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van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, ‘Dynamiek van cultuur: Enige dilemma’s van hedendaags Afrika in een context van globalisering’, contribution to a special issue entitled ‘De dynamiek van de cultuur’, guest editors L. Brouwer & I. Hogema, Antropologische Verkenningen, 13, 2: 17-33, 1994; English version: ‘Popular culture in Africa: Dynamics of African cultural and ethnic identity in a context of globalization’, in: J.D.M. van der Klei, ed., Popular culture: Africa, Asia & Europe: Beyond historical legacy and political innocence, Proceedings Summer-school 1994, Utrecht: CERES, 1995, pp. 7-40.
©
1994-2002 Wim van Binsbergen
ABSTRACT. Particularly as
elites mediating between local communities and the outside world,
actors in Southern African societies today tend to speak more
about culture than, until quite recently, the social scientists
analyzing those societies. The latter have tended to explain away
culture in a materialist and political economy discourse.
(Paradoxically, the latter type of discourse is now gaining
ascendancy in the study of the multi-cultural society of Western
Europe.) A discussion of ethnicity seeks to define this concept
and the strategic identity construction to which it gives rise.
Discarding the illusions of ethnic boundedness, localization and
cultural purity which have dominated the study of cultural
dynamics in Africa for too long, a new elan is suggested to
derive from a perspective which combines globalization,
commoditification, embodiment (the extent to which cultural
practices are inscribed onto the human body), the changing role
of the state, and the strategies of social inequality in these
four contexts. Theoretically, this means a continued dialogue
with the paradigms of the past decades, including structural
functionalism, Marxism, and postmodernism. Empirically, this
perspective stresses the paradoxical proliferation of local
particularisms precisely in a context of mounting
globalization. The case of the Kazanga Cultural Association,
a recent ethnic movement focussing on the Nkoya identity in
Zambia, serves to bring out the heuristic potential of the
approach advocated. The conclusion assesses the implications of
the argument for the uses and limitations of the concept of
popular culture.
© 1994 W.M.J. van Binsbergen
1. Introduction[1]
When the organizers of this conference
sollicited my contribution, I proposed as title of my paper:
‘Possible scholarly contributions to the future of identities
in South Central and Southern Africa’. I intended to follow up
an argument advanced by Leroy Vail (1989b; cf. Ranger 1982) in
his introduction to one of the most significant collections on
African ethnicity to appear in recent years: the idea that
outsiders to African societies, including missionaries,
anthropologists and employers contributed greatly to the
definition of the ethnic categories which subsequently reified
and ossified and now popularly pose as social realities, often
thought — wrongly so, of course — to derive directly from
some pre-contact, primordial African context. Over the years, I
have not only studied ethnicity in various African settings but,
particularly in the context of the Nkoya identity in Zambia, I
have also consciously been an ethnic actor myself, intensively
sharing in court life at traditional capitals which are centres
of ethnic identity and mobilization, and publishing
ethno-historical texts and analyses that are now used in Nkoya
ethic strategies. However, when I set out to write the paper I
found that it would be far more meaningful to dwell on what
should be the outside scholar’s main contribution to African
ethnicity: not so much the production of materials which could be
recirculated as ethnic material in the hands of local actors, but
the production of theoretical insights which would throw the
analytical light of scholarship upon the processes of identity
formation and identity presentation in the modern world, and
would help both outsiders and actors to critically assess the
political and existential claims propounded in the context of
these processes. The world over, ‘identity’ has been one of
the key words of the twentieth century, with strong mobilizing
power which can be used both for justified emancipation and for
self-deception and strategic blackmail. The researcher’s main
contribution to the future of African identities is to make
widely available such insights as detached yet empathic social
and historical research into this topic has produced, and to
indicate directions for further research in the years to come. My
argument in the present paper seeks to make that kind of
contribution, by presenting paradoxes, dilemmas and potentials of
African identity research today. Even so it remains a personal
contribution, in the sense that its inspiration largely derives
from my Nkoya research, and that some of the most pressing
identity problems in Africa today (ethnic and racial violent
conflict) are not touched upon.
2. Paradoxes
Looking at postcolonial identity from the
Southern African perspective, a number of striking paradoxes
become apparent:
— the paradox that for a long time
‘culture’ as a term was hardly used in the scholarly
discourse on the societies of Southern Africa, whereas certain
categories of actors in those societies, or in contact with those
societies, have been only too keen to use that term;
— the paradox of the ‘phase
difference’ (in the physics sense) between the paradigms as
employed in the study of cultural dynamics in Africa, and those
that inform the study of West European multicultural society; and
finally
— we have reached the end of a rather long
period in which cultural dynamics was considered largely from a
marxist-inspired, political economy perspective: as the
production and reproduction of the manipulative conditions
(allegedly based on ‘false consciousness’) for the
exercise of power by the state, the state elite and international
capital. It is only recently that, in the study of contemporary
Africa, we have begin to speak publicly of culture and its
dynamics as phenomena which in themselves invite profound
research.
silence on culture
Although much is being researched and
written on cultural phenomena in Africa, in the course of the
last few decades anthropologists/ Africanists have done
remarkably little theorizing on culture, and have tended to use
the word as a non-technical blanket term. However, at the same
time two categories of actors have been rather vocal on culture:
— development experts from the North
Atlantic part of the world, who have made a reified concept of
culture into an integral part of a new discourse on development
which, while somewhat less technocratic, has become no less
mystifying than the earlier variant;[2] and
— actors who are members of the societies
which we as anthropologists study in Africa, but who occupy more
or less an elite position there (in terms of education, political
power and wealth); their explicit use of the word culture in
connexion with local societies reflects tension and
discontinuity, particularly
• between a state elite and the wider
civil society (and here the concept of culture becomes
ideologically subservient to the construction of national
consensus under the state elite’s hegemony), and/or
• between an intellectual and consumptive
elite, and the more or less historic social forms peculiar to the
rural communities where this elite goes looking for its roots as
a solution for its problematic identity.
These two non-analytical actors’
discourses on culture are not unconnected. For the elitist
insistence on culture often serves to claim or to support —
within the national domain — a key position within the flows of
initiative and intervention which seek to connect the North with
non-elite groups in the societies of the South. Moreover, among
members of modern African elites, prolonged personal exposure to
the growing global culture of formal education, a world religion,
mass consumption and electronic media has reduced that elite’s
continuity with the original village culture, language and
religion to only selected life spheres (e.g. recreational
behaviour, therapy, primary kinship relations) and to a almost
permanent state of latency — with the exception of individual
or national crisis situations. When this elite claims to search
its own cultural roots, this does in part reflect an existential
problematic of alienation and symbolic erosion, as a parallel to
what culture critique has since long signaled for the industrial
North Atlantic societies. However, in the Southern African
context we must not lose sight of the unmistakable strategic
elements in such a discourse. While in quest for its own culture
of origin, the national elite establishes or reinforces linkages
(between basis and middle classes, between village and town,
between peasant and salaried workers) which offer that elite not
only symbolic but also, and particularly, politico-ethnic and
politico-economic gains. While expressly claiming their own
cultural continuity vis-a-vis a less privileged constituency, the
elite celebrates its own social, political and economic
privileges, and further expands them. The selective display of
cultural continuity vis-a-vis one’s ‘own’ village, clan,
chiefdom, ethnic group etc. is thus combined with the display of
symbols derived from a different (for urban, North Atlantic,
global) repertoire of distinction, through which the elite
articulates itself in terms of power, status and wealth. And it
is symbols of the latter type which, on their turn, create
access, and credibility, in the world of international
co-operation, on which a few African countries are dependent for
most of their national income, and many for a considerable
proportion of that income.
While presenting themselves as ethnic brokers between, on the one
hand, newly-invented or newly-revived ethnic groupings at the
basis, and the national political and economic centre, on the
other, the elite strengthens its own position both in the centre
and at the basis, but often in ways which are applauded, if for
different reasons, in either domain (e.g. van Binsbergen 1992b).
In a comparable way we see a modern religious elite (leaders of
various versions of world religions within the national space)
establish successful mediation between the state and their
followers at the basis, through a dextrous play of organizational
forms and symbolic contents, which satisfies both the state’s
demands of bureaucratic rationality and the longing, among the
believers, for historic continuity vis-a-vis a local religious
heritage (e.g. van Binsbergen 1993b and in press (a)).
