Wim van Binsbergen, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa
9. Conclusion
I hope that after my theoretical explorations,
the case study I presented has set some descriptive basis for a
further theoretical elaboration of the concept of virtuality in a
context of globalisation in Africa today. The kind of problems I
have tried to pinpoint continue to stand out in my mind as both
relevant and tantalising, and I realise that my own commitment to
the study of globalisation is largely fuelled by my hope that
somewhere in that sort of perspective these analytical problems
which have haunted me for a long time (cf. 1981: ch. 6) may come
closer to a solution; but the present paper makes only a small
step towards such a solution, and in the process reveals how
difficult it is to capture, in academic discourse whose hallmark
is consistency, the contradictions which exist in reality.
I have concentrated, as forms of virtuality, on phenomena of
dislocation and disconnectedness in time and space, and have al
but overlooked forms of disembodiment, and of dehumanisation of
human activity. As Norman Long remarked during a recent
conference,75 under contemporary technological conditions new
questions of agency are raised. Agency now is more than ever a
matter of man / object communication (in stead of primary man /
man communication). This means that the formal organisation which
I have stressed so much, if based on such agency, are no longer
what they used to be. The images of Africa as conveyed in this
paper are rooted in years of anthropological participation in
African contexts, by myself and others, yet the mechanics of the
actual production of these images has involved not only human
intersubjectivity (both between the researcher and the
researched, and between the researcher and his colleagues), but
also solid days of solitary interaction between me and my
computer. There is also virtuality for you, of the
self-reflective kind so much cherished by our post-modernists.
Anthropology may be among the West's more sympathetic globalising
projects, but that does not prevent it from being infested with
the very phenomena it tries to study detachedly.
(c) 1997, 1999 W.M.J. van Binsbergen
return to homepage | or back to title page of Virtuality as a key concept | Notes | References | Photo essay