CONNECTIONS IN AFRICAN KNOWLEDGE
Proposed
sub-programme within the Theme Group under construction:
‘Connections
and Transformations in Africa’,
African Studies Centre,
Leiden, the
Netherlands, November 2006
this is the discursive
text extracted from the PowerPoint presentation, so without the suggestive
photographs and background, but with the advantage that it is easy to print and
read; click on the following link to go to the presentation itself at: http://www.ascconnections.bravehost.com/knowledge/connections_in_african_knowledge_2006.htm
and click here to return
to the index page of the Connections and Transformation programme
Wim van Binsbergen
(African Studies Centre, Leiden /
Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Vignette and background
illustration
•
The same picture is seen in the righthand side of our
background illustration
•
The lefthand side is occupied by a picture of Professor
Valentin Mudimbe, one of Africa’s leading intellectuals today, literary writer,
philosopher, and author of, among others, The Invention of Africa, in
which he explores the appropriation of Africa in the construction of, mainly,
North Atlantic knowledge; photo © 2005 V. Ling/V. Mudimbe
•
The other two background illustrations have great antiquity
on African soil, and have been argued (van Binsbergen 2006) to depict
identifiable mythical content
•
In the lower centre shows the red ochre block from Blombos
Cave, South Africa, c. 70,000 years old; the incised pattern has been argued to
be evocative of Lightning Bird as one of the oldest and most widespread
mythemes worldwide; illustration courtesy: [ to be completed]
•
The far righthand side shows a Zimbabwean rock painting,
first described and interpreted by Frobenius, and here taken from Garlake 1995;
the mytheme illustrated is that of the connection between heaven and earth, a
major theme in African mythologies, as in West and Central Asian ones since c.
25000 BP
Contents: What ground are we
trying to cover in this presentation?
•
Introduction and background
•
Material technology as a difficult subject for
anthropologists/Africanists
•
A paradox
•
What is knowledge?
• Collective
representations as crucial, connecting forms of knowledge
•
Intermezzo: not one world-picture is the correct one, and African
world-pictures may in certain respects have a claim to greater truth
• Collective
representations as social technologies of knowledge
•
Conflictive versus connective modalities of knowledge
• Ways out of the
uncertainty of knowledge
•
(a) Divine sanction
•
(b) Initiation
•
(c) Judicial procedure
•
(d) Divination
•
The First Knowledge Revolution
•
Beyond relativism
•
Sandra Harding and the foundations of modern science:
hegemony or sound epistemological procedure?
•
What does this mean for African knowledge?
•
1. Disconnection.
•
2. Equivalence.
•
3. Multicentered universalism as the ultimate form of
global connectedness.
•
Some implications of the argument so far
•
(1) Pandora’s Box as the baseline of connecting knowledge
•
(2) How to characterise the Second Knowledge Revolution,
that of today?
•
(3) The first knowledge revolution never really took root
in African soil before the 20th century CE
•
(4) Myth as transregionally continuous knowledge
•
Conclusion: Two projects
•
Project 1. The current South-North collaboration in the production
of Africanist knowledge
•
Project 2. Old and new formats of connection in African
knowledge
•
References
1. Introduction and background
•
The overall Research Programme and Theme Group ‘Connections
and Transformations in Africa’,
•
looks at Africa from a present-day perspective but with a
strong historical awareness
•
stressing connecting technologies as a major aspect
of socio-cultural transformations
•
whilst aware that connecting technologies are not just
those in the obvious material sense
–
The footpath, the caravan, sailing boat, railroad,
airplane, cellphone, Internet, etc.
•
but also ‘ways of going about connecting people’ through
–
Strategies/technologies of space (conviviality/locality, or
its opposite, mobility),
–
Strategies/technologies of time (myth, tradition,
ethnicity, religion, music)
–
Strategies/technologies of management and conflict
regulation (kinship, the economy, formal organisations, the state, law)
2. Material technology as a difficult subject for
anthropologists/Africanists
•
Many (although by no means all) Africanists are
anthropologists, or general
social
scientists
•
Material technologies are rather difficult topics to be
studied by for
present-day
Africanists:
•
Technologies belong mainly to the study of material culture
•
With the emergence of classic social anthropology (c.