Traditional political leaders (‘chiefs’) in modern Africa can
be demonstrated to play a similar mediating function in the
constitutional domain (e.g. van Binsbergen 1987), although their
actual political and economic power is often very limited.
phase difference in paradigms
Since Kuhn, the circulation of scientific
paradigms has become a cynical cliche of the production of
knowledge in the social sciences, to such an extent that we often
lose sight of the complex interactions between researcher and the
researched — even when it is those interactions, more than the
researcher’s desire to produce something novel for the academic
market, which make certain new approaches suddenly appear as more
attractive than other, earlier ones. In other words, we cannot
rule out the possibility that paradigms may simply be supplanted
by others because researchers genuinely learn from the people and
the social situations they study, and on that basis produce
insights which are felt, by their colleagues, to be not only good
for a change but more revealing, more in tune with topical
developments outside academia. Such interaction in research is
specific in time and place. Therefore fields of enquiry which are
related in substance but directed at different socio-political
parts of the world, and which therefore have little overlap in
terms of research interaction and research organization, may
display a remarkable phase difference.
On the felicitous moment that in the study of West European
multicultural processes Marxism is again vigorously defended as
an attractive perspective (Rath 1991), in the study of Southern
Africa we are struggling to escape from a too stringent Marxist
view of ethnicity, one which sought to reduce that phenomenon to
class struggle under the umbrella of the apartheid state, on the
spur of a somewhat naive idea which could be paraphrased as
follows:[3] if we could only show
ethnic divisions in South Africa to be a form of false
consciousness, notable the result of a sinister strategy in the
near past redefining the fundamental underlying class struggle in
perverse racist terms, then ethnicity will be prevented from
playing a similarly destructive role in the post-apartheid phase.
The extent to which, also with reference to other parts of
Africa, class and ethnicity have been seen as incompatible,
mutually exclusive theoretical points of departure is for
instance clear from the influential piece by Shaw (1986) entitled
‘Ethnicity as a resilient paradigm for Africa’; around the
same time I myself also presented a Marxist approach to ethnic
processes in Zambia.[4] In this respect a study
such as that of Beinart’s (1988) marks a turning point
especially for South Africa: for that argument admits, against
the grain of the intellectual ideology which has been dominant
in that country, that ethnic considerations may be a factor in
the social views and personal strategies of Black South African
even without direct intervention from the apartheid state.
Because of this re-orientation (which of course is connected with
recent political change in South Africa) the study of ethnicity
could become once again the principal growth point in South
African anthropology — to wit the rapid succession of major
conferences on the topic.[5]
from politico-economic manipulation back to
culture?
Also more in general it would be true to say
that the study of ethnicity in Africa is gradually leaving behind
the obsession with political economy, power and manipulation
which has dominated this field of study since the 1960s. By a
striking dialectics in the process of the production of scholarly
knowledge, an intellectual development which was most timely
and liberating only a quarter of a century ago, now has to give
way to less rigid approaches. At that earlier phase, the purpose
of ethnicity studies[6] was to explode, or
‘deconstruct’, the colonial and ethnographic myth of the
‘tribal’ culture as a unit of social experience and of social
analysis in Africa. Ethnic identity turned out to be a strategic
phenomenon, linked (according to principles first theoretically
explored by Barth (1970)) with ecological and economic
specialization and with differential access to scarce resources.
As a consequence, ethnic processes turned out to be subjected to
the hegemony of the colonial and post-colonial state. This to
such an extent even that an entire genre of studies emerged
seeking to demonstrate, also for other parts of Africa than South
Africa, that ethnicity was entirely a colonial creation. In fact
this trend is still dominant today,[7] despite a growing body of studies exploring
pre-colonial ethnic processes.[8] Again, however, the turning point is
unmistakable, for instance in recent work by John Peel, who
engages in a polemic with Cohen’s work and reminds us (Peel
1989: 201):
‘The further we
go back, the more we find that Yoruba ethnicity was a cultural
project before it became a political instrument.’
In this way yet another phase difference can
be detected between African studies and studies of cultural
dynamics in Western Europe: while in the European context culture
is being problematized not to say exposed as a reified concept in
the hands of the minorities-studies industry,[9] in the African contexts we see, on the
contrary, a rediscovery of the cultural dimension notably in
ethnicity studies.[10]
Before we can appreciate this development, let us consider the
concept of ethnicity in greater detail.
3. Ethnicity[11]
A perennial and probably universal aspect of
the human condition is that we give names,[12] to elements of the non-human world which
surrounds us and to human individuals, but also to the groupings
into which we organize ourselves.[13] Usually members of a society designate their
own grouping by a proper name, and in any case they give names to
other groupings around them. Such nomenclature is often vague,
but it brings about a dramatic ordering within the wider social
field which various communities share with one another. On the
logical plane, projecting onto another grouping a distinct name
which does not apply to one’s own grouping, denies that other
grouping the possibility of differing only gradually from one’s
own. Through the expression in words which make up the name, the
opposition between groupings is rendered absolute, and is in
principle subjected to the relentlessness of the dendrogram, of
binary opposition which plays such an important role in human
thought.[14] By
calling the other category ‘A’ one’s own category in any
case identifies as ‘not-A’. The latter is usually also given
a name, ‘B’, by those which it has called ‘A’, and third
parties within the social field can either adopt this
nomenclature or replace it by one of their own invention.
Every society comprises, among other features, a large number of
named sets of people: for instance local communities, kin
groupings, production groupings, parts of an administrative
apparatus, cults, voluntary associations. We would call such a
named set of people an ‘ethnic group’ only if certain
additional characteristics are present: when individual
membership is primarily derived from a birth right (ascription);
when the set of people consciously and explicitly distinguishes
itself from other such sets in its social environment by
reference to specific cultural differences; and when the members
of such a set identify with one another on the basis of a shared
historical experience. ‘Ethnicity’, then, is the totality of
processes through which people, by reference to the ethnic groups
which they distinguish, structure the wider social and
geographical field in which they are involved so as to transform
it into an ethnic field.
The nature of the additional characteristics mentioned is gradual
and not absolute. For their formulation and application is in the
hands of the members of a society; the social scientist tries to
identify these socially constructed characteristics through
empirical research. In order to be effective the relationships
which people enter into with one another, have to be not only
systematic but also flexible and contradictory. The social
process creates boundaries, but also in order to cut across them.
For instance, most ethnic groups include a minority of members
who have gained their membership not at birth but only later in
life, in a context of marriage, migration, language acquisition,
adoption, the assumption of a new identity and a new life style,
religious conversion etc.[15] Ethnic
fields turn out to be differently organized at different places
in the world and in different periods of human history; there is
a great variation in the way in which people demarcate ethnic
groups through distinctive cultural attributes (for instance,
language) and through historical consciousness.[16] Ethnic groups may often have a subjective
historical consciousness, but what they always have is an
objective history open to academic enquiry, from their emergence
to their disappearance,[17] and
this history cannot be understood unless as part of the history
of the genesis of the encompassing ethnic field as a whole.
It is analytically useful to make a clear distinction, by
reference to strategically chosen characteristics, between ethnic
groups and other ascriptive groupings such as castes and classes,
but we must not expect that such analytically-imposed
distinctions stand in a clear-cut one-to-one relationship to
analogous distinctions in the consciousness of the social actors
themselves. For the distinction between such ethnic groups as
exist, side by side, within the same social field is not limited
to the logic of nomenclature (,which merely entails co-ordinative
relationships, without hierarchy), but tends to assume a
subordinative nature; within the overarching ethnic field, the
participants articulate political, economic and ritual
inequalities between ethnic groups in a way which the analyst
would rather associate with classes and castes.[18]
Ethnic nomenclature is a complex social process which deserves
specific research in its own right. This is a position which
anthropology has only adopted in the most recent decades. Until
the middle of the twentieth century anthropology used ethnic
names as labels marking apparently self-evident units of culture
and social organization: within the units thus demarcated one
defined one’s research, but the demarcation in itself was
hardly problematized.
The card-index boxes and book shelves of the young
anthropological science filled with an overwhelming production of
ethnographic material which almost invariably was presented by
reference to an ethnic name intended to identify a ‘people’
or especially a ‘tribe’. Colonialism produced a nomenclatural
fragmentation of social fields in the colonized areas, with the
implied assumption that each of the units so identified displayed
absolute boundedness and internal integration,
characteristics which allegedly were inescapably underpinned
by century-old tradition. Such was the unit of analysis within
which individual careers of anthropologists could come to
fruition.
It was only in the 1960s that the concept of ‘tribe’ was
subjected to profound criticism as an ethnocentric and reified
designation of an ethnic group within the global ethnic field
but outside the politically dominant civilization — in
other words in the so-called ‘Third World’.[19]
Since then much has been written about the rise and fall of the
concept of tribe in Africa, in the context of political and
economic processes in this continent since the end of the
nineteenth century.
