American Anthropologist Volume 105 Issue 2 2003 [Doi 10.1525%2Faa.2003.105.2.359] Catherine Boone -- Poststructuralism as a Historical Condition

7/27/2019 American Anthropologist Volume 105 Issue 2 2003 [Doi 10.1525%2Faa.2003.105.2.359] Catherine Boone -- Poststructuralism as a Historical Condition

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Book Reviews

a Historical Conditionand Constructed Categories: Con-in Focus. George Clement Bond and

C. Gibson, eds. Boulder: Westview Press, 2002. 474 p p.and Transnationalism in Africa. Thomas

andRobert Latham, eds. Cam-in Africa. Richard Werbner,New York: Palgrave, 200 2. 244 pp.

se three edited volumes published in 2002 pu t forwardaswell as about African studies.l are po sitioned as critiques of reigning master concepts

and they gather much of their intellec-can be remade through engagement with Africa.thevolumes help to show why African

at the forefront of theoretical innovationRealities of Africa's economic and political situation

in political science and anthropology,arewell represented in the volumesof the neocolonial economy

of the p ostcolonial state have resulted in aIt works to subvert inter-n th e state itself. Inthese settings, political science

endnot as an ontology orasanobjective feature of Af-

and social reality. The oldquestions aboutand how local order isproduced begin Post-Subjectivities, the challenge is theorizing agencyareenmeshed in

the same pervasive structural instabilities and uncer-es. These con ditions could no t be m ore imlike the co-intraditional anthro-

pology. Richard Werbner proposes thinking of the subjectas "living in the subjunctive," inwhich contingency itselfis a defining feature of social context. Force of circum-stance leads both political scientists and anthropologistsincluding many of the contributors to Contested Terrainsan d Constructed Categoriesto seek newways to theorizesocial context and social order in settings defined by insta-bility, flux, and destructuration. The quest for theoreticalinnovation under these circumstances is perhaps whatunites the 45 chapters presented in these three volumes.Thomas Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir, and Robert Latham'sIntervention an d Transnationalism in Africa grew outof tw ounits within the Social Science Research Council: the Pro-gram on International Cooperation andGlobal Securityand th e African Studies Program. The volum e o pens w ith acritique of themaster concepts of the juridical state andstate sovereignty. Taken together, thechapters stress thefact that the African state does not necessarily exercise ter-ritorial control, that it often exercises power via means

other than those sanctioned by law, andtha t it sharespower with a myriad of other kinds of formal and infor-mal institutions (which are typologized intheeditors ' in-troduction) that compromise state sovereignty. The chap-ters show that institutions in Africa are criss-crossed bytransnational or global-local linkages that take a myriadof forms (typologized in the chapter by Latham, who dis-tinguishes among transnational networks, arenas, and"deployments"). Linkages erode external state sovereigntyand impact local politics in highly ambivalent ways. Inthese settings, classic questions of political scienceWhogoverns? How is authority constituted?present them-selves inuniquely compelling ways. If we follow MichaelBarnett's injunction (p. 48) to separate the concepts ofstate, authority, and territory, then almost anything ispossible.

Chapters by William Reno, Carolyn Nordstrom, andJanet Roitman reflect onhow each author's earlier empiri-cal work (on state breakdown in Liberia, civil war inMozambique, and informal "regulatory networks" thatgovern trade and plunder in the Chad Basin, respectively)speaks to questions of state sovereignty. All three focus onnonstate actors who establish territorial control in war

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 105(2):359-371, COPYRIGHT 2003, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION


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360 American An thro po log ist Vo l. 105, No. 2 June 2003zones or on the periphery of war zones, in which businessis to be had in the shadowy trading networks for guns,petrol, arms, and other contraband. Roitman shows thatthese networks can become institutionalized over time,but the main focus of these papers is on the deinstitution-alization of political authority and the breakdown of rule-governed forms of political control over violence. Bothweak state rulers and warlords can exploit transnationallinkages to gain haid currency, weapons and logisticalsupport, military reinforcements (in the form of foreignmercenaries, for example), and, in the case of those whohappen to gain control of the capital city, even interna-tional recognition as the rulers of a "sovereign state."