1930s), the study of material culture was largely relegated to the periphery of
the disciplines involved: ‘armchair and museum ethnography’ (to be pronounced with distinct disdain)
•
As a paradigm, classic anthropology
–
with its emphasis on fieldwork, presentist and localist
horizons, and the minutiae of social relations, and in varying degrees
enlightened by the relativist notion of culture
•
supplanted the once dominant paradigm of diffusionism
–
Diffusionism would trace the spatio-temporal connections
–
not so much between peoples, styles and institutions,
–
but particularly between objects
–
which brought material technologies within the orbit of the
diffusionists
–
Even though their objects were largely conceived as
detached from their historic local cultural setting
–
for which diffusionism had no theory yet
–
So that it never got round to the study, let alone
understanding, of socio-cultural transformations
2.1. A paradox
–
Modern Africanists are now in the process of re-inventing
objects, their material technologies, and their spatio-temporal ramifications,
–
and to develop a professional feeling for objects
that was absent in the classic paradigm;
–
But while they are thus recovering part of the ground once
intensively studied, but since vacated, by diffusionism (NB. globalisation
studies are often neo-diffusionist!),
–
they are in principle much better equipped than their
diffusionist predecessors,
–
to begin to appreciate the cultural embeddedness,
and the social relations involved in objects, material technologies, and
spatio-temporal ramifications
–
And to situate these in a theoretically informed context,
not of mere displacement of objects, but of genuine social transformation
Our proposed Theme Group on
Connections and Transformations is facing the challenges implied in this
complex disciplinary history of ideas
Knowledge is among the principal aspects of
this challenge.
2.2.
A perspective on knowledge
•
Within the proposed Research Programme and Theme Group ‘Connections
and Transformations in Africa’, the present sub-programme concentrates on knowledge.
•
Above I outlined four dimensions of our proposed research
–
Material technologies
–
Technologies of space
–
Technologies of time
–
Technologies of management
• but this was not
the list of our four sub-programmes; knowledge was not one of them.
•
The point is that knowledge is a ubiquitous aspect of all
human existence
•
It is found in all these four dimensions (and in – probably
– all others we can think of)
•
‘Knowledge’ may be claimed to offer a particular,
illuminating perspective on Connections and Transformations
•
So we have at least two tasks:
•
to identify the knowledge perspective
•
To render the knowledge perspective amenable to concrete
empirical research, by operationalising it into a few Africans research
projects
3. What is knowledge?
•
I have called knowledge an ubiquitous aspect of the human
existence
•
Little wonder that the question as to what constitutes
knowledge, is at the heart of academic life, science, philosophy
•
An entire branch of philosophy, epistemology, deals
with the nature of knowledge, and with the criteria by which to assess the
validity and scope of knowledge claims
•
We can scarcely summarise that entire, immensely complex and
difficult field in a nutshell, but neither can we avoid the theoretical and
conceptual exercise altogether in the present context
•
The fact that our proposed research project is, per
definition, a project of specialist knowledge construction in its own right,
lends a double layer, a complicating and confusing element of reflexivity, to
our endeavours here
•
If we can agree that action is the event in which an
human individual’s material corporality makes itself felt (upon the world,
other humans, and herself/himself),
•
then knowledge may be said to be everything that
makes up that individual’s not-primarily-material, not-primarily-corporal,
existence in so far as it leads up to, produces, and evaluates action.
•
However, such a conception of knowledge is far too broad
for a limited research project limited in space, time and personnel; far too
vague and general for a research project that is to be empirical, in the first
place; and not evidently rooted in a specifically African problematic.
•
Further steps therefore are required to enumerate specific
forms of knowledge, and to identify, among these, the ones that are most
strategically situated to highlight our central problematic and to enhance our
understanding of ‘Africa’, past and present
•
In the most general sense (cf. Heidegger, Mall), knowledge
may be defined as the coincidence between human representation on the one hand,
and Being on the other hand
–
– i.e. if we think, say, portray, act under the assumption,
of what is in fact the case, then our inner world of mental representations is
in concert with reality, in other words, then we know, then Truth is a
quality of what we think, say, portray, and assume.
