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
divination, e.g. of the following types
‘If the liver is found to exhibit a
black spot near the gall bladder…the king will be victorious’
‘If Venus resides in the moon’s
domain… the royal marriage will be disastrous for the state’
[ the examples are somewhat fictitious but true
to type; they will be replaced by authentic ones from the Assyriological
literature]
Diviner-scientists would be the
king’s principal advisers, and their catalogues would constantly be revised,
tested in the light of similar observations accumulated over centuries, and
augmented. We are here in the realm of science.
Its hallmark is not the lasting
validity of its assumptions and procedures (in the North Atlantic region,
astrology has been considered a pseudo-science since the Enlightenment), but the
fact that it is formal, intersubjective, specialist procedures that establish
truth, and not recourse to generality mediated as collective representations. The
procedural knowledge that is thus being produced is sui generis, and
whether it will prove to connect or to disconnect, to reinforce the status-quo
or to bring about fundamental transformation, -- these are not questions that
are allowed to determine the nature and the contents of the knowledge that is
thus being produced.
Ancient Mesopotamian divinatory
science must be understood as a crucial element in the path-breaking package
of writing, the state, organised priesthood, and science, that was to bring
about the first knowledge revolution in history.
8. The First Knowledge Revolution
What the First Knowledge Revolution
consisted of can be appreciated in many different ways. For some the invention
of the state is crucial, for others the one-sided activation of the left
cerebral lobe by the continuous processing of texts rather than the more
musical and emotive elemtns residing in the other lobe.
For me, the crucial thing is that
the package writing-state-organised priesthood-science greatly enhanced,
revolutionarised and transformed a tendency that had always been inherent full
speech from its very beginning: the capacity to vicariously refer to aspects
of the world that were not given in the situation at hand – to start out on
the path of transcendence, beyond the here and the now.
The First Knowledge Revolution was
a move, not towards centrifugality, more imagination, more uncertainty, the
uncontrolled private proliferation of knowledges – but towards control, not
only over the here and now, but also over that what was not here and not now
(legal texts, a tax register, a royal genealogy legitimating a heir, the
hundred names of God), in the hands of a select literate elite with –
inevitably – hieratic powers.
To the extent to which the history
of the North Atlantic region, since the Ancient Near East, has been the history
of transcendence (‘connective control through disconnection from the here and
now’), the fundamental conditions of this process are to be found in the First
Knowledge Revolution.
It took two and a half millennium
of growth, innovation, and cross-continetal influences, before the inchoate
procedural divinatory science of Ancient Mesopotamia could spawn, as its
distant offspring, the logic of Aristotle (largely compiled in his Organon) in which the outlines of formal, specialist
epistemology become clearly visible for the first time. In that logic, the
truth of a statement is to be assessed, not by inituitive appeal to common
sense or to sense data, but by complex formal procedures informing the
construction and evaluation of syllogisms. It was still only the foundation of
science which, as transforming knowledge, has changed the modern world more
than anything else.
We are now at a point where we can
pinpoint the relevance of particular forms of knowledge, for an understanding
of Africa’s past and present.
9. Beyond relativism
Cultural relativism emerged in the
middle of the 20th century (Herskowits, Kroeber, Kluckhohn)
Somewhat surprisingly: the USA that
had few colonial possessions but many client societies in Latin America, as
well as, domestically, an extensive fringe of racistically informed colour bar
and reservation life. (Probably European intellectuals emigrating to the USA
especially from Nazi Germany brought an injection of continental philosophical
echoes to USA anthropology, however, the roots of cultural relativism are
immaterial in the present context.)
Cultural relativism has been one of the most precious
fruits of the anthropological endeavour. It has tempted us to consider all
knowledge as in principle equivalent and sacrosanct, as to be respected in its
own right as the product of a particular culture.
Yet, African knowledges have not
been thus respected, but almost per definition despised, rejected as
fundamentally invalid.
Ever since early modern European
expansion, and especially since Hegel’s formal exclusion of Africa from the
communion of history, African knowledge has suffered under hegemonic exclusion,
ridicule, suspicion.
By the same token, Africa has
attracted (probably also to its further detriment, in part) the well-wishing
attemps of North Atlantic advocates of African knowledge like myself.
10. Sandra Harding and the foundations of modern science: hegemony or
sound epistemological procedure?
