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Adam Bedřich, Tomáš Retka (eds.)
RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA
K 70. narozeninám Petra Skalníka
KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
To Petr Skalník for his 70
th
birthday
Recenzent: PhDr. František Bahenský
AntropoEdice, sv. 4
© AntropoWeb, 2015
ISBN 978-80-905098-6-3 (elektronická publikace – PDF)
ISBN 978-80-905098-7-0 (tisk)
Informace ovědecké redakci aelektronická verze publikace jsou dostupné na stránkách
vydavatele: www.antropoweb.cz
Publikace vychází pod licencí Creative Commons Attri-
bution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Introduction / Předmluva: Petr Skalník — vědec mezi světy
Anthropologist as political actor
Domination, Legitimacy, Trust: Socio-anthropological Considerations
Limits of engagement in anthropology
Identities, failed identities, and social ontologies
Toward a Philosophy of African History: Communality as a Foun-
dation of Africa’s Socio Cultural Tradition
A Flâneur and Ethnographer in Their Home City: The Krakow of
Bronisław Malinowski and Feliks Gross. Remarks of a Historian of
Anthropology
Agrarian Ideology and Local Governance: Continuities in Postso-
cialist Hungary
Sebechlebští vinaři / The Winemakers of Sebechleby
Gambie: geneze politického stranictví / The Gambia: The Genesis
of Party Politics
The Slovakization of the Prešov Region in the 1920s and 1930s
Afrikanistika na Filozofické fakultě UK: Ambice a bolesti /
African Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University: Ambi-
tions and Constraints
Contested Disciplines in New Europe: Ethnology and Sociocultural
Anthropology in Lithuania
Postmoderní antropologie? / Postmodern anthropology?
Why are social anthropologists not interested in the study of hu-
man origins?
Petr Skalník — antropolog tělem a duší / Petr Sklaník — Anthropo-
logist in body and soul
List of authors
ADAM BEDŘICH, TOMÁŠ RETKA, JANA JETMAROVÁ
Sborníky vycházející u příležitosti jubilejních okamžiků v životě významných osobností
jsou v akademickém světě zavedeným formátem. Účelem těchto publikací většinou nebý-
vá patetická glorifikace oslavenců, otištění seznamu gratulačních textů všech těch, kteří
s jejím/jeho životem a dílem mají něco společného, ani dalším darem v řadě, kterých bývá
při významných výročí mnoho. Jubilejní Festschrift je především formou uznání kolegů
a bývalých studentů a způsobem širokého ocenění celoživotního významu a přínosu, který
adresát a jeho práce v daném oboru představuje. U Petra Skalníka to platí minimálně
dvojnásob skrze jeho profesní dráhu objímající a propojující antropologii a afrikanistiku
v měřítku přesahujícím hranice, a to navíc ve specifickém historickém období etablování
porevoluční československé vědy po téměř půlstoletí určité deprivace.
Sedmdesáté narozeniny Petra Skalníka jsou pro nás především příležitostí k ohlédnutí se
za jeho bohatým a navýsost aktivním akademickým životem. V létě 2014 jsme začali sborník
připravovat a pročítali na webu Mezinárodní unie antropologických a etnografických věd
(IUAES)1 téměř padesát stran jeho profesního životopisu, zachycujícího půlstoletí terén-
ních výzkumů, konferenčních příspěvků a akademických umístění. Záhy bylo jasné, že na
pozadí pestrosti a bohatství témat, lokalit a regionů, publikací, míst působení a kontaktů
v rámci oborů antropologie a afrikanistiky i mimo ně, bude prakticky nemožné sestavit
sborník tak, aby mohl alespoň trochu aspirovat na reprezentativnost reflektující bohatou
celoživotní profesní dráhu jubilanta. Jak byla ve zdravici k Petrovým šedesátinám ve stručnosti
shrnuta jeho kariéra (Kandert 2006), tak by se nám, skrze výběr z textů, podařilo zachytit
a představit jeho rozsáhlou práci vždy jen velice kuse a neúplně. Nebo bychom potřebovali
ne jednu, ale několik publikací, či mnohonásobně více stránek.
Tento sborník tedy z podstaty není objektivní reprezentací a ani nemůže být.
Zůstává tak „pouhou“ – a nezbytně jen dílčí – pozvánkou ke společnému oslavení Petra
Skalníka skrze texty těch z jeho kolegů a přátel z tuzemských, ale i zahraničních institucí,
výzkumných ústavů a univerzit, kteří stihli (nejednu) uzávěrku. Bezpochyby mohlo být
přispěvatelů více, stejně jako jsme se nemuseli držet pouze akademických mantinelů.
Nakonec však – a posoudíte to jistě sami – zastoupení akademiků z 12 zemí 3 kontinentů
lépe vystihuje mnohovrstevnatost zkušeností a rozličnost podob jejich známosti s posta-
vou a prací Petra Skalníka a je nakonec tím, co dokládá šíři a bohatost jeho akademické
dráhy nejlépe. Ve společnosti přátel a kolegů antropologů, orientalistů a afrikanistů je
suma předložených textů vhodným momentem k reflexi osobní i profesní inspirace a
9
1 International Union of Anthropological and Ethnographical Sciences, organizace, jíž byl Petr Skalník od
roku 2003 deset let vice-prezidentem (http://www.iuaes.org). Naposledy přistoupeno 27. 10. 2015.
10 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
nezměrného, až nakažlivého elánu pro společenskou vědu, kterými jsou prodchnuty jeho práce,
výzkumné a pedagogické aktivity a další projekty. Sborník by měl sloužit především
jako zhmotněné poděkování za vše, čeho se nám skrze známost s Petrem Skalníkem dostalo
a čím jsme byli inspirováni, ale zároveň byl koncipován tak, aby si zachoval obsahovou
zajímavost pro čtenáře.
Petr Skalník je postavou s pevným a konzistentním profesionálním charak-
terem, který osvědčil v celé řadě kontextů a mezních situací – ať už šlo o peri-
petie studia a příležitostí k terénnímu výzkumu v prostředí tehdejšího totalitního státu,
nebo pozdější angažmá na celé řadě zahraničních akademických pracovišť od Nizozemí po Jihoaf-
rickou republiku, či – a především pak – po svém návratu do porevolučního Československa.
Jeho neúnavná snaha o rozvoj tuzemského akademického prostředí a etablování sociální
antropologie jako svébytné disciplíny je dokumentovaná celou řadou polemických diskusí,
publikací a textů, týkajících se jednou polarity antropologie a národopisu v českém i evropském
kontextu, podruhé pokusu o navázání na předválečné sociálněvědní mapování obce Dolní
Roveň na Pardubicku. Své vypovídá i sedmnáctým rokem pořádaný Gellnerovský seminář,
který v roce 1998 s profesorem Jiřím Musilem založili a dlouhá léta vedli, či insignie rytíře
řádu Akademických palem, kterých je Petr Skalník nositelem od roku 2006 za vynikající
vědeckou práci a pozoruhodné zásluhy k rozvoji francouzsko-českých styků. Na výčet jeho
příspěvků k tématům etnicity, procesu utváření a vývoje raných států (Early State Concept),
regionálních studií, antropologie politiky a moci a dalších, bychom ovšem potřebovali
samostatný oddíl.
Jako pedagog patří Petr Skalník do společnosti skutečně kosmopolitních akademiků.
Vždy se konzistentně, a přitom kriticky, zasazoval o inspirativní kontakt tuzemské a zahraniční
sociální vědy a propagoval těsnější spolupráci zahraničních vědců a výzkumníků s českými
a středo a východoevropskými kolegy. Jeho jméno vvzahraničí stále rezonuje a otevírá
dveře – často bývá tím, koho si zahraniční kolegové vybaví při zmínce o české antropologii.
Na pardubické katedře sociálních věd, kde od počátku milénia působil a zásadně formoval
generace studentů sociální antropologie, na něj vzpomínají jako na osobnost, která skrze
líčení své praxe z Nizozemí, Ghany, Jihoafrické republiky, sovětské Tuvy, slovenské
Šuňavy, či Papui-Nové Guinei, dokázala zprostředkovat nejen fascinující perspektivy a ryze
osobní, reflexivní zkušenosti, ale především svoje nadšení a zápal pro metodu a disciplínu.
Nebylo mnoho témat, o kterých by Petr Skalník nedokázal hovořit, nebo ve kterých by nesvedl
poradit a doporučit – a vždy povzbudit! Bez nadsázky lze říci, že jeho průprava a vzor daleko
přesahuje léta, kdy působil na Pardubické univerzitě, a má formující charakter provázející
jeho studenty a studentky, stejně jako kolegy a kolegyně, doposud.
Pozvání k participaci na sborníku přijali pardubičtí kolegové s nadšením a jejich přání
shrnuje vše, co by zde mělo zaznít – k čemuž se my jen připojujeme!
Milý Petře,
s velkým potěšením jsme přijali nabídku sepsat několik úvodních řádků a přidat se na tomto
čestném místě k zástupu gratulantů k Vašemu životnímu jubileu.
Zajisté by bylo možné se zde široce rozepsat o Vaší pestré vědecké dráze, o nezdolné
snaze budovat v českém prostředí kvalitní sociální antropologii, o nepřeberném množství
konferencí a publikací, na jejichž realizaci jste měl zásadní podíl, nebo o oborových orga-
nizacích, na jejichž rozvoji a činnosti se aktivně podílíte. Zároveň bychom mohli jmenovat
desítky absolventů, kteří se díky Vašemu vedení rozhodli zasvětit své profesní dráhy sociální
antropologii.
11ADAM BEDŘICH, TOMÁŠ RETKA, JANA JETMAROVÁ
Tato knížka je ale věnována především milému kolegovi s nakažlivým nadšením pro obor,
jehož hluboké odborné kompetence jsou spolu se sympaticky lidským přístupem obdivu-
hodné a inspirativní. Kolegovi s mezinárodním renomé, který svou kritikou, jasnou a ostrou
jak břitva, dokázal energicky čeřit stojaté vody českého akademického rybníčku. Skvělému
spolupracovníkovi, jenž se stal mladším kolegům vzorem, rádcem a především přítelem.
Milý Petře, děkujeme Vám za roky, kdy nám bylo potěšením s Vámi spolupracovat a přejeme
Vám do dalších let pevné zdraví, nevyčerpatelnou zásobu tvůrčího elánu a neutuchající
životní optimismus.
Vaši kolegové z Katedry sociálních věd v Pardubicích.
Avšak zdaleka nejen bývalí i současní studenti a pedagogové univerzity v Pardubicích
se na přípravě sborníku podíleli. Ten by nikdy nemohl vzniknout bez nadšené práce řady
spolupracovnic a spolupracovníků, kteří se alespoň takto připojili ke gratulantům Petru
Skalníkovi a jež se sluší na tomto místě připomenout. Je to předně vydavatel díla, tedy
spolek AntropoWeb, který poskytl své zázemí, vydavatelské know-how a zkušenosti s
publikací volně šiřitelných (v duchu myšlenky open access) špičkových antropologických
textů v rámci AntropoEdice. Členové spolku Pavlína Chánová, Veronika Kořínková, Petr
Tůma a Jiří Woitsch se postarali o redakční přípravu sborníku, Petr Tůma je autorem
grafického zpracování a sazby textu. K „vyladění“ článků do co nejkvalitnější podoby
přispěli překladatelé, jazykoví korektoři a proofreadeři, jmenovitě William Golding, Miss.
Hester Clarke, Emma Ford, Victoria Biggs a Klára Woitschová. Náš dík patří v neposlední
řadě i všem těm, kteří drobnými i většími finančními příspěvky umožnili sborník dotáhnout
od počáteční myšlenky až do podoby důstojné a reprezentativní publikace. Seznam všech
dárců a sponzorů je uveden v závěru naší publikace.
Kandert, Josef. 2006. „Petr Skalník šedesátník.“ Lidé města 8: 195–196.
12 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
13ALEKSANDAR BOŠKOVIĆ
ALEKSANDAR BOŠKOVIĆ
In the quest to understand other cultures, anthropologists also carry the burden of the legacy from the societies
they come from. This is more than an attempt to establish an “ethnographic authority” in relation to specific
“folk models” that people take with themselves to their research – it relates to practical social and political cir-
cumstances. The chapter will deal with the politicization of anthropology in the last decades of the 20th century,
beginning with some examples from the former Yugoslavia. This seems as a good reference point, as Yugoslavia
was a crucial part of the route that Skalník used four decades ago, in order to escape Czechoslovakia and make
his way to The Netherlands. This chapter will also present a comparative view of the discipline’s role in different
post-conflict and post-transitional societies (like Brazil or South Africa), with all the problems and challenges
that the role of anthropologists entails.
Political anthropology; Franz Boas; Anthropology and ethics; Anthropology and human rights; Anthropology
and ethnicity
In this chapter, I look at the role of anthropologists as participants in everyday political life.
This role is not always obvious or intentional, but as politics is part of all aspects of our lives,
it cannot be ignored. The role of anthropologists opens some questions on the ways in which
anthropologists (and social scientists in general) conduct themselves in the field, but also
about the ways in which their theories can be used (cf. Skalník 1988, Gingrich 2005). Skalník
himself dealt with this topic, but in relation to subject/object interplay (2012). I am interes-
ted in both the rationality and the consequences of anthropologists’ actions – which opens
up a variety of questions dealing with goals and strategies that we employ in our research.
In my view, and starting from a premise by two other great Czech-born anthropologists,
I take these goals and strategies primarily to be concerned with understanding “why do
people do what they do” (Holy and Stuchlik 1983, 4).
14 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
I met Petr (“Peter”) Skalník in 2001 in South Africa, at the Anthropology Southern Africa
conference in Pretoria. He was introduced to me by a mutual friend, Robert Thornton,
with whom he edited a volume of the early writings by Bronislaw Malinowski some years
previously (Thornton and Skalnik 1993). According to Thornton (personal communica-
tion), the book did not sell very well – something that I found surprising, as the volume
offered important insights into how theories of one of the most influential 20th century
anthropologist were formed. However, perhaps books have their own lives and destinies, in
the Buddhist sense of Karma (Delahoutre 1996) – so even an excellent volume can end up
relatively unnoticed, if it appears at the wrong moment. Some years ago, when writing about
Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz nicely summarized Kuhn’s contribution in that he produced
“the right text at the right time” (Geertz 1997). I would like to extend this nice metaphor
to people, and Skalník is certainly one of the scholars who appeared “at the right time”,
and in doing so, has made a lasting impact on contemporary anthropology.
In this chapter, I wish to examine the role of anthropologists as political actors.
I will do it through several examples, and attempt to leave to my readers to draw their
own conclusions. Skalnik’s anthropological journey offers plenty of examples for this,
but I would primarily like to use him as an inspiration (as he has been in an intellectual
and moral sense for many people, over the course of his long and productive career).
I will mention in some detail only one instance – his speaking out on the eve of a major
anthropological event in 2009 – as I believe that it serves to depict him as a scholar
and a highly moral person (I do not have time to dwell on the question on morality here,
as I dealt with it in Bošković 2012). The fact that the part of this journey (when he left
the socialist Czechoslovakia) was done via Belgrade to The Netherlands (Skalník 2011)
also provides me an opportunity to inquire into the meaning of the concept of dissent
in the former Yugoslavia.
It is obvious that anthropologists also carry the burden of the legacy from the societies they
come from. This is more than an attempt to establish an “ethnographic authority” in relation
to specific “folk models” that people take with themselves to their research – it also relates
to practical social and political circumstances. This can sometimes get anthropologists
in trouble. One of the best known examples is Boas’ criticism of the involvement of several
American anthropologists during the First World War, in the letter to The Nation, published
on 20 December 1919 (Boas 2005). As he put it:
A soldier whose business is murder as a fine art, a diplomat whose calling is based on
deception and secretiveness, a politician whose very life consists in compromises with
his conscience, a business man whose aim is personal profit within the limits allowed by
a lenient law – such may be excused if they set patriotic devotion above common everyday
decency and perform services as spies. (…) A person, however, who uses science as a cover
for political spying, who demeans himself to pose before a foreign government as an in-
vestigator and asks for assistance in his alleged researches in order to carry on, under this
cloak, his political machinations, prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits
the right to be classed as a scientist. (Boas 2005: 27)
His criticism was not taken very kindly, as many American anthropologists rallied
to the defense of their colleagues (who were not named, but, apparently, everyone knew
15ALEKSANDAR BOŠKOVIĆ
who they were), so Boas was censured, and he had to resign from the National Research
Council (Boas 2005: 27; Bošković 2010: 107).
In his letter (as well as in his writings on racism, much later) Boas put forward what
he perceived to be minimal standards of “common everyday decency”. The fact that several
of his colleagues (and some of them ended up being extremely influential in American
anthropology – especially in the field of Maya studies) felt unbound by any moral principles
was very disturbing for him. On the other hand, the situation was critical, and three out of
four of the colleagues that he referred to voted for his expulsion from the AAA (the fourth
abstained).
Almost ninety years after the Boas affair, Petr Skalník raised his voice in protest,
as 200 people were killed in the demonstrations in China (Antropologi.info 2009a, 2009b).
The 16th congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences
(IUAES), the most global world anthropology organization, was about to be held in Kunming,
China. Skalník’s protest was even more important, as he was a member of the IUAES
Executive Committee – and he had a very long history of being committed to this organiza-
tion. Among other things, he organized the IUAES Inter-Congress on racism in Pardubice
(at the University where he taught at the time), in 2005. The success of that Inter-Congress
was a fitting tribute to his lifelong commitment to fighting against all kinds of prejudice
and discrimination (and this is certainly something that he shares with Boas).
Skalník’s reaction in 2009 was triggered by an invitation that he received just before
the Congress from the State Ethnic Affairs Commission of the People’s Republic of China,
which invited him (as well as some other leading figures of the IUAES) to a meeting in
Beijing, where, apparently, a high-ranking state official was also to be present. Skalník was
a bit surprised by this invitation, as he had no intention to serve as a “poster boy” for China’s
political leadership. As he put it, in an open letter:
My life experience of studying ethnic problems in other countries (e.g. South Africa,
West Africa, Soviet Union and Europe) have taught me that conflicts of the size like that
in Urumqi this July or Lhasa last year are not and cannot be caused just by some mali-
cious plotters. There must be also a deal of responsibility on the side of the power holders,
your Commission not excluded. However, no self-criticism and constructive proposal for
remedy has come out from China till this very day. (Anthropology.info 2009a)
In declining the invitation, Skalník also decided not to attend the IUAES Congress at all:
I also will not participate in the Kunming congress (…) because I do not want to be part
of overt and/or tacit legitimation of evidently erroneous handling of nationality question
in China. As a person with a particularly strong IUAES loyalty who participated in almost
all its congresses and other events starting from Permanent Council meeting in Prague
back in 1962 I was very keen on participating and playing active role as a Distinguished
Speaker, member of the Executive Council (EC) of IUAES, Czech member of the Permanent
Council of IUAES, chairperson of the Commission on Theoretical Anthropology (COTA)
and thrice paper giver. The above mentioned reasons, however, thwarted these intentions.
Under present circumstance I would not feel free to express my thoughts and research
findings. (Anthropology.info 2009a)
Skalník’s letter did have some impact – despite the fact that relatively few people decided
to boycott the Kunming meeting. After all, as he emphasized, he wrote it in his personal
capacity, as an individual. However, unpleasant questions about the role and complicity of
anthropologists in dealing with totalitarian regimes were being asked, and there was quite
16 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
a bit of uneasiness in some anthropological communities (in The Netherlands, for example)
about the remarks that some of their representatives made during the IUAES congress.
By raising his voice, Skalník demonstrated how it was possible to be consistent and at the
same time an engaged anthropologist (pace Eriksen 2006). He also reminded us about
the importance of living up to certain standards – perhaps not much more than “common
everyday decency”, as Boas called it.
Anthropologists are not the only ones caught in the web of everyday politics, and it would
be unfair to set for them standards that are higher than standards for other actors in the
public arena. On the other hand, the fact that they work with people, spend considerable
amount of time in their communities, and that they gain their trust – makes them poten-
tially very dangerous allies of the ones who want to hurt the communities that they study.
The most flagrant case in the 20th century was, of course, the role that some German-language
anthropologists played during the Third Reich. In recent years, with the wealth of material
being accessible (due to opening of various archives all around the world), this legacy was
studied in great detail – especially by scholars like Andre Gingrich (2005). It is also worth
noticing that the issue of scholars adapting their theories in context of totalitarian regimes
was also present in Skalník’s work.