These chapters underscore the deeply international-ized nature of African warlordism, the regional wars, andthe corrupt weak states. They also direct attention to terri-torial reconfigurations of political power, as de factoauthority to regulate economic and social life is wieldedby warlords "in the bush," or rogue state agents operatingbeyo nd th e limits of their formal au thority, rather tha n bynational governments. The territorial scope of these non-state or quasistate forms of authority is not defined by theboun daries of the juridical state.In a chapter on local politics and the Ugandan Catho-lic Church, Kassimir argues that the sources and agents of"nonstate governance have become increasingly transna-tional" (p. 95). Contributions to this volume develop thispoin t in several different ways by pointing to th e growinginvolvement of transnational NGOs, foreign mercenaries,and warlords who draw economic and military strengthfrom international business networks, and the interna-tional financial institutions (the International MonetaryFund and the World Bank) that assume governing func-tions where the state has been privatized or forsaken. Kas-simir is on target in asking about how and whether non-state actors and organizations, including "ethnicassociations and communities" (p. 100), "represent" thosethey govern, and raising the question of whether politicalaccountability is possible under these conditions. He in-sists on the importance of viewing nonstate "polities" asfields of power in themselves that can either reinforce orsap the authority of the juridical state.Two excellent chapters on government and opposi-tion show the "ambivalent effects" of transnational link-age on opposition movements, and the difficulties of in-stitutionalizing op position politics in settings of high stateviolence, social fragmentation (related in part to ethn icand com mu nal politics), and general weakness of "civil so-ciety" associations such as unio ns, producers associations,and civic associations that can provide building blocks foropposition politics. Hans Peter Schmitz argues that in thecase of externally linked NGOs in Kenya, external ties pro-duced the paradoxical effect of enhancing the visibility ofNGOs while, at the same time, short-circuiting local insti-tution building. Cyril I. Obi shows that massive state vio-lence destroyed painstakingly built institutions of localidentity and resistance in Ogoniland, decapitated a local

resistance movement, and sowed local division, all underthe spotlight of international scrutiny.Yet local actors can use global resources for better aswell as for worse. Schmitz and Obi show that some activ-ists have been able to gain som e resources and so me meas-ure of protection from linkages to transnational civil soci-ety movements. In a chapter entitled "Networks, moraldiscourse, and history," Fred Cooper shows that transna-tional social discourse can be constitutive of new moralframes that help sustain and broaden the scope of localpolitics.Callaghy focuses on the emergence of an interna-tional debt regime that has provided mechanisms and re-sources for dealing with African macroeconomic crisessince the 1970s. He traces the evolution of the debt regimeover time and makes two important points about "tran-snationalism." First, he argues that the Paris Club's han-dling of Africa's debt problems in the 1970s ("the earlydebt crises") created much of the common law, normativeconsensus, ap preciation of long-term c onsequen ces, socialnetworking, and institutional linkages that made possiblethe swift and largely successful handling of subsequentcrises, including the Mexican debt crisis of August 1982.Second, Callaghy highlights the im porta nt role tha t "prin-cipled-issue networks" and transnational civil societyinthe form of Oxfam International and the Jubilee 2000Coalition, for examplehave played in this process.Meanwhile, this debt regime has been imposed in sub-Saharan Africa in the form of Structural Adjustment Pro-grams (SAPs), which are both one cause and an effect ofthe diminished and compromised national sovereigntiesthat t he rest of this volum e describes.In their conclusion to the volume, Kassimir andLatham write that outcomes are being generated "whereinternational, local, and national forces operate cotermi-nously" (p. 270). The editors recognize that of these, it isthe nature of local power and sources of local power thatremain particularly obscure (except, perhaps, when localpower comes directly from the barrel of a gun). Kassimirand Latham indicate that we need "a more sophisticatedanalysis of what constitutes local order and authority" (p.269). Although all three volumes reviewed here deal indifferent ways with global-local interconnections (orquestion the ontological status of these as separate catego-ries), we still come away without much explicit theoriza-tion of, or systematic inquiry into, local-level logics ofpower, accumulation, representation, and authority. Thechallenge arises, in part, from the very erosion of localgovernmental or quasi-governmental institutions (like po-litical party organs), inform al political relations (like pa-tron-client networks), and economic processes (like state-controlled export crop marketing) that had long beenviewed as important sites or sources of political cum socialhierarchy at the local level. Contributors to Interventionand Transnationalism argue forcefully that these questionscannot be answered without acknowledging the ubiquityof transnational ties in constituting local power (and the


