‘Critical Entanglements: Histories of Anthropology in Southern Africa’

In 1959, the Portuguese anthropologist Jorge Dias spent the academic year at Wits University as a Visiting Fellow with the Ernest Oppenheimer Institute of Portuguese Studies. Trained in the German tradition of Ethnology, Dias is commonly referred to as the ‘father’ of modern anthropology in Portugal. Indeed, in the 1950s, he was the lead investigator in what was perhaps the most ambitious project in ethnographic research in Portuguese Africa at the time, the Missão de Estudos das Minorias Étnicas do Ultramar Português (Mission for the Study of Ethnic Minorities in the Portuguese Overseas Territories).¹ Between 1956 and 1961, Dias and his wife – the German amateur ethnographer Margot Dias – carried out fieldwork in northern Mozambique, with research visits to Tanzania, South Africa, Namibia and Angola. It was within the context of this project that Dias stayed at Wits, having delivered a series of lectures to the local scholarly community, later edited in a book.²

Many decades later, the Mozambique-born and Lisbon-based artist Ângela Ferreira completed her installation A Tendency to Forget (Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, 2015).³ Ferreira’s work invited the viewer to physically and intellectually enter the contested terrain of colonial anthropology. A wooden sculpture reproduced the façade of the Ministry of Overseas Territories, the institution attempting to rule Portuguese Africa from Lisbon. Inside the structure, which the viewer could enter by a flight of stairs, a video-essay, playing on a loop, intercalated footage from settler urban life in colonial Lourenço Marques (Maputo) with ethnographic film collected by the Diases. On these images, Ferreira superimposed the voice of the anthropologists, in the form of spoken fragments of field diaries and reports written during and after the missions.⁴ The installation invited the viewer to inhabit and to delve into the interstices of colonialism itself. It challenged a certain ‘tendency to forget’ the making of anthropology with and within the colonial encounter, while also inviting the audience to revaluate the memories and legacies of this persistent and troubled past. The video-essay was shown in South Africa on two occasions: at the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town and as part of Ferreira’s solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, titled South Facing, both in 2017.

Surely, to observe that anthropology was complicit in the colonial venture – whatever that means – has become perhaps a trivial exercise, or a tired critique. After all, nearly half a century has passed since the publication of Talal Asad’s influential book, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, in 1973.⁵ Often regarded as field-defining by those working in the history of the discipline, the volume was a timely attempt to critically interrogate the multiple imbrications between anthropological practice and the unequal power encounter of the ‘colonial field’. Since Asad’s intervention, a substantial amount of work has been done to both expand and complicate a research agenda on the histories of anthropology, taken differently as a scientific discipline, as an epistemic project or as a social practice in various colonial landscapes.⁶

Besides the renewed academic critique we have been seeing in the last two decades, what Ferreira’s work brings to the fore is the creative and subversive powers of the arts in performing a critical incision in what would otherwise be the stuff of the disciplines, of history and anthropology themselves. Her research-based artistic practice points to the critical possibilities of pursuing a consistent dialogue between intellectual, political, artistic and curatorial agendas. Surely, Ferreira’s installation is one example of how an interdisciplinary lens may work to alert us to the critical entanglements between colonial histories, the ethnographic archive and the transformative abilities of artistic or curatorial ways of re-reading and re-assembling the past. In that, she is not alone, and other artists have also been productively interrogating the archive and the ethnographic collection creatively and subversively, through research-based artistic practices.⁷ In a similar manner, historians and anthropologists have been in dialogue with interdisciplinary and critical types of scholarship that have both engaged and subverted some of the more stable notions of historical research, of the archive, of collections and museums, or even of what the very ‘object’ of these disciplines is.⁸

Drawing on this historical scholarship and related debates around public culture, the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) at Wits University hosted the Workshop ‘Critical Entanglements: Colonialism, Anthropology, and the Visual Arts’, on 10–11 May 2019, at the Wits Anthropology Museum. The workshop symbolically marked the 60 years since Dias’ visiting fellowship at the Institute of Portuguese Studies, and was organised in connection with the multi-media installation ‘Ethnographically Intimate: Images from the Colonial Field’, which delves into the politics of knowledge and intimacy underlying his research missions in southern Africa and is part of the feature on colonial anthropology in this issue of the journal. The workshop put historians and anthropologists in conversation with artists and curators. While Jorge Dias and his stay in Johannesburg were taken as a port of entry into the ‘forgotten’ linkages between political and intellectual settler colonial projects in southern Africa – between Portuguese colonialism and South African apartheid – the goal of the event was to encourage a reflexive debate on the possibilities of new mappings and genealogies of anthropological knowledge in the region, paying particular attention to the circulations of researchers and artefacts, of theories and texts. As a collective, participants were interested not only in the historical conjuncture of the colonial context, of past anthropological research in its circulations across borders in southern Africa, but also in the multiple moments of reading and reassemblage of theories, objects and memories across time in the postcolonial period.

