Title of Paper     :               In Search of South African Anthropology:

                                         reconciling insider and outsider perspectives through engagement

Presented by     :                    Cecil E Cook

                                             University of Fort Hare Research Action Programme

                                             Institute for the Study of Complexity and Development Innovation

Venue                  :                 Rhodes University Anthropology Seminar                   

                                             Grahamstown

Date                      :               13-4-1999

________________________________________________________________________

1. Introduction

Anthropology in all its multifarious guises and incarnations - rather like the illustrious Mark Twain - can surely claim that the rumors of its early demise are greatly exaggerated.  I for one nurse the millennial expectation that the onrushing era may well be known as the Age of Anthropology.

However, in my own case, I indeed expired as an officially practicing anthropologists about 25 years ago because I could not personally handle the extreme dissonance I encountered from fellow anthropologists when I wanted to talk with them about the spiritual foundations of culture.  One of my last official efforts to function as a critical anthropologist was a talk I gave in 1976 to the department of anthropology at Ohio University on the forbidding topic of 'spiritual anthropology'.  It happens that I had a deep, life changing spiritual awakening while living with the Nambiquara peoples in Mato Grosso, Brazil, in 1966 which eventually transformed my entire world view from a conflict oriented Marxian materialist into a struggling member of the Baha'i Faith.  I became a Baha'i because the Writings of the Prophetic source of the Baha'i Revelation - Baha'u'llah (a title meaning the Glory of God) - most perfectly explained the drug free mystical communions I experienced during a series of unsought after awakenings while participating in the agricultural and healing ceremonies of the Nambiquara people between 1966 and 1969.

After returning to the US, I discovered that I could not interest my colleagues at Harvard in seriously dialoguing with me about the spiritual foundations of cultural systems and the necessity for the anthropological observer to become spiritually awake and sensitive in order to pick up and record the subtle, power generating perceptions from which particular cultures are constructed as material resonances and symbolic iterations.  Lacking any anthropological interlocutors I gradually fell silent as an anthropologist.  I went to ground, even into the underground.  Today I am still pretty much of a hidden or covert anthropologist. 

If matters get too hot in this presentation to the RU Anthropology Seminar, I may decide to disappear for another 25 years.  By the end of that period of meditative reflection, I doubt seriously whether I will be making sense to anyone, even myself.  So, this presentation is made by a 'burn out', fallen, defrocked, backslide revolutionary anthropologist from the 60's who converted out of anthropology into a tribal religion.  I went spiritually native and I have never felt really at home with 'my' fellow anthropologists since that conversion.  It seems that we belong to different communions.

Let me say that I have continued to read anthropology in a desultory way over the years and I have functioned practically in the field of self-help development as a covert practitioner of applied anthropology (what Edmond Leach referred to 'as colonialism pure and simple').  More recently, I taught undergraduate and honours students anthropology at the University of Fort Hare for two and a half years.  Earlier, I taught anthropology part time at Unitra.  I also have spent years creating and managing many different types of development organizations.  Most recently, I started up something called TATU - an appropriate technology and self help oriented parastatal in the old Transkei.

2. The Focus of the Paper

My focus in this paper - In Search of South African Anthropology: reconciling insider and outsider perspectives through engagement - has two practical points of concern and reference:

(1.)   the preparation of young South Africans to function competently in a newly emerging multi-

       cultural nation within an emergent, conflict ridden global system, and

(2.)   the revitalization of what remains of indigenous African culture and “deep” social strategies to

       serve as bases for rapid modernization (a return to the future?)

I will present a crude typology that purports to identify the four major anthropological tendencies or camps within contemporary SA anthropology.

The paper then proposes the introduction of multi-cultural fieldwork teams made up of insiders and outsiders as a methodology for resolving the tension between detachment and solidarity and thereby overcoming what Hastrup refers to as the 'performative paradox' in anthropology (see, A Passage to Anthropology, particularly the (i.) Prologue, (ii.) The Anthropological Present and the (iii.) Epilogue).  The paper concludes that if SA anthropology is not able to unify its presently antagonistic and incommensurate parts into a more complementary anthropology project, then it will be doomed to the dustbin of history. 

3.       The Challenge Confronting Post Apartheid Anthropology: getting the four major political 

       camps into relations of constructive polarity and converting adversarial relationships into   

       complementarities

While teaching at the UFH, I challenged myself and my students to imagine what kinds of inter-cultural and intra-cultural competencies are needed for them to become more effective citizens of a revitalized society in South Africa.  My approach to teaching was entirely based on the premise that for anthropology to reach its full potential as an effective or transformative profession it will first have to master and then teach several very practical mental and methodological skills to the up coming generation.  We set out to identify and practice a series of competencies ideally nurtured by the discipline of anthropology as a discipline such as:

(i.)                the temporary suspension of cultural and moral judgment (the method of

              relativity),

(ii.)              getting inside the other persons head and shoes,

(iii.)             learning how to learn another person's culture and world view,

(iv.)            excavating and appreciating one's own culture(s),

(v.)              managing and resolving cultural conflicts,

(vi.)            understanding the way interests and socio-economic position influence peoples

             points of view and propensities to act, etc.

In passing, I want to share my amazement at how ‘mystified’ the present university aged youth have become about themselves as cultural Africans.  It is as if they have been so traumatized by the political battles waged over their cultural identities that they are today afflicted with a kind of cultural amnesia.  There is a great confusion among township Africans between trivial and short term fashion culture and the persistence of deep cultural paradigms guiding their lives as uniquely South African youth.  It is as if African culture has suddenly gone AWOL (absent without leave).

We used South African Keywords edited by Boonzaier and Sharp in the 2^nd and 3^rd years of anthropology to awaken students to the gross distortions caused by prejudice, conflict, and prior culture to the way different groups of anthropologists in South Africa applied - and modified (spin doctored) - concepts and methods which they incorporated into their own partial, often adversarial anthropologies from Euro-American anthropological discourse.  We eventually identified four major home grown anthropological camps.  It is of course possible to identify more camps and thereby elaborate this fourfold typology.

(1.)         the Afrikanse/volkekunde 'cultural' anthropologists (described by Robert

    Gordon in his useful article: "Serving the Volk with Volkekunde - on the rise of South

    African anthropology")

(2.)         the English oriented and affiliated social anthropologists (as evidenced

              through their extreme critiques of volkekunde anthropology in South

              African Keywords)

(3.)         the Africanist oriented social scientists (such as Sobahle, Majeke,

              Vilakazi, Mafeje, and - reaching a bit - Owusu)

(4.)         the integrationist/modernizing social scientists (Manona, Paulus Zulu,

    Webster,  etc.)

There is probably still a serious hard-line Marxist anthropology camp, and others with whom I have never had a chance to dialogue.  It is clear that I will require assistance from my colleagues in sorting the relatively few home grown and imported anthropologists here in South Africa into these proposed camps.  At this point, my crude typology of proposed camps is only intended to serve as a thought provoking heuristic conceptualization. I realize that my simplistic “chunking” does not begin to capture the fluidity of the underlying realities and inter-linkages in SA anthropology.

Now let me add a little more meat to my proposed four anthropological camps or should we call them more appropriately tendencies. 

Everyone in the English SA camp is agreed that Afrikaner anthropologists essentialize their concept of culture.  Once you have got your culture, you are stuck with it, patterned and branded (in both senses) for life.  There are no second chances in Afrikaner anthropology.  The historical research of R Gorden into the circulation of Afrikaner elite's between the university, the Broederbund and the government has closely documented the confluence of political expedience and anthropological map making in the hands – heads and probably also hearts - of the Volkekundiges (also see Myburgh's Anthropology for Southern Africa).

