|
©
1984-2002 Wim M.J. van Binsbergen
INTRODUCTION[1]
Among Marxist-inspired anthropologists,
Pierre Philippe Rey is primarily known as the theoretician of the
articulation of modes of production. His work offers the most
penetrating analyses to date of the conditions and mechanisms by
means of which an encroaching capitalist mode of production
manages, or fails, to impose itself upon the non-capitalist
societies of the Third World, foremost Africa. However,
underlying these specific theoretical contributions is a more
general conception, of the nature and project of anthropology and
of the political role of the anthropological researcher in the
class struggle of Third-World peasants and proletarians. It is
this overall orientation that I shall examine in the present
paper. A discussion of Rey’s view of anthropology as the theory
of class struggle in the periphery of the contemporary capitalist
world system, will lead us to consider the ideological nature of
anthropology, the specific constraints and potentialities of
modern anthropological fieldwork, the ways in which relations of
intellectual production in anthropology itself influence,
reflexively, our understanding of such relations of production as
we study in our capacity of anthropologists, and finally Rey’s
own contributions to the empirical study of ideology. Thus the
strength as well as the limitations of Rey’s proposals will be
brought out, as an incentive to further develop the inspiration
his work is offering us.
ANTHROPOLOGY AS IDEOLOGICAL PRODUCTION
Pierre Philippe Rey’s work (1971, 1973,
1976, 1978, and numerous articles) makes immensely inspiring
reading. Few anthropologists are similarly capable of presenting
an analysis of African local societies in such terms as to make
them directly relevant to the pressing problems of sociological
theory and praxis in our own society. The way Rey depicts the
African people he studies, they unmistakably inhabit the same
world as the author and his readers, albeit at different parts of
the globe and under significantly different conditions; and they
face basically the same problem as we do: how to cope with a
world whose productive, political and ideological processes are
increasingly shaped by the capitalist mode of production.
Rey’s work is
unprecedented in that it provides original solutions for a number
of dilemmas pervading debates among Africanists and left-wing
intellectuals in general during the last decade and a half.
Whilst demonstrating the impact of colonialism and capitalism, he
does not turn a blind eye to such forms of exploitation as
defined ante-capitalist[2] modes of production in
Africa, and in fact his main theoretical contribution concerns
the linking-up between these various forms of exploitation, both
local and imported. While offering adequate (if somewhat too
generalised) monographic descriptions of African societies (in
Congo-Brazzaville and Northern Togo), he insists on an explicitly
theoretical treatment on every page of his published work —
rather than simply polishing up his ethnography with eclectic
theoretical footnotes as is so often done in anthropology.
Further, it is admirable how little entrenched Rey is as an
Africanist. Not only do his actors produce, interact and think as
people rather than as Africans; his African societies turn out to
be located in an analytical universe that encompasses, among many
other things, intercontinental migrant labour in modern France,
the history of capitalism in the North Atlantic region,
Nambikwara kinship structures from South America, oriental
despotism, and the history of historical materialist thought from
pre-Marxism right through to Althusser. Most importantly, against
the political paralysis and guilt feelings of so many left-wing
anthropologists (who are aware of poverty and oppression among
their Third-World informants but cannot think of anything more
meaningful to offer the latter than their obscure academic
writings), Rey sees his work as the production of an
anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois ideology, developing a theory of
the class struggle of African peasants and proletarians, and thus
providing the insights by which their struggle may be
strengthened, may learn from earlier struggles, and may
ultimately be successful. Implied in all his writings is the hope
that his analytical work will enlighten those fighting against
peasant oppression, against exploitation and discrimination of
migrant workers, and against the arrogance of the exploitative
state bureaucracy that has emerged in African societies. His
brand of Marxist anthropology seeks to render these struggles
better informed, better focused and more effective. Thus Rey
(along with some of his colleagues) joined the cause of African
migrants in France (cf. Rey 1976, especially the political
presentation, pp. 937). A more inspiring solution for the dilemma
of intellectual embourgeoisement and the sense of inefficacy so
widespread among left-wing intellectuals could hardly be
proposed.
Rey’s stance on
anthropology as ideology is clearly located within the
intellectual climate of France not too long after May 1968, and
as far as Africa is concerned still echoes — in his belief in a
viable and ultimately successful class struggle by African
peasants and proletarians — something of the hope that
characterised North Atlantic intellectual thinking about that
continent in the 1960s and early 1970s. The changes in
intellectual climate ever since combine with Rey’s own
intellectual and career development. However, he still considers
the class struggle of African peasants and proletarians as both
the source and the aim of Africanist research; and he still tries
to emulate this view in his current societal practice as an
intellectual worker.