Circulations, transnationalism and entanglements have become increasingly powerful lenses with which to approach the history of anthropology, a discipline shaped by the colonial situation, but also by the internationalisation of social science research amidst periods of decolonisation and globalisation. From this perspective, already in the early 1990s, historian George Stocking argued that the grand narrative of the complicity between colonialism and professional anthropology had to be recalibrated through a more nuanced, historically contextualised and empirically orientated (that is, archivally grounded) research practice, thus making room for specificity across a variety of ‘colonial situations’.⁹ By the same token, in the late 1990s, Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink noted that most of the history of the discipline had been so far located in a specific time and space (Africa under late British colonialism) and written around a specific actor (the professionally trained anthropologist).¹⁰ Over the last few decades, various studies have explored non-English speaking academic cultures, and the role of ‘amateur scholars’ and ‘informants’ in the making of colonial knowledge.¹¹ At the same time, scholars have been increasingly interested in comparative and transnational research focusing on the circuits of knowledge by which social scientists – professionally trained or not – interacted with a range of actors, in a variety of geographical and institutional spaces.¹²

Entanglement is a particularly appropriate concept here. In historical scholarship, the notion of ‘entangled histories’ has been used as an alternative to conventional comparison, to indicate a renewed interest in ‘processes of mutual influencing, in reciprocal or asymmetric perceptions, [and] in entangled processes of constituting one another’.¹³ As Shalini Randeria has argued, this analytical shift challenges not only historical narratives bounded by a narrow national frame, but also the underlying Eurocentrism of social science research, by opening up paths of inquiry into ‘maps of social connectedness’ that do not necessarily reproduce the metropole-colony hierarchy.¹⁴ More recently, Sarah Nuttall’s Entanglement brought the term to the core of her literary and cultural analysis of post-apartheid South Africa. With her fascinating exploration of different materials and scales, Nuttall makes a compelling case for the creative and critical potential of the concept. Here, entanglement

may gesture towards a relationship or set of social relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle, but which also implies a human foldedness. It works with difference and sameness but also with their limits, their predicaments, their moments of complication.¹⁵

This special section of this issue of the journal intends precisely to capture various ‘moments of complication’ in the fraught history of anthropology in southern Africa. Anjuli Webster’s piece embraces circulation as an analytical frame, to foreground the influential role of transatlantic connections in the making of ‘race relations’ scholarship in twentieth-century South Africa. Building on the work of scholars such as Tiffany Willoughby-Herard,¹⁶ Webster’s piece emphasises the role of philanthropic actors and Western funders in shaping research agendas and intellectual priorities. João Figueiredo’s article, in a similar manner, demonstrates that capitalist ambitions and mining interests were the driving force moving ethnographic research and fieldwork in northern Angola. By looking at the role of the mining company Diamang as a sponsor of the discipline in the country, Figueiredo calls for a closer examination of the epistemic and political entanglements between anthropology, mining and geology. Rob Gordon’s article delves into the fascinating, and understudied, history of the role of experts, and of ethnologists specifically, in setting up a military camp for a Bushmen Battalion in Omega, in South African-occupied Namibia. Gordon’s critical analysis of the epistemic and political practices underlying the uses of ‘expert knowledge’ in Omega points to the critical entanglements between knowledge regimes and political violence in the context of armed struggle. Raquel Schefer’s article looks at a complicated history of anthropological mobilisation in revolutionary cinema in the aftermath of Angolan independence. By following the history of Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s film Nelisita (1982), Schefer explores the shifting boundaries between art (cinema) and science (anthropology) in a historical moment of social and political change marked by post-colonial aspirations and nation-building.

Each of the four research articles in this special section, as well as the exhibition feature, explores a particular dimension of the critical entanglements tying anthropology and colonialism in complicated ways, from philanthropic associations to mining companies, from military experts to revolutionary cinema. By looking at circulation across political borders and linguistic geographies, and between academic spaces and non-academic agendas, this special section hopes to encourage further comparative and transnational research around Portuguese and English-speaking Southern Africa.