However, a careful analysis of the critique given in South African Keywords of the sins of their volkekunde colleagues by the proponents of British style social anthropology in South Africa clearly documents the extreme and highly politicized lengths to which the English speaking fraternity and their allies were prepared to go in attacking the intellectual roots of the apartheid heresy.  In SA Keywords and in many other published articles, it appears that the social anthropologists of South Africa were prepared to largely empty the concept of culture of any substance at all in order to strengthen their attack on Bantustans erected, as they were, upon make believe tribes.  The aim of the social anthropology camp was to weaken the efforts by volkekunde anthropologists within the Nationalist government and in the Afrikaans universities to rationalize the neo-colonial strategy of ‘separate development’ by appealing to its role in conserving and harnessing the cultural 'capital' of the various tribal communions into which apartheid had divided the African peoples of South Africa.  

I do not need to remind anyone of the enormous distance separating the rigidly culture centered and separative approach of volkekunde anthropologists nor the inclusive socio-economic systems approach of the English affiliated social anthropologists bent on showing the immateriality, and/or the political creation, of the major cultural boundaries  which the apartheid state attempted used to justify its existence.  In retrospect, and also from the perspective of a relative outsider, I must say that I found much of the anti-apartheid social anthropology of the 1980's in South Africa to be every bit as politically motivated and distorted as the volkekunde rationalizations.

With the un-banning of the liberation movements, the return of exiles, and the gradual commencement of more 'normal' multi-party politics in South Africa, two other South African camps of social science opened up a second cross cutting axis of tension (and contestation) in South African anthropology: (5.) the Africanist and (6.) the integrationist/modernizing projects.  The Africanist revision of social sciences in South Africa is closely associated with the Pan African Congress (PAC) and Black Consciousness (BC) critiques of Euro-settler civilization, politics, economics, culture and social sciences as being foreign, elitist, and oppressive (dis-empowering and culture destroying) to theAfrican majorities in the country (see J Jansen, "The World System Context of Knowledge and Power", pages 17-52).

The logic of the Africanist critique aims to deconstruct the apartheid system through the progressive and systematic de-colonialization of all the major arenas of South African public life.  The Africanist project asserts that African sentiments, values, social organization and processes must now be allowed to sit in radical judgment of Euro-settler institutions, definitions of what are culturally appropriate, and the residual powers still concentrated in their hands and communities.  The Africanists are especially sensitive about those Euro-settler designed and managed institutions which manipulated and assimilated African peoples to better fit the requirements of the apartheid economy of the country and which continue to sustain neo-apartheid tendencies and neo-colonial enclaves within contemporary South African society.

Lastly, the integrationist/modernizing strategy of the ANC has pretty much incorporated (bought into?) the formerly discredited American policy of constructive engagement between South Africa and the major national players in the world system.  I am not sure whether and which SA anthropologists are strongly affiliated with this camp.  Perhaps the anthropologists in Natal, who never miss an opportunity to lambaste the Inkata Freedom Party and Minister Buthelezi, are affiliated with the integrationist/modernizing project.  The anti-Inkata anthropologists apparently believe tribalism to be hopelessly anachronistic and therefore retrogressive. Perhaps some of the more moderate South African Marxists will naturally tend to ally themselves with a radical modernization/westernization approach to the revitalization of the country.  David Webster, Jeff Peries, W Beinart, and the activists behind the old Grahamstown Rural Committee (later the Border Rural Committee) would perhaps be examples of the integrationist/modernizing camp.    

Playing a little with the four-fold classification, we can associate the following generative principles with each camp:

British social relations	imperial perspective	outsider stand point logic of vertical multi-culturalism generation of identity of the sub-altern other(s)
Afrikaner essentialism viewpoint	competitive/survivalist perspective	Insider perspective horizontal multi-culturalism self generation of identity
National integrationists/ global modernizers	constructive functionalist perspective	outsider standpoint logic of incorporation and social engineering
Africanist radical relativism	backward revitalization perspective	insider standpoint logic of differentiation and restorative social engineering

4.      My Own Retrospective Experience of the Intrusion of the New Left and Anti-Vietnam      War Politics into the Discipline of Anthropology in the States

My own recollections of the intrusion of the New Left into the discipline of anthropology in the USA during the 1960's and 1970's is that it produced a hard fragmentation of the discipline into a number of highly antagonistic camps.  I was one of the perpetrators of this politicization process.  In retrospect - and with the wisdom of perfect hindsight - I believe this hyper-politicization of anthropology ultimately jeopardized the viability of the Euro-American anthropology project more than it helped reorient it toward more constructive forms of engagement. The prolonged period of hostile contestation over issues of appropriate research strategies and ethical applications of anthropological knowledge with reference to the war in Vietnam unleashed vicious and personalized struggles for control of the discipline at all levels.  American anthropology has not yet, in my view, managed to heal itself from the academic wars of the 60's and 70's.  In my view the crude struggles between anthropologists over intergenerational, gender, ethnic and colonial issues resulted in far more losses than gains to the profession as the debate polarized American and also, but to a lesser degree, British and European anthropologists. In retrospect I personally cannot salvage much ennoblement or liberation from partisan fraternities of anthropologists arrogantly locked in miniature battles that mimicked and echoed the serious agendas of contending political movements.  What progress has been achieved in terms of building a more useful anthropology when the internal politics of the discipline are usurped by national and world politics dominated by ideologically hostile movements and interest groups outside of the profession?  What is the gain for anthropology when its internal politics become a reflection of national and international politics and anthropologists take hard non-negotiable positions on conflictful issues which define the major social and economic and cultural fault lines dividing their various worlds?

It is indeed very strange that contemporary anthropology in the North finds itself rendered semi-paralyzed and comatose at the very moment when a de facto world system is coming into existence, ready or not.  It is my view that northern anthropologists find themselves in this condition because of they have allowed the discipline to fragment into so many competing partial anthropologies.  We can particularly see an acute example of this condition of 'fragmentation' here in South Africa among the different, and still politically estranged camps of anthropologists and social sciences.

If the dis-integrated discipline of anthropology in Euro-America could rediscover a de facto middle ground in between the various antagonistic partial anthropologies currently being practiced in the West, then the advent of a functional world society could perhaps be reasonably designated as the Age of Anthropology.  Why?  Because it is only through the more perfect application of the intercultural understandings and competencies, cultivated and taught by the discipline of anthropology, that it will be possible for the whole human collective to practically pioneer the creation of a transcendent ‘world culture of relativity’.  The secret competencies discovered and cultivated by the profession of anthropology along the troubled interfaces and frontiers of the expanding Western diasphora (qua empire) will have to become endemic to the majority of humanity during the coming centuries.  When the generality of humankind become de facto (or lumpen) insider as well as outsider anthropologists, they will be able to participate fully and creatively in the construction of a world culture of relativity.

Without the advent of such a posited world culture of relativity, in terms of which particular cultural communions will be celebrated and sustained in their own terms, how will it be possible to avoid the rapid evolution of a vulgar and no doubt significantly Americanized uniform planetary culture (reminiscent no doubt of Brave New World and 1984 combined)?  Would not an Age of Anthropology serve as an effective antidote for the positivist excesses visited upon humankind by the Age of the Enlightenment? 

Many of my generation can clearly recall the personal exhilaration of challenging the old men (and women) of the profession from the floor of the AAA meetings about the dangers of succumbing to the military-industrial-university complex during the tumult of the Vietnam era, as well as the naïve chauvinism and extreme positivism evinced by elder anthropologists such as Margaret Mead in rejecting out of hand the notion that detachment could be used as a cover for CIA manipulation.  For the majority of the over 30 something anthropologists of the Vietnam era there was no necessary conflict between the anthropological mission of cultural liberation for all and a healthy American patriotism.  However, I also recall the decade long academic wars of attrition which ensued when the trouble making radical anthropologists were systematically driven out of academia and into other worlds of praxis. 