In a nutshell this body of literature revolves on: colonization
(in the course of which the state created administrative units
which were presented as ‘tribes’ — an optique which the
Africans soon took over in their own perception and political
action)[20]; the
implantation of the capitalist mode of production by means of
cash crops and migrant labour (which eroded local systems of
production, reproduction and signification, and at the same time
produced regional inequalities which soon came to be interpreted
in terms of an ethnic idiom); urbanization (in the course
of which a plurality of ethnic groups, and their members, engaged
in urban relationships which, through a process of selective
transformation, referred less and less to the traditional culture
of their respective region of origin);[21] decolonization (the rise of a
nationalism which exposed ethnic fragmentation as a product of
manipulation by the state); and, notwithstanding the previous
point, the ethnic overtones of political mobilization and
networks of patronage in the post-colonial states;[22] the vicissitudes of
military and one-party regimes which often presented themselves
as the solution for ethnically-based domestic political problems;
and most recently the rise of democratic alternatives which
despite their emphasis on constitutional universalism would yet
seem to offer new opportunities for ethnic mobilization.[23]
The Africanist literature on these topics is large and rapidly
increasing, but at the same time we know far less of the
processes of symbolic and cultural transformation which have
informed ethnicity in these contexts.[24] It is these processes, specifically, which
constitute the main topic of the present argument.
4. Ethnic identity and ethnic brokerage
A common term in the context of ethnicity
and ethnicity research is that of ‘identity’.[25] As social scientists in
the narrower sense, we might define ‘identity’ as the
socially constructed perception of self as group membership.
Everybody plays various different roles in various groupings,
and therefore everybody has a plurality of identities, as
acquired in the course of one’s socialization to become a
member of these groupings.
Usually the rise of an ethnic group in Africa consists, as a
project, in the launching of a new identity and the installation
of that identity in the personalities of the ethnic group’s
prospective or intended members. The project of ethnicization
presents the ethnic identity (as expressed by a group name) as
the ultimate, all-encompassing and most deeply anchored identity,
which is then supposed to incorporate all other identities which
one has acquired as a member of the local society.
Not by accident, such an ethnic identity reminds us strongly of
the concept of culture in classic anthropology, often
defined as: ‘everything one acquires as a member of a
society’. However, the local culture need not in the least be
limited, in place and time, to a specific named ethnic group;
often it has a much wider distribution. For instance, in the
savanna belt of South Central Africa scores of ethnic groups have
been distinguished one next to the other since the nineteenth
century; yet if one were to concentrate on the distribution of
patterns of production, reproduction and signification one would
perceive such an underlying unity that there is every reason to
speak of one large cultural area in this part of the world.[26] Within this
far-reaching regional continuity distinct ethnic groups have
distinguished themselves — almost in the way one may cut
several differently shaped cookies out of the same slab of dough.
Among those sharing in this regional cultural continuity,
self-perception will be anchored in ethnic names (which do not
define cultural boundaries), and moreover, rather diffusely, in
references to kin groups and local groups at various levels of
inclusiveness and scale, in a landscape, a language, a
poly-ethnic state system etc.
Ethnicity comprises the process of taking consciousness (which
for many people means being actively persuaded to do so, by
ethnic leaders and brokers), in the course of which a plurality
of diffuse, accumulated, often cross-cutting, identities are
brought under the denominator of one ethnic identity,
which is then marked by a specific name. The ethnic name is
constructed so as to mark a cultural boundary, and therefore
pre-existing culture (or at least a selection of items from that
culture) has to be partly reconstructed so as to fall within that
boundary and to offer distinctive cultural attributes. In the
bundling and reshuffling of identities the personal experience of
self and of the world of transformed: the discovery of ‘I am a
— Fleming, Azeri, Yoruba, Nkoya’ etc. offers a ordering
perspective in which powerlessness, deprivation and estrangement
such as one has experienced earlier on in all kinds of
situations, suddenly appear in a new light: as if the collective
historical experience suddenly makes sense of them, and as if
there is reason for hope that these negative experiences will be
turned in their opposites through ethnic self-presentation.
Viewed in this way ethnicity has many parallels with other
ideological phenomena such as nationalism, the awakening of class
consciousness, religious conversion and religious innovation.
Ethnicity displays a remarkable dialectics which I am inclined to
consider as its engine.[27] On the
one hand, the binary opposition through nomenclature offers a
logical structure, which is further ossified through ascription
and which presents itself as unconditional, bounded,
inescapable and timeless;[28] on the other hand, the actual processual
realization (through the construction of a culture coinciding
with the group boundary, through distinctive cultural symbols,
through a shared historical consciousness, through that
part of membership which is non-ascriptive but acquired) means flexibility,
choice, constructedness and recent change. Both,
entirely contradictory, aspects form part of ethnicity. This
dialectics renders ethnicity particularly suitable for mediating,
in processes of social change, between social contexts with are
each of a fundamentally different structure, and particularly
between the local level on the one hand, and the state and wider
economic structures on the other.[29] The ethnic name and the principle of
ascription produce the image of a bounded set of people.
Therefore integration between the local level and the national
and international level, which poses such bewildering problems of
structural discontinuity, under conditions of etnicization, no
longer remains a challenge which the vulnerable individual must
cope with on his own on the basis of his inadequate skills and
perceptions geared to the local level; on the contrary, such
integration becomes the object of group action.
Internally, a set of individuals is restructured so as to become
an ethnic group by designing a cultural package which, in its
own right (i.e. not just because of its symbolizing more
abstract power relations such as exist between the local level
and the more global levels) constitutes a major stake in the
negotiations between the emerging ethnic group and the outside
world. One takes a distance from rival ethnic groups at the local
and regional scene through a strategic emphasis on cultural and
linguistic elements; and on a more comprehensive, national level
of socio-political organization one competes for the state’s
political and economic prizes (primarily: for the exercise of
power and the benefit of government expenditure) by means of
the state’s recognition of the ethnically constructed cultural
package.
In this process the ethnic group more and more articulates itself
as just that. But although all persons involved in this process
are in principle equals as carriers of the ethnic identity, the
contact with the outside world, precisely if it shapes up
successfully, causes new inequalities within the group. The
mediation takes place via political, economic and ideological
brokers who (through greater knowledge, better education, more
experience, better political contacts and more material means of
sustaining such contacts) are more than their fellow-members of
the ethnic group in a position to exploit the opportunities
offered by the outside world.[30] These brokers develop ethnic leadership to an
instrument of power formation which works in two directions:
— externally, towards the outside world,
where these leaders claim resources in exchange for an effective
ordering of the local domain;[31]
— and, internally, within the ethnic group
itself, where the brokers trade off a limited share of their
outside spoils for internal authority, prestige and control at
the local level.
The leaders negotiate both with the outside world and with their
potential followers in the local society. In this context of
brokerage between local community and the outside world, that
which constitutes one’s own identity becomes problematic, and
asserting the ‘traditional’, ‘authentic’ (but in fact
newly reconstructed) culture appears as an important task and as
a source of power for the brokers. Ethnic associations,
publications, and such manifestations as festivals, under the
direction of ethnic brokers, constitute widespread and
time-honoured strategies in this process.
The insistence on ethnic identity produces powerful ideological
claims, which the outside world sometimes meets with more
sympathy than with analytical understanding. These claims may not
be recognized as a recent, strategic, and rhetorical product, but
may be idealized (as they are idealized by the ethnic brokers
themselves) as, for instance, ‘...the courageous expressions,
worthy of our deepest respect, of an inescapable identity which
these people have acquired in childhood socialization and which
takes a desperate stand against the encroachments of the outside
world...’ For instance, in today’s thinking about
intercontinental development cooperation a fair place has been
reserved for such claims and the associated cultural expressions.
5. Current dynamics of African cultural and
ethnic identity
Ethnicity is only one aspect of the
contemporary transformation of African cultural forms producing
identity. In my opinion, the greatest challenge lies in the quest
for an acceptable analytical paradigm which offers a solution for
the conflict between
• on the one hand the ideological and
perhaps partly mythical heritage, within African studies, of the
view of local African cultural forms as situated within clear-cut
boundaries, even capable of being projected onto the landscape;
• on the other hand the fact that
contemporary cultural forms in Africa, as elsewhere in the world,
absolutely do not occur in isolation, purity, ans strict
geographical demarcation, and that any assumption to the contrary
would be detrimental to both our analytical understanding and
our position-taking within the politics of identity.
