| The Comaroffs Out of Africa: A Reflection Out of Oceania | The American Historical Review, 108.2

Review Essays

The Comaroffs Out of Africa: A Reflection Out of Oceania

GREG DENING

I was partly through the 1,002 pages of Jean and John Comaroff's two-volume seminal work, Of Revelation and Revolution, when I happened upon a report by Chris McGeal in the Guardian Weekly.¹ "Homeward Bound," the headline reads. Beside it is a photograph of the "Hottentot Venus," Saartjie Baartman, in plaster. Eyes closed, a look on her face as if death had surprised her, hair styled in an "out-of-Africa" coiffure we see on the streets today, the tones and texture of her skin eerily real—the "Hottentot Venus" is frozen in an awful moment of European hegemony.

Saartjie Baartman had been brought to London in 1810. She had been paraded naked on the stages in Piccadilly, Bartholomew's Fair, the Haymarket, and in aristocratic salons. She was made to squat and bend and stride by her trainer, the better to expose her protruding buttocks and enlarged genitals. These last looked like the skin that hangs from a turkey's throat, the promotion bills for the "show" proclaimed. She was the grotesque Other in the flesh. Look up the London theater advertisement for the decades around these times. There is plenty of evidence that the Hottentots were the soft porn of empire.

Baartman died in Paris just four years later, probably from syphilis contracted from men with a more sexually active interest in her grotesque condition. "Science" immediately made a claim on her in death. Georges Cuvier, Napoleon's surgeon-general, had a plaster cast made of her body, dissected her, pickled her genitals and brain, boiled her skeleton. There were many things about her body that made them all "scientifically" comfortable in their sense of white superiority and secure in their judgment that they had the right to collect her.

So, for 151 years, museums in France, and finally the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, displayed the "Hottentot Venus." The shame of it all caught up with the Musée in 1976, and she was taken from public exhibition and put on backroom shelves. Last year, 2002, the French Senate voted to release her remains to her Khoisan people. The vote didn't come easily. What else of France's plundered treasure would have to be returned on this precedent, the Senate asked? How nationally demeaning is it to admit to an inhumane past?

Saartjie Baartman has returned to South Africa. Nelson Mandela it was who pressed François Mitterand to send Baartman home when Mandela became president of South Africa in 1994. But whose past, whose history does she belong to? The Khoi people—for "Hottentot," read Khoi—believe that she belongs to them, not necessarily to "South Africa." The Khoi were victims of wars of extermination by the Boers. Apartheid counted them neither black nor white but mixed, "coloured." Baartman was lost to them and their past on museum shelves, but now that she is found and her story told, she is theater to their suffering. She is anchor to the seafloor of their identity. The line that holds a present Khoisanness to a past Khoisan identity is 200 years long, and 2,000 years longer beyond that.

How does one pull on that line from the present to a deep time past? In the forty-five years of my engagement with the history of the encounter between empires in their various modalities—of exploration, trade, mission, and settlement—and first peoples in their various modalities—of independence, subordination, resistance, transformation—this has been the most pertinent question. How do we make a history that is true to the tropes of our times, the ideals of our disciplines, the political realities of cross-cultural knowledge, and the creativity of our imagination?

The Comaroffs have answers to these questions. Be dialectically neomodern. Have an anthropology of process and a history of transformation. Write ethnography of hegemonic practice on all sides of cultural boundaries.

Please note the phrase "dialectically neomodern." It is not "dialectically neomodernist." I doubt if the Comaroffs would ever be comfortable in an "ism." These two volumes (and all their other works) are suffused with active, critical discourse. In their acknowledgment to Volume 1, they remark that "knowledge" belongs to the etymology of acknowledging. They "know" because of the wisdom and insight in the practice of discourse around them. They "know" the lineage of their ideas through old teachers, Isaac Schapera outstandingly among them. They "know" what their students teach them. They "know" how colleagues in their Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago shape them. They are especially proud of the famously "no-prisoners-taken" professionalism of that department. Anyone would be proud to have their ideas closely scrutinized by that band—Bernard Cohn, William Hanks, James Fernandez, Raymond Fogelson, Raymond Smith, Sharon Stevens, Terence Turner, and Marshall Sahlins.

So, Of Revelation and Revolution is dialectically neomodern. It does not proclaim dialectical neomodernism as an ideology. Being neomodern is a scholarly practice. It embraces all the strategies of knowledge advancement of modernity—perspective, exhaustive research, critical dialogue, disengagement as far as is humanly possible from whatever filters that knowledge with prejudice and error. Then the "neo" in neomodern replaces the "post" in postmodern, with the connotation that newness better describes the cultural conditions of knowledge advancement than any notion of afterness. The polarities of positivism and postmodernism are the fantasies of the knowledge world. A modernity that is in touch at the same time with the possibilities and limits of knowing, a modernity that is expressive both of what is known and how brokenly it is known, a modernity that begins with the real and enlarges it with imagination is a neomodernity.

