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Review: Anthropologists and the Third DimensionAuthor(s): J. VansinaReviewed work(s): La Vie quotidienne au royaume de Kongo du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Daily Lifein the Kingdom of the Kongo from the 16th to the 18th Century) by G. Balandier ; H.WeaverSource: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 39, No. 1, (Jan., 1969), pp.62-68Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1157950Accessed: 06/05/2008 17:46

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ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND THE THIRD DIMENSION'

J. VANSINA

CAN an anthropologist work with evidence supplied by historical sources? Or rather, can he deal with sources written by foreigners to a culture, data so

obviously different from his usual reliance on his own participant observation ? The

question becomes more relevant each day as more historical data are becoming available about African and Asian societies. In addition trends in theoretical anthro-

pology require more and more diachronic evidence to test or refine existing structural or functional theories.

The case of the kingdom of Kongo, part of the ethnic group with the same name south of the lower river Congo, is privileged in this respect. For a century historians have been uncovering and publishing texts of all sorts so that, not only are the major events in the area known since 1482, but a great wealth of documentation in the form of' relations' and letters, including even some by Kongo kings, has come to light. It covers the late sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth centuries. If, then, it is

possible, and it ought to be, to reconstruct the workings of a society from this sort of documentation, this case, in Africa at least, is ideal to test it. Professor Balandier's work was therefore looked forward to with eagerness.

He proposed to interpret the old evidence by 'our present sociological know-

ledge' and vice versa. His aim was to give a picture of Kongo between I 5 oo and about 1700 and his book falls into three parts. The first gives a political history of the king- dom to I665, the second deals with institutions and structures, the third with ideo-

logies. In the second part (' To forge Kongo') sections deal in turn with material culture and economics, cities, the daily round, social and political structure. The part on economics includes rather oddly a description of war and in the next section villages are curiously neglected by our urban sociologist. The round of days groups observations on counting time, feeding, clothing, love (why here?), and etiquette. In the last part the sections are devoted to initiation and magic (' les savoirs '), art (literature and sculpture), and religion.

Despite the flourish and the polish, the work is a total flop, because the author did not delineate the object of his study carefully enough and because his handling of sources has been very defective. And since both these flaws are very common and the kinds of error the historical method is designed to cope with, it is worth consider- ing them in some detail. The failure makes apparent what anthropologists must know, if they use historical sources. In history, as in all other disciplines, one starts out with a problem, not merely with a collection of archives. With the data available here it was possible to write either a synchronic study and analyse Kongo society at a point in time, or to discover and interpret changes. For a synchronic analysis the first serious problem was to define the ethnographic present, something most anthro- pologists, including myself, have been disinclined to do in the past. Obviously ideal

I Review of La Vie quotidienne au royaume de the Kingdom of the Kongofrom the i6th to the 8th Century, Kongo du XVIe au XVIIIe siecle, by G. Balandier, London: Allen & Unwin, I967, pp. 288. Paris, I965, pp. 286. Tr. H. Weaver, Daily Life in

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND THE THIRD DIMENSION

synchrony would be to limit the study to a moment in time, e.g. 25 November 1662.

Equally obviously this is impossible with the documentation at hand. What unit of time can be adopted ? In effect Balandier took a unit of 200 years which is far too long. For practical purposes it seems that the longest defensible unit would be the length of a generation, twenty years or so, and a period in which no drastic institutional changes took place. Such a period for Kongo might have been 1640-60, for instance. There is plenty of documentation, it falls almost all under the reign of one king, Garcia II, and the data are well distributed geographically. Even so a synchronic analysis would run into some difficulties. On some points extrapolation would have to be made from earlier or later documents, attention would have to be paid to the spatial unit of study (the whole state, a ' tribe', a ' region ', a 'village '?) but the sharpness of focus in the concept of a synchronic study would have most usefully raised the question of what the documentation could and could not yield. More- over, a coherent account would have emerged and an analysis of Kongo in the period chosen could have become as useful a monograph as one written about a more recent society. Instead, we are told off-hand (p. 8)' that there are ' observations garanties ' (material culture and routine activities) and ' observations moins garan- ties' (odd behaviour, barbarous customs, superstitions, all as defined by foreign observers). Any historian will recoil from such an arbitrary blanket classification.