For example, during his stay in South Africa, where he continued to work on political
anthropology – a topic he already contributed to significantly with Henri Claessen during
the 1970s (Claessen and Skalník 1978, 1981) – Skalník produceda major study of how
a specific reworking of the concept of etnos (ethnos) has made its way from its original creator
(Russian ethnologist Shirokogoroff), via the most prominent German anthropologist during
the Nazi period (Mühlmann), and to the South African anthropologists and ethnologists
at the University of Stellenbosch in the 1930s, like Werner Eiselen. South African ethnolo-
gists were struggling to understand the consequences of the economic crisis of the early
1930s, and thinking about the ways in which they can devise a system in which the white
(predominantly Afrikaner) population will be spared from its devastating consequences.
As a result, reworking the etnos, they further developed the idea that the best way in which
different cultures can develop is to keep them separate – which contributed to the ideological
basis of the political system of apartheid, which was dominant in South Africa between
1949 and 1990.1 It is interesting how a single concept was found to be so useful in three
different totalitarian settings, and Skalník’s paper is a masterful study of how ideas are taken
and shaped by people, in real political circumstances, as well as how these ideas can turn out.
Living in the totalitarian state for so long reinforced Skalník’s need to understand
the functioning of the state, with all of its mechanisms (even from within – as he served
first as a Czechoslovakian, and then Czech, Ambassador in Lebanon in the early 1990s).
Thiswas also probably a reason why he was keen to meet, during his visit to Belgrade in 2011,
Dr. Aleksa Đilas, the son of the former Yugoslav dissident, Milovan Đilas (1911–1995).
1 Technically, this political system was in place until the first free elections in 1994. However, in reality, it was
already dismantled with the reforms of the President F. W. de Klerk in early 1990, including releasing Mr.
Nelson Mandela, as well as all political prisoners, legalizing of the previously banned political parties, like
the ANC and SACP, etc. This led to the cancellation of the international sanctions against South Africa, so
the country re-entered the international scene in sports, culture, politics, etc.
17ALEKSANDAR BOŠKOVIĆ
Đilas was one of the two dissidents during the socialist rule in the country (the other one was
Mihailo Mihailov [1934–2010]).2 He was one of the most prominent Yugoslav communists
and President of the Federal Parliament, until he was sacked in early 1954. He claimed that
communism only served as a means for “the new class” to take and strengthen its power
– a far cry from the proclaimed goals of egalitarianism and democracy. For this, he spent
most of his time until 1966 in prison, and after that, under strict government surveillance,
until the late 1980s. As someone who knew the system from within, Đilas was also very well
positioned (because of his intelligence, great writing style, etc.) to criticize it. I will quote
here from a conversation that was published in the magazine Encounter:
The essence of any Communist system is the monopolistic rule of society by the Communist
Party. Communismis about the possession of power. It is, moreover, about the posses-
sion of totalitarian power. Communism looks upon itself as fully entitled by the design
of history to change and tocontrol not only man“s allegiances and behaviour as a political
being, but also his readings, his tastes, his leisure time and,indeed, the whole of his pri-
vate universe. Communism cannot, therefore, transform itself into a free society. (Djilas
and Urban 1988: 3–4)
And, commenting on the changes that were then taking place in the Soviet Union:
They have come to realise what other Communists in Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia and China realised much earlier — namely that Communism doesn’t
work. It works neither at the economic level nor at the level of satisfying essential human
needs and liberties. Put all these factors side by side with the rapid technological advance
of the Western and Far Eastern worlds and you cannot help realising that Communism
is a 19th century relic and a prescription for disaster. (Djilas and Urban 1988: 4)
The interesting thing about Đilas is that, once he changed his mind and developed a new
understanding of the system that he was living in (and that he helped create), he was consistent
and acted according to his beliefs – regardless of the costs. This was the time when critical
views of the socialist system were still very rare – although Czeslaw Milosz published his
brilliant book in 1953, it was for a very long time mostly ignored, as the majority of European
intellectuals sought to pursue ideas of emancipation and progress, disregarding the darker
aspects of socialism. More importantly, many European intellectuals at the time were
disregarding the experiences of people who actually lived in this type of political system.
Anthropologists are frequently in a position to interpret local discourses and present
the voices of a “local community” to the outside world. This brings with it a great respon-
sibility, and was in the past sometimes a source for some serious misunderstandings.
Here I primarly mean the myth of “anthropology as a handmaiden of colonialism” –
something that cannot be taken seriously by anyone with even basic knowledge of the
history of anthropology (cf. Lewis 2013). For, even with very dark shades of the Nazi era,
or anthropologists who worked (and thrived) during the apartheid regime and the like,
the fact is that a great majority of nthropologists (at least beginning with Haddon and
Rivers in the late 19th century, and possibly even before them) have usually been committed
to ideals of peace and fairness, and refused to collaborate with totalitarian regimes.
2 I mention him here intentionally, both because I had the privilege to know him, and because of a widespread
tendency among Yugoslav intellectuals to mythologize their alleged “dissident” status. Thus, people who
received state grants to travel abroad and to attend conferences or festivals, and then were able to return to
Yugoslavia and live very comfortable lives, like to call themselves “dissidents” (Bogdanović 2009).
18 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
When anthropologists end up being caught up in ethnic conflicts, it might provoke them
to rush to the side of “their” ethnic group – or to try to analyze the roots of the conflict.
The former Yugoslavia presents a good case for the first scenario. This region became
especially interesting for outside observers following the bloody dissolution of the former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The amount of violence broadcasted on TV screens was shocking
for the audiences throughout the world: atrocities unheard of since the end of the Second
World War were present, dangerously close to “home”, and mass murders and rapes were
committed in Europe for the first time since 1945. How was this possible? And what kind
of people were able to commit such horrible acts? The debates about the Yugoslav wars
resulted in interesting rejoinders, angry rebuttals, or threats of legal action (and here I find
particularly interesting the situation following the publication of a paper by Cushman [2004]
in the journal Anthropological Theory — for the responses to this very controversial paper,
see Denich 2005 and Hayden 2005). To be quite honest, this does not make anthropolo-
gists different from professionals in other academic fields or disciplines — as my primary
interest here is in explaining models of behavior, I will leave the issues of morality to people
with more interest in the thriving area of ethics of academic work.
Another way is best exemplified in Kapferer’s reading of the roots of the conflict in Sri
Lanka (Kapferer 1988). Kapferer skillfully navigates between the currents of myth, history,
politics, and ethnicity – and maps the origin of a specific ideological construction that will
much later be one of the main causes of the brutal civil war. The beauty of his analysis
is that the war in Sri Lanka is never mentioned in the book – and yet, chapters of the
book serve as a precise and very useful tool for interpreting it. This puts Kapferer in a role
as a political actor, similar to the one that Skalník has been in.3 This proves that it is
possible for anthropologists to perform important roles in the lives and histories of the
societies that they study. Therefore, what anthropologists do or believe in is not something
benign or purely “theoretical” (as many colonized peoples can provide good examples for).
It is what anthropologists practise that matters. And in practice, there are very few of our
colleagues, whose commitment and integrity can match the one by Petr Skalník.
Anthropologi.info 2009a. “Anthropology in China: IUAES-conference boycott due to Uyghur
massacre.” http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2009/iuaes-conference-boycott-
due-to-uyghur-massacre.
Anthropologi.info 2009b. “Chinese media propaganda at IUAES anthropology conference
in Kunming.” http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2009/chinese-media-propa-
ganda-at-iuaes-anthropology-c.
Boas, Franz. 2005. [1919]. “Scientists as Spies.” The Nation Vol. CIX, No. 2842, 20 December
1919. Reprinted in: Anthropology Today 21(3): 27.
3 I should also mention his involvement as the editor of the Berghahn Books series Critical Interventions –
a series that critically examines various aspects (political, historical, economic, ideological) of the contem-
porary world.
19ALEKSANDAR BOŠKOVIĆ
Bogdanović, Mira. 2009. “Jugoslavenski disidentii hladni rat.” Sociologija LI (2): 113–136.
Bošković, Aleksanda. 2010. Kratak uvod u antropologiju. Zagreb: Jesenskii Turk.
Bošković, Aleksandar. 2012. “The question of morality: ‘The starry Heavens above me’
and everyday life in the Balkans.” Forum Bosnae 55: 128–132.
Claessen, Henri J. M., and Peter Skalnik (eds.). 1978. The Early State. Leiden: De Gruyter Mouton.
Claessen, Henri J. M., and Peter Skalnik (eds.). 1981. The Study of the State. Leiden: De Gruyter
Mouton.
Cushman, Thomas. 2004. “Anthropology and genocide in the Balkans: An analysis of conceptual
practices of power.” Anthropological Theory 4(1): 5–28.
Delahoutre, Michel. 1996. Art etspiritualité de l“Inde. La-Pierre-qui-Vire: Zodiaque.
Denich, Bette. 2005. “Debate or defamation? Comment on the publication of Cushman’s
“Anthropology and Genocide in the Balkans’.” Anthropological Theory 5(4): 555–558.
Djilas, Milovan, and George Urban. 1988. “Djilas on Gorbachov.” Encounter September/
October 1988, pp. 3–19.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence.
Oxford: Berg.
Geertz, Clifford. 1997. “The legacy of Thomas Kuhn: The right text at the right time.”
Common Knowledge 6(1): 1–5.
Gingrich, Andre. 2005. German anthropology during the Nazi period: Complex scenarios of
collaboration, persecution, and competition. In One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German,
French, and American Anthropology, edited by Fredrik Barth, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin
and Sydel Silverman, pp. 111–136. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayden, Robert M. 2005. “Inaccurate data, spurious issues and editorial failure in Cushman’s
“Anthropology and Genocide in the Balkans’.” Anthropological Theory 5(4): 545–554.
Holy, Ladislav, and Milan Stuchlik. 1983. Actions, Norms and Representations: Foundations
of Anthropological Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political
Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Lewis, Herbert S. 2013. In Defense of Anthropology: An Investigation of the Critique of Anthro-
pology. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.
Milosz, Czeslaw. 1953. [1952]. The Captive Mind. Translated by Jane Zielonko. London: Martin
Secker & Warburg Ltd.
Skalník, Petr. 1988. “Union soviétique – Afrique du Sud: les “théories” de l“etnos.” Cahiers
d’Études Africaines 28, Cahier 110, pp. 157–176.
Skalník, Petr. 2011. Fieldwork as a tightrope walk (A political anthropologist as a survivor).
Guest seminar (Antropološka Agora) at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, Faculty
of Philosophy, Belgrade, 22 February.
20 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
Skalník, Petr. 2012. “The state and the anthropologies of the state. (A political anthropolo-
gist’s testimony).” RAM-WAN Journal 6: 43–65. Available online at: http://www.ram-wan.net/
documents/05_e_Journal/journal-6/3-skalnik.pdf
Thornton, Robert J., and Peter Skalník, eds. 1993. The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
21
CHRISTIAN GIORDANO
Social sciences have tackled the question of legitimacy in the various forms of domination thanks to the dis-
tinction formulated by Max Weber between domination (Herrschaft) and power (Macht). But it was chiefly
anthropologist Georges Balandier who forcefully underscored that power, inherently arbitrary, stands no chance
to last long, whereas domination based solely on the exercise of physical force and violence is constantly at risk.
Therefore, whoever seeks to govern must perforce establish his own legitimacy through the production of images,
the manipulation of symbols and their organization within a ceremonial context. These social representations
and practices are essential to foster in the governed that credence in their governors’ legitimacy (not to be
confused with legitimation) that Max Weber called Legitimitätsglauben. Moreover, credence in legitimacy is
also based on the trust of the governed in their governors. Notoriously, though, trust cannot be defined as an
objective certainty, but solely as the subjective probability of not being deceived. In line with this theoretical
reference frame, the presentation aims to analyze legal forms of domination primarily, which, however, display
a mutual lack of trust between citizens and governors (politicians and bureaucrats). Accordingly, it centers on
the organization of social relationships in societies that may be defined as societies of public distrust. These
cases, therefore, display a permanent tension between legality (rooted in state law) and legitimacy since, con-
trary to Max Weber’s thoughts, legality is perceived as illegitimate whereas illegality is considered legitimate.
Power; Domination; Legality; Legitimacy; Informality; Clientelism; Trust
Social sciences have tackled the question of legitimacy in the various forms of power
sensu lato thanks to the distinction formulated by Max Weber between power sensu strictu
(Macht) and domination (Herrschaft) (Weber 1956, Vol. 1, 28) . Power sensu strictu,
inherently arbitrary, stands no chance to last long, whereas domination without recog-
nition is constantly at risk. Therefore, whoever seeks to govern must perforce establish
his own legitimacy through the production of images, the manipulation of symbols and
their organization within a ceremonial context. These social representations and practices
are essential to foster in the governed that belief in their governors’ legitimacy that
Max Weber called Legitimitätsglauben or Legitimitätsgeltung (Weber 1956, Vol.1, 122–124).
Moreover, belief in legitimacy as I will show is also based on the trust of the governed
in their governors.
22 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
In line with this theoretical reference frame, my presentation aims to analyze chiefly
legal forms of domination or authority (the imprecise and by now obsolescent formula-
tion by Talcott Parsons), which, however, display a mutual lack of trust between citizens
and governors (politicians and bureaucrats). Accordingly, the focus is on the organiza-
tion of social relationships in societies that may be defined as societies of public mistrust.
These cases display a permanent tension between legality (rooted in state law) and legiti-
macy since legality, contrary to Max Weber’s analyses, is perceived as illegitimate whereas
illegality is considered legitimate.
One can hardly claim that political anthropology has had a predominant role in general
anthropology, be it social or cultural. With due exceptions, it brings to mind the story
of Cinderella who was constantly being outshone by her older and apparently more impor-
tant stepsisters. How can we not notice the greater importance given to the anthropology
of the family or of religion, though they both have significant affinities or links with politi-
cal anthropology?
This neglect or lesser interest probably stems from a distinctively anthropological attitude
which would rather employ the bottom-up or from below perspective than the top-down one,
thus tending to overlook what Laura Nader called the studying up (Nader 1972, 284–311).
Through this perspective the anthropologist tends to observe political power sensu lato
through the eyes of those who endure it or try to counter it with, quoting James Scott,
the weapons of the weak (Scott 1985). With this conceptual and terminological vagueness
though, power sensu lato appears to be a sum of essentially uniform and undifferentiated
phenomena rife with wanton brutality, intimidation and perversion, thus sheer arbitrari-
ness. If so, political anthropology would have precious little relevance, given this very naïve
and banal conception of the relationship between those who command and those who obey,
i.e., those in a subaltern condition.
This stance was subsequently strengthened by considerations stemming from postco-
lonial studies, which, due precisely to their peculiarly culturalistic conception, reduced
relationships of domination to a crude distinction between hegemonic and subaltern social
groups (Spivak and Guha 1988). Aside from the important contributions of postcolonial
studies to various other analyses of social relationships, we need to underscore that the
dichotomy between hegemonic and subaltern groups is ultimately based on a feeble
and simplistic theoretical apparatus originating from some thought-provoking but far
too loosely connected reflections formulated by Antonio Gramsci (1975).
In short, we can hardly deny that our discipline, by means of what I would define
as anthropological populism, has somewhat demonized and vacated the question of power,
domination and authority in terms of social phenomena as if it were a sort of original sin
unworthy of an in-depth analysis of its various forms, strategies, stratagems and stagings.
In its empirical program anthropology has somehow forgotten the theoretical reasonings
postulated by Niccolò Machiavelli and by those who drew inspiration from this founder
of political anthropology.
23CHRISTIAN GIORDANO
Drawing on the teachings of Machiavelli, in this presentation I aim to distinguish between
various forms of power sensu lato by means of a disenchanted approach without moralistic
preconceptions. Therefore, I will endeavor to show its social complexity, perhaps in an
incomplete and fragmentary manner, but avoiding the pitfall of an a priori stigmatization.
Given the above inaccuracy of the socio-anthropological analysis of power sensu lato,
resorting to specific basic categories of sociology, as French political anthropologist Georges
Balandier did, is more to the purpose (Balandier 1999). We are clearly referring to the
concepts developed by Max Weber in his attempt to analyze the array of political pheno-
mena in the most sophisticated way possible.
Therefore, the first and fundamental step, in my opinion, is to distinguish between power
sensu strictu (Macht) and domination or authority (Herrschaft).
Power sensu strictu (Macht) is the possibility that an individual acting in the context
of a social relationship may impose his/her own will, even if faced by an opposition
(Weber 1956, Vol. 1, 28). As Max Weber aptly points up, the concept of power sensu stricto
is sociologically, but also anthropologically, indeterminate, thus with practically no cogni-
tive relevance. Simply said, any individual in any social configuration may be in a position
to impose his/her own will on someone who cannot object. A classic example is the thief
who uses his physical force or a weapon to force his victims into handing over their wallets
without being able to counter him effectively. Thus, power sensu strictu is based on arbi-
trariness and in most cases on the use of physical force.
Sociologically and anthropologically more relevant by far is the notion of domina-
tion (Herrschaft) that may be defined as follows: the possibility that part of an entire
group will obey an order given them by one or more individuals (Weber 1956, Vol. 1, 29).
From these initial observations we can already perceive the striking difference between power
sensu strictu and domination; unlike the former, in fact, the latter is not based on arbitrari-
ness, whereas the use of physical force and physical punishments is limited, though clearly
possible. According to Max Weber, therefore, whoever is in command and gives orders
must be accountable to those whose task is to follow and execute orders. Any leadership,
better yet any political elite holding that form of power called domination must obtain
a quantum of consensus from the dominated. As we shall see more in detail, this means that
the imperative requirement of domination is credibility.
In fact, Georges Balandier, the anthropologist who probably more than any other
has carried on and expanded on Weber’s political typology, in his enlightening book
Le pouvoir sur scènes noted that power sensu strictu based exclusively on brute physical
force is constantly at risk (Balandier 1980). Yet, also a rational justification like the bureau-
cratic iron cage (Weber’s well-known stahlhartes Gehäuse) would prove to be scarcely
efficient in long-term practices and strategies of domination (Weber 1956, Vol. 2, 843).
Balandier shows us therefore that domination can justify and maintain itself solely with
the transposition, production and manipulation of images and symbols within a specific,
institutionalized, ceremonial framework (Balandier 1980). This applies to charismatic
24 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
leaders and traditional sovereigns, but it also clearly applies to modern-day dictators
with their military or militarized hierarchies, nomenklatura and single-party State as well
as to present-day politicians with their specific systems of legal-bureaucratic democratic
domination.
Therefore, domination exerted by the elites, as Vilfredo Pareto called them, and by the
political classes, as instead Gaetano Mosca defined them, is always grounded in specific
dramaturgies by which willingly or not whoever is at the helm, or in Italian political parlance
is in the switch room (namely the control center) belongs to a theatocracy (Pareto 1974, 156,
Mosca 1966; Balandier 1980, 14). This particular form systematically resorts to the past,
too, in the shape of an idealized history and of a constructed, deconstructed and recon-
structed social memory, to its own advantage, i.e., to help maintain its own position within
the domination structures. These ethical ornaments, as Roberto Michels so aptly described
them, are always in the service of domination (Michels, 1970: 17–19).
From these initial observations we can already gather that by differentiating between
power sensu strictu and domination Max Weber challenges Marx’s rather simplistic view
by which power sensu lato is essentially force and especially force exerted by one class
on the other ones. Weber therefore seeks to improve on Marx’s inherent objectivism, which
features above all the importance of the economic or structural dimension understood
as the base. This would mean though that the required quantum of consensus and credibility
characterizing social relationships between those in command and those who obey orders,
as well as the symbolic and theatocratic aspects of domination, are reduced to a superstruc-
ture, i.e. merely a deceiving ideology.
If we continue along Weber’s line of reasoning and agree that domination is not solely
force, i.e., a form of power essentially based on arbitrariness and physical violence, then we
need to address the question of the legitimacy of the various forms of domination.
Analyzing common parlance as well as political parlance, we will notice that the two terms
are often confused and incorrectly used as synonyms, whereas their meanings are signifi-
cantly different.
For Max Weber legitimacy is a prerequisite for every relationship of domination
(thus not of force) of man over man (Weber 1956, Vol 1, 122) The consensus of the domi-
nated and the willingness to believe of the dominants are the two mainstays of legitimacy.
Consequently, legitimacy exists if the dominated are willing to follow the orders of those
in charge of issuing them. In a relationship of domination the prerequisite for a recog-
nized legitimacy is that those who execute orders must believe in the specific abilities,
qualities or qualifications of whoever administers power. Therefore, believing that the domi-
nant positions are held by the right persons in the right place is essential. This is why
Max Weber coined the renowned term Legitimitätsglaube, i.e. the belief in legitimacy.
