Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World PDF

Introduction to anthropology in a decolonizing world [1 Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing world 4](#introduction-to-anthropology-in-a-decolonizing-world) [1.1 Anthropology 4](#anthropology) [1.1.1 Ethnography 5](#ethnography) [1.1.2 Anthropology's double movement 6](#anthropologys-double-movement) [1.1.3 Emic vs. Ethic 6](#emic-vs.-ethic) [1.2 Postcoloniality 7](#postcoloniality) [1.3 Decolonization 9](#decolonization) [2 History and the anthropological narrative 9](#history-and-the-anthropological-narrative) [2.1 Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1857-1924) 9](#jozef-teodor-konrad-korzeniowski-1857-1924) [2.2 Cultural evolutionism 9](#cultural-evolutionism) [2.3 Structural-functionalism 11](#structural-functionalism) [2.4 Johannes Fabian 12](#johannes-fabian) [3 La Pensée sauvage: Lévi-Strauss and History 14](#la-pens%C3%A9e-sauvage-l%C3%A9vi-strauss-and-history) [4 Re-introducing Historical Perspectives in Anthropology 19](#re-introducing-historical-perspectives-in-anthropology) [5 Africa in world history: opening up the historical space and centrum-periphery relations 24](#africa-in-world-history-opening-up-the-historical-space-and-centrum-periphery-relations) [5.1 Feierman -- African histories and the Dissolution of World History 24](#feierman-african-histories-and-the-dissolution-of-world-history) [5.2 Valentin yves Mudimbe -- The invention of Africa 25](#valentin-yves-mudimbe-the-invention-of-africa) [5.3 Fernand Braudel 26](#fernand-braudel) [5.3.1 Example 1: The Santu 27](#example-1-the-santu) [5.3.2 Example 2: the bible 30](#example-2-the-bible) [6 Orientalism 32](#orientalism) [6.1 Introduction 32](#introduction) [6.2 Situating Edward Said 33](#situating-edward-said) [6.3 Michel Foucault (1926 -- 1984): notion of discourse 34](#michel-foucault-1926-1984-notion-of-discourse) [6.4 Key arguments orientalism 38](#key-arguments-orientalism) [7 The (Post-)Colonial Museum and the Representation of Self and Other 39](#the-post-colonial-museum-and-the-representation-of-self-and-other) [8 Crisis of representation and etnography 40](#crisis-of-representation-and-etnography) [8.1 Partial Truth 40](#partial-truth) [8.2 Conclusion 41](#conclusion) [9 Re-inventing etnography 41](#re-inventing-etnography) [9.1 Introduction 41](#introduction-1) [9.2 Reflexivity and posisionality 41](#reflexivity-and-posisionality) [9.3 Dialogical model 42](#dialogical-model) [9.4 Collaborative anthropologies 43](#collaborative-anthropologies) [9.5 Ethnographic refusal and reserve 44](#ethnographic-refusal-and-reserve) [9.6 Discussion and conclusion 45](#discussion-and-conclusion) [10 Feminism and anthropology 45](#feminism-and-anthropology) [10.1 Introduction 45](#introduction-2) [10.2 Background: anthropology and the women's questions 45](#background-anthropology-and-the-womens-questions) [10.3 The moral/analytical dilemma's posed by the interaction of feminism and social sciences (Rosaldo 1980) 46](#the-moralanalytical-dilemmas-posed-by-the-interaction-of-feminism-and-social-sciences-rosaldo-1980) [10.4 Feminist theory, embodiment and the docile agent (Mahmood 2001) 51](#feminist-theory-embodiment-and-the-docile-agent-mahmood-2001) [11 Guest lecture 54](#_Toc187917136) [11.1 Anthropocene and origins 54](#anthropocene-and-origins) [11.2 White (m)Anthropocene 55](#white-manthropocene) [11.3 Nakuru-city 56](#social-sciences) [12 The global emergence of the humanitarian subject 56](#the-global-emergence-of-the-humanitarian-subject) [12.1 Introduction 56](#introduction-3) [12.2 The emergence of the 'refugee question' 57](#the-emergence-of-the-refugee-question) [12.3 Refugees as bare life 58](#refugees-as-bare-life) [12.4 Refugee question in France 59](#refugee-question-in-france) [12.5 Refugee question in Palestine 60](#refugee-question-in-palestine) [12.6 Conclusion 61](#conclusion-1) Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing world ==================================================== Anthropology ------------ - When does anthropology start? - As old as humankind itself - Reflected about it's own condition - Murals testify reflections of everyday contexts and living conditions - Ancient times: Herodotus - Founding fathers of history: historia - ![](media/image2.jpeg)Reflected about the cultures in Persia and the middle east - As a science: modern science - Tylor and frazer - Evolutionary aspect within anthropology - Where do we come from? How has mankind evolved around the world? - Clues and keys about our common history \~problems: hierarchy and racial attitudes - Other cultures - ![](media/image4.png)Assumption of going far away - Right picture: Malinowski - Left: classical idea of white anthropologists working with non-white people in the global south - studying other cultures, foreign cultures - Cartoon - Idea that anthropology studies exotic, ancient, non-western cultures - invented imagination of other cultures - Hide away artefacts that undo the idea of the exotic other - Triouillot: how anthropologists have constituted themselves as the savage sluts as a mirror image about question that the west has about itself and that they reflect on the other - Study of the human - Study of the origins of mankind - Study of the diversity of mankind, the study of non-Western customs and cultures - Study of everyday life -.... - No shared research object - What do anthropologist have in common? - Difference between anthropology and other (social) sciences? ### Ethnography - Separates anthropology from other sciences? - The practice of "fieldwork" - The study of everyday life - Participant observation as its hallmark - Anthropology = fieldwork and participative observation? - Other disciplines use it as well - Ingold 'that's enough about ethnography!': problem because of methodological reduction - reductivist account of what the discipline stands for by narrowing it down to documentary aspects - Anthropology is not a positivistic subject - It is a way of learning - Don't study on people but learn WITH them - What is anthropology? - Different answers, different perspectives - A shared commitment to studying the potentiality of human life - A critical awareness on the historical and cultural specificity of everyday practices and events - A shared commitment to your research interlocutors - An embodied construction of knowledge ### Anthropology's double movement - Critically opening up and exploring the possibilities of the human condition (what does it mean to be human?) - Recording the everyday lives and practices of our interlockers - Making lives "legible" - Recording realities is a contradictory movement of opening and closing. Inherent paradox and contradiction - Expanding: different answer and option -- but also narrowing while writing you write about specific things and moments, more complexity to the moment and pattern that you're writing about - Writing culture: creating a kind of cultures and writing it down but It's on version of how it actually is - Accounting for patterns/structure *and* complexity - Experiencing realities in their complexity and writing about them imperfectly (cf. other media than writing, audio, video, performance etc..) - Anthropology doesn't (only) study 'what' but 'how' (e.g. how is 'gender' performed, how is 'poverty' lived and experienced, how is 'religion' practiced). - Very vulnerable discipline: what you think you know now it not necessarily the truth - Anthropology as a study to deal with difference - How do we cope with a multi-cultural world? - Fieldwork: to embrace difference, can also be around the corner ### Emic vs. Ethic - Anthropology as a practiced relationship between self and other; as an exercise in understanding and translation ***EMIC*** *An **emic view** of culture is ultimately a perspective [focus on the intrinsic cultural distinctions] that are meaningful to the members of a given society, often considered to be an ['insider's' perspective]. While this perspective stems from the concept [of immersion in a specific culture], the emic participant isn't always a member of that culture or society. Studies done from an emic perspective often include [more detailed and culturally rich information] than studies done from an etic point of view. Because the observer places themselves within the culture of intended study, they are able to go further in-depth on the details of practices and beliefs of a society that may otherwise have been ignored. * ***ETIC*** *An **etic view** of a culture is the perspective of [an outsider looking in]. For example, if an American anthropologist went to Africa to study a nomadic tribe, his/her resulting case study would be from an etic standpoint if he/she did not integrate themselves into the culture they were observing. Some anthropologists took this approach to [avoid altering the culture that they were studying by direct interaction]. The etic perspective is [data gathering by outsiders that yield questions posed by outsiders.]* - Emic: letting go, suspension of disbelief - Jump into things that are less comfortable and unknown - Enter a different social and cultural context - sociology: more outsider point of view - Try to listen to the other - Anthropology is about living together: about rationality that is transcendent and ties us together but that also created differences - But anthropology as academic discipline does not exist in a political or societal void - We will therefore not only focus on anthropology as a specific way of knowing about *Anthropos,* the way in which we, as human beings, form a 'living together', and inhabit our social worlds - We will also pay particular attention to the ways in which this knowledge is never innocent but was/ is constructed in the historical contexts of colonialism, e.g., contexts that are deeply rooted in hegemonic relations of power. - To understand the birth and evolution of anthropology as an academic discipline, we will therefore also contextualize and scrutinize the knowledge it generates through the critical theoretical perspective of post-colonial theory and reflections on the need for decolonial vocabularies. - 19^th^ century: consolidation of European nation states - Once internal others (working class) where colonized and formatted into the citizen ---\> exported themselves to overseas territories - \~Berlin conference & scramble for Africa - How could Europe do that in less than 100years - Joseph Conrad: polish sailor who later became a writer in the UK - Reflect on his life as a sailor in Asia, Africa,... - 1890: on the congo-river - Reflect on his journey to the heart of Africa 'the heart of darkness' - Later on: critised - Wipes out local world - "an apology of colonialism" - No agency for Africans themselves - But intentionally done: what he encounters is not at the heart of darkness - Madness inside the colonizer himself - \~des maitres fous Postcoloniality --------------- - ![](media/image6.png)postcoloniality as an in-between space - attendancy to revert to the past: to fight the impact of colonialism - but also modernity, development - But need education, functioning economy - Colonizer NGO's and development organizations - In between past and future - H. Bhabba - Where is culture in the in-between? - Cultural creativity - Space of opportunity - Hybridity as a surplus (botanical metaphor) - Frans Fanon: threated the madness of colonialism - Political decolonization - World of the colonial was a world that separated and created segregation - mixture and intermingling was something good and was the authentic - Colonial times: métisse-problem - Creolization (linguistic metaphor) - Limbala: marriage in langala - Bal perdu: divorce - ≠ lingala, French anymore - - Mudimbe: the invention of Africa - \~Orientalism - Did what Saïd did for the middle east and the orient but then for Africa - Space of marginalization stuck between the past and the ability to move forward - Produces poverty, analphabetism - Not transparent: part of negotiation of what you used and keep - Palimpsest: text writing upon another text/paper (ex. middle ages) - Layers of meaning on top of each other - \~colonizers idea of a blank page - Underlying local layer remained invisible during colonial times - Was still there but ignored - Postcoloniasation - Layers became visible - Post? - \"Post\" in postcolonial: a break with the past (post as something subsequent, clearly distinct from the colonial past)? - Cfr. the decolonization movement, inspired in part by the work of Argentinian thinker Walter Mignolo. - Or "Post" as continuity, as a period grown out of a reworking of the past in the present, something that incorporates the previous moments? - Postcoloniality-decoloniality: a tense relationship? - Radical break with the past? - Or does it take the past into the future? - Mental colonization that is still present today - Colonial past still has it footprints today - Mignolo: idea of the decolonial - Have to cut the colonial fact out of the world - Activist agenda - Postcolonial: impossible to just take it out because it makes us as we are today Decolonization -------------- - Historical moment - [Political movement] '40-60s: national soveirnity and independence - Different [epistemological movements] co-exists (decolonizing the mind) - Critically challenging the hegemony of "the West" and/or "modernity" as main horizon of possibility - Exploring alternative trajectories and complex engagements with modernity (also within the West) - Opening up the horizon of possibilities of what it means to be human (pluriverse) - Within anthropology - Where hired by colonial administrators to research, report,... - Quest to reinvent itself strength of the discipline - Decolonization as an ethnographic moment (studying decoloniality) - How does the movement of decolonization reshape anthropology? - What to study?, in what language?, representational authority?, reciprocity? Etc. - How does anthropology participate in enlarging the possibilities of being human? History and the anthropological narrative ========================================= - With particular attention to: Evolutionism, diffusionism, structural functionalism, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, "denial of coevalness", "Writing Culture" - important for the exam!! Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1857-1924) -------------------------------------------- - Evolutionary thought of that time: a travel from the river Thames and sailing upstream to the Congo-river - Kind of like a journey back in time and to the origins of mankind - evolutionary thinking of 2^nd^ half of the 19^th^ century - "Heart of Darkness" (1902): key novel about the dynamics of colonization - Illustration of evolutionist notions of time - Marlowe, Conrad's literary alter ego in search of Mr. Kurtz - Search for the Other (Africa) turns out to be a meeting with our dark inner Self - The horror, the horror! Cultural evolutionism --------------------- - Lewis Henry Morgan: only one of his generations with an actual real experience with the people he was writing about - Iroquois in New York - US was building a railway in native territory: he as a lawyer defended them in court but also investigated the way they organize themselves in a pollical way - Henry Maine, Edward Burnett Tylor armchair anthropologists - \~material of colonial administrators and missionaries - \~Darwinism - physical anthropology: 19^th^ century idea of outline and document the evolution of animals and humankind - Book Maarten Couttenier: Anthropology and race in Belgium and the Congo (1839 -- 1922) - About the early days of anthropology in Belgium and the Congo - Birth of physical anthropology - Remains popular in our common thinking: still think in races or color bars - ![](media/image8.jpeg)Decolonization restitution of objects - Tylor's unilineal evolution - From the early beginnings of nature to the development of humankind - But also outs ide the colonial context - Innercolonialism - Ex. New Belgium had to colonize his own inhabitants - Measuring difference between Flemish (Germanic origins) and Walloons (Latin origins) - \~social context - Natural history museums across Europe and US - \~Afrikamuseum Tervuren - ![](media/image10.png)Floorplan - New entrance - Decolonization: successful? - Impossible: celebrate colonialism - See cinquatenaire - Human zoo's - Look at it as who we were before - evolutionist thought - Hottentot Venus: South-African female that was put on display still kept in a Parish museum - Franz Boas - Opposed evolutionism very strongly - Argued that culture cannot evolve on one line - = oversimplification - Monocultural idea: that everyone evolve in the same way to the same end - but much more complex then that - Denies all forms of cultural diversity - Father of cultural relativision - Every culture should be understood in their own terms - Diffusionism: displaced the unilinear timeline - Special mapping-out - plurarity of culture - Great stretch on the link to space - Not one place where pottery volved - different centers that mutually influence each other - diffused in different ways - By 1930/40's it was gone - New diffusionists wave today Structural-functionalism ------------------------ - Mainly out of UK - Begore: fin du siècle Germany, Austria - Malinowski - Austrian citizen seen as an enemy during WWI - Argonauts of the western pacific - \~Durkheim: social institutions as an organism that could get ill - Describes it as organs in a body - Notion that all of these elements need to function in order to have a working social order - Interest in structural elements that made a social organization work - ≠ history of changes on the daily level - But the underlying institutions, structures - ≠ history - But everything that is fixed, permanent: law and order - Anthropology that creates law and order into these studied objects - primitive worlds are well organized and have a fixed structure - Word 'savage' bounceless liberty (see text) - Discovers the Kula-ring - Cycles of exchange: gifts and counter gifts - Hierarchically classified (\~Mamluk diplomacy) - Maus' essay on the gifts: every gift always askes for a counter gift - in their untouched, pure form: not in their history and change - Radcliff-brown - Not interested in the impact of colonialism, but wanted to describe it how it is - Completely ahistorical way - Pendant of Malinowski - Brown: turn anthropology into something that leans more towards the positive sciences - Malinowski - Book structure and function in primitive society - Write a theoretical manifesto - Set ourselves apart to evolutionists and historians - Because it is not scientific, they are just storytellers - historiography = pseudo-causal - Idiographic - Anthropology: nomothetic - More general theories (not isolated facts) - \~chemistry, physics - Rules and laws - in 50 years: the way anthropology started completely disappears Johannes Fabian --------------- - Time and the other - Postmodern theories: we had come at the end of history - Everything that western thought produced was based on ideology but not on factual truth - no truth anymore - Anthropology and historiography have always derived from a very western point of view - Postmodern theories debate that - Alternative maps - Pearce map (see sociale geografie) - Smaller Europe, US but bigger Africa then the standard Mercator map - How does an anthropologist write about other cultures - Book writing culture: reflect upon this question - What does it mean to have the right to write about others? - Was a problem with the modes of production - Denial of coevalness - French anthropology (ex.Marcel Griaule): le dieu d'eau - Créole men Dogon - about mythology - first time in the 1950's that we hear an African voice In an Anthropological book - British Victor Turner - Contemporary Zambia: Ndembu group - Parts of the conversations with the interlocutors are in his book - live in the same timeframe, world - anochronic: different time - The Nuer (south Sudan) - Evans-Pritchard - 1940's - Static representation of their world - Colonial agent: worked for the British army - Changed the wordl that he was acting in but not visible in his book - looked at the ethnographic present - Fabian: critize this use it to distance ourselves from the others - Different types of time - Physical time: objective time, vast spans of time, to measure things and evolutions - Fixed time, not and object of cultural variation - Mundane/typological time - Anthropological discourse - Worldwide time - Ads different kind of layer to physical time - Ex. Prehistoric, neolithic, ritual, tribal - creates difference between time that the subject lived in and the time we are writing about it - Medieval time - Time used in anthropology comes from other timeframes that came in the ancient regime - Medieval time: time of salvation inclusive - Pagan ready for inclusion - ≠ the savage in evolutionary thought - Modern time: distance the west from the rest - On a special line and on a timeline - Seen as something from the past - Something far away La Pensée sauvage: Lévi-Strauss and History =========================================== - Historical typologies (cfr. Fabian) - Anthropology that is not historical - Used typological timeframes exposed by Fabian - Illustration: French structuralism and the relationship between history and anthropology - Claude Lévi-Strauss - His work was very central in the development of (structural) anthropology - Tristes tropiques - LS argued that the \"savage\" mind had the same structures as the \"civilized\" mind and that human characteristics were the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book *Tristes Tropiques*, which positioned him as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought, where his ideas extended to many fields in the humanities, as well as sociology and philosophy. Structuralism is defined as \"[the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human action.