I submit that a solution for this
contradiction may be found in the elaboration, in research and
analysis, of four interrelated themes:
— globalization
— commoditification
— embodiment, against the background of a
fourth theme which by now has acquired virtually classic status
within African anthropology:
— the role of the state.
globalization
By this term (cf. Robertson 1990) we
understand the way in which, under specific contemporary
technological conditions,[32] the
global affects the local but at the same time the local asserts
itself in the global. Also in more remote areas people are drawn
with ever greater speed, and to an ever increasing extent, into
the modern global society, especially through the spread of new
communication techniques, electronic media, and industrially
manufactured commodities in general. Political, ideological,
religious and cultural developments which occur in one place in
the world resound ever more rapidly in other places, including
places which we used to call, in the terminology of an earlier
vintage, ‘the periphery’. But far from leading to a
world-wide cultural hotchpotch of uniformity, the process of
globalization very often turns out to go hand in hand with the
strengthening and even the fresh construction of all sorts of
parochial identities of great local or regional specificity.
Within the global, distinction is being produced — especially
by means of differentiation within ever changing and innovating
industrially produced material culture; and this distinction is
not only vertical, between classes, but also horizontal, between
that life style, religion, local and regional identity which an
actor may recognize as his or her own, and other similar items
which are rejected as incorporations of otherhood.[33] I will come back to
this.
commoditification
Commoditification is the process (cf.
Jameson 1984, 1988) in which, according to a more or less
capitalist logic, use value is transformed into market value, and
items embodying use value either become commodities themselves or
are supplanted by commodities, exchangeable without primary
relations existing between the actors involved, and thus drawn
into networks — in principle world-wide — of production and
circulation. In the modern world commodities have come to play an
absolutely dominant role, also and particularly in culture,
cultural production and cultural politics. Commodities constitute
the main nexus between the local and the global, and they
function dominantly in the economic and political aspects of
cultural transformation processes. The notion of commoditified
culture implies considerable continuity vis-a-vis the Marxist
paradigms which were dominant between ca. 1968 and 1983 and which
since have lost much of their appeal because of both political
changes (the liberalization of Eastern Europe) and paradigmatic
ones (the rise of postmodernism). Increasingly it is not so much
the representations or the organizational forms, but the
commodities, which create and sustain socially and politically
(including ethnically) relevant distinctions. In the course of
the 1980s the cultural aspects of this process were increasingly
emphasized; the culturally determined view of commodities and
their value defines the interaction between local societies and
the world market; it is for this reason that processes of
commoditification can take all sorts of unexpected turns and
reversals.[34] A
renewed study of material culture from this perspective promises
to be one of the important growth points of African studies in
the 1990s (cf. van Binsbergen 1993c).
from forgotten body to embodiment
A third theme, which begins to be heard in
recent discussions around globalizing aspects of clothing,[35] contemporary music,[36] and ecstatic therapy
(Janzen (1992)), is the human body — which outside the specific
(but flourishing) domain of medical anthropology has been
neglected for so long in the established social science of
Africa. It becomes clear that the body (in ways which must appear
rather obvious to ‘configurationalists’ concentrating on
the study of European society; Elias 1939) plays a key role in
globalization processes which hitherto has not by far received
the proper attention. The body forms the condensation point
around which the desire of, the manipulation of, and the spatial
distribution of commodities are concentrated. The definition and
emphatic marking of the body’s boundaries and orifices
(clothing, adornment, shame, hygiene, sociability, desire,
eroticism), as well as the body’s metabolism, give rise to
socially meaningful patterns of eating, drinking, commensality,
food taboos, sexuality, — fields which are all increasingly
invaded by commodities that are aggressively advertised and whose
message has begun to dominate the individual’s experience and
social display of her or his body. The movements, rhythms and
acoustic expressions of the body (music, dance) reflect, comment
on and challenge both local and global processes. Globalization
and commoditification turn out to coincide, to a considerable
extent, with the most literal form of incorporation, i.e.
embodiment.
the role of the state
Globalization, commoditification and
embodiment take place within a political space whose parameters
we can now far better define than a few decades ago, when for
instance even for the brilliantly innovative Manchester
anthropologists the contours of the colonial societies within
which they did their research remained basically invisible — a
black box vaguely indicated as the ‘colonial industrial
complex’ — despite these anthropologists’ very articulate
personal political consciousness. One of the most remarkable
achievements in African anthropology since the 1960s has been the
development of a dynamic anthropological approach to the colonial
and post-colonial state, a discourse which essentially
complemented the discourses of political scientists and
constitutional lawyers, and which has continued to increase in
relevance as the models of the latter sciences turned out to be
less and less applicable to African post-colonial realities (e.g.
Bayart 1989).
For our present argument the important question is: to what
extent can the state continue to play a mediating role between
the continuing force of parochial identities, and the local and
regional effect of globalization processes? At the descriptive
level, the power of African ethnicity research lies in the fact
that (in itself of limited originality) it does not pretend to be
a paradigmatic innovation, yet it offers a clear perspective on
one of the great themes of the last quarter of the twentieth
century: the way in which the state becomes more and more
invisible, in the context of a constant interaction between
globalization (which at the political level is reflected in the
increasing erosion of the nation state in favour of international
and intercontinental forms of organization) and localization.
By-passing the state, or eclipsing the state, ethnicity has
become a dominant form to relate the local and the global. In
this field fascinating possibilities are opening up for an
exploration of the interaction between commodity, power, and the
formation of identity. In this connexion we must continue to pay
considerable attention to the role of ethnic brokers in their
combination of political and cultural initiatives in the
formation of identity.
inequality as an enduring theme
In this connexion I wish to make one
cautionary remark concerning social and cultural inequality in
the globalization perspective. Although the authors working in
this field have shown through their other writings to be aware of
the hegemonic and subordinative tendencies within global
structures, yet the image of the circulation of messages,
commodities and symbols — a circulation which technological
means have allegedly rendered as free and instantaneous as
possible — may create the totally unwarranted illusion of
fundamental equality in access and participation, across the
globe. For have hegemony, centre and periphery not been united by
the fax machine and the communication satellite, and do not their
operators, wherever in the world, wear the same sportive footwear
and blue jeans even at their places of work? Why spoil that fun
by pointing out the fundamentally different economic and
political parameters in the myriads of local contexts which
together constitute the modern world, and by tracing the
subordinative dependence which exists between these various
contexts. The essential characteristic of culture is that it is
learned, not innate, and this creates a flexible escape clause
(for individuals more than for social groups and categories) by
which the apparently free circulation and acquisition of items of
culture are somehow difficult to tie down to a discourse of the
firm structural inescapabilities of political and economic power.
In other words, if may well be as difficult to develop a
convincing culturological discourse on power, as it has turned
out to be difficult to develop a satisfactory politico-economic
discourse on culture. Yet unintentionally the globalization
paradigm (much like discussions of a new democratic world order)
might be turned into a formula to conceal under a postmodernist
culturalist jargon, rather than expose and reduce, the
inequalities in the modern world. Is not the brave new world of
the globalization approach too optimistic and naive by far? Is
that approach perhaps in itself an ideological project promoting
North Atlantic military, cultural and consumerist dominance? In
this connexion the emphasis on the specificities which exist at
the local level (where inequality is particularly visible, and
accessible for perceptive research), and the emphasis on
political and economic power as implied in such themes as
commoditification and the role of the state, constitute a
necessary correction.
6. Bones of contention
In the future elaboration of the emergent
approach sketched above, the major bone of contention, but
therefore also a great source of inspiration, could lie in the
dialogue between the paradigms of the 1970s and ’80s (such as
(post?)Marxism, as well as neo-classic, i.e. structural
functional anthropology), and post-modernism.
More is involved here than a model of scientific knowledge and
scholarly production. Sometimes, post-modernists do not seem to
believe in fieldwork as a systematic method, and tend to stress
the systematically global so much over the specifically local,
that intensive fieldwork somewhere out in the fringes of the
contemporary world system would appear to be not only extremely
uncomfortable (no fax machines and E-mail there!) but also a
waste of time; for if the global is declared dominant, the whole
world would essentially be the same. More than commoditification,
globalization (with its fascination with virtual, electronically
patterned experience and modern gadgets) and embodiment are
certainly themes which have only risen to paradigmatic power by
virtue of the post-modern movement in the social sciences —
which in itself was a rather belated echo of developments in
literary criticism, history of art, architecture etc. But once we
have understood that globalization is only a new, systematic and
world-wide framework for the ever greater proliferation of new
identities, new distinctions, new symbolic boundaries (in other
words, a framework for anti-globalization), then it will
be clear that the mapping of these processes requires, more than
ever, skilful locally specific fieldwork. In the contemporary
globalizing cultural space the codes of distinction assume such
sophisticated and subtle forms, and they are accompanied by such
mirages of reference and counter-reference, imitation, reversal
and denial, and by such confusing echoes and near-echoes between
the worlds of the researcher and the researched, that by
comparison old-fashioned fieldwork in an old-fashioned (but by
now of course totally transformed) African village would appear a
mere school outing. How does one detect and analyse this
dynamics, in a world where researcher and the researched may both
wear the same Far-Eastern manufactured blue jeans, but
distributed and purchased via different routes — constituting
for the former a sign of quasi-humility (the emulation of a late
nineteenth-century workman’s uniform meant to conceal the
Western academician’s relative affluence at least by global
comparison), but for the latter a sign of undeniable economic
success and conspicuous consumption?
