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 **Other reading:** J. Comaroff and Comaroff (1989); J. L. Comaroff and Comaroff (1990); J. L. Comaroff (1987) **Other reading:** J. Comaroff and Comaroff (1989); J. L. Comaroff and Comaroff (1990); J. L. Comaroff (1987)
 +
 +===== One and many =====
 +
 +Anthropology faces a problem that all inquiry faces.
 +
 +Does the object of inquiry—people—have a single, unitary essence, or is it just a name for many, different things?
 +
 +==== Two responses ====
 +
 +<HTML>
 +<table style="border:1px">
 +<tr>
 +<td>
 +</HTML>
 +There is something that all people have in common.
 +<HTML>
 +</td>
 +<td>
 +</HTML>
 +People are different; there is nothing they have in common.
 +<HTML>
 +</td>
 +</tr>
 +<tr>
 +<td>
 +</HTML>
 +There is a single French language as an abstract system.
 +<HTML>
 +</td>
 +<td>
 +</HTML>
 +There are many ways of speaking, and some of these are similar enough to be mutually intelligible.
 +<HTML>
 +</td>
 +</tr>
 +<tr>
 +<td>
 +</HTML>
 +A modern society is a society based on individualism, voluntary choice, and rational rules for cooperation.
 +<HTML>
 +</td>
 +<td>
 +</HTML>
 +There is no such thing as modernity because no two societies are alike or have the same history.
 +<HTML>
 +</td>
 +</tr>
 +</table>
 +</HTML>
 +Neither of these are good choices. What to do?
 +
 +===== Solution 1: Things are what they are in essence; something is either one thing or another =====
 +
 +One solution would start from the assumption that things are what they are. Everything that is, has a single essence. A = A.
 +
 +A = { a<html><sub></html>1<html></sub></html>, a<html><sub></html>2<html></sub></html>, a<html><sub></html>3<html></sub></html>, a<html><sub></html>4<html></sub></html>, … a<html><sub></html>n<html></sub></html> }
 +
 +B = { b<html><sub></html>1<html></sub></html>, b<html><sub></html>2<html></sub></html>, b<html><sub></html>3<html></sub></html>, … b<html><sub></html>n<html></sub></html> }
 +
 +Everything is **either** a version of one thing **or** a version of another. The boundary is clear. A is not (A or B).
 +
 +===== Solution 2: Things contain multitudes; there is a unity of opposites within every thing =====
 +
 +Nothing has an essence. Everything is mixed. Everything is somewhere on a continuum, and different points on the continuum have **both** one side **and** the other.
 +
 +A….a…..a…..ab……ba…..b…….b…..B
 +
 +===== State and process =====
 +
 +Sahlins and Bashkow are examples of thinkers who seek to find the underlying unity and essence in the many examples of people’s lives within one community or situation.
 +
 +  * The idea of Orokaiva is more real than the diverse manifestations of Orokaiva in the material world.
 +  * Contemporary Orokaiva is different from the Orokaiva of the past, but we can still find an abstract system or logic at the level of ideas which is constant over time. 
 +
 +Wolf can be read as offering several alternatives.
 +
 +  * One possibility is that Wolf seeks order as well, but not in the form of culture as abstract system of thought. He might instead argue for a fundamental unity of global capitalism that appears in different versions in different places and times. In this view global capitalism “grind[s] the human fabric into the featureless uniformity of selenic erosion” (Polanyi 1947, 115).
 +  * Another possibility is that Wolf has no view of an underlying order, and that he really thinks that history is random chance, chaos, and disorder. (This seems unlikely though.)
 +
 +History can appear as though it has no direction, but I would argue that in historical processes we see **flux** and the **possibility** of new developments, not chaos
 +
 +===== Things change =====
 +
 +What would it mean to embrace the second solution, and to assume that A is both A and not-A.
 +
 +It would mean that everything in the world is always in flux, always changing, which is the view of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.
 +
 +  * “The way up is the way back” (Heraclitus 2001, 45).
 +  * You can’t cross the same river twice (see Heraclitus 2001, 27).
 +
 +Or, what about clouds? Do clouds have a single essence, or are they just dense collections of drops of water?
 +
 +Clouds are **both** countable entities **and** fuzzy collections. Clouds exist in flux.
 +
 +===== Contradictions lead to change =====
 +
 +The law of the dialectic is known even to people who know how to cook soup, or so says Marxist thinker Leon Trotsky (see Thatcher 1991, 134).
 +
 +  * Boil water. Add ingredients.
 +  * Add some salt. Mmmm… soup.
 +  * Add some more salt. Mmmmmmm…. soup.
