Johannes Fabian

Popular Culture in Africa: Findings and Conjectures

One effect of specialization in the field of African Studies has been to prevent or hinder the study of subjects which, by their very nature, demand interdisciplinary interests and competences. Emerging popular culture is such a field. Division of labor among various social sciences and between the social sciences and the humanities—late-comers to Anglo-American concerns with Africa—have long worked like a conjuring trick: making vast and vigorous expressions of African experience de facto invisible, especially to expatriate researchers. African scholars have been slow to denounce this state of affairs, perhaps out of an elitist need to set themselves apart from the loud and colorful bursts of creativity in music, oral lore, and the visual arts emerging from the masses.

History from Below: The “Vocabulary of Elisabethville” by André Yav: Text, Translations and Interpretive Essay

1. Preface and Acknowledgements 2. 1. The Document 3. 2. Translations 4. 3. Interpretations 5. Maps 6. Bibliography

Issues in the Ethics of Research Method: An Interpretation of the Anglo-American Perspective [and Comments and Reply]

There is a pattern of elements within the Anglo-American structure of thinking and reasoning which affects methods of data collection, data analysis, and systems of information dispersion with respect to studies of non-Western cultures. An argument is built in this paper which maintains that: (1) These same elements hinder some Anglo-American anthropologists from studying their own cultures. They form a pattern which begins with the selection of anthropology as a profession, the selection of a target culture, the selection of behavioral phenomena, actions, events, and occurrences for observation in the target culture, the selection of informants, and the choice of language-words and concepts-for recording, description, classification, and generalization. (2) The pattern is witnessed in some verbal descriptions and in descriptive and inferential statistics in reference to non-Western cultures and also in some book titles, course titles, textbook illustrations, cover designs, and photographs. It is witnessed in slides. movies, films, public lectures, and college lectures. (3) Resultant from these elements are characteristic psychological consequences observed among students and scholars in anthropology and the masses who are exposed to this Anglo-American anthropological epistemology. (4) In pursuit of a world epistemology, the author calls for worldwide respected scientific research methods, on-going cross-disciplinary researches around the world, and new methods in the dispersion of anthropological information.

Ethnography and intersubjectivity: Loose ends

Here I want to offer a few thoughts for discussion by returning to key notions— intersubjectivity, coevalness, and communication—I worked with and helped to propagate. Some of them will be second thoughts that inevitably come up upon further reflection, others are prompted by worries I have expressed ever since I took a position in critical debates almost forty years ago. They concern the relationship between epistemology and ethics generally, and problems with deriving from epistemological insights methodological prescriptions or ethical rules for field research specifically. It is perhaps also time to ask another general question: Is it possible or desirable to promote a renewed “critical anthropology” as a distinctive school of thought? And if critical once meant antipositivist where is the adversary today?

What History for Which Africa

are most directly concerned. A limitation inherent in such undertakings is that they often remain locked within disciplinary boundaries. We can avoid such closure if we keep an eye on developments in fields which have acclaimed anthropology as helpful in solving their own critical problems. African History figures prominently among them and this volume is a courageous and fairly encompassing attempt critically to reexamine the subject, methods, and motives of writing about the history of black Africa. Compliments first. Jewsiewicki and Newbury have, during a period which several of the contributors describe as one of relative lethargy, succeeded in stirring up twenty three accomplished scholars. All of them

Interpretation in Anthropology

Interpretation, often paired with or opposed to explanation, signifies practices (including methods of selecting and preparing ethnographic material, ways of defining questions and arguing positions, and styles of writing) by which anthropologists produce and represent knowledge. The idea goes back to a tradition of text-oriented critical philology and history that, together with the project of a natural history of mankind, emerged as the discipline of anthropology during the Age of Enlightenment. Approaches to interpretation in anthropology that were developed subsequently varied depending on how the discipline defined its object of study (for instance, as a historical record, as the result of processes of evolution, or as symbol-based systems orienting action). Throughout this period, interpretation retained its general meaning, until in the 1970s, pleas for an interpretive or hermeneutic anthropology were formulated by those who argued that cultural anthropology could not be practiced either as a (narrowly defined) natural science or as a purely semiotic discipline. Assigning central importance to the concept of text (and context) was a common feature of this critical movement; its strategies varied greatly between promoting text as a metaphor for culture, regarding ethnographic data as texts, promoting performative views of culture as texts-in-action, and calling for attention to the political aspects of investing texts with authority.

Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire

This book combines ethnography with the study of art to present a fascinating new vision of African history. It contains the paintings of a single artist depicting Zaires history, along with a series of ethnographic essays discussing local history, its complex relationship to forms of self-expression and self-understanding, and the aesthetics of contemporary urban African and Third World societies. As a collaboration between ethnographer and painter, this innovative study challenges text-oriented approaches to understanding history and argues instead for an event- and experience-oriented model, ultimately adding a fresh perspective to the discourse on the relationship between modernity and tradition. During the 1970s, Johannes Fabian encouraged Tshibumba Kanda Matulu to paint the history of Zaire. The artist delivered the work in batches, together with an oral narrative. Fabian recorded these statements along with his own question-and-answer sessions with the painter. The first part of the book is the complete series of 100 paintings, with excerpts from the artists narrative and the artist-anthropologist dialogues. Part Two consists of Fabians essays about this and other popular painting in Zaire. The essays discuss such topics as performance, orality, history, colonization, and popular art.

Time and the work of anthropology : critical essays, 1971-1991

The development of the dialogical approach, the autobiographical perspective and the central role of text-interpretation are all seen as characteristics of post-modern ethnography, arising from the daily chores of field research. The breakthrough into time and history, away from the timeless theorizing of structuralism and functionalism, is seen as inevitable when anthropology is forced to think about its own epistemology. Another current concern is taken up with reflections on the politics of representing the other. In the later essays, he opposes post-modern fashions and re-asserts the need to continue with a truly critical agenda.

Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938

Among the preconditions for establishing colonial authority was communication with the colonised. Verbal exchanges depended on a shared communicative praxis providing common ground on which unilateral claims could be imposed. Use of, and control over, verbal means of communication were needed to maintain regimes - military, religious-ideological, economic - in power. In the Belgian Congo brutal physical force never ceased to be exercised. In this study Professor Fabian examines the more subtle uses of power through controls on communication, by looking at the history of Swahili as it spread from the East Coast to Central Africa and demonstrating connections between -changing forms of colonial power and the development of policies towards Swahili. Using a wide range of sources, including numerous and sometimes obscure vocabularies, he combines concepts derived from literary theory and sociolinguistics to uncover, through the flaws and failures of these texts, deep-seated attitudes to language and communication.