Thus, the specific abilities, qualities and qualifications of those exerting domination are not
objective but only assumed, i.e., socially constructed.
For this reason Balandier strongly emphasized the importance of the theatocratic aspect,
which clearly refers to the requisite legitimacy while strategically striving to validate one’s
suitability for the position of power already held or pursued (Balandier 1980).
25CHRISTIAN GIORDANO
These phenomena of the social production of legitimacy are inherent to so-called
traditional societies or charismatic movements, but are also and especially visible
in modern systems based on democratic legality where the request and demand for legitimacy
is particularly important given the strong competition for positions of authority. In these
systems, dramaturgical practices aimed at generating belief in legitimacy, and as often
as not inventing it, are increasingly on the agenda but peak during political campaigns
preceding elections. All the organization involved in creating a politician’s public image
centers round the production of belief in legitimacy. The public image is necessary to create
belief in the candidate’s legitimacy.
Yet, the belief in legitimacy as a foundation of domination is only one option, albeit a key
one. In fact, we cannot rule out that other reasons may induce individuals or groups to obey
and thus accept the state of domination. Obedience may conceal reasons of expediency
and quasi-fatalistic feelings of powerlessness.
Unlike legitimacy, which is based on the subalterns’ belief in it and has an ascriptive
and relational nature, legitimation has distinctly systemic and formal characteristics.
In other words, legitimation does not arise from a quantum of consensus or recognition,
but rather, as Rodney Barker notes, from the respect, in empirical reality, for specific rules
often rooted in unwritten codes regarding conventions, customs, and traditions or in legal
systems based on written laws (Barker 2001, 22–25).
This distinction may seem slightly contrived, but a few examples can help us grasp
its relevance. During the recent political crises in Greece, Spain and Italy there has been
a drifting apart if not indeed a separation between legitimacy and legitimation. In their final
phases, the governments led by Papandreu, Berlusconi and Zapatero, though fully aware
of their loss of legitimacy, kept on governing to the very end by clinging on to legitimation,
i.e., by resorting to articles of the constitution they were able to exploit unexceptionable
technicalities of the election laws.
Several dictatorships, well aware of not being able to rely on the legitimacy of their
subjects, tailor the legal apparatus to fit their needs, aiming precisely to justify their
arbitrary exercise of power in order to create a formal legitimation that will allow them
to act with impunity. In this regard we need only mention the most brutal example of the
last fifty years: Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia.
Finally, the above examples show how, unlike legitimacy, legitimation may be exploited
by an elite or a political class self-referentially; in this case, in line with Brian Turner’s
formulation, it ought to be defined as exclusively ruler-centered (Turner 1982, 370).
An undeniably central point is the close correlation between legitimacy and trust.
In fact, crediting a person or group with the recognized social role of exercising domination,
thus believing in their legitimacy, also implies, in principle, not being deceived by those
in command.
Diego Gambetta has aptly highlighted that trust is based on a subjective likelihood,
while German sociologist Niklas Luhmann speaks about a reasonable expectation, but never
26 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
of a certainty (Luhmann 1973, 45). Therefore, single or collective actors in a relationship
of trust cannot and must not be utterly certain that their partner will never cheat, deceive,
betray or defraud them, especially in a relationship of domination. Accordingly, Luhmann
likens trust to a risky advance performance, since loyal behavior, i.e., respecting agree-
ments and rules, must be regarded solely as a probability (Luhmann 1973, 45; Gambetta
1988, 217). The trusting actor is constantly coming face to face with a betrayal of trust.
Blind trust is simply evidence of naiveté and foolishness, while an excessive amount of trust,
as German historian Ute Frevert points up, can only lead to ruination and perdition, since
too much trust is generally perceived as a shortcoming or, worse still, as a sign of weak-
ness or powerlessness (Frevert 2003, 11–13). Thus trust is a commodity in short supply
that one must know how to get a hold of, as the Italian expression conquistarsi la fiducia,
win someone’s trust, rightly expresses.
Going back to our subject, winning the others’ trust, possibly even by resorting
to lies or other fraudulent means, is of the essence to generate belief in one’s legitimacy,
thus to build one’s dominant position. Accordingly, obtaining trust is a prerequisite to ensure
one’s legitimacy.
There is a rather widespread phenomenon in some societies (we need only mention south
and east Europe and especially southeast Europe) by which mistrust, chiefly in the public
sphere, plays a major role. This means that political and administrative classes in these
societies are permanently challenged by a severe crisis of legitimacy in which the State
and its entire legislative apparatus are ultimately involved.
In these societies anthropologists must deal with specific notions of public and private
that clash somewhat with ideals and ideologies specific to the Occident. The relation
between public and private in these societies, which we will call public mistrust socie-
ties, is clearly conceived as a binary opposition. In terms of collective representations,
in fact, there is an undeniable confrontation between the public and the private sphere.
There is no empirical evidence in the societies we are talking about of the well-known idea
of sociologist Richard Sennett for whom public and private spheres in the Occidental world
have been a so-to-say complementary set of social relationships, or, more metaphorically,
two atoms of the same molecule (Sennett 1976, Sennett 1983, 33 and 120). Accordingly,
in public mistrust societies the clear-cut separation between public and private sphere
and the supremacy of the former on the latter has never been questioned. The consequent
opinion of these societies’ members is categorical: the private sector is regarded as the social
space of security, trustworthiness, and solidarity, whereas the public sector is perceived
as a dangerous foreign body. For this reason, anthropologist Carlo Tullio-Altan, referring
to Italy pointed out that this country has its specific morality (Tullio-Altan 1986). In accord-
ance with this type of morality, which is a more or less a standard feature of public mistrust
societies, any endeavor a person undertakes to guarantee, achieve, and even maximize
the particularistic-like welfare and benefits of his own group is legitimate, given the private
sphere’s essentially positive features. In line with this type of morality, these strategies
can be activated even if they should damage other members of society and above all if they
should jeopardize the public welfare.
27CHRISTIAN GIORDANO
In parallel with the positive evaluation of private social spaces, this morality is averse
to the public ones. In fact, when the public universe is perceived as increasingly imper-
sonal, objectified, anonymous, and rationalized, then suspicion and mistrust will increase
among the members of public mistrust societies. This is precisely one of the reasons why
extralocal public institutions rekindle the feeling that their ultimate aim is to rob and harass
people. Anyone who sees this is an undisputed truth can have only one reaction; namely,
develop action strategies based on the logic that robbing your robber is legitimate
(Giordano 1992, 412–417; Giordano 2012, 124).
Aiming to infiltrate and thereby neutralize the untrustworthy public institutions, especially
the ones linked to the State, the single actors opt for the multiform methods of informality,
which they regard as the most effective course of action to avoid the hazards of the public
sphere. Paraphrasing Barbara Misztal, by informality we mean very broadly speaking those
social organization systems based on face-to face social interactions and relationships
in operation within or in parallel to institutions governed by impersonal and established
rules, codes, laws or decrees (Misztal 2000, 3–5).
Informality in the public sphere, such as the one observed by anthropologists in public
mistrust societies, has a terrible reputation in social sciences and at times is considered
a form of anomie. Yet, informality is unimaginable without its opposite, i.e., formality.
Therefore, informality and formality cannot be treated separately. The sharp distinction
and contrast between the two is essentially ideal typical in a Weberian sense (Weber 1968,
235–249). In the empirical reality of social relationships and interactions the two phenomena
coexist side by side and as often as not will overlap, intersect, merge and blend.
Based on the socio-anthropological observation that informal relationships and practices
in modern public mistrust societies are the rule rather than the exception and that they do not
necessarily involve socially illegitimate relationships, we can agree with American sociolo-
gist Homans that informal behaviors are akin to the more simple, fundamental and effective
models of human relationships (Homans 1961). Pointless moralisms aside, informality
ultimately implies an extra-institutional resource based on interpersonal transactions and
exchanges of mutual services between actors interfacing with each other. I believe this fact
has been keenly recognized by anthropology, especially by the Manchester School, which
is a constant point of reference for those studying the social organization of informality
(Bailey 1970; Boissevain 1974).
As previously mentioned, informality is neither anomie nor social disorganization.
Actually, the social organization specific to informality is highly complex. We are dealing
in particular with dyadic and polyadic relationships and with extended or extensive person-
alized networks, both horizontal and vertical, which infiltrate the public sphere where
impersonal and established structures are, on paper at least, predominant. The purpose
of these organizations of informality is to generate relationships of trust with people
in dominant positions (politicians and bureaucrats) whom one does not trust a priori and
consequently does not attribute any legitimacy. These activities aim to activate forms of reci-
procity either directly or mediated by third parties who in turn obtain their own material,
political or solely symbolic advantage.
Given the existing types of reciprocity and exchange of favors though, practices in these
organizations of informality often have an illegal or semi-legal quality. Returning to Max
Weber this generates, as we shall see, a permanent tension between legality and legitimacy.
28 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
Among these organizations of informality, in public mistrust societies there are clientelist
and family networks in particular, the ones including friends and acquaintances such as the
renowned Soviet blat (Ledenova 1998, 37), the Chinese guanxi (Hertz 1998), the Bulgarian
vrazki, the Serbian veze and the Polish znajomosci (Benovska-Săbkova 2001, 165–168) along
with the corruptive cartels. Finally, we also need to add all those highly flexible associations
that are far less centralized than official statements would have us believe and which Italian
legal parlance defines as Mafia-like.
At this point, the anthropologist needs to tackle the reasons underlying mistrust in the
public sphere and the rather precarious legitimacy of political classes, bureaucracy and
the State’s legal apparatus in general. Researching the social logic, better yet, the social
action, in line with Weber’s agnostic tradition, appears to be the most suitable and tenable
approach. Therefore, we definitely must avoid moralistic and ethnocentric stances.
The clientelist, corruptive and Mafia practices in the frame of informality should not
be considered exclusive to public mistrust societies perceived as archaic collectivities
or ones plagued by fatalism or social, cultural and moral backwardness (Banfield 1958;
Lepsius 1965, 321; Tullio-Altan 1986, 57–60; Haller and Shore 2005, 3–19; Pardo 2004).
This would be yet another ethnocentric theory of the sociocultural deficit of some societies
compared to others, namely Western ones. Societies deemed more advanced have cronyism,
clientelism, corruption and Mafia too, although probably to a lesser extent or maybe just
better concealed because the State is more efficient. Evidence that single Mafia networks are
by now quite successfully operating in Germany and Switzerland substantiates this thesis.
The question of the diffusion as well as the continuity and persistence of informality and
its associated social relationships in public mistrust societies cannot be adequately dealt
with via a culturalist approach, which usually employs an overly static notion of culture
by which the actors are caged in a fixed frame, thus reduced to robots without a choice.
An interpretation based on the pure and simple use of the rational choice paradigm appears
to be highly reductive as well (Giordano 2003, 548–551).
An historical-anthropological approach, instead, reveals quite clearly that the extent
of clientelist, cronyist, corruptive and Mafia-like phenomena in public mistrust societies
is strictly correlated to a permanent discord between State and society (Pardo and Prato
2011). In Weberian terms we could say that there is a split between legality and legitimacy
as shown in the following diagram:
Formal State institutions and agents Informal relationships, coalitions and
social networks
Legal Partially Illegal or semi-legal
Non-Legitimate Legitimate
The roots of this dissonance between State and society and the consequent split between
legality and legitimacy reach deep into a distant history. Yet, contrary to most historians’
modus operandi, history cannot be reduced to a mechanical or automatic sequence of
objective facts. Instead, it must be understood as an interpreted past activated by the actors
themselves in their to-be-interpreted present (Ricoeur 1985, Vol. 3, 314). Thus, we reach the
29CHRISTIAN GIORDANO
question of history as a past that is experienced, either in a direct or mediated way, and then
actualized (Giordano, 2005: 53–57). This concerns what has been defined as the presence
or efficacy of history (Schaff 1976, 129; Ricoeur 1985, Vol. 3, 495). Unlike socio-genetic
narratives, the historical-anthropological view does not deal as much with the sociologically
relevant roots of informality and its manifestations in the social practices of public mistrust
societies, but rather with the social construction of continuity by which informal activities
take on and maintain a specific meaning in the minds of members of public mistrust societies.
According to the historical-anthropological view, this persistence, despite inevitable socio-
structural changes, springs from the tight and permanent interaction between the collective
spaces of experience, in the sense of interpreted past, and the horizons of expectation,
regarded, instead, in the present as an imagined future (thus to be interpreted) (Koselleck
1979, 349–359).
Informality as a suitable principle of social organization (along with its above-mentioned
social practices) is strictly linked to the dreadful experiences that members of a given
society have continuously had with the State, both in a recent and distant past. Obviously,
these negatives spaces of experience, which have a marked influence on the actors and on
the formation of their horizons of expectation, do not reproduce themselves automatically
by tradition, i.e., simply because they are handed down from one generation to the next.
These spaces of experience must be constantly confirmed in the present. Traditions as well
as mentalities are extremely moldable phenomena whose plausibility and effectiveness
must be permanently verified and confirmed. In accordance with the members’ perception
of these experiences, the corresponding systems of representations and behavioral models
will be strengthened, modified, or discarded.
As already mentioned, the reproduction of negative spaces of experience in public mistrust
societies, such as the one in the Mezzogiorno or those of Eastern Europe, goes hand in hand
with the constant failing of the State and of civil society’s institutions. Yet, such a public
inability to carry out one’s duties is not only an objective fact that can be observed from
the outside, but, far more important, is also shared within and consequently built as such
by the citizens themselves. Thus, for the actors affected by the permanent disaster of public
powers and civil society’s institutions, the persistence, resurgence and expansion of informal
behavioral models is simply the outcome of a contextual rational choice. Paraphrasing
Pizzorno, in fact, members of public mistrust societies in the Mediterranean and South
East-European areas resort to informality with good reason since nobody is foolish to the
point of doing things that serve no purpose or that could be damaging (Pizzorno 1976, 243).
I would like to close with the following five points:
• By distinguishing between two types of power, i.e., power sensu strictu and domi-
nation, Max Weber shows that the former is sociologically amorphous, therefore
arbitrary and ephemeral, whereas the latter is much more stable since it is rooted
in the belief of the dominated in their dominator’s legitimacy.
• Dominators must perforce stage their own legitimacy via theatocratic strategies.
30 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
Hence, there is a constant social production of legitimacy by means of public
performances. Domination, therefore, is never based on physical violence alone.
• Distinguishing between legitimacy and legitimation is both useful and necessary.
The former has ascriptive and relational characteristics, whereas the latter has
essentially formal and systemic ones independent of the subalterns’ recognition.
• Legitimacy implies a relationship of trust between dominators and subalterns,
where trust refers to a subjective likelihood or reasonable expectation but never
to the certainty of not being deceived.
• From an ethnographic point of view, the anthropologist often deals with socie-
ties showing a form of legal domination that can rely on legitimation but not
on legitimacy owing to a lack of trust in anything public. Consequently,
there is a separation between legality and legitimacy by which single individuals
feel justified in resorting to informal networks to overcome this deficit. However,
the anthropologist must not commit the mistake common to many political scien-
tists of regarding these societies as backward ones. The informalization of society
ought to be interpreted, instead, as a sum of rational strategies based on past
spaces of experience activated in the present horizon of expectations. We need to
tress that this is not a case of historical determinism, but rather of an intentional
and properly thought-out choice.
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33
MARCIN BROCKI
It becomes almost a commonsense truth in social sciences and humanities that the scholar should not only get
out of his/her “ivory tower” but also to participate in an activist way in the world of his “informant”. The text
critically examines the achievements and research directives of activist anthropology. I’m trying to show that
anthropological projects that base on the so called “participation” are far from the epistemological rupture,
that is fundamental to the freedom of scientific thinking, the freedom that can lead sometimes to the genera-
tion of opposite knowledge to common sense, while participatory projects leads rather toward confirmation of
the common sense. In the article I’m trying to show that the researcher who is negotiating the content of his
knowledge, which is to be a representation of informant’s knowledge, with the informant, becomes a hostage
of the unwritten agreement, which he imposed by himself, assuming that what is good from the moral stand
defined by a researcher, is also good for informant, and is good at all.
Action anthropology; Activist anthropology; Moral models in anthropology; Critical anthropology; Para-
ethnography
In the mid-1990s, George Marcus indicated the need to rethink the contemporary, single-sited
strategy for ethnographic research, and proposed what he referred to as multi-sited research,
an approach based on Marcus’s own definition of complicity (Marcus 1995). He Christian
Giordano gives the following reasons why other, similar terms that denote a certain aspect
of fieldwork related to the researcher-researched relationship have become inadequate
(referring to previous proposals by Clifford Geertz, Renato Rosaldo and James Clifford):
1. Rapport, denoting the necessary level of acquaintance with the researched
that allows researchers to obtain valuable field data (the value of which is determined
by the outside, i.e. the researcher’s professional culture, in relation to the inside,
i.e. the perspective of the researched), even though it still symbolises the ideal
research conditions, is an inadequate term because:
34 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
a. The context of conducting research and the context of culture have changed.
Today’s culture is riddled with inconsistencies and interrelationships between
different localities. Efficient research does not require sophisticated rapport
(enabled only by single-sited research) to permeate/access/cross/enter local
knowledge (in a single-sited manner, as all that is local is situated “here”);
b. The term solidifies the colonialist and neocolonialist division between the active
researcher and the passive researched. Under multi-sited research conditions,
this division is an externally maintained fiction, as authority relations may actually
be much more complex. Consequently, situating the anthropologist within these
relations does not necessarily benefit the building of asymmetrical relationships;
2. Not all elements of the semantic field of the term complicity can be used to describe
the sense Marcus attributes to them, because even if we take into account causes that
are external to the local culture (i.e., if complicity is not limited to the researcher-
researched relationship) – in other words, if the external context is embedded
“inside the area of research” – we may still find our understanding of the inside too
conventional. In Marcus’ opinion, this happened to Renato Rosaldo, who situated
fieldwork “inside another form of life.” It is the figure of “the area of research” that
should change;
3. Dialogue, accordingly, is also an inadequate term, as it refers to Utopian “collabora-
tion” (cooperation in the dialogue), because even though it rhetorically frees fieldwork
from an instrumentalised approach to the researched, multivocality still exists in some
particular, enclosed “object of study”, i.e. a clear, different lifestyle (Marcus 1997).
Marcus inscribes the notion of collaboration with an extremely mysterious similarity
of experiences of the “third,” an external motivating force that shapes the lives of the
researcher and the researched:
What ethnographers in this changed mise-en-scene want from subjects is not so much local
knowledge as an articulation of the forms of anxiety that are generated by the awareness
of being affected by what is elsewhere without knowing what the particular connections
to that elsewhere might be. The ethnographer on the scene in this sense makes that el-
sewhere present. […] This version of complicity tries to get at a form of local knowledge
that is about the kind of difference that is not accessible by working out internal cultural
logics. It is about difference that arises from the anxieties of knowing that one is somehow
tied into what is happening elsewhere, but, as noted, without those connections being clear
or precisely articulated through available internal cultural models. In effect, subjects are
participating in discourses that are thoroughly localized but that are not their own. […]
This uncertainty creates anxiety, wonder, and insecurity, in different registers, both in
the ethnographer and in her subjects. This recognition of a common predicament is the
primary motivation for thinking about the changed conception of fieldwork relationships
in terms of complicity. It would be possible to understand our emphasis on the figure
of complicity as the achievement of a different kind of rapport, but it would be a mistake
to identify it with the precise construction of that figure in the traditional mode. The in-
vestment in the figure of complicity rests on highlighting this contemporary external de-
termination of local discourses, marked and set off by the fieldworker“s presence but free
of the figures of rapport and collaboration that have traditionally characterized fieldwork.
Free of these, complicity between an ethnographer whose outsideness is always prominent
and a subject who is sensitive to the outside helps to materialize other dimensions that the
dialogue of traditional fieldwork, conceived as taking place inside rapport, cannot get at as
well. (Marcus 1997, 97–98)
35MARCIN BROCKI
When facing this “external third”, the researcher and the researched are on par with each
other. They are equally uncertain, and they both negotiate relations with the third in their
own “local” manner. The researcher and the researched enter an “agreement” with the third,
thus creating a bond that this time places them both in a situation of “complicity” against
the third. Their worlds may differ dramatically, but against the “underground discourse”,
a term he quotes after Douglas Holmes to denote “the third”, the researcher and the
researched create a community. Consequently, a thread of cognitive kinship is formed that
results in a “fair” relationship, i.e. honest partnership (Marcus 1997, 103). The researches
becomes a “partner” or an “actor” fully engaged in analysis (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 1104).