Beyond this rather predictable paradigmatic and methodological
struggle there is the debate over the critical appreciation of
the transformation processes which are taking place in Southern
Africa today. Are we witnessing here a case of the local being
totally trampled down by the global, while the latter has been
effectively robbed of all value and meaning, because of its being
linked to routinized and commoditified models of production and
especially consumption? Or must we allow for far greater
creativity and power of defence on the part of the local,
resulting in new cultural products which are not only
unpredictable and locally specific, but in which old and new
forms of self respect and identity, of boundaries and boundary
marking, create, on the contrary, new meaning — so that the
local appears in its far from passive negotiation with an outside
world which is not merely seen as destructive and negative.
Clifford stresses that there are ‘different paths through
modernity’. Like Hannerz and Appadurai he claims that
globalization far from implies increasing cultural homogeneity.
On the contrary, cultural heterogeneity seems to be on the
increase, even in the metropoles. Anthropology and related
disciplines should address that new cultural diversity. In this
context Hannerz uses the concept of ‘creolization’: the rise
of new, hybrid identities from the interaction between local
elements and modern influences, as furthered particularly through
the new communication techniques. The term creolization however
suggests far more admixture or fusion on the basis of equality
and equal dosage, while in actual fact there is hegemony, partial
selection and rejection, and the creation of new boundaries.
perhaps the irony of the Rushdie affair is a case in point: the
post-Islamic writer who on the strength of The Satanic Verses
earned himself a global death sentence, sees himself as the
embodiment of the creolizing element in the modern world, but to
his — somewhat naive — surprise he finds on his path another
expression of the very same world society in statu nascendi,
Islamic fundamentalism, which as a complementary aspect of the
same globalizing logic stresses not fusion but boundaries, and
bounded forms over which no compromise can be negotiated. Without
that confrontation the writer’s attitude in itself would be
meaningless and devoid of content. The same paradox can be seen
in the social and academic reception of the Rushdie affaire: the
champions of the lonely intellectual appeal (justifiably,
despite’s Rushdie creolizing claims) on human rights and
principles which, they hope, will assume the status of new,
unshakable universals, new boundaries in a world culture which
has become relativist to the extreme; whereas the (non-Islamic)
champions of the fundamentalists, by contrast, seek refuge with a
cultural relativism that was once such a beautiful and
illuminating invention of humanist anthropology less than half a
century ago.
The interaction between local elements and global influences can
be studied with the aid of the concept of ‘rationality’. It
does not do to juxtapose a modern (= Western) rationality and
non-Western irrationality. In reality the image is far more
fragmented. The interaction between local and global should
rather be analysed in terms of a struggle over which
rationality is to dominate. Of course the idea is obsolete that
this will naturally be the western one (yet it is this idea which
informed much of the development and modernization thinking of a
earlier period). On the one hand, the world-wide circulation of
commodities implies a technical and bureaucratic rationality in
the field of production, distribution, consumption, and their
social organization. But this does not in the least preclude the
possibility that commodities, surrounded by an aura of this type
of global rationality, are being used for the articulation of
distinction in the context of a local rationality which, although
transformed, still displays a marked continuity vis-a-vis
historic local forms of rationality and meaning. It is not only
that forms of ‘modernity’ (charged to a greater or lesser
extent with elite connotations and notions of conspicuous
consumption) are, in the last analysis, shaped and experienced
though commodities. Also the formation of ethnic and religious
groupings utilizes (for the definition of their own identity
under construction) specific commodities, which on the one hand
derive from world-wide circulation and on the other hand appear
as expression of a parochial identity: for instance church
uniforms, varieties of music and dance which emulate industrially
produced and electronically conveyed, commercial cosmopolitan
forms, etc. Therefore the local is not by definition that which
is passive, which is being trampled down, which receives the
global — no, it selects, rearranges and transforms creatively.
Playing its own game, the local also seeks to penetrate the
global with its own rearranged and transformed selection. And
often, to our amazement, it succeeds in doing just that — to
wit African ethnic group formation and cultural production in
that context, as well as African independent churches. As firm
material cores in a world which in terms of images, ideology and
norms is so fluid, complex and contradictory, the commodities
form the main articulation points between the local and the
global.
7. An ethnographic example: The Kazanga Cultural
Association in contemporary Zambia
Let me conclude this sketch of general
themes with an illustration derived from an ethnic association in
modern Zambia (van Binsbergen 1992b, cf. 1992a, 1994a).[37]
In western Zambia a large number of ethnic identities circulate,
among which that of the Lozi (Barotse) is dominant because of its
association with the Luyana state. The latter had its
pre-colonial claims confirmed and even expanded with the
establishment of colonial rule in 1900, resulting in the
Barotseland Protectorate, which initially coincided with North
Western Rhodesia, and after Zambia’s independence (1964) became
that country’s Western Province. Lozi arrogance, limited access
to education and to markets, and the influence of a
fundamentalist Christian mission, stimulated a process of ethnic
awakening. As from the middle of the twentieth century more and
more people in eastern Barotseland and adjacent areas came to
identify as ‘Nkoya’. In addition to the Nkoya language, and
to a few cultural traits recognized as proper to the Nkoya (even
if these traits have a much wider distribution in the region),
royal ‘chiefs’, although incorporated in the Lozi
aristocracy, have constituted the major condensation points of
this identity. The usual pattern of migrant labour and
urban-rural migration endowed this identity with an urban
component, whose most successful representatives distinguished
themselves from their rural Nkoya nationals in terms of
education, income and active participation in national
politics. While the Lozi continued to be considered as the ethnic
enemies, a second major theme in Nkoya ethnicity was to emerge:[38] the quest for
political and economic articulation with the national centre,
by-passing the Lozi whose dominance at the district and
provincial level dwindled only slowly. In this articulation
process the chiefs, with the lack of education, economic and
political power, and being the prisoners of court protocol, could
only fulfil a symbolic function. The main task fell to the urban
Nkoya ‘elite’ (in fact mainly lower- and middle-range civil
servants and salaried workers), and with this task in mind the
most prominent among them formed the Kazanga Cultural Association
in the early 1980s. In subsequent years, this association has
provided an urban reception structure for prospective migrants,
has contributed to Nkoya Bible translation and the publication of
ethnic history texts, has assumed a considerable role at the
royal courts next to the traditional royal councils, and within
various political parties and publicity media has campaigned
against the Lozi and for the Nkoya cause. The association’s
main achievement, however, has been the annual organization
(since 1988) of the Kazanga festival, in the course of which a
large audience (including Zambian national dignitaries, the four
Nkoya royal chiefs, Nkoya nationals and outsiders), for two days
is treated to a complete overview of Nkoya songs, dances and
staged rituals. Of course what we have here is a form of
bricolage and of invention of tradition (Hobsbawm & Ranger
1983): for it would have been impossible to completely revive the
nineteenth-century Kazanga harvest festival, which comprised only
one royal, but also human sacrifices. The details of the
contemporary Kazanga festival I have treated at length elsewhere
(van Binsbergen 1992b), and I shall here merely focus on the
themes which I have discussed in general in the preceding
sections of this paper.
globalization
The Kazanga festival revolves around the
mediation of the local Nkoya identity towards the national, and
by implication world-wide space, — a mediation which is to
transmute the local symbolic production (one has hardly any other
products eligible for exchange with the outside world) into a
measure of political and economic power via access to the
national centre. Besides the selection and presentation of
culture, this involves the transformation of culture: the
Kazanga festival has the appearance of presenting items of
traditional Nkoya culture, but in fact all these elements have
been totally transformed towards a performative format,
orchestrated, directed, rehearsed, subjected to the streamlining
ordering by an organizing elite and its mobilizing and
mediating ambitions. The models for this performative format
derive from radio, television, the world of Christian missions,
agricultural shows, state intervention in national ethnic
cultural production, and intercontinental pop media culture. The
Nkoya identity which is thus put on display, is not only recent
and situational, but also ‘virtual’, in the sense that it
does not at all coincide any more with what the participating and
performing villagers do experience as the self-evident ordering
(in terms of space, time and social relations) of village life,
in whose context superficially similar (but on closer scrutiny
fundamentally different) truly historic forms of symbolic
production are engaged in which might be more properly terms
‘Nkoya traditional culture’.
commoditification
Therefore, cultural presentation in the
context of the Kazanga festival is a form of commoditification.