Today we are left with an anthropology of incomplete fragments, each muttering to themselves and to each other in strange tongues or talking about odd post modernist constructions.  We find anthropology in the US in a state of profound "fragmentalism".  There is no higher or more inclusive universe of discourse that would allow the isolated fragments to discover and creatively use their polar affinities and tensions to serve the greater good of humankind.  Each partial anthropology is still struggling futilely to grow itself into the missing whole, to fill the void between the fragments with enough common theory, method, praxis and ethics to enable the estranged parts to become whole again.  My own view is that the collapse of the anthropology project in the West is directly a consequence of the hyper-politicization of the profession during the l960's.

If we, for instance, compare the practice of anthropology with the profession and practice of law in the western world, we can get an idea of the missed opportunities.  Lawyers probably have nearly the same diversity of politics as anthropologists, but they still keep a common technical language and a culture of practice in terms of which it is possible for lawyers to represent a range of clients in conflict with each other over rights and obligations.  Lawyers with very different politics are able to assist all manner of clients, also with their own discordant politics, to reconcile conflicts of interest and rights by translating these conflicts into a more 'objective' professional meta-language.  This professional meta-language is both more abstract and more precise than the charged and distorting natural languages spoken by the parties who are locked in real world conflict with each other. 

Like lawyers, anthropologists today find themselves on all sides of the many divisive issues of modernity and the birth of global society.  Unfortunately, unlike lawyers, we anthropologists apparently have not succeeded in building a strong enough professional culture and language, a discipline of practice, to be able to reliably mediate and help to resolve the complex conflicts of culture and interest which are agitating every ethnicity and nationality as humanity explores the new frontier of global consciousness and interdependence.  It is not utopian to aspire for the communion of anthropologists to discipline themselves sufficiently to separate their personal politics from their professional politics of service to the common good.  Once the discipline of anthropology can again separate the politics of service to the common good, defined in terms of negotiated agreements between consenting fellows of the anthropological fellowship, from other kinds of partisan politics then it will be possible for the discipline to immediately apply the abstract frameworks of understanding, technical language and methods of data gathering, the professional meta-cultural competencies of the profession of anthropology, to the mediation and resolution of  the confusions and conflicts which interfere with progress toward higher orders of integrity and harmony within the emerging world society.

5.       The Pervasive Melancholia of Euro-American Anthropology

The writings of many able anthropologists during the 1980's and 90's show the consequences of the hyper-politicization and fragmentation of Euro-American anthropology during the previous decades of the 60's and 70's.  Take a look at A M Schlessinger's contentious and mean spirited little book, The Disuniting of  America, or read Robert Hughes diatribe - The Culture of Complaint - which specifically targets the absurdities of multi-cultural (the ‘multi-cultis’) and affirmative action reactions to mainstream American culture.  Kirsten Hastrup's A Passage to Anthropology , and also Renato Rosaldo's Culture and Truth both capture and partially account for the collapse of the integrity of Euro-American anthropology as a unitary discipline.  This faltering of the Euro-American anthropology project is partly the result of the gradual weakening of western hegemony over the emerging world system. 

Now there are many other voices and centers of cultural projection and power.  The natives are talking back, often very rudely as in the case of Max Owusu (see, 'The Ethnography of Africa: the usefulness of the useless).  Owusu documents the fact that only a handful of the British, European, and American anthropologists who produced the now classical ethnographies in Africa were able to converse fluently with their informants.  He claims that the quality of the ethnographic data is so low in many cases as to render cross-cultural comparisons virtually useless.  Owusu alleges that all the ethnographies produced by anthropologists who were not fluent in the indigenous African languages which he has checked with native language speakers show themselves to be fundamentally flawed and therefore unreliable as valid cultural reference points for African anthropologists and historians in search of their own precedents and backgrounds.

In passing, Prof de Wet has written a useful little article, the Anthropology of Africa or African Anthropology, in which he comes down firmly on the side of the former, the Anthropology of Africa.  Instead of resolving the quest for a more perfect anthropology in Africa in terms of the adequacy of the research methods and language competencies of the researchers, he chooses to treat all anthropological researchers as more or less equal.  The strengths of the outsider are balanced by his weaknesses, and vice versa for the cultural insider.  He seems to sidestep the question of whether or not it is possible for non native speakers of the subject's language to deeply penetrate their cultural world in the few years available to them during their sojourn in a foreign culture.  He chooses to define the anthropology of Africa in terms of a long roster of important survival problems confronting all the different peoples living in Africa at this moment.

The crisis of Euro-American anthropology is due to the inability of the methods of participant observation to objectively penetrate other cultural worlds and to create a scientifically respectable transcultural methodology of ethnographic description.  Take a look at the restudy of Mead's work on the people of Samoa by Derek Freeman where he found almost no correspondence between the ethnographic statements of a world famous anthropologist and the statistical distributions of observable cases and behaviors on the ground. (see D Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa - the making and unmaking of an anthropological myth).

Once the built in limitations, ambiguities, idiosyncrasies and whimsies associated with the method of participant observation were publicly admitted by the profession, anthropologists have been either running away from fieldwork or engaging in a veritable orgy of blaming and exculpation concerning the epistemological and methodological failures of Euro-American anthropology to somehow magically transmute itself into an objective world anthropology.  What is being revealed in the final decades of the so called American century of the 2^nd Millennium is the relatively huge load of western culture - let's politely refer to it as ethno-science - which is carried along inside the Euro-American anthropology project (see In My Father's House for Anthoy K Appiah's extended discussion of the relative adequacy of outsider versus insider investigations and interpretations of African peoples). 

Why should American anthropology be exempt from the excesses of political correction and multi-cultural anarchy which are shattering the initially unifying 'narratives' and borrowed public British culture around which the USA organized itself over the past 200 years (See A M Schlessinger, the Disuniting of America - reflections on a multi-cultural society)? 

According to the sociologist Tom Bottomore, Husserl commented that social scientist are like a man who sharpens a knife until it is not there.  In my opinion, Euro-American anthropology is methodologically refining itself into oblivion.  It is succumbing to the methodological equivalent of a mental heart attack in its doomed efforts to’ alchemy-istically’  transmute a culturally provincial and therefore limited Euro-American anthropology into the universal framework for a viable and carefully constructed world anthropology based upon years and years of cross cultural negotiation.  The solitary Imperial Mind is metamorphosing itself into madness following in the footsteps of Nietzsche.

6.       Can a Distinctive and Inclusive South African Anthropology Be Created in Response to   the Post Colonial Stress Syndrome?

The four (4) crudely sketched alternative South African anthropologies define a predicament and 

opportunity.  Right now these competing anthropologies are radically disjoined, the sound of 1/2 of

a hand clapping.  It is the main purpose of my paper to challenge these different partial 

anthropologies or tendencies within contemporary SA anthropology to begin seriously

engaging with each other around the praxis of effectively expressing and institutionalizing 

all the latent and manifest cultural diversity that is struggling for space in which to exist 

and/or regenerate.  The  rehabilitation of the discipline within South Africa requires that 

representatives of all four major tendencies or schools become seriously engaged with each other's 

embodiment in iconic undertakings such as:

        (1.)         the progressive Africanization of the country's legal system;

        (2.)         the creation of an Afrikaner homeland;

        (3.)         the controlled participation in the global economy through a network of export                     processing zones;

        (4.)         the systematic Africanization of the public service;

        (5.)         the modernization and integration of traditional and municipal/district systems of                   local governance;

        (6.)         the construction of a genuine national SA identity based on the principle of 'unity                 through diversity'; etc.