Rey has been
extremely fortunate in that his first fieldwork, in the Mossendjo
area, Congo-Brazzaville, could be conducted in close association
with practical Marxist revolutionaries in the area. He tells me
he did not enter the field as a Marxist theoretician[3] but
he certainly emerged from it as one. When, in the postface of Les
Alliances de classes (1973), he claims that Marxist theory
literally has to grow from a theorist’s personal association
with the class struggle, this view certainly applies to his own
Congo field research — if not to his later experience in the
authoritarian state of Togo.
Along with what he
calls bourgeois ideology, and the ‘reactionary’ ideologies of
African marabouts, griots, diviner-priests, not to mention
Christianity (1976: 12f), Rey admits that historical materialism,
too, is an ideology, but one with unique characteristics: it
alone has the power to render the struggle of the oppressed
classes victorious, laying bare the true conditions of their
oppression (Rey 1973: 174f, espec. 176). If anthropology is to
become a theory of class struggle, this theory not only has to be
substantiated by our usual type of intellectual scrutiny and
criticism, but also has be shown to be effective when put into
actual revolutionary practice.
In these respects
ideology is a fundamental issue in Rey’s work (1971: 11f). Rey
is deliberately, passionately, ideological in his anthropological
theorising. Yet his approach remains very sophisticated. He is
well aware that, even if the ultimate test of such theorising may
lie in its utility for the class struggle (Rey 1976: 10), its
intellectual critique lies in a Marxist sociology of knowledge,
which shows us the theorising intellectual as working within the
objective historical conditions of his time and class. Rey goes
to considerable length to show that historical materialism does
not represent some timeless, ultimate truth, but could only
emerge under the specific conditions of high capitalism (Rey
1973: 194), in general, and of Engels’ and Marx’s personal
association with the oppressed classes, in particular (Rey
1973:172f).
Rey’s work is of
very great importance both for its theoretical depth, and as an
attempt to solve the problem of the relation between theory and
praxis in the social sciences. It is therefore with great
respect, and while affirming my intellectual and political
affinity vis-a-vis his work, that I shall now raise a number of
questions relating to his approach to ideology.
FIELDWORK
There is an obvious, intended parallel
between historical materialist theorists associating with the
oppressed, and anthropological field-workers associating with the
peasants and proletarians (known to be oppressed) in Africa. One
would assume that anthropological field-workers, participating in
the conditions that prevail in the periphery of the capitalist
world system, are in an ideal position to ‘learn from the
masses’, in other words to pick up, in the field, essential
elements towards a theory of peripheral class oppression and
class struggle.[4] However, is it possible
to specify the conditions under which such association in
fieldwork does, or does not, yield insights that could be termed
‘correct’ in terms of such a theory?
Few field-workers
happen to be as fortunate as Rey was in the Mossendjo area. E.g.,
in the various settings where I conducted extensive fieldwork
over the past fifteen years (rural Tunisia, urban Zambia, rural
Zambia, rural Guinea-Bissau), revolutionaries were either absent,
or were socially so isolated that close association with them
would have jeopardised my more general productive contact with
the community. The local people’s consciousness of their
oppression (both under ante-capitalist relations and under
conditions of peripheral capitalism, i.e. cash-crop production
and migrant labour) were diffuse, mystified, and took the form of
witchcraft accusations, divination rites, prophetic movements,
ethnic rivalry, male/female conflicts, inter-generational
conflicts, etc. A bourgeois anthropologist might be loath to
analyse any of these forms as expressions of class conflict; a
Marxist-inspired field-worker would be inclined to analyse all of
them in such terms, but in doing so might be accused of jumping
to conclusions, since many of these expressions are, on the
surface, so totally encapsulated in the local status quo that
only by analytical sleight-of-hand they could be said to protest
against, negate and counteract, rather than to reinforce, a
structure of domination (cf. van Binsbergen 1981a: 57f). Could we
develop a method that would allow us to interpret these
expressions correctly, in ways that are both reliable (i.e. other
researchers would arrive at the same conclusions), and valid
(i.e. we really find what we claim to find)?
