Michael Rowlands

The role of memory in the transmission of culture

Abstract Following earlier discussions of the roles played by memory in oral and literate societies, this paper distinguishes between inscribed and incorporated practices in the process of cultural transmission. Instead of adopting the distinction between literate and non‐literate societies, it shows how different modes of cultural transmission can be associated with different kinds of political strategy and with different forms of religious life.

ELITE ASSOCIATIONS AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING IN CAMEROON

The development of elite associations has been a consequence of the growth of multi-partyism and the weakening of authoritarian state control in Cameroon in the 1990s. The attachment of electoral votes and rights of citizenship to belonging to ethnicised regions has encouraged the formal distinction between ‘natives’ and ‘strangers’ in the creation of a politics of belonging. The article argues that this development has also led to the replacement of political parties at the local level by ethnicised elite associations as prime movers in regional and national politics.

The future of Mali's past

One of the greatest disasters for African archaeology is the systematic plundering of archaeological sites for the antiquities trade (e.g. Schmidt & McIntosh 1996; ICOM 1994). An eloquent proof of this plundering is the beautiful catalogue ‘Earth and ore’, published in 1997 by Schaedler. Of the 668 objects illustrated fullcolour in this catalogue all come, except for a dozen objects and some forgeries, from recent looting of sites in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ghana and Nigeria. Regions in Mali that are particularly rich in cultural heritage, such as the Niger Inner Delta and the Dogon country, are particularly shocking examples of this systematic plundering. Archaeological research in 1991 in the south of the Delta, undertaken within the framework of the Malian-Dutch ‘Toguéré’ project of the Institut des Sciences Humaines at Bamako, showed that 450h of the 830 visited sites exhibited traces of illicit excavations (Dembele et al. 1993). In 1996, a sample of 80 of these sites was revisited by Annette Schmidt. The percentage of plundered sites had increased by 20%) (Annette Schmidt pers. comm.). One does not need much imagination to realize the scale of this disaster.

Repetition and Exteriorisa tion in Narratives of Historical Origins

It is now widely recognised that the cultural interpretation of origins has a distinct power to order and reorder realities and to give history meaning in ways different from other forms of symbolic action. Althusser once claimed that all forms of ideology could be reduced to two major tropes, one being naturalism and the other origins and that, of the two, the latter was logically prior to the former which became dominant in early modem Europe as the Culture/Nature dichotomy because the latter could no longer be supported by theological argument (Althusser 1971). In fact the dualism is likely to be much older than this. Mircea Eliade amongst others was particularly attracted to the idea that an earlier mythopoeic era in which ’happenings’ were turned into ’events’ to form creationist accounts of social origins, and been replaced at some point in the history of the West by sequentialist narratives of origins (Eliade 1949). Moreover shorn of its historicist overtones, the contrast has been widely explored in the subchronic analysis of myth, most notably by Levi-Strauss (Levi-Strauss 1963). However such controversial issues as the ’origin of origins’ in narrative structures are not at issue in this paper where I shall be more concerned

Exclusionary Tactics in the Logic of Collective Dynamics

In Minima Moralia, in a tone of despair which pervades both this volume and Negative Dialectics, Adorno declared ’the whole is the untrue’. This inversion of Hegel’s famous aphorism constituted for him a final break with any lingering sympathy for the notion of expressive totality. Auschwitz had indeed confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death (Adorno 1973:361-2). Hegel’s demonstration of the need for a totalising vision in the face of increasing fragmentation in bourgeois society was revealed as a strategy of domination exercised by those claiming special knowledge of the complex whole. One of the Frankfurt School’s main explanations for the rise of fascism was that creation of the totality was an act of self-objectification ’gave unconscious sway to the ideology that the not-I (1’autrui) and all that reminds us of nature is inferior’ (Adorno referred in Jay 1977:132). This baleful outlook long antedated the rise of fascism and is already implicit in the criticisms of Lukacs’ ’Stalinist turn’ and his support of Lenin’s view that the party, possessing a complete view of the totality, was more than the voice of the working class. An identical subject-object as totaliser became anathema to many as the only reasonable response to an experience of 20th century history which presented this attitude in a very real and brutal field of activity. The imperative to totalme which characterised Gcrman philosophy for a hundred years was deemed to have ended, probably more from a desire to forget than aB an act of rational intellectual will. Clearly it hadn’t. What emerged through the early cold war period, was the de-centered or