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