If anthropological
theorising has to be grounded in our revolutionary association
with the oppressed members of the societies we study, does that
mean that our theory is less valid if such association does not
succeed? How does Rey appreciate, in this connection, the
difference between his Mossendjo and Togo fieldwork? The obvious
answer (hinted by Rey in the discussion that followed the
presentation of an earlier version of this paper) is that the
international nature of capital and of the capitalist mode of
production allows us to join the peripheral class struggle also
outside the immediate geographical area of our research, e.g.
right in the metropolitan centres where we may not have done
fieldwork but where migrants hailing from areas similar to our
research area are employed. Anything else would have been
impossible in the Togo case, as well as in most other fieldwork
settings.
Perhaps it is true to
say that only rarely has the anthropologist a totally unlimited,
totally unbiased access to peasants and proletarians; and seldom
can he or she afford to report on them as freely as would be
required for an adequate, revolutionary theory of their class
struggle. The constraints involved exist both in the field and at
home. As Wyatt MacGaffey writes (1981:253), ‘ethnographic
reporting involves a kind of collusion between dominant
groups’. The ethnographer himself or herself is not necessarily
a member of any such group, but it would not seem unrealistic to
see much of ethnographic reporting as a compromise, informed by
the secret and unconscious class alliance between North Atlantic
senior academicians (who selectively allocate research funds for
anthropologists in the field), and chiefs and politicians in the
Third World, who selectively admit the researchers into their
sphere of influence, and try to control the flow of information
from the local people to the researcher. Anthropologists’ field
activities and field reports also undergo censure and
self-censure to this effect. Especially at the beginning of his
or her career (when personal revolutionary inclinations may be at
the highest) can the anthropologist seldom afford to associate
closely with local revolutionaries, or worse still from a career
point of view, present a field report whose revolutionary
overtones run counter to the (normally bourgeois) political
outlook of academic supervisors and funding agencies. I shall
come back to this when discussing, below, the production of
anthropology.
If the ultimate test
of Marxist anthropology is its utility for the peripheral class
struggle, one wonders whether Rey has had his insights in the
Mossendjo area actually be brought to the test. Did the
revolutionaries of Congo-Brazzaville put Colonialisme,
neocolonialisme et transition au capitalisme within reach at
their commando posts, as Rey claims they did Marx’s work (Rey
1971:7); and if so, what happened?[5] More
in general, should all our fieldwork be ‘action research’, in
order to be acceptable as intellectual practice? (Even if this
means that most regimes in present-day Africa would no longer
welcome our research, and would not allow us to enter their
territories a second time!)
Will our theories
remain untested if they deal with situations in which the link
with revolutionary struggle is less easily made? E.g. it is very
unlikely that the Nkoya, inhabitants of Kaoma district in Western
Zambia, will ever put to some revolutionary practice my rather
devastating materialist analysis of their attempts at ethnic
mobilisation (van Binsbergen 1981b, and in press); but if they do
not, what practical ‘real-life’ possibilities remain of
testing my insights (in addition to textual, theoretical
criticism)? And, more important for the Nkoya (and they are not
atypical of African peasants in general): how could their class
struggle be furthered by our analyses and theories, if their
class consciousness is still at an inchoate and mystified level?
What the Nkoya wanted out of my project was not an understanding
and remedy of their economic and political predicament, but
mainly, texts that would show the world the glory of their
chieftainship, and their rightful existence as a distinct people
with it own history. In other words, they gave their full
co-operation only towards the production of yet another
mystification of their situation, and particularly one that was
clad in the trappings of a tributary mode of production now
eroded and encapsulated.
Does it amount to a
betrayal of one’s revolutionary inspiration if the researcher,
in such a situation, goes ahead and actually, as part of his or
her research output, produces such texts as requested by the
hosts (e.g. Sangambo 1979; Shimunika in press; and numerous other
similar locally-generated texts edited by field researchers). The
situation becomes even more complicated once one realises the
class component in the hosts’ expectations. For a ‘naive’
account of an ethnic group’s self-perceived past or identity is
likely to render academic legitimacy to ideological claims
perpetrating ante-capitalist modes of production encapsulated by
the capitalist mode; but these ante-capitalist modes, too, are
structures of domination, furthering the interest of a local
surviving aristocracy, gerontocracy, priestly class etc. at the
expense of the local peasantry. In principle, one could hope that
my Marxist attempt at a demystifying ideological critique of
Nkoya ethnicity might persuade young Nkoya to adopt a more
straightforward and militant class consciousness; but there are,
as yet, no indications to this effect.
Here again, such
revolutionary lessons as the Nkoya situation may have to offer
could only be taken to some other part of the world system and
applied there, but the tests offered by such practical
revolutionary application, if any, would then be difficult to
feed back into our specific analysis of the Nkoya situation.