A question comes to mind at this point: What is the desired product of such a morally
pristine interaction? By referring to Holmes, whose research involves talks with far-right
politicians during which he attempts not to exoticise his interlocutors by incorporating
them into an apparently obvious frame, the author clearly suggests that the desired product
are meeting points between different imaginings of the third, just as in Holmes’s research.
The product, at least according to Marcus’s declarations, does not constitute scientific
knowledge about common knowledge. Rather, quite understandably, it constitutes the
“unknown”, i.e. loosely defined “internarratives” or “interconnected discourses” (Holmes
and Marcus 2005, 1105), even though we actually obtain a conventional product resembling
a press article wherein the author openly declares the will to create entities for ideological
purposes (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 1108), does not avoid mixing their own interpretation
with the interpretation of the researched and attempts to guess what their informer thinks
and “instinctively feels”. Thus, contrary to Marcus’s intentions, the informed is exoticised,
and the entire enterprise becomes shrouded in complete mystery:
[…] the collaborative space encompassed by integralism created a dynamic purview from
which we can view integration in terms of its manifold contradictions, revealing not merely
its institutional manifestations but also its profoundly human character - the ways in which
it has come to align consciousness and mediate intimacy. For us, this is the essence of
a multisited mise-en-scene, a staging that can reveal the interplay between metatheoretical
issues and the intricacies of human experience. (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 1104)
Perhaps it is worth adding that Marcus uses reductio ad essentiam when collectively
addresses the “conventional ethnography” and “traditional fieldwork” (including the
aforementioned “conventional” attempts to tackle the complex conditions of fieldwork).
The diversity and complexity of researchers’ attitudes are treated as unimportant; empirical
complexity is excluded because the proposed solution favours whatever is pertinent in terms
of the argument the author wishes to present, rather than the actual state of affairs (Marcus
2008). In other words, Marcus creates a founding myth by killing a fictional “character”.
This is accompanied by a rhetoric of challenge, i.e. a rhetoric of the complexity of the enter-
prise and a rhetoric of “metamorphosis,” of modernising change (Holmes and Marcus 2005),
and of the radicalism of the entire project. It is a truly awe-inspiring experience to read about
“the most radical thesis” that “spontaneously created para-ethnographies are built into
the structure of contemporary and give form and content to continuously unfolding skein
of experience” (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 1110). The entire project, promoted by Marcus
in numerous venues, is riddled with ambiguous, very general statements that form the basis
for the entire explanation. His “ethnography of complicity” resembles a parable more than
it resembles a scientific proposal. As a parable, its task is to express simple moral “truth”:
that the only good researcher is one that strives to equalise the contribution of the researcher
36 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
and the researched during the course of investigation; such a researcher can thus be called
a “collaborating researcher”. As any formula reflecting a certain scope of common know-
ledge, this one is also unclear and does not cover all cases (it can be used to determine many
cases, but not all of them). This renders any attempt at making the formula more explicit
pointless. Unsurprisingly, Marcus’ publications lack any such attempts. On the other hand,
the project does involve a tangible will to imbue complicity with scientific prestige. Complicity,
however, does not fall under scientific consideration, as despite referring to a supposed
democratisation of research procedure and analysis, it actually constitutes an attempt to
mix the structure of knowledge of the researcher and the researched according to vaguely
defined rules, and for an obscure purpose. Not only does this stall our understanding of
the Other, and through the Other, Ourselves, it actually makes understanding impossible.
Sol Tax’s Action Anthropology Project initiated in the 1940s addressed complicity in
a different manner. Unfortunately, the project also resulted in failure. Tax’s project aimed
to give Native Americans freedom to introduce changes they wanted and which seemed
beneficial for them. Tax’s team wished to break the vicious cycle of impossibilities: The effect
of inevitable modernisation on the local community and the actual changes that need
to occur on the one hand, and preserving Native American identity and system of values
on the other. The team also assumed that permanent financial aid for education and health
on the part of the federal government would be a necessary condition for the successful-
ness of the project. Consequently, they tried to interest politicians with the idea of a new
financial agreement that would guarantee support for schools and medical centres and,
at the same time, would allow Native Americans to make their own decisions concerning
their education and treatment in order to finally show that they are able to manage their
own affairs (cf. Tax 2010, 21).
Under Tax’s project, anthropologists in theory follow aims formulated by the local commu-
nity. However, the role anthropologists are to play in the community-led project of changes
is unclear: are they supposed to “give” the freedom to introduce changes as protectors
of the right of the local community to make decisions or as the active factors of change
themselves? The latter type of activity proved to be more popular than the former in Tax’s
as well as other projects. As a result, anthropology in action became action in the name of
anthropology (or values connected with it), undertaken for the sake of cultural change.
Ultimately, Tax’s project resembles what is referred to as intervention studies, which are
saliently orientated towards social change.
Action research aims to solve pertinent problems in a given context through democratic
inquiry in which professional researches collaborate with local stakeholders to seek and
enact solutions to problems of major importance to the stakeholders. We refer to this
as cogenerative inquiry because it is built on professional researcher-stakeholder colla-
boration and aims to solve real-life problems in context. Cogenerative inquiry processes
involve trained professional researchers and knowledgeable local stakeholders who work
together to define the problems to be addressed, to gather and organize relevant knowledge
and data, to analyze the resulting information, and to design social change interventions.
The relationship between the professional researcher and the local stakeholders is based
on bringing the diverse bases of their knowledge and their distinctive social locations to bear
on a problem collaboratively. The professional researcher often brings knowledge of other
relevant cases and of relevant research methods, and he or she often has experience in or-
ganizing research processes. The insiders have extensive and long-term knowledge of the
problems at hand and the contexts in which they occur, as well as knowledge about how and
from whom to get additional information. They also contribute urgency and focus to the
37MARCIN BROCKI
process, because it centers on problems they are eager to solve. Together, these partners
create a powerful research team. (Greenwood and Levin 2005, 54)
The interventional character of the researchers’ action is, as stated by the researchers
themselves, a way to democratise knowledge, and expanding the fields of cooperation
between the researcher and the researched is supposed to benefit this expansion (cf. Miller
and Crabtree 2005, 615). However, projects based on increasingly close “cooperation” suffer
from the same problem as Sol Tax’s actions of involving only superficial democratisation.
Superficial democratisation is also the result of formulating the research aim, which was
supposed to make this type of investigation similar to the anthropology of dialogism and,
at the same time, refute the accusation that the research aim is formulated by external
institutions. The most well-known example of a project of this type is Luke Lassiter’s
collaborative ethnography.
Lassiter claims that for anthropology to acquire a significant position within the public
debate, it should be introduced into social change projects in a manner that would allow
it to fully collaborate with the objects of change. He also claims that the researcher-research
relationship involves asymmetry that may be considered a violation of the reciprocity rule.
Lassiter agrees with Robert Borofsky that we are indebted to those who we research (they
themselves and the culture they allow us to investigate constitute a gift for us). We should
repay this debt by means of our support for matters important for the researched. Furthermore,
Lassiter provides a detailed list of areas that should be supported through collaboration with
the researched: “From human rights to violence, from the trafficking of body parts to the
illegal drug trade, from problem-solving to policy making, from the global to the local and
back again” (Lassiter 2005b, 83). Lassiter moves on to state, without giving any extensive
explanation that the reach of this kind of collaboration not only does not endanger “strict
scientific viability,” it fosters it in terms of the addressed subjects and the joint creation
of an ethnographic text (during writing). One may agree that Lassiter expounds the public
influence of this kind of an anthropology project well: “Collaborative ethnography, as one
of many academic/applied approaches, offers us a powerful way to engage the public with
anthropology one field project, one ethnographic text at a time” (Lassiter 2005b, 84–85).
This will predominantly interest those we engage in the project. The question is, however,
what type of influence is it? It is easy to make good “subject for thought” out of the informer
by generalizing them, a subject that we will later use during a particular study according to
the theoretical opinion about the informer we arrive at. The problem, however, lies in the fact
that this opinion may be incorrect. We are unable to decide prior to an investigation what
character the type of relationship we enter is going to have, as we do not know whether the
informer is able and willing to meet a researcher and whether they perceive the meeting and
the developing relationship in the same manner as we do. Dialogue cannot simply be taken
for granted, it may only occur on its own. Jean-Claude Kaufmann addresses the potential
deep relationship with the researched much more subtly:
From the informer’s perspective, the ideal researcher is a remarkable person. The resear-
cher should be someone unfamiliar and anonymous, someone we can share anything with
because we are never going to see them again; someone who is obviously not going to play
any role in the realm of contacts maintained by the informer. At the same time, the researcher
should become someone close to the informer during the interview, someone who seems
to be or actually is extremely familiar; someone we can share everything with because they
have become our friend. The deepest confessions come from a successful combination of
these two opposite expectations. Anonymity is the foundation here. The informer should
38 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
absolutely be guaranteed anonymity, just as a physician guarantees discretion. This is why,
for instance, I do not agree for a second meeting with the informers after the interview
to discuss results, etc., even though it could obviously be a fascinating experience. Once
the interview is finished, the informer should feel completely free. In contrast, during the
interview, the informer expects the researcher to leave their ivory tower, reject the cold role
of someone only concerned with asking questions and show themselves to be a human being
with human opinions and feelings. Bashfully yet systematically, the interviewees attempt
to bring the researcher out of the ivory tower. For instance, after expressing an opinion,
they may ask, “Don’t you agree?’ It often happens that the interviewer, uncomfortable
with this rhetorical figure, mumbles agreement in such a soft and unclear manner that
the interviewee understands it to mean that the interviewer either disagrees with them
or does not want to tell them what they think. After several fruitless attempts, the infor-
mer focuses on ready answers and refuses to become engaged. (translated from Polish;
Kaufmann 2010, 82–83)
Lassiter’s strategy is practically the opposite of this one. He claims that ethnolog-
ical knowledge should be negotiated with the informer. That is to say, the researcher,
in the name of expectations and predictions completely external to what the informer regards
as the communication process, in other words, ignoring the informer’s microcosm in the
name of the researcher’s own plan, pulls the informer into their game for an unspecified
amount of time. There is nothing at the end of this informer engagement plan. This comes
as no surprise, as the informer has no means of knowing what such interaction is leading
to, and the notion of shared knowledge (what does the term even mean?) is an unsupported
dream that the researcher and the informer do not necessarily both work towards. Interest-
ingly, when Lassiter comes close to presenting his opinion, he provides a short description
of Kevin Dwyer’s dialogic anthropology (Dwyer and Muhammad 1987; Lassiter 2005a,
67). Lassiter finds it useful to quote the important fragments, but draws from them only
what does not endanger his own concept. In Moroccan Dialogues, Kevin Dwyer writes:
“The anthropologist who encounters people from other societies is not merely observing
them or attempting to record their behavior,” wrote Dwyer; “both he and the people he
confronts, and the societal interests that each represents, are engaging each other crea-
tively, producing the new phenomenon of Self and Other becoming interdependent, of Self
and Other sometimes challenging, sometimes accommodating one another” (quoted after:
Lassiter 2005b, 92). In his commentary to this and other quotes from Dwyer, Lassiter notes
that dialogic ethnography called for detailed analysis of the intercultural understanding
of and respect to real challenges faced by researchers when they strive to re-forge experi-
ence into text (Lassiter 2005a,: 67). It is astonishing that Lassiter completely disregarded
this call and did not analyse intercultural understanding. Had he not done so, he would
have realised that communication, especially intercultural communication, involves an
extremely complex play of expectations and predictions based on deep cultural experience.
Engaging anyone in anything is impossible without taking into account this call. As a result,
we cannot call “joint writing” an investigation. Rather, it is at best a type of hegemonic
practice whereby the subject becomes objectified and manipulated for the researcher’s
own needs and aims. In my opinion, Lassiter’s intentions were much different; the result,
however, could have been better.
Sol Tax’s team encountered a similar problem. As later interpretations of what actually
occurred during the Fox Project have shown, Tax’s team had great difficulties remaining
within the Action Anthropology frame. Douglas E. Foley (2010,: 289) proposes that the
failure resulted from an overly idealistic (Utopian) approach to Meskwaki Native Americans
39MARCIN BROCKI
and the fact that the team assumed the role of spokespersons for the community without
full awareness of how this would affect the locals (i.e. that taking one side would exacerbate
the existing differences), created and initiated projects and programmes and coordinated
them throughout their entire course (i.e. the team appropriated activity for themselves)
and suggested cultural and historical topics without prior comprehensive analysis of what the
community actually found important. “Circulating between and engaging in informal chats
with those who have become a group of ‘professional informers’” (translated from Polish;
Foley 2010, 289) constitutes a very feeble base for even the most superficial observations
and interpretations. In the end, the Fox Project ended in the “ideals” of applied anthropology
becoming implemented, i.e. a type of social engineering whereby the anthropologists func-
tions as a therapist, and their “clinical” actions (Sol Tax called his manner of conducting
investigation clinical science, in contrast to “pure science,” which is inapplicable in social
practice) are supposed to ultimately “heal” the organisational and psychological dysfunc-
tions of its “patients,” i.e. the researched community (Foley 2010, 291).
Action anthropologists were certain that they know what ails the Meskwaki and white
communities. They pictured themselves as easing the psychological and organisational
pain caused by violent cultural change. Just as Keynesian economists oversaw the “soft
landing’ of the unavoidable recession, action anthropologist were convinced that they are
overseeing the “soft cultural landing’ in the unavoidable acculturation processes. (translated
from Polish; Foley 2010, 291)
George Marcus’s and Luke Lassiter’s projects lack epistemological detachment, crucial
for the scientific freedom of thought. This detachment may lead to the creation of social
knowledge that contradicts common sense. On the other hand, their projects include
a particular acknowledgement of the obviousness of common thinking; “particular” because,
even though this manner of thinking may agree with what scientific investigation reveals,
collaborative ethnography does not account for the possibility of escaping non-knowledge.
I use the term non-knowledge to denote an artificial creation that constitutes neither
the informer’s knowledge nor the model of knowledge (in other words, the image of the world
and the model of categorization) averaged between the members of a given community nor
any other form of the researcher’s knowledge, but a set of opinions about something that
does not even exist (a lack of reference) outside the “instance of speech”, i.e. something
that, rather than existing within a natural situation (which could serve as a starting point
for an understanding), exists in a completely artificial situation. The “correct” unfolding
of this artificial situation is guaranteed only by the researcher’s ethical project, and the rules
and dynamics of conversation are treated as natural because the researcher assumes that
it is enough to “somehow” erase the difference between them and the researched to stop
having to account for the artificial situation. The researcher negotiates with the informer
the content of the researcher’s knowledge that is to represent the informer’s knowledge.
Thus, the researcher becomes hostage to the very agreement they imposed, assuming that
whatever is good from the researcher’s moral standpoint is good not only for the informer,
but also good in general.
Dwyer, Kevin, and Faqir Muhammad. 1987. Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question.
Prospect Heights: Waveland Press.
40 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
Foley, Douglas E. 2010. “Projekt Lisy. Rewizja.” In Badania w działaniu. Pedagogika iantropo-
logia zaangażowane, edited by Hana Cervinkova, and Dorota Gołębniak, 265–296. Wrocław:
Wydawnictwo Naukowe Dolnośląskiej Szkoły Wyższej.
Greenwood, Davydd J., and Morten Levin. 2005. “Reform of the Social Sciences and of Universi-
ties Through Action Research.” In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman
K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 43–64. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.
Holmes, Douglas R., and George E. Marcus. 2005. “Refunctioning Ethnography: The Challenge
of an Anthropology of the Contemporary.” In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited
by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 1099–1114. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.
Kaufmann, Jean Claude. 2010. Wywiad rozumiejacy. Translated byAlina Kapciak. Warszawa:
Oficyna Naukowa.
Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005a. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005b. “Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology.” Current
Anthropology 46:83–106.
Marcus, George E. 1995. “Ethnography In/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited
Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24:95–117.
Marcus, George E. 1997. “The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-En-Scene of Anthro-
pological Fieldwork.” Representations 59:85–108.
Marcus, George E. 2008. “Collaborative Options and Pedagogical Experiment in Anthropologi-
cal Research on Experts and Policy Processes.” Anthropology in Action 15:47–57.
Miller, William L., and Benjamin F. Crabtree. 2005. “Clinical Research.” In The Sage Handbook
of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 605–639. Thou-
sand Oaks: SAGE Publications.
Tax, Sol. 2010. “Projekt Lisy.” In Badania w działaniu. Pedagogika iantropologia zaangażowane,
edited by Hana Cervinkova, and Dorota Gołębniak, 19–28. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Naukowe
Dolnośląskiej Szkoły Wyższej.
41
ROBERT J. THORNTON
The notion of “identity” is fundamental to the social sciences. Contra the Durkheimian idea of “socialisation”
in which “society” creates persons and social roles, I argue that “identity” is simply entailed by the ontol-
ogy of “society” itself. I claim further that not all social forms create “identity” in the canonical sociological
sense, and that “identity” is not a useful category of analysis for these social forms, including the market,
social networks, and populations. These constitute distinct social ontologies in which “identity” does not
exist or is excluded by definition. But even within the social ontology of “society”, it is possible to have failed
identities, non-identities, or “spoiled” identities. Thus, the “failure” of identity that I address here is twofold:
apparent identities that effectively fail to exist in certain social ontologies, and social identities that fail to be
effective or to exist at all even under social ontologies in which they do exist. Examples are drawn especially
from South African politics and culture, but the conceptual scope is global.
Identity; Ontology; Society; Social networks; Population; Markets
The notion of “identity” is one of the fundamental terms in contemporary theory in the
social sciences. It is also a fundamental issue in most of contemporary politics and violent
conflict in the world today, at the local level – any locality anywhere – and internationally.
We assume that identity is something like a “natural” category – an a priori, or some-
thing sui generis – that we both assume and have to explain. In so far as we accept the
ontological status of states and groups of any kind – ethnic, religious, gendered, sexual,
racial, occupational, etc. – as primary objects of analysis in the social sciences, we must
accept the notion of identity as that which characterises the membership of any person in
such a group or category. The idea that all human being have, at least, personhood, and,
more than this, that they are fully equal as “human” with rights and duties, derives largely
from the Enlightenment. The notion of “society” and “group” as essential “containers”
of such persons comes somewhat later in the history of social science philosophy. But by now
it is clear that we have assumed that “society” exists in more or less the same terms by which
42 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
it was defined during the emergence of this analytic category in the nineteenth century.
“Society” replaced god or gods as the ultimate reality – that is the final cause and the primary
ontological ground for there being anything (social) at all. It began to do the work of the
theological god-entity, especially in the form of the Platonic “demiurge”. The δημιουργός
(demiurge) is an energy or active force (ourgos) of the people (δημι, demos) that exists –
that is, has ontological reality status – and that has causal efficacy. Persons have what we
call “identity” with reference to these groups as members of society.
However, I will claim here that not all social forms create “identity” in the canonical
sociological sense, and that “identity” is not a useful category of analysis for these social
forms. Further, even within the social ontology of “society”, it is possible to have failed iden-
tities, non-identities, or “spoiled” identities. Thus, the “failure” of identity that I address
here is twofold: apparent identities that effectively fail to exist in certain social ontologies,
and social identities that fail to be effective or to exist at all even under social ontologies
in which they do exist.
Some of this is obvious, but I will argue that we can routinely use other concepts –
and ascribe ontological status to them at least for analytical purposes – for which the concept
of identity makes no sense. For instance, markets, networks, and populations cannot
be “containers” for persons who are said to have an “identity”, or that the kind of identity
persons have with respect to markets, networks and populations is of a different sort.
Specifically actors can be ascribed a functional identity in markets, but do not “have”
an identity as persons since each actor is theoretically exchangeable – as is money and
goods – in the context of market exchanges. This is also true of what we call “networks”,
that is sets of person-to-person (or actor-to-actor) relations that form, in the mind’s eye,
a network, something like a fishing net, or like the “reticulation” of root systems, electrical
networks and circuits, and so on. Many kinds of networks are possible, but the visualization
of them as networks is something that only takes place in the imagination. For the actor
in the network, only the immediate relation with a next-in-sequence actor is all that is known
of the network. The actor or “node” in the “network” never sees the whole network, nor does
the analyst. Network memberships cannot be counted in principle because (a) a person
(node) may have many or only one relation (link or “edge”) with another/others, including
him/herself (b) but never knows who his contacts are linked to as the network expands,
and (c) because the network is dynamic with links formed and broken over any arbitrary time
span. This is also true of populations, but population have the specific property of treating
all elements as identical, and therefore lacking identity by definition.