\"] - Autobiographical book - Worked in Latin-America (amazonian region) - About the body of myths in first nation to Iberia and Alaska - Intimate writing about the 'vanishes' worlds - Anthropologie structural (1963) - Reflects upon the relationship between the historical discipline and anthropology - Quote *" (\...) we can formulate the problem of the relationship between the anthropological sciences and history as follows: (...) The problem of reconstructing a past whose history we are incapable of grasping confronts ethnology more particularly; **the problem of writing the history of a present without a past confronts ethnography**. That is, at any rate, the dilemma which has too often halted the development of these sciences in the course of the last fifty years" (Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 3).* - Objects Boas' radical historical approach - ![](media/image12.jpeg)Against evolutionism and diffusionism - Ex. Kayapo village - How, for example, to explain the existence of 'dual societies' historically? - Dual society - \~Special lay-out of the village - Circle, center = hut in the middle (political organization of the village, (male space)) - Outer circle: 'long houses' - Each house represents a lineage - more female world - There also one that are divided in two halves moiety - When a society is divided into exactly two social or ritual groups, each part of the society is called a moiety, after the French word for half (*moité*). When two halves are each required to marry members of the other group, they are called marriage groups - Totemic animals as identification - Idea that they are part of the world of that totem - Endogamous groups: can only marry those of your own group - Exogamous: cannot marry someone from within your own group - asked himself what form came first *"Let us immediately rule out **evolutionist** and **diffusionist** interpretations. **The evolutionist**, who tends to consider **dual organization as a necessary stage of social development**, would first have to define a simple form whose actually observed forms would be concrete manifestations, survivals, or vestiges. He would then have to postulate the presence, at a remote time, of this form among peoples where nothing demonstrates that a moiety division ever existed. **The diffusionist**, in turn, would select one of the observed types, usually the most developed and complex, as **representing the archaic form of the institution** and would attribute its origin to that region of the world where it is best documented, all other forms being considered the product of migrations and borrowings from the common cradle. In both cases, one arbitrarily selects a type form all those provided by experience and makes of this type the model from which one attempts, through speculation, to derive all the others" (Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 10).* - Because some villages also have both forms - Evolutionism can't explain it - Sees it linear: the more you go back the more simple the structures will be - Diffusionism - One center first spread and so the world becomes more and more complex - complex first and then it spreads - wants to understand the present by cultural organizations without throwing away its history - Anthropology and history are similar: quote - Have a similar perspective: both want to understand human organization and the history of humankind - Fundamental difference - ≠ subject, method - But in the choice of complimentary perspectives - History: conscious expressions of social life - Data's, crownings,... - Anthropology - Unconscious nature - Things we are not aware of - Ex. History of table manners - Structures are invisible - \~model of structural linguists - To reach this 'unconscious structure' - Relation between history (diachrony) and the present (synchrony) - Structuralism based on the synchronic linguistics of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) - Collected forms of words from previous times in linear timeline - To see how language evolves - 19^th^ century linguistics = historical linguistics - = Diachronic: the study of the historical development and evolution of a language : - Old Dutch Middle Dutch Modern Dutch - historical linguistics about the development of a language - into a scheme that shows the evolution of a language - But Saussure: synchronic - Significant - Word itself: ex. chair - Parole: visible everyday usage of the language - Signifié - Langue: the underlying structures that make English into English - NOAM CHOMSKY's, Transformational-Generative Grammar - Performance (parole) and competence - Structures Elémentaires de la parenté (1948)(CLS) - \~kingship - studies, following de Saussure, not only conscious, visible phenomena or superstructure of things, but also the unconscious infrastructure - Different ways in which kingship around the world is organized - But basic rules and structures that underline it - On the surface: Thousands of variations: each society regulates kinship and marriage in its own specific way (lived-in orders) - Underneath: - 3 possible kingship structures: Elementary, semicomplex and complex - Elementary - Prescribed with who you should marry - Strauss: positive proscription - Symmetrical: two groups (wife-givers and wife-takers) - Reciprocal - Asymmetrical - 2 forms of exchange - Wife-givers - Wife-takers - 1 underlying general rule Incest-Taboo - Notion of reciprocity - Symbolic character of the gift - The existence of one basic law (taboo on incest) - = universal mental realities, Unconscious basic rules - La pensée sauvage - These unconscious basic rules are part of the universal architecture of the human mind - Universalist thought - Often translated as the savage mind - But mistranslation: French for 'Wild Pansy' - Talks about the mind of humankind (all of us) - In nature it is wild each culture domesticates it in its own form - put it in a certain cultural order - Not interested in evolution and history - a-historical approach - Preference for the synchronic, and therefore for a a-historical approach - But in his later writings, he tries to come to terms with the notion of 'history' and attempts to give it a more prominent place in anthropology - But history drips in again - Race and history (Anthropologie Structurale II) - Distinguishes between tension between synchronic anthropology and the need for a historical explanation of our world today - Warm society (own European, western society) - Thermodynamic - Cumulative history - Progress - Large molecule consisting of thousands of atoms - Great stress on change and progress - Constant evolution and transformation - Cold society - Mechanical - Static history - Stationary - Simple molecule consisting of a reduced number of atoms - Pre-industrial cultural organizations - Sticking to tradition - but not so that one it better than the other according to him: matter of choice - Conclusion - Human past does not evolve on one line - CLS does not conceptualize the human past as unilinear progress - He does not object to the notion of history or progress per se, but counters the idea that there exists only one universal uniform history, and one universal form of progress - Illustration: debate between CLS and Sartre in text 5: - Debate: History and Dialectics (chapter 9 from *La pensée sauvage*) - Sartre: Critique de la raison dialectique - Distinction: - Analytical Reason = static - Dialectical Reason = critical, self-questioning - Cls disagrees with Sartre's distinction - Starts from a particular notion of history but not universal itself: part of a historical process - The ideal of an objective homogeneous world history is a fiction: instead a nebula of histories - No universal value of what it a historical event - Western form of mythology - \~postmodernism - With his critique on the possibility of a linear and homogeneous historical narrative CLS may be seen as a forerunner of the (postmodern) criticism on the modernistic view of history ![](media/image14.jpeg)Re-introducing Historical Perspectives in Anthropology ============================================================================= - EP - Inspired by the French Annales school, EP makes a plea for the re-introduction of an historical perspective in anthropology. Evans-Pritchard studied history at Exeter College, Oxford, and then as a postgraduate at the London School of Economic (LSE). There he came under the influence of Bronisław Malinowski and especially Charles Gabriel Seligman, the founding ethnographer of the Sudan. His first fieldwork began in 1926 with the Azande, a people of the upper Nile, and resulted in both a doctoral dissertation (in 1927) and his classic *Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande* (in 1937). Evans-Pritchard continued to lecture at the LSE and conduct research in Azande land until 1930, when he began a new research project among the Nuer. After his return to Oxford, he continued his research on Nuer. It was during this period that he first met Meyer Fortes and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Evans-Pritchard began developing Radcliffe-Brown\'s program of structural-functionalism. As a result his trilogy of works on the Nuer (*The Nuer*, *Nuer Religion*, and *Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer*) and the volume he coedited entitled *African Political Systems* came to be seen as classics of British social anthropology. Evans-Pritchard\'s *Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande* is the first major anthropological contribution to the sociology of knowledge through its neutral --- some would say \"relativist\" --- stance on the \"correctness\" of Zande beliefs about causation. Evans-Pritchard\'s empirical work in this vein became well-known through philosophy of science and \"rationality\" debates of the 1960s and 1970s involving Thomas Kuhn and especially Paul Feyerabend. During WWII Evans-Pritchard served in Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, and Syria. In Sudan he raised irregular troops among