virt 1

Wim van Binsbergen, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation:Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa

1. Globalisation, boundaries, and identity

1.1. Introduction1

(notes for all chapters, identifiable as numbers in the text, are collected in Notes, which give access to the list of References)

Towards the end of the first international conference to be organised by the Dutch national research programme on 'globalisation and the construction of communal identities', Ulf Hannerz took the opportunity of stressing the need for further conceptual development, not just in the case of the Dutch programme but in that of globalisation studies in general. The present paper is an attempt on my part to take up that challenge. While situated against the background of a rapidly growing social-science literature on globalisation,2 my aim is not to review that literature in its impressive scope and depth; rather more modestly, and perhaps non inappropriately in the present stage of our programme, I have let myself be inspired by a series of recent discussions and presentations within the programme and within the wider intellectual framework of Dutch anthropology. I concentrate on virtuality, which I have come to regard as one of the key concepts for a characterisation and understanding of the forms of globalisation in Africa; sections I and II are taken up defining virtuality and globalisation and provisionally indicating their theoretical relationship. The problematic heritage of a locality-obsessed anthropological tradition provides the analytical framework within which virtuality makes an inspiring topic. We then make a transition from the theory to the empirical case studies, by examining the problem of meaning in the African urban environment. I then present four case studies which illustrate particular forms of virtuality as part of the globalisation process in Africa today. True to the Manchester/ Rhodes-Livingstone tradition by which it was largely fed, my field-work career has oscillated between urban and rural African settings, and I realise of course that African towns have always been a context for cosmopolitan meaning which does not stem from the villages in the rural region surrounding the town, but reflects, and is reflected in, the world at large. Yet I have decided to dwell here upon problems of meaning which - under the heading of virtuality - can only be formulated (even if their solution calls for a much broader geographical scope) when we look upon globalisation from the vantage point of the African village and its largely internal processes of signification. Seeking to illuminate virtuality as an aspect of globalisation requires that we set the scene by taking a closer look at the latter concept.

1.2. The globalisation process

1.2.1. The global logic In the final analysis, globalisation is a consequence of the mathematical properties of the shape of the earth's surface. Taken at face value, globalisation is primarily a spatial metaphor (the socio-cultural implications of the mathematical properties of the earth's surface, notably the fact that from any spot on that surface any other point can be reached, while (provided the journey is continued for long enough in the same direction) the ultimate destination will be the point of departure, ultimately in other words the entire surface will be covered. Yet it is important to also investigate the temporal dimension of the globalisation metaphor: the compressing of time and of time costs3 in relation to spatial displacement, as well as the meaning and the effects of such displacement. It is the interplay between the temporal and the spatial dimension which allows us to pinpoint why globalisation has taken on a substantially new shape in the last few decades. The shape of the earth has not noticeably changed over the few million years of man's existence on earth, and therefore human culture, or cultures, could perhaps be said to have always been subject to globalising tendencies.4 But before the invention of the telegraph, the railroad, and the aeroplane the technology of time and space was in most parts of the world so limited that the effective social and cultural life world tended to be severely bound by geographical propinquity. Most people would thus live in a world where localising tendencies would greatly outweigh whatever globalisation took place or came along. People, ideas, and goods did travel, and often across wide distances, as the archaeological and historical record demonstrates. If writing and effective imperial organisation then created a continuous and more or less stable orientation across space and time, the conditions would be set for early or proto-globalisation, characteristic of the communication technology of the mounted courier and the sailing boat. Where no such conditions prevailed, movement inevitably meant dissociating from the social setting of origin, and establishing a new local world elsewhere - a world usually no longer connected, through effective social interaction, with the one left behind, initially strongly reminiscent of the latter but decreasingly so - even in the case of nomadic cultures whose persistence in the face of spatial mobility has depended on their comparatively low investment in spatial attachment as an organising principle. If today we have the feeling that globalisation expresses a real and qualitative change that uniquely characterises the contemporary condition, it is because of the hegemonic nature of capitalist technology, which has brought about unprecedented levels of mastery of space and time. When messages travel at light speed across the globe using electronic media, when therefore physical displacement is hardly needed for effective communication yet such displacement can be effected within one or two days from anywhere on the globe to anywhere else, and when the technology of manufacturing and distribution has developed to such levels that the same material environment using the same objects can be created and fitted out anywhere on the globe at will - then we have reduced the fees that time and space impose on the social process, to virtually zero. Then we can speak of globalisation in the true sense. Globalisation is not about the absence or dissolution of boundaries, but about the dramatically reduced fee imposed by time and space, and thus the opening up of new spaces and new times within new boundaries that were hitherto inconceivable. Globalisation as a condition of the social world today revolves on the interplay between unbounded world-wide flow, and the selective framing of such flow within localising contexts; such framing organises not only flow (of people, ideas and objects) and individual experience, but also the people involved in them, creating more or less enduring social categories and groups whose collective identity as supported by their members' interaction creates an eddy of particularism, of social localisation, within the unbounded global flow.