To be neomodern, you have to begin with the real. Not the "texts." The real is loud and noisy; it shouts and screams, is sticky with blood. The real is silent, unseen, shadowy, all pervasive. The real is known immediately; the real will never be known. The real is outside, uncontrollable, unconstructed; the real is inside, constructed. The real is the present; the real is the past; the real is the present inscribed with the past.

It is a scary thing to expose oneself to the real in a world that is close to saying that nothing is real, all is spin. A commitment to the real and the truth in which the real is enclosed is always a gamble. To be a true believer that discipline, exhaustive research, and discourse will make the real accessible and yet to know all the tricks one practices demands a delicate balancing act. We each know all the different ways of knowing and the different limits to one's certainties. We each experience the many dimensions of truth, the many dimensions of lies, the many dimensions of error. In a world that likes its truths in three-second sound bites and two-inch headlines, it takes courage to say that truth and life are more complicated than that. It takes art to say it persuasively. In cross-cultural matters, it also takes sagacity. In cross-cultural matters, you tread on shadows. You trespass.

The Comaroffs tell a story of their encounter with the neomodern real. It is thirty years ago. They are out on the veld north of Mafeking, near the borderlands of Botswana and South Africa. They are in the deserted ruins of Tiger Kloof. Tiger Kloof was the evangelizing missionaries' "light of the world. A city built on a hill."² Tiger Kloof set the civilized spirit in stone. There was a clock tower, even. In 1956, the Afrikaans, in hatred of all the ways missionizing civilization had empowered the natives, destroyed Tiger Kloof. Their obscene graffiti are still to be seen on broken blackboards. So are tangles of classroom furniture, rubbished books. The real in Tiger Kloof is the graceful forms of the architecture. The clock tower inscribed time over the space of ordered streets. The real in Tiger Kloof is in the rubble. Hatred and injustice is inscribed in the disorder and silence.

The Comaroffs are dangerously exposed to themselves in the stark sunlight and sharp shadows of the Tiger Kloof ruins. They see that they owe this reality another sort of history, another sort of anthropology. It cannot be a purely narrative history, isolating individuals and events in a particular story, setting up sharp oppositions between colonial power and native peoples. It has to be a reality suffused with the broader "dispositions" invested in everyday things and agency. There is always time in this story—short-term time and long-term time. But the relationship between culturally opposed dispositions of time and space, of human agency and institutions is dialectical. Each side affects the other. Nothing is cloned. What is made is always new.

The trick, of course, is to do this other sort of historical anthropology. Not just to do it, to do it well and effectively. A neomodern scholar is also a neomodern writer.

A neomodern writer's task is to engage the reader, to persuade. Writing neomodernly is artful. And dare I say it? A neomodern writer has to change the world in some way. Make it laugh. Make it cry. Make it be serious for a moment. The world can't change its past, but it can change the present that the past has made.

Writing has no other power than its persuasiveness. To be persuasive, aneomodern writer has to be imaginative. Imagination is taking the cliché out of something that has been said over and over again. Imagination is working the fictions in our nonfictions the better to be read. A neomodern writer needs the directness of a novelist, the choosiness of a poet, the freedoms of a filmmaker, the engagement of a violinist.

My experience of encounter histories is from Oceania. My credentials for commenting on an African encounter are nearly nil—except I was once privileged to have a course from an anthropologist much quoted by the Comaroffs, Tom Beidelman. His course at Harvard on Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard and the Nuer was a wonderful exercise in historical anthropology. My African experience might be slight, but there is not much that the Comaroffs write about evangelizing missions that does not accord with my experience from Oceania.

The Comaroffs' thesis on the interconnected—"homogenized" is the word they use—nature of the relation between religion and the rest of cultural phenomena especially accords with my experience in Oceania. I used to tease my students about religious encounters by asking them what they thought the first lesson might be that missionaries would teach a native audience who were totally uncomprehending of their language, their metaphors, and the context of every belief and ritual action. When I told them it was a lesson on how to tell the time, it became a moment of enlightenment on the processes of cultural exchange and interwoven hegemonies. When we unraveled the missionaries' proto-Marxian logic on the civilizing process, we began to write the history of religious conversion with a Weberian/Tawney/Lukacsian cant.

