Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Introduction(ch. 1)
PIOT, CHARLES(1996) Remotely Global. Village Modernity in West Africa,
Chicago, MI: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-26
@africanstates
Remotely Global
AIMS
• Retheorize a classic „out-of-the-way‟ place (Kabre, Northern Togo)
as existing within modernity
• Criticize orientalizing images by showing the ways in which
apparently traditional African society is within modernity
• Question the „Euroamerican commodity metaphors, property
assumptions, subject-object relations, and individualistic views of the
person‟
• Position: informed by overwhelmingly positive experience among the
Kabre. driven by urgency due to political situation in Togo where
Northerners are regarded as „savages‟ and thus subject to brutality
@africanstates
Remotely Global
DISCUSSION
• Previous studies on the same place:
• British School: Fortes, Goody, Tait
• French tradition: Griaule, Diaterlen, Cartry, Héritier, Izard
• Marxist: Meillasoux, Terray
@africanstates
Remotely Global
DISCUSSION
• Structural-funcionalist discourses (1940-1960)
• African societies as composed of „lineages‟, which can be taken as a
„single person‟. Society is thus composed of bounded, property-
owning units in competition with one another
• The (rather Durkheimian) question is how lineages were kept
together, particularly in acephalous societies
• Problems: circularity (if you look for solidarity, and take for granted
that a particular society is solidary, everything you observe is
regarded as contributing to solidarity); indeterminacy (does not
explain why one form of cohesion is found in one place and a very
different one in other place); gap with local categories (no Nuer word
for „clan‟, for instance) (pp. 10-11)
@africanstates
Remotely Global
DISCUSSION
• The major problem however of structural-functionalism is its roots
in Euroamerican view of individual, property-owning units kept
together by coercive mechanisms.
• The central problematic (how to tie individuals together) is
produced by this view
• Structural-functionalism intended to trascend individuals, but they
reemerged at other level
@africanstates
Remotely Global
DISCUSSION
• Marxism (1960-)
• Power relations at the heart of social practices. Those in power –
elders – maintain their status by controlling the means of
reproduction (subsistence goods and women‟s marriage) (p. 11)
• Subsequent analysys (Donham about the Maale of Ethiopia) draw on
power inequalities perpetuated by commodity fetishism: Maale
misperceive the true source of fertility (labors and sexuality) in favour
of rituals. Hence, false consciousness is developed
@africanstates
Remotely Global
DISCUSSION
• Problems with Marxism:
• Analysis still functionalist, with power substituting cohesion as the
explanatory variable
• „Chicken and egg‟: hierarchy and power could be the source of control
of rituals and property, not the other way around
• Displacement of local understandings: Maale conceptions about the
source of fertility are assumed not to be real; the analysist presumes to
have access to a „real‟ world beyond Maale words
• A propertied vision of persons and society: assumes the existence of
autonomous persons as well as a split in the person/thing relationship
@africanstates
Remotely Global
DISCUSSION
• Practice theory (Bourdieu, 1977-)
• Individuals strategically manipulate social rules and norms in their
favour. Social life is seen as a field of open contests for power, and
social practice as the site of interested individuals strategies and
manipulations
• Core question is: whose interest (elders‟, juniors‟, etc.) is being
served in any instance of wealth formation, of the operation of taboo,
etc.?
@africanstates
Remotely Global
DISCUSSION
• Problems with practice theory
• Remains embedded in Durkheimian duality of „individual‟ and „society‟ –
here „agent‟ and „structure‟. On the one hand, a reified, nondiscursive,
ahistorical view of the subject; on the other, culture-as-commodity
• Conceptual terms betray self-economism (particularly the word
„interest‟). This can capture late 20th century capitalism, but probably not
other practices elsewhere
@africanstates
Remotely Global
DISCUSSION
• Summing up the weaknesses of the Africanist discourse
• It assumes the person as autonomous, self-interested, propertied,
accumulative and having independent agency. Hence, it ends up by
focusing on either „how the solidarity of individuals is brought about to
produce society‟ (structural-functionalism) or „how individuals
manipulate culture/society to achieve their own ends‟ (practice theory,
Marxism) (p. 16)
• It presumes that the dynamics that explain social practice are internal
to the society at hand. No forces beyond the local are considered
@africanstates
Remotely Global
DISCUSSION
• Beyond the postmodern vs. modern&premodern fiction
• Postmodern characterised as fluid, instable, contradictory,
heterogeneous (Harvey, Baudrillard), as opposite to the modern &
premodern
• However, no scholar has ever advocated the existence of a bounded,
homogeneous African culture
• Kabre as as cosmopolitans as anyone else, partaking in a social life given
by cohabiting with ancestors, polygynous families, fostering of children as
a routine, etc.
• It resonates with other African cultures where modernity is seen not
much as a loss of culture but as an addition (p. 24)
@africanstates
Remotely Global
DISCUSSION
• Piot‟s “fictions” (his position)
• Persons do not have relations, they „are‟ relations (p. 18)
• For instance, relations are inscribed in the body through sickness,
understood to be related with a breakdown in social relations
• The self also diffusely spread into the world of spirits and ancestors
• Avoiding Orientalism (Said): challenging it not by showing how
individualistic Others are, but by pointing out how non-individualistic
Westerners are
• Arguing thus for an alternative modernity within capitalism (Gilroy,
Comaroff and Comaroff, Escobar, Appadurai). Since Africa has been an
integral part of Europe for 400 years, modernity‟s roots lie in Africa as
much as in Europe
@africanstates