The combination of epistemology and
cultural relativism is dynamite, as the radical feminist epistemologist Sandra
Harding showed when she asked the question ‘is Western science an
ethno-science’ – in other words,
•
Is that what the North Atlantic, and many people elsewhere
worldwide, consider as the universal, objective and rational qualities of modern
(especially natural) science, merely at a par with other specialist knowledge
systems in Africa and elsewhere – equally illusory, equally uncertain, but
merely by accident favoured by the superior military and economic power of the
North Atlantic region
•
Or, whilst admitting these hegemonic elements to some
extent, is the success of the knowledge claims of modern science yet not to
be reduced to the accidents of power in the world today, but is there
instead also a real epistemological foundation for the truth claims of
modern science, in the sense of valid procedures, methodologies of data
collection, theory formation and hypothesis testing?
Much as she would have liked to
expose modern science as purely hegemonic and nothing more, Harding’s position
is reluctantly that of (2). This is in accordance with everyday common
experience: an airplane build after the principles of modern science, does not
drop from the air as soon as it leaves North Atlantic fly zones and begins to
fly over countries whose population is not supportive of North Atlantic
collective representations, and may even (as a result of their negative
perception of North Atlantic hegemony) be inimical to them. Motor cars imported
to or assembled in Africa, follow the same mechanical and thermodynamical
principles as effectively and demonstrably apply in the North Atlantic, as well
as elsewhere in the world.
Give or take a margin of hegemonic
overkill, modern science can yet substantiate its claims as to rationality,
universality and objectivity fairly well.
11. What does this mean for African knowledge?
(1) Disconnection
At first sight, this does not look
so good for African knowledge.
•
1. Disconnection. If modern science is not,
essentially, an ethnoscience, does that mean that it is fundamentally
different, and at an incomparable higher plane, than other fields of knowledge,
however specialised and systematic, outside the North Atlantic – e.g. African
knowledges, some of which we have briefly looked at? Here we would yield
totally to the disconnecting tendencies inherent in modern science: it
disconnects those ‘to whom it seems to belong’ (the North Atlantic) from ‘those
to whom it does not belong and who have only acquired it second-hand’
(African). In the field of knowledge production, and particularly of academic
knowledge construction, the only place left for Africans is that of imitators
and facilitators of North Atlantic knowledge, in casu scholarship.
To avoid all misunderstanding, let
me declare emphatically (though redundantly) that I totally disagree with the disconnection
position (1).
Fortunately there are alternative
ways of constructing the argument.
2.
Equivalence
•
2. Equivalence. We could try to make the
complementary case for selected African knowledge systems, claiming that these,
too, cannot be totally relegated to the prison of uncertainty and local
collective representation typical of collective representations. If we could
argue that certain forms of African knowledge also deserve the epithets universal,
rational and objective, that would mean that we have discovered, on African
soil, forms of knowledge production that could be considered inalienable
conributions to the universal knowledge heritage of humankind, and that by
implication these knowledges could meaningfully be exported to other parts of
the world, and remain valid and true there. African knowledges would then be
connective with the rest of the world.
This
is the argument I have advanced for Southern African divination and healing
systems (van Binsbergen 2003), seeking – with considerable success -- to
translate them into a global format.
But
we need not reach for something so abstruse and so repulse to the Sceptical
establishment in our North Atlantic midst. There are at least two, very
convincing, arguments for the position of equivalence advocated here (see next
slide):
•
Any society can only survive if its members have a
sufficiently valid knowledge of the world (the human body, human society, but
especially the non-human world that surrounds us) to sustain vital life
processes of production and reproduction. This involves a very considerable
body of valid knowledge about the world. Anatomically Modern Humans have
emerged in Africa 200 ka BP, have survived uniquely their for 120 ka, and (in
addition to the Out-of-Africa movement) have continued to massively live and
thrive there until today. So Africa must always have saturated with valid,
endogenous knowledge about reality. Case concluded.
•
Not all knowledge is scientific, not all knowledge is even
verbal. The vast knowledge of corporality, rhythms, moods and altered states of
consciousness enshrined in African music and dance has undeniably conquered the
world in the last few centuries, as another argument for the equivalence (2)
claimed here.