Make the "natives" desire the material goods that only the "civilized" could provide them, the missionary proto-Marxian logic went. They will need to work to earn the money to buy them. Work will give them discipline and end the cycle of feasts and play. Material goods will give the neophytes independence of systems of exchange and their chiefs. Women will become independent of men. Land ownership will become private. When the "natives" became "civilized," it was then that they could become Christian. So the key qualifications of a good missionary were never theological in Oceania (or in Africa). Skills in the practice of civilization—carpentry, building, farming, printing—were more essential.

To describe the logic, indicate the intentions, and report the rhetoric of the religious encounter is not to write either its history or its anthropology. The Comaroffs out of Africa write an anthropology of process and histories of transformation. Let me reflect on that.

There was something that came out of Africa for us working from Oceania. I am talking about fifty years ago! It was the notion of "zero point," a notion that there was a Time Before and a Time After in the encounter between first peoples and empires. Time Before was the time of pure aboriginality. Time After was a time of cultural bastardy and changed identity. I suppose that the most challenging discovery of the neomodern in Oceania is that the "zero point" is a fiction. It disappears when one writes a historical anthropology of what actually happened in the encounter.

Although they do not say as much, I believe that the Comaroffs would be proponents of the disappearance of the "zero point."

I suspect that we all experience the disappearance of a zero point in that blurred moment when an old "I" and a new "I" merge, when apparent discontinuity is transformed in the continuities of living. The zero point disappears when my plagiarist self merges with my inventive self. I like to use as an example of a personal disappearing zero point what I have called elsewhere the erotics of reading. It is that moment of trembling pleasure when I realize that what I am reading is what I am just about to say. It is the sense that something so stamped with individuality as my own thinking is larger than itself. It belongs to a paradigm or an episteme or a discourse. At that moment, I have a sense of the essential plagiarism of cultural living. There is nothing that I know, nothing that I say, that is not in some sense translation, my metaphor for somebody else's metaphor.

The word "process" describes that ongoing continuity in discontinuity better than the word "change," I think. Change has a sense of substitution. Describing change inevitably involves frozen moments.

The disappearance of the zero point in process is not just personal, it is cultural. In cultural processes of the encounter, beliefs, objects, words are not "borrowed" from one culture to another. They are transformed, re-created. Identity in cultural process is continuous. There is no loss of authenticity. Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life quotes Jean-François Lyotard: "To arrest the meaning of words once and for all, that is what the Terror wants."³ To look for a zero point is to arrest the meaning of words. To claim that cultural forms are arrested enough to be "borrowed" is the great colonial fraud. It is what the Terror wants. Certainly it has been what the Terror has wanted in Africa, Australia, and Oceania when authentic aboriginality is seen to belong to the Time Before of the zero point, in the museums of the mind. Not down the street.

Anthropology describes these processes. Histories tell their stories. Historical anthropologies will need to be processual in form as well as in content. There is not much process or neomodernity of form, for that matter, in an Introduction, six Chapters, and a Conclusion. There is sometimes much arresting Terror in disciplines. Or perhaps it is just Fear of Flying. We need to fly a little, to use our freedoms. The structures of our narratives and our books are too staid by far.

I suppose most reviewers of my own work would see it as anthropological history rather than historical anthropology. That would probably be my own assessment of my work. If I have a contribution to make, it is more to the discourse of history than to the discourse of anthropology. The Comaroffs' contribution, I think, would be the other way 'round.

But the Comaroffs and I have one thing in common. We believe that both the native and the colonizing side of the encounter are owed both a history and an anthropology. So in Oceania, I am happy to write what I consider to be a historical ethnography of a Franciscan missionary priest at Mass, a Protestant missionary at prayer and preaching, and a Tahitian native priest at sacrifice, a Marquesan native believing in spirits. I am happy with the insights on religion as a human phenomenon that the otherness of native and the sameness of Euroamerican experiences gives me. In any case, I would endeavor first of all to describe the religious experience as it is in itself, not in terms of something else—of class, of gender, of economic experience. One day, not now, I would like to write a historical ethnography of believing, fearing, loving, praying, singing, dancing, gesturing, reading sacred texts. Processual anthropologies and histories demand description of the human experience in its totality and its independent parts.

Pierre Bourdieu once suggested that an arrested form in cultural analysis might be the view of an outsider that culture is a map.⁴ An outsider finds a way around a foreign landscape by use of a model of all possible routes. The "native," on the other hand, has a sense of practice, of journeys actually made. The native brings all the potential axes of space into practical relationship with the traveler's body.

The Comaroffs' two volumes are in essence a historical ethnography of hegemonic practices in dialectical mode—a description of the processes by which colonizing practice did and did not disempower native practice and by which native practice did and did not disempower colonizing practices, inevitably to create something new on both sides of the cultural boundary. So architecture, agriculture, clothes, domesticity, everyday living, health and healing, labor, and money in their materiality are interwoven with subjectivism, rationality, law, family, class, and gender in their immateriality.