The performative format anticipates on the expectations of the
visiting non-Nkoya elite, and has to produce goodwill and
rapprochement, some sort of symbolic ready cash, to be effective
within the wider world of political and economic power which is
represented by these dignitaries. There is also more tangible
ready cash involved: the performers are paid a little for their
services. Moreover the performances take place in a context which
is increasingly dominated by characteristic commodities from the
global consumerist culture of reference: the performances are
supported — and this is absolutely unheard of in the villages
— by public address systems, and all royal protocol has to give
in to the urge, among those possessing tape recorders and video
cameras, to ‘record’ the event — an act most characteristic
of our electronic age and of the possibilities of individually
reproduced and consumed, virtual and vicarious experience it
entails. The standardization of a commoditified cultural
production is also borne out by the emphasis (which is in
absolute contradiction with historic village patterns) on
identical movements according to neat geometrical patterns, the
avoidance of ‘offensive’ bodily movements particularly in the
body zones singled out by Christian prudery, and in the identical
uniforms of the members of the main dancing troupes. The
representatives of the urban Kazanga troupe moreover advertise
themselves through exceptional commodities such as shoes (which
asre not only expensive, but offensive and impractical in village
dancing), expensive coiffures, sun glasses and identical T-shirts
imprinted for the occasion. The commoditification element is also
manifest in the separation — extremely unusual in this rural
society — between (a) passive, culture-consuming spectators,
who explicitly are not supposed to join in the singing and
dancing, (b) the producers (who clearly act not by their own
initiative — as in the village — but as they have been told),
and (c) the supervising elite (who in their turn single
themselves out through such commodities as formal jackets and
ties).
embodiment
As we have seen under the previous heading,
even under the performative format Kazanga has no choice but to
present the Nkoya identity (recently constructed as it clearly
is, and even reduced to virtuality in the commoditified and
invented context of the festival) as inscribed onto the very
bodies of those who define themselves socially as the bearers of
that identity, and who express it through their bodily
manifestations in music, song and attire. The performance
embodies the identity and renders it communicable in an
appropriate format, even to an outside world where, before the
creation of Kazanga in its present form, that identity did not
mean anything of positive value. The stress on uniformity of the
performers and their actions paradoxically creates both
(a) an illusion of being identical — which
dissimulates actual class differences (for each dance troupe
again represent the entire Nkoya nation as a whole), and
(b) a sense of distinction — for very
visibly, the urban elite’s troupe is ‘more equal’ than the
other performers, and than the spectators.
In this incorporative context one also
borrows from a repertoire which has certainly not been
commoditified even if it is performative: dressed in leopard
skins, around the temples a royal ornament of Conus shells, and
brandishing an antique executioner’s axe (all these attributes
— regalia, in fact — have now become non-commodities,
pertaining to a circuit that in the present time is no longer
mercantile, although it was more so during the nineteenth
century), an aged royal chief, with virtuoso accompaniment from a
hereditary honorary drummer of the same age (he has always been
far above performing with the state-subsidized royal orchestra in
the routine court contexts), performs the old Royal Dance which
since the end of the nineteenth century was hardly seen any more
in this region; at the climax the king (for that is what he shows
himself to be) kneels down and drinks directly from a hole in the
ground where beer has been poured out for his royal ancestors —
the patrons of at least his part of the Nkoya nation, implied to
share in the deeply emotional cheers from the audience. And young
women who have long been through girls’ puberty initiation,
perform that ritual’s final dance (cf. van Binsbergen 1987),
without any signs of the appropriate stage fright and modesty,
and with their too mature breasts against all tradition tucked
into conspicuous white bras; yet despite this performative
artificiality their sublime bodily movements, which in this case
are far from censored, approach the village-based original
sufficiently close to bring the spectators, men as well as women,
to ecstatic expressions of a recognized and shared identity.
Obviously commoditification and transformative selection, however
important, do not tell the whole story, and even after the
recreation of Nkoya culture in the form Kazanga format enough
reason for enthusiasm and identification is left for us not to be
too cynical about the globalizing erosion of the symbolic and
ethnic domain.
the role of the state
With all the attention for performative
control, matched with a strong suggestion of authenticity, it
is clear that the Kazanga leadership does not for one moment lose
sight of the fact that the festival is primarily an attempt to
exchange the one scarce good which one locally has in abundance,
competence in symbolic production, for political and economic
power. The national dignitaries, and not the royal chiefs, let
alone the audience, constitute the spatial focus of the event,
and a large part of the programme is devoted to the
dignitaries’ welcome speeches and other formal addresses. Since
the political arena is indeed the right place (and not only in
Zambia) to exchange symbolic production for development projects,
political allocation and patronage, the harvest of the series of
Kazanga festivals since 1988 is by now eminently manifest in a
marked increase of Nkoya participation at the national level, in
representative bodies and in the media, and in a marked decrease
of the stigmatization to which they used to be subjected under
Lozi domination until well after independence. Kazanga is an
example of how an ethnic group can not only articulate itself
through symbolic production, but may actually lift itself by its
own hairs out of the bog.
inequality
Above I have already emphasized how the categorical
(i.e. logical, conceptual) equality (‘identity’
hardly means anything else) of all Nkoya nationals — in the
light of the shared, recently constructed Nkoya identity as
nmanifeted at Kazanga — is, by contrast, constantly accompanied
by the manifestation of all sorts of inequalities: those between
peasants and urbanites, between peasants and salaried workers;
elite leaders, performers and spectators. I regret that in the
present scope I cannot deal with other, equally interesting
inequalities (like those between men and women, and between
Christians and traditionalists). Undoubtedly the Kazanga
leaders perceive themselves as being altruistically subservient
to an abstract ethnic collectivity, but in fact their ethnic
mediation primarily serves their own position, especially when
and if their mediation is successful and begins to be
reciprocated by the national centre.
8. Conclusion
This concrete application of the general
themes of my argument onto the analysis of a specific ethnic
festival in a backwater of Southern Africa, may give an
impression of the possibilities of the approach to cultural
dynamics which is now beginning to take shape. Regrettably the
present scope does not allow us to explore contrasting patterns
of culturally localizing globalization, such as for instance
manifest themselves when we compare the ethnic processes in
Kazanga with the developments in Southern African Independent
churches. Whereas the ethnic association transforms a selection
of local culture so as to bring about mediation between the local
and the outside world (notably the political centre), the process
is the churches often amounts to the opposite: within the church
organization a selection of more or less commoditified elements
from the global culture (money, Christianity, uniform clothing
which has been manufactured according to special colour schemes
and designs, and other paraphernalia) is transformed so as to
bring about the construction of protective conceptual boundaries
within which to retreat from that outside world.[39]
Without a detailed analysis of this material it is difficult to
decide whether, in the case of these churches, it is the cultural
contents which largely determines the organizational processes,
or whether the cultural contents are rather the somewhat
indifferent stuffing of a process whose primary aim is the social
construction of subjectively bounded little islands of security
within the maelstrom of globalization and commoditification.
But even without such additional cases I hope to have
demonstrated that the perspective which now unfolds in the
context of the globalization approach offers interesting
possibilities for an analysis of the dynamics of cultural and
ethnic identity in Africa today, which seeks to do justice both
to the locally specific and to the global, and which foreshadows
a certain balance, in our analyses, between cultural empathy (as
carried by intensive local research as fed by cultural and
linguistic competence) and political economy, and between
identity as recently constructed yet not to be de-constructed
into impotence and annihilation, but to be see to function as a
major dynamic force shaping the present and the future of the
modern world, inside and outside Africa.[40]
More than 25 years ago, when I tried to do
my own first field-work, the assumption within the
anthropological profession was still that one could expect to do
research among people who were actively, competently and as a
matter of course producing their own expressive culture, in the
form of song, music, dance, tattooing, embellishments on the
utensils and dwellings they would construct, etc etc. I certainly
had a knack for ending up at the right place: while my classmates
were suffering in barren communities which according to their
accounts were even devoid of humour, I found myself invariably
surrounded by dancers and musicians. The latter were eager to
share their rich ceremonial and religious culture with me, and
both in North-western Tunisia (1968, 1970) and in urban and rural
Zambia (1972-74) I intensively participated in whatever forms of
expressive culture the had to offer. For me they constituted a
self-evident form of doing field-work; more than anything else,
these frequent occasions of cultural production allowed me to
survive as a whole (but often tired, and sometimes intoxicated)
human being in the field, and they helped to remind my hosts that
I was just that.