the Anuak to harass the Italians and engaged in guerilla warfare. Evans-Pritchard became professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College. He remained at All Souls College for the rest of his career. - Makes up for a return of history in way which anthropologist must work - Annales-school (zie historiografie) - The Annales school consisted of a group of French historians around the journal *Annales d\'histoire économique et sociale* (° 1929). This group was very influential and made its mark on historiography in France and elsewhere, especially by introducing social scientific methods into historiography, emphasizing social rather than political or diplomatic themes. - \~Lévi-strauss: unconscious structures - **Prominente figures in this movement**: Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie en Philippe Ariès. - It was the latter two in particular that pushed the group in the direction of the *[histoire des mentalités]*, a history that did not focus so much on wars, great historical figures (Napoleon, Charles V), or political processes, subjects that had been typical of European historiography up to that point. Instead, they set about producing a more cultural history, focusing on the social and cultural structure of groups, and on the way ordinary people lived their lives. - Example: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: *Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324* (1975). - This is a study of a village in the Languedoc at the time of the Cathars. Based on the material of hearings of the Inquisitor who prosecuted the Cathar heretics, the author sketches a picture of a rural village (its relations to other villages, to political and spiritual power, field work, housing, etc\...) and the mentality and customs of its inhabitants (what they thought about life, death, marriage, witchcraft, fate, time, space), just as an anthropologist would write an ethnography of a village in Africa. - Ethnography of an medieval village - Micro history - EP' return to history = same period as Lévi-Strauss - Two disciplines rejoin - Marshal Sahlins - New evolutionist, diffusion ist \~Franz Boas - Student uprising Paris: US Paris - Student of Lévi-Strauss - Influence in his further writing - ≠homo economicus: cultural construct - Social biology, DNA,... - Moves more towards a historical approach - Fiji - M. Sahlins (1985), excerpt from [Islands of History] - Book about history of the island of Fiji - Sahlins: different cultural worlds have their own types of social organization - Historical determination: own way of interpret the passing of time - 'structural history': rejoin historical dimension, structural history (levi-strauss) - Tension between Structure and Event - Example: The colonisation of Fiji. - Intersection of local history and European history - Different cultural orders have their own modes of historical action, consciousness and determination' - Devine kingship - Frazer: armchair anthropologist from the UK - The golden Bough - Anthropology, theology - Ancient Greece, rome - Mythological events, ritual beliefs - The birth of religion - Very influential book: still a lot referred to - Notion of sacred/divine king - Political figurehead who becomes almost like a God social world into motion - Enthronement: human body divine body - King as mediator/incarnation of the supernatural - King ages executed and replaced by follower - Ex. Indonesia, Africa, Europe (French medieval kings) - Still existing and alive - Structure: divine body of the king makes the social order - Historical event happens impacts upon that structure arrival of British colonizer (19^th^ century) - Impact upon how Fijians see their own history - structure and event should be viewed together - ![](media/image16.jpeg)**Structural history**: European idea of history and structure of divine kingship combined - Example: Lunda kingdom - Still a divine king today - Member of a very prominent political family - Embodies notion of divine king - Mwant yav: rule continues to exist even though he is a member of the DRC - Known about this because of Africanist historians (ex.Jan Vansina) - Jan Vansina (zie koloniale en historiografie) - (° Antwerpen, 14 September 1929 - 8 February 2017) was an historian and anthropologist who specialized in the history of Africa, and Central Africa in particular - WORDS AND THINGS METHOD - Kuba: impact of Belgian colonialism - Luc de Huesch: main followers of Lévi-Strauss - Left together for Congo - Beliefs of Amerindian people - Now want to do the same in Africa - Structural reading of underlying political, cultural structures in wider Africa - Used historical data - 1970's: fall out between the two - Is elegance proof? - Beautiful written work of de Huesch but not based on anything in reality - debate between structuralist and African historians/anthropologists - Founder of Anthropological department at KU Leuven - Vansina, Jan (1965). *Oral Tradition. A Study in Historical Methodology* (Translated from the French by H. M. Wright). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. - idea of Africa without a history - Vansina: not written sources, but doesn't mean that there is no history oral traditions - Vansina, Jan (1966). *Kingdoms of the Savanna*. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. - Methodology of oral tradition into practice - Example: the Stranger King (see story Lunda) - Lunda: Very hierarchical society - Mwant Yav at the top - Musumba: main royal court send out deputees - Second royal court: Nzofu symbolically important for traditional political rule - Not much real power - Second king - Consultation and visits of important people: talked about a particular problem - History of precedents told and retold into the court - Vansina: recorded these royal genealogies 16 generations back - Vansina, Jan (1985). *Oral Tradition as History*. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. - Vansina, Jan (1990). *Paths in the Rainforests*. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. - History of central African rainforest - Very few material remains: climate, natural conditions - About the evolution of language, food staples,... as a source - Crops brought in from Latin-America: now when they were brought - Names of things: older or more recent forms - Ex. K Pf: chief: Kumu Pfumu - Group that uses kumu: was there before - Vansina, Jan (1994). *Living With Africa*. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. - Vansina, Jan (2004). *How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600*. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press. - Example: the stranger king - ![](media/image18.png)Way of recounting history in royal courts - Always begins with two mythological figures: brothers and sister that marry - Incest taboo - also true for the Lunda - Real start of the kingdom: first one marries a woman princess and princesses born - Underlying principle: set in motion by an outsider - Lunda: generation of first children story focused on Luweej and her father - Luweej marries tshibinda Ilunga stranger and king of a rival kingdom - Power handed over from Luweej to him - Her brothers disagree: large wave of migration because brothers leave and set of their courts elsewhere - explains diffusionist history of the Lunda kingdom and how it spread out over time - Royal compound: centered east where the sun rises - Vertical represents masculinity - Divine king: behind the fence in the circle so divine that you can't see him because you will be blinded - Junior wife next to him - Left side: matriarchal line of representatives - Right side: patriarchal - visitors in front: bring palm wine - Good wine: good judgement and wisdom - Bad wine: not good - 1 liter of wine in handed around by the wife: finished = refilled and passed on to the person next to you - King can also not have children 'symbolically' so divine that it makes him infertile - When he gets ill secretly brought away for recovery - Can show no signs of illness: will be killed and replaced - history conceived upon in a whole different way - History read through two concepts - **Positional succession:** form of social continuity by means of which a man's death should be followed by the succession, by another man of his lineage, to his name and social position. As such important historical names do not die out but remain within the clan or lineage. - = telescopic time - = truncated time - Nzofu 17 carries same name - Every court meeting he will tell the story of migration in the first person and in the present - 'I Nzofu...' - 1th and 17^th^ are one and the same person - History incorporated in the royal body - Sahlin: making the past alive in the present with the divine king with the Fiji's - **Perpetual kinship:** The perpetual kin relationship is an expressed relationship between the holders of two names, which does not vary with the actual genealogical relationship of the people who are at any one time holding the names. It is a fixed relationship between hereditary names which remains constant through the generations. - Kingship ties are lasting over time yaka, chockwe,... and Lunda refer to each other as junior or senior brothers - Same with DRC and Brazzaville - Also used to adapt to certain circumstances, not stagnant gives newcomers, strangers a place in the community through this system Africa in world history: opening up the historical space and centrum-periphery relations ======================================================================================== Feierman -- African histories and the Dissolution of World History ------------------------------------------------------------------ - Feierman - Post-modern criticism on an Eurocentric perspective on the world - Since renaissance: Europa has had the gaze, the globe and invention of cartography - the world was seen as one whole but seen from a western, Eurocentric view - Paradigm of world history that leads to European civilization (uni-linear timeline) unravels - Realization that we know little of the world outside our own Eurocentric perspective - For a long time in historian considered history to be about certain civilizations (the occidental, western); certain political leaders as being worth to wright about (ex. Napoleon, Jefferson, Charles the fifth,...), certain periods (enlightenments,...) European notions, conceptions, time periods,... - ≠ other places, people and cultures of no importance to understand that western history - 1960's: mostly Jan van Sina important role - Realize that the construction of the historical narrative is one that hides a lot of historical knowledge - Evolution of African history and the way