 +  * Add some more salt. Mmmmmmm…. soup.
 +  * Add some more salt. Mmmmmmm…. soup. (Maybe a little salty.)
 +  * Add some more salt. Mmmmmmm…. soup. (Probably too salty but still edible soup.)
 +  * Add some more salt. 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
 +  * It’s not soup anymore. It’s undrinkable saltwater.
 +
 +The soup is the flux of salt and water. It is a union of drinkable and undrinkable water.
 +
 +Soup is always on the verge of becoming something else.
 +
 +Can we also say this about societies and cultures?
 +
 +===== A dialectic process is the working-out of contradictions =====
 +
 +A dialectic is a back-and-forth process over time. It is not a synchronic snapshot or a straight linear narrative with a single end.
 +
 +G. W. F. Hegel: Self-consciousness (an idea of one’s self) is a dialectic process.
 +
 +[Often this is described as a sequence of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but these are not Hegel’s words, and can be a distraction.]
 +
 +==== The dialectic of recognition between lord and servant ====
 +
 +  * I am me; everything else is something I can use for me.
 +  * Other people are just other objects in the environment for me to use.
 +  * When two people meet, they each treat the other as an object. A struggle ensues.
 +  * The incompleteness of their initial self-concepts can be changed into an new, unequal, asymmetric relationship.
 +    * One person is the master of the other.
 +    * The other person is the servant of the master, and depends on the master for its new understanding of itself.
 +  * This is an unstable relationship. One person’s self-image depends on denying another person a self-image.
 +    * If the lord kills the servant, then we’re back to square one.
 +    * If the servant kills the lord, then their self-concept as a free person now depends on killing other people.
 +  * The struggle for recognition between two people ultimately can and will resolve itself when the contadiction is **sublated**, or overcome, and both parties move to a new self-concept of themselves as equals.
 +  * A new kind of self-consciousness emerges: I am a person who is like others. A person is both a self (for me) and an other (for other people).
 +
 +===== Colonialism as dialectic =====
 +
 +  * The initial European conception of their colonial expansion is that it is simply the establishment of a new society in a new place.
 +  * But this produces a contradiction: A colonial settlement calls forth its opposite—A colonial settlement is not a native society.
 +  * Colonialism is the **both** the establishment of a new community **and** the displacement of an old community.
 +
 +The same dialectic is taking place for people who are subject to colonialism.
 +
 +  * To be Orokaiva is, on some level, to be not-//waitman//. Bashkow describes one moment in this struggle of recognition between Orokaiva and the (neo)colonial culture. What happens next?
 +  * Orokaiva people are Orokaiva, but in a changed context.
 +
 +===== Ethnicity, Inc.  =====
 +
 +  * Being San or a member of the Bafokeng kingdom is now defined by the community’s existence within a postcolonial, post-Apartheid nation-state.
 +  * Ethnic consciousness of oneself as San, Bafokeng, or another ethnic identity is associated with an overall shift to participation in and dependence on an economy based on private property.
 +    * To be San is to be a co-owner of “San traditional knowledge.”
 +  * People’s distinctive cultural differences are a basis for their collective identity as an ethnicity, but this identity is objectified as collective property.
  
 ===== References and further reading ===== ===== References and further reading =====
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 ———. 2009. “A Tale of Two Ethnicities.” In //Ethnicity, Inc.//, 86–116. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2009. “A Tale of Two Ethnicities.” In //Ethnicity, Inc.//, 86–116. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 +
 +
 +Heraclitus. 2001. //Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus//. Translated by Brooks Haxton. New York: Viking. http://archive.org/details/fragmentscollect00hera.
 +
 +
 +Polanyi, Karl. 1947. “Our Obsolete Market Mentality.” //Commentary//, February 1947. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-obsolete-market-mentality/.
 +
 +
 +Thatcher, Ian D. 1991. “Trotsky’s Dialectic.” //Studies in Soviet Thought// 41 (2): 127–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20100579.
  
  
  
2700/2021/5.1614310317.txt.gz · Last modified: 2021/02/25 19:31 by 127.0.0.1