•
Radical, ‘strong’ Afrocentrists would reverse the disconnection
(1) argument and claim that everything that constitutes the North Atlantic,
was ultimately taken (‘stolen’) from Africa – not in the utterly remote times
of the ‘Out of Africa’ movement (when all Anatomically Modern Humans were in
effect Africans, but not at all Africans in the modern sense), but only a few
thousand years ago. Long before, and also after, the Black Athena debate
(initiated by Bernal 1987) Ancient Egypt was appropriated as the channel for
such one-way transmission. Besides the growth of modern science on African soil
in the hand of African scientists, and the reluctantly-African universalism of
the Mudimbe type (van Binsbergen 2005), Afrocentricity is one of the three
major African responses in the global anti-hegemonic struggle in the domain of
anti-hegemonic scholarship. So we cannot dismiss the Afrocentrist position
lightly, but we need to engage critically with it, especially since it is based
on incomplete internalisation of the epistemological canons of global
scholarship (but to what extent is that a hegemonic argument?), as well as on a
fundamental, wishful misreading of the (pre-)historical data especially on the
‘Back-into-Africa’ movement (from 15 ka BP onwards).
(3) Multicentered universalism as
the ultimate form of global connectedness
Another way out of the hegemonic
dilemmas of disconnection (1) could lie, again, in the following
argument:
•
3. Multicentered universalism as the ultimate form of
global connectedness. Only by hegemonic sleight-of-hand could the North
Atlantic region appropriate modern science as being ‘North Atlantic’. Modern
science is demonstrably the product from many cultures in all continents, grown
over five millennia of more. It is only by historic, geopolitical accident that
Europeans, Africans, Asians etc. have come to be distinguished as broad ethnic
categories. Especially for the appropriation and innovative use of science,
continentality or regionality has no meaning. If it is largely by virtue of the
proper epistemological procedures that modern science produced a truth that is
somewhat more valid, somewhat more lasting (let us be prudent) than the truth
of collective representations (or the truth of material divination, for that
matter), than these epistemological procedures are the proper heritage of
humankind as a whole. If they do make modern science universal (as even the
initially sceptical Harding has agreed), then African participating in
scientific knowledge are simply discharging their common humanity shared with
all other humans – at a par with shared joy at childbirth, or shared grief at
death.
We have now almost completed our
task of setting the framework, within which our specific concrete projects on
Connections in African knowledge can be presented and justified. But before we
make that final step, let me bring out four more implications of the argument
so far.
12. Some implications of the argument :
(1) Pandora’s Box as the
baseline of connecting knowledge
1. In the first place, we have
characterised the rise of the package ‘writing–the state–organised
priesthood–science’ as the First Knowledge Revolution. We will not quibble over
the world ‘first’ – but surely, as we seek
–
(as others and I myself have been doing over the past few
years, in a Harvard-centred network on comparative mythology and long-range
approaches, not only anthroplogists and historians but also geneticists,
linguists and archaeologists)
to
penetrate the mists of time to understand something of the knowledge systems of
Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) in the long period from 200 ka to 5 ka BP,
such a claim of ‘first’ is bound to need qualification.
When a handful of AMHs left Africa,
it was after 120 ka years of cultural and linguistic development, and they
brought with them a considerable knowledge package (testified by the long list
of cultural (near)universals in humans cultures today), what I have termed
‘Pandora’s Box’, that has since been spread, transformed and innovated all over
the world.
This is (for as long as the ‘Out of
Africa’ thesis holds…) the fundamental given of socio-cultural connectedness,
the basis of intra- and transcultural interaction, of all globalisation and
proto-globalisation.
We are now beginning to discern the
various crucial steps in this substained process, in, out of, and back to
Africa, and this emerging picture, however dim, inevitably informs our reading
of intra-Africa connections and transformations.
(2) How to characterise the
second knowledge revolution, that of today?
2. In the second place, we have to
do some further thinking as to what constitutes, in the knowledge-centred terms
of the present argument, the essence of today’s ‘Second’ Knowledge Revolution?
• The word
‘mediatisation’ has been used in the overall Theme Group Programme, and this
may well be an apt way to define the further transformation of a knowledge
evolution initially characterised, I repeat, as the history of the global rise
of transcendence. In today’s Second Knowledge Revolution, through the multiple,
electronically supported ways in which man-made devices totally affect our
corporality, take possession (!) of it and seek to reduce it to just a passive
appendice of the device, such a sense of immediacy and inescapability is
created that the fanciful, imaginary recourse to God, the ancestors and other
evocations of ultimate meaning can be largely dispensed with.
