The Golden Bough, Once Again

by Geoffrey Clarfield (October 2011)

Yesterday I drove to the nearby mission hospital, an island of modern medicine in a sea of rural underdevelopment, in this unusually peaceful African country, in order to see if I still had malarial parasites in my blood. We drove through the surreal expanses of the mechanized farms, a donor driven, and so far successful project producing much food for an expanding population.

Everywhere we went we saw people walking in the same direction as we were driving, peasants well wrapped in Swahili style kangas and traditional pastoralists of the Nilotic cultures that over the millennia had spread from the Sudan and across the Great Lakes region, men almost naked, with just a blanket thrown around them, a spear and club in one hand and with a look that they had not been in water for days.

My housekeeper, a non literate, town-based woman in her late thirties who was also on her way to the clinic said that these traditional pastoralists have not yet adopted the habit of washing with water. She told me that they take a mixture of mud and animal fat, sometimes mixed with the urine of a cow and smear their body with the substance. Over time, it comes off and it is assumed that the person in question feels better for it.

Most of the people were on foot. The old land rovers, filled to the gills with people and produce, are going to a nearby town, beside a fresh water lake, which we could see from the road where the following day there was to be the monthly fair. This is where people from miles around, as well as traders of various sorts, set up their stalls and trade produce for manufactured goods, an ideal and logical place to find the indigenous entrepreneurs. They are slowly transforming the preindustrial African rural economy and by doing so, changing the mores of the tribes around them as more and more children are being sent to school, abandoning time honored tribal customs and joining the cash based economy.

With cash comes greater individualism and with greater individualism comes a desire for political participation, what we in the West call democracy. In Africa it is emerging, but the process is and continues to be non-linear.

On the way back from the hospital we stopped beside a house and walked down the path to a lake. It had that crater like feeling. There was a sudden and then steady descent from the road to the water, which was thick with trees, and vegetation, which surrounded the lake like an enormous green tiara of foliage. Within a few minutes it began to rain and sheer sheets of droplets moved from one side of the lake to another. There was no other noise.

My housekeeper told me that until recently this was an area where only the pastoral peoples of Nilotic descent had once lived. She said that in the past, this tribe thought of all other people as enemies to be killed. She said that it was common for them to accost an unknown enemy, kill him or her, cut off parts of the body and throw the rest into this quiet, placid lake. She then explained that some cut off parts were dried and then shown to other tribesmen as trophies. She quietly added that the custom is dying out since the territory has been settled by other tribes from various parts of the surrounding countryside, as the National authorities had lifted the ban of the previous colonial regime that restricted ethnic groups from settling in the territory of other tribes.

After hearing this I thought of the essays of Jared Diamond. Diamond is a controversial Darwinian thinker whose vision of preindustrial society is somewhat different from the mainstream cultural relativism of so many anthropologists. He writes that:

Since WWII anthropological fieldwork in developing countries has become more and more difficult to do as the newly westernized and modernized elites of developing nations have set up bureaucratic obstacles whereby foreign researchers must get research clearance to study whoever and whatever topic they are proposing. On many occasions graduate students who have passed their exams, raised funds and are ready to roll have been refused this clearance at the last minute.

At the same time these same researchers (the ones who got their clearance and did their work) also practice a form of self-censorship. If they report practices or behaviour which offends the often public version of Victorian values (rarely followed in private) of these new elites, that is, if their picture of a society contradicts the public image of the national authority they will never be allowed back into the country. So, they give us a prettified picture of daily life overseas.

Of course researchers factor out so much of the corruption, violence, the retreat from universal standards and an almost phobic treatment of outsiders, especially researchers that is often the baggage of a ruling autocracy.

It is common for visiting researchers in developing countries to identify strongly with the people that they have come to live among. It is even easier if this experience is lived out within two related but contradictory ideologies, one stemming from Rousseau and one stemming from Marx.

That which stems from Rousseau assumes that preindustrial men (and sometimes women) are better off in their traditional societies away from the organized violence and inequality of modernity. Thus indigenous becomes morally superior. (Oddly enough there is some truth to this as we see with the widely celebrated Paleo Diet!) Once I met a colleague for dinner, a British ethnographer who spent many years among a relatively peaceful group of East African hunter-gatherers. He believes that they have a message of equality that should be shared with the rest of the world.

This a marvelous platform from which intellectuals in colleges and universities (and particularly departments of anthropology) can come to the developing world and blame their funders. There is no accountability and they come and go according to the funding sources that support them. As African and third world countries have not quite yet given up on Marxist ideologies, there is no hint of regret or accountability in the social sciences as to their almost complete support of authoritarian socialism during the ninety sixties until the fall of the Berlin Wall, from these liberal bastions of the western democratic world.

Indeed the doctoral thesis of the head of the Khmer Rouge was produced at the Sorbonne and was followed to the letter in the killing fields of that tragic nation. There are many worthwhile studies which show the relationship between Nazi ideology and German intellectual decline in the nineteen thirties to the actions of the Holocaust, but so far as I know, there has yet to be committee of inquiry set up at the Sorbonne by former professors whose consciences should be active. I believe Foucault was silent on this one and he wrote so many, many words.