•
However, such terms as ‘Being’, ‘reality’, ‘inner world’,
‘mental representations’, ‘truth’, ‘fact’, are extremely problematic, in many
ways, including
–
the private, individual nature of such postulated inner
knowledge (of which others have only hearsay evidence)
–
as against the presumably convergent, presumably
invariable, response from the non-human world outside us
–
the potentially distortive effect of language, let alone of
plurality of languages
–
the inherently indirect and distortive nature of all
representation (Kant)
–
the mystical, aggregate nature of ‘Being’ and ‘reality’
–
the evidently divergent nature of truths, from one
individual to another, and from one group/culture/society/historical period to
another
•
A favourite definition of knowledge that avoids some of
these issues, is the well-known adage ‘knowledge is justified true belief’
•
Gettier (1963) has qualified this definition in arguing
that we may need not always believe what we know, etc., but in general the
definition remains illuminating
•
For us as Africanist social scientists, working at the
interface between continents and between cultures, what is particularly
useful in this definition is that it highlights the cultural embeddedness of
knowledge:
•
E.g. a witchcraft idiom such as
–
‘my colleague is a witch, he made my computer crash by
immaterial means and thus prevented me from finishing my book in time and
earning the promotion he and I were both after’
•
cannot constitute knowledge in our own North Atlantic
academic circles, because no university council or disciplinary committee in
this part of the world and in 2006 would seriously consider such individual
belief true and justified
–
But change ‘witch’ into ‘communist’ (USA 1950s) or
‘terrorist’ (USA etc. 2000s), and see what happens!
•
However, in the North Atlantic region in other periods (cf.
The European Witchcraze, Salem Possessed etc.) there was no doubt
that such an idiom addressed proper knowledge
•
And the same is true for, e.g., most African settings
attested in modern times
•
The belief in God is an even clearer case
•
And so is the belief, in Western Europe, in the mysterious
illness-causing agent named ‘cold’, inhabiting especially drafty windy places,
attracted by open windows, etc.
Contrary to what most (Western)
epistemologists…. believe (!),
•
whatever is a justified truth claim within a
particular spatio-temporal socio-cultural setting,
•
would not be so justified, or may often not be justified at
all, in many other spatio-temporal socio-cultural settings we know of
By the same token, whether a
particular belief may be considered true by the social environment to which it
is communicated, depends
•
Not only, and (except among professional epistemologists)
not in the first place, on the formal validity of the epistemological
procedures underpinning such a belief,
• But also, and
particularly, on the truth-producing, world-creating nature of any given
spatio-temporal socio-cultural setting (which comes close to Wittgenstein’s
concept of the life-world)
4. Collective representations as crucial, connecting forms of knowledge
•
Collectivities (societies, cultures, world religions, classes,
cults) are largely machines for the production of self-evidence, in
other words for the production of collective representations (Durkheim 1912)
that not so much secondarily represent, but that create in the
first place, the local life-world.
•
In that particularistic local world, God, angels, the
devil, witches, ancestors, elementary particles, Extraterrestrials, UFOs and
their Abductees, the Axis of Evil, race, ‘cold’, are made to exist,
–
not because they directly present themselves to the senses
of the individual members of such collectivities (they do not),
–
but because these members are encoded (often through
specific bodily strategies of discipline and repetition) to spuriously connect specific
sensory perceptions of real events (illness, death, misfortune, meteorological
phenomena, natural disasters etc.) , with these imperceptible agents.
And
(but this is a mere aside immaterial to our argument) we do not even know
for sure that this is a one-way process only:
– That, on the one
hand, sense impressions based on real events are, spuriously, culturally
patterned into collective representations, but not the other way around :
–
That, on the other hand, collective representations bring
about, not just (as is understood) sense impressions – as individual or
collective hallucinations – , but that these collective representations have
also some slight effect (in the form of creatio ex nihilo,
psychokinesis, whatever) upon the very empirical materiality that then brings
about these sense impressions
4.1. Intermezzo:not one
world-picture is the correct one, and African world-pictures may in certain
respects have a claim to greater truth
Perhaps the power of collective
human imagination is such that it somehow, sometimes, manages to produce, in
the real world out there, the illusory effects we believe in, turning them from
illusory agents into genuine agents; this is, in other words, the faith that
may move mountains: miracles
Of course, the belief in the
possibility of miracles as against the belief in immutable natural laws,
separates the modern world-picture from the premodern; but what about the
postmodern one?