Imagine if you will a series of major transformation projects - rather like little Manhattan projects -each with substantial bureaucratic over ride powers and sufficient public resources- that are charged with bringing together representatives of the four schools of SA anthropology into unitary project teams.  In order to achieve any results at all, the representatives of the four partial SA anthropologies will have to synthesize their theories and methods into a higher order anthropology.  If the different anthropologies are able to engage and re-integrate their different perspectives and practices within a common discipline, then the discipline of South African anthropology becomes a de facto microcosm of the national society.  To the extent that we anthropologists gradually succeed in reconciling our substantive and methodological differences then the higher order synergies achieved can be legitimately shared with fellow South Africans as proof that profound differences can be usefully - perhaps even inspirationally - brought into complementarity.  

If South African anthropologists can figure out how to remove the historical partitions separating them into the four antagonistic camps identified in this paper, then they will have to convert their long standing, and by now habitual polarization into a more challenging relationship of polarity within a unitary discipline.  The unification of anthropology would constitute a dramatic demonstration that it is possible for a unified and dynamic meta- South Africa reality to emerge through democratic negotiations between equal peoples and cultures. 

The discipline of anthropology in South Africa in reality is a testing ground – the canary in the mine – with great potential to discover the way forward into the new post colonial South Africa.  The new and more unified anthropology of the post apartheid era in South Africa would again come to the service of the unifying and modernizing project of the ANC in much the same way that the fragmented discipline served contending interest groups during previous eras, including the colonial and neocolonial interests of Europe and Britain during the era of imperialistic expansion.  Now the discipline of anthropology in South Africa has a unique opportunity to play a leadership role by exploring new pathways into a more global era of development organized around a higher culture of relativity.

The genuine joining together of the four or more constituent anthropologies into a unitary South African anthropology would certainly give fellow South Africans an uplifting example of what is possible when men and women of good will and trans-cultural experience decide to rigorously apply their deeply cultivated understanding of the fundamental brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind.  It is highly unlikely that the sub-disciplines of South African anthropology will be able to heal themselves from the post colonial stress syndrome if they continue to occupy and cultivate parallel ‘post modern’ approaches to the discipline.  The challenge of African anthropology is for it to gain enough inner strength to break out of the isolation in which Euro-centric post modernism has imprisoned ‘provincial’ intellectuals and activists.  The four contending tendencies of South African anthropology have a golden opportunity to break free once and for all of the prison of ‘provincial’ consciousness by directly and creatively engaging with each other. The challenge is to construct a unifying post colonial understanding of the role and practice of anthropology as world science that gradually grows an inclusive and transcendent ‘culture of relativity’.     

7.       Overcoming the Outsider/Insider Predicament in SA Society and Anthropology

It is proposed here that one of the main reasons for the crisis of Euro-American anthropology is due to the mono-polar and uni-lateral nature of the standard fieldwork process itself.  From the time of Malinowski onward, we anthropologists have celebrated the mastery by a unitary imperial mind of other cultures, languages, and consciousnesses.  Fieldwork is seen as a one way process whereby the culture and consciousness of the subject people or community gets accurately converted into the frames and terms of the outside observer.  The inside participant and the outside observer collaborate to translate the subject's culture and social relations into one of the several competing ethno-theoretical languages of contemporary anthropology (in so far as the descriptive and theoretical terminologies used by anthropologists are different from the native culture, consciousness and language of the studied communities).

So far so good.  What I am proposing in place of uni-lateral, one-sided fieldwork and anthropological analysis is two sided and ultimately many sided anthropology.  Briefly, bilateral or reciprocal fieldwork requires that a minimum of two anthropologists - an insider and an outsider – will combine to undertake fieldwork.  We assume absolute parity of intellect and power for the pair of fieldworkers relative to each other.  The insider and the outsider anthropologists jointly study a particular socio-cultural system.  In the process of conducting their fieldwork they record the normal ethnographic discourses and explanatory interpretations.  In addition, they also explore in similar detail their differences and their similarities of experience, understanding and interactions with the subject community.  They are responsible for recording this data about the interaction between themselves as insider and outsider anthropologists in exactly the same detail as they record their data from the people they are studying. 

There will be large areas of agreement, and areas where the insider and the outsider's experience and interpretations are in tension, perhaps even totally contradictory.  Interestingly, these differences will be subject to critical reviews and negotiation between the insider and the outsider anthropologist.  Some differences, perhaps most, will be argued about and resolved one way or the other.  Other differences will remain contested and ambiguous, perhaps due to a fundamental untranslatability or a reflection of conflicting psychological modalities between the two or more observers serving on a particular intercultural fieldwork team.

Once this kind of long term dyadic, triadic, etc. research partnerships have been entered into, it would surely make sense for the fieldworker team to investigate each other's home communities and cultures as well.  In the process of follow on investigations, certain of the unresolved ambiguities may be better understood and therefore reconciled at a later date.

Applying this multi-lateral fieldwork approach to our SA situation we could well imagine a long term fieldwork team comprised, for example, of a Xhosa, Afrikaner, and English (or other European or foreign born) anthropologist.  Between them there would need to be one team member who represents the Africanist, modernizing global, and insider/minority enclave perspectives.  This trio or perhaps even foursome would also be expected to jointly study, document and interpret all of their respective home communities and cultures, so that each team member gets to function as an insider anthropologist on his or her own home ground in tandem with other collaborating outsider anthropologists.  It would no doubt be necessary to focus on particular topics such as land reform, resettlement, and restitution, or the reorganization of local government, or the stimulation of well contextualized rural enterprises, the design of rural and peri-urban settlements, etc.

The multi-lateral fieldwork approach represents another way of solving what Hastrup refers to as the performative paradox in anthropology, namely the requirement for anthropologists to be both "detached" while at the same time being "solidary", or existentially and morally engaged with their subjects.   In the SA case, we are discussing the advisability and the feasibility of insisting that anthropological teams which engage in research and explanation of a community, institution, programme, problem within South Africa need to be a microcosm of the macrocosm which they are investigating.  The long-term engagement of anthropologists serving on a particular intercultural team with each other and their informants guarantees that they will gradually negotiate about their different perceptions and interpretations of observed patterns.  This long-term mutually accountable relationship between insiders and outsiders across an intercultural boundary will greatly reduce the opportunities for interference in ethnography by intercultural biases and cross-cultural incompetencies.

It must be emphasized by the writer that ‘post-millennial’ anthropology requires two mindedness - the insider mind and outsider mind (and two heartedness as well) to gradually progress toward a more transcendent, transparent, and even translucent world anthropology.   It also became apparent during the thinking and writing of this paper that South African Anthropology is - like Steve Biko's black man - increasingly adrift and on its own.  I do not believe it is possible for the potential greater communion of anthropologists working and living in South Africa to sustain themselves as provincial social scientists who are fed and sustained by long umbilical cords stretching back to Harvard, Cambridge, the Sorbonne or Berlin.  The accelerating advent of the world commonwealth of countries and cultures now makes it imperative that South African Anthropology becomes mature and freestanding so that it can sit at the big table and make its own independent contributions to the consultation out of which a more perfect and liberating world anthropology will eventually emerge.  It is increasingly obvious that the anthropologies that are being brought to the world consultation by the mother countries of Europe, UK and the USA do not capture or represent many of the hybrid realities of culture and society which are emerging before our very eyes, under our feet and within our minds and hearts here in the new mother country of South Africa.

In closing, let me state that it requires a separate exploration to figure out the various strategies by which many different, observer contaminated anthropologies from South Africa and around the planet can be ‘polygamously’ wedded into a lasting and hopefully harmonious world anthropology.  The methods by which partial anthropologies can be rigorously combined into a more inclusive and holistic understanding to humanity is a deep subject which must be left to another time and place, and probably to anthropologists who are more tough minded and tender hearted than the present writer (or is it the reverse: soft headed and brave hearted?).  

