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Ethnography and the Historical Imagination by Jean Comaroff; John ComaroffReview by: Jan VansinaThe International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (1993), pp. 417-420Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/219567 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 417 BOOK REVIEWS 417

caused application and teaching to become accented at the expense of research and experimentation, the focus of the profession in the distant past.

The last chapters show that when the occupying power transformed the language of teaching in the medical school into English, only Englishmen or English speakers were hired as professors of medicine. This transformed the school into an institution that catered to the elites (who learned English), and turned out elitist doctors who aspired to make money from private practice. That policy curtailed the number of medical school applicants, since only a small number of the population could speak English, so there were never enough doctors to serve the population. This served to encourage the immigration of foreign doctors at the expense of the local citizenry, who could neither afford nor understand them.

The book is well written and ably researched, making its points clearly and cogently. It is of value to historians, students of colonialism and imperialism, to social scientists, and to anyone interested in the process of social transformation and the making and unmaking of institutions.

AFAF LUTIFI ALSAYYID MARSOT(

University of California, Los Angeles

ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION. By John and Jean Comaroff. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992. Pp. 337. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

This book is intended as a textbook for students of historical anthropology. It con- sists of chapters on ten topics divided in three groups: Theory, Ethnography, Historiography; Dialectical Systems, Imaginative Sociologies; Colonialism and Modernity. With the exception of the first essay, the work consists of an anthology of articles written by the authors since 1982 in easily accessible journals. Two of these (Chapters 8 and 10) are actually appearing both here and elsewhere at the same time. All the essays, except for the first one, deal in substance with the Tshidi, a subgroup of Tswana near Mafiking (Mafeking).

The message of the book is implied in the use of the tell-tale expression "historical imagination"l in its title and spelled out in the first chapter. The notions

1 "Historical imagination" is the rallying cry of postmodernists, since Hayden White, the philosopher of history popularized it in his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London, 1973) and claimed that such imagination

caused application and teaching to become accented at the expense of research and experimentation, the focus of the profession in the distant past.

The last chapters show that when the occupying power transformed the language of teaching in the medical school into English, only Englishmen or English speakers were hired as professors of medicine. This transformed the school into an institution that catered to the elites (who learned English), and turned out elitist doctors who aspired to make money from private practice. That policy curtailed the number of medical school applicants, since only a small number of the population could speak English, so there were never enough doctors to serve the population. This served to encourage the immigration of foreign doctors at the expense of the local citizenry, who could neither afford nor understand them.

The book is well written and ably researched, making its points clearly and cogently. It is of value to historians, students of colonialism and imperialism, to social scientists, and to anyone interested in the process of social transformation and the making and unmaking of institutions.

AFAF LUTIFI ALSAYYID MARSOT(

University of California, Los Angeles

ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION. By John and Jean Comaroff. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992. Pp. 337. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

This book is intended as a textbook for students of historical anthropology. It con- sists of chapters on ten topics divided in three groups: Theory, Ethnography, Historiography; Dialectical Systems, Imaginative Sociologies; Colonialism and Modernity. With the exception of the first essay, the work consists of an anthology of articles written by the authors since 1982 in easily accessible journals. Two of these (Chapters 8 and 10) are actually appearing both here and elsewhere at the same time. All the essays, except for the first one, deal in substance with the Tshidi, a subgroup of Tswana near Mafiking (Mafeking).

The message of the book is implied in the use of the tell-tale expression "historical imagination"l in its title and spelled out in the first chapter. The notions

1 "Historical imagination" is the rallying cry of postmodernists, since Hayden White, the philosopher of history popularized it in his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London, 1973) and claimed that such imagination

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 18:49:19 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

418 BOOK REVIEWS

of "culture" and "ethnography" should not be discarded "in the age of deconstruc- tion and critical postmodernism" (p. ix). Historical anthropology is a discipline of its own, characterized by method rather than theory. That of course also is the hallmark of history. But the Comaroffs use the term "method" to stand for

"theoretically informed practice" (p. ix), which greatly differs from the common definitions.2 They go on to tell us that the ethnographic gaze allows one to give a "humanist" (what is humanist?) account of the past. Hence historiography must

rely on the tools of the ethnographer. But the ethnographer must be informed by the historical imagination, defined as "the imagination, that is, of both those who make history and who write it" (p. xi). What all this leads up to is to the necessity for anthropologists to do "ethnography in the archives" (p. 33).