Each of these types of social formation has a different ontological status, especially
with respect to the parts that may be said to compose it, and which in turn they define
or bring into “reality”. These are society (according to the canonical definitions), networks,
markets and populations, and possibly other specialised concepts of how we as humans
manage our relations with one another.
Thus, the theoretical concept of “society” is defined with respect to “identities” that
compose it, and in terms of which these identities can be said to exist. Accordingly,
Durkheim’s notion of “socialization” (and for that matter Foucault’s teachings about
“becoming subject to discourse”) is simply circular: society does not so much “socialise”
(non-social) beings into social “roles”, but rather that the social identity is logically
entailed by the concept of society itself, and vice versa.
43ROBERT J. THORNTON
In the case of networks, markets, and populations, a personal identity is not defined,
or can only be defined in such a way that it is incommensurable with the standard under-
standing of the social identity. This should be understood as a different social ontology
in which different kinds of entities exist. In contemporary social science, we tend to assume
that networks, markets, and populations are somehow sub-categories of “society” rather
than separate ontological visions of how social relations work. By “social relations” I mean
here any type of interactions humans may have with each other, but also any type of rela-
tion that they are imagined to have with each other in terms of some social ontology.
Actors in a network never see the network, and rarely have any overall concept of it as such.
Such a concept is irrelevant to being an actor in a network. Thus, an identity is irrelevant
in a way that cannot be the case for, say, ethnic membership.
The idea that each person has an identity as some essential property of his or her being
implies directly an ontology of identity: it is something that we can “have”, like other property
we might own. Indeed status, beauty, charisma, personality, and so on are all considered
to be something one owns, that has value, and that can be exchanged for other things such
as “social capital”, or even sold, more or less, “as is”.
But more specifically, to have a social identity implies the existence of a person who possesses
such an identity within a social context that is the condition for the existence of any identity.
Any such person has a concept (“identity”) of his or her own being with reference to his
or her social ontology.
The social identity implies a social ontology, that is, the mode of being that we call
“the social”. But I will argue here that the different forms of the social constitute different social
ontologies. Social identities can be – and are – understood and constituted within different
social ontologies such as markets, populations, networks and institutions. Although the
social sciences generally assume that identities are fundamental elements of social being,
and are therefore positive, empirical entities, identity must be defined differently within
different social ontologies. For instance, the identity of participants in randomised controlled
trials (medical population-based experimental method) is necessarily – that is ethically
– without personal identity. There are also “failed identities” and frustrated identities,
and identities that are not always possible to define with respect to four fundamental
social ontologies. These include criminal identities, secret actors in corrupt, nepotistic,
kleptocratic or criminal networks. It is often not possible to assign specific identities
to economic actors in markets since it is the prices and commodities rather than the human
transactors that are important, and that are recorded. This paper offers a critique of the
notion that identities are always possible, and positive, and/or necessarily successful;
and argues that some identities to which some people might aspire, or that they imagine
for themselves, are impossible in practice. These are “failed identities” or frustrated iden-
tities. Negative identities, and negation of identity is also possible. Identity, then, depends
on assumptions about social ontologies, and is sometimes “undefined”, impossible, negated,
or frustrated.
The concept of identity in contemporary social science is invariably a positive concept.
It is “positive” in the sense of Positivism, that is, it exists and can be named, measured,
44 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
categorised, analysed, aggregated, and otherwise understood as either created by society,
as self-existing, primordial, constructed or “imagined”, but nevertheless brought into being
as the result of concrete observable social process. In this sense, the social identity can
only exist if it is “efficacious” that is, if it “works”, creates positive value. In other words,
identities are positive, not negative, not zero (except in the Durkheimian case of anomie).
In this sense, the notion of identity has a similar status to that of medicine and tech-
nology. A failed identity is not an identity just as a failed technology, or failed medicine,
is not technology or medicine, as Marilyn Strathern once remarked.
Medicine, like technology, is only recognized in being efficacious (failed medicine is no
such thing, i.e., is not medicine). It works if it achieves results. And those results will
of course vary as widely as the subject of treatment. (Strathern 2004, 6)
Identity is treated as if it were always a good thing, even though it can be “misused”,
that is, directed towards nefarious or murderous political ends. But what of identities
that don’t or can’t exist, or that are indeterminate, confused or otherwise compromised?
These can’t be politically deployed, but they present problems for the anthropologists or
sociologist who thinks in terms of identities and those (theoretical) objects to which iden-
tities refer.
Speaking for myself, now, I have what I will call an “uncertain identity complex”.
Call it a global identity. Perhaps I am just a cosmopolitan. Or belong to a “third culture”.
I look in wonder at people who come from a (single) place: in short people who have what
might be called “identity”. By contrast, I have an itinerary, a travel log, rather than a place.
There are many people like me, and often those are just the people who like to theorise about
(other) people”s identity.
Some years ago I was helping my daughter with a school assignment. The teacher had
asked the children to count up the number of discrete places that they had lived. Her score
was 4 or 5 on only two continents. At that time, at the age of 40, I discovered that I had
lived in 43 places, on three continents, five countries and seven American states from
Hawai’i to New Jersey.
My parents travelled, and so had I. We were effectively nomadic. My father’s parents
had come from Appalachia, from one of the poorest counties in the US, descended
from Cherokee (Tsulagi, Native American) and Celtic ancestry. My mother’s father was
an immigrant from Britain who insisted on his Cornish identity. The Cornish, or Kernow,
are a small Celtic people whose language died out in the 18th century. It was years before
I learned that Cornwall was not an independent country. (In fact, it has only just recently
been recognised by the British government as a valid “national minority group” of Great
Britain, that allows it to be protected under the European framework convention for the
protection of national minorities). My mother’s mother came from American pioneer
stock whose earliest ancestors had been among the first Europeans to live in America.
As deeply American, then, as it is possible to be, my parents moved first to India,
and then to Uganda, among other places where I grew up “local”. We never lived among
expatriates in these countries, but “went local”. My brother and sister and I went to Indian
schools in India, and Ugandan schools in Uganda. After studying at Makerere University
in Uganda, and then Stanford and Chicago in the US, I made my home in South Africa
thirty-eight years ago. As an immigrant there, I began the process of becoming African.
45ROBERT J. THORNTON
But as a white person in Africa, especially in South Africa, this was already a compro-
mised identity. The identities that I have tried to assume – American, Native American,
Indian, Ugandan, and South African have all been frustrated, or have “failed” in one way
or another. Though compromised, I cannot fully escape them either.
This leads me to identities that are “failed”, compromised, or frustrated. Despite vast
writings about identity, it seems to me that there is still a lack of theory and description
concerning the condition of the “failed identity,” the “frustrated” or “non-” identity.
Now a South African, with my three children, their spouses and four grandchildren
integrated into the South African economy and culture, like all South Africans their
identities are also compromised, changing and multiple. They/we cannot escape this.
But this is also true for people born in South Africa: all of their identities are compro-
mised and uncertain too. Current South African politics is the politics of compromised
identities.
Take the struggle between Helen Zille, the white, female, former leader of the opposition
Democratic Alliance (DA) party. She and the party have led a strong campaign against the
ANC, the “ruling party” currently in government. President Jacob Zuma leads the ANC,
even though his identity (and that of the ANC and the nation) is deeply compromised
by accusations of fraud, racketeering and corruption. He claims to be “100% Zulu”.
Julius Malema, the former leader of the ANC Youth League, and now self-styled “Commander
in Chief” of his own party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) now vociferously opposes
the ANC in Parliament. Early in 2015 he and his party were forcibly ejected from Parliament
by a unidentified informal “police” action when they insisted on pointing to Jacob Zuma’s
corruption, and his failure to acknowledge it, submit to prosecution, or – as they demand
– to “pay back the money”. Malema accuses his former political opponent, Helen Zille,
of dancing like a monkey, and insists on singing the “struggle song” known as bulal’ibhunu,
or Kill the Boer, that is, Kill the Farmer or the Afrikaner. Both Malema and Zuma accuse
Musi Maimane, the current black African head of the DA of being no more than a “garden
boy” to the “White elites” of the DA. Their political identities cut across and blend racial,
personal, criminal, animal and other types of identities.
Malema went to trial in 2012 for “hate speech” in the special Equity Court that was
originally set up to discipline whites who were suspected of being “racists”. The majority
of cases, however, today are concerned with “hate speech” among all kinds of South Afri-
cans, but especially “hate speech” among other black African alleged perpetrators and
victims of hate speech. Identity is not indemnified against abuse by any others, and all
seem to have some animus against the other. In fact, the rapid rise of stand-up comedy
in South Africa revolves frequently around the ambiguities of identity, and South Africa
soap operas explore the ironies and ambiguities of racial, gender, sexual, local, political
and other identities.
Visiting Malema’s hometown, Zille told a small crowd of DA supporters that:
“we will fight for your rights. …. Julius Malema is … completely out of touch with his own
people. He spends the night drinking Blue Label whiskey, going to sushi parties, … but he
has contempt for his voters because he thinks he can just sing a few struggle songs and
mobilise people on race and they’ll keep voting for him.”
46 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
These words are all about compromised and failed identity: Malema’s “own people”
for whom he is alleged to have contempt, his Johnny Walker whiskey and “sushi parties”
pointing to Scottish and Japanese (or White) identities that are perhaps unavailable to
a poorly educated township man. Above all, Zille told Malema that his mobilisation of race
is illegitimate because compromised by the past and bound to fail. Malema returns the
political diatribes in equal measure. This is not any more a racist politics of South Africa,
but it is a politics of race conducted by “White”, “Black”, “Coloured” and other opponents
in South Africa where all identities seem to have failed in the aftermath of Apartheid.
Apartheid, of course, aimed to be the identity engine of a new South Africa in which all
“identities” were to be “natural”, “national”, and beyond cavil. Its failure was more than
a failure of a political order, therefore.
Malema’s hate speech trial was attended by other leaders of the ANC including Winnie
Mandela, a woman whose own “struggle identity” has been deeply compromised by allega-
tions of corruption, accusations of murder and other trials. There is another irony in this.
Although the song in question contains the line “kill the Boer”, and clearly references
an Afrikaner and white male identity as a potential victim, Malema´s supporters insist that
the song today “means no harm”. It is now said to be the unalienable heritage of South
Africa’s struggle for “freedom”, a freedom still compromised by high levels of on-going
lethal violence, in some cases indeed directed against white Afrikaans-speaking farmers.
A case in point is the death of Eugene Terre’blanche (his name modified from the Dutch
surname “ter Blanche”, “White” to a pseudo-French meaning “White earth”), a colourful
advocate for Afrikaans and “White” separate identity. Before his death at the hands of two
young black males, Terre’blanche was the leader of the extreme white nationalist Afrikaner
Weerstand Beweging, AWB that stood for Afrikaner, or “White” hegemony, and looked
nostalgically at the Apartheid past. He had been discovered naked, in his bedroom, bludgeoned
to death by the two men who had admitted to the crime after being quickly apprehended.
Terre’blanche’s death might have been used to prove that Malema’s song, “kill the Boer”
had led to the death of Eugene on his farm. It was not used, however, because it had been
reported that Terre’blanche had been having sex with the two young black males who
had killed him, and that used condoms had been discovered at the scene of the crime.
These allegations were quickly denied but the true identity of the whitest of White racists
was unambiguously compromised.
Zille’s identity is also compromised by the fact of her whiteness, but in a different
way. She is learning to dance better, she says, but is proud of dancing “like a monkey”
in the meantime.
Identities often involve complex ironies and paradoxes. One of these paradoxes is the problem
that many black South Africans face as they confront themselves seemingly changed fore-
ver by the new freedoms of the 1994 constitutional republic. “Black” South Africans are
universally aware of their darker skins – journalists and humourists often say “darkies”
to contrast them with the “whities” – South Africans nevertheless have a wide range
of colours and shades of colour. But as many black African South Africans move into the
middle class, and into former White, Indian, or Coloured neighbourhoods, they feel – and
47ROBERT J. THORNTON
are made to feel – that they are “merely” brown on the outside, and “white” on the inside,
like a coconut. This is the “coconut anxiety complex” that afflicts more than a few contem-
porary South Africans. The inverse case exists from white South Africans who identify
strongly as Africans, and as South Africans, but whose identity is compromised by their
skin. What appears to be true or observable on “outside” is contradicted by what also
is held to be a deeper “truth” on the “inside”. But the “internal” African identity is contra-
dicted – even negated – by ontological beliefs about “deep” or “shallow” Africanness.
These identities, then, constitute a kind of ontological irony.
The variety is scarcely possible to describe; it is apparently enough to pretend to divide
it into four “canonical races”: black, white, coloured, and Indian. These are the categories
of Apartheid, but retain their differentiating power in twenty-first century South Africa
due to affirmative action programmes, and their political usefulness. These categories
are augmented by the addition of, for instance, “Chinese” and “African”, among others,
that do not fit into the historical and political-administrative categories even though they
have long been part of South African society. (Nineteenth-century immigrant Chinese are
fully part of South African cultures and historical imagination, although recently arrived
Chinese from Mainland and Taiwan are more problematic. “African” in South Africa refers
to people from the rest of Africa who are not native South African. Always having been
present in South Africa, some have been attacked in periodic and recent so-called xeno-
phobic violence.)
The colour categories present many paradoxes and ironies of identity. Rich and poor,
black and white live close together. Despite apartheid separation, while the majority
of South Africans of different race categories still do not live in close proximity,
the degree of integration or interaction in the workplace and schools, shopping, and enter-
tainmentis very high. It is much higher than one might encounter in the US, or in other
African countries.
Because rich and poor – whether they are black of white – are in daily and often inti-
mate contact with each other, this exacerbates issues of identity. White people recall
times when their livelihoods were once ensured by the state; today, while this is still the
case, many whites people have slid into poverty and envy the rising wealth of the black
middle classes and elites.
Identity, it would seem, is fundamental to the social sciences. Without “identity”,
whom do we write about? Can we write without identity? Isn”t identity the fundamental
quality of what we are: Race, nation, class, tribe, language, gender, age? An identity is the
answer to the question, “what kind of person is this?”
Ironically, identity is not necessarily the answer to the simple question “who is she/
he?” We distinguish in other words between having an identity as a quality of being in
a group or a category, and being an individual, a person. The irony in the question involves
the fundamental distinction between the person as person and the person as part of a larger
social entity. That is, there is a question of the person asbeing, and being in a society.
48 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
The issue of identity is one way of making the connection between what we call “society”,
and the person, the physical entity of the actual human being.
We seem to believe independently of culture difference that persons are persons and that
their personal identity may be clearly distinct from their national identity, their “racial”
or any other social identity.
How do we identify “identity”? How do we know it when we see it … or do we?
Conventionally, not having an identity is a tragedy similar to death, a social death. People
are often expected to, and do, fight to the death to ensure and to preserve their identity.
But, increasingly in today”s world – and no doubt in the past – many people lack “an identity.”
They did not feel the need to have one as such, that is, they were just people, or even
“the people” – or, their identity had been “lost”, torn from them, or otherwise ruined.
Those with “ruined identity” could be called “stigmatised” according to the sociolo-
gist Erving Goffman (1963). People whose identity have been “ruined” include those with
physical marks of “disgrace” – the criminal, the polluted, the ill or insane – but the term
also refers to the marks of grace that marked the hands and body of the reborn Christ,
and those of his followers who believed deeply enough to manifest lesions on the skin of the
hands, feet and body: the stigmata. Whether and attribute of grace, or disgrace, the notion
of stigma has come to mean to us today the signs or belief concerning a “ruined” identity,
of one “reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one”
(Goffman 1963, 3). For Goffman what was ruined was the “normal”, whole and usual
identity that “society” had established.
A means of categorising persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary
and natural for members of each of these categories. Social settings establish the categories
of persons likely to be encountered there. The routines of social intercourse in established
settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought.
When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to
anticipate his category and attributes, his “social identity” – to use a term that is better
than “social status” because personal attributes such as “honesty” are involved, as well as
structural ones, like “occupation” (Goffman 1963, 2).
We must pay special attention to Goffman’s introduction of the phrase “social identity”
in his book The presentation of self in everyday life (1959). Though not the first use of the
phrase, Goffman”s treatment of the “spoiled” social identity, and his work several years
earlier on how persons present themselves “everyday” as having “natural” or “ordinary”
identities were defining moments in the history of social science theory of “social identity”.
In this passage, above, Goffman was correcting Max Weber, offering for the first time the
concept of “social identity” in place of Weber”s concept of Stände, or “status groups”.
Goffman listed “three grossly different types of stigma”: First, what he called “abomi-
nation of the body;” second, he included in the category of “blemishes of the individual
character perceived as weak will … domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and
rigid beliefs” the stigma of “mental disorder, … addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality,
suicide attempts and radical political behaviour” (Goffman 1963, 4). Some of these stigma/
stigmata seem surprising today, especially when the “stigma” of AIDS and HIV infection
in addition to homosexuality have become such causes célèbres, re-imagined as positive
49ROBERT J. THORNTON
identities associated with political action and self-esteem rather than ruin. Goffman’s
notion of ruined identity, and specifically the idea of stigma as a ruined social identity,
has had entirely unanticipated consequences. It appears that negative identities can
be negated, and turned to positive position of honour and status. Even mental illness,
in this age of pharmacological cures for epilepsy, depression and schizophrenia, among
other mental illnesses, create support groups, foundations, and political action groups.
Neither Weber nor Goffman could have imagined this outcome.
Goffman’s focus on the self, performance of the self, and the potential for failure of the
self in a ruined identity were pivotal moves for American social sciences in which the notion
of identity has, since the middle of the twentieth century at least, attended far more to the
emotional and interior life of the person than to the structural and institutional issues
of European sociology. Goffman is concerned with impressions and “impression manage-
ment”. He speaks of “our minds” as if this were an automatically knowable and shared
knowledge. Such assumptions seem by now out-dated, even antique, for all the value of the
larger concepts that we might wish to inherit.
For Goffman, identity is “normal”: an ordinary part of everyday life. For Max Weber, iden-
tity in all its various forms, was political and economic, and might not have “any objective
foundation” at all (1978:389). What he called “ethnic groups”, for instance, are based in a:
Subjective belief in their common essence because of similarities of physical type or cus-
toms or both … [and] this belief must be important for the propagation of group forma-
tion; conversely, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists.
Ethnic membership …[is] a presumed identity. (Weber 1978, 389)
Critical to Weber´s concept is not “identity” understood as a subjective state of knowl-
edge or even of moral being as for Goffman, but rather “objective” membership of groups,
especially “status groups”, economic groups and political groups or parties. The status
groups (Stände) are, for Weber, “normally groups” (Weber 1978, 932) although “often of
an amorphous kind”. This distinguishes them from “class” and from groups formed specifi-
cally for political action, that is, parties. Their normality is what counts here for Weber,
since they refer to what Weber calls “honour”. Honour for Weber seems to be essentially
what earlier social philosophers like Giambattista Vico and Niccolo Machiavelli called
virtù. Honour, in this sense and according to Weber is “any quality shared by a “plurality”
(Weber 1978, 932) or “within a larger group … a special social esteem … by virtue of their
own style of life, particularly the type of vocation, “self styled” … [or] “hereditary charisma”
(Weber 1978, 306).
Against Weber and Goffman, I want to suggest that the “normal groups” that naturally
confer identity, or honour and social esteem (according to Weber), are simply one type
of group: natural groups that are understood as being normal, ordinary. As Goffman’s
analysis seems to suggest, Weber’s “social esteem” that defines the group can be spoiled
and disgraced. Does the status group cease to exist when this happens? Does its identity
no longer matter when it is “discounted”? We know now that this is not the case.
Especially today, it is precisely being NOT-“normal”, not-ordinary, or belonging to groups
of low “social esteem”, those stigmatised by a ruined identity, the disgraced as well as those
with grace that are often the most visible and highly touted identities in our twenty-first
century world.
50 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
It is these anti-identities, spoiled and disgraced, those who have run out of esteem, and the
unnatural groups that are likely to “tweet” on Twitter, to post a blog on Google’s BlogSpot,
or to message on the Wall in Facebook, or to go viral with a video on YouTube. The vocabulary
itself – tweet, blog, go viral, and message (as a verb) is unique to this emerging moment,
and points to new sources of identity, and to new ways for identity to fail, or to be spoiled
and fall from grace and honour – but it also the way up to status, too.