In short, as
anthropologists involved in participatory field research we may
be in a position to ‘learn from the masses’, but this
learning process remains extremely problematic; and the theory of
the peripheral class struggle we may end up with, would be hard
to test in the specific field situation it derives from. At best
we could hope to generalise and internationalise it.[6]
THE PRODUCTION OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Having examined how anthropological
fieldwork may or may not contribute to the development of a
theory of peripheral class struggle, we shall now follow the
anthropologist on his or her return journey home. For it is
there, at universities, research institutes and private writing
desks, that Marxist anthropology is made — more than in the
field. In addition to ‘learning from the masses’ in the
African periphery, what are the specific requirements for
anthropology to become rightly and effectively a theory of
peripheral class struggle?
It does not seem to
be enough if one were merely to locate one’s theorising in the
mainstream of the historical materialist Ideeengeschichte,
as Rey himself does so often in his works. For whatever one’s
explicit ideological and intellectual orientation, as an
intellectual producer one remains subjected to the largely
invisible objective forces of a sociology of knowledge which
obtains at a given place and time. The emergence of Marxism
itself, as Rey shows, was no historical accident but a more or
less systematic result of the ideological and economic
orientation of European society under high capitalism. It could
not have developed earlier. Similarly, the emergence of e.g.
nuclear physics, sociology, anthropology, were systematic
intellectual responses to the development taking place within the
social formation — much in the same way as royal cults, High
God cults and healing movements emerged in southern Central
Africa at a rhythm dictated by the emergence and decline of
successive modes of production (van Binsbergen 1981a). As regards
the emergence of anthropology: its link with the intercontinental
expansion of the capitalist mode of production, as mediated by
the colonial state, is only too obvious, and I shall come back to
this point below.
Therefore, if we are
to produce, as anthropologists, a theory of the peripheral class
struggle, we should not only examine the relations of production
to which the peasants and proletarians in the periphery are
subjected — we should also, self-reflexively, analyse the
relations of production to which we ourselves, as intellectual
producers, are subjected. Such a self-reflexive exercise should
be conducted at two levels at least.
On a general level,
we ought to realise that all contemporary anthropology, even the
Marxist or revolutionary versions, is being produced by
intellectual producers whose class position in the world system
is based on a dependence (perhaps innocent, but certainly
unavoidable) from capital. This dependence is mediated by the
modern state or by large private funding agencies in collusion
with the state. Individuals cannot generate, nor sustain, the
immense resources (libraries, computers, the publication of
learned journals, salaries, research equipment) necessary for
academic production today. The vast majority of productive
academics today are salaried employees, or aspiring to become
just that. Their intellectual production is commoditised, sold in
an academic market of salaries, honours, opportunities for
publication, and institutional power. Their class position would
be similar to that of industrial proletarians, were it not for
the theoretical difficulties involved in assessing the surplus
value produced and — presumably — exploited in academic work.
At any rate, today’s intellectual production in the West is
realised in a context which is wholly capitalist, and the
patterns of remuneration, expenditure, consumption and career
planning of intellectual producers corroborate this. Now it would
be sociologically impossible for this capitalist context of our
intellectual production not to determine the nature and contents
of our intellectual products. This determination may not be
total. That it allows for a certain leeway is clear from the fact
that the great revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries often came from bourgeois backgrounds. One could very
well imagine a situation where the very contradictions inherent
in today’s late capitalism would allow for (or rather, would be
reflected in) some limited degree of anti-capitalist intellectual
production within an overall capitalist context. But these are
likely to be exceptions, the more so since radical intellectuals
themselves have been largely unaware of the bourgeois conditions
within which their revolutionary intellectual production is set.
In whatever dialectical or transformed way, our intellectual
products (including our theories of class struggle) cannot fail
to partly reflect the capitalist mode of production within which
they are generated. Nor does this capitalist encapsulation of
intellectual production in the North Atlantic region seem to be a
constant: there are massive indications (in the field of state
control, the growth of central planning and formal procedures for
the organization, evaluation and funding of scholarly production,
the growth of national and international scholarly and
governmental bodies to control these activities, the introduction
of high technology equipment etc.) to show that such
encapsulation has dramatically increased in the 1970s and 1980s,
at the expense of academic freedom. More than ever a
revolutionary intellectual practice is to be realised in the
hidden folds of capitalist domination over academic production.
Secondly, within the
general field of contemporary intellectual production there is
the more specific level of the production of anthropology itself.