Title of Paper     :               In Search of South African Anthropology:

reconciling insider and outsider perspectives through engagement

Presented by     :               Cecil E Cook

                                                University of Fort Hare Research Action Programme

                                                Institute for the Study of Complexity and Development Innovation

Venue                  :               the Rhodes University Anthropology Seminar                   

                                                Grahamstown

Date                      :               13-4-1999

________________________________________________________________________

1. Introduction

Anthropology in all its multifarious guises and incarnations - rather like the illustrious Mark Twain - can surely claim that the rumors of its early demise are greatly exaggerated.  I for one nurse the millennial expectation that the onrushing era may well be known as the Age of Anthropology.

However, in my own case, I indeed expired as an officially practicing anthropologists about 25 years ago because I could not personally handle the extreme dissonance I encountered from fellow anthropologists when I wanted to talk with them about the spiritual foundations of culture.  One of my last official efforts to function as a critical anthropologist was a talk I gave in 1976 to the department of anthropology at Ohio University on the forbidding topic of 'spiritual anthropology'.  It happens that I had a deep, life changing spiritual awakening while living with the Nambiquara peoples in Mato Grosso, Brazil, in 1966 which eventually transformed my entire world view from a conflict oriented Marxian materialist into a struggling member of the Baha'i Faith.  I became a Baha'i because the Writings of the Prophetic source of the Baha'i Revelation - Baha'u'llah (a title meaning the Glory of God) - most perfectly explained the drug free mystical communions I experienced during a series of unsought after awakenings while participating in the agricultural and healing ceremonies of the Nambiquara people between 1966 and 1969.

After returning to the US, I discovered that I could not interest my colleagues at Harvard in seriously dialoguing with me about the spiritual foundations of cultural systems and the necessity for the anthropological observer to become spiritually awake and sensitive in order to pick up and record the subtle, power generating perceptions from which particular cultures are constructed as material resonances and symbolic iterations.  Lacking any anthropological interlocutors I gradually fell silent as an anthropologist.  I went to ground, even into the underground.  Today I am still pretty much of a hidden or covert anthropologist. 

If matters get too hot in this presentation to the RU Anthropology Seminar, I may decide to disappear for another 25 years.  By the end of that period of meditative reflection, I doubt seriously whether I will be making sense to anyone, even myself.  So, this presentation is made by a 'burn out', fallen, defrocked, backslide revolutionary anthropologist from the 60's who converted out of anthropology into a tribal religion.  I went spiritually native and I have never felt really at home with 'my' fellow anthropologists since that conversion.  It seems that we belong to different communions.

Let me say that I have continued to read anthropology in a desultory way over the years and I have functioned practically in the field of self-help development as a covert practitioner of applied anthropology (what Edmond Leach referred to 'as colonialism pure and simple').  More recently, I taught undergraduate and honours students anthropology at the University of Fort Hare for two and a half years.  Earlier, I taught anthropology part time at Unitra.  I also have spent years creating and managing many different types of development organizations.  Most recently, I started up something called TATU - an appropriate technology and self help oriented parastatal in the old Transkei.

2. The Focus of the Paper

My focus in this paper - In Search of South African Anthropology: reconciling insider and outsider perspectives through engagement - has two practical points of concern and reference:

(1.)  the preparation of young South Africans to function competently in a newly emerging multi-cultural nation within an emergent, conflict ridden global system, and

(2.)   the revitalization of what remains of indigenous African culture and “deep” social strategies to serve as bases for rapid modernization (a return to the future?)

I will present a crude typology that purports to identify the four major anthropological tendencies or camps within contemporary SA anthropology.

The paper then proposes the introduction of multi-cultural fieldwork teams made up of insiders and outsiders as a methodology for resolving the tension between detachment and solidarity and thereby overcoming what Hastrup refers to as the 'performative paradox' in anthropology (see, A Passage to Anthropology, particularly the (i.) Prologue, (ii.) The Anthropological Present and the (iii.) Epilogue).  The paper concludes that if SA anthropology is not able to unify its presently antagonistic and incommensurate parts into a more complementary anthropology project, then it will be doomed to the dustbin of history. 

3.       The Challenge Confronting Post Apartheid Anthropology: getting the four major political camps into relations of constructive polarity and converting adversarial relationships into complementarities

While teaching at the UFH, I challenged myself and my students to imagine what kinds of inter-cultural and intra-cultural competencies are needed for them to become more effective citizens of a revitalized society in South Africa.  My approach to teaching was entirely based on the premise that for anthropology to reach its full potential as an effective or transformative profession it will first have to master and then teach several very practical mental and methodological skills to the up coming generation.  We set out to identify and practice a series of competencies ideally nurtured by the discipline of anthropology as a discipline such as:

(i.)                the temporary suspension of cultural and moral judgment (the method of

                                relativity),

(ii.)              getting inside the other persons head and shoes,

(iii.)             learning how to learn another person's culture and world view,

(iv.)            excavating and appreciating one's own culture(s),

(v.)              managing and resolving cultural conflicts,

(vi.)            understanding the way interests and socio-economic position influence peoples points of view and propensities to act, etc.

In passing, I want to share my amazement at how ‘mystified’ the present university aged youth have become about themselves as cultural Africans.  It is as if they have been so traumatized by the political battles waged over their cultural identities that they are today afflicted with a kind of cultural amnesia.  There is a great confusion among township Africans between trivial and short term fashion culture and the persistence of deep cultural paradigms guiding their lives as uniquely South African youth.  It is as if African culture has suddenly gone AWOL (absent without leave).

We used South African Keywords edited by Boonzaier and Sharp in the 2^nd and 3^rd years of anthropology to awaken students to the gross distortions caused by prejudice, conflict, and prior culture to the way different groups of anthropologists in South Africa applied - and modified (spin doctored) - concepts and methods which they incorporated into their own partial, often adversarial anthropologies from Euro-American anthropological discourse.  We eventually identified four major home grown anthropological camps.  It is of course possible to identify more camps and thereby elaborate this fourfold typology.

(1.)         the Afrikanse/volkekunde 'cultural' anthropologists (described by Robert

Gordon in his useful article: "Serving the Volk with Volkekunde - on the rise of South African anthropology")

(2.)         the English oriented and affiliated social anthropologists (as evidenced

                through their extreme critiques of volkekunde anthropology in South

                African Keywords)

(3.)         the Africanist oriented social scientists (such as Sobahle, Majeke,

                Vilakazi, Mafeje, and - reaching a bit - Owusu)

(4.)         the integrationist/modernizing social scientists (Manona, Paulus Zulu,

Webster,  etc.)

There is probably still a serious hard-line Marxist anthropology camp, and others with whom I have never had a chance to dialogue.  It is clear that I will require assistance from my colleagues in sorting the relatively few home grown and imported anthropologists here in South Africa into these proposed camps.  At this point, my crude typology of proposed camps is only intended to serve as a thought provoking heuristic conceptualization. I realize that my simplistic “chunking” does not begin to capture the fluidity of the underlying realities and inter-linkages in SA anthropology.

Now let me add a little more meat to my proposed four anthropological camps or should we call them more appropriately tendencies. 

Everyone in the English SA camp is agreed that Afrikaner anthropologists essentialize their concept of culture.  Once you have got your culture, you are stuck with it, patterned and branded (in both senses) for life.  There are no second chances in Afrikaner anthropology.  The historical research of R Gorden into the circulation of Afrikaner elite's between the university, the Broederbund and the government has closely documented the confluence of political expedience and anthropological map making in the hands – heads and probably also hearts - of the Volkekundiges (also see Myburgh's Anthropology for Southern Africa).