•
What are the implications of this perspective for the field
of academic knowledge production in the African context? I am not altogether
sure yet, and again, further reflection is needed. Perhaps in this field the
equivalent of mediatisation is a situation where the hegemony produced by the
(materially supported) inescapably massive display (evdiently in collusion with
state, economy and military) of North Atlantic forms of science is so
inescapable that in fact the disconnection option (1) gains absolute
dominance – so the only way out for the African scholar is to emulate North
Atlantic models, and the only alternative for the North Atlantic Africanist is
to expect our African colleagues to reproduce what we are doing ourselves.
It
then becomes revealing to see have a leading African intellectual like Mudimbe
display increasing difficulty in appreciating African, especially Afrocentrist,
knowledge production, or to make contact with historic African religion –
instead he teaches French literature, Latin and Greek, and begins to admit that
‘the Colonial Library’ (his famous term for North Atlantic Africanist
scholarship) may be a valid source of knowledge after all
•
If the above analysis makes some sense, this sub-programme
on knowledge will have the critical function of exploring what space exists for
non-hegemonic African scholarship, and seeking to enlarge that space. This is
the main rationale of the first project I will be proposing.
(3) The First Knowledge
Revolution never really took root in African soil before the 20th century CE
3. If the West’s path of scientific
knowledge was opened with the Neolithic invention of the package of writing—the
state—organised priesthood—science, then for an appreciation of the predicament
of knowledge in Africa today we need to remind ourselves that the first
knowledge revolution never really took root in African soil before the 20th
century CE, when it came in the trappings of colonial and missionary
domination.
This is of course the kind of
overstatement one would make in a provisional presentation like the present
one,
–
Admittedly, it does not do justice to, for instance,
African Islamic scholarship throughout the second mill. CE; or to the very wide
popular spread of Islam and Christianity, with unmistakable notions of
transcendence, in sub-Saharan Africa in the second half of the 2nd
mill CE
–
Nor to the fact that (probably in stimulus invention
triggered by Sumerian examples) one of the most influential literate societies
of Antiquity, that of Ancient Egypt, arose in the African continent albeit not
in sub-Saharan Africa;
–
Nor to the fact that large (through largely or fully
illiterate, and economically precarious) states did arise in the interiors of
West and South Central Africa in the course of the second millennium
–
Nor to the fact that (as we have seen) organised
priesthoods managing some form of endogenous (proto-) science are certainly
found in West Africa (Ifa etc.) and Southern Africa
Yet the statement to the effect
that the First Knowledge Revolution never really took root in African soil
before the 20th century CE does contain a fair measure of truth
Think of the African reluctance of
explaining human death by reference not to guilty human witchcraft but,
transcendence-fashion, to supernatural powers; of the great difficulties of
establishing and maintaining formality in formal organisations, the state, the
economy, etc.
•
I am tempted to illustrate the implications of the limited
penetration of the First Knowledge Revolution by an present-day (i.e. last
quarter of the 20th c. CE) example from rural western central Zambia.
•
My first prolonged stay at the Njonjolo royal capital of
King Kahare of the Nkoya Mashasha people was in the early 1970s. It soon became
clear that in the myths and legends circulating in that community, the royal
figure of Kapesh Kamunungampanda (‘Kapesh who Joined the Forked Branches’) was
very prominent: in order to steal the moon from heaven so that his child might
wear it as a royal ornament, Kapesh ordered his people to build a very high
tower (or ladder) out of forked branches – common building material but also
the format of a common type of cult shrine. After much hardship and protest,
the tower collapsed, many people died and the survivers were scattered -- the
beginning of the diversity of nations and of languages. The story is familiar from
the Bible, and also occurs elsewhere in Zambia, the Mozambican-Angolan belt,
and sparsily throughout Africa. Elsewhere I have demonstrated (van Binsbergen
2005 and in preparation) that this distribution is not due to the spread of
Christianity, and that specifically the name Kapesh (without Bantu etymology)
goes back to the Sanskrit word for ‘forked pole, gable’ – but that is not the
point here. When, over the decades, I returned to Njonjolo to collect ethnographic data and
oral history, it turned out that King Kapesh had been given a place in the
Kahare genealogy. The national archives revealed the existence of a heriditary
title Kapesh in neighbouring Kasempa district, and also in Kahare’s area Kapesh
was the hereditary title of a village headman, some 30 km from Njonjolo. In
1989 I was pressurised to go and visit the latter: he was a nonagenarian, and
might die any day, taking the most precious historical information into his
grave, for he himself had been among the
builders of the tower, who had only survived by sheer luck and presence of mind
– stepping aside when the tower collapsed. Of course I realised that in SC
Africa, incumbents of a title when stating the official history of their
dynasty, will speak in the first person singular also when describing events
many generations before the present incumbent. However, that obviously
intelligent and nominally literate others, with extensive urban
experience, and with whom I had been in
intensive discussion for decades, apparently perceived complete continuity
between mythical times and the present, was a great surprise to me. Not only
had Vico’s and Hegel’s historicity failed to penetrate Nkoya consciousness –
even the First Knowledge Revolution seemed to
have left Nkoyaland untouched.
There is an important and sustained
debate on African rationality. It started, negatively, with Hegel (or
was it the author of Genesis, with the curse of Ḥam, who has
traditionally been regarded as representing Africans? Or with the Talmudic and
Islamic traditions to the effect that Ḥam, of all travellers aboard the
Ark, sought to secretly utilise Adam’s bones or leopard-skin clothing – also on
board – for sorcery purposes?). Livingstone’s dialogue with the Southern
African ‘witchdoctor’ was another, more positive early instalment –to be taken
over, in time, by African contributions, from Kagame to Hountondji, Sodipo and
Mudimbe, with North Atlantic contributions from, e.g., Evans-Pritchard,
Gluckman, Horton and Hallen. We cannot meaningfully summarise that debate here.
Suffice it to say that the denial of standard rationality to Africans has been
the single most hurtful form of exclusion of Africans from the domain of
knowledge; therefore we must watch our step very carefully before rushing to
conclusions that can easily be misunderstood. Yet the implication of having
missed, partly or largely, the First Knowledge Revolution, seems to imply
that the particular, transcendent, formal format in which rationality tends to
be predominantly cast in the Western tradition, probably remained largely alien
to Africans until the massive popular spread of the world religions Islam and
Christianity in the second half of the second millennium CE. The relative
absence of the transcendent format may well be a blessing in disguise: what has
captivated many non-Africans in modern times, and has produced in them a love
at first sight for the African continent and its inhabitants, is precisely the
absence of that impersonal, formal, transcendent rationality that has meant
both the triumph, and the doom, of the North Atlantic region.
As a result, and despite such
African parallels and prototypes as I have identified in judicial procedure and
divination, the formal language of science procedure has remained somehow an
alien language for Africa, and for most Africans.
Given the relatively recent, and
hegemonically affected, advent of the First Knowledge Revolution in Africa, to
be followed within a century by the global Second Knowledge Revolution which is
now hitting also Africa with considerable force, makes African knowledge a
particularly complex and contradictory field of study, full of pitfalls also
from the viewpoint of political correctness.
(4) Myth as transregionally
continuous knowledge
4. Collective representations
constitute a major form of knowledge throughout premodern societies in Africa
and elsewhere. We have had the tendency to consider them as highly connective,
but also as primarily local.
This in contrast with the
universality of, particularly modern science.
In her initial, radical (but
ultimately abortive) attempts to play down the epistemological underpinnings of
modern science, and to play down as sheer hegemonic power its claims to
universality, rationality and objectivity, Harding pointed to the practical, concrete
ubiquity of modern science – available or implied in every school, hospital,
motorcar, telephone, television set, airplane etc. wherever in the world. She
suggested that the impression of modern science as universal might well derive
primarily from that ubiquity. As we have seen, she would soon trade that point
for an affirmation, on second thought, of the epistemological underpinnings of
modern science which seem to make for real, grounded, meta-cultural
universality.
However, I took her argument as an
invitation to explore the transregional nature, if any – perhaps even the
ubiquity – of collective representations as a form of pre-modern knowledge.
I soon found enough to make me
overcome the disdain and fear of diffusionism in which I had been educated at
the University of Amsterdam, 1960s, and to elaborate the notion of
‘transformative localisation’: the more or less superficial transformation
formal systems (such as writing systems, languages, divination systems, (board)
games, iconographies) undergo whenever they cross what classic anthropology –
from its presentist and localist perspective – considered to be ‘cultural
boundaries’.
My
first case was, as said, geomantic divination, with a near-global world-wide distribution.
Followed board-games, especially mankala. Clan nomenclature in Southern Africa,
the naming of markers in divination sets, and astronomical terminology, were
the next, equally promising (though utterly bewildering) topic. Leopard-skin
symbolism (inside and outside Africa intimately linked with the rise of
shamanism) turned out to be a diffusionist’s dream topic, with fairly immutable
iconographies, semantics, and even lexical forms (!) constant, it seemed, over
two dozen of millennia and over the entire Old World and part of the new. Only
seeing is believing. Finally, I set out to tackle comparative myth, especially
cosmogonic myth, on a grand, global scale, with immensely gratifying results
(van Binsbergen 2005, 2006 and in preparation) – this brought home to me the
vision of the cultural history of AMHs, ever since the Out of Africa migration
(80 ka BP), as a coherent, systematic, and (with genetic and linguistic help)
essentially reconstructable process of diffusion, transformation and innovation
of basic mythical material originally contained Pandora’s Box, ultimately,
during the last 15 ka, reverting back into Africa in order to be have a
feed-back effect upon whatever had been left to percolate locally after Out of
Africa migration.
The conclusions on this point of
‘Myth as transregional continuous knowledge’ are inevitable, at least to me,
and they are the main inspiration for the second project to be proposed
below:
•
premodern knowledge systems, in the shape of mythical
collective representations (which shade over into religious concepts,
initiation, notions of power and legitimacy etc.), in terms of constancy and
transcontinental distribution are far more comparable to modern science than
has met our eye so far – even though their format is that of a narrative,
mythical, rather than a procedural, transcendent rationality
•
Such premodern systems therefore turn out to be powerful
forms of transregional connection, in addition to the connecting effect they
have, socio-culturally, at the local and regional level.
•
In the origin and unfolding of such mythical knowledge
systems, Africa takes pride of place
–
as origin,
–
initial laboratory (200 to 80 ka BP),
–
point of departure for the Out of Africa migration,
–
destination for the Back into Africa movement,
–
and, subtly, as a place where pre-Out of Africa notions
have percolated and from where these may have gradually seeped through into
Europe, West, and Central Asia.
This is not a ‘strong Afrocentrist’
argument in disguise – it is rather, once more, a plea for recognition of the
ultimate, primordial connections between AMHs, on which all other regional and
local connections ultimately depend.
13. Conclusion: Two projects
Having indicated some of the
saliant conceptual, analytical and historical aspects of connections in African
knowledge, and having suggested where some of the crucial contradictions and
dilemmas in this field may be identified, I can now simply announce the two
constituent projects within the ‘knowledge’ sub-programme without much further
commentary (and in fact with some overlap with the preceding text):
•
Project 1. The current South-North
collaboration in the production of Africanist knowledge
•
Project 2. Old and new formats of connection in African
knowledge
Project 1. The current
South-North collaboration in the production of Africanist knowledge
• The current South-North collaboration in the production of
Africanist knowledge is an intercontinental project of connectedness,
both in the use of social and technical technologies (disciplinary
organisation, technologies of research, data processing and publication), and
in the critical construction of a shared knowledge domain that -- considering
increasing North-South contradictions in the world today -- may well be
considered a unique achievement.
• Work on this topic makes us aware of the epistemological and
knowledge-political presuppositions of Africanist research in the past (e.g.
the alleged geopolitical and cultural distinctness of Africa and of Africans;
and of the alleged superiority of North Atlantic theories and methods).
• The hierarchical dimension to be considered in this connection is that
of (real and imagined) North Atlantic hegemony – increasingly challenged not only by Islamism but
also by Afrocentrism.
• It forces us to reconsider the place of Africa as massively connected
with other continents in an increasingly connected global world.
•
The forms of hegemonic exclusion and rejection, the disdain
(often also among African elites) vis-à-vis African forms of knowledge and
their rationality, makes us select the production of African/Africanist
scholarship by Africanist a particularly strategic point to concentrate our
research on
•
This is a form of action research, in which the
possibilities for South-North co-operation in scholarship are explicitly
considered and pursued,
•
Not only out of loyalty with the South and of awareness of
the historical shortcomings of an Africanist production dominated (numerically
and in terms of means of production) by northerners
•
But also because such collaboration constitutes a concrete
setting in which the contradictions of African knowledge production today can
be experienced and negotiated
• The project will be
executed by Wim van Binsbergen in conjunction with the othe members of the
editorial team (Editorial Board and Advisory Editorial Board) of Quest: An
African Journal of Philosophy
•
Its proposed products are
– the continued
publication of the journal Quest
–
a series of articles (including editorials) in which the
research topic is explored
–
An international conference – preferably in West Africa –
on the research topic, and the publication on an edited collection based on
that conference
– Initiation of a
series on African philosophy and society with a reputable publishing house, in
association with Quest
Project 2. Old and new
formats of connection in African knowledge
•
Old and new formats of connection in African knowledge. New, electronic and digital
technologies of connectedness, however exciting and important, only exist in continuity
with older technologies of connectedness through knowledge. In the latter,
ethnic and religious myths of identity, difference, and fundamental meaning (in
other words, everything that is constitutive of society) have always played a
major role.
•
These forms of connecting knowledge have been conveyed
through older formats of communication such as story-telling and initiation
rites.
•
Do modern communication technologies destroy these older
formats?
•
Or may they also lead (in a way parallel to the near-ubiquity
of global science, which to Harding is a major factor in the latter’s claims to
universality) to the articulation, circulation and (re‑)invention of ancient myths – and if so, why and under what conditions?
•
Is it even possible that ancient myths gain a new lease of
life through these new technological means? Wide supralocal connectedness now
becomes an everyday experience through modern technology; but is that
experience perhaps already implied in the deep structure and the (often very
wide and persistent) distribution of ancient myths? Is this a context in which
even the sacrosanct distinction between Africa and the other continents begins
to dissolve?
•
The last point needs some clarification: (see next slide)
State-of-the-art myth analysis brings
out, as much as genetic and linguistic analysis, two crucial forms of
connectedness between Africa and the wider world:
–
Africa as the cradle of all of modern humankind (with an
entirely African habitat from 200,000-80,000 years Before Present, after which
‘Out-of-Africa’ trickle populated the other continents), and thus the
starting-point of cultural history, and
–
Africa as, much more recently (from 15,000 years Before
Present onwards) affected – both genetically/demographically, and culturally,
by the ‘Back into Africa’ return migration from Asia, which created
considerable linguistic and cultural (including mythological and religious)
continuity between West Asia (and hence Europe) and much of the African continent.
A specific
part of that ‘Back-into-Africa’ movement was not overland but seaborn, and
involves, particularly (but far from exclusively) the ‘fanthom’ (Dick-Read
2005) ‘Sunda migration’ (Oppenheimer 1998); this offers an interesting context
to study the interaction between knowledge systems and technology, since
nautical technology (seaworthy vessels, with or without outriggers, capable of
braving the Indian and Atlantic Oceans) are a necessary condition for this
influence of South East Asia upon Afric – most manifest in the case of
Madagascar. Interestingly, nautical material technology (especially navigation
bowls as proto-compasses) would appear to have been appropriated, in Southern
and West Africa, to be transformed into apparatus for another form of knowledge
production we have considered above: divination!
In general, in this sub programme
we seek to explore the boundary conditions under which new technologies of
connectedness are both reshaping and preserving Africa.
This project will be executed by
Wim van Binsbergen
•
in association with Eric Venbrux (Radboud University
Nijmegen) and Daniela Merolla (Leiden University)
•
the Harvard Round Table on Comparative Mythology
•
And the International Association for Comparative Mythology
Its envisaged products are
•
Several articles
•
An international conference 2008 on Connections in global
mythology (provisional title), to be convened by Wim van Binsbergen, Eric
Venbrux and possibly Damiela Merolla on behalf of the International Association
for Comparative Mythology
•
An edited collection based on that conference
•
A book on comparative world mythology from an African
long-range perspective
•
A four-volume (or four-part) book on transcontinental connections
that has been long in the making and that will sum up much of my related
research into African knowledge systems since the late 1980s
14. References
•
Still to be compiled
and click here to return
to the index page of the Connections and Transformation programme
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