Here we should take into account such relations of production,
and forms of exploitation, as are typical of the craft of
anthropology. What are the relations between the anthropological
producer, and, e.g., his or her unpaid informants; paid research
assistants; domestic assistants in the field; wife or husband who
takes care of the daily reproduction of anthropological labour
power; what is the relation with the home institute and with
research directors, advisory boards etc.; we might look at
colleagues and students whose intellectual products are borrowed,
sometimes even stolen; typists and computer personnel whose
essential work may be expropriated in a field report published
exclusively under the researcher’s name, etc. An analysis of
anthropological production along these lines has rarely been
made.
At this juncture, let
us return to our original point of departure, Rey’s view of
anthropology as the production of a theory of the peripheral
class struggle. It now appears that, in addition to ‘learning
from the masses’ about the specific forms of domination and
exploitation to which they are subjected, we have two other
fields of domination determining our theorising: the general
capitalist context of all our intellectual production, and the
specific relations of production prevailing in, or rather
constituting, modern anthropology. Given the virtual absence of
sophisticated theory on these crucial points, we may resort to
caricatures to bring out what is meant here. Within the general
capitalist context of my intellectual production as a more or
less senior academician, I can derive a considerable money income
from contributing to the theory of the peripheral class struggle;
this income derives from state resources which partly are
realised by exploitative relations between the rich and the poor
countries — the preconditions for the predicament of the very
same poor peasant and proletarians in the periphery. In other
words, however well-intended my intellectual production may be,
it is contaminated from a methodological point of view. Another
caricature: as an anthropologist I realise my intellectual
production partly through a form of brokerage, where I buy my
information very cheaply from paid assistants somewhere in the
African periphery,[7] but after intellectually
processing it I sell basically the same information at the
metropole at a very attractive prize: my academic salary.
These are, I repeat,
caricatures, and I would still disagree with an argument like
Bleek’s (cf. Bleek 1979; van Binsbergen 1979) who inclines to
take them as true images of anthropological relations of
production. It is not the moral or economic argument I am
interested in here. I am glad that Professor Rey’s class
position in the world system is very much like my own. The point
I am trying to make has solely to do with the logic of
intersecting relations of production. The point is this: if the
relations of production that determine our intellectual products
as anthropologists (both at a general level, as members of a
capitalist society, and at a specific level, as members of a
profession) remain unanalysed, subconscious, hidden as part of
some false consciousness, then we do not stand the slightest
chance of arriving at an adequate and effective theory of the
peripheral class struggle, i.e. a theory illuminating the very
different relations of production to which other people at the
other end of the globe may be subjected — but under overall
conditions of a capitalist world system from which we as
intellectual producers benefit more than we are prepared to
admit. Our would-be liberating theory would continue to carry too
much of our own class position, and therefore would remain
mystifying, naive, ineffective, and (from a Third-World
perspective) perhaps even arrogant.
These philosophical
problems are further exacerbated by the fact that anthropology,
as Rey rightly claims, is a form of ideological production.
Marxist anthropology may have its roots in mainstream historical
materialism, but at the same time it springs, with all
anthropology, from North Atlantic imperialism. It is now fairly
accepted to look at early anthropology as an ideological
expression, among North Atlantic participants, of an imperialism
seeking to create conditions (including ideological and
intellectual ones) for the world-wide penetration of the
capitalist mode of production (Leclerc 1972; Asad 1973; Copans
1974, 1975). In a way, the early anthropologist was the
intellectual agent of the articulation of ante-capitalist modes
of production, and capitalism. This imperialist heritage is
likely to have some continued, if hidden, impact on whatever
topic modern anthropology undertakes in that part of the world
where conditions of peripheral capitalism prevail. Considering
how long it took anthropology to take up the study of
incorporation processes, capitalist penetration etc. (a very
small trickle up to the 1960s, such studies only became a major
topic in the 1970s), one begins to suspect that anthropology is
genetically conditioned to turn a blind eye to the very processes
of articulation of modes of production to which it owes its
existence. Indulging in a Freudian analogy, one might say that
there is here a Primal Scene which anthropology could not, until
quite recently, afford to face, for the sake of its own sanity.
Since anthropology is primarily a matter of intellectual, i.e.
ideological, production, this problematic might have a less
devastating effect on anthropological studies of economic and
political effects of articulation — studies that do no
concentrate on the ideology of the people studied. But when
anthropologists turn to the ideological dimensions of the
articulation process, and for instance begin to study religious
or ethnic responses under conditions of capitalist encroachment,
then the ideological complexity of this research undertaking is
raised to the power 2 — although we would need additional
conceptual refinement in order to distinguish between
spontaneous, ‘folk’ ideologies on the one hand, and
engineered, ‘reflexive’, ideologies as produced by social
scientists.