This is part of a much longer
argument of which I can only indicate the bare outlines here – I am not even
sure that it is opportune here, but it implies a vindication of African
knowledges.
As
a trained spirit medium in the Southern African tradition (sangoma), as
well as a senior North Atlantic academic, I have extensive experience in two
disparate knowledge domains, each of which is constructed on the basis of
fundamentally different premises as to how the world and the human existence
are structured.
•
Specifically, in (a) the North Atlantic context, our
collective representations stipulate that (by virtue of the transcendent mode
of thinking we will turn to shortly – one that invites sharp and insurmountable
distinctions) the individual mind is a black box that has only one means of
access: our senses, defined to be only five; and we have Kant’s critical
philosophy, over the past 200 years built into our very collective
representations, according to which the mental image we build through the
senses, is necessarily very imperfect and distortive.
•
On the other hand, in the world-picture of (b) Southern
African religious specialists (and in many other premodern settings in Africa
and worldwide) the individual mind is considered to be porous, and may
self-evidently share contents with other human minds living and dead, and with
other, non-human existences.
Working
as a sangoma, and (with the aid of the ritual and mental technology of sangomahood,
in other words, with the aid of ancestors, whose illusory nature as active
agents is then eclipsed from my mind…) temporarily stressing (b) in my own
experience and self-definition, I have found the minds of my clients to be
effectively porous, even across huge distances, and to be readable like a book
in twilight, often with verifiable results. However, reverting to (a), to a
situation where telepathy cannot be publicly acknowledged according to dominant
North Atlantic collective representations (even though experiences reminiscent
of telepathy are quite common also there), minds are closing around me, and so
does my own, and even (or, especially) the will is incapable of producing the
porousness with which I am so familiar under (b). So it looks as if the
world has various and variable faces, and that it turns to us the particular
face that best matches the expectations with which we approach it. In line
with well-known implications of quantum mechanics (popularised to the
macrolevel by Pauli and Jung, among others), knowledge about the world is not a
constant based on the allegedly immutable feature of the world (‘natural laws’)
alone, but is a variable product of a specific human observer (with personal
and collective preconceptions) and the world. There is an objective, universal
truth in sangoma knowledge that acknowledges an aspect of the world
about which North Atlantic science is ignorant.
5. Collective
representations as social technologies of knowledge
•
Collective representations, as forms of knowledge, have
their binding effect upon the communities in which they are found through some
process of externalisation, where the individual minds of humans,
otherwise uncontrollable and wandering off in all kinds of directions where the
imagination may take them, are disciplined in one direction by social control.
The externalisation of collective representations, therefore, is among the most
crucial aspects of the social technology of knowledge in premodern situations.
•
How does this work? Durkheim’s brilliant analysis in Les
formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912), even though based on a
total misreading of the Australian material, still seems to capture the
essense. Below we will inspect a selection of well-known African situations of
the production and management of knowledge (divine sanction, judicial process,
divination) in which this question may be given concrete answers.
•
In general, we may say that the human individual’s
corporality, by social pressures of conformity, is made to engage, regularly or
at crucial moments in life, in specific ‘special events’ instituted by the
local culture, such as ceremonies, rites, sessions of a ritual nature such as
divination, prayer, possession dance, musical performances, judicial protocol.
