virginia to young villagers in West Africa. But what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, and to what ends does this rhetoric get deployed?To answer these questions, anthropologist David Berliner travels around the world, from Guinea-Conakry, where globalization affects the traditional patriarchal structure of cultural transmission, to Laos, where foreign UNESCO experts have become self-appointed saviors of the nation's cultural heritage. He also embarks on a voyage of critical self-exploration, reflecting on how anthropologists handle their own sense of cultural alienation while becoming deeply embedded in other cultures. This leads into a larger examination of how and why we experience exonostalgia, a longing for vanished cultural heydays we never directly experienced. Losing Culture provides a nuanced analysis of these phenomena, addressing why intergenerational cultural transmission is vital to humans, yet also considering how efforts to preserve disappearing cultures are sometimes misguided or even reactionary. Blending anthropological theory with vivid case studies, this book teaches us how to appreciate the multitudes of different ways we might understand loss, memory, transmission, and heritage.

1

Transmission Impossible in West Africa

But what would Africa be without fetishes and their mysteries?

—Achille Mbembe, Critique de la raison nègre

The Mask behind the Glass

Africa—its memory and its objects. Inside a glass display case, African objects have the power to fascinate. One day, I found myself discussing the famous snakelike Baga¹ mask (known as the bansonyi in Europe and the United States) with a friend, an enthusiast for non-European art. We were in a museum, standing in front of a glass case containing this particular mask. My friend described the bansonyi in terms of an object, a material reality, solid, inanimate, tangible, manmade, visible, and so on; but beautiful, fragile, and precious, he emphasized, pointing out the aesthetic quality of its design, as well as potential problems it might have with paintwork and cracking. It was a “rare object” in light of its pedigree and this or that distinctive feature; an “authentic object” for having been collected before 1920; an “aesthetic object,” whose forms inspired Matisse and Giacometti; and a “valuable object” on the African art market since its acquisition from a famous collector; but always just an object, of pure materiality, to be displayed center stage. As the focus of my friend’s gaze and passions, the bansonyi (objectified by use of the definite article) evoked a veritable object mystique, which only served to reinforce the museological impetus. Always referring to the bansonyi as an object, my friend began to utter a few generalities on the symbolic resonance of the snake in West Africa; that this mask must certainly be the illustration of a mythology; and that it “served to,” “was made to,” express this mythical background. Everything he said about the object was in the past tense, nostalgic in its way: “Unfortunately, there’s nothing left today among the Baga. Before, they used to carve the bansonyi masks, but now the masks have vanished, and the Baga are Muslim. Sadly for them, they’ve lost their culture.” To his mind, Islamization and the loss of the object must have caused shock waves in the traditional community, an unprecedented crisis of identity for the Baga. Based on the material nature and fairly specific definition of what can be called a mask, his theory implied the absence of objects as a sign of cultural loss: if there are no more of the old objects to be found among the Baga today, or no one mentions them, it must mean that the basis of what once was is now gone. In the end, he was pleased to see the successful conservation of these memory-objects in our museums, saved from a destructive past.

And so the memory of these ancient colonized peoples is preserved through their objects, forever protected behind the plexiglass of our museums. On reflection, the materiality of these objects, their relative ability to withstand the ravages of time, has become for us a reassuring synonym for memory, permanence, and transmission of culture.² In contrast, the absence of visible objects signifies nondurability, an inability to transmit and perpetuate culture. Without these tangible objects and their increasing global renown, how would African societies ever be able to remember their history? Is an Islamized or Christianized African society without any visible “ancestral” rituals not a ship lost at sea—or, in less poetic terms, a society without memory?

The Silence of Masks

The Bulongic constitute one of the seven Baga subgroups alongside which I conducted my research between 1998 and 2002. There is little documentary evidence available that would allow us to analyze what their religion comprised before the 1950s.³ Broadly speaking, what my interlocutors referred to using the term “custom” was an organized religion that predated the establishment of Islam, based on the existence of immaterial entities in the world (spirits) and their relationships with humans, involving certain places (sacred groves, ritual houses), ritual practices (initiation), social categories (uncircumcised/initiates/women), as well as secrets and prohibitions. Among the Bulongic featured a snake mask called Mossolo Kombo that completely dominated the lives of men, from rites of passage to manhood through initiation to punishment for misdeeds, as well as the subordination of women. In the hands of the initiated elders, it instilled a veritable climate of terror.

