Harri Englund

Ethnography and the Meta‐Narratives of Modernity1

Current attempts to increase the relevance of sociocultural anthropology encourage anthropologists to engage in the study of modernity. In this discourse dominated by sociologists, the contribution of anthropology is often to reveal cultural diversity in globalization, leading to the notion of multiple modernities. Yet such ethnographic accounts draw upon familiar sociological abstractions such as time‐space compression, commodification, individualization, disenchantment, and reenchantment. This article shows how an underlying meta‐narrative preempts social scientific argument by making shifts in analytical scales look natural, as in the alleged need to “situate” the particular in “wider” contexts. This analytical procedure undermines what is unique in the ethnographic method—its reflexivity, which gives subjects authority in determining the contexts of their beliefs and practices. Two ethnographic case studies are presented to support this argument, one from Melanesia on current interests in white people, money, and consumption and the other from Africa on born‐again Christianity and individuality. The article ends by reflecting not only on the limits of metropolitan meta‐narratives in returning relevance to anthropology but also on the contemporary conditions of academic work that undermine the knowledge practices of ethnography and render such meta‐narratives plausible.

The dead hand of human rights: contrasting Christianities in post-transition Malawi

This article shows the importance of understanding the pluralism of moral ideas in contemporary Africa. Although the discourse on human rights is only one aspect of that pluralism, it threatens to overshadow other ways of conceiving human dignity. The impact of the ‘human rights talk’ can be observed in Christian churches, and the article contrasts elite and lay practices in Catholic and pentecostal churches in Malawi. Drawing upon rural and urban fieldwork, the article reveals variation as much within as between these two forms of Christianity. Rather than documenting a wholesale rejection of the ‘human rights talk’, the article draws attention to the situational use of different moral ideas. In this regard, public debates on politics may be enriched by the insights gained during fieldwork among Catholic and pentecostal congregations.

Cosmopolitanism and the Devil in Malawi

The article contributes to recent attempts to provide historically and ethnographically nuanced accounts of cosmopolitanism. A central argument in the article revolves around the notion of situated cosmopolitanism. While cosmopolitanisms must be envisaged in the plural, common to these diverse cultural projects is an uneasy relation to the home that imposes itself on the subject. Pentecostal Christians in an impoverished township in Malawi consider this-worldly realities as one, ruled by the Devil. Their cosmopolitan vision transcends, therefore, social and spatial boundaries, but it gains its force from their particular existential predicament of impoverishment. The article shows in detail how the Pentecostal belief in the second birth establishes a specific form of cosmopolitan relatedness. It entails a deterritorialized mode of belonging which undermines, among others, the rural–urban distinction.

Towards a Critique of Rights Talk in New Democracies: The Case of Legal Aid in Malawi

As an institutionalized form of human rights discourses, rights talk plays a prominent role in recently democratized countries. It also poses a challenge to critical analysts of language, because its contribution to maintaining inequalities is not apparent in its emancipatory rhetoric. This article examines rights talk at a non-governmental centre for free legal aid in Malawi. By deploying the notion of narrative inequality, the article shows how legal officers and their clients engage in a contest of contexts from unequal subject positions. While officers subscribe to an individualist concept of rights and seek piecemeal solutions to abuse, clients generally situate their complaints in complex moral narratives. The limited success of their claims leads to subtle forms of resistance against rights talk. The article shows that narrative inequality provides a perspective that both reaches beyond interlocutors’ own terms and asserts the value of rigorous empirical analysis in the critical study of language.

Multivocal morality: Narrative, sentiment, and Zambia’s radio grandfathers

Multivocal morality concentrates attention on the ideologies of voice in efforts to narrate boundary-crossing moral dilemmas. This article’s focus on the relationship between narrative and sentiment in moral transgression brings together two distinct bodies of literature. One is anthropologists’ recent statements about a disciplinary shift from the study of law-like morality to ethical reasoning. The other is literary scholars’ emphasis on the novel as the privileged genre of narrative in generating moral sentiments such as sympathy and compassion. While anthropologists risk turning a blind eye to their discipline’s past achievements in understanding the complex interplay between customary obligation and moral sentiment, literary scholars foreclose an open discussion about the genres and media by which narrative may generate moral sentiments. The importance of attending to the notion of voice is elaborated through the work of two self-styled grandfathers on Zambian radio who, thirty years apart, performed the same story about strangers within. Despite the different eras of broadcast, they both assembled multiple voices in order to generate the moral sentiment of sympathy. The customary codes of elderhood informed multivocality not by giving others their voices as an act of charity or justice but by having moral authority to assemble those voices in the first place.