These events are highly structured and highly controlled. Their corporal aspect
is reinforced by the use of specific objects that mark these externalisations
situations, and constitute their material technology: special rooms or edifices
set apart for this purpose, musical instruments, garments, paraphernalia,
divination and healing tools, etc. These events
make explicit reference, also at the non-specialist level, to the
contents of the collective representations in question, and in these public
situations the individual has no option but to display obeisance vis-à-vis
these collective representations. This equips the individual with at least
minimum awareness of and deference vis-à-vis these binding elements, whose
traces are stored not only mentally but also corporally. The complex,
externally controlled and stage-directed (in other words, highly performative)
corporal experience within the ‘special
event’, the confrontation between the body and the senses with the special
space and the material objects, produces inevitably a sense of hightened
experience of reality (that part of the experience is, in fact, real); and that
sense of reality is then transferred, secondarily and illusory, onto the
collective representations evoked in the ‘special events’ – endowing these
collectiverepresentations, too (cf. Geertz 1966) , with an impression of
tangible reality they do not objectively possess. The result is: social
connection, or what used to be described by structural-functional sociology as
‘normative integration’ (Parsons 1937). The individual mind may still wander
off in all directions, and will do so (religious anthropologists have often
been amazed by the lack of consensus between their informants’
conceptualisations of the sacred in private interviews), but the social
technology of externalisation has enforced a minimum of consensus at least for
that which is publicly mediated by their actors also outside ritual situations,
e.g. in everyday informal conversations.
•
We are now in a better position to appreciate the relation
between knowledge and action.
•
Action is where the human existence, through its
corporality, engages in direct contact with the givens of reality (in one’s own
body, in and through other humans, in and through the non-human world). To Marx
we owe an inspiring materialist theory of action and knowledge whose continued
relevance is, of course, not eclipsed by events in recent social history such
as the collapse of state communism in 1989. Action (‘praxis’) is the only
source of valid knowledge, for it is in Man’s engagement with the world (in
Marx’s too narrow view: through production) that the human existence takes
shape, and from which it depends in the most literal sense.
•
This is at the back of my affirmation (1999/2003) that
philosophy is much more of an empirical knowledge than most philosophers admit;
in the development of an original yet intersubjective language forged to
articulate crucial aspects of the contemporary experience (usually with
extension to the past and the future) – for this is how I define philosophy –
philosophy usually does not just dwell on formal procedure but also seeks to
state ‘what is the case’ (Wittgenstein). Only knowledge procedures ultimately
based on action (research, measurement, experience, debate) can tell us what
reality is like. Only kites that have been tested on a windy beach, can make a
claim to flying.
•
This also drives home the vital significance, for
knowledge, of (a) objects and of (b) our having a body: without being able to
constrain and harness knowledge entirely, at least these two givens allow us,
nay force us, to ground our knowledge (they occupy space we do not, and if we
touch, hit, eat etc. them our body registers that) and thus to lend practical
validity to our knowledge
•
Yet the socio-cultural construction of a life-world never
stops at that which is empirically validated by the interaction between body
and objects; typically, that construction endows with self-evidence, (1) many
products of knowledge that have stood the empirical test of body-object
interaction and (2) many more that have not. As long as we are inside that
life-world, we cannot tell the difference between (1) and(2)!
•
The anthropologist is privileged in that his/her boundary
crossing occasionally affords him the possibility to discriminate between (1)
and (2), but usually at high costs of cultural learning investment,
subjectivity, disorientation, social penalties in either reference group (at
home or in the field), and hence homelessness.
•
The epistemologist seeks to formulate surer, saver, more
readily available and more objective procedures for such discrimination
6. Conflictive versus connective modalities of knowledge
•
Against this background, ‘true or false’, ‘justified or
unjustified’, ‘local or universal’, are only secondary attributes of knowledge.
•
These attributes (labels) divide: they indicate some of the
several axes along which knowledge invites confrontation, conflict,
subjugation/hegemony, and rebellion
•
a culture, a society, is a web of knowledge, interwoven,
yet immensely varying, and contradictory
•
Given the initially private and incontrolled nature of
individual knowledge, and the capability of the human imagination to fly off in
all directions, knowledge is a potentially divisive and centrifugal force
–
Little wonder that in many societies, especially in the
African context, collectively recognised superior knowledge (such as that of
ritual, divinatory and therapeutic specialists) was closely associated with
outsidership and (like the main other positions of outsidership: kings,
backsmiths, traders) have often had connotations of sorcery, of utter evil –
connotations that might lead to ostracism and lynching
• So within the context
of our proposed sub-programme we have to ask the central question: under
what conditions can knowledge be a connecting force, and a force of social
transformation, in the African context?
