Early ethnography

Our information on the coast of East Africa dates back to classical Greek and Arab sources and, from the sixteenth century, to the reports of Portuguese navigators. Occasional news on the interior of East Africa, merely of a geographical nature, began to reach Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century; its second half brought in some reliable information of a crude ethnographic type, normally scattered in the daily records of voyagers and explorers, colonial administrators and missionaries. All of these were pioneers in their own ways, but very few had an academic training. When based on firsthand knowledge, their information is still priceless. Normally, however, their reports are uncritical, and even valueless when dependent on hearsay evidence or distorted by stereotyped prejudices. Only a few early twentieth-century sources are distinguished by their accuracy and thoroughness as classics of the anthropological literature, such as the monograph of Gerard Lindblom, a Swedish scholar, on the Kamba of Kenya, and the two volumes on the Thonga of Mozambique by †H.A.Junod, a Swiss evangelist. Both covered the entire spectrum of local culture, aiming at an encyclopedic survey as required by the ethnographic method of the day.

Africa: East

In its narrowest sense East Africa includes the three modern republics of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. All three of them were heirs to the early British colonies and continue to show a deep British influence. English is one of the official languages of Uganda, together with Swahili and Luganda, while it is of general daily use in Kenya and Tanzania, where Swahili is the official language. Under colonial administration these three states were involved in an agreement for the common promotion of commercial exchange, a connection that has never entirely ceased even after the official termination of the agreement. In a wider and more comprehensive sense East Africa may also include the republics of Burundi, Rwanda, Malawi and Mozambique. However, the influence of the former Belgian administration, and the continuing use of French as an official language, have strengthened the cultural ties between Rwanda and Burundi and francophone Zaïre, rather than with anglophone Uganda and Tanzania, while the recent history of Malawi and Mozambique has favoured continuing cultural and ethnic relations with the neighbouring states of Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa rather than with their northern East African partners.

Aesthetics

We can identify two issues which are important with respect to anthropology’s approach to aesthetics in non-Western societies: firstly, are we obliged to consider the anthropology of *art and the anthropology of aesthetics as inseparable? We are first confronted by the problem of those societies which either do not produce material objects of art or do not produce many artefacts at all. The Foi of Papua New Guinea and the Dinka of southern Sudan are good examples of societies that have no artefactual or artistic elaboration whatsoever but which have a highly developed form of verbal art in the form of poetic songs (see Coote 1992; Deng 1973; Weiner 1991). There is also the case of the Papua New Guinea Highlanders, for whom the *body is perhaps the only site of aesthetic elaboration (O’Hanlon 1989; Strathern and Strathern 1983). This throws into relief our Western commitment to the objet d’art as the focus of aesthetic elaboration, which has been criticized by anthropologists as †ethnocentric. We can thus picture an aesthetics without art objects; can we similarly picture an artistic world without an aesthetic?

To consider this problem we turn to the second issue: we must separate at least two distinct, though related, senses of the term ‘aesthetics’. The first pertains to the judgement of taste, of what is beautiful (identified in Kant’s Critique of Judgement). The second is more general, and pertains to the form of our sensible intuition (identified in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason). Most studies of non-Western artistic practices until recently confined aesthetics to the identification of the beautiful in any society, while more recently, anthropologists of art such as Morphy (1991) have defined aesthetics as the effect of sensory stimuli on human perception. But there is no effect of such stimuli by themselves, that is, apart from some prior cognitive schematism that makes such stimuli recognizable in their particular form, and this is exactly the point of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. While I think a case can be made that we cannot export our notions of the beautiful to other non-Western cultures, as Overing and Gow have recently argued (Weiner 1994), I think no anthropological theory does not contain within its implicit rationale some idea of how form itself is brought forth in different communal usages. It is this general appeal to the transcendental aesthetic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason— without which Kant’s notion of schematism (upon which modern anthropology is founded) makes no sense—that anthropologists such as Marilyn Strathern invoke in her concern with seeing Melanesian social process as a matter of making the form of social life appear in a proper manner (1988). The question then becomes why art, whether it be graphic, verbal or whatever, should be the method by which attention is drawn to the form-producing process as such.

The answer may lie in an appeal to transcendance, without which art would scarcely have the special properties we attribute to it. But our Western world of communal life activity, totally mediated as it is by the image industry, has become so thoroughly aestheticized that the ability of art to achieve this stepping-outside has become attentuated (Baudrillard 1983). Our tendency to aestheticize our subjects’ social world can perhaps be seen in the increasing attention to the phenomenon of *‘poetics’, where the expressive and constitutive role of social *discourse is brought into focus (see for example Herzfeld 1985). We thus see our world as well as the world of peoples like the Foi and the Dinka as a total aesthetic fact, because we are both said to inhabit a thoroughly mediated *environment upon which a body image has been projected and expanded. But it is in the very different roles that art plays in these two societies that this similarity is revealed as illusory. Dinka cattle songs focus on men, cattle and their embodied relationship and thus reveal in everyday communal discourse the way human production, reproduction and politics are mediated by bovine fertility. They constitute their economy through the body. But such embodying force has been totally appropriated by the symbolic economy in the West—it is advertising that mediates social body image and conceals the transcendant nature of its own construction; we constitute the body through our economy and leave art to the marginal discourse of the academy.