Is it sufficient to
be a Marxist scholar, and to take the struggle of the oppressed
to heart, in order to escape from these contingencies? Or does
one succumb to them, just as the built-in exploitative aspects of
the relations of anthropological production can hardly be
escaped, for risk of losing one’s intellectual and material
resources as an anthropologist?[8] Rey
is very much aware of the process by which bourgeois science has
appropriated historical materialism, and adulterated it (Rey
1973: 178ff). To what extent does the Marxist anthropologist
escape such embourgeoisement, not only in the form of radical
theorising fed back into the class struggle, but also in the form
of resistance against such bourgeois incentives as a salary, job
security, academic esteem, academic power etc.? An important
contradiction in this respect seems to be that access to
essential resources for the Marxist anthropologist (funds for
fieldwork, libraries, computers etc.) is partly determined by
positive integration within the academic world, i.e.
embourgeoisement.
While, for the time
being, we cannot do anything about the general capitalist context
of our intellectual production (or may not consider it opportune
to do so, for personal reasons of security and comfort), we do
have the opportunity and the duty to consider the relations of
production prevailing at the specific level of our
anthropological profession. Our work should be subjected to a
critique based on an analysis of the forms of exploitation and
domination implied in the process of anthropological production
itself. A first requirement in this respect would be full
information on the process and organization of fieldwork and
subsequent writing-up; this information is largely lacking in
Rey’s work, as in that of other present-day French Marxist
anthropologists (cf. van Binsbergen & Geschiere, in press).
Finally, it is useful
to realise what Rey’s redefinition of anthropology means for
the survival of anthropology as a distinct disciple. For Rey,
anthropology has to become the theory of class struggle under
conditions of peripheral capitalism. Are all other possible
topics in modern anthropology related to this (e.g. as necessary
conceptual or methodological steppingstones, which need not
explicitly follow a Marxist idiom — after all, even Meillassoux
and Rey are building upon bourgeois kinship theory), and if some
are not, should those then be abandoned? Should we become
historical materialists tout court, or remain Marxist
anthropologists — and if the latter, what would be our specific
contribution and our specific institutional basis within the
organization of academic life?[9]
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF IDEOLOGY
It has to be admitted that ideology is more
of a central and explicit concern in Rey’s self-perception as
an intellectual producer, than in his analysis of African
societies. The student of African ideological systems and
processes will find, in Rey’s work, little that is of immediate
relevance to his or her specific theoretical interests, in so far
as Rey does not seem to have an elaborate theory of the ideology
of the peoples he studies. This does not exclude that underlying
e.g. his analysis of kinship in some Congolese societies one can
detect a summary theory of kinship as an ideology, which is both
basically sound, and capable of confronting bourgeois kinship
theory, from Levi-Strauss to Leach (Rey 1971: 207f). However,
ideology is relegated to the third place of importance in the
structural blueprint of lineage societies, after circulation and
after politics (Rey 1971: 200). The importance of these other two
principles is well argued, but the unimportance of ideology is
not, and the relevant passage appears to be too sketchy. Any
non-Marxist specialist in African symbolic systems would likewise
be critical of Rey’s all too brief account of Congolese sorcery
notions as a perfect, if inverted, mirror image of real relations
between ego, father and mother’s brother (Rey 1971: 202f). What
seems to be lacking is an explicit method in the light of which
the reader can be persuaded that the ethnographic evidence is
both sufficiently rich, and properly analysed. Rey’s analysis
in terms of compensation and reflection lacks theoretical
foundation, and within the whole of contemporary African
religious studies would be considered somewhat superficial. Many
more levels of discourse are likely to be involved; these levels
are likely to be situationally intertwined and dialectically
opposed to each other; sorcery notions are not likely to be
limited to cases involving father and mother’s brother; perfect
fit is extremely unlikely in the analysis of African symbolic
configurations; the symbolic order is likely to be more
autonomous vis-a-vis other levels in society than is suggested by
Rey’s claim of perfect fit; etc. (cf. van Binsbergen 1981a:
56-60, 77-88; Werbner 1977: introduction).