historians who looked about it - Idea that Africa did not have a history - A lot of histories fall out of that general narrative consequences for the validity of that narrative Valentin yves Mudimbe -- The invention of Africa ------------------------------------------------ - Valentin yves Mudimbe - Helped opening up that discussion - Important voice coming form the African continent - Trained in philosophers, roman literature and poetry - Asked to work for the Mobutu regime - Exciled: to Leuven UK - Prominent novelist: - Invention of Africa: instant classic - \~orientalism: does for Africa what said does for the middle east - Production of knowledge regarding Africa doesn't say much about the reality of Africa on the ground but has been produced through the eyes of western scholars - an invention that took place in Europe, the west - Very complex book: one of the main voices of African philosophy - Also focusses very much on la philosophy bantou, placide tempels - See koloniale geschiedenis - 1930's-1940's: Placide Temples -- La philosophie Bantoue - Revolutionary book in his time - For the very first time someone said that Africans were capable of production a philosophical system that could stand next to Kant, Hegel, Descartes... - Published by présense Africaine: main and first African publisher in paris - Jean paul cartres: saw a kind of literative move in it to place Africans as part of a larger humanity - Embraced by the progressive intellectual environment of the day in Europe - But Mudimbe: whole Bantu philosophy what comes out of the missionary of Placide temples - No African voice in that book - Remains an European production of a supposed African philosophy - part of the way Europa has colonized Africa (not only physically) - 3 elements of the structure of colonization - 1\) procedures of acquisition, distribution, reclamation of land (control of physical space) - making of borders, carving put the whole continent of Africa into nation states - 2\) politics of domesticating the indigenous population (colonization of the mind of the native) - a mental colonization - Done through the technology of writing and of the book the colonial library - The colonizer controls the indigenes mind and space through writing - Bible, senses to count people, cartography (ties people in an order place that can be controlled, ethnocides them) - ![](media/image20.jpeg)Also see the'census' and the map as part of the 'colonial library' - Map Olga Boone, 1954, *Carte Ethnique du Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi*. Tervuren: Amis du Musée royal du Congo Belge. - scholar that worked for the Africa museum of Tervuren - Made ethnic maps of Congo - Maps out every ethnic group to a specific space - pre-colonial: more flexible and fluent, ethnic labels weren't fixed - European constructions - 3\) management of old forms of organization and implementation of new modes of production (integration of local histories into a western perspective) Fernand Braudel --------------- - Fernand Braudel - Annales-school - Civilisation Matérielle, Economie et Capitalisme XV-XVIII (1979) (3 volumes), the rise of the west and Europe - About the mediteranean - Tries to tell the story of Europe by letting in other perspectives - Didn't exist with one frontier - 100 frontiers to tell the history of the Mediterranean: linguistic one, political, economical,... - A lot of import from the African continent - For the first time Braudel asked the question: How representative is our historical knowledge in relation to the totality of the studied universe? - = Beginnings of the growth of an African historiography - historical work done around the emergence of the slave trade - Major round of globalization form the 15th century onwards - The triangular trade Europe -- African west coast -- America's - The **Middle Passage**: the name given to the triangular trade in which millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade. - Link youtube ppt: slave routes - history that can not only be told by an European perspective: need for an African perspective - Notion of 'slave' - 16^th^,17^th^ century the French British and Dutch arrive in the gold coast, benin,... - Settled at the coast - European demand for manpower, labor for the plantations of the new world - Met a system that existed before the colonization - French Marxist anthropologists: started working on the slave trade - Ex. Claude Meillasoux, Pierre-Philippe Rey, Georges Dupré ### Example 1: The Santu - Distinction between wealth in things and wealth in people - **Wealth in people** (sometimes written **wealth-in-people**) is a concept developed by anthropologists and historians to describe social systems in which status, power, and influence are achieved and mediated through the number of one\'s dependents, followers, or other social ties and affiliations. The dependent\'s labor generates material wealth, which is in turn used to attach further dependents. Such systems can therefore exist independent of or alongside other capitalist or monetary modes of value and accumulation. - Local African understanding: political strong your capacity to control the fertility of your womenfolk (wife, daughter, nieces) and the labor of younger men - Meritocratic system: \~age the older the more you become a strong public figure - Derived from the people that depend on you - wealth in people - Common that elders from different lineage made deals amongst each other by using the people that were at their disposal - Africa had an agency: economically, politically,... - World of the black Atlantic -- Paul Gilroy - Emergence of our modern world and the invention of capitalism is linked to the middle passage - Idea that everything can become a commodity including people - history of entanglements between different worlds and point of views - Ex. of the Santuin Matamba (Capucine mission station in the second half of the 17^th^ century) - Catholic sanctuary of the saint (mother mary,...) - Introduced into central Africa from the 17th century onwards - Portuguese arrived in Angola - Moved inlands in very small numbers - How did this few hundred people to ship millions of Africans around the world? - Establishment of the catholic missionary stations: Italians capuchins played on important role - Settled in Matamba (deep in the Angolan hinterland) - Matamba: Capital of important kingdom of queen Njinga - Linda haywood: Njinga of Angola -- Arica's Warrior queen - Incredible story - Mixture of Jeanne d'arc, Margaret thatcher and Theresa of avila - Fought the Portuguese colonial army twice (warrior queen) - Image: sits on top of one of her slave to welcome the Portuguese ambassadors to negotiate a peace treaty with her - Christianized: mystical phase - After her death: kingdom unravels and disappears - Slave trade from the interior markets of Angola to the Angolan coast is shaping up - very violent people where local tribesmen captured other people and ethnic group and sold them to the Portuguese at the coast - space taken by the Italian capuhines - Introduction Catholicism - Via inland missionary stations - Via local Ovimbundu traders, also known as: - ambaquistas - pombeiros descalcos - ovimbali/ yimbadi - middle men - In between European white world and African world - Were Africans but could read and write, were baptized - sold goods to the capuchins who sold them further - Traded saint statues further into local inland markets - Catholicism: barok Catholicism form the medirateanen with statues and everything - Local people loved it: thought it could strengthen their own religious universe - Panteon of spirits/shades - All have a name and specific character - Show your respect to them: can ensure good health, successful hunt,... - But they can also be malevolent - make sacrifices, give them salt, palm wine,... - Not a closed class: some are important and present - New spirits can be incorporated - ![](media/image22.jpeg)Statues of the Catholics: incorporated (saint Anthony and baby Jesus,...) represented fertility, plentitude - Became (ma)hamba in their own right - Continues today - Local ritual universe: (ma)hamba - Picture: Chimbadi - Mother mary - Lot of things added - ![](media/image24.jpeg) turtle on head: represents political power - picture 1950's: man uses virgin statue for healing proposes - transformed into a hunter - longue durée of history making: rituals today opens up a time space of 100 of years and tells something about how the connecting of Europeans and African emerge in the time of the slave trade - Santu becomes an epistemic object - **Episteme**, as distinguished from *techne*, is etymologically derived from the Ancient Greek word *ἐπιστήμη* for knowledge or science, which comes from the verb ἐπίσταμαι, \"to know\". In Plato\'s terminology *episteme* means knowledge, as in \"justified true belief\", in contrast to *doxa*, common belief or opinion. The word epistemology, meaning the study of knowledge, is derived from *episteme*. - The French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault used the term *épistème* in a specific sense in his work *The Order of Things* to mean the historical *a priori* that grounds knowledge and its discourses and thus represents the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch. In subsequent writings, he made it clear that several epistemes may co-exist and interact at the same time, being parts of various power-knowledge systems. But he did not discard the concept: - "I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won't say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. **The episteme is the 'apparatus' which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific**." - Foucault\'s *episteme* is not merely confined to science but to a wider range of discourse (all of science itself would fall under the *episteme* of the epoch). While Kuhn\'s paradigm shifts are a consequence of a series of conscious decisions made by scientists to pursue a neglected set of questions, Foucault\'s epistemes are something like the \'epistemological unconscious\' of an era; the configuration of knowledge in a particular episteme is based on a set of fundamental assumptions that are so basic to that episteme so as to be invisible to people operating within it - Michel Foucault: scientific paradigm - Episteme: paradigm in a more unconscious way - Common sense of a certain time/period - Santu became figures to imagine the European world and to understand the world beyond their own horizon - But also became epistemologies for Europe and in order to understand what Africa was all about - Ex. Feitiço (\~Fetish) - Power objects form the Lower Congo - Statues for healing