Les zones critiques d'une anthropologie du contemporain. Группа авторов
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My career in South Africa actually began before and during the epochal Soweto student uprising of 1976, which changed the face of urban South Africa. What impressed me at the time was of course the sufferings of the black South African majority, but equally the resistance, indeed the achievement of cultural performance practitioners in creating and cultivating a milieu of black urban performance against the odds and against the state. Foucault said, in a moment of Derridian paradox that if you want something to grow, then attempt to stamp it out. Yet it was not so much repression as malevolent neglect that enabled the performing and literary arts to flourish in black townships.
As a result of my field research, I was persona non grata in South Africa for fourteen years. Ultimately I was allowed back as a Fulbright Fellow in 1991, part of the first cohort of Fellows sent to South Africa since 1962. Then in 1993, as democratic elections loomed, I was offered a position in anthropology at the University of Cape Town. This seemed an unmissable chance to participate in the building of a new, inclusive system of university research and education. Or what we hoped would be. Higher education would be a battle ground of social reconstruction and the struggle for post-apartheid South Africa’s soul. And I wanted to fight on it. I thought I would do a tour of duty and return home, but that struggle has not ended and I am unable to retreat now that I am a prisoner of that war. Turning to the role of the performing arts in that war, what came to impress me most over the years, and occupied my teaching, was the productivity through which artists of all sorts create the lasting character of cities. Any city, but in South Africa’s case, a struggle against such heavy-handed odds.
Society as a contested Space
In South Africa, the particular forms that colonial capitalist expropriation and post-colonial economic development took and are taking undeniably make for a heady, sometimes poisonous stew. The political cooks have spoiled the broth, and well-intended policies have been undermined by incompetent and corrupt implementation rooted in patronage and cronyism. Within university departments of social sciences and humanities, there is a parallel impasse in social and economic theory and practice. The failure to repair the damage of colonialism and apartheid or prevent the widening of inequalities in social and economic resources has led to frustration not only among the marginalized population but among intellectuals as well. At present, academic argument has been reduced to blaming the financially and politically empowered, impractical calls for a populist socialism or sincere but impotent special pleading for numerous demographic categories beset by social predation and injustice. More controversially, formulating and more importantly implementing a strategy, whether politically viable or not, that can transform the victims of agrarian and industrial exploitation and suppressive social engineering into independent minded, self-reliant citizens of a constitutional liberal democracy is proving an intractable problem. Such a transformation self-evidently takes a very long and at some junctures, turbulent time.
For example, the majority of South Africans excluded from the middle classes do not identify the promises of freedom and democracy with participatory citizenship, personal autonomy, an open society, or self-determination. They identify them with material well-being, and a mythic return to the land. Which is why in some communities “democracy“ is blamed for social disorder and immorality. Demand for the fulfilment of “promises“, both made and never made, are responsible for the surge of support for the ironically-named Economic Freedom Fighters among marginalized black youth in the recent elections. The argument goes: if one is not economically secure, one is not free. Providing such security is believed to be the responsibility of the state, itself the victim of a parasitic, predatory new political elite. Concomitantly, it has so far not proved so far not possible to wean either political authorities or technocrats in the public sector away from patrimonial, client-based systems of resource mobilisation and distribution, and the resulting appropriation of public funds to serve personal networks of power and financial gain. Led by, and sometimes leading on, corrupt managers at para-statal enterprises, which constitute the greatest obstacle to economic reform and revitalisation, the private sector is also deeply implicated.
Many of those whose tasks are to protect and strengthen democratic rights, institutions, and the rule of law do their utmost, but stagger under the weight of ingrained corrupt practices, arrogant entitlement, deliberately restricted resources, patriarchal, anti-democratic values, and political factionalism and manipulation. With regard to weak social morality and endless peremptory demands enforced by ready mass violence, provoking retaliation by the police, the common citizenry require but actively resist the extensive governance the government and its fragile institutions are unable to provide or sustain. Could it be, perish the thought that as the Italian proverb goes, the people are getting the government they deserve?
As South Africa goes, so goes Anthropology
A siamese-twinning of experience and self-projection, of identity and strategy, of simulation and dissimulation among the human subjects of our research in post-apartheid South Africa has led to paradigmatic fragmentation and conflict within the discipline. The English-speaking social anthropologists are shocked that the post-apartheid condition harbours the old forms of authoritarianism among new black leaders as well as among the citizenry. In dispute with the new grand narratives of modernization as we were with the old, anthropologists are almost as out of favour with the bureaucracy now, and it with us, as we were before liberation. Meanwhile, the attempts of our Afrikaans-speaking colleagues to retain their responsive relationships to government, and to substitute the term “culture“ for what was called “race“ appear to have had some success.
Our own efforts at practice-oriented introspection alerted us to the consequences of these realities for methodology. Ethnography now had to be pursued in a field saturated with factional politics, suspicion, antagonism, manipulation, disingenuousness and the ambivalent reflections of our subjects upon our researches and researchers. Indeed, perhaps this had always been the case. Our subjects were neither what they’d been thought to be, nor whom they claimed or seemed, and our categories were not reflected in situations on the ground. No one spoke for the community, though there was no lack of spokespersons. Many non-spokespersons wouldn’t speak to us at all, and those who would, wanted to ask rather than answer questions: Who were we? Who paid and sent us? Who and what did the research serve? What were we getting out of it? What would they get out of it? Could we get them attention, resources, services, justice or jobs? How could they be sure we got the “right“ impression? What, if anything, were we good for (Coplan 1998)?
Behind the uncomfortable silences of subjects who felt better safe than sorry were larger, more worrying questions: Was it simply the insouciant caution of the black American poet Paul Dunbar to wit; “Why should the world be over wise/In counting all our cares and sighs“ (Dunbar 1895), or were they in practical terms justified in trying to manage rather than engage us? It is apparent that our research subjects or interlocutors (ethnographic co-authors?) at this point have us figured out at least as well as we have them. And they have their own purposes for us and our work that are more important to them than ours. Most of the new generation of colleagues admit of none of this. “The People“ must be framed as the sincere source of authentic experience, and we of moral insecurity and privileged hypocrisy. In response to all this, a politics of not only of opposition, but politics in general, has come to dominate an anthropology desperate to demonstrate its bona fides to predictably radicalized students, and why “advocacy scholarship“ has become the order of our day (Jean Copans 2019).
Presently at our formerly “white“, now non-racial universities, there is great fear among academics of marginalization and even direct attack, based on long-lasting perceptions of anthropology as a colonial discipline impervious to populist political transformation. Professor Copans has spoken and written authoritatively on this dilemma as it has played out within Francophone African Studies (2000, 2006, 2013). In South Africa the result has been a consolidation of theoretical and empirical hegemony by the insurgent left, so that other political perspectives or indeed any perspective that is not overtly politically oriented have been publicly silenced. The agenda is to campaign on behalf of the “have-nots“, while attacking the existential legitimacy of the “haves“, the category to which academics guiltily believe