•
Knowledge as a connecting force: The answer to this part of the
question has already been indicated, and (from what we flatter outselves to be
our privileged position, which I will soon criticise) it is slightly depressing:
socially connecting knowledge is in the first place knowledge contained in
collective representations, that are generally shared within a community, and
that produce a self-evident ‘world-picture’ (Weltanschauung);
the depressing aspect lies in the fact that,
as modernist academic outside observers, of our own society and especially of
African societies, we have often found the contents of the collective
representations of others, once reinterpreted into our own external
discourse and then taken literally, to be so much at variance with our own
collective representations (those that are informed by modern science,
secularisation etc.), that we can only considers the others’ collective
representations to be, not valid pictures of reality, but merely instruments of
social domination, of a stultifying tradition, of a patently untrue conception
of the world, nature, the human body, etc.
However,
do we have the right to impose our own collective representations to that
extent? Or is more involved – are some collective representations, possibly
including our own, truer to reality than others?
•
Knowledge as a force of social transformation: If knowledge as collective
representation is clearly a force, both of connection and of conservatism, it
is the rise of new knowledge that can act as a force of social transformation.
Such know knowledge often comes from the
outside, from North Atlantic modernity, and this is largely and rightly also the
perspective of our proposed programme. However, there are also endogenous
forces at work. Some of my first research was on C African prophets (Mupumani,
Lenshina, Shimbinga, Lubumba; van Binsbergen 1981), and I found that they had
managed to fundamentally shake local collective representations by presenting
new knowledge, dreamed up on the basis of their own personal creative struggle
with the contradictions of the times. Braving tradition (as well as colonial
and missionary oppression), after their inner struggle these prophets were
involved in a struggle with public opinion, in which they were partly
successful to the extent to which they succeeded in securing, and retaining, a
following, and build an organisation managing and spreading the new knowledge.
The story of early Christianity and early Islam is scarcely different.
7. Ways out of the uncertainty of knowledge
We have seen that knowledge is
precarious, contested, that there is no obvious, universally binding
distinction to be made between ‘factual knowledge that is in agreement with the
fact, with reality’, and private and collective flights of the imagination.
‘Reality’, ‘facts’, are in themselves desparate constructs of our lack of an
Archimedean fixed point. We usually take recourse to use our own
self-evidences, our own collective representations, in order to judge the
knowledge of others outside our own community, but that does not free our own
self-evidences from the suspicion that these, too, are largely or wholle
illusory.
Are we then forever to be
impressioned in sham knowledge whose truth value we cannot determine? Is there
no way to know the truth – a truth that is more than a private or collective
illusion?
(a) Divine sanction
The appeal to ancestral tradition
or (as among the ancient Sumerians, Etruscans, Hebrews, Christians, Muslims,
etc.) a specific personal revelation (often divine), is a sign that people in
many different spatio-temporal contexts have often felt the need for a solid
foundation that put their truths beyond doubt – that afforded them true
knowledge.
As far as Africa is concerned, the
mytheme of the connection between heaven and earth (initially self-evident in
the time of the beginning, then disastrously destroyed, then partly restored by
rain, kings, animal messengers, tools and seeds dropping from heaven etc.) has
been one of the central themes in mythology.
And for the early historic African
past, we are vaguely informed on the Ancient Egyptian Houses of Life (prw ckh),
temple colleges where specialist knowledge from ritual procedure to law,
divination, healing and procedures securing the afterlife was managed (often
also in written form), always under divine dispensation, especially of the god
Thoth – but already as a form of the path-breaking package of writing, the
state, organised priesthood, and science, that was to bring about the first
knowledge revolution in history – see below.