purposes - Every spike in the statue represents a client that came to see the healer - European sailors broad it back to Europe and called it the fetish - Word with a deep colonial root: now we use 'power objects' - How European try to imagine that terro incognita - feierman: open up historian space and let other stories enter ### Example 2: the bible - As part of the "Colonial Library" which - "represents a body of knowledge constructed with the explicit purpose of faithfully translating and deciphering the African object." - (See. V.Y. Mudimbe, 1988, *The Invention of Africa*) - Bible as one of the main technologies to colonize the African mind - Incorporated of local rituals world - Bible also understood in local terms - Book can become object to study counterreformations, critical voices,... - Tells us something about African agency - Ex. Catholicism became so popular in Angola in the 17th century that the Vatican lost total control over the way people interpreted the bible - 18^th^ century: Vatican prohibited local Africans to become priests fearing to loose control - Translation of the bible become the ground for different kinds of voices, interpretations and readings of the European words - God nzambi (lingala) - Interpreted it for all the notion that come with nzambi - ≠ Christian understanding of what a God it - Sin Lisumu - \~kusumik: action of obtaining during time of mourning kusumik: lift it and reintegrate into the social order - The lifting of the taboo - Palimpsest: layers of meaning inscribed over each other that form new content - A palimpsest (/ˈpælɪmpsɛst/) is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The word \"palimpsest\" comes through Latin palimpsēstus from Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος (palímpsestos, "scratched or scraped again") originally compounded from πάλιν (palin, "again") and ψάω (psao, "I scrape") literally meaning "scraped clean and used again". Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be smoothed and reused, and a passing use of the term \"palimpsest\" by Cicero seems to refer to this practice. - The term has come to be used in similar context in a variety of disciplines, notably architectural archaeology. - Colonization - = Dislocatory Presence - (Homi Bhabha 1994, *The Location of Culture*) - Want to create a world that is not actually there - = Displacement - = Ambivalence - = lack of transparency in the "translation" - Braudel was still trapped in a unilinear historiography - Product of his time: trapped in a unilinear historiography - Took the Mediterranean as the beginning and the end of his history - Main story was still about Europe - Tension between - Searching for correct spatial framework - Definition of modern world history as the rise of a dominant Europe - \~ E. Wallerstein (World System-analysis; cf. Dependency theory: centre -- periphery) - Book wolf - Critique of talal assad - Can we write a history of the world without Europe? - Braudel still describes evolutions in Africa in strongly racial terms - Differentiation between - Civilization - The occident, the west - White Africa: the Maghreb - Clear set of elements - \~European context - Urbanization - = birth of the city - = productive agricultural systems - = writing - Complex of elements that form coherent configurations (according to European standards, that is...) - Culture - Black Africa - Counterexamples ferierman - Igboland in South East Nigeria - Vast system of markets - Through markets: birth of urbanized world - Without a writing system - Lemba (John Janzen 1982, *Lemba 1650-1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World*) - healing cult 17^th^-20^th^ century - Mahamba spirit - Former patients becomes the healers - Members of the cult: marry each other, trade each other - Reach New World: still present in Brazil - Eric wolf: Europe and the people without history - Wolf analyzes how the introduction of capitalism affects local \"traditional\" cultures, from an anthropological perspective from within (emic perspective) rather than the view of policymakers or the state (etic perspective: from outside, external) - Focus on non-Europeans and their role in global world history - Critiques - Still Eurocentric focus? (For example in the choice of the criterion 'money' (See also Appadurai on 'The Social Life of Things' ) - "Are there histories of people without Europe?" (Talal Asad) Orientalism =========== Introduction ------------ - Anthropology and history (first part) - The development of anthropological scholarship didn't happen outside of a context - Colonial context and decolonial mobilization - Growing critique on representation and discourse - Reflexive turn within Anthropology - Representation draws on exclusions, omissions and oppositions (Asad 1973) - Represention has performative effects - Anthropology in a decolonizing world - Not only understanding how the world around us changes in the 20^th^ century - anthropology as a child of colonialism - Goes along an epistemological interrogation in the way in which the global south has been presented - \~theoretical debates and changes in social sciences and anthropology - Interpretative turn, understanding societies in their histories, rise of structuralism - Self-critique reflexive turn: understand that the concepts they use are contributing to processes of othering - Ex. Fabian: time and the other and the denial of coevalness - Part 2: how have these developments played played out in anthropology - Orientalism (discourse and post-structuralism) - Crisis of representation and reshaping of ethnography - Feminism and anthropology - Part 3: how has anthropology reinvented itself - Posthuman anthropology - Anthropology of the state and humanitarianism Situating Edward Said --------------------- - Palestinian scholar: identified very strongly as a Palestinian - Palestinian question very central in his life - Symptomatic in a transition in which scholars from 'the global south' will increasingly start to take part to the academic conversation - Different relationship with the colonial enterprise: from we study the other the other is part of the conversation - Early childhood: between Jerusalem and Cairo - Wealthy family usually the case for those scholars in the global south - send to the US for education (high school and university) - PhD at Harvard, position in Columbia university elite universities - Does not come from anthropology but very important influence on other disciplines like anthropology - Actually comparative literature discipline - But really important for post-colonial studies !! - Christian Palestinian autobiography out of place - Parents: intermediate position - Didn't give him a classic arab name desire for the west, 'modernity' - He and his parents lived the Palestinian struggle - He will be very aware of the contradiction between his lifeworld in the middle east and the representation of that same middle east in the USA - Cognitive dissonance: how can you reconcile these two different experiences? - He has his own cosmopolitan lifestyle between different countries, educated in a western environment, western high culture (played piano) and with and important story of disposition and exile and a history of colonialism - But in the us: the Palestinians are the terrorists - "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile's life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever" (p. 173) - triggers an interest in presentation and it's power, the power of words and discourses - How does academic literature participate in the reproduction and the maintenance of colonial modes of subjugation - 1\. Comes from the global south and participates to the conversation in the global north - 2; belongs to an elite that can do that - 3\. doesn't just restrict his engagements to academic work but is also actively engaged - 1977-1991: involved in Palestinian national council - Not only scholarly work - Also essay and autobiographies - other ways of doing scholarship: scholarship you produce also integrate you you are also part of that, also about you - \~positionality, breaks with the idea of objectivity Michel Foucault (1926 -- 1984): notion of discourse --------------------------------------------------- - Chief theorist of relationship "knowledge" and "power" - Applied to the question of Sciences - Madness and Civilization (1961) - Discipline and Punish (1975) - History of the Sexuality (1976) - Key concepts: - Microphysics of power & productivity of power - Biopolitics & governmentality - Anti-Humanism - Radical Constructivism - His work has opened the door for a different understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power - Early period: the order of things, the archeology of power - emphasis on how the relationship to the world/environment is connected to systems of knowledge that are particular for certain period in time and certain histories - Critique of ideology - Concept of Ideology - \~political discourse - But can be found everywhere: religious, cultural context - Removed from realty? - Something wrong about it: made believe, wishful thinking, interested - science: real, disinterested - Collective: way of seeing the world - Way of representing the world - Propaganda the truth - Presupposes a distinction between "true" vs "false" knowledge - Presupposes an idea of knowledge that is devoid of power - Marxist theory: notion of ideology is understood as that that allows capitalist modes of production to function - Why are people accepting to be exploited?... - picture them an ideology that is false but that they live to - The cruel optimism: just work hard enough = enough money to buy what you really want (bourgeois lifestyle idea) - promoted by political elite, film industry - Infrastructure - Vs superstructure: ideological structure that serves the interest of a political elite - First interruption points of Foucault's work is around the concept of ideology - Sees it as problematic: presupposes a distinction between true and false knowledge - Presupposes a relationship to power that is absent from knowledge , disinterest - Ideology is interested: want to achieve something - Quote - "behind the concept of ideology there is a kind of nostalgia for a quasi-transparent form of knowledge, free from all error and illusion" Foucault cited in Rabinow 1996: 35 - Idea that knowledge can be pure is a lure - every knowledge, discourse is necessarily entangled with a specific version of truth - = first interruption point - Opposes distinction between true and false knowledge - And proposed that no knowledge can be devolved of power - For him our relationship to the world is always limited and mediated