However, a careful analysis of the critique given in South African Keywords of the sins of their volkekunde colleagues by the proponents of British style social anthropology in South Africa clearly documents the extreme and highly politicized lengths to which the English speaking fraternity and their allies were prepared to go in attacking the intellectual roots of the apartheid heresy.  In SA Keywords and in many other published articles, it appears that the social anthropologists of South Africa were prepared to largely empty the concept of culture of any substance at all in order to strengthen their attack on Bantustans erected, as they were, upon make believe tribes.  The aim of the social anthropology camp was to weaken the efforts by volkekunde anthropologists within the Nationalist government and in the Afrikaans universities to rationalize the neo-colonial strategy of ‘separate development’ by appealing to its role in conserving and harnessing the cultural 'capital' of the various tribal communions into which apartheid had divided the African peoples of South Africa.  

I do not need to remind anyone of the enormous distance separating the rigidly culture centered and separative approach of volkekunde anthropologists nor the inclusive socio-economic systems approach of the English affiliated social anthropologists bent on showing the immateriality, and/or the political creation, of the major cultural boundaries  which the apartheid state attempted used to justify its existence.  In retrospect, and also from the perspective of a relative outsider, I must say that I found much of the anti-apartheid social anthropology of the 1980's in South Africa to be every bit as politically motivated and distorted as the volkekunde rationalizations.

With the un-banning of the liberation movements, the return of exiles, and the gradual commencement of more 'normal' multi-party politics in South Africa, two other South African camps of social science opened up a second cross cutting axis of tension (and contestation) in South African anthropology: (5.) the Africanist and (6.) the integrationist/modernizing projects.  The Africanist revision of social sciences in South Africa is closely associated with the Pan African Congress (PAC) and Black Consciousness (BC) critiques of Euro-settler civilization, politics, economics, culture and social sciences as being foreign, elitist, and oppressive (dis-empowering and culture destroying) to theAfrican majorities in the country (see J Jansen, "The World System Context of Knowledge and Power", pages 17-52).

The logic of the Africanist critique aims to deconstruct the apartheid system through the progressive and systematic de-colonialization of all the major arenas of South African public life.  The Africanist project asserts that African sentiments, values, social organization and processes must now be allowed to sit in radical judgment of Euro-settler institutions, definitions of what are culturally appropriate, and the residual powers still concentrated in their hands and communities.  The Africanists are especially sensitive about those Euro-settler designed and managed institutions which manipulated and assimilated African peoples to better fit the requirements of the apartheid economy of the country and which continue to sustain neo-apartheid tendencies and neo-colonial enclaves within contemporary South African society.

Lastly, the integrationist/modernizing strategy of the ANC has pretty much incorporated (bought into?) the formerly discredited American policy of constructive engagement between South Africa and the major national players in the world system.  I am not sure whether and which SA anthropologists are strongly affiliated with this camp.  Perhaps the anthropologists in Natal, who never miss an opportunity to lambaste the Inkata Freedom Party and Minister Buthelezi, are affiliated with the integrationist/modernizing project.  The anti-Inkata anthropologists apparently believe tribalism to be hopelessly anachronistic and therefore retrogressive. Perhaps some of the more moderate South African Marxists will naturally tend to ally themselves with a radical modernization/westernization approach to the revitalization of the country.  David Webster, Jeff Peries, W Beinart, and the activists behind the old Grahamstown Rural Committee (later the Border Rural Committee) would perhaps be examples of the integrationist/modernizing camp.    

Playing a little with the four-fold classification, we can associate the following generative principles with each camp:

British social relations	imperial perspective	outsider stand point logic of vertical multi-culturalism generation of identity of the sub-altern other(s)
Afrikaner essentialism viewpoint	competitive/survivalist perspective	Insider perspective horizontal multi-culturalism self generation of identity
National integrationists/ global modernizers	constructive functionalist perspective	outsider standpoint logic of incorporation and social engineering
Africanist radical relativism	backward revitalization perspective	insider standpoint logic of differentiation and restorative social engineering

4.       My Own Retrospective Experience of the Intrusion of the New Left and Anti-Vietnam War Politics into the Discipline of Anthropology in the States

My own recollections of the intrusion of the New Left into the discipline of anthropology in the USA during the 1960's and 1970's is that it produced a hard fragmentation of the discipline into a number of highly antagonistic camps.  I was one of the perpetrators of this politicization process.  In retrospect - and with the wisdom of perfect hindsight - I believe this hyper-politicization of anthropology ultimately jeopardized the viability of the Euro-American anthropology project more than it helped reorient it toward more constructive forms of engagement. The prolonged period of hostile contestation over issues of appropriate research strategies and ethical applications of anthropological knowledge with reference to the war in Vietnam unleashed vicious and personalized struggles for control of the discipline at all levels.  American anthropology has not yet, in my view, managed to heal itself from the academic wars of the 60's and 70's.  In my view the crude struggles between anthropologists over intergenerational, gender, ethnic and colonial issues resulted in far more losses than gains to the profession as the debate polarized American and also, but to a lesser degree, British and European anthropologists. In retrospect I personally cannot salvage much ennoblement or liberation from partisan fraternities of anthropologists arrogantly locked in miniature battles that mimicked and echoed the serious agendas of contending political movements.  What progress has been achieved in terms of building a more useful anthropology when the internal politics of the discipline are usurped by national and world politics dominated by ideologically hostile movements and interest groups outside of the profession?  What is the gain for anthropology when its internal politics become a reflection of national and international politics and anthropologists take hard non-negotiable positions on conflictful issues which define the major social and economic and cultural fault lines dividing their various worlds?

It is indeed very strange that contemporary anthropology in the North finds itself rendered semi-paralyzed and comatose at the very moment when a de facto world system is coming into existence, ready or not.  It is my view that northern anthropologists find themselves in this condition because of they have allowed the discipline to fragment into so many competing partial anthropologies.  We can particularly see an acute example of this condition of 'fragmentation' here in South Africa among the different, and still politically estranged camps of anthropologists and social sciences.

If the dis-integrated discipline of anthropology in Euro-America could rediscover a de facto middle ground in between the various antagonistic partial anthropologies currently being practiced in the West, then the advent of a functional world society could perhaps be reasonably designated as the Age of Anthropology.  Why?  Because it is only through the more perfect application of the intercultural understandings and competencies, cultivated and taught by the discipline of anthropology, that it will be possible for the whole human collective to practically pioneer the creation of a transcendent ‘world culture of relativity’.  The secret competencies discovered and cultivated by the profession of anthropology along the troubled interfaces and frontiers of the expanding Western diasphora (qua empire) will have to become endemic to the majority of humanity during the coming centuries.  When the generality of humankind become de facto (or lumpen) insider as well as outsider anthropologists, they will be able to participate fully and creatively in the construction of a world culture of relativity.

Without the advent of such a posited world culture of relativity, in terms of which particular cultural communions will be celebrated and sustained in their own terms, how will it be possible to avoid the rapid evolution of a vulgar and no doubt significantly Americanized uniform planetary culture (reminiscent no doubt of Brave New World and 1984 combined)?  Would not an Age of Anthropology serve as an effective antidote for the positivist excesses visited upon humankind by the Age of the Enlightenment?

Many of my generation can clearly recall the personal exhilaration of challenging the old men (and women) of the profession from the floor of the AAA meetings about the dangers of succumbing to the military-industrial-university complex during the tumult of the Vietnam era, as well as the naïve chauvinism and extreme positivism evinced by elder anthropologists such as Margaret Mead in rejecting out of hand the notion that detachment could be used as a cover for CIA manipulation.  For the majority of the over 30 something anthropologists of the Vietnam era there was no necessary conflict between the anthropological mission of cultural liberation for all and a healthy American patriotism.  However, I also recall the decade long academic wars of attrition which ensued when the trouble making radical anthropologists were systematically driven out of academia and into other worlds of praxis. 