(b) Initiation
In Africa and elsewhere, initiation
has constituted a major way of imparting fundamental knowledge that, as
collective representation (even if not general but privileged, e.g. to
initiates of a particular gender and grade), is a major connecting force in
society. The secrets imparted at initiation may appear to be empty to the
outsider (de Jong 2000), but they do bind the initiates nonetheless. An usually
there is a real and invaluable contents, in the form of central myths
establishing and grounding the local life-world, major intrasocietal rules and
divisions, often in combination with a profound physical experience (mutilatory
or otherwise) powerful enough to imprint initiation as crucial connecting event
in the body and in the personal experience.
(c) Judicial procedure
But these collective
mythico-religious strategies are not the only ways out of the uncertainty of
knowledge. There are other methods that because of their lack of reliance on
collective representations, are quite promising from the point of view of our
own academic perspective.
There is, for instance, the
judicial methods of deliberation and cross-examination as found in most African
and West Asian local-level courts of law – one of the sources, I am inclined to
think, of specialised philosophical dispute. What is interesting here is the
attempt to establish the validity of statements, not by an appeal to a shared
collective representation, but by a painstaking reconstruction of a course of
concrete events known to some but not to all. Of course, court cases are in
order when the community balances between connection and disruption,
and when the appeal to collective representations alone has evidently failed to
bring all persons concerned into the societal harness of consensus. Then,
knowledge specific not only to the spatio-temporal features of the community as
a whole, butto the concrete persons involved and the concrete matter at hand,
is take recourse to in order to re-connect, sometimes also in order to
negotiate a situation of such fundamental social transformation that the
existing collective representations have lost their compelling connecting
power.
(d) Divination
Other methods, often remarkably
close to deliberation and cross-examination typical of the court of law,
comprise the quest for divinatory revelation, that all other Africa
constitutes a major way in which notions of truth and validity are locally
conceptualised.
Some forms of divination (e.g.
trance divination) rely on altered states of consciousness induced by
respiration and musical techniques, rather than by an elaborate material
apparatus to be used with great specialist knowledge.
Most forms of African divination
however are of the latter type, and the constitutes African technologies of
knowledge production whose detailed comparative and historical study has
occupied me since the late 1980s. Interestingly, both the proper handling of
the apparatus, and the management of the elaborate interpretative catalogues
(of specific configurations produced by the apparatus, coupled to specific
verbal interpretations in terms of individual and/or collective predicaments),
are predicated on the idea that proper technical and conceptual procedure will
produce truth – even though ultimately thought to be sanctioned by the oracular
god, ancestor or spirit held to preside over the oracle.
Again, it is not the general
condition of society that is administered by an appeal to generally held
collective representations, but the production of a specific truth, made to the
measure of a particular individual or group at a crucial moment in their
existence.
Here we have proper African
procedures to produce, by formal material technologies of knowledge, knowledge
that, however tailor-made to the persons and the situation, is yet considered
to be validitated by proper procedure. Typically, the knowledge of divinatory
procedure is collectively administered, by a guild of diviners, and apprentices
after their training with an individual diviner are to be tested by a
committee. The parallels with North Atlantic, or global, academic procedure are
not accidental and anecdotal, but go to the heart of the matter.
We need not quibble, in the present
connection, about the allegedly uniquely African nature of such material
divination systems, or alternatively (as a presumably scientific truth although
unwelcome to many African ears) their indeniable ramifications over vast areas
of space and time, from Southern Africa to West and Central Asia, even Northern
America, and from the Upper Palaeolithic rise of shamanism to the noble art of
geomancy at Renaissance courts in early modern Europe. I have spent a very long
time collecting, analysing, and provisionally publishing the available
evidence, the case is made, and the final book is being compiled.
One thing is uncontested,
meanwhile. It is in the Ancient Near East, particularly in Ancient Mesopotamia
in the third millennium BCE, that we find our first, and massively documented,
attestation of the type of procedural truth production that we find in
African divination, as a procedural way out from the prison of uncertainty of
knowledge that would not centrally appeal to collective representations.
Mesopotamian divination (initially especially for the king and the state, and
in the form of expicy, soon also astrological, and finally also for commoners,
individuals) emerged as the first form of science, governed by procedures in
direct response to concrete findings ‘out there’. The statements are of the
form still remotely echoed in the interpretative catalogues of African material
di
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