by specific selection and omissions - Discourse - Not simply speech or language - Also entails a materiality (dispositif) - Regularity is at the heart of how discourse works (system of association and correspondance -- structuralism) - What can be said and what can be heard - What cannot be said or is inaudible? - How does that change over time? - Question of the selection what can be said, seen heard = at the heart of how discourse works - our understanding of the world is always selective: what we think is legible, hearable at a specific time in history - about how speech and language come together - Ensemble if structural associations and regularity - Ex. Illnesses & discourse of Domenic possession: - Today: symptoms of often crying, being anxious, not being able to hear what people say to you (blockage), not getting out of bed - possessed: need to exorcise you - But no hearable in a society that is structured around a biomedical system of health - burnout fits that society and that discourse - Diagnosis that is validated by the infrastructure of sciences we accept it as a determiner of truth - about understanding how these different elements came together to find our version of truth - What is sayable and not sayable at a particular moment of history? (cf. explaining catastrophies) - What can/t be said is not simply a matter of individual will or choice - Rather, embedded in a larger structure of what is thinkable, hearable, sayable = power - What are the structures of intellibility? And how do these change across time and culture? - What counts as relevant is tied with a larger network of expertise, evaluation, review that is historically situated and specific etc... (e.g. science, journalism (a particular kind)) - The construction of 'truth' through a set of protocols which are also conventions - *Regimes of truth:* system or procedures that organise and regulate what counts as true (or real). It is often an interplay between different types of discourses, institutions (scientific, legal, media etc.) and actors. - For Foucault: historical and not cultural - Changes over time - What is said and can be said is not a result of individual choice seen as crazy - What we collectively can achieve of an think of a being real an true is embedded in a larger structure in what is seeable, hearable and even internalized - Foucault: how that emerges historically - Understanding how different discourses emerge - e.g. Biomedical regime of truth (occasional accomodation of other views on healing) - Christian Suhr (2019) - Descending with Angels: ethnographic study on how people navigate between different regimes of truth (posession vs. schizophrenia) - Research with Muslims form the middle east - Exorcism within the tradition - Looks how people navigate between different regimes of truths - Mental illness: regime of truth - Go to the hospital,... - But also go to the Iman because they have in yin within them - for many people in the world these regimes of truth cohabit - Principle of rarefaction and episteme - Only focus on specific things - Not a matter of "conspiracy theory"! - Foucault is structuralist - ≠ Said - Understand how a consensus is created around what is sayable and not-sayable through the coalescence between different actors (dispositif) - Not about control but about selections - Processes of inclusion and exclusion - Quote "What I am doing is thus neither a formalization nor an exegesis, but an archaeology: that is to say, as its name indicates only too obviously, the description of an archive. (...) I mean **the set of rules which at a given period and for a given society define**: (1) the limits and forms of the sayable (...), (2)of conversation (...) of memory (...) of reactivation (...) of appropriation" Foucault, M. (1968) "Politics and the study of discourse", pp. 59-60 - History: what is remembered from a different moment in history - What is materially present: archive - Know the story of those who are in power = their story is archived - The archive determines our understanding of the past - limits the sayable - Archive as good tool of how discourses work (also in the contemporary) - Knowledge and power - Truth is always embedded in power structure - Power understood as that which allows things to stand in relation with each other (and thus also not include other elements -- cast them out) - Power is about the selection that is made in telling a particular story (not conscious, no masterplan) - Principle of rarefaction: what can(not) be heard - Principle of 'sorting out' -- evacuating, putting aside - Knowledge always embedded in power - Power is what allows for something to be possible, not just something that has an agenda - Ex. The archive - Ex. biomedical healing: evidence based - what counts a curative is subjected to very strict test, experiments that are also very expensive - Those who do not have those resources remain in the fringes (like the araveda) - Implication - Contra objectivist claims on science (science as detached from history) - Understand how science participates and/or accompanies existing regimes of truth - History of sexuality (1976) - Sexuality emerges as a 'question', as a 'discourse' - Not only in a rhetoric sense, but also in a material sense - Scientific & medicinal - Institutional - Educational - Moral - Subjectivity Key arguments orientalism ------------------------- - Orientalism is a discourse and a regime of truth - Video - Violence, stereotypes, - interesting how they are put in relationship to each other: from different time period, documentaries, fictions together they make sense - Orientalism start with an historical moment: the European colonization and occupation of the middle east - Eind of the 18^th^ century: coming of napoleon and the discovery of the pyramids - specific interest/fascination with also the ancient history - Start pharaonic expeditions, pre-Islamic - accompany a larger colonial expedition - Colonial relationship to the Muslim world - Far East: India (16th century), Indonesia (19th century) - Arab world: Egypt (1798-1801), Algeria (1830) & Middle-East (early 20th century) - Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: division of MENA region across colonial powers early 20th century - Definition orientalism - 3 different elements - 1\. Academic discipline: as it still exists (arabistique, orientalism as an academic discipline) - 2\. Style of thought - Ontological, epistemological: Fabians denial of coevalness - "Orientalism is a style of thought based upon **an ontological and epistemological distinction** made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident"" (3) - worlds are very distinct, but also the knowledge that is been produced in these worlds - 3\. Orient as a discourse - Quote *"My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage -- and even produce -- the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism, the orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action" (3)* - Orientalism is not about the orient, about the creation of it - Cannot escape it in the west - Central elements - 1\. A discourse that organizes the convergence between political, sociological, scientific, military... enterprise - That which organizes is and keeps it together - Needs to be a framework and a relevance - defines and predefines what we think is important and interesting - Why is everything a muslims woman does so interestingly to us? even more likely to get a funding for it of the university then when it is about for ex. Philippian women - Interested in a colonial enterprise - ≠ Foucault: discourse as a generic sense - Said: orientalism tied to colonialism - It's the regime of truth that makes colonialism possible - It's a discourse - 2\. Structures one's imaginative field: not a free subject of thought and action - 3\. Relationship of power (military power: difference with Foucault) - 4\. Orientalism is not the Orient - Examples of how orientalism has worked in history and continues to work - Colonial postcard: discourse of subversion but also seduction - Produced to attract colonial militars etc - Completely staged haram as a way to encourage soldiers to come The (Post-)Colonial Museum and the Representation of Self and Other =================================================================== - Theorizing of colonial discoursing becomes a big thing in the 1990's - Ex.comarofss - Representations of colonial enterprises around the turn of the century colonial subjects reprentensed in non- domestical envronments (ex. The jungle) - zie sv studocu Crisis of representation and etnography ======================================= ![](media/image26.jpeg)Partial Truth ------------------------------------ - Writing culture (1986): Picture *"No longer a marginal, or occulted dimension, writing has emerged as central to what anthropologists do both in the field and thereafter. The fact that it has not until recently been portrayed or seriously discussed reflects the persistence of an ideology claiming transparency of representation and immediacy of experience." (2)* - Try to write down events as quick as possible - Writes note with his back towards his research participants - One of the participants is looking at him taking notes - captured the changes relationship between the two: can no longer turn your back to them now - Rethinking etnogrpahy practice: writing as an action that creates a reality of its own - How can we think about etnography? - Second step in his introduction: what d o anthropologist produce? - Quote: ethnography as fiction *"To call ethnographies fictions may raise empiricist hackles. But the word as commonly used in recent textual theory has lost its connotation of falsehood, of something merely opposed to truth. **It suggests the partiality of cultural and historical truths, the ways they are systematic and exclusive**. Ethnographic writings can properly be called fictions in the sense of "something made or fashioned", the principal burden of the word's Latin root, fingere. But it is important to preserve the meaning not merely of making, but also of making up, of inventing things not actually real. Interpretative social scientist have recently come to view good ethnographies as "true fictions", but usually at the cost of weakening the oxymoron, reducing it to the banal claim that all truths are constructed. The essays collected here keep the oxymoron sharp. (...) In this view, more Nietzschean than realist or hermeneutic, all constructed truths are made possible by powerful "lies" or exclusion and rhetoric. **Even the best ethnographic texts -- serious, true fictions -- are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully control. Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial -- committed and incomplete**. This point is now widely asserted -- and resisted at strategic points by those who fear the collapse of clear standards of verification. But once accepted and built into ethnographic art, a rigorous sense of partiality can be a source of representational tact." " (6-7)* - Provocative statement - Should embrace that it is an ibterpretation an that it's partial - Transition from objectivity to partiality - Transition from accurate descriptions to interpretations - How do you understand this formulation: ethnography is "true fiction"? - How do you understand the final sentence: "Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial -- commited and incomplete"? - What is the value of ethnography in the light of these claims? - What does it mean to challenge claims of 'realistic descriptions' that are so central to science? - What does it mean to see your observation as an *interpretation*? - - Example of partial truth: football game Amsterdam - Different interpretation - Jews being attacked by muslims, anit-semitism - Or Isreali's being offensive towards Palestians - Hooligans who were destroying palestinan symbols - also says al lot about ho you look at the war in Palestine - What is the truth in this? - Anthropologist: be aware of this different perspectives and thrth and understand how yoy ourself are informed by a specific regime of truth - no neutral point of view - Implication - Transition from objectivity to partiality or true fiction *"The ethnographer's personal experiences, especially those of participation and empathy, are recognized as central to the research process, but they are firmly restrained by the impersonal standards of observation and "objective" distance" (13)* - Idea of the ethnographer who merely observes and describes becomes increasingly challenged - Growing attention for the positionality of the ethnographer, self-reflexivity as a genre Conclusion ---------- - Crisis of representation: situate and contextualise - Rise and emergence of ethnographic authority: a specific genre - Reflect on the partial status of ethnography - Emergence of reflexivity as a genre - Discussion: where does the notion of "objectivity" stand for research? Re-inventing etnography ======================= Introduction ------------ - Crisis of representation: Transition from objectivity to partiality or fiction (true fiction) - No longer the assumption that anthropologists have a solid overview of 'reality as it is' - 'Reality as it is' does not exist: its always a fragmented nature, incomplete that appears to us - Ethnography as an interpretation of events as they appeared and occurred - Critically aware of their own "partiality" and the limits of what they can say - How has ethnography sought to re-invent itself? Reflexivity and posisionality ----------------------------- - Quote Clifford *"The ethnographer's personal experiences, especially those of participation and empathy, are recognized as central to the research process, but they are firmly restrained by the impersonal standards of observation and "objective" distance" (13)* - The question of reflexivity becomes a new genre within anthropology - Reflecting on your own positionality, relation to the fieldsite and theme: how has that affected and shaped the ethnographic encounter? - ≠ Fieldworker interpretor - Anthropologist of merly observer - Positionality: what it allows you to see - See different things, questions - ≠limits - Paul Rabinow (1977) *"Culture is interpretation. The 'facts' anthropology, the material which the anthropologist has gone to the field to find, are themselves interpretation. The baseline data is already culturally mediated by the people whose culture we, as anthropologist, have come to explore. Facts are made -- the word comes from the Latin factum, "made" -- and the facts we interpret are made and remade. Therefore they cannot be collected as if they were rocks, picked up and put into cartons and shopped home to be analyzed in the laboratory" (150)* - Experience of research in Morocco as an American Jewish researcher - Completely demystified ethnography - Enters the field trough the margins - interpretate each other all the time - facts are themselves interpretations - People he talks to are interpretating their reality - What they show him is what they think he finds interesting - constantly makes interpretations of interpretations Dialogical model ---------------- - Understanding ethnography as an outcome of dialogue - Voice of the research participants emerges in a much more explicit way - Lassiter (2001) - About possession - What is possessed? When is he possessed? - Shift to the dialogical model following the crisis of representation within anthropology - Anthropologist is no longer the detached observer, but hermeneutical model becomes more explicitly written into the text - Element that is important because it brings this interpretative process in - Product of exchange between researcher and the participator - almost a co-author: came to the insights because of the dialogue - Wouldn't come up to them alone - Hermeneutical process is central: the 'insights' anthropologists gain is through an recurrent dialogue and exchange with the 'respondent' - Voicing becomes more important -- respondent move from being represented to also receiving a 'voice' in the representational process - The anthropologist's interpretative work is also rendered visible in that hermeneutical process (the ethnographer is also observed) - Rupture with the observer/observed vs. subject/object duality in classical ethnography - Observer / subject = anthropologist observed/object = native - Ethnography is rather the outcome of this intersubjective encounter and exchange - Quote Lassiter *"If we take the dialogic metaphor of "reading alongside the natives" to its next logical step, beyond its representational role to the use of dialogue in the actual practice of writing, then what happens when we collaboratively read and interpret the ethnographic text alongside our consultants as it develops -- not just sitting down to verify quotes, for example (which is merely bureaucratic), but using the developing text as the centerpiece of evolving ongoing conversations? Might this more completely extend the dialogic metaphor to its political implications?" (139-140)* - Language changes: research participants interlocketers - Can we extend this dialogue in the way we design this product? Collaborative anthropologies ---------------------------- - Anthropological process where the research participants are actively included - Language also changes: teachers, consultants, friends - Lassiter (2001) - Research among the Kiowa native americans - Overresearched population - Anthropology of Indian americans: very long history - Foundational to Anthrolopogy - More and more they refuse to collaborate with anthropoligsts - At two levels: - In the process of producing an ethnographic text - what version are you producing? - Including the interpretation of the research participants in the production of the text (feedback from your interlocutors) - Example of Elaine Lawless (1988) - Reciprocal ethnography - Feminist perspective determined her reading of the female pastor's agency (superwomen in a man's world) - Critically challenged by her main respondent and friend - Participant was not happy about the end report - In the research questions and research process - what research questions do you ask in the first place? - The question of ethics and politics: how does the latter guide the ethnographic decision making? - What research question will you center on? - What information will you include/exclude? - Whom will you speak to? - Are those decisions taken individually (or with academic colleagues) or in co-consultation with your research participants? - Ultimately: who do you write for? - what you're going to work on is really about the dialogue with your interloketers - Charter Lassiter (2005) - Our primary responsibility is to the community of consultants with whom we work - We shall maintain academic integrity by creating faithful representation - We shall establish good rapport with the community so that future collaborative studies can be undertaken. This project is not just about our book. - All project participants should be aware of the study's products. Materials are only archived with the participants' consent. Participants have rights to have copies of their own interviews. - We shall willingly and openly communicate intentions, plans, goals, and collaborative processes of the project - We shall remain open to our consultants' experiences and perspectives, even when their views are different from ours - We have a responsibility to the community, our respective disciplines, and our future audience to fulfill our commitments to finish what we have started: the book, The Other Side of Middletown Ethnographic refusal and reserve -------------------------------- - Abu Lughod - American Anthropologist - Reflects on her attempt on a renewed version on veiled sentiments - Entangled lives - Spend 20 years with her interlocketers - Puts her initial project on the side because of what her interlocketers wanted - Demystify the idea that you come to your fieldwork alone negotiated project with your participants - Savage slots: global transformations - Savage slot: the benchmark/foundational idea around which anthropology has come to develop itself as a discipline - Study the other in order to understand the question that we have ourselves - We know who we are by relating to the others - Quote dia 18 - The other is also here in the west - Abu Lughod draws on audra simpsons concept of ethnographic refusal - Refers to anthropologists who refused to give ethnographic details about their fieldwork - Representational sovereignty: the sovereignty of their own life's and the stories of their own life's - Discussion and conclusion ------------------------- - Feminism and anthropology ========================= Introduction ------------ - Feminism as an important movement that accompanies the transformation in anthropology (besides decolonization) - First wave feminism: demand for equal political participation - Sufragettes-movement - Started during the FR - Second wave feminism: attention for the question of reproduction and labor - Anthropology increasingly concerned with this question - Awkward relationship between anthropology and feminism (Strathern) - How anthropologists who worked with women adopt the same voice as feminists - But also: not always the same objective

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