Also included in this issue of the journal is an obituary for our colleague Rui Matheus Pereira. For those working on the history of the discipline in Portuguese Africa, he will need no introduction. His PhD thesis was perhaps the most detailed account of the historical formation of anthropology as a discipline, and as a colonial regime of knowledge, in Mozambique. Near the end of his life, he became increasingly interested and active in ongoing debates on the decolonisation of anthropology and its material cultures.¹⁷ Because it is mostly available in Portuguese , his work will be unknown to many in South Africa. We hope this note will spark some interest.

Acknowledgements

I thank the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) at Wits University and the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS) for their financial support for the workshop from which this special section originated. I also thank George Mahashe for hosting the event in the Wits Anthropology Museum. Thanks to Ângela Ferreira for allowing us to use images of her work. Special thanks to authors, reviewers and editors who had to finalise these articles during the COVID-19 pandemic, at times under strenuous circumstances. Special thanks to Arianna Lissoni for all her work, her patience and her attention to detail.

Notes

1 For more on Dias and this Research Mission, see the exhibition feature in this special section.

2 J. Dias, Portuguese Contribution to Cultural Anthropology (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1961).

3 The Project received the Premio NOVO Banco in 2015, one of the most prestigious art awards for artists from Portuguese-language countries. For more information, see https://angelaferreira.info/?p=249, accessed 29 October 2020.

4 A slightly modified version of this video-essay, titled Adventures in Mozambique and the Portuguese Tendency to Forget (2016), is available at http://loop-barcelona.com/videocloop/video/angela-ferreira/, accessed 29 October 2020.

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

5 T. Asad, Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973).

6 G. Stocking, Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); P. Pels and O. Salemink, Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

7 F. Siegenthaler, ‘Towards an Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art Scholarship’, Critical Arts, 27, 6 (2013), 737–752. K. Rutten, A. Dienderen, and R. Soetaert, ‘Revisiting the Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art’, Critical Arts, 27, 5 (2013), 459–473. See both issues 5 and 6 of Critical Arts, 2013, for more articles around these topics.

8 C. Hamilton and P. Skotnes, Uncertain Curature: In and Out of the Archive (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2014); C. Hamilton, V. Harris, J. Taylor, M. Pickover, G. Reid and R. Saleh, Refiguring the Archive (Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002); C. Hamilton and N. Leibhammer, Tribing and Untribing the Archive, vols. 1 and 2 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2017); M. Legassick and C. Rassool, Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African Museums and the Trade in Human Remains, 1907–1917 (Cape Town: South African Museum, 2000); I. Karp, C. Kratz, G. Buntinx, L. Szwaja, T. Ybarra-Frausto, B. Krishenblatt-Gimblett, C. Rassool, Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006).

9 G. Stocking, Colonial Situations.

10 P. Pels and O. Salemink, Colonial Subject, 6–8.

11 I cannot possibly do justice to this scholarship. On Portuguese, French, and German colonial anthropology, see R. M. Pereira, ‘Conhecer para Dominar: O Desenvolvimento do Conhecimento Antropológico na Política Colonial Portuguesa em Moçambique, 1926–1959’ (PhD thesis, NOVA University Lisbon, 2005). L. Tai, L’anthropologie française entre sciences colonials et décolonisation (1880–1960) (Paris: Publications de la Societé fraçaise d’histoire d’outre-mer, 2010); G. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Hanwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingado, Samoa and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). On informants, see S. P. Lekgoathi, ‘ “Colonial Experts”, Local Interlocutors, Informants and the Making of an Archive on the “Transvaal Ndebele”, 1930–1989’, The Journal of African History, 50, 1 (2009), 61–80; L. Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001).

12 F. Cooper, ‘Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences in the Era of Decolonization: The Examples of British and French Africa’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 10, 1 (2004), 9–38.

13 J. Kocka, ‘Comparison and Beyond’, History and Theory, 4, 1 (2003), 42.

14 S. Randeria, ‘Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in Post-colonial India’, in Y. Elkana, I. Krastev, E. Macamo, and S. Randeria, eds, Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness (Frankfurt: Campus, 2002), 284–311.

15 S. Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections in Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009), 1.

16 T. Willoughby-Herard, Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).

17 In 2019, he coordinated, with Vera Marques Alves, a panel on ‘Decolonizing the Museum: New Challenges and Practices in Anthropological Museology’, for the 7^th Congress of the Portuguese Anthropological Association (Lisbon, 4–7 June 2019).