How does this actually differ from the work of the garden variety of histori- ans? Superficially this book demonstrates that to understand and interpret present or past conditions in the Tshidi chiefdom one must be thoroughly conversant with local ethnography and history - and that these materials reflect the imagination of those who wrote, especially the missionaries of yore. True enough. A more atten- tive study, however, discloses disturbing elements. Missionaries are heard, but no Tswana voices from the past, writing in Setswana. or about the past are. And there is much hineininterpretierung-that is, the attribution of one's own interpretations, rather than those of the historical agents (or actors), to the phenomena observed. An example makes this clear. It concerns the "crazy" clothes of a mad prophet, including a sash with the letters S.A.R. (South African Railways) and standard miners' boots, whom the authors saw at the railway station. They puzzled to deci-

pher the message, especially the SAR (p. 155). They argue that the madman made visible essential portions of the particular historical conditions of postcolonial [sic!] South Africa: the SAR is a reminder of the railway, linking center and periphery, while the boots refer to the wage labor from which the madman was now free (pp. 173-74). But they did not ask the "madman" what these things meant, they did not ask other Tshidi, and they did not check various other, less theoretically laden, more plausible interpretations: could it be that perhaps most former miners wear boots because they have them and they are sturdy? Perhaps the employees of the South African Railways have a strong sense of community, as the miners and rail-

way personnel do in Shaba, for example, where a common life in a company's compounds, at work, and even in hospitals fostered such an esprit de corps; and

should not be fettered by evidence. The Comaroffs somehow miss this work but refer to R.G. Collingwood, The Historical Imagination: An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford 1935), who merely summarizes the results of earlier discussions about the role of the historian's imagination chief among which is W. Dilthey. Cf. H.P. Rickman, ed., Wilhelm Dilthey Pattern and Meaning in

History: Thoughts on History and Society (New York 1961 ), 43-50.

2 A. Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris, 1972), V, Methode, 623-25.

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BOOK REVIEWS 419

are SAR sashes used by the company? Whether such guesses will turn out to be right or not is not at issue here. What matters is that the authors just threw their own interpretation unto the situation and left it at that. Their interpretation is informed by their experience as white South Africans, their readings about South African history, their place in an intellectual coterie at Chicago,3 and their fondness for certain grand theories, but how believable is it then? How valid and at what level? Such a stance is bad ethnography. Indeed the poor quality of the ethnogra- phy is the overwhelming impression one derives from all of the essays. Living for months or years in a small community, genuine participant observation, and a truly informed knowledge of the language may be subjective illusions of hegemonic observers, as the critics of fieldwork argue, but inspired guessing is certainly worse.

There is also a great hubris here. Their note about the citation of sources betrays how innocent the Comaroffs are about historical techniques (p. xiv). Yet they act as if no historian had ever dealt with questions of evidence and subjectivity. They ignore over two centuries' worth of discussions about historical method (not even listed in the index) and about the development of a canon of evidence (also absent in the index), perhaps because these are supposedly ethnocentric construc- tions. But they are not. The rules of evidence consist in a body of logical proposi- tions. They are present, for instance, in Chinese historiography since the days of Szu Ma Chien (104-91 B.C.). The result is that much of what the Comaroffs discover is like reinventing a partial wheel. They have not even read major works about the history of mentalitis, which is their major concern.4 That type of history, like cultural history in general, has given rise for most of a century to an abundant literature pro and con, not just in France but perhaps even more in Germany. They might at least have cited J. Le Goffs state of the question (with a good bibliogra- phy) of 1974.5

How useful is this work, then? Certainly it should not become a textbook for undergraduates. Apart from the defects mentioned its tone is too dogmatic, at times arrogant, and its cute use of paradoxes, alliterations, and buzzwords often hides superficiality. This book is riddled with allusions to a cocktail of every major sociological and anthropological theory propounded since the days of functional- ism. Undergraduates, and even most graduates, will fail to pick up the cues. But the work may be of some use to historians who are firmly grounded in their craft

3 Bernard Cohn and Marshall Sahlins founded the postmoder (or "neomodern," p. ix) group of "historical anthropology" at Chicago (p. xi; p. 45) in the late 1970s. The group now also includes sociologists such as Wendy Griswold.