However, this is a
matter of lack of specialised attention on Rey’s part, rather
than of theoretical lack of potential. That his approach, based
as it is in the mainstream of historical materialism, has all the
potential of arriving at a fascinating understanding of
ideological processes, is clear for instance from his pages on
the European Bauernkrieg (1973: 196-203). I have elsewhere
shown at great length that it is possible to develop an approach
to African ideological transformations on the basis of Rey’s
central idea, that of the articulation of modes of production
(van Binsbergen 1981a). Here the importance of religious
ideological forms should be stressed, not only those of the world
religions of Islam and Christianity, but also, and perhaps
primarily, such transformations of indigenous religious forms as
have emerged under conditions of capitalist encroachment and
which, as idioms of healing and prophetism, constitute dominant
forms of popular religion throughout Africa today.
An important question with regard to these ideological forms is: to what extent do they serve as expressions of divisiveness or mobilisation in a context where the state aims at increasing control of the reproduction of capitalist dominance? An even more crucial one would seem to be: to what extent can these mystifying ideologies be supplanted by historical materialism in the minds of African people, thus vindicating Rey’s central effort? While we can forgive Rey for not analysing adequately the ideological dimensions of ante-capitalist modes of production in Africa, it becomes rather more difficult to understand why he does not describe in detail, let alone analyse theoretically, the ideological transformations in Africa during and after the colonial period. For it is here that one would have expected some form of revolutionary class consciousness to emerge among African people, and as an anthropologist trying to enhance and enlighten, with his theoretical work, such forms of local consciousness, Rey ought to have been deeply interested in these ideological developments. The point is, however, that also his approach towards contemporary African ideological forms is unsophisticated.
CONCLUSION
The crucial question remains: will the
adoption of historical materialism as a dominant ideology in
Africa really mean the end (Rey 1973: 176) of the exploitation to
which the African peasants and urban poor are subjected?
The answer would
appear to be negative; one need only think of the Ethiopian
experience under Mengistu after the overthrow of imperial rule.
On the surface such a negative answer would render the whole of
Rey’s approach meaningless. A different form of liberating
ideology seems to be needed, and we should have far greater
insight in the conditions under which such an ideology is being
produced, transmitted, implemented, and adulterated or vindicated
in the hands of the peasants, proletarians, leaders and
politicians. In a more optimistic vein one would, however, take
this as an invitation to continue our intellectual work at the
point where Rey has left it: to develop, not only a
scientifically-based ideology for the peripheral class struggle,
but also, and primarily, a reflexive Marxist anthropology of
ideology. In the process, our anthropology might become a much
more powerful tool, capable of self-analysis, ready perhaps to
throw off the incentives of embourgeoisement within the
capitalist overall society — and thus the true partisan of the
distant people to whom we have pledged both our minds, and our
hearts.
REFERENCES
Asad,
T. (ed.)
1973
Anthropology and the colonial encounter, London: Ithaca
Press.
Bleek,
W.,
1979
‘Inequality and envy in fieldwork’, Human Organization,
38, 2: 200-205.
Buijtenhuijs,
R.
1975
‘L’Anthropologie revolutionnaire, comment faire?‘, in:
Copans 1975: 457-62.
1980
‘Revolutionaire informants en "revolutionaire"
anthropologie’, Sociologische Gids 28, 5.
forthcoming
‘Op zoek naar de Afrikaanse revolutie’, in: M.R. Doornbos
& W.M.J. van Binsbergen (eds) Afrika in spiegelbeeld,
Haarlem: In de Knipscheer (published 1988)..
Copans,
J.
1974
Critiques et politiques de l’anthropologie, Paris:
Maspero.
1975
(ed.) Anthropologie et imperialisme, Paris:
Maspero.Leclerc, G.
1972
Anthropologie et colonialisme, Paris: Fayard.
MacGaffey,
W.
1981
‘African ideology and belief: A survey’, African Studies
Review, 24, 23: 227-74.
Nash,
J.
1975
‘Nationalism and fieldwork’ in: Siegel et al. 1975: 225-45.
O’Laughlin,
B.
1975
‘Marxist approaches in anthropology’, in: Siegel et al. 1975:
34170.
Rey,
P.P.
1971
Colonialisme, neocolonialisme et transition au capitalisme,
Paris: Maspero.
1973
Les alliances de classes, Paris: Maspero.
1976
(ed.) Capitalisme negrier, Paris: Maspero.
1978
‘Les concepts de l’anthropologie economique marxiste:
Critique et mise a l’epreuve’, these d’Etat, Universite de
Paris V.
Sangambo,
M.K.