Forget the Poor

Gogo Breeze, a popular radio personality in Zambia’s Eastern Province, responds to his listeners’ frequent evocations of poverty by refusing to consider them as members of the generic poor. Instead, he deploys idioms of kinship by which his status as the listeners’ grandfather on air assigns him moral authority that is both intimate and infallible. In this article I examine radio kinship in the context of abundant labor and scarce opportunities to be gainfully employed in Chipata, the provincial capital. A labor dispute between Zambian workers and Chinese management brought to the fore grievances about wages and conditions. When the grievances fell on deaf ears with both management and the government, the workers turned to Gogo Breeze with a letter in which they asserted themselves as children. The radio grandfather responded by visiting the provincial labor office and by broadcasting a richly allusive story about exploitation. The article concludes by discussing hierarchy and conflict as intrinsic to the mutuality and dependence that the workers yearned for. Radio kinship as one modality of mutual dependence offered a frame for making claims that was compatible with what the workers demanded.

Law, law everywhere

Comment on Obarrio, Juan. 2014. The spirit of the laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Zambia at 50: The Rediscovery of Liberalism

Zambia stands out in African Studies as a country that has attracted an unusual degree of scholarly attention. From the establishment of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in 1937 to the present, research in Zambia has significantly influenced academic and policy debates well beyond its borders. Relatively rapid urban growth on the Copperbelt, for example, occasioned not only pioneering studies in urban anthropology (Epstein 1958) but also debates about ethnic, national and class identities – studies whose foundational impact continues to be felt in the twenty-first century (Gluckman 1961; Magubane 1971; Mitchell 1956; see also Ferguson 2002;

Doing Conceptual History in Africa ed. by Axel Fleisch and Rhiannon Stephens (review)

(Herwitz again, and probably others too). Struggle crops up again in Minkley and Mnyaka (Chapter 3), who explore the contestation between citizens and state around a massacre memorial that its opponents angrily read as an attempt to extend state power and propaganda. A memorial to resistance, it has sparked a new wave of resistance from vandals, who are in effect re-making an image they reject. In another stand-out chapter, Rassool examines the centrality of human body parts in debates and disputes about South Africa’s ‘memorial complex’, and the disturbing role of forensic anthropology and scientists in that process. He discusses ethical issues that have resonance internationally: for example, in conflicts between museums and descendent communities around the repatriation and reburial of, and scientific access to, human remains. The bodies just keep coming up. On the positive side, as a result of these fierce debates and challenges, governments such as South Africa’s are moving towards establishing ‘national remains’ policies, which Rassool applauds as offering ‘the promise of decolonising and deracialising museums’ in that country (p. 155). A common theme throughout the collection is the myriad ways in which heritage work mirrors the rise and development of the postcolonial nation state, and offers avenues and tools for redress, healing (some scholars would question that), re-membering and reclamation in order to counter (Modisane quoting Fanon, p. 234) the ways in which colonialism distorted, disfigured and destroyed the past of oppressed peoples. One may not agree with all the views expressed, but this volume is a must-have for tutors and students of heritage, in and beyond the postcolony.

Radio in Africa: Publics, Cultures, Communities

and photo-ops. Such contradictions litter development in the Nyae Nyae. Strong’s documentary shows the problems of Western-imposed development projects when the links between organisations and beneficiaries are gradually eroded – as one Ju/’hoansi states of her present predicament: ‘no cattle, no money, no nothing: only sickness’. The head of the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation is based hundreds of miles from the people she is meant to be serving (in Windhoek), while pressure for international norms and modes of development increasingly overshadows the self-sufficient community involvement of Marshall’s engagement with local people. Yet the viewer is also aware of the problems beyond the reach of the development projects. Strong’s documentary shows what happens when well-meaning involvement with local communities is mismanaged at a macro-level, with communities seemingly lost in-between. Strong’s direction and narration are effective but not without their failings. How exactly Marshall/Ritchie’s development project ended up divorced from the subjects that had become so intimately involved is patched over: the documentary opening shows Ritchie in an abandoned former field office with papers and documents strewn everywhere, yet how their project came to be engulfed in bureaucracy and mirror international developmental norms is not addressed. It is not clear how the early progress deteriorated so much. Furthermore, an abrupt conclusion, without the discussion of alternative routes for the community, is disappointing given Strong (and Ritchie’s) evidently close connection with the communities under consideration. The closing credits note that the development foundation has provided a grazing management specialist to help with problems of over-grazing in the Tshumke region. Yet ‘it appears that no further technical assistance is being given to guide Ju/’hoansi on practical matters of cattle farming’. It seems that the Ju/’hoansi are once more on the precipice: caught between a past they left behind and a future they can’t quite attain.