Today we are left with an anthropology of incomplete fragments, each muttering to themselves and to each other in strange tongues or talking about odd post modernist constructions.  We find anthropology in the US in a state of profound "fragmentalism".  There is no higher or more inclusive universe of discourse that would allow the isolated fragments to discover and creatively use their polar affinities and tensions to serve the greater good of humankind.  Each partial anthropology is still struggling futilely to grow itself into the missing whole, to fill the void between the fragments with enough common theory, method, praxis and ethics to enable the estranged parts to become whole again.  My own view is that the collapse of the anthropology project in the West is directly a consequence of the hyper-politicization of the profession during the l960's.

If we, for instance, compare the practice of anthropology with the profession and practice of law in the western world, we can get an idea of the missed opportunities.  Lawyers probably have nearly the same diversity of politics as anthropologists, but they still keep a common technical language and a culture of practice in terms of which it is possible for lawyers to represent a range of clients in conflict with each other over rights and obligations.  Lawyers with very different politics are able to assist all manner of clients, also with their own discordant politics, to reconcile conflicts of interest and rights by translating these conflicts into a more 'objective' professional meta-language.  This professional meta-language is both more abstract and more precise than the charged and distorting natural languages spoken by the parties who are locked in real world conflict with each other. 

Like lawyers, anthropologists today find themselves on all sides of the many divisive issues of modernity and the birth of global society.  Unfortunately, unlike lawyers, we anthropologists apparently have not succeeded in building a strong enough professional culture and language, a discipline of practice, to be able to reliably mediate and help to resolve the complex conflicts of culture and interest which are agitating every ethnicity and nationality as humanity explores the new frontier of global consciousness and interdependence.  It is not utopian to aspire for the communion of anthropologists to discipline themselves sufficiently to separate their personal politics from their professional politics of service to the common good.  Once the discipline of anthropology can again separate the politics of service to the common good, defined in terms of negotiated agreements between consenting fellows of the anthropological fellowship, from other kinds of partisan politics then it will be possible for the discipline to immediately apply the abstract frameworks of understanding, technical language and methods of data gathering, the professional meta-cultural competencies of the profession of anthropology, to the mediation and resolution of  the confusions and conflicts which interfere with progress toward higher orders of integrity and harmony within the emerging world society.

5.       The Pervasive Melancholia of Euro-American Anthropology

The writings of many able anthropologists during the 1980's and 90's show the consequences of the hyper-politicization and fragmentation of Euro-American anthropology during the previous decades of the 60's and 70's.  Take a look at A M Schlessinger's contentious and mean spirited little book, The Disuniting of  America, or read Robert Hughes diatribe - The Culture of Complaint - which specifically targets the absurdities of multi-cultural (the ‘multi-cultis’) and affirmative action reactions to mainstream American culture.  Kirsten Hastrup's A Passage to Anthropology , and also Renato Rosaldo's Culture and Truth both capture and partially account for the collapse of the integrity of Euro-American anthropology as a unitary discipline.  This faltering of the Euro-American anthropology project is partly the result of the gradual weakening of western hegemony over the emerging world system. 

Now there are many other voices and centers of cultural projection and power.  The natives are talking back, often very rudely as in the case of Max Owusu (see, 'The Ethnography of Africa: the usefulness of the useless).  Owusu documents the fact that only a handful of the British, European, and American anthropologists who produced the now classical ethnographies in Africa were able to converse fluently with their informants.  He claims that the quality of the ethnographic data is so low in many cases as to render cross-cultural comparisons virtually useless.  Owusu alleges that all the ethnographies produced by anthropologists who were not fluent in the indigenous African languages which he has checked with native language speakers show themselves to be fundamentally flawed and therefore unreliable as valid cultural reference points for African anthropologists and historians in search of their own precedents and backgrounds.

In passing, Prof de Wet has written a useful little article, the Anthropology of Africa or African Anthropology, in which he comes down firmly on the side of the former, the Anthropology of Africa.  Instead of resolving the quest for a more perfect anthropology in Africa in terms of the adequacy of the research methods and language competencies of the researchers, he chooses to treat all anthropological researchers as more or less equal.  The strengths of the outsider are balanced by his weaknesses, and vice versa for the cultural insider.  He seems to sidestep the question of whether or not it is possible for non native speakers of the subject's language to deeply penetrate their cultural world in the few years available to them during their sojourn in a foreign culture.  He chooses to define the anthropology of Africa in terms of a long roster of important survival problems confronting all the different peoples living in Africa at this moment.

The crisis of Euro-American anthropology is due to the inability of the methods of participant observation to objectively penetrate other cultural worlds and to create a scientifically respectable transcultural methodology of ethnographic description.  Take a look at the restudy of Mead's work on the people of Samoa by Derek Freeman where he found almost no correspondence between the ethnographic statements of a world famous anthropologist and the statistical distributions of observable cases and behaviors on the ground. (see D Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa - the making and unmaking of an anthropological myth).

Once the built in limitations, ambiguities, idiosyncrasies and whimsies associated with the method of participant observation were publicly admitted by the profession, anthropologists have been either running away from fieldwork or engaging in a veritable orgy of blaming and exculpation concerning the epistemological and methodological failures of Euro-American anthropology to somehow magically transmute itself into an objective world anthropology.  What is being revealed in the final decades of the so called American century of the 2^nd Millennium is the relatively huge load of western culture - let's politely refer to it as ethno-science - which is carried along inside the Euro-American anthropology project (see In My Father's House for Anthoy K Appiah's extended discussion of the relative adequacy of outsider versus insider investigations and interpretations of African peoples). 

Why should American anthropology be exempt from the excesses of political correction and multi-cultural anarchy which are shattering the initially unifying 'narratives' and borrowed public British culture around which the USA organized itself over the past 200 years (See A M Schlessinger, the Disuniting of America - reflections on a multi-cultural society)? 

According to the sociologist Tom Bottomore, Husserl commented that social scientist are like a man who sharpens a knife until it is not there.  In my opinion, Euro-American anthropology is methodologically refining itself into oblivion.  It is succumbing to the methodological equivalent of a mental heart attack in its doomed efforts to’ alchemy-istically’  transmute a culturally provincial and therefore limited Euro-American anthropology into the universal framework for a viable and carefully constructed world anthropology based upon years and years of cross cultural negotiation.  The solitary Imperial Mind is metamorphosing itself into madness following in the footsteps of Nietzsche.

6.       Can a Distinctive and Inclusive South African Anthropology Be Created in Response to the Post Colonial Stress Syndrome?

The four (4) crudely sketched alternative South African anthropologies define a predicament and an opportunity.  Right now these competing anthropologies are radically disjoined, the sound of 1/2 of a hand clapping.  It is the main purpose of my paper to challenge these different partial anthropologies or tendencies within contemporary SA anthropology to begin seriously engaging with each other around the praxis of effectively expressing and institutionalizing all the latent and manifest cultural diversity that is struggling for space in which to exist and/or regenerate.  The  rehabilitation of the discipline within South Africa requires that representatives of all four major tendencies or schools become seriously engaged with each other's embodiment in iconic undertakings such as:

(1.)         the progressive Africanization of the country's legal system;

(2.)         the creation of an Afrikaner homeland;

(3.)         the controlled participation in the global economy through a network of export processing zones;

(4.)         the systematic Africanization of the public service;

(5.)         the modernization and integration of traditional and municipal/district systems of local governance;

(6.)         the construction of a genuine national SA identity based on the principle of 'unity through diversity'; etc.