It could thus be argued that to save the aesthetic from collapsing into a new *functionalism, a new appeal to the transcendance afforded by the work of art might be necessary. The merit of such an approach is that it side-steps the productionist appeals that our ordinary social constructivist view of art contains implicitly within it, and allows us to accept once again the complete interdependence of aesthetics and art, as the formproducing regime in any society, and its mode of revelation respectively. But most anthropologists insist on seeing art and aesthetics as the expressive form of social order or cohesion and attribute to them a function in maintaining such order. It is inevitable that under such conditions, either art or aesthetics is seen to be redundant with respect to that functionality. But the relation between the two demands dialectical thinking, opposed to functionalist thinking. It is reasonable to assume that, just as is the case with our own art, the artistic practices of non-Western people might have nothing to do with making society visible and everything to do with outlining the limits of human action and thought.

Adoption and fostering

Conventionally, fostering involves a parent or set of parents looking after someone else’s  child, often on a long-term basis, whereas adoption involves in addition the acquisition of a ‘kin’ relationship between such parents and their (adopted) children. Both practices involve the assumption of parental roles by individuals who are not the child’s biological or birthparents, but the addition of *kinship status in adoption makes that concept both more problematic and more interesting.

The original ancient Roman notion of adoptio (adoption) was simply one of passing legal authority (potestas) over an individual from one person to another, outside his own †lineage, often for the purpose of making alliances and securing the inheritance of *property. In Roman times, the ‘adopted’ individual was most often an adult male who continued, even after his adoption, to retain the ties of love and duty toward his own, living parents. With adoptio, the legal authority of the father over his child was broken and a new relationship established with adoptive parents. In contrast, the Roman notion of adrogatio entailed the acquisition of such authority in a case where the adopted person’s own father and father’s father had died, much as modern adoption usually assumes the death or incapacity of the birth-parents.

Thus, modern notions of adoption, including anthropologists’ perceptions as to what constitutes the practice cross-culturally, generally combine the legal aspects of the Roman institutions with the nurturing and affective aspects of fostering and ‘true’ parentage. It also has elements in common with ritual kin relationships, such as *compadrazgo, though ironically the very fact of acquiring a legal kinship status arguably makes adoption an aspect of ‘true’ rather than merely figurative kinship. Sometimes adoption is described as a form of fictive kin relation, but the degree of its truth or fiction is a matter of cultural perception (Barnard and Good 1984:150–4). Ethnographically, adoption in this broadly-defined sense is most commonly found in Europe, North America and West Africa.

Both fostering and adoption reveal important cultural assumptions about processes of relatedness and concepts of *personhood. On the island of Langkawi off the coast of Malaysia (Carsten 1991), for example, people are thought to become kin through sharing common food, and thus common substance, and widespread fostering can be related to other ideas about the fluidity and mutability of kinship (a theme more widely encountered in Austronesian societies). Unlike the Malaysians of Langkawi, for many Americans ‘fictive’ kinship, in the etymological sense of kinship that is ‘made’, fits uneasily into EuroAmerican expectations about the givenness of ‘real’ kinship (Modell 1994). In America, then, changing adoption practices (and consequent public debate), work as a kind of mirror image of what is considered to be ‘real’ kinship, and ethnographic research on ‘fictive’ kinship helps clarify unspoken assumptions about what is ‘real’.

Aboriginal empowerment

The growth of Aboriginal self-determination has had a substantial impact on the practice of anthropology in Australia. While *resistance to assimilation has been exercised throughout the present century, it was only in the later 1960s that European Australians began to appreciate the difficulties of enforcing assimilation against sustained indigenous opposition. In 1963, The Australian Social Science Research Council sponsored a project to investigate the policy implications ‘arising from contacts between Aborigines and non- Aborigines’ which culminated in a three-volume publication by the political scientist C.D. Rowley; the first of which provided a detailed critique of the failure of assimilationist policy. Myers’s recent, excellent ethnography of the Pintupi, of central Australia, not only analyses traditional Pintupi social strategies as social adaptations to the harsh, unpredictable environment of the Western Desert, but interprets Pintupi society as the product of intentionally negotiated relationships.

A more fundamental effect on anthropological practice has been felt as Aboriginal people have become aware of what anthropologists had written about them in the past. At least three anthropologists have been criticized for publishing material to which access is restricted by ritual sanctions. In two cases, the offending material has been with-drawn from publication. While *archaeology has been the primary target, anthropology will not be able to escape an indigenous critique. Regrettably, some academics have interpreted these campaigns as a denial of scientific objectivity. Others, who have sustained cooperation with Aboriginal communities, have emphasized that this is not the case. The same issues are being confronted in North America.

A number of Australian Aboriginal authors have recently published studies of the social conditions in which they grew up and of traditional legends from their own communities. Perhaps the most significant influence on the direction anthropological research takes in Australia over the next few years will come from Aboriginal people themselves.