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Book Rev iew Essays 3 6 1

ritical point of departure for further analysis.Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa completes a t r i logyf volumes on identity, memory, and subjectivity thatRichard Werbner has edited or coedited for the Zed Pressseries on "Postcolonial Encounters." Werbner and his col-laborators set out to subvert not only classical anthropol-

ogy's master concept of social and communal coherenceut also the modernist notion of the "autonomous sub-ject" that is present, they argue, in co nventio nal postcolo-nial studies. Contributors to this volum e insist on ways inwhich individual autonomy is constrained and condi-tioned by webs of social interdependence, and by the un-certainties of flux and destructuration that characterizethe postcolonial context. With this analytic lens, theauthors present an extended theoretical inquiry into post-colonial subjectivity in Africa that is, at the same time,grounded in history, political economy, and attention tothe effects of state power.In the introduction, Werbner insists that uncertainty,flux, and social interconnectedness are not unique to thepostcolonial predicamentcolonial and precolonial erasshould be understood in similar terms. He does say, how-ever, that Africa's postcolonial predicaments are distinc-tive. Here he seems to refer, at least in part, to a "condi-ion of postmodernity" that is defined by a sense of

ind much by way of improvement. Indeed, much of this

nd at th e level of social processes an d consciou sness. Eco-omic hardship, state decline, and awareness of the often

Some chapters foreground the social processes by

self, or social conscious-

historical consciousness as en-

healing rituals as a way of making sense of their

Contributions by Susan Reynolds Whyte and DeborahDurham highlight a different aspect of subjectivity. Thesepapers are less about the construction of "meaning" per sethan about people who try to figure out what to do in theabsence of a single, coherent model of meaning. In a mov-ing chapter on seeking health care and dealing withHIV/AIDS in Uganda, Whyte shows that different under-standings of disease and cure intermingle. People gropefor explanations of what is happening to them (they "tryout" different explanations). They devise plans of actionthat reflect uncertainties and contingencies of health anddisease, of the Ugandan health care system, and of the in-terpersonal relationships that are necessary for survival. AsWhyte puts it, the mood of action is "often more subjunc-tive tha n indicative or imperative" (p. 172). Durban sensesa similar mood of uncertainty and tentativeness. Shewrites that in Botswana, where citizens are not subject tochronic state predation or violence, and w here promises ofprogress and electoral democracy "have not been entirelyabnegated," "people seem less assured of exactly who haspower and what its exercise might look like" (p. 139).Competing models of political representation intermingle,giving rise to "puzzlement" over the causes of politicaloutcomes "the moral grounds on which [individuals andcommunities] can take effective action" (p. 139). In bothstudies, people entertain many possible theories of whythings happen. The implication for practical action is thatthey may simultaneously employ different, sometimeseven apparently contradictory strategies, to the same end.The concept of "subjunctivity" is a way of focusing on theintermingling of intention, hope, and doubt.

Francis B. Nya mn joh's accou nt of witchcraft narra-tives among the Msa, on the Bamenda grasslands inCameroon, highlights contradiction or multiplicity in themoral frames within which Msa understand and evaluatepersonal success, civic action, and political identity.Nyamnjoh's semiautobiographical account shows how, inthis setting, capitalism, accumulation, and individual ad-vancement are understood as inherently predatory proc-esses. What one "eats" comes at the expense of the rest ofsociety (p. 120). This is a discourse of constraint and am-bivalence regarding individual agency, about social de-pendencies and interdependencies, and a kind of uneasycoexistence of past and present moral frames.These chapters contain much by way of scholarly re-flection on contemporary anthropology, postcolonialstudies, and critical theory. The volume as a whole bene-fits from the strong unifying vision of Werbner, laid out inan introduction that situates the present volume in thecontext of the "Postcolonial Encounters" trilogy. PaulStoller's concluding chapter employs an analytic lens thatis even wider. Stoller explains how the authors' insistenceon constrained and deeply contextualized subjectivi-tiesthat is, on the postcolonial subject who is con-strained to act, think, and hope in the subjunctive, and inthe context of webs of social relationstranscends someof the contradictions between structuralist anthropology,


