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ABSTRACT
This paper revisits some of the writing of E.P. Thompson, a British historian held to have been influential in the development of social history in South Africa. Differently to debates that seek to establish the extent of his direct influence, the paper is concerned with the concepts Thompson used, and seeks to understand his theory and method for approaching historical transformation. The paper suggests that Thompson’s reception in South African studies has generally ignored his materialism and used his concepts empirically without reckoning with some of their broad theoretical arguments. The paper then shows how Thompson’s Marxian critique resonates with the historical anthropology of Jean and John Comaroff. Yet, the paper shows, this historical anthropology has been the object of attack by social history for its alleged failure to contextualise. The paper argues that what is at stake in this Africanist debate are two understandings of context that turn on the character of the empirical in research and the place of capitalism in contemporary studies of South Africa.
Acknowledgments
This paper was originally written for a conference on E.P. Thompson and African History, held at the University of Michigan in November 2015. It has changed somewhat in its rewriting, and a part of it was also presented at an Ethnography workshop at the University of the Western Cape in May 2019. For encouragement, comments and criticisms, I wish to thank Robert Blunt, Keith Breckenridge, Kelly Gillespie, Fernanda Pinto de Almeida, Neil Roos, and Stephen Sparks.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. Delius (Citation2017) considers Thompson as one among many influences on the writing of South African History since the 1970s, even in History Workshop circles. Delius acknowledges that “history from below” was a mantra but argues that this did not represent all members’ work. In a recent conversation, William Beinart echoed Delius, emphasising that it was not Thompson that motivated them: rather it was the possibility of writing the histories of African polities and societies in a manner that had simply been ignored by previous scholarship.
2. Postone (Citation1993) considers this the abstraction of time, and a central feature of domination in capitalism.
3. Thompson (Citation1978b, 261–262) makes this point forcefully in a paper published in the same year as Poverty of Theory. “What is radically wrong … is the employment of too narrow a category, “economic”.. [w]hat this emphasises is the simultaneity of expression of characteristic productive relations in all systems and areas of social life rather than any notion of the primacy (more “real”) of the economic, with the norms and cultures seen as some secondary reflection of the primary. What I am calling into question is not the centrality of the mode of production (and attendant questions of power and ownership) to any materialist understanding of history. I am calling in question – and Marxists, if they wish to have an honour dialogue with anthropologists, must call in question – the notion that it is possible to describe a mode of production in “economic” terms, leaving aside as secondary (less “real”) the norms, the culture, the critical concepts around which this mode of production is organised.’
4. Archie Majefe’s review article (Citation1981) responds even more explicitly to South African revisionist Marxism, calling for an anthropology able to recognise the mediation of global capitalism by African cultures, resonating with the position articulated by John Comaroff.
5. In the first volume, the Comaroffs offer a detailed discussion of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and its elaboration in South Africa, an endeavour that attempts to grasp the interaction between colonialism and capitalism.
6. Presented in block form for emphasis.
7. Sewell (Citation1990) has suggested that by not sufficiently explaining what he meant by experience, Thompson’s category suffers from ambiguity, at times seeming to carry structural forms and at others opposing them.
8. This definition of occult economy is taken from an introductory essay in a volume Jean and John Comaroff (2001) assembled and edited on “millennial capitalism.”
9. Compare this with Thompson’s (Citation1978a, 61) suggestion about historical categories, that the historical materialist needs to establish whether facts encountered are new or have changed form or meaning.
10. Blunt’s (Citation2013) consideration of witchcraft accusation in contemporary Kenya argues persuasively that Ranger’s demand for contextualisation is curiously ahistorical and locally bounded, and that his criticism of “lumping” misunderstands how witchcraft can be experienced precisely as an aggregation of a range of unbounded evil forces. That witchcraft is not containable by a local cultural context, Blunt argues, is a feature of classic anthropological accounts, even as its “aggregations” may take on a specific character in the present.
11. The Comaroffs’ more recent Ethnicity, Inc (Citation2009) draws on several South African cases to theorise how traditional culture is commodified, and indeed, how commodities are cultured, demonstrates this point about the difficulty of a spatially contained cultural phenomenon. To wit: you could not understand the branding of particular cultures by focusing exclusively on their village context, and without recognising patterns elsewhere, when you encountered this branding you consider it unique.
12. Calhoun (Citation1994) reconstructs Thompson’s procedure for contextualising: “Thompson suggested, the historian needed to understand his facts in close relationship to the rest of the cultural setting within which the fact was produced. This meant: (a) other apparent facts of the nearby settings, (b) the other aspects of the way of life of the people who produced the fact, and (c) the conditions of recording and preservation of the fact.”
13. In his second published engagement with anthropology, Thompson (Citation1978b, 264–265) makes clear that while he is seeking an engagement with Marxist anthropologists, in particular, he views class as a historical category, both economically and culturally produced, and thus potentially as having different social importance in different societies.
14. Delius mentions how in the 1970s, several historians were influenced by Marxist anthropology. Yet they became especially enamoured with pre-colonial history and this led them away from the “shark-infested Marxist-tinged waters of the Institute for Commonwealth Studies Seminar” (at SOAS), especially after they completed fieldwork and returned to find a confident group of Structural Marxists, who he experienced as treating “empirical research as secondary to developing and applying theory” (Delius Citation2017, 8–10).
15. Roos (Citation2016) also notes how the legacy of Thompsonian social history privileged particular subjects as worthy of study, with recording the histories of dominated black South Africans the focus of many studies. The Comaroffs’ early work is also distinct from social history in this respect.
16. Of course, this is not to say that other recent approaches to the writing of South Africa’s past have all equally excluded theory. Historians at the University of the Western Cape, including Patricia Hayes, Ciraj Rassool, Leslie Witz and Premesh Lalu, have at least since the late 1990s, developed a significant scholarship that engages poststructural and postcolonial approaches quite directly, not to mention a number of historians based at British and North American universities.
17. While anthropology cannot be accused of the same atheoreticism as social history, White (Citation2013) reviews anthropological traditions of the occult and religion, showing the long history of tensions between insisting on an ethnographic empiricism that records only what is observed and attempts to explain what socially lies behind the supernatural. He does point out how recent attempts to relate the occult to capitalism have also been met with a renewed commitment to empiricism by some Africanists, and suggests that it is possible to develop a “dialectical realism” that “focuses on the pragmatic links between different types of social interaction, including those with invisible beings, just as one would do with any articulation of interactions linking different spheres or scales of social organisation. Seen that way, what comes into view is a fact of much more general application, namely that the most intimate interpersonal ties depend in a very direct way on ties of a specifically impersonal nature: ones that link our actions to global society through the circulation of money” (White Citation2013, 143).
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Bernard Dubbeld
Bernard Dubbeld lectures in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University, where he teaches social theory. He has written about social grants, housing and the experience of political transformation after apartheid.