Remotely Global by Charles Piot

Author:Charles Piot [Piot, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2008-11-25T23:00:00+00:00

Six

COMMUNITY

Spirits, Mimesis, Modernity

This chapter addresses a question that preoccupied British anthropology at mid-century, and especially those ethnographers—Meyer Fortes, Jack Goody, David Tait—who worked among the savanna peoples of northern Ghana and Togo: what is the nature of community, and what are its forms of solidarity? Of course, it is now a commonplace to remark that there was a certain complicity between an anthropology preoccupied with such questions—and more broadly with African political processes—and colonialism. Thus, not only were these anthropologists working on subjects of keen interest to colonial governments (and presumably exchanging their knowledge for research access and funding); there also seemed to be a tidy fit between the objects of knowledge they were constructing—static, bounded, self-contained societies—and the colonial need to name, fix, and control colonial subjects.

While there is certainly much truth to this view, it is also the case, as with functionalist arguments generally, that things are more complicated—that the work of individual anthropologists didn’t correspond so neatly to colonial interest (Asad 1991; S. Moore 1994; Goody 1995) and that colonial need was more varied and contradictory than such a view suggested (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997; Thomas 1994; Cooper and Stoler 1997). Indeed, while Fortes did construct a static picture of Tallensi society, and took little account of the colonial presence, his books are nevertheless filled with descriptions and analyses that also suggest a more fluid Tallensi reality. And while in many places throughout Africa colonialism sought fixity and stasis, here in the coastal hinterland of West Africa it was more interested in mobility and in societies that were able to accommodate such mobility. (Recall that colonial interest in this savanna area was in its capacity to serve as a labor reserve supplying workers to the coast.) Ironically, then, in the Volta basin, anthropological depictions and colonial need were at cross purposes.

My focus in this chapter is on Kabre conceptions of community, conceptions that seem on the one hand significantly at odds with those of descent theorists, and on the other remarkably in concert with colonial (and postcolonial) agendas in the Volta basin. I will suggest that there is a fluidity to social relations that enabled Kabre to intersect almost seamlessly with and adapt to the new ruptures and circulations of the colonial era, while nevertheless engaging it on terms that were more or less of their own choosing. The fluidity I refer to derives not only from the mobility of people into and out of houses and communities but also from a life centered around invisible spirits whose motives are inscrutable and forever unpredictable. When I spoke in chapter 1 about the cosmopolitanism of life in these savanna societies, I had in mind this very fluidity and the uncertainties that accompany daily life in a world governed by spirits.

Boundaries

It is no easy matter to decide where Kabre communities begin and end, who their members are, what their sources of solidarity are. Kabre ethnographers have offered up a host of terms—tεtƱ (earth), haʠaa (work group), dikoye (the clearing where warriors gathered in time of attack)—as signifying the term “community.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.