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362 American An throp olog ist Vo l. 105, No. 2 June 2003which emphasized constraining forces, and the poststruc-tuialist project, which privileges agency, the individual,and creative subjectivity.George Clement Bond and Nigel C. Gibson's ContestedTerrains and Co nstructed Territories: Contempo rary Africa inFocus is a collection of 16 papers that were first presentedas invited lectures at Columbia University's Institute of Af-rican Studies during th e editors' tenure as Director and As-sistant Director of the Institute. They cover the discipli-nary waterfront in the humanities and social sciences anddeal with issues of political economy, political organiza-tion and representation, health and the body, and thepolitics of knowledge. Like contributors to the two othervolumes, most of the authors featured here eschew masterconcepts like state, civil society, institutions, property,ethnicity, and community. The editors' introduction iden-tifies this critical stance vis-a-vis disciplinary paradigmsand analytical constructs as what unites an otherwise dis-parate set of chapters. At the same time, it seems notewor-thy that almost all the authors decline to advance alterna-tive conceptual schema to describe society and socialprocess, to make argu men ts abo ut what alternative futuresmight look like, to identify "fundamental issues" or "ba-sic" social cleavages, or to speculate about trajectories ofchange in political or social institutions. It seems to metha t this is as much a sign of the times as the p roduct of ana priori theoretical commitment to empiricism, to study-ing the particular, or an embrace of poststructural theory.The historical and empirical realities of structural instabil-ity in Africa todaydestructuration and deinstitutionali-zationhave made it harder to rely on social science'sstandard toolkits, or, as many of the contributors to thesethree volumes would surely argue, served to underscorehow limited the old tools were in the first place.

Sayre Schatz and Oliver S. Saasa focus on the inescap-able facts of Africa's post-1980 economic catastrophe andpervasive, grinding poverty on the continent. Schatz pre-sents a devastating critique of structural adjustment pro-grams and of the World Bank's continuing attempts toclaim some success for two decades of neoliberal eco-nomic "restructuring" on the continent. Saasa reports thatover half of the population in many countries lives belowthe national poverty line and notes that poverty is notmerely a question of low income, b ut is instead highly cor-related with economic exclusionhaving no job, no as-sets, or limited access to productive assets like land. Thereality behind the statistics is one of pervasive economicdisenfranchisement, the undermining of livelihoods, andchronic social and economic uncertainty about the future.This has implications for the structure a nd o rganization ofsocial and political interests, for forms of cooperation andinterdependence, and for engagement w ith the state.

Irving Leonard Markovitz notes that in these c ontexts,hopes for the enactment of "liberal civil society theory,"whereby politically moderate and well-organized interestgroups help support an accountable and probusiness state,can be flights of ideological fantasy. An imp ortan t chapter

by Franco Barchiesi identifies some of the ways in whicheconomic decline and neoliberal restructuring actually doaffect the structure and organization of societal interests,and the implications of this for politics. Barchiesi arguesthat "neoliberal policies themselves recursively modify thenature of 'civil society' and its forms of resistance" (p.146). W hen it comes to class politics an d organized labor,he says, some studies have focused on the radicalizationproduced by wage freezes and privatizations, but anotherconsequence of neoliberal policies can be the decomposi-tion of labor as a distinct social class or an organized, cor-porate social group. This comes as a consequence of dein-dustrialization, retrenchments, informalization of theeconomy, fragmentation of labor markets, unemploy-ment, and return of jobless workers to the rural areas. Inmany countries, empirical referents for social categorieslike labor, middle class, civil service, or peasantry have be-come even more tenuous and elusive than they once were.One effect is to complicate the articulation of "group in-terests," and to erode structures for the institutionalizedrepresentation of collective interests. Social movementpolitics can develop in these settings, but in a conclusionthat resonates strongly with the papers by Schmidt andObi (Callaghy et al.) this will tend to be based on dynam-ics that are fluid, unpredictable, and difficult to institu-tionalize (Barchiesi, p. 150). The "decline of civil societylinked to neoliberalism" tends to make political align-ments unstable (p. 150).

In an analysis of NGOs working with rural communi-ties in South Africa, Kate Crehan arrived at the unsettlingconclusion that "communities" as such did not alwaysseem to exist. "Though the outlines of 'the community'migh t seem clear eno ugh at a distance, close up they had afrustrating tendency to dissolve into messy incoherence"(p. 184). As one interviewee told the author, people "areessentially competing with one another" (p. 183). Crehanjuxtaposes the reality of community as a discursive con-struct or "precipitate of the past" with "factions and shift-ing realities" of daily life at the local level in a context ofextreme resource scarcity. In South Africa, she argues, re-alities of power at the local level are shifting "in favor ofthe more straightforward economic inequalities of anymodern capitalist economy" (p. 193). This is one way inwhich South Africa may be an exception that helps provethe rule, for in most of the rest of the continent it wouldbe difficult to discern such a clear trajectory.