As a result of neglecting the questions raised here, Balandier has committed some astonishing errors. He omits to tell us anything at all about power relations in politics, or about the precise territorial structure of the kingdom at a chosen moment. Even worse, he leaves the Portuguese and the missions completely out of the picture when he handles the political structure, even though both were involved not only in poli- tics, but were represented in the structure by a Councillor and a Father Confessor, at least in the seventeenth century. For a major proponent of lefait colonial, who has argued quite rightly that one cannot and should never make abstraction from the colonial situation when describing cultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this is unexpected. In his discussion of economics he does not appreciate that the existence of multiple currencies requires an explanation, or notice the institutions of staples, brokerage, caravan organization, credit, etc., and he scarcely touches on the topic of the market-place for which there is ample evidence. In the realm of social structure the emergence of a special class of infantes goes by unnoticed, no attempt is made to discuss pawnship of pregnant females by the king and the analysis is so superficial that the term ' lineage ' is used on p. 43 to refer to the sum of sons, nephews, brothers, and the children of servants! In short, by neglecting to ask questions about the integration of society at a given time, a good many of the available data were passed over and the significance of many more was not realized.

A second option would have been to pursue an analysis of changes in the society over time to show how and why institutions were modified through time. This could have been complementary to a synchronic analysis, or several of these. Or it could have taken the form of a history of institutions. For Kongo there is detailed evidence of some power-struggles and how these affected the structures. The establishment of' gates 'in the successoral system is one. The emergence of Soyo as an independent province after 1636 (adumbrated since I49I) while retaining its formalized influence

All references are to the French edition.

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64 ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND THE THIRD DIMENSION on Kongo is all discoverable in the data. The institutionalization of Portuguese power, first inside the factions, later in positions at court can similarly be traced. Change in economic structures as Kongo moved to long distance and to overseas trade can be documented. Then there is another type of change: the gradual shift in emphasis or style. This is evident in art, but also in religion. Here it is not only a matter of gauging the effects of Christianity, but also of assessing subtle differences in the relative importance as causal factors of charms v. ancestors v. other beliefs. For instance, Balandier dismisses a 5 83 report that the sun and the moon were spirits by saying that this is now merely a part of Kongo dualism. But the same was said about the Tio and older Tio remember that the sun was considered to be a spirit. This also applies to the Kuba (Bushong), who even remember the names of the seven spirits which made up the sun. By denying the possibility of change on the one hand and handling all data on religion as 'non-guaranteed sources ' Balandier has effectively cut himself off from investigating it.

The absence of a systematic focus on diachronic problems has led to superficiality. The most dramatic change in the kingdom was its disintegration after I665. Little is said about the internal factors which contributed to this: the rise of the infantes (possible successors) class, the harsher taxation which led already under Garcia II (1641-60) to peasant uprisings, the bare fact that the disintegration amounted to a mutation, a restructuring of society. Even the growth of some territorial units at the expense of others (e.g. Mosul, Soyo, China), usually as a result of trade, is barely hinted at. When discussing the Christianization of the state under Affonso I, the problem of how the kingship was able to switch its basis of authority from traditional ideology to Christianity is not brought into clear focus. As a result important clues are missed. These show, for example, that Affonso I had to destroy the state charms and expected an uprising as a result.

In fact the vagueness of Balandier's stated aim: 'I s'efforce de reconstituer l'image d'une societe et d'une civilisation congolaises autrefois prestigieuses, de montrer ce qu'etait en ce cocur de l'Afrique, la condition humaine, de retrouver les effets des contacts entre civilisations que l'esprit de decouverte mit soudain en rapport,' (p. io) is responsible for the results. Colourful language such as 'Kongo, malgre la restauration tentee sous le regne de Pedro IV, derive deja sur l'ocean des histoires abolies ' (p. 67) is a poor substitute for analysis.