As anthropologists, we did not, by that time, label these
expressive manifestations ‘popular culture’, but
‘culture’ tout court. If today many of us are clearly
inclined to do otherwise, this must be indicative of the long way
we (the world, and the social scientific study of other societies
than our own) have moved since then.
Why were we simply speaking of ‘culture’, then? A fundamental
idea in this connection was that of localised sets of people
producing symbolic manifestations which, although not totally
invariable, tend to converge, within that localised set, toward a
certain degree of collectively, repetitive standardisation and
uniqueness, in such a way that these manifestations can be seen
as one of the carriers (of even the main carrier) of their
identity. Basically this culture was considered to be autonomous
and self-reproducing. Moreover, cultures although historically
and typologically connected, were considered to be somehow
demarcated and bounded — in other words, a culure would in the
first instance be peculiar to the localised set of people
carrying it and lending its ethnic name to it. And lastly, the
people studied by anthropology were likely to be considered, up
to the 1960s, as competent producers of expressive culture (and
not, as in subsequent decades, as the incapacitated producers —
as peasants, proletarians or otherwise underprivileged and
underlying — of merely a secondary part culture),
because of the background idea that all cultures were equal. Like
in the colonial times which then had scarcely passed,
anthropology tended to assume the responsibility of vindicating
the (peripheral, humiliated and exploited) people who formed its
main subjects, by showing how even those were capable of
producing coherent, meaningful and beautiful symbolic edifices at
a par with the North Atlantic culture — to which almost all
anthropologists happened to belong too, of course.
By contrast, why would we be so keen to speak of ‘popular
culture’ when referring to the expressive manifestations of the
same people’s children and grandchildren, today? Here again,
only a few points must do. We perceive the world today as in a
state of globalisation, and that means, among other things, that
local cultural products are inevitably be set off against the
products of a growing ‘world culture’, which however shallow
and ugly in its worst manifestations, is yet backed up by
world-wide networks of commercial and industrial entrepreneurship
and the electronic media. We have learned to look at the subjects
or our research from a perspective of class formation,
highlighting the contradictions between peasants and urban
elites. We realise how local Third World urban elites have been
drawn into international global consumption patterns, to which
they have access through increased travel opportunities,
electronic media, dress styles, capitalist patterns of mass
production and distribution. We now look at our research subjects
with an increased awareness of power differences and of contexts
of incorporation and hegemony: in the context of ideological
systems (political, world religions), of consumer styles, of
levels of educational and technical skills, of access to globally
standardised (once again through media) means of cultural
production and reproduction. And so we see that the locally
competent Third World dweller of only a generation ago, has been
turned into a state of cultural dependence, incompetence, and
relative cultural deprivation when viewed from a world-wide,
globalising perspective. The neutral villager, nomad, hunter of
the middle third of the twentieth century, has now become very
clearly an encapsulated subject in regional, national and global
contexts which, even if encompassing and generally tolerating his
or her expressive production, condescendingly relegates the
latter to the secondary status of ‘folk’, ‘non-elite’,
‘non-global’, and indeed, ‘popular’.
Such a use of the concept of ‘popular’ even lacks the
redemptive (and of course highly illusory) dreams of creativity
and historic self-realisation that attended 18th and 19th century
Romantic studies of ‘folk’, ‘folklore’ and ‘popular
culture’. The ‘popular culture’ of African peasants and
urban poor today is hardly considered, by its academic analysts,
to be the mould out of which a national culture will spring, its
increasingly articulate genius expressed in literary and musical
products worthy to be enshrined among the universal heritage of
mankind. Popular culture as a term has come to reflect a reality
of subordination, incorporation, hegemony and globalisation which
has affected the cultural producers in Africa just as it has
affected anthropology itself.
For anthropology has by now incorporated the reality attending
the transition from culture to popular culture in at least two
ways. First, we have learned that the ‘primitive isolate’,
the bounded culture largely reproduced on endogenous forces, does
not exist, that it did not exist thirty years ago, either — nor
at any time of human history, for that matter; and we have
created an entire sub-discipline around the concept of ethnicity,
which does nothing but problematising the kind of classification
phenomena — and their social, political and economic
repercussions — which in the 1960s were still unashamedly
subsumed under the concept of ‘tribe’. Secondly, deprived of
its erstwhile monopoly on knowledge production concerning exotic
societies, anthropology has become somewhat eager to please the
other — often institutionally more powerful — sciences
(development economics, political science, religious studies
etc.) working on the Third World. It has in many respects even
been made subservient to yet another idiom of cultural and
economic hegemony, that of development intervention or aid.
It is largely in this framework that I can understand
anthropology’s recent adoption of a term like ‘popular
culture’, which has no systematic status in the discipline and
would turn out to be rather dubious if subjected to theoretical
anthropological analysis.
Does that mean that it is meaningless, or even wrong, to speak of
‘popular culture’ in an anthropological context? I would no
go as far as that, and can see a specific context in which the
term is useful and even illuminating. Although globalisation does
produce, as a counter-effect, very specific and idiosyncratic
local repercussions in the domain of symbolic production, yet it
primarily constitutes a trend towards convergence and
standardisation, among people who share neither the same
language, nor historical symbols and experiences, nor a named
ethnic or religious identity. Alongside the world-wide media
culture we do witness the gradual growth of a world-wide popular
culture, punctuated and publicly presented by festivals,
independence celebrations, often in contexts that bring together
elite and peasants, pagans as well as believers in a world
religion, politicians as well as ordinary citizens etc., and
which aspire to bridge the widening political and economic gaps
e.g. in Africa. Here a concept of popular culture does apply, as
a symbolic celebration of globalisation as it were — complete
with the trappings of electronic media, state mediation of global
cultural forms etc. Here local cultural production of an earlier
vintage is radically trnsformed so as to fit in a series: a
series of named similar, ethnicaly, regionally or institutionally
marked and named items of expressive culture, different merely on
specific points which are then cultivated and canonized in
writing and media comments. This form of popular culture is even
extremely relevant for an understanding of the contemporary
ethnic revival, which (if I may be forgiven for concentrating on
its non-violent aspects) responds to the global incentives for
the symbolic production of difference, in the form of an industry
of ethnic specificity. Such ethnic specificity, with predictable
political and economic effects, is now increasingly rendered
tangible (and especially visible, via media recording and
broadcasting) through specifically engineered popular culture,
featuring forms of expressive culture which while often newly
arranged yet pose as traditional, in a fascinating process of
bricolage, of cultural ‘do-it-yourself’ under the unbinding
inspiration of a local symbolic memory.
Does popular culture in Africa nothing but reinforcing and
expressing the state of encapsulation and reduced symbolic
competence of the peasants and urban poor engaging in it, forcing
them under the joke of a serialized and ritualized production of
difference? Much to our surprise, then (and in a way that leaves
hope both for anthropology and for its habitual research
subjects), the answer must yet be ‘no’. For in popular
culture if nowhere else, the underdog strikes back: culture is
not totally dependent and borrowed — on the contrary, it can be
seen by the actors, even if bricolaged, as very much one’s own
(just like language), and therefore creates an issue for
mediating with the outside world. It may build new expressive
boundaries around the local community, but not to seal this off
from the outside world, but to negotiate with it. While
selectively appropriating the means of modern cultural production
and reproduction, with video, loudspeakers, T-shirts with
messages, predictable choreographies and musical styles etc. —
the whole disgusting modern global culture some of us tried to
escape from by reading anthropology and going to distant places,
even such cultural production turns out to be capable —
occasionally, e.g. in the ethnographic case of the Nkoya’s
Kazanga festival as argued in the paper — of becoming the
vehicle of a critical and militant identity, transcending rather
than reinforcing the peripheral subordination to which its
producers have been reduced in the modern world.