In a case study of the Asante region of Ghana, SaraBerry makes a different argument about the lived reality ofstructural instability and institutional contingency. Sheshows that here, property rights in land are continuallycontested, socially contingent, and encumbered by socialobligations. People's access to prop erty and their very live-lihoods become enmeshed in social relationships that re-quire continual investment, renewal, and renegotiation,which may not follow a predictable course. We learn thatland is part of a process of constituting local relationshipsand local authority, but may not be the main source or


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Book Review Essays 363

a political-economy counterpart to themes of interde-and "subjunctive subjectivity" developed byto the Werbner volume. Like most ofnot dwell on sources of struc-to the last two decades. This sug-in African studies, there is still plenty of rooma process of "destructu-in post-1980 Africa, and those who never reallyTwo powerful chapters on Mozambique, one by Al-

of political violence in ripping apart

and the 1947 Malagasy massacre links thesequestion of colonialism. George BondJoan Vincent trace the spatial and political geog raphyf HIV/AIDS in Uganda, showing am ong other thing s t ha tof the state and of HIV/AIDS research

toof long periods of fightingrefugee mo vem ents, insecurity, physical dis-of disease,

Although all three volumes focus on issues of greatof the contributors are re-it comes to embracing pre-of change, or making arguments abouta few ofto these volumes undertake to

identify particular social agentsAfrican governments, or-ganizations, social collectivities, even ou tside actors thatare well-positioned, likely, orwilling to undertake actionto redirect things toward some better future. This politicalcircumspection on the part of scholars is surely anothersign of the times. As Meredith Turshen suggests in achap-ter on health and politics in Contested Terrains and Con-structed Categories, without sovereign and effective govern-ing institutions, it is harder to assign responsibility andaccountability for change, and for political and policy fail-ure. Nongovernmental organizations and the interna-tional financial institutions have become prominent andoften heavy-handed actors on the African scene, but asTurshen points out, they are not accountable to Africanpublics and their linkages to local political actors aremurky, informal, and often shallow. Meanwhile, in coun-tries that lack stable political institutions, cohesive socialorganizations, and structured class and political relation-ships, it is harder to identify social actors or groups thatcould be agents of directed change. At the same time, allthree volumes are clear in insisting that without Africa, so-cial science runs the risk of relying too much on masterconcepts that are actually quite partial and contingent intheir scope of applicability, and of assuming too muchabout capitalism, the state, social organization, politicalauthority, and individual subjectivity. What Bond andGibson call "the innovative critical orienta tion " (p. xix) ofAfrican studies is precisely the effect of this sustained en-gagement with general social science theory. An insularand inward-looking "area studies" would not speak soforcefully to the disciplines, to disciplinary knowledge, orabout disciplinary boundaries.

of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary inEast-

J. Lefler and Frederic W. Gleach, eds.in the Chero-

of Oklahoma. Circe Sturm. Berkeley: Univer-of California Press, 2002. 24 9 pp.

that, after decades of neglect, the field is mo ving in promisingnew directions. After the pioneering w ork of James M ooney,John Swanton, and Frank Speck, the field fell into general ne-glect, and the few scholars working with Sou theastern Ind iansor their Oklahoma descendents rarely addressed the concernsof contemporary anthropological scholarship. Ray Fogelsonhas long been a prominent exception, and now he is beingjoined by anumber of other scholars. Circe Sturm, MargaretBender, and the authors collected in Southern Indians and An-thropologists draw on writings by Benedict Anderson, Jean C o-maroff and John Comaroff, Brian Street, and o thers, reflectinga broad engagement with influential scholarship. Moreover,they tackle subjects such as gender, race, identity, and literacythat speak to general readers as well as to specialists onSoutheastern Native America.

American Anthropologist Volume 105 Issue 2 2003 [Doi 10.1525%2Faa.2003.105.2.359] Catherine Boone -- Poststructuralism as a Historical Condition

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