1979
The history of the Luvale people and their chieftainship, edited
by A. Hansen and R.J. Papstein, Los Angeles: Africa Institute for
Applied Research.
Siegel,
B.J., A.R. Beals & S. A. Tyler (eds)
1975
Annual Review of Anthropology, 4, Palo Alto: Annual
Reviews Inc.
Shimunika,
J.M.
in
press Likota
lya Bankoya/The History of the Nkoya, translated by M.M.
Malapa & W.M.J. van Binsbergen, Leiden: African Studies
Centre, published 1988
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J.
1979
‘Anthropological fieldwork: "There and back again"‘
Human Organization, 38, 2: 205-209.
1981a
Religious change in Zambia, London/Boston: Kegan Paul
International.
1981b
‘The unit of study and the interpretation of ethnicity’, Journal
of Southern African Studies, 8: 54-84
in
press = 1985 ‘From tribe to ethnicity in western Zambia: The
unit of study as an ideological problem’, in: W.M.J. van
Binsbergen & P. Geschiere, eds., Old modes of production
and capitalist encroachment: Anthropological explorations in
Africa, London: Kegan Paul International, 1985, pp. 181-234.
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J. & P.L. Geschiere
in press (a) = 1985 Old modes of production and capitalist encroachment, London/ Boston: Kegan Paul International, 1985.
in press (b) = 1985 ‘Marxist theory and anthropological practice: The application of French Marxist anthropology in fieldwork’, in: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & P. Geschiere, eds, Old modes of production and capitalist encroachment: Anthropological explorations in Africa, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International, pp. 235-89
Werbner,
R.P. (ed.)
1977
Regional cults, New York: Academic Press.
[1]
Published as chapter vii in: W.M.J. van Binsbergen & G.S.C.M.
Hesseling (eds.), Aspecten van staat en maatschappij in
Afrika: Recent Dutch and Belgian research on the African state,
Leiden: African Studies Centre, pp. 163-80. An earlier version of
this paper was presented at a seminar of the Dutch Association of
African Studies, Leiden, 4th November 1983. I am indebted to M.
Doornbos, P.L. Geschiere and P.P. Rey for their stimulating
remarks, and to Ria van Hal, Adrienne van Wijngaarden and Mieke
Zwart for typing successive drafts of this paper.
[2]
Antecapitalist simply means preceding capitalist forms in time,
without claiming the evolutionist implications inherent in the
term precapitalist. Antecapitalist should not, of course, be
confused with anticapitalist, the latter denoting an ideology
which opposes the forms of domination inherent in the capitalist
mode of production.
[3]
By the late 1960s, his theoretical inclinations were rather
towards Sartre, and the critique of Levi-Straussian
structuralism. Rey’s political practice however has had a
strong Marxist inspiration ever since the Algerian liberation
war.
[4]
The term ‘peripheral class struggle’ merely locates such
class struggle in the periphery of a worldwide capitalist system:
in such relations of production as display both capitalist and
antecapitalist characte ristics. Geographically, such a periphery
would encompass much of today’s Third World, but also
metropolitan contexts where ThirdWorld migrants come to work
(e.g. industrial centres in Western Europe). Least of all does
the term intend to imply that such a ‘peripheral’ class
struggle is only ‘marginal’, ‘unimportant’.
[5]
Rey tells me that they were, in fact, eager readers of his magnum
opus (Rey 1971); but an account of the impact of this theoretical
feedback remains to be written.
[6] Some
of the research dilemmas discussed here come out clearly, and
have been discussed in a subtle way, in the work of my colleague
Robert Buijtenhuijs; cf. Buijtenhuijs 1975, 1980, forthcoming,
and his contribution to the present book (ch. XI).
[7]
Most information in the field, of course, derives not from paid
assis tants but from unpaid informants on the basis of the
anthropologist adopting or mimicking forms of exchange peculiar
to domestic, ante capitalist modes of production, such as
putative kinship, friendship, joking relations, neighbourly
relations etc. Here the broker’s role of the anthropologist in
the field is even more pronounced. But let us not forget that we
are sketching a caricature.
[8]
It is important to appreciate the fact that Rey’s point of view
cuts across, rather than converges with, the now familiar debate
on anthro pology and nationalism, as usefully summarized in Nash
1975. Rey’s proposals are based not on a political analysis in
terms of ThirdWorld nationalism, but on a class analysis in terms
of exploitation.
[9]
This section of my paper takes up and develops points cursorily
indicated in O’Laughlin (1975: 368-69).
page last modified: 20-04-13 12:24:42 | ||||