Nyamnjoh, Francis B. (2012),
Blinded by Sight : Divining the Future of Anthropology in Africa,
In Africa Spectrum, 47, 2-3, 63-92.
ISSN: 1868-6869 (online), ISSN: 0002-0397 (print)
See online: Blinded by Sight : Divining the Future of Anthropology in Africa
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Robert J. Gordon
Keywords: South Africa, anthropology
Robert J. Gordon has worked in southern Africa and Papua New Guinea, focusing on a variety of topics including violence, law and colonialism. He is currently a Professor and Senior Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont and the University of the Free State, respectively. E-mail: <rgordon@uvm.edu>
Nyamnjoh begins his invigorating and provocative effort at divination with a parable, which requires reciprocity:
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Annika Teppo
Keywords: South Africa, anthropology, social structure
Annika Teppo holds a Ph.D. (Social and Cultural Anthropology) and is an adjunct professor (docent) in Urban Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland, as well as the head of the Urban Dynamics cluster at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden.
E-mail: <annika.teppo@nai.uu.se>
I found Francis Nyamnjoh’s recent article (2012) in Africa Spectrum, as well as Isak Niehaus’ response to it (2013), of great interest. Nyamnjoh argues that ethnographers should not only study “down” to poor people, but also look “up” at the elites. While I genuinely find his point of great importance to the whole field of anthropological and ethnographical research, I have to concur with Isak Niehaus’ opinion that Nyamnjoh’s paper does not really treat its main example, the study of white South Africans, fairly.
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Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Keywords: Africa, South Africa, anthropology
Francis B. Nyamnjoh is a professor of Anthropology and head of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. He served as Director of Publications at CODESRIA from 2003-2009, and taught at universities in Cameroon and Botswana previously. His current research is funded by the NRF, SANPAD, WOTRO, Volkswagen Foundation, CODESRIA and UCT.
E-mail: <francis.nyamnjoh@uct.ac.za>
Effects of Epistemological Encounters in Africa I appreciate the scholarly engagement with my article and would like to take this moment to further clarify my central argument and take up a number of points raised in the responses. First, however, it is important for me to make clear that the article entitled “Blinded by Sight: Divining the Future of Anthropology in Africa” (Nyamnjoh 2012b), which appeared in Africa Spectrum, represents a two-part conversation. In the first part of the conversation, entitled “ ‘Potted Plants in Greenhouses’: Critical Reflections on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa” (Nyamnjoh 2012a), I outlined in greater detail the central point about the epistemological and social implications of knowledge production in Africa. In all fairness, the argument mapped out there was meant to be the precursor to the article under question – “Blinded by Sight”.
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On Gaining Access: A Response to Francis Nyamnjoh’s “Blinded by Sight: Divining the Future of Anthropology in Africa”
Andrew Hartnack
Keywords: Africa, anthropology
Andrew Hartnack is a Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Section, School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. He has conducted in-depth research and published on the social, political and economic dynamics of displacement for Zimbabwean farm workers following the land reforms in that country over the last decade.
His current research project centres on the history of welfare initiatives on Zimbabwean commercial farms, how these have been forced to change due to land reform and how this has affected the beneficiaries of such programmes.
E-mail: <hrtand009@myuct.ac.za>
In his essay “Blinded by Sight: Divining the Future of Anthropology in Africa”, Francis Nyamnjoh (2012b) uses the well-known story of the elephant and the blind men as a useful metaphor for exploring, revealing and critiquing the ways in which anthropology has been conducted in African (and especially South African) universities.1 In so doing, he strongly challenges not only the ….
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On Agnotology as Built-in Ignorance
Jean-Pierre Warnier
Keywords: Africa, anthropology
Jean-Pierre Warnier (Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 1975) has taught anthropology in Nigeria, Cameroon and, since 1985, at the University Paris-Descartes. He is now an honorary professor and research fellow at the Centre d’études africaines, Paris. Since 1972, he has been conducting research on the economic and political history of the Cameroon grassfields. More recently, he began to study bodily and material cultures as technologies of power. One of his latest books is The Pot-King: The Body and Technologies of Power, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007.
E-mail: <jp-warnier@wanadoo.fr> Re-reading Francis Nyamnjoh’s essay on the elephant and the blind men has stirred up lots of thoughts, regrets and soul-searching on my part. For one thing, the piece reminds me of the book by Nicholas Thomas (1989), Out of Time, and about the making of ignorance. Thomas says that Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was the first “professional” anthropologist in history – that is, he was trained as an anthropologist and made a living from his anthropological endeavours. He wanted to turn anthropology into a serious professional activity. To achieve this, in a fully Durkheimian tradition, he declared before the social science community that, from that point forward, only the data collected by professional and trained anthropologists working in a canonical fieldwork situation should be accepted to feed the anthropological machine. In so doing, Radcliffe-Brown disqualified all the information produced by the traveller, the merchant, the soldier, the missionary. I would add to Thomas’ list the local literati (in Arabic or other local languages, or in European precolonial and colonial languages), as well as literature, cinema, and other cultural and artistic productions. In one word, Radcliffe-Brown disqualified the elephant. Given the fact that the historical dynamics of societies have been partially shaped and defined by trade, power relations, conquests, religious movements, etc., Radcliffe-Brown’s statement was quite bold.
Ruling out the knowledge produced by the merchant, the missionary, the military and other sources amounts to excluding many direct insights made by “unprofessional” anthropologists into certain societies. In other words …. Download the full document
Anthropology and Whites in South Africa: Response to an Unreasonable Critique
Isak Niehaus
Keywords: South Africa, anthropology
Isak Niehaus is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University in London. He has done extensive research in South African rural areas on topics such as witchcraft, politics, masculinity, and on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. His most recent monograph is Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa (2013).
E-mail: <isak.niehaus@brunel.ac.uk>
Anthropology has made a profound intellectual contribution toward understanding the nuances of social life in the unequal, often violent, society that is South Africa (Pauw 1980, Gordon and Spiegel 1993, Hammond-Tooke 1997). The insights generated by anthropology have eclipsed those of far larger and much better-endowed disciplines, such as sociology and psychology.
In recent years, only social historians have had greater intellectual impact than anthropologists, but they themselves have drawn heavily upon earlier anthropological writings (Saunders 1988). South African anthropology has nonetheless been subject to a great deal of unreasonable criticism.
This is perhaps due to the anthropological capacity to transgress racial boundaries and hereby threaten those with vested interest in them.
During Apartheid, anthropologists provoked a vicious response from those intent upon maintaining the status quo. A native commissioner expelled Max Gluckman from Zululand for transgressing the etiquette of the colour bar. Gluckman upset whites by living in a hut and wearing a Zulu bheshu (loincloth) when he visited town (Schumaker 2001: 45). In 1969 police observed the interactions in John Blacking’s bedroom from the elevated vantage point of trees outside his apartment, and then proceeded to arrest him for engaging in sexual relations with his Indian lover (Robertson and Whitten 1980). Security police kept a file, headed “Dr. Zion”, on Jim Kiernan and trailed him during his visits to London (Kiernan 1997). The inappropriately named Civilian Cooperation Bureau assassinated David Webster, an anthropologist who assumed a more overtly political role (James 2009).
At the end of Apartheid, critics emerged from very different quarters: They were now drawn from the ranks of American liberals and African …..Download the full document