Starting in the 1930s, certain local leaders, particularly the canton chiefs (chefs de cantons), began to surround themselves with Muslim experts (karamoko) and gradually converted to Islam. The first Quranic schools began to appear in the region. In 1954, the local young boys, those now referred to as ceux de 54, underwent their initiation. With the arrival of a Quranic expert known as Asékou Bokaré, 1954 saw the end of local ritual and carving practices, along with most other pre-Islamic practices too. This kind of destruction of objects and desecration of ritual sites, this religious iconoclasm around the same time that Islam took a firm hold, has known many different guises in West Africa. There are, of course, many well-known examples of accommodation between Islam and the ritual practices that came before it;⁴ but among the Bulongic, all pre-Islamic rites appear to have been incompatible with the Muslim faith. The few art historians and anthropologists to take an interest in Guinea’s coastal populations reported how this once culturally diverse and prosperous Bulongic society became, in the wake of these rapid religious changes, silent and forgetful. In the literature, the Bulongic (and other Baga subgroups) are always described in terms of endangered societies. According to French anthropologist Denise Paulme, the only ethnologist to have conducted research in the region prior to Guinea’s independence, these populations had already become heirs to a tradition they were incapable of preserving, and she as an ethnologist was bound to witness, helplessly, the end of their story: “Threatened on all sides,” she wrote, “Baga society will soon disappear. It is already too late to record the essentials.”⁵

Transmission Impossible

The year 1954 saw the last male Bulongic initiation. Never again, so say the elders, would an initiation take place in the shadows of the sacred groves. The initiation masks would no longer be carved, nor would the people dance; the drums were about to fall silent. The drinking of palm wine was to stop. New dates were to be introduced into the ritual calendar, and circumcision to be conducted according to Muslim rites. Nowadays the principal guardians of their Islamic faith, the old men who lived through this final ritual, celebrate the arrival of Islam, while declaring themselves “the last Bulongic,” the silent keepers of knowledge and secrets that cannot be transmitted without initiation. Judging from what they say, nothing of this past before Islam, of the time of custom, will ever be revived: transmission of this information is now impossible.

These old men always met me with a discourse marked by many silences, only confirming the nostalgic musings of my interlocutors in Europe. “We’ve left everything behind. There’s nothing left here!” they would lament, before closing themselves off behind a wall of silence. Taking this to mean “they have nothing left to say,” I first interpreted this silence in accordance with my own prejudices: they say nothing about it because they have nothing left to say about it. And this phrase “we are the last Bulongic,” something I heard these old men say many times, the sad confirmation of my fears of a cultural void, spelled the doom of an Africanism that I had too much wanted to believe in. There was to be no possibility of re-creating the mask, no more trace of those great initiation rituals described by Denise Paulme in the 1950s. My disappointment during those first months of my fieldwork was considerable. Where was the Africa of our museums: the Africa of legend, from the novels of Joseph Conrad, the Africa of our grandparents, so ingrained in the imaginations of the Western colonial world?

Indeed, the younger villagers confirmed that they knew nothing of the pre-Islamic traditions; mourning the loss of these secrets that could have made them better prepared for the hazards of modernity, all of them blamed the old men and their silence. This was in fact the same lament that marked the discourse of the urban Bulongic now living in Conakry, those seeking to actively preserve their cultural heritage (by recording it, photographing it, or writing it down). In this way, under the combined blows of Islamization and the demystification policies of Sékou Touré, the religious edifice of the Bulongic appeared to have crumbled entirely—and abruptly—giving way to silence, and its (supposed) synonyms: forgetting and loss.

The Young Have Not Forgotten

And so the first months of my ethnographic experience were spent in silence, during which I felt a great deal of this “ethnographic nostalgia,” so aptly described by Dimitrios Theodossopoulos as the anthropologist’s desire to find continuities in the studied society with an idealized vision of a past cultural identity, often conveyed by the ethnographic texts themselves.⁶ Yet, gradually, I began to realize that the actual sites of transmission were not those I had been so impatient to discover since the start of my fieldwork. In fact, there is a considerable gap between the discourses on transmission (what should be transmitted or not, how, and to what end) and the subtle realities of transmitting (its agents, objects, recipients, i.e., the mechanisms behind it), a divide often hard to identify in the Bulongic environment, shrouded as it was in secrecy. Contrary to both the established credo depicting Africa’s younger generations as rootless and the discourses of the elders, the younger Bulongic do not in fact lack memory. Having been born after 1954, they were never initiated, nor saw the Mossolo Kombo mask dance. They know nothing of the time when their fathers and grandfathers would only drink and dance. And yet this pre-Islamic religious past remains both apparent and valued, and the young do possess a religious memory. They have heard tell of initiation, of the powerful rites, secret locations, and prohibitions, out of which emerge a series of stereotypes in regard to custom. The young adults are all well aware that Mossolo Kombo is a very powerful and dangerous spirit, related to the sacred groves, secrets, and initiation, as well as the violence the latter entails. Indeed, says Abdou (aged twenty), “everyone was very scared of Mossolo Kombo. When he screamed, everyone had to run and lock themselves in their houses with the windows closed.” As proof of his power, “whenever Mossolo Kombo would scream in the mangrove swamps, you could hear it, even here”; “he moved like light”; “he was as tall as a palm tree”; “he could get inside your pants and scream.” These were just some of the things I heard from younger people in the village, the same extraordinary powers that were beneficial for rice growing and helped the Bulongic “protect themselves against their enemies during ethnic conflicts.”