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[1] Earlier versions of part of this argument were presented at the post-doc course ‘globalization, cultural commoditification and ethnicity’, Leiden University/ African Studies Centre/Municipal University of Amsterdam/Institute for Social Studies, Leiden/The Hague, 8 June 1993; and at the workshop ‘Dynamics of culture’, organized by the Netherlands Sociological and Anthropological Association, Amsterdam, 12 March 1993; and at the Second Inter-University Colloquium: African research futures: Postcolonialism and identity, Manchester, 13-16 May 1994. I am indebted to the referents on these occasions, Achile Mbembe, Pius Ngandu and Hans Vermeulen, for stimulating reactions; and to my friend and colleague Peter Geschiere, with whom I explored the present problematic in fascinating conversations and joint drafts, also in preparation for the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) research programme on Globalization and the construction of communal identities, administered by the two of us together with Bonno Thoden van Velzen en Peter van der Veer (Geschiere et al 1993). An earlier Dutch version of sections of the present paper was published as van Binsbergen 1994b. Other sections derive from van Binsbergen 1992b, of which an English version is now in press with African Studies.
[2] E.g.
Verhelst 1990; cf. Geschiere’s critique 1989.
[3] Cf. Simons & Simons 1969;
Mafeje 1971; Phimister & van Onselen 1979.
[4] Van
Binsbergen 1985; also cf. Edelstein 1974; Saul 1979; Kahn 1981.
[5] Including Pietermaritzburg 1992, Grahamstown 1993; also the annual meetings of the Association for Anthropology in Southern Africa have been dominated by the study of ethnicity since 1991.
[6] As in the work of Mitchell (1956, 1974), Epstein (1958, 1978), Gluckman (1960, 1971) and Cohen (1969, 1974).
[7] Cf.
Amselle 1990; Amselle & M’bokolo 1985; Vail 1989.
[8] E.g.
Chretien & Prunier 1989; van Binsbergen 1992a.
[9] Rath 1991; Vermeulen 1984, 1992.
[10] For examples from Dutch and Belgian African studies, cf. van Binsbergen 1992b; Schilder & van Binsbergen 1993.
[11] The following two sections derive from van Binsbergen 1992b.
[12] Cf. Genesis 2:19.
[13] Fardon 1987 however denies the existence of universals in the study of ethnicity.
[14] Cf. Levi-Strauss 1962a, 1962b.
[15] Cf. Salamone 1975; Schultz 1984. The few migrants from Kaoma district who are successful in town sometimes seek to pose as members of a more prestigious ethnic group: Bemba or Lozi. Such posing (‘passing’) is a much studied aspect of ethnic and race relations in North America; e.g. Drake & Cayton 1962: 159f.
[16] As stressed by, e.g., Horowitz 1975; Fardon 1987; Prunier 1989.
[17] Cf. Chretien & Prunier 1989; Tonkin e.a. 1989; Vail 1989a, 1989b.
[18] A famous example of such ambiguity is Leach 1953. Further cf. Barth 1970; Doornbos 1978; Mitchell 1956, 1974; Lemarchand 1983.
[19] Gutkind 1970; Helm 1968; Godelier 1973, especially pp. 93-131: ‘Le concept de tribu: Crise d’un concept ou crise des fondements empiriques de l’anthropologie?’.
[20] E.g. Ranger 1982; Vail 1989a, 1989b.
[21] Among many studies I only cite the classic Mitchell 1956.
[22] For an excellent analysis, see Bayart 1989, especially pp. 65-86: ‘Le theatre d’ombres de l’ethnicite’.
[23]
Cf. Buijtenhuijs 1991; Buijtenhuijs & Rijnierse 1993.
[24] A trend in recent Dutch and Belgian research of ethnicity seeks to address this onesidedness by stressing cultural aspects; cf. Schilder & van Binsbergen 1993.
[25] In the limited scope of this argument I cannot do justice to the very extensive, multi-disciplinary literature on identity. One of the most influential authors on identity has been the psychiatrist Erikson (e.g. 1968). Valuable anthropological studies on ethnic identity include de Vos & Romanucci-Ross 1975; Horowitz 1975; Jacobson-Widding 1983. For Zambia specifically, cf. Ethos and identity (Epstein 1978), which dissociates itself from the earlier emphasis on more classification in the ethnicity research of his close colleague Mitchell (1956, 1974). A masterly approach, with emphasis on expressive culture, is Blacking 1983. For an inspiring French contribution, see Amselle 1990.
[26] Such continuity was especially stressed by Vansina in his pioneering work on the history of the southern savanna in Africa (1966); van Binsbergen 1981 is an attempt to explore the religious dimension of this continuity.
[27] For a similar insight, cf. Uchendu 1975: 265.
[28] Early researchers of ethnic phenomena in Africa have been persuaded, precisely by this aspect, to analyze ethnicity in terms of primordial identity — a view exploded by Doornbos 1972.
[29] Marxist anthropology analyzes the mediation between such fundamentally structured social sectors in terms of the articulation, or linking, of modes of production; cf. Geschiere 1982; van Binsbergen & Geschiere 1985; and references cited there. Although the study of ethnicity demonstrates that the symbolic domain cannot be regarded as clearly subordinate to production and reproduction, the articulation of modes of production perspective remains inspiring in this field — cf. van Binsbergen 1985.
[30] The central role of this type of brokers is discussed in an extensive anthropological literature, in which Barth 1966 features as a classic.
[31] In ethnic mediation, the outside world does not merely consist of the state and nothing more. Peel 1989 describes Yoruba ethnicity as a nineteenth-century project in which an early church leader played a leading part — just as was the case among the Nkoya. Vail 1989b mentions, besides local politicians and church leaders, also academic researchers as mediators in many ethnicisation processes in Southern Africa; cf. Papstein 1989; van Binsbergen 1985. The mediation process is also a theme in Ranger 1982. Recent studies of Afrikaners or Boers in South Africa have also elucidated the role of creative writers, and in this respect there are numerous parallels with other parts of Africa, e.g. Okot p’Bitek as a champion of Acholi ethnicity in Uganda (van de Werk 1980).
[32] This avoids the question of whether globalization is only of our age, or of all ages of man. In the last analysis globalization is only a word for the social, cultural and political consequences of the mathematical properties of the earth’s surface; and the earth’s quasi-globular shape did not alter conspicuously over the past few billion years. The spread — in pre-historical times — of the human species to all corners of the earth; or the wide distribution of the remarkable and unmistakable (for it defies all factual observation) artistic representation of the ‘flying gallop’, between North-Africa and China, and across several millennia (first studied by Reinach at the turn of the last century; Reinach 1925); or divination systems based on four different configurations, which have an even broader distribution in space and time (van Binsbergen, in press (b) and in preparation); or state formation in the times of Sargon, Alexander or Caesar — are these not all examples of globalization? They need not be, if we make this term dependent, as above, upon ‘contemporary technological conditions’, when the good old geoid appears under a different light (no doubt produced by Lasers or LED) by the impact of electronic carriers and transmission velocities close to or equalling the velocity of light.
[33] Cf. Clifford (1988); Hannerz (1987, 1990, 1992); Appadurai 1990.
[34] Vgl. Taussig (1987); Appadurai (1986).
[35] Comaroff (1993); Tranberg Hansen (1993); Faurschou (1987); Heath (1992).
[36] Erlmann (1991); Waterman (1990).
[37] Anthropological and oral-historical fieldwork was undertaken in Western Zambia and under migrants from this area in Lusaka, in 1972-1974, and during shorter periods in 1977, 1978, 1981, 1988, 1989, 1992 (twice) and 1994 (twice). I am indebted to the Zambian research participants, to the members of my family who shared in the fieldwork, to the Board of the African Studies Centre for adequate research funds, and to the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) for a writing-up year in 1974-75.
[38] Very recently a third theme is emerging: the blurring of ethnic boundaries in Western Zambia, the attenuation even of Nkoya/Lozi antagonism, in favour of a pan-Westerners regionalism opposing the Northern block which is President Chiluba’s ethnic base. This at least is the situation around the National Party, which in bye-elections in Mongu (the capital of Western Province) in early 1994 defeated both MMD and UNIP. At Kazanga 1994, the society’s office of national chairman went to the leading NP official in Kaoma district.
[39] Cf. Comaroff (1985); Werbner (1986); Schoffeleers (1991); van Binsbergen (1993a, 1993b and in press). These authors differ especially with regard to the role they attribute to the state: whereas Schoffeleers and to a certain degree also Werbner, notably with reference to the South African situation under apartheid, stress the factor ‘acquiescence’ (people resignedly accepting the political structure of their society, also in the awareness of an introspective alternative ideal of individual salvation or healing), Comaroff and van Binsbergen see reason for a more antagonistic interpretation of the church leaders’ attitudes vis-a-vis the state.
[40] The remainder of the conclusion
reflects my oral presentation at the conference, which was not
yet included in my paper as then circulated.
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