Indeed, could we today even think of defining fundamental social categories in terms
of honour and social esteem, or talk in terms of “spoiled” grace, and disgrace? I think the
ground has shifted, or at least the epistemological grounds have shifted for our under-
standing of what identity might mean.
Does this matter? Are the grounds of identity simply being redefined with new identities
emerging, or is it possible to think now of the dark side of identity, the null identity, the lost
identity, the failed identity?
In our standard sociological imagination, to not have an identity is a failure. For Durkheim,
it was one reason for killing yourself. Being “anomic” – literally without name – was the
essence of personal failure. The anomic is antithetical to society, an anathema, literally
a subject without a predicate, the negation of meaning, and incomplete proposition.
For Durkheim, anomie was “a regular and specific factor in suicide in our modern socie-
ties”. In fact, it constituted the modern form of suicide in the industrial state, in contrast to
egoistic and altruistic suicide. It is the results of “man’s activities lacking regulation and
his consequent suffering … from society’s insufficient presence in individuals” (Durkheim
1950, 258). Widowhood, divorce, and separation – what Durkheim called “conjugal anomy”
(Durkheim 1950, 273) – are different from the economic condition of anomic suicide in the
first instance, but they share the same immediate cause: “irritation [and] disgust” leading
to “violent recriminations against life in general” (Durkheim 1950, 293). If loss of identity
can lead, according to Emile Durkheim in Le Suicide – one of the most important founda-
tional document of modern sociology – then it must be very important.
In these cases, Durkheim, Weber, and Goffman, the idea of identity is fundamental to the
idea of social science itself. Moreover, identity is always a positive entity, that is, it is a moral
good, and experientially present and verifiable in all cases.
But, can we write ethnographies and sociologies that describe and detail the patterns
of being of nothing but persons? Can we envision something so fundamental as “social
structure” without identity? Is it necessary to have a social identity? If we can find cases
in which identity is less than necessary, or where it does not constitute an “insufficient
presence of society” in un-socialised persons as Durkheim believes, or a subject without
social honour or esteem of the group in Weber’s sense, or even a “ruined identity” in Goff-
man’s words?
I will not discuss here the intellectual history of having an identity. I am not asking what are
the structural conditions for “being an X”, or the consequences of being identified as an X,
whether by the self or by the other. I am not concerned with the discourse of “the Other”,
the notions of self and other.
51ROBERT J. THORNTON
Instead, I am concerned here with the conditions under which it is possible to have an
identity and under which it might be possible to have no identity, or something in between.
What are the conditions for failing to have “identity”, and what are the consequences –
both for the person or people whose identity has failed, and for those who try to make sense
of what this might mean?
Clearly identity – or at least the notion of identity – is one of the most fundamental
concepts of the social sciences and history. What did Thucydides write about? Is it not the
peoples of the Peloponnesus, that is, the Hellenes? Could we have had history at all without
Spartans and Athenians, that is, people who knew themselves as such, who identified
as Spartans and Athenians? Through wars over a thirty-year period they protected their
identities and sought to extend and to augment them. Their identities were worth dying for,
killing for, and were the reason beyond reason for seeking to expand, to grow to exert their
“us-ness” against “them”, the other. But what if this had not happened? What if people
refused identity, or if identity failed?
For Thucydides identity is, in fact, a constant problem. Thucydides began his The History
of Peloponnesian War at the outbreak of the wars between Sparta and Athens, fought from
431 BC to 404. He began to record this history, he tells us, because he believed “it was going
to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place
in the past” [Para.1]. This was because he judged the two city states to be at the height
of their powers, but also because
the rest of the Hellenic world was committed to one side or the other; … This was the greatest
disturbance in the history of the Hellenes, affecting also a large part of the non-Hellenic
world, and indeed, I might say, the whole of mankind.
Clearly Thucidides understood the importance of identity in his narrative: he was an Athe-
nian and tells us this in the first sentence. But he is also aware that the identity of the
“Hellenic world” was itself an historical process. “Hellas” he tells us, only came into being
after the Trojan War.
The best evidence for this can be found in Homer, who, though he was born much later
than the time of the Trojan War, nowhere uses the name “Hellenic” for the whole force.
Instead he keeps this name for the followers of Achilles, who came from Phthiotis, and were
in fact the original Hellenes. … He [Homer] does not even use the term “foreigners”, and this,
in my [Thucidides] opinion is because in his time the Hellenes were not yet known by one
name, and so marked off as something separate from the outside world. [Para. 3]
Thucydides, writing 2400 years before us, seems to have anticipated the discourse of “self”
and “other” that is today so prevalent in social studies of identity. Moreover, he is fully
aware of the role of the media (in this case, his own history, with Homer’s and Herotodus’s)
in creating the “imagined community” of the Hellenic world that we associate so strongly
with Benedict Anderson these days. His endless attention to speech, historical discourse,
memory, and to their dubious pretensions to truth, pre-dates by millennia Michel Foucault’s
work. Here too we find the roots of the claim that that the Peloponnesian war was of sufficient
gravity to affect the “whole of mankind”, and thus to become the foundation of “the idea
that Western History is the foundation of everyone else’s [history]” (Sahlins 2004, 1).
Like history from the time of Thucydides, it is inconceivable that we could have a modern
social science without the notion of identity. Marx could not have imagined history the way
he did without the possibility that the “working classes” might become aware of themselves
like the Spartans and the Athenians and “affecting … the whole of mankind”. He expected
52 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
“classes” to act for themselves, that is, to have an identity that would make them instruments
of history instead of just its object. Apart from any Hegelian forms of historical process,
without capitalists who knew and understood themselves to be capitalists, and workers
who knew themselves to be and to identify as workers, the engine of history could not run;
indeed it could not have been imagined.
But given the weight that identity carried for Marx, it is perhaps instructive that the
“working class” never did become aware of itself as such, or, if acquiring this identity some-
times by force, to act on it in an appropriately responsible and political way. Historically,
this pivotal identity did not materialise. The “working class” failed to identify itself from
the start. This is because the economy based on a market does not allow such identities
to be imagined. The failure of identity in this case is based on a confusion of categories.
First, identity is a quality that the person bears but is not identical to the person.
It cannot exist without more than one person. Yet, it is not quantitative either. One is not
more Chinese because there are more and more Chinese (1.3 billion in China alone),
nor does the Chinese identity become clearer or stronger with their numbers, although the
power of such an identity may do so. In other words, it is tied to person and to population,
but is neither personal nor a quality of population. It depends on a primitive sense of number
– one, or many – but is not sensitive to scale. The identity of a Bushman in a band of forty
persons is equal to – no greater, no less – than the identity of any single Chinese person.
The relative size of populations identified as “Bushman” or “Chinese” is irrelevant.
Identity does not seem to depend on the quality or quantity of time. With the new ANC
government in South Africa, for instance, the old provinces – The Cape, the Transvaal,
Natal, The Orange Free State – were dissolved. Nine new provinces were established
in their place. The old flag was retired and a new one introduced. Despite the blood that
had been shed and the apparent intensity of identification with the four old provinces,
all based historically on previously independent states or self-sufficient colonies, all South
Africans (with a negligible tiny resistance) immediately embraced the new provincial
identities and the new national flag. What has appeared to be historically strong and
passionate identities disappeared overnight, scarcely leaving a trace. New provincial
identities – Gauteng, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga, in place of Transvaal, Cape and Natal
– took their place, with passions transferred to the new provinces whose names had
never been heard before in this context. This happened across race, class and other types
of identities. Time, historical depth, was not an issue.
This has implications for the kinds of entities that can have identity that is, to which
the quality of identity can be ascribed. In other words, it implies a social ontology.
South Africa is the only country in the world with a national anthem that is sung in four
languages, one after the other, with a key change in the middle of the song. This happens
nowhere else in the world, and yet South Africans think nothing of it. Everyone sings other
people’s languages without taking on their identity, and no one has an identity that is fierce
enough to prevent them from speaking, singing or understanding the other’s languages.
But the change of key between the Xhosa and Sotho lyrics and the Afrikaans and English
53ROBERT J. THORNTON
lyrics is a musical pointer to the ‘transition” to constitutional universal democracy –
what is called “freedom” these days – and this makes the song indexical of the subtle waves
of difference in South Africa that do not quite make an identity, but at least do not allow
“identity” to destroy other potentials for social meaning and coherence. It might be said
that though South Africans do not have a clear national identity – time has been far too
short for that – what identity as a nation that they do possess is based in their awareness
of identity and its enemies.
The struggles around identity and identities in southern Africa have produced societies
that struggle constantly to define themselves, and are always in state of slow “transition”
to something else. Here racial and tribal identities have been paramount, but as often as not
the identities in play are failed identities. In many ways it has been the irony of identity that
has dominated South African politics, rather than the tragedy of identity politics that it has
seemed.
Apartheid itself was in part an effort rescue the poor white population of the Union of South
Africa from Africanization. In 1949, at the beginning of the National Party government,
South Africa was still a Dominion of the British Crown. The effort backfired. It had the effect
of spoiling the identity of white people in Africa, creating a “stigma” of white oppression
of a black majority. This has had many positive outcomes: there is a large and rapidly growing
black middle class. South Africa has recently joined world politics through its domination
of the African economies south of the Sahara. BRIC, the bloc of “emerging economies”
of Brazil, Russia, India and China now includes South Africa, making BRICS (with and “s”).
It is apparent on the ground, though not publicly remarked, that the South African economy
is growing much faster than the official numbers indicate. This is because so much of it
is “unobserved”, deriving from the rest of Africa, and from covert economies of all kinds.
It is far more socially integrated than any politician dares admit since formal politics still
attempts to play off a racial identity.
Under Apartheid, white people were encouraged to think of themselves and “European”.
It attempted to make black people think of themselves as African, like Ghanaians and
Tanzanians, while South Africans of Indian origins were supposed to identify with India.
After the release of Mandela, South Africans actually went to Europe, India and the rest
of Africa and found that they were South Africans. Their supposed “original” identities
evaporated; failed.
The South African identity is identity in the ironic mode: there is always more to it than
it might appear, but is never quite what it seems.
Take race for instance. Racial identity has created its opposite, the “non-racial” identity
that is predicated on the negation of another historical identity. Indeed, non-racialism has
been a prominent marker of identity, especially for many who could not fully identify with
any of what I call the “canonical” races of South African legislation. Non-racialism implies
a non-race as a racial identity, and dives deep into the heart of the ironic.
Non-race as racial identity is not simply the negation of racism as anomie is the negation
of identity in Durkheim’s terms. It is a positive political identity predicated on the negation
of the forced identification with “race”. It is the negation of a specific politics of identity
rather than of identity itself. It has been the identity of the South African cosmopolitans that
54 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
has typically included so called “emerging” Black African elites, especially in the church,
government or business.
In some ways this is similar to the cultural condition of the migrant from neighbouring
countries. They have long histories of migration back and forth; they are not immigrants but
bi-national residents, identifying with neither country, but engaging in an economic flow
of people that has characterised the region for centuries. Thus, the periodic “xenophobia”
is a prosaic reaction to the ironic identity of migrants who are simply mobile across bounda-
ries and who are defined by their double non-identity. They cannot identify fully from the
states like Zimbabwe and Mozambique that have forced them to flee, but they cannot shed
that identity either as they fail to acquire South African identities.
Thus, identity exists in relation to institutional ontologies: the state (province, region,
parish/county, locality) language and religion, other social organisations, status groups,
political party/factions, and today, especially, corporate organisations (businesses, NGOs
etc.). In fact, the concept of identity is meaningless without a social ontology that specifies
an identity with respect to some institutional form or canonical group, such as Max Weber’s
“status groups”, or Durkheim’s religious congregations. This amounts to an implicitly
theory of how humans form relationships with each other and how these might (or must)
be visualised theoretically. This is what we call the the Durkheim-Weber concept of ‘the
social’: a limited ontology that specifically does not include the social forms or ontologies
that do not implicitly entail identity, such as
• the market
• the population
• the network
These social forms imply ontologies in which “identity” is not defined or definable.
In markets, only some abstract identities are possible. It is only possible to be an actor
in a market and, theoretically, only a rational actor. For instance, the market for sex is excluded
from standard textbook notions of markets not because it is not a market, but because since
it is held that sexual choices are not “rational”. In other words, it is believed that one cannot
rationally choose to enter the sexual market – that is, the market for sex – in a rational
manner, or with rational motives. Nevertheless, many do in fact enter the market for sex
with sexual motives and make relatively rational choices. A market for sex cannot be contem-
plated, then, not because it is not a market, but because the identities in such a market are
“all too human”. A market actor is a fiction and exchangeable, ultimately for any other,
or any other type of person who can act “rationally” with respect to monetary values.
But sex requires identity of persons. It cannot be a market in the terms by which we define
“market”. It belongs to a different ontological reality, a different worldview.
There can be only functional actors in a market – especially since these are now understood
in mathematical terms – not “identities” as these are normally conceived. A mathematical
term signifying a “rational” actor cannot have gender, or desire, or be named “Bob”.
The producer creates supply with the worker, and the “owner of capital” finances these
55ROBERT J. THORNTON
activities. But these identities are functional and exist only in terms of the market ontology.
That is, they only have existence if the market exists, and the market is only ontologi-
cally real if all believe that it is. These are functional identities, not meaningful identities,
and differ significantly from self-indexing, personal identities such as “Czech”, “African”,
“European”, “Catholic”, “Muslim”, “woman”, “homosexual”, and so on. Some of these
identities depend on embodied or bodily markers such as skin colour, circumcision, or type
of sexual act (nowadays assumed to be a physical property of the body, not merely an “act”
of sex), or other physical marker, but all depend on social consensus that these identities
exist, that is, that they are ontologically real.
Population, on the other hand, are specifically defined to exclude personal identity.
The members of a population are just that; nothing more or less. According to ethical social
science methodologies, a population (or “sample”) consists of anonymous persons who
specifically have no identity. This is more than a “failed identity”. The element of a popu-
lation exists only with reference to a statistical method and a “data base’ or register of its
members who are elements or items and necessarily equivalent. The sum of members
of a opulation constitutes a “mass”, as in “the popular masses”. A social ontology that
postulates “class positions” for members of “masses” have meaning only according to their
functional position in a social ontology that postulates economies composed of classes. Such
persons exist, that is, have ontological reality, as undifferentiated elements of sets/popula-
tions: but identity is not defined because it is conceptually meaningless. There are no “great
men” or even persons with identity in Marxian or Foucaultian theory, for instance. These
powerful conceptual frameworks lead to significant category errors. For instance, a mass or
population has “characteristics’ or is defined by its “data”, but it cannot act, and therefore
cannot have “power”. This is the problem with Foucault’s abstract notions of power or “bio-
power” that is diffused through a “population” is a simple misconception of the ontology
of population, or, at best, an unwarranted extension of a metaphor. Such misapprehensions
of the ontological status of social forms is common in many theoretical systems, and is often
responsible for their appeal since they necessarily present conundrums, that is, problems that
cannot be solved but appear to be solvable. These are sociological problems that guarantee
failure, but are especially seductive because they also guarantee open-ended discussions.
Networks are different again. Social networks are open-ended collections of relations,
rather than sets of people who share an identity. In a social network, such as a criminal drug
distribution network, or a “snow-ball” sample in social research, each member of the network
shares only enough knowledge of others to accomplish the function that is at issue such
as purchasing a drug, or being recruited into a study. Local identities are possible with respect
to specific current transaction, but beyond the “network’s horizon” knowledge is extremely
difficult to obtain with a rapidly rising marginal cost of transaction to obtain it beyond the
first or second degree. Thus we may know our “friends” in a network, and perhaps “friends
of friends” (first degree network connections) but it is unlikely that we will know friends
of friends of friends (that is, second degree connections in the network). This is why it is
so effective in criminal, sexual, or spy networks. The attempt to trace persons in networks
is precise the challenge of popular detective novels and TV series from Sherlock Holmes
to The Wire and CSI: Miami. Each element has no identity relative to others in the network,
even though they are all involved – in theory, and from some imaginary point of view –
in the same network. Attempts to trace infection by the HIV virus or Ebola face the same
difficulty.
56 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
Markets, social networks, and populations, therefore, are ontological real to their members
and participants, but are not social forms in which “identity” can exist. A class “identity”
in other words, is always a “failed identity” since its underlying ontology is a social form
in which identities are necessarily functional rather than meaningful or political.
The social ontologies that we construct, according to the social theorists such as J. R.
Searle, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckman assume the Durkheimian social as “total soci-
al fact”, but lacked a theory of the nature of the realities that they proposed. John Searle,
for instance, remarks that
… the great philosopher-sociologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially
Weber, Simmel, and Durkheim … lacked an adequate theory of speech acts, of performatives,
of intentionality, of collection intentionality, of rule-governed behaviour, etc. (Searle 1995, xii)
The “constructivist” ontologies of the social are too limited in scope. We have distin-
guished here at least four separate ontological “types” in social theory. These appear largely
incommensurable since the ontological status of these social forms is never fully developed
or understood:
• Institutions
• Networks
• Populations
• Markets
Identities are defined with reference to only one of these, the “institution” as this is conceived
and theorised by our standard (Marxian-Weberian-Durkheimian) social theory. As a member,
citizen, or subject of institutional forms for power, it is reasonable to believe that a person
has an identity. This is also true of primordialist or “religious” identities, but like the state,
these social forms are organised in ways that are either formal institutions, or parallel the
formal institution sufficient closely (for instance, the Muslim umma, “community of the
Islamic faithful”) to make identity meaningful.
This is not the case for an actor in a network, the “organism” in a population, or the func-
tional “rational” actor/transactor in a market. Members, actors, transactors, and organisms
all imply different ontologies of the person who is an element of one of these ontologically
distinct sets of social relations.
The great classic sociologists encountered problems that derived from their inadequate
ontologies. Durkheim’s problem with anomie, for instance, had to do with “not enough
society” in the person, in other words the personal was not sufficiently named (that is
“without name” > /a/ “without” + /nom-/, “name”). The opposite of the anomic is the
nominal, that is, the category that can be named and that therefore has identity. The condi-
tion of anomie is loss of category, the uncategorisable and therefore not identifiable, lacking
an identity. Durkheim’s problem then is a problem of the ontology of the person as either
“named” or “without name” and therefore without existence in the sui generis social fact
that, by definition, constituted reality as “the social”.
57ROBERT J. THORNTON
When Durkheim identified two categories of anomie that he called the “conjugal”
and the “modern” , he did so within an ontology that postulated “society” as uniquely
real. He took marriage to be a part of this natural reality, sui generis, as he said. Conjugal
anomie was the loss of the natural state of marriage which he was able to demonstrate
was much more beneficial to men, at the cost of a small loss of freedom of (male) lust.
(He like most of his contemporaries in Europe assumed that lust was primarily male). The loss
of the conjugal was not just the loss of sex and affection – that can be satisfied, in theory and
sometime in practice through promiscuity and the market for sex – but rather the loss of the
category of marriage as a named and formal institutionalisation of love and property in the
household. Marriage creates households, while also giving sexual access and legitimation,
as well as – for the lucky ones – love. But it is the household not marriage per se that distin-
guishes marriage from promiscuity, not the fact of sex or anything else. (This was a frequently
made mistake, as much in the nineteenth century as in our century and the last).
“Modern” anomie for Durkheim, on the other hand, is the loss of category through merging
of the personal with the modern market in which the person – with or without “sufficient”
society inside them – is lost to the specific activity of trade, commodity forms of interaction
and transactions involving pure value. Here only the functionality of the person as trader
or transactor is important. Modern anomie, then, is the loss of categorical identity to the
functionality of the market.
Identity takes on different characteristics, or even none at all, depending on the nature
of the social model that is selected.
A similar argument can be made for “populations” that are composed of masses or aggre-
gates of elements. These elements can be persons in what we call the “human population”,
but they are persons only in a biological sense, that is, they do not and cannot carry social
identity since social identity is not a biological property. In fact, to the extent that we might
consider the elements of the aggregate as having identity, the less they become populations,
and the more they become institutions (families, ethnic groups, or tribes, for instance).
This notion of “the mass” as primary ontological object is what makes the work of the
terrorist, the brutal dictator, or the genocidal “leader” possible. It is the “mass” of people
of some kind or other conceived as “population” that must be eliminated, suppressed
or contained. But the population is also essential to biological methods including what has
been called the gold standard of biomedical research, the randomised controlled trial. This
does not mean that the demagogue intent on genocide is equivalent to the pharmaceutical
global corporation testing its drugs, but only that they are both compelled to think of popu-
lations as aggregates of biological elements, not as collections of persons with identity.