Imagine if you will a series of major transformation projects - rather like little Manhattan projects -each with substantial bureaucratic over ride powers and sufficient public resources- that are charged with bringing together representatives of the four schools of SA anthropology into unitary project teams.  In order to achieve any results at all, the representatives of the four partial SA anthropologies will have to synthesize their theories and methods into a higher order anthropology.  If the different anthropologies are able to engage and re-integrate their different perspectives and practices within a common discipline, then the discipline of South African anthropology becomes a de facto microcosm of the national society.  To the extent that we anthropologists gradually succeed in reconciling our substantive and methodological differences then the higher order synergies achieved can be legitimately shared with fellow South Africans as proof that profound differences can be usefully - perhaps even inspirationally - brought into complementarity.  

If South African anthropologists can figure out how to remove the historical partitions separating them into the four antagonistic camps identified in this paper, then they will have to convert their long standing, and by now habitual polarization into a more challenging relationship of polarity within a unitary discipline.  The unification of anthropology would constitute a dramatic demonstration that it is possible for a unified and dynamic meta- South Africa reality to emerge through democratic negotiations between equal peoples and cultures. 

The discipline of anthropology in South Africa in reality is a testing ground – the canary in the mine – with great potential to discover the way forward into the new post colonial South Africa.  The new and more unified anthropology of the post apartheid era in South Africa would again come to the service of the unifying and modernizing project of the ANC in much the same way that the fragmented discipline served contending interest groups during previous eras, including the colonial and neocolonial interests of Europe and Britain during the era of imperialistic expansion.  Now the discipline of anthropology in South Africa has a unique opportunity to play a leadership role by exploring new pathways into a more global era of development organized around a higher culture of relativity.

 The genuine joining together of the four or more constituent anthropologies into a unitary South African anthropology would certainly give fellow South Africans an uplifting example of what is possible when men and women of good will and trans-cultural experience decide to rigorously apply their deeply cultivated understanding of the fundamental brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind.  It is highly unlikely that the sub-disciplines of South African anthropology will be able to heal themselves from the post colonial stress s

post colonial stress syndrome if they continue to occupy and cultivate parallel ‘post modern’ approaches to the discipline.  The challenge of African anthropology is for it to gain enough inner strength to break out of the isolation in which Euro-centric post modernism has imprisoned ‘provincial’ intellectuals and activists.  The four contending tendencies of South African anthropology have a golden opportunity to break free once and for all of the prison of ‘provincial’ consciousness by directly and creatively engaging with each other. The challenge is to construct a unifying post colonial understanding of the role and practice of anthropology as world science that gradually grows an inclusive and transcendent ‘culture of relativity’.     

7.       Overcoming the Outsider/Insider Predicament in SA Society and Anthropology

It is proposed here that one of the main reasons for the crisis of Euro-American anthropology is due to the mono-polar and uni-lateral nature of the standard fieldwork process itself.  From the time of Malinowski onward, we anthropologists have celebrated the mastery by a unitary imperial mind of other cultures, languages, and consciousnesses.  Fieldwork is seen as a one way process whereby the culture and consciousness of the subject people or community gets accurately converted into the frames and terms of the outside observer.  The inside participant and the outside observer collaborate to translate the subject's culture and social relations into one of the several competing ethno-theoretical languages of contemporary anthropology (in so far as the descriptive and theoretical terminologies used by anthropologists are different from the native culture, consciousness and language of the studied communities).

So far so good.  What I am proposing in place of uni-lateral, one-sided fieldwork and anthropological analysis is two sided and ultimately many sided anthropology.  Briefly, bilateral or reciprocal fieldwork requires that a minimum of two anthropologists - an insider and an outsider – will combine to undertake fieldwork.  We assume absolute parity of intellect and power for the pair of fieldworkers relative to each other.  The insider and the outsider anthropologists jointly study a particular socio-cultural system.  In the process of conducting their fieldwork they record the normal ethnographic discourses and explanatory interpretations.  In addition, they also explore in similar detail their differences and their similarities of experience, understanding and interactions with the subject community.  They are responsible for recording this data about the interaction between themselves as insider and outsider anthropologists in exactly the same detail as they record their data from the people they are studying. 

There will be large areas of agreement, and areas where the insider and the outsider's experience and interpretations are in tension, perhaps even totally contradictory.  Interestingly, these differences will be subject to critical reviews and negotiation between the insider and the outsider anthropologist.  Some differences, perhaps most, will be argued about and resolved one way or the other.  Other differences will remain contested and ambiguous, perhaps due to a fundamental untranslatability or a reflection of conflicting psychological modalities between the two or more observers serving on a particular intercultural fieldwork team.

Once this kind of long term dyadic, triadic, etc. research partnerships have been entered into, it would surely make sense for the fieldworker team to investigate each other's home communities and cultures as well.  In the process of follow on investigations, certain of the unresolved ambiguities may be better understood and therefore reconciled at a later date.

Applying this multi-lateral fieldwork approach to our SA situation we could well imagine a long term fieldwork team comprised, for example, of a Xhosa, Afrikaner, and English (or other European or foreign born) anthropologist.  Between them there would need to be one team member who represents the Africanist, modernizing global, and insider/minority enclave perspectives.  This trio or perhaps even foursome would also be expected to jointly study, document and interpret all of their respective home communities and cultures, so that each team member gets to function as an insider anthropologist on his or her own home ground in tandem with other collaborating outsider anthropologists.  It would no doubt be necessary to focus on particular topics such as land reform, resettlement, and restitution, or the reorganization of local government, or the stimulation of well contextualized rural enterprises, the design of rural and peri-urban settlements, etc.

The multi-lateral fieldwork approach represents another way of solving what Hastrup refers to as the performative paradox in anthropology, namely the requirement for anthropologists to be both "detached" while at the same time being "solidary", or existentially and morally engaged with their subjects.   In the SA case, we are discussing the advisability and the feasibility of insisting that anthropological teams which engage in research and explanation of a community, institution, programme, problem within South Africa need to be a microcosm of the macrocosm which they are investigating.  The long-term engagement of anthropologists serving on a particular intercultural team with each other and their informants guarantees that they will gradually negotiate about their different perceptions and interpretations of observed patterns.  This long-term mutually accountable relationship between insiders and outsiders across an intercultural boundary will greatly reduce the opportunities for interference in ethnography by intercultural biases and cross-cultural incompetencies.

It must be emphasized by the writer that ‘post-millennial’ anthropology requires two mindedness - the insider mind and outsider mind (and two heartedness as well) to gradually progress toward a more transcendent, transparent, and even translucent world anthropology.   It also became apparent during the thinking and writing of this paper that South African Anthropology is - like Steve Biko's black man - increasingly adrift and on its own.  I do not believe it is possible for the potential greater communion of anthropologists working and living in South Africa to sustain themselves as provincial social scientists who are fed and sustained by long umbilical cords stretching back to Harvard, Cambridge, the Sorbonne or Berlin.  The accelerating advent of the world commonwealth of countries and cultures now makes it imperative that South African Anthropology becomes mature and freestanding so that it can sit at the big table and make its own independent contributions to the consultation out of which a more perfect and liberating world anthropology will eventually emerge.  It is increasingly obvious that the anthropologies that are being brought to the world consultation by the mother countries of Europe, UK and the USA do not capture or represent many of the hybrid realities of culture and society which are emerging before our very eyes, under our feet and within our minds and hearts here in the new mother country of South Africa.

In closing, let me state that it requires a separate exploration to figure out the various strategies by which many different, observer contaminated anthropologies from South Africa and around the planet can be ‘polygamously’ wedded into a lasting and hopefully harmonious world anthropology.  The methods by which partial anthropologies can be rigorously combined into a more inclusive and holistic understanding to humanity is a deep subject which must be left to another time and place, and probably to anthropologists who are more tough minded and tender hearted than the present writer (or is it the reverse: soft headed and brave hearted?).