Writing culture from its edges—looking in—has suddenly become complicated. "Being there" is not enough if all it gives is a map. It also has to have something of "being in there." "Being in there" is sharing in some way the contingency of cultural living, especially the contingency of identifying self and group. These contingencies of identity-making—these settings of the axes of the spaces of cultural traveling, in Bourdieu's metaphor—are akin to reading in my view.

Reading, writes Michel de Certeau, is "detours, drifts across the page, metamorphoses and anamorphoses of the text produced by the travelling eye, imaginary or meditative flights taking off from a few words ... and ephemeral dances."⁵ "Being in there" is also detours, drifts, transformations, distorted projections, flights, dances. That is what practice is. It melts the frozen moment, reinspirits the reified.

"Being in there" in postcolonial Oceania has meant attempting to describe indigeneity from the center, not the edge.⁶ Indigeneity from the center has all the dialectical qualities the Comaroffs describe, maybe more. The hegemonies that invest indigeneity are not just dialectical in their relationship with global and postcolonial hegemonies. They are also dialectical between the present and the past of an indigenous experience. These hegemonies have histories. They have depth. They are discovered in memory as well as everyday experience. Memory is a will-o'-the-wisp thing every ethnographer and historian knows. Memory is perhaps too opportunist, too inventive, to be trusted by anyone intent on "being in there." Maybe. But there is no identity without memory and history. No indigeneity. A historical anthropology of the encounter has to discover the dialectics between past and present on both sides of the encounter.

What has happened in Oceania has been the discovery of all the places that memory might be found—in dance, song, legend, tattoo, body art, theater, language. If identity has theater, these are the places in which it has to be found. This discovery of the many places in which memory can be found has had a liberating effect in Oceania for insiders and outsiders. For insiders, it has been the discovery of how metaphoric identity is through time. For outsiders, it has been the liberating discovery that life after positivism is very full.

The practices of the ways by which the past is made present all have depth. James Clifford has described practices with depth in Oceania as "articulation."⁷ "Articulation" is the process by which the metaphors of self-identity and indigeneity are hooked and unhooked, made and remade through centuries of contrary forces—of "discovery," settling, conversion, resistance, nationalism, rebel conflict. In a world in which hegemonies are global, identity is more processual than ever. It is rooted in diaspora, in transformed lives, in settled territories. In Oceania, at least, we live on the edge of an exciting century, as our first peoples discover who they are, wherever they are.

One final point about the practice of historical anthropology itself. I have the privilege in my own Time After of engaging with young doctoral students of many disciplines—anthropology, history, literature, music, architecture, performing arts, medicine, archaeology, geography, linguistics—on the matter of their creative imagination in the presentation of knowledge.

These young scholars are confidently neomodern. They are very conscious that novelists, artists, filmmakers, playwrights of their day—today—have given them great freedom. They don't feel confined by the rules of their discipline. Their neomodernity tells them that it is not the letter of their rules that binds them but the function and purpose of the rules. They find that they have not gone far enough simply with notions of process and practice. They are eager to discover all the neomodern ways in which they can persuade others that what they see is true. They are compassionate. They share their humanity, body and mind, with the subjects of their research. They are performers. They engage themselves with an audience, and in that engagement are conscious of what they are doing. They are reflective. They belong to the twenty-first century in their appreciation of the many media by which they can present their work. They have control of the reflective literature and the issues of debate within it. In the best of them, I see a knack of recognizing streams of thought across a range of fields. Their neomodern future does not frighten me. It makes me jealous.

The Comaroffs' passion for learning, and their passion that their learning be put to causes of justice, is patent on every page of Of Revelation and Revolution. They are proud of their discipline of anthropology, dismayed where the extravagances of both positivism and postmodernism have pushed it. They promise in the last sentence of Volume 2 a Volume 3. Historical anthropologists the world over, grateful for the first two volumes, will anticipate the third with pleasure.

Greg Dening is an adjunct professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University. He conducts workshops for doctoral students of all disciplines and professions on "The Creative Imagination in the Presentation of Scholarly Knowledge."

Notes

¹ Chris McGeal, "Homeward Bound," Guardian Weekly (March 6, 2002): 26.

² The Gospel According to Matthew 5: 14 (The Gideons International Zondervan, 1982 edn., 711).

³ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven Rendall, trans. (Berkeley, Calif., 1988), 165.

⁴ Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge, 1977), 1–2.

⁵ Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 165–76.

⁶ See "Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge," Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, guest eds., The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 13 (Fall 2001).

⁷ James Clifford, "Indigenous Articulations," Contemporary Pacific 13 (Fall 2001): 468–90.

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