Under this ontological vision, the person with identity does not exist. The “failure” of iden-
tity is essential, definitional.
Markets are involved in transformations and transactions of value, or with things that
are valuable, that carry value (money), or that are treated as if they are valuable for any
[potentially] arbitrary cultural choice. As such, the identity of the transactors takes second
place to the attributes of what they trade or exchange, and the values in terms of which they
do this. A trader may have a name, but this has no function in the market transaction as such.
For instance, computers today carry out many trades, and as such they have no identity;
they merely have a place in a network of computers that is signified by a number (although
this is simply a name signified by a set of numbers). While their nominal network name
58 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
may act in some cases like an identity – called a URL, or IP address – it is merely a place
in a functional space that can be represented mathematically as purely logical functions.
The social network is a set of relations, specifically relations between persons. The relation
is primary, not the person. Thus a “son” or a father is a “relation”. It does not matter that
the son’s name is “Bob” and the father’s name is “Carl”, but only that they stand in relation
to each other as father and son. People of any name, any category, and any institutional role
or position can stand to each other as father and son. Thus Bob might be the father and Carl
the son. They each have identity relative to one another and to the network or ideal concept
of the kin network, but not in general. Thus not all Bobs are fathers, nor sons, nor all sons
named Bob or Carl. It does not matter to the network that we call this “kinship”. The same
is true of any other kind of network whether this is a criminal network, a sexual network,
a secret trade network, or a terrorist network. The identity is in many cases inimical to the
functionality of the network.
The institution – or what I call here an institution more or less as Max Weber defined
it – possesses above all social members with social identity; an institution is identifiable,
and confers identity. The “status” of Weber’s “status groups” is the status of institutional
position while the “social” in Goffman’s “social identity” is like Durkheim’s non-anomic
person who is “full of society.” The institution confers categorical identity and is itself
a category, not a population, market or network. To confuse an institution with the popula-
tion, the market, or the network is to commit a specific kind of category error.
The general relation of these social ontologies can be presented in a table form.
There are failed identities, that is identities that are “tried on” or “tried out” and that do not
achieve the social integration, benefits, spiritual sense of well-being, or cultural sense
of belonging, or access, that was expected. Or that others have achieved with the same identity.
Table 1. Characteristics of Institutions, Networks, Markets, and Populations compared.
Conceptual
Structure
Identity
Relation
Grammatical, semantic,
meaningful;
randomness concept has
no meaning
Functional, & mathematical
function spaces;
randomness is meaningful
Value relations as
transformations &
transactions involving
value
SOCIAL NETWORKS MARKETS
Identifiable (and
countable) social
mass with attributes;
categorisable
INSTITUTIONS POPULATIONS
59ROBERT J. THORNTON
In South Africa, for instance, the “Africa” identity has been particularly problematic
in this regard. The same has been true for the “European”. The “national” identity, and the
Nationalist, as in National(ist) Party, the party of Apartheid, is similarly compromised
by the fact that today, there are scarcely any “nationalist” Afrikaners left, and those that
wish to ascribe to an Afrikaans identity based on language and history, no longer see this
as a “national” identity but rather as an “ethnic” or regional African identity.
In South Africa, for instance, the “Africa” identity has been particularly problem-
atic in this regard. The same has been true for the “European”. The “national” identity,
and the Nationalist, as in National(ist) Party, the party of Apartheid, is similarly compro-
mised by the fact that today, there are scarcely any “nationalist’ Afrikaners left, and those
that wish to ascribe to an Afrikaans identity based on language and history, no longer see
this as a “national” identity but rather as an “ethnic” or regional African identity.
The “Oriental”, Orientalists, and Orientalism – as identities and as political agendas –
have once more been brought into prominence with the failed outcomes of the “Arab Spring”.
Edward Said’s Orientalism (Döring and Stein 2012; Said 1979; Said and Barsamian 2010)
comments on the construction of orientalism by Western powers, but now looks extremely
dated and naïve as Muslim extremists such as Da’esh or Al Qaeda create, quite deliberately,
an “oriental’ identity and an Orientalism specifically with reference to an imagined past
of the Caliphate, with reference to the literature of the Hadith, the sharia’ and the Quran,
and, above all, specifically as an opposition to their image of “The West”. If Edward Said’s
orientalism had not existed, it seems the “orientals’ would have to invent it. Orientalism
is always cited in this respect, and scarcely a paper can be written on identity, colonialism
can be written without citing this work at least (as I have done here), as well as Benedict
Anderson’s Imagined Community (Anderson 1983). The imagined community of the oriental,
and “their” identity, that of the “Other” then, is what is at issue time and again. “The West”
is supposed to be responsible for “Orientalism”, an erroneous reification and imagined iden-
tification of the “oriental” as archetypal “other”, the mirror image, the mindless and slavish
mob, fanatical of religious belief and supine in the face of comically-dressed satraps and
dictators. Is this useful? Isn’t ironic that it is Colonel Gadaffi came closest to embodying
in this stereotype since the fall of the Ottomans while Assad in what remains of Syria
embodies the banality of pure brutality that has become fully endemic. Current events in
North Africa and the Middle East seem to show that no one is quite as committed to the
Orientalist vision as some of the Orientals themselves, while Orientalism flourishes in both the
Orient and the West. These are “failed” identities because they seem to be entirely theatrical,
unmoored from the actual past, and, however extreme, appear to be either fantasy or merely
ordinary.
Ironically, the “East” is now largely south of an expanded Europe. Europe has gone
so far East as to include countries like the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Turkey,
while considering for membership countries even further East in, for instance the failing state
of Ukraine. “The East”, meanwhile spread west across North Africa long ago. The geograph-
ical designators East and West are as fantastical as the political “Left” and “Right” while
the North-South dichotomy has emerged with much more force. Brazil, India and China
are now “South” to the fabled “North”, while South Africa – the only country here with
an actual compass bearing in its name – wishes vehemently for inclusion in “the South”
as the “versus” to the West.
60 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
If these are not yet failed identities they are at least dubious identities, and in some
cases fantastically ridiculous identities. The “East-West”, “North-South”, “Left-Right”
dichotomies need to be given safe passage to exile as they will not serve the community
of minds that seek to understand – as we do – what is going on behind the media hype
and political self-justification. But how then can we compare and contrast the new identities
that are emerging, the old ones that die, and the ones for which we simply have no names,
lacking even a vague concept to characterise them?
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nati-
onalism. London: Verso.
Döring, Tobias, and Mark Stein. 2012. Edward Said’s translocations : essays in secular criticism.
New York: Routledge.
Durkheim, Émile. 1951 [1897]. Suicide: A study in sociology. New York: The Free Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor Books.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Pren-
tice-Hall.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2004. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding history as culture and vice
versa. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Said, Edward W., and David Barsamian. 2010. The pen and the sword : conversations with Edward
Said. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
Searle, John R. 1995. The construction of social reality. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Searle, John R. 1998. Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World. New York:
Basic Books.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. “The whole person and its artefacts.” Annual Revue of Anthropology
33:1–19.
61
DMITRI M. BONDARENKO
The principle of communality is denoted as the ability of the originally and essentially communal worldview,
consciousness, behavioral pattern, socio-political norms and relations to spread on all the levels of societal
complexity including, though in modified or sometimes even corrupted form, sociologically supra- and non-
communal. As a pivotal socio-cultural foundation, the principle of communality has a direct impact on all
subsystems of the African society at all the levels of its being throughout its whole history. Precisely this is what
can explain to a large extent the originality of African culture. In the embodiment of the principle of commu-
nality it can also make sense to seek the roots of specificity of the historical process in sub-Saharan Africa.
Sub-Saharan Africa; African history; African culture; African society; African worldview; African tradition;
Communality
In the article below, we conceptualize the socio-cultural tradition as a durable modus of life
in a society or related societies in all its manifold manifestations, institutionalized and nonin-
stitutionalized. It accumulates all-sided specificity of a culture and can serve as a triking
example of inseparability of societal subsystems that form a seamless socio-cultural fabric.
The tradition is not static. Its mutability and continuity are reflected both in culture and
society. In fact, it will be misleading if we carry over to the academic language the common-
sense understanding of tradition as something unchangeable, given long ago once and
for all, as complete opposite of innovation. In reality, tradition presupposes continuity,
which is possible only as a consequent chain of absorbable changes within the tradition’s broad
general framework. What was an innovation yesterday, has become a part of tradition today,
if it has not contradicted sharply the culture’s basic foundations. For example, the Chinese
colorful plastic bowls have already replaced local handmade calabashes even in distant African
villages and have become an inalienable attribute of common people’s everyday homecare.
However, the African evidence proves that if we really observe development of an existing
62 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
culture and not formation of a new one from the old, the culture’s foundations (and hence
those of its tradition) remain there notwithstanding all changes, including some much more
important than the one noted above. Due to either internal evolution or transformations
triggered by outside, the culture can acquire new forms in all its spheres, but these forms
retain the essential continuity of those preceding them. As Melville Herskovits, a founding
father of African Studies in the USA, wrote, “[b]ecause it is a cardinal tenet of scientific
method that all relevant factors must be taken into account, the cultural base from which
change has come and the place of established tradition in shaping responses to innovation
will therefore have to be given full consideration” (Herskovits 1962, 7).
Herskovits seems to be the first prominent scholar who based his conception of African
socio-cultural history on the idea of a specific single cultural tradition of the sub-Saharan
part of the continent that had continuity both in time and in space, as he argued that this
tradition was not lost but, on the contrary, was preserved by, and determined the group
cultural identity of, the Black people in the Americas (see e.g. Herskovits 1941; Hersko-
vits 1962).1 Yet, is it actually lawful to speak about an “African socio-cultural tradition”,
given the fact that Africa has always been a whole mosaic of societies with their distinc-
tive cultures? We are sure that yes, if a proper scale of analysis is chosen. The valid “unit
of measurement” of, for example, political tradition as an integral part and aspect of the more
inclusive socio-cultural tradition can well vary depending on the scale of analysis relevant
for the task of research. The variety can be significant: from “the human political tradition”
(Storey 2006, 21, 43) to that of a separate people (e.g. Anyanwu and Aguwa 1993; Walzer
et al. 2003–2006) or even a part of a state (e.g. Howard 1981; Lauck et al. 2011). The logic
of our reasoning suggests that it is possible to postulate the presence of an African tradition
to the degree to which “the African culture” is real. Indeed, if we compare different African
cultures of any historical period, we will no doubt see significant differences between them.
Nonetheless, we will definitely also see important similarities that can give us good reason
to cluster them geographically at several levels, in particular: of a single polity (if we deal
with as a rule multicultural and multiethnic precolonial kingdoms, colonial or postcolonial
states), regional (for example, by opposing West African to East African cultures, those of
Western Sudan to the cultures of the Congo river basin, cultures of the savannah to cultures of
the tropical forest zone, and so forth), and, eventually, at the level of sub-Saharan Africa as a
single culture area distinctive from the rest of the world (see e.g. Sow et al. 1977; Ogot 1985;
Bondarenko 1997b; Bondarenko et al. 2010).2 As the Nigerian anthropologist Simon Ajayi
formulates it in an elegantly simple way, “‘African Culture’ refers to the distinctive cultural
elements in Africa that do not exist among the British or the Chinese” (Ajayi 2005, 36).
During the colonial period, the idea of reality of the single African culture served
as a background for such powerful theories/ideologies of the time as pan-Africanism (mainly
in the British colonies) and Négritude (spread predominantly in the French possessions),
each of which became the basis of a tradition in academic research. Nowadays, the idea of
the African culture plays the same role for the cultural ideology of Afrocentrism and the
1 It is worth noting that the debate between those who believe that the African origin of Blacks in the
New World society is central to their identity and outlook and those who deny this proposition is still going
on (see Okpewho et al. 2001; Gershenhorn 2004; Rucker 2005; Rucker 2010; Palmer 2006, 53, 97–98;
Jamison 2008, 100–102).
2 The scholar who stood at the origin of socio-cultural zoning of sub-Saharan Africa was Leo Frobenius
(1898; see also Frobenius 1923; Frobenius 1933), though his imbued with mysticism constructions are far
from the modern understanding of the scientific.
63DMITRI M. BONDARENKO
tradition of academic writing that is forming on its basis (e.g. Asante 1990; Asante 2003;
Asante 2007; see also Howe 1999, 230–239; Reinhardt 2008; Fenderson 2010; for another,
and probably more purely academic, powerful postcolonial substantiation of the idea of the
African culture see Sow et al. 1977). In particular, all these theories/ideologies sought
to establish a strong link between Africans and black people in the Americas. Thus, they
argued that the African culture had been carried across the Atlantic by black slaves and
then became, and despite everything always remained, common for all those who trace
their origin to Africa. Noteworthy, many prominent thinkers of that trend (in particular,
Edward Blyden, William Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, Molefi Asante) were
born outside Africa – in the USA or on the Caribbean islands.
Some scholars talk of not only “the African culture” but also “the African civiliza-
tion”, trying this way to give the concept of the African culture a dynamic dimension and
to express the idea of its continuity throughout history from Antiquity to the present.
An especially strong and distinctive tradition of such an approach has formed in the Fran-
cophone literature under the direct influence of the philosophers, poets and Négritude
ideologists Léopold Cédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire. In particular, the famous Senegalese
historian Cheikh Anta Diop “was the first African with a university degree to support the
idea of unity and antiquity of the African civilization” (Vaillant 2006, 294, n. 1; see Diop,
Ch. A. 1955; Diop, Ch. A. 1967; Bâ 1995). From probably less ideologically-biased angles,
the African civilization is also an object of research for Africanists of other intellectual and
academic traditions (Bondarenko 1997b; Fyle 1999–2001; Ajayi, S. A. 2005; Nikitin 2005;
Lebedeva and Khoros 2006). What these authors usually want to emphasize, is that sub-
Saharan Africa is not just a space on which cultures share some fundamental features but
is an area of a historically and socio-culturally specific pathway of transformations in all
spheres and of development in general. At the same time, Africanists write both about
local (separate “high cultures”) and regional “African civilizations” (e.g., Maquet 1972;
Kobishchanov 1985; Onwuejeogwu et al. 2000; Connah 2001; Ehret 2002; Lye 2002).
Naturally, the interrelation between the notions of “the African civilization” and “African
civilizations” is exactly the same as between “the African culture” and “African cultures”.
An analogy suggests itself: we do not hesitate to use such notions as “the French (English,
Spanish, etc.) culture” and “the European culture”, “European (or “Western”) civiliza-
tion” both in everyday speech and academic texts without thinking about any contradiction
between them. Indeed, there is no contradiction at all: the choice of a notion depends on what
we want to stress in a particular case – differences or similarities between the cultures
of Europe. In other words, what matters is our level of generalization, the scale of analysis
at the moment. As we have already emphasized, each of the abovementioned levels may
be a lawful level of analysis if it is adequate to the task of a particular research.
The question of the temporal scope of the study is equally important. As emphasized
at the beginning of this article, the cultural tradition is not static, its variability and volatil-
ity reflect continuity and succession over time in culture and society. Thus, we would like
to stress once again the need to take into account the historical dynamics of the African
culture. In particular, there is a long-lasting (actually, from the first decade of most African
states’ independence [Ajayi, J. F. A. 1969]) discussion on the place of the colonial period
in the continent’s millennia history, one of the trends in which is to consider it as in fact,
nothing more than an “episode” (Herbst 2000; for a review of the discussion see Austin
2010, 13–15). From the perspective of the present research, however, colonialism was
64 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
an important and specific stage of African history. Just under colonial regimes the impact
of another (European) civilization became an intrinsic and internal factor of African socie-
ties’ transformations.3 As a result, that was the colonial partition of the continent during
which the colonizers redrew radically its preceding political, cultural, and socio-economic
map, what eventually, in the course and after decolonization, gave rise to most present-day
African states and nations with all their specificity. As for the current historical moment
of intensive globalization, internal and external factors of transformations are basically
intertwined to the extent when that separation in the analysis becomes artificial and even
counterproductive.
So, while different bases can be chosen for the African history’s periodization, for the purpo-
ses of this article, its division into the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods seems
justified and meaningful. The first of the three was that of internal factors’ domination
in the formation and development of the African culture and tradition. The second period
was characterized by interiorization of the previous external influence and this becoming
a prime mover of many developments of the time, while those of the current era are deter-
mined by actual inseparability of the internal and external factors that drive the newest
developments in all the spheres of African societies and cultures.
Definitely, in its entirety Africa, which caught the great travelers of the 15th–19th centu-
ries, is really a thing of the past. However, those tourists and not only, disenchanted
at the sight of cars, newspapers and computers in Africa and thinking that “there is no genu-
ine Africa any more”, are wrong. Notwithstanding all the immense changes throughout
history, including those of the colonial and postcolonial times, today the cultures of Africa
still preserve their identity and, in their essence, remain precisely African cultures.
This means that beyond the visible novelties, they are still based on the fundamentals,
characteristic of them since olden times. Indeed, we are sure that many problems the Dark
Continent faces nowadays are rooted just in this fact, as far as these foundations have proved
to be compatible insufficiently with the demands of the Modern and Contemporary world,
in which Africa was once dragged forcibly and which was at first dominated by industrial,
and today is dominated by postindustrial, cultures. Nevertheless, due to these very socio-
cultural foundations Africa has remained Africa and has not become a “branch” of Europe
despite its direct and in many cases and respects strong influence during the colonial
period (for detail see e.g. Bondarenko 1995b; Bondarenko 2005).
What we regard as the most basic common constant foundation of the overwhelming
majority of historical and contemporary sub-Saharan African societies and cultures (and hence
of the African socio-cultural tradition), is the principle of communality. In our opinion,
its meaning is the ability of the historically and essentially communal worldview, conscious-
ness, pattern of behavior, socio-political norms and relations to spread to all levels of societal
organization, including supra- and non-communal. Thus, communality follows from,
but is by no means reduced to, the fact that the local community has always – from the earli-
est days of history to the present – remained the basic institution in Africa, the core of social
life, which has also determined the specificity of African authentic worldview and spirituality.
3 In the pre-colonial time, not only European but also Arab influence on African societies remained
external in most cases: only on the Indian Ocean coast and the adjacent islands a synthetic Afro-Arabian
culture – the Swahili culture – formed (Zhukov 1983; Hurreiz 1985; Allen, J. V. 1993; Horton and Middleton
2000; Middleton 2004). The early Portuguese possessions in the continent’s South, West and Cape Colony
are the only other notable case of interiorization of initially external influence before the second half of the
19th century in sub-Saharan Africa.
65DMITRI M. BONDARENKO
Historically and still today, communities in Africa demonstrate a great variety of types
and forms, from small kin-based bands to extended family to territorial (or neighbor)
communities. The extended family community – the one composed of a number of extend-
ed families, in their turn divided into households, is the most widespread community
type, as it is adequate to the manual (hoe) slash-and-burn agriculture, which has long
been the basis for the economy of the majority of African peoples. The extended family
demonstrates a combination of kin and territorial ties by definition (Olderogge 1975),
and the situation, naturally, is even more complex at the level of extended family commu-
nities. A line between their two kinds can be drawn. The first variant is represented by
communities of the Nigerian Bini, peoples of the Central Cameroon, and the Shona of Zimba-
bwe, among others (Bradbury 1973; McCulloch et al. 1954, 160; Ksenofontova 1970).
There extended families within a community preserve kinship ties, and thus these ties
dominate in the community as a whole. The second variant is that in which extended fami-
lies within a community do not hold kinship relations with each other (as, for instance,
among the Bambara and the Songhay of the Western Sudan [Paque 1954, 53–54; Rouch
1954, 43]). In such a situation territorial ties predominate over kin at the community level.
This means that in the sociological sense, the principle of communality is not equal to that
of kinship, although it is inherent for the African culture to formulate and express the
relations of different sorts, including political, in terms of kinship (Diop, 1958–1959, 16;
Armstrong 1960, 38; see also Kaberry 1959, 373; Tardits 1980, 753–754; Tymowski 1985,
187–188; Ray 1991, 205; Skalník 1996, 92; Bondarenko 2006, 103).4
Long heated debates5 have finally established as dominant the view that the community
was the first fundamental form of human social organization all over the world, char-
acteristic of most types of preindustrial societies, beginning with those of foragers (e.g.