So in order to find out what is happening in those parts of the developing world where I do not have first hand sources of information I have mixed social science with historical studies and a judicious mix of investigative journalism. It is almost as if the journalist and social scientists are living in two different worlds. The journalist describes, albeit anecdotally, massive environmental destruction, populating growth, the aids pandemic, corruption and migration while the social scientists confine themselves to context less works with limited foci and which often ignore history.

One marvelous doctoral thesis by a colleague describes in great detail the contemporary pastoral economy of one nomadic tribe without mentioning that this tribe is continuously suffering losses from the raids of a more powerful tribe to its east, and which during the last thirty years has taken over thirty per cent of its territory through a combination of raids and migration.

The tragedy of the commons is a theory put forward by the writer Garret Hardin. Simply put, Hardin argues that each pastoral nomad acting rationally will put as many animals on the range as he can. Since all do the same thing the range is destroyed by the collective actions of rationally acting individuals, a bit like a traffic jam in downtown New York. No one planned the jam but each commuter planned a rational route for his car to get to work.

These researchers show that traditional pastoralists have a series of customs, which limit access to the range, and they argue persuasively that the manner and style with which this tribe manages its range has kept them out of the refugee camps during the last major drought.

There is only one caveat or logical fallacy here and once again it is missed in the ahistorical worldview of much social science. The tribe in question went from a mere 25,000 people in 1925 to 350,0000 in1995. I imagine that despite the ongoing drought they now number more than 400.000 And, they have expanded their territory by many fold during those few decades by pushing out other tribesmen.

Once when I was hired to train a group of indigenous ethnographers for a cultural documentation project, the day before I left for my post there was an article in the national papers that said something like, all researchers in district x are suspected spies. I saw the article, became very anxious and went to my boss. I asked him to call the appropriate authorities to explain to them that I had had clearance at the highest level of authority. Soon afterward I was under investigation by rogue elements of the local secret service who were accusing me of being a spy for the CIA without having been ordered to do so by their superiors in the capital.

If one reads the reports of journalists who have covered Africa there is a curious family resemblance between the material that they uncover and that of 19th century explorers, travelers and missionaries, the kind of sources that gave Frazer his facts and that until this day are looked upon with skepticism by many social and cultural anthropologists.

It was the great British anthropologist Arthur Edwin Evans Pritchard who wrote an article arguing that the divine kingdom of the Shilluk, a kind of ancient Egyptian style pagan kingdom of the Sudan, did not really kill and bury their king while he was alive but showing signs of infirmity. They only in essence created a discourse to that effect. Despite the fact that the most eminent American anthropologist and Africanist of the day wrote an essay demonstrating that the Shilluk probably did kill their kings, and that we should believe them when they tell us, it went against the climate of opinion.

The power of the preindustrial, the attitudes, beliefs and world view, so well described in the now discredited writings of Frazer are clearly seen even in those areas of West Africa which have been thought to have been most westernized. Consider the case of General ButtNaked:

It is 1982 and as day breaks in Liberia, the Krahn tribe prepares for the initiation of its high priest. Against the sound of the drumbeat, he is taken to an isolated area, led by a man in a carved black mask. The priest stands before an altar, naked. The elders bring a little girl, unclothe her and smear her body with clay. The priest slays the child.

In a ritual that spans three days, her heart and other body parts are removed and eaten. In the course of those days the priest has a vision: he meets the devil who tells him he will become a great warrior. The devil says to increase his power he must continue the rituals of child sacrifice and cannibalism.

One is tempted to dismiss much of the violence in the third world as the result of environmental degradation, the destabilizing power of multinationals, uncontrollable population growth but, it would appear that the dynamics of divine kingship are facts that need to be reintroduced in to the discourse on violence and authority in the third world.

Likewise liberal anthropologists have argued that the incidence of cannibalism in the non-industrial world has been exaggerated in the extreme. They argue that no anthropologist has witnessed one case and that it is common for neighboring ethnic groups to stereotypically demonize each other as cannibals and head hunters. The recent experience of the Pygmies of the Congo shows that this is most definitely not the case. They have been hunted, raped, enslaved and eaten. The newspapers are full of eye witness reports.

Modern fieldwork among traditional peoples in Africa has allowed us to fine tune Frazer for it is clear that most shamans, sorcerers and conscious practitioners of witchcraft and sorcery believe that it does work. They are not charlatans but that is not the point.

As I stared out over the lake where the Barabaig used to sacrifice the body parts of their enemies, I realized that Frazer was and is close to the truth. Sixty years of civil war in Africa at least should have provided us with enough material to compare to some of the most obscure, gruesome and curious phenomena reported in the Golden Bough. Brave African journalists are writing about it all the time and it is covered in the local, national and regional newspapers of the sub continent.

If European Nazis could burn innocent children, based on a pseudo scientific theory no better and quite worse than sub Saharan witchcraft practices, certainly African tribesmen could murder their dying kings. And, if African intellectuals and foreign scholars of things Africans want a better future for that conflicted continent, we avoid reading the Golden Bough at our own peril.

Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at large.

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