4 See, for example, 46 n. 14 for the derivative fashion in which they pick up "concepts." 5 J. LeGoff, "Les mentalites: une histoire ambigue," in J. Le Goff and P. Nora, eds., Faire de

l'histoire (Paris, 1974), 76-94.

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420 BOOK REVIEWS 420 BOOK REVIEWS

and curious to see how "fashionable" anthropologists from the Chicago school relate very general theories to concrete problems in social or cultural history.

JAN VANSINA

University of Wisconsin, Madison

PEASANTS, TRADERS, AND WIVES: SHONA WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF ZIMBABWE, 1870-1939. By Elizabeth Schmidt. Social History of Africa. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann Educational Books, Inc.; Harare: Baobab Books; and London: James Currey Ltd., 1992. Pp. xiv, 290; 3 maps, 16 photographs. $45.00 cloth; $22.95 paper.

Schmidt implicitly sets two tasks for her book in her opening sentence: "The failure of most historians to recognize the importance of household dynamics in the shap- ing of broader social structures and relations-and their general neglect of women's lives-does not simply mean that half the story is left untold" (p. 1). The first task, obviously, is to create a nuanced, gendered history of Zimbabwe that takes account of the impact of colonialism on women and men as families, that is the "other half of the story" that has been left "untold." The second and more subtle task is to show that there were many more forces at work on women and men- both African and white-than just "settler capital" and "peasant resistance" in Southern Rhodesia, as Schmidt calls this place and time. She handles both tasks elegantly and persuasively.

Schmidt argues that colonialism was characterized by the confluence of both the African and white patriarchal systems, and that these two systems coexisted through their mutual subordination of African women. The term subordination is important here: Schmidt demonstrates very precisely that while women could and did resist, their actions could correct individual injustices within the system, but not reform the system; on the other hand, if her act of resistance failed, it could bring physical harm and social humiliation on a woman. In other words, Schmidt shows that women were not completely dominated, but that women had very little space in which to maneuver and manipulate the power relations impinging on them.

Schmidt explores how this pattern of subordination was transformed as it interacted with colonialism. The new patterns that resulted devalued African women's work and denigrated their humanity, while at the same time providing the economic and philosophical underpinnings for white rule. When colonialism and settler capitalism changed the regional economy, Schmidt points out that women

and curious to see how "fashionable" anthropologists from the Chicago school relate very general theories to concrete problems in social or cultural history.

JAN VANSINA

University of Wisconsin, Madison

PEASANTS, TRADERS, AND WIVES: SHONA WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF ZIMBABWE, 1870-1939. By Elizabeth Schmidt. Social History of Africa. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann Educational Books, Inc.; Harare: Baobab Books; and London: James Currey Ltd., 1992. Pp. xiv, 290; 3 maps, 16 photographs. $45.00 cloth; $22.95 paper.

Schmidt implicitly sets two tasks for her book in her opening sentence: "The failure of most historians to recognize the importance of household dynamics in the shap- ing of broader social structures and relations-and their general neglect of women's lives-does not simply mean that half the story is left untold" (p. 1). The first task, obviously, is to create a nuanced, gendered history of Zimbabwe that takes account of the impact of colonialism on women and men as families, that is the "other half of the story" that has been left "untold." The second and more subtle task is to show that there were many more forces at work on women and men- both African and white-than just "settler capital" and "peasant resistance" in Southern Rhodesia, as Schmidt calls this place and time. She handles both tasks elegantly and persuasively.

Schmidt argues that colonialism was characterized by the confluence of both the African and white patriarchal systems, and that these two systems coexisted through their mutual subordination of African women. The term subordination is important here: Schmidt demonstrates very precisely that while women could and did resist, their actions could correct individual injustices within the system, but not reform the system; on the other hand, if her act of resistance failed, it could bring physical harm and social humiliation on a woman. In other words, Schmidt shows that women were not completely dominated, but that women had very little space in which to maneuver and manipulate the power relations impinging on them.

Schmidt explores how this pattern of subordination was transformed as it interacted with colonialism. The new patterns that resulted devalued African women's work and denigrated their humanity, while at the same time providing the economic and philosophical underpinnings for white rule. When colonialism and settler capitalism changed the regional economy, Schmidt points out that women

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 18:49:19 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions