ANTH326 Peoples and Cultures of Sub-Saharan AfricaMeeting 9, November 5, 2007

Business

• Media Critique• Critical reviews• Journal• Blog entries• FIFEQ.ca (FFEM), November 15

Last stretch

• Reached important point• Making links• Bring everything together• Make sure understand• Dangling issues

Southall and Ranger

Team 1

Team 2

Team 3

Team 4

British Social Anthropology

• Emeriti– LSE (then Madison), Oxford

• Nationalism, ethnicity, tribalism• Southeastern Africa– Southall on Uganda– Ranger in Zimbabwe, Tanzania

• Ranger’s Invention of Tradition with Hobsbawm, 1983

Social Groups

Beyond Kinship

• Defining social groups– Support systems– Solidarity– Communitas

• Ethnicity as super-kinship• Kindreds (selected kins)• “Sodalities” (age sets)• Associations

Secret societies

• Initiation societies• Muslim brotherhoods (sufism)– Tijaniyya

• Freemasons

Voluntary Associations

• Social networks• Urban life• Local• "Ethnic“• Cosmopolitan networks• Political parties

Group Identity

• Identity as us/them• Constructed/created/invented• Negotiated/fluid/flexible• Leading to conflicts• Schisms and mergers

War and Peace

• War as “violent resolution of conflict”– Between groups (however defined)

• Peace as “normal state of system”• Pacifist tendency among anthropologists– Academic and personal– Pragmatic and principled

“Traditional Africa”

Orality

• Verbal communication– Include sign languages, “body language”– Exclude writing (but may include IM)

• Chain of direct transmission• Immediacy/instantaneity/simultaneity• Exchange/dialogue/back-and-forth• Multi-layered/multi-channel

“Oral societies”

• “Pre-literate?”• Writing as defining feature?• Functional literacy?• Writing systems often exist– Coexistence oral/written

“Tradition?”

• Static?• Old?• Genuine?• Conservative?

Tradition and Modernity

• Tradition– Continuity (perceived or real)– Change (happening)

• Modernity– Discontinuity (with ancients)– Change (perceived or real)

Postmodernism (PoMo)

• Reaction to modernism• Implied historicity• Cross boundaries• Deconstruct identities• Multiplicity of identities/viewpoints• Flexibility/fluidity/informality/chaos• Recognise anything?

States

Defining States?

Characteristics of States

• Pre-/Post-Industrial• Centralisation• Boundaries• Administration• Currency• Hierarchy• Formality

Southall Notes

Group Definition

• Glossonyms, ethnonyms• Colonial constructs (perhaps unwittingly)• Identity claims by use/explanation ethnonym• Define through contact/conflict

Tribe

• Defining characteristics: whole, autonomous, self-sufficient, subsistence strategy, low-tech, low-literacy, language, identity religion

• Empirical foundation for tribe as: oral, low-tech, subsistence, kinship, multiplex

Tribe in Anthropology

• “segmentary lineage systems with emphasis on genealogical reckoning”

• Level (pseudo-evolutionary): band, tribe, chiefdom, state

• Band also (even more so) fluid, flexible, casual

Tribal

• “acephalous”• “Tribal” associated with “primitive”• “close identity (if it ever existed)”• Monolithic, static, bounded categories

accepted by people (parallels)• Stateless, without discrete boundaries• Continued significance of idea of tribe• Group nostalgia (act as if)

Southall on Anthropology

• Sahlins (now semi-accepted)• Critical overview of literature available at time• Difficulty distinguish from chiefdom• Anthropological nostalgia (obsession with small-

scale, acephalous, stateless, w/ ethnography)• Relative importance of natural environment

(cultural ecology)• Village exogamy

Tribe cannot exist anymore

• Not autonomous (claimed by sovereign state)• Not self-sufficient• Notion of “well-being”• Market economy• Complex technology (ease borrowing0• Literate in foreign languages• “joining modern world” (Western-style

industrialism)

Reconstruction, illusion, invention…

• Tribalism as inappropriate carryover• Nyerere on tribal to national (to post-

national)• “not historical foundation” but Oyo (parallel

post-colonial names from kingdoms and empires)

• Problems of definition, illusion, transformation

Social Politics

• Language/politics/self-determination• Political use of tools given• “clear cut, isolated, enclosed”• “united more by language than by culture…

speak of themselves as”• Administrative to people• Constructs/artefacts

Identities

• District or subtribe• Language-based identity (not recognised)• Multi-linguistic• “not…undifferentiated mass but…

differentiated in many subtle and complex ways for different purposes”

• “interlocking, overlapping, multiple and alternative collective identities”

Post-National

• Post-industrial as exclusively Western?• “Constrasting mirror”• Malagasy identities (Cole on)• City states (parallel ancient Greece and

current emphasis on local)• Somali as nation-state with complications

Beyond Tribe

• Ethnicity?• Transcending ethnocentrism• “ethnic group” as solution? (problematised

later)