1.2.2. Forms of self-organisation impose boundaries to the global flow and thus produce identity

This raises the crucial question of how boundaries and unboundedness are at all produced and socially (and psychologically) maintained. Without proper attention to this question, I believe that our concern with globalisation will remain up in the air, and theoretically barren. Political processes, especially those of an imperial nature, have carved out geographical spaces within which a plurality of identities tend to be mapped out; this is the indispensable framework for the studies of ethnic and religious, communal identities; yet, as a social anthropologist interested in human subjects, their experiences and concrete interactions, I am particularly interested in the transactions at the grassroots level, where people situate themselves not so much in contiguous geographical spaces of political administration and military control, but in interlocking social spaces of interaction and identity. An unstructured diffuse social field cannot be named nor can it inspire identity; we need to concentrate on the situations where through conceptualisation and interaction people create a bounded space which can be named and set apart within the generalised and in principle unbounded flow of commodities, ideas and images. The apparently unlimited and uncontrollable supply of intercontinentally mediated images, symbols, ideas and objects which is swept across contemporary Africa by the media, commodity distribution, the educational services, cosmopolitan medicine and world religions, calls for new identities. People seek to define new boundaries so as to create or salvage their identity in the face of this constant flow. By imposing boundaries they may either appropriate for themselves a specific part of the global supply, or protect themselves in order to keep part of the global flow at a safe distance. Eddies of local particularism which come to life on either side of the massive steam of world-wide, universalising homogenisation - I think there is handy, albeit much simplified, image for you of the cultural globalisation process in Africa. Such boundaries are in part constructed by human thought: they are conceptual boundaries, collective ways of naming and classifying contemporary reality: e.g. a classification in terms of 'old-fashioned', 'retarded' versus 'new', modern', 'world class' of such a wide variety of cultural items as: dress styles; variation in speech behaviour; gendered, sexual and conjugal roles; conceptions of law and order; visions of cosmology and causality. However, in order to express such conceptual boundaries in the converging social behaviour of large numbers of people, it is necessary that they are mediated, or rather constructed and ever again re-constructed, in interaction; and for such interaction generating and maintaining boundaries the new formal organisations of Africa constitute some of the most obvious contexts. Many researchers of globalisation and related topics therefore now define their research sites no longer in terms of localised communities but of formal organisations: churches, ethnic associations, sport associations etc.