Murdock and Wilson 1972; Kabo 1986; Butinov 2000, 75–93). In Africa, the community
has survived all the historical periods. In the precolonial time, the socio-political evolution,
reflected first of all in the formation and development of the complex society6 in most of
4 The phenomenon of “shipmates” seems to be hardly not the most striking confirmation of this. In the
time of slave trade, the Africans brought to the New World on the same ship used to begin consider each
other and behave towards each other as relatives (siblings, parents and children, grandparents and grand-
children), while the ship’s name became the common name for all the pseudo-kin unit members (Dridzo
1995; Mustakeem 2007; Popov 2009). Nowadays, the fictive kinship relationships can be established between
the Africans who, escaping from “hot spots”, have lived in the same refugee camp for a long time (Swigart
2001, 6, 16).
5 P articularly, on the history of those debates in the British functionalist and structuralist social anthro-
pology and in the Soviet ethnography see Bromley 1981, 181–185; Nikishenkov 1986, 133–139; Girenko
2000; Reshetov 2000; Artemova 2009, 102–109. While in the West those debates were an outcome of the
change of the dominant theoretical paradigm from unilinear evolutionism to functionalism and structural-
ism by the 1920s, in the USSR they were initiated in the late 1960s – early 1970s by several scholars who
tried to overcome theoretical inertia which was a result of canonization of the ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan
due to their high estimation by Engels and Marx (as it is known, Morgan [1877] postulated that not the
community but the clan was the first and most fundamental social institution in prestate societies). For the
present author’s advocating the community’s primacy in the latest discussions triggered by the attempts
(generally, we are sure, much desirable and successful) to expand the theoretical potential of Anthropology
and Archaeology through the integration of a world-system approach in the West, and to eradicate evolu-
tionism (what, we believe, is a wrong intention) in post-Soviet Russia, see Bondarenko 2006, 111–112;
Bondarenko 2010, 150–152).
6 Anthropologists and archaeologists, especially of the evolutionist schools of theoretical thought, call
“complex” the societies in which more than one level of socio-political integration is observed. When prein-
dustrial cultures are concerned, the societies designated as complex are those that comprise more than one
local community under one authority. The societies that do not have supracommunity levels of socio-political
integration, i.e., consist of one and only community being in fact equal to it, are called “simple”.
66 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
the continent mainly during the second part of the first – first half of the second millennia
CE, did not result in undermining its basic socio-cultural role. On the contrary, most often
the community served as the “matrix” for the socio-political institutions that arose above
it (Bondarenko 1995c; Bondarenko 2004; Bondarenko 2012; Bondarenko 2013).
The community was not destroyed by the much more rapid and abrupt changes during
the period of colonialism, either. In particular, almost all the colonizers’ attempts to impose
unrestricted – permitting its sale – private ownership of land (which, as world history tells,
leads to the community’s destruction [see Bondarenko 2006, 71–72]) failed. The only excep-
tion was the introduction of the “mailo”7 system in Buganda (Balezin 1986, 118) – the core
of the British protectorate of Uganda, which undoubtedly became possible because, uniquely
for sub-Saharan Africa, yet in the precolonial Buganda Kingdom, the prerequisites for the
emergence of private property, including land ownership, had been maturing (Mukwaya
1953). In general, the Africans did not know private property in the politico-economic sense.
In the meantime, they believed that the land belonged to the ancestors. Due to that, the
Africans were sure in their specific, but not proprietary, relations with the land: the people
and the land were perceived as in essence non-alienable from each other, as far as the
living formed an indissoluble unity with the spirits of their ancestors. In the final analysis,
the existence of community turned to be part and parcel of the colonial society without
which large colonial exploitation could not actually be effective or maybe even possible,
at least to such a degree (Meillassoux 1991).
Today, over half a century after most African countries’ independence, notwithstanding
the increased migration to cities, the majority of the continent’s population still remains
rural, agriculturalist, and hence communal. Co-existence of the community and the state
is among the most typical and important features of the socio-political composition of many
contemporary African countries. The state, at least in its present form, appeared there
due not to the long-lasting internal socio-political processes but as a result of imposing
and implantation in the late 19th–20th centuries. Hence, what can be observed is precisely
the community and the state’s co-existence rather than organic co-evolution.
The community’s decay is interconnected with the process of the wider society’s transi-
tion to capitalism (see e.g. Kamen 2000, 126–137). Hence, on the one hand, the continuing
existence of the community alongside modern economic, social, political, and cultural
elements testifies to internal eclecticism of the contemporary African societies which
should be interpreted as an important outcome of violation of their self-development due
to the European colonization. On the other hand, Africa has retained its socio-cultural
identity up to this day exactly because the community still exists as the basic institution
which predetermines communality as a fundamental principle embodied not only inside,
but also outside the community as a certain social institution – in the broader, complex
society. The indestructibility of the community throughout African history with all its pertur-
bations shows that today it is not a throwback, a relic of the past, but the most vivid and
significant expression of the deep general essence of the African civilization as communalist:
let us repeat that communality as a socio-cultural foundation, though follows from,
is not reduced to the fact of temporal and spatial universality of the institution of community
in Africa south of the Sahara. In brief, communality can be called a basic principle of private
7 A corruption of the English word “mile”: the size of the plots given away as private property was calcu-
lated in square miles.
67DMITRI M. BONDARENKO
and public life in African society; a tenet that organizes the society in all its spheres and at all
levels, including those far beyond the community.
Communality is not equal to collectivism. This is directly related to the fact that in most
types of communities spread in Africa a combination of the rights of a community as a whole
and a separate family on the same means of production, especially arable land, is observed.
Characteristically, all attempts to base a postcolonial society on the ideas of “African social-
ism” failed. One of the major reasons for this was that at all the diversity of these ideas in the
treatment of different ideologists (Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, the Guinean Sékou Touré,
Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and others), their key tenet remained the same: the African
peasant, a member of the community and the main inhabitant of the country, is ostensibly
“socialist at heart”, as the Russian Narodniks of the 1860s–1870s, those African leaders’
intellectual predecessors (Khoros 1973), used to call the members of peasant communities
in their own country (Brockway 1963, 18–36; Mohiddin 1981, 65–94; Metz 1982, 380–384;
Idahosa 2005, 2236–2237). Thus, those ideologists tended to ignore the dualistic nature
of the community overemphasizing its collectivistic side and underestimating individual-
istic. As soon as the peasant was deprived by the state of incentives to work for the benefit
of him/herself and his/her own family, agriculture, the basis of national economy, fell into
a severe crisis, which in its turn, contributed a lot to the general crisis of the soc io-political
system. For example, in Tanzania the newly formed villages (ujamaas) proved economically
ineffective already less than a decade after the social experiment began – by the second
half of the 1970s (Lofchie 1978; Coulson 1979, 158–172; Freyhold 1979; Hydén 1980,
119–123; see also inter alia recent works of Tanzanian researchers: Mwakikagile 2006,
61–80; Mkenda 2010; Shivji 2010).
Naturally, the African “modal personality”8 is compatible with the communal social rea-
lity in which it has formed. Not a separate person but the society is seen as “the measure
of all things”, while similarity of all, and hence of everyone to everyone, is seen as the prin-
ciple of the Universe’s existence (Bondarenko 1997a; Sledzevski 2006). This means that
in people’s minds, the society’s problems, needs, and possibilities are not a sum of those
of its separate members, but determined by the communal collectivity as a whole. This is
so because the communal world outlook is sociocentric, which means that people perceive
their society as the most important element of the Universe (compare with Ancient and
Modern European anthropocentrism or medieval theocentrism). Sociocentrism of the world
outlook is explained by the belief that namely the ancestors and/or deities of this people
have created the Universe and, hence, its fortunes are dependent on their will. But their
will, good or bad, is a reaction to their descendents’ conduct, either proper or not.9
8 “[D]efined as those character traits that occur with the highest frequency in a social group and are
therefore the most representative of its culture” (Haviland et al. 2010, 143) and “referring to central tenden-
cies in the personalities of members of a society that are not necessarily shared by all” (Wedenoja 2006,
1359). The term was introduced by Cora Du Bois (1944) who, however, put a too biologized meaning in it
(see Fogelson 2006, 1603).
9 Correspondingly, sociocentric cultures do not know abstract humanism as recognition of human life
and dignity’s high value per se: the value differs greatly depending on who they are: good-natured members
of their society, or either criminals or strangers. The former have high value as those vitally important for
all the given society members’ prosperity and actually the whole Universe’s further being, as far as the
proper behavior of the descendents pacifies the ancestors and inclines them to confer benefits to the whole
society and allow the whole world to persist. Besides, and also in relation with the fundamental inextrica-
ble connection between the living and the ancestors, each member of the society occupies a specific place
in its web of kinship ties and can extend this main common wealth in such a society by begetting children.
68 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
In a sociocentric culture anyone’s being is really important, but possible only in the colle-
ctivity of people. Respectively, ethics – problems of good and evil – becomes a function of not
a person but the society. In such a society, there is nothing about what its member could
say: “This is my own business”. For example, one cannot consider as a completely personal
matter whether to beget children or not: it is important for the whole community to widen
the kin net and to be sure that the individual will have descendents to take care of him
as an ancestor spirit when he dies. So, not begetting children is regarded as an essentially
social act – as failure to perform public duties. Traditionally, childless people became social
outcasts, they were feared and despised at the same time (see, for instance, among the Bini:
Bradbury 1965, 97–98). Characteristically, this attitude has still not changed. For example,
in many African cultures of the postcolonial time the childless are still regarded as witches
and sorcerers, and not buried on community cemeteries or buried but without full funerary
ritual (Fortes 1978; Ademola 1982; Ebin 1982; Silva 2009; Noret 2010).
However, the individual is not “offset” or “dissolved” in the collectivity but has a clear value
in itself, contrary to the conviction spread among Europeans since the time of the first travel-
ers to sub-Saharan Africa.10 This stemmed from the idea of uniqueness of everyone’s place,
his/her indispensability in the Universe and in the communal collectivity as the Universe’s
central point, as precisely this person is a relative of these or those community members,
a descendant of certain ancestors. The ancestor cult lies at the very heart of traditional
African religion and world outlook; it is the primer of the authentic African picture of the
Universe (e.g. Fortes 1965; Bondarenko 1996; Grinker et al. 2010, 283–322). The outstand-
ing early student of African cultures Percy Amaury Talbot emphasized long ago that
“[n]o one can hope to appreciate the thoughts and feelings of the black man who does not
realise that to him the dead are not dead but living, in full command of all their faculties,
including memory, and endowed with greater abilities and powers than when on earth”
(Talbot 1926, II, 298). Today, ancestor worship co-exists quite easily with Christianity
and Islam in the forms of syncretism or dual religiosity all over sub-Saharan Africa.
The ancestor cult dictates that what is most important is to preserve proper relations with
the ancestors who can either bless their descendents with all the good or ruin the whole
Universe. Thus, the patterns of behavior that have already proved their safety in terms of the
Criminals and strangers are not attributed high value due to the fact of belonging to the human race. Crimi-
nals lose it, as their anti-social behavior is a threat not only to those directly against whom they committed
the crimes, but first of all to the general welfare: their misconduct can influence negatively the ancestors’
attitude to the living. Strangers do not have high value by definition: “others” cannot be as valuable as
“we” are because, contrary to ours, their ancestors did not participate in the creation of the Universe, and
hence their descendents cannot influence crucially its fortune. Characteristically, till the moment when
the exogenous (European and Arab) slave trade corrupted the moral foundations of the African societies
involved in it as human commodity suppliers, in the overwhelming majority of cases, only criminals and
strangers, particularly captives of war, could be enslaved by force and sold legally (Park 2000, 256–263;
Fage and Tordoff 2002, 267; Perbi 2004, 28–68; Bonislawski 2007, 353–354; Lovejoy 2011). It is also not
by chance that adoption, that is integration into the local system of kinship relations and hence linking
to the societies’ ancestors, was regarded as the natural, if not the only, way of obtaining the status of the
recipient society members by strangers in the authentic African culture.
10 In academic works, with respect to non-modern societies, this “common wisdom” was conceptualized
particularly by Émile Durkheim in “Individual and Collective Representations” (1953), first published in
1898. In philosophy and ideology, this view was articulated, for example, by Karl Marx (see Overing 1992).
Joanna Overing (1992, 32–33) is completely right in her statement about the roots of the academic and
philosophic problem of collectivism and individualism of “the primitive Other”: “The very opposition of the
priority of the collectivity and the priority of the individual is characteristic of Western thinkers and is of
fundamental importance for understanding of the political legacy of the West. In brief, at the heart of these
contradictions are rather our own estimates than objective differences between ‘modern’ and ‘premodern’”.
69DMITRI M. BONDARENKO
ancestors’ reaction, i.e. those followed from generation to generation, are always definitely
preferred to any new ones; the novelty as such is seen as something risky and hence, a priori
undesirable. As the dynamics of life is perceived as cyclic, in which everything new is actually
a repetition of old,11 society is focused on the simple socio-economic and cultural reproduc-
tion of itself (thus giving to the community and the principle of communality additional
durability and significance), while behavior of one its member is seen as inevitably affecting
all, as ancestors are regarded as simultaneously personal (of that ancestor’s direct descend-
ents) and collective (of the whole community). Hence, each and everyone is responsible for
maintaining of the vitally necessary fragile universal balance between the living and the
ancestors. The individual’s role in what we call “history” seems to be very big, as far as the
myth, the predominant form of how it is perceived in an authentic African society, allows
voluntarism by making changes in it while telling. So, the myth gives faith in the possibility
to change the past by an effort (and in this sense, in reality, myth opposes history). At the
same time, not only all the community members as individuals but also the community
as a whole is liable to the ancestors who are also perceived as simultaneously individuals
and, more importantly, a collectivity – the host of ancestors. In the final analysis, communal-
ity demands concerted action to maintain the universal balance and mutual responsibility
for the correctness of conduct (Bondarenko 1994; Bondarenko 1996; Bondarenko 1997a).
The principle of communality, in whatever it is manifested – religion, politics, social or
economic relations, is based on the interplay of the individual and the collective, and the
interests of the latter, though do not suppress those of the former, are regarded as superior
in relation to them (Sow et al. 1977, 158–161).
Contrary to the Modern European ideas, in the authentic African culture, to be a person-
ality meant not to manifest individuality, difference from other members of society but
to consciously be like they. Only this way the African got and felt his/her indispensability and
uniqueness. The individual’s exclusivity was seen in the uniqueness of his/her not qualities
and traits but social role and position. The collectivity, which in the Africans’ minds included
both the living and their ancestors, was perceived in the communal notions and categories.
Its priority over the individual, thus, was grounds for existence of the community as the
overarching fundamentals of African societies at all times. Like any individual could have
access to a plot of land only as a member of the community, a person could be socially full
and substantial exceptionally as a worthy, in a sense typical, part of the communal collec-
tivity either. The principle of communality dictates the imperative to align themselves with
other members of the collectivity and to act not contrary to, but within the standard model
of behavior. Only basing on the recognition of superiority and primacy of the collectivity
over the individual, an African could realize him/herself as a personality, only in the collec-
tivity he/she could feel truly free.
Indeed, communality as a socio-cultural principle is directly related to the fact that
community in a great variety of types and forms has remained the essential, fundamen-
tal social institution throughout the whole of African history. But communality is wider
than community in the sense that, as a principle of social life organization and a basis
11 For example, in African cultures, even the birth of a baby is seen not as a completely new event but as
a reincarnation of an ancestor in the baby’s image. So, the newborn is not a “completely newly-born” but
someone who was born, lived and died before, and is now beginning the traffic on the same circle of life
again. The main task of the relatives and other co-communalists of the baby during the first days of his or
her life is to find out which of the ancestors has returned to life in the material form. Usually, special diviners
are invited to solve the problem (and also to foretell the newborn’s fortune). On their decision the name the
baby will be given often depends (Bockie 1993, 129–130; Ephirim-Donkor 1997, 38; Nel 2007, 136–148).
70 RYTÍŘ Z KOMÁROVA / KNIGHT FROM KOMÁROV
of culture, it can well manifest itself in complex societies, far beyond the community,
that is when the community served either as a true matrix for a complex society’s building
or as at least an ideological metaphor, a pillar for its construction (Bondarenko 2008, 26–30).
In fact, communality became a fundamental socio-cultural principle exactly because it turned
out able to surpass the community. Essential communalism of the African culture found
significant manifestations in the supra- and non-community contexts. It found them both
in the precolonial period and during colonial and post-colonial times, when completely new,
unrelated to the community institutions were imposed. Let us remind that above the princi-
ple of communality as a socio-cultural foundation was defined as the ability of the originally
and essentially communal socio-political norms and relations, worldview, consciousness,
behavioral pattern to spread on all the levels of societal complexity including, though
in modified or sometimes even corrupted form, sociologically supra- and non-communal.
The African city is a very good example of the aforementioned. Sometimes the Afri-
can civilization is called “rural” or “village” (e.g. Huỳnh 1986, 117; Sadous 1986, 80;
Ranger 1997, 277), which is basically wrong (Bondarenko 1995a, 283; Şaul 1998, 543).
There were at least three areas in sub-Saharan Africa in which numerous cities flourished
long before many more appeared in the colonial time all over the continent: the Western
Sudan, Upper Guinea, and the Indian Ocean Coast (Lvova 1988; Coquery-Vidrovitch 1993;
Anderson and Rathbone 2000; Connah 2001). However, “African precolonial cities had
a distinctly agrarian character with a majority of the male population commuting regularly
to farms a couple of miles away from the town. In such cities, quite a bit of farming occurred
in any available space within the city” (Fyle 1999–2001, I, 109–110). Respectively, socially,
those cities were intricate compositions of a considerable number of communities similar
to rural, each of which usually occupied a ward in the city. Thus, the precolonial African city
was not separated from the village, but quite the opposite, it preserved economic, social,
and cultural continuity with it. The city and the village equally were unthinkable without
the community, and together they formed the self-consistent socio-economic and socio-
historical fabrics of the precolonial African culture (Bondarenko 1995d). It is correct to call
the sub-Saharan African civilization not “rural” or “village” but “communal”.
Colonialism promoted erosion of the communal social composition of the “old”,
“traditional”, cities by introducing industry and stimulating intensive migration there from
the countryside. It also gave birth to a great number of “new” cities, especially big cities,
predominantly non-communal in their social basis (and non-agricultural economically)
from the very beginning. These tendencies further strengthened in the time of independ-
ence. Nevertheless, the principle of communality remained in the socially transformed old,
and penetrated into new cities, finding various manifestations; sometimes positive for the
society, sometimes negative. For example, most migrants to the city, especially recent, send
remittances to their native settlements, many of them try to go there for holidays and other
proper occasions. Besides that, we will mention just two of those many striking manifes-
tations of communality in the city, the present author has observed personally in a dozen
African states. These manifestations differ considerably from each other, and thus indicate
the scope of possible differences.
On the one hand, in the biggest cities which attract migrants from actually all over the
respective countries, like Accra, Cotonou, Dar es Salaam, Lagos, Luanda or Lusaka, there
are mutual aid associations of the same region natives and their descendants. Significantly,
these associations are really regional, not ethnic: for example in Dar es Salaam, people
71DMITRI M. BONDARENKO
from the same multiethnic region join the same association, irrespective of their ethnicities.
Even if people from the same region do not form distinctive city neighborhoods but live
dispersed, they tend to communicate and co-operate with each other (see also Ivanchenko
2012; Ivanchenko 2014, 38–42).
On the other hand, there are neighborhoods in the cities which inhabitants, despite
differences in regional and ethnic origin or religion, regard themselves as forming not
a random group of neighbors but rather a specific social unit. Contrary to the first exam-
ple, in this case people do not strive to preserve their “pre-city-dweller” identity in the new
socio-cultural environment, but vice versa, adapt the modern city realities to their basically
communal consciousness. Furthermore, they “tear” the social space of the city by draw-
ing a thick line between “them” and “others” – all those who live in other neighborhoods.
They regard their neighborhood as “only theirs” and believe they have every right to regu-
late all the relations in it, including the “mode of stay” and “rules of conduct” of strangers,
be it a foreigner or a resident of another block, often including representatives of the city
authorities and even policemen. There are such neighborhoods in big cities of Ghana,
Tanzania, South Africa, other countries, but probably most well-known are those of Lagos
in Nigeria, controlled by the notorious “area boys” gangs (Momoh 2000; Momoh 2003). 12
So, as a pivotal socio-cultural foundation, the principle of communality has a direct
impact on all subsystems and at all levels of the African society throughout its whole history
up to present. In our opinion, precisely this is what to a large extent explains the speci-
ficity of African culture, African civilization. Therefore the embodiment of the principle
of communality is where it makes sense to seek the roots of the peculiarity of the historical
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