While the young may speak about initiation in the past tense, the present does prevail when discussing Mossolo Kombo. However, most of them are unaware that the mask had a material component, which was banned with the arrival of Asékou Bokaré in the 1950s. For them, Mossolo Kombo represents in particular a typically Bulongic spirit, autonomous and unpredictable, known only to “our” elders, and that still instills terror. For, to their minds, there is no dissolution of the continuity between the past and the present. As Oumar, aged eighteen, told me, “Mossolo Kombo is there, with his wife and children, he lives in the mangroves. You can see him down there praying. When the sun is hot on the plain and you’re walking alone, you can see him.” During my last visit in 2001, a group of young people told me how they had seen the spirit while preparing to cut wood in what they did not realize was an old sacred grove. They explained how Mossolo Kombo had appeared to tell them not to cut wood in this forbidden place. And several of them stressed how much “everyone still fears Mossolo Kombo, he still kills a lot. He can be found all across Bulongic country. Everything is there.” And there are rumors that the initiated elders are still practicing in secret. If there is one thing that all the uninitiated young people hold true, it is that the elders still hold the secrets that made the groves sacred. “These secrets are still there”; “the elders can still do it”; “it still exists today”; “they’re carrying on with Mossolo Kombo, but in secret”: these are some of the things I heard them say to reinforce their point of view. In any case, it does not matter that the sacred groves were cut down during Asékou’s time; the elders now go to Mecca for Hajj, described to me by Abdoulaye, a young male aged twenty, as a “place reserved specially for the elders, where all the secrets are revealed to them.” Like the uninitiated who came before them, the young are acutely aware of their exclusion from this hidden knowledge, highlighting the very special bond that exists between their elders and these secrets. For the young villagers, the elders’ secrets are the symbols of another time, safe and idyllic, a source of fascination, but also dangerous and frightening. Above all, however, as we shall see, this is an age waiting to be revived, though they acknowledge, paradoxically, that they are waiting for what is now an “impossible” transmission of knowledge. Far from forgetting, faced with a difficult present full of frustrations, the young seem to be weighed down “to the point of paralysis by a fixated memory.”⁷

The Elders’ Memory

Constrained by the dissimulation tactics of their elders, the memories of the young reveal what has been told to them, as well as the effort they have made to reimagine a world they have never known. I too became aware of this ambiguous sense of the “absent being present,” of the existence of something dangerous and precious, something only the initiated elders possess, but which remains hidden away and buried. The latter are as closed off and impenetrable as their children are open and candid. In their company, I was first met with silence. This is an extremely sensitive domain, mired in taboo. Many of them would answer me with a smile, saying: “Custom? We can’t talk about that, we swore not to say anything.” My tactlessness was all too apparent; one simply couldn’t ask direct questions on the subject of their secrets. Misjudged curiosity could be punished by death, as if the words themselves were dangerous, and survival lay in silence. “In the past,” people say, “you could be reported by a palm kernel for mentioning Mossolo Kombo. Even a fly could report you.” The question is then: “In what way does one not talk about it?”⁸

Despite the silences and innuendo that characterized them, the conversations I held with the initiated elders over the course of several months were nonetheless quite instructive. One thing they repeatedly stressed was the importance of having abandoned their pre-Islamic practices, initiations, and sacred groves. Their discourse exuded the rhetoric of both Islam and Sékou Touré (who ruled Guinea from 1958 to 1984, and launched demystification campaigns targeting rural communities and their “regressive” beliefs), full of moral pronouncements against so-called animist practices. The arrival of Islam was always recounted with an apologetic tone. Always keen to project an image of being respectable Muslims, their accounts described the perseverance, the passion, the courage, and the temerity of the first converts. In 1954, people had grown “tired of custom” because “fetishes stopped them moving forward. Custom was...