1.2.3. An example: the religious laundering of globally mediated items

An understanding of the way in which such organisations create identity by imposing boundaries on the initially unlimited flow that globalisation entails, can for instance be gathered from the study of such a widespread phenomenon as the laundering of globally mediated commodities and of money in the context of contemporary religious organisations. Many African Christian churches appear5 as a context for the managing of elements belonging to the inimical domain of commodities, consumption and the market. But we should not overlook that very much the same process is at work outside world religions yet (inevitably, since the problem presupposes the clients' extensive participation in the world economy) in a context of globalisation - among syncretistic or neo-traditional cults, which have their own forms of formal organisation. Here examples of such ritual laundering can be quoted from urban cultic practice among Surinam Creoles in the Netherlands and from an urban variety of sangoma cults widespread in Southern Africa.6 If such organisations can selectively manage the global and construct a security screen of identity around their members, it is crucial for the development of my argument in this paper to realise that they are at least as effective in keeping the local out of their charmed circle of identity, or allowing it in only at severe restrictions. There is a remarkable variation in the way in which local religious forms can be voiced in a context where globally mediated religious forms are clearly dominant. The Ghanaian experience as recorded by Birgit Meyer7 is that in Pentecostal prayer camp meetings one can talk about ancestral deities (under the guise of the devil) and show that one is possessed by them. Here specific individual spirits are acknowledged and confronted, so that local identities (referring to the home village, the in group, ancestors) remain part of the identity which is recognised to be ushered into the new Pentecostal environment. In Independent Churches in Francistown, Botswana, a very different situation obtains.8

Admittedly, there is a large number of different churches at work on the urban scene today, and although the liturgical and therapeutic style of most of them is remarkably similar, differences should not be ignored. My participant observation inevitably had to be limited to just a handful of such churches. Here at any rate ancestral spirits could only be mediated to the globally informed church environment in the most muted form possible: individual spirit were never named, but the church-goer (or in view of the fact that therapy is a prime motivation for church-going, 'patient' would be an appropriate designation) would collapse, moan and scream inarticulately, no attempt would be undertaken to name the troubling spirit and identify it in the patient's genealogy - its suppression and dispelling was the church leadership's recognised task. An exploration of the wider social framework shows that the particular mix of global and local elements to be 'allowed in' is far from entirely decided at the level of these formal organisations alone. in Francistown, the church routine is only one example out of very many,9 which go to show that, as a result of the converging effects of state monitoring and the population's self-censorship and informal social control, the public production of any local cultural tradition is anathema within the urban environment of Francistown today - unless under conditions of state orchestration, such as urban customary courts or Independence celebrations. For most purposes, traditional culture has gone underground in this town. This also makes it understandable why rival therapeutic institutions available on the local urban scene: herbalists (dingaka ya setswana) and spirit mediums (basangoma) offering more secluded sessions for private conversation and therapeutic action, continue to attract a larger number of clients than the populations massive involvement in healing churches would suggest. Ethnicity does play a role here, since Francistown is in the heart of Kalanga country, and the Kalanga constitute the most vocal and privileged ethnic and linguistic monitory to challenge Tswana hegemony in Botswana. Yet this cannot be the entire explanation: Kalanga is not the lingua franca in Francistown (that is Tswana, which is also the mother tongue not only of the distant Tswana majority to the west and the South but also of some communities near Francistown), and as from the 1960s the town has attracted such large numbers of Tswana urban migrants that Tswana are now in the majority - but also Tswana expression of traditional culture are barred from the public urban scene. More important, churches are about the least ethically divided domain in Francistown society: many churches here are emphatically bilingual or trilingual in their ritual practice, and whereas it is sometimes possible to detect ethnic overtones in the conflicts which often lead churches to split, in general adherents live up to their stated conviction that ethnic bickering is not becoming in a context meant to express common humanity before the face of God.10

Creating identity - 'a place to feel at home', to borrow Welbourn & Ogot's apt expression first applied to independent churches in Western Kenya,11 - means that the church members engage in a social process that allows them, by the management of boundaries and the positioning of people, ideas and objects within and outside these boundaries, to create a new community which is principle is independent from whatever pre-existing community attachments they may have had on the basis of their kinship affiliations, rural homes, ethnic or political affiliations. How can we understand such a home outside home? The new home made afresh on the basis of chosen attachments in a voluntary association, often in a new social and geographical environment, partly disqualifies the old home, yet reminds of it and from this reminder derives part of its meaning and emotional satisfaction. The concept of virtuality helps us to understand these important operations in the domain of identity and self-organisation.