The second major reason for failure is the author's attitude towards his sources. He has used secondary sources and some of the published primary evidence, but he has missed much of the latter. Had he been working on a limited time-period, no doubt he would have spent more energy on discovering and studying this. As it is, what is most obviously lacking is a thorough reading of Brasio's Monumenta Mis- sionaria Africana (x+iii vols., 1952-64) and perusal of the dictionary compiled in

65 3 (ed. J. VAN WING, C. PENDERS, Le plus ancien dictionnaire bantu. Louvain, I928). For Balandier relies heavily on the usage of Kongo words and cites many of them. Obviously he should have related terminology closely to its time. Failure to do this results in confusion. Thus in his discussion of the concepts of time he says that there is only one Kongo word, ntangu. But the I653 source gives both ntangwa and ntazi. Again he explains the name nsona used as a boy's name by reference to the charm nsona mpungu (the strongest nsona) (p. 227) whereas in I653 nsona meant: 'a small

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND THE THIRD DIMENSION

boy, an orphan' and was a common name! That these are not trifles, comes out especially in the discussion of religious concepts, for instance on the central notion of nkisi (charm) both the dictionary definition and the careful explanation of Dapper have been missed. It is pointless to multiply the examples of what could have been done, if the relevant sources had been fully used, and sufficient to state that the most serious defects arise in the description of food, villages, and religion.

The historical critique used to evaluate the evidence is of the simplest. In fact all sources have been more or less lumped together with the exception of Lorenzo da Lucca who was found to be a good describer of material culture. No account has been taken of the fact that Bras Correa had been brought up in Kongo, that Cavazzi was only a compiler and never went there, that Bishop Manuel Baptista wrote unfavour- able reports because he hoped to be stationed in Luanda, or that de Gallo spoke Kongo fluently and others did not. At one place we are told that when Lopes- Pigafetta describes the array of the army, he describes it correctly (p. 114) but on the same topic the source must be wrong (p. 118). What is the basis of these evalua- tions ? The attitude towards Affonso I's letters, truly a difficult problem of criticism, is very inconsistent. Balandier claims that they seem badly translated from Kikongo (p. 42) without offering evidence, yet elsewhere he uses them when it seems con- venient, leaving the caveat aside. And his treatment of recorded oral traditions is even more rudimentary. He fails to note (pp. 38, 27I, n. I4) that the story of how Affonso I murdered his own pagan mother appears only a century after the alleged occurrence and includes a cliche of oral literature (people falling through a mat under which a hole has been dug). It attests more to the way people thought about Affonso I around I65o as a culture hero, than to what actually happened under Affonso's own reign around I506. Similarly, the failure to understand that Kongo tradition and ritual stresses the symbolic equality of smith and king, rather than a historical statement that the first king was a smith, leads to the assumption (pp. 23, 97) that the Kongo learned smithing only from their first king, possibly in the fourteenth century A.D. !

There remains the way in which the documentation was actually handled. The procedure of illuminating earlier data from present knowledge of the culture can be sound. But Balandier appears not to appreciate the implications. His representation of history (p. io) as being mere chronology, the inventory of events and the tracing of the historical movement of the first colonization suggests that he implicitly assumes that there was no change in other areas of Kongo society. He refers to some fields in which no changes probably took place such as kinship terminology, the linking of pre-eminence to seniority, the organization of material life, division of work, and even the attributes and symbols of power. This implies, however, that certain sectors of the culture and society change faster or more slowly than others and some do not change at all. Change would be slowest in material culture, social organization, politi- cal values, and religion. Such a hypothesis, reasonable as it may appear, should still be documented. In fact Balandier shows that within material culture quite important changes did take place. For the rest he has assumed no change but did not check his assumption. As it happens, the 6 5 3 dictionary gives most of the kinship terminology (are there differences from modern usage ?) and substantiates the principle of matri- lineal descent by the words unguri: ' family' derived from nguri: ' mother ', kivumu (mentioned under mpangi) as a small lineage, and ekanda: 'tribe, republic' as the larger

F

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66 ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND THE THIRD DIMENSION

one. In fact, the terminology Balandier uses is restricted to Mayombe, which was never part of the kingdom and his term luvila, 'tribe' is not in use around San Salvador even now. When discussing kinship terminology the dictionary makes a point of stressing the special compound terms used for uterine relatives, thus

confirming a matrilineal lineage structure. But on all other points Balandier's hypo- thesis of no change does not hold.

It is not otiose to check carefully for possible changes in such elements as a principle of descent, even if one feels that it is so central that it could not change. For otherwise much historical reconstruction from present knowledge will be like putting a rabbit in the hat and then pulling it out again in front of the audience. Moreover, history is a fickle mistress. One cannot count on her following a general principle of this nature. Everything can change and perhaps it did, perhaps it did not. Neglect of the careful checking of inferences from modern data against earlier evidence has led to a lack of realization of the significance of some data, to glossing over facts, and worst of all to flattening out the time sequence to nothing. The additional neglect of

checking whether something holds now and held in the past for the whole area or

only for part of it, has led to distortions in space as well. The ancestor cult is assumed to have been much the same in the past as it is now.

But a priori one could argue that it must have been different. Since the political struc- ture exercised so many of the functions that lineages took over in the eighteenth century, lineage ancestors and domestic cults for ' shades ' should be less important in the seventeenth century than they are now. Balandier does not consider this

possibility. He equates devils with ancestors (pp. 86-8, I 2, 148) even though the

expression might refer just as well to ' charms', 'ghosts', 'unknown dead people (nkita) ', or perhaps only to the spirits of dead kings or other rulers, not to mention

possible nature spirits. He does give on p. 255 the only text known to the reviewer which is reliable and deals specifically with the veneration of domestic shades, but its significance is ignored. And in his discussion (pp. 255-8) he assumes that when sources refer to the powers of Mfumu tsi,' the chief of the land ', they deal with ances- tors, when nothing warrants this. Above all, he omits the major point: namely that there is precious little information about ancestor worship in the evidence used, so that the nature of this cult still remains an outstanding problem for further research.

Reluctance to consider the facts carefully comes out when the royal succession is

analysed. The data are clear: every male descendant of a former king in whatever line of descent could claim the throne. This is not matrilineal but bilateral succession. Balandier (pp. 197-8) tries to explain this away by stating that only sons of slaves were meant, when sons are mentioned. Yet he did not check. And it does not work. Pedro II was a son of the Duke of Nsundi (descendant of Affonso I) and of Christina, the daughter of a count of Soyo, hardly a slave woman ! On the same topic the Kimu- laza and Kimpanzu groups are called ' clans ' without justification (they are probably not) and on p. 64 one is told that Antonio I (I66I) was the first Kimulaza, whereas on

p. 198 Alvare VI (I636) is given as the first king of that line. Careless interpretation from present day 'insights' leads to serious distortion in

some cases. Thus it is claimed that the days of the week are rendered by numerals in

Kongo, except for Saturday and Sunday because only those two are special days with

religious and magic significance (which is not true: he shows Tuesday to be relevant

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND THE THIRD DIMENSION

too!). A simple check would have shown him that in Portuguese, from which the names are derived, numerals are also used, e.g.' Monday': a segundafeira. The use of 'nationalisme naissant' (p. 266) or ' modernization' in a sixteenth-century context are at best anachronisms as concepts. At worst they warp the whole understanding of a particular historical period. The flattening out of chronology until it becomes irrelevant often leads to a fictitious ethnographic present. Two illustrations dealing with innovation may suffice. A statement of Cavazzi (I665) about the relative profusion of European furniture among the chiefs is ' corrected ' by a contrary state- ment of 1595. Adobe houses are said to have been an innovation, citing Lorenzo da Lucca (I706) and this is ' confirmed' by citing Cavazzi (I665 !).

The over-all imprecision is not limited to time, but also to space. After a discussion of the size of cities where evidence covering the whole time-span and even a source as late as 1747 is used without considering the external events affecting this factor, he includes as an example of a provincial city, the large town of Ngombela (p. I42) which was (a) independent, (b) a Tio and not a Kongo settlement, and (c) the largest market in the whole area, the market of the Stanleypool.

Does this illustration of the need for refining problems and methods mean that anthropologists should not attempt to tackle historical documents? Are historians a breed of hairsplitters one should best avoid? Of course not. But whoever works with evidence from the past should be acquainted with, and sensitive to, the problems of evaluation of sources, in the same way that whoever works with evidence from a different culture should know how to acquire a relevant cultural background and all scholars should know how to ask significant questions of the data. While it is quite true that historians are often painfully unaware of the achievement of anthropology and thereby propose oversimplified theories, it is equally true that many anthro- pologists have only approximate notions of the canons of historical method. But when this question of' data quality control ', as it is called in other contexts, is itself under control, there is nothing to prevent anthropologists making the most of the data.

Attempts such as that of Professor Balandier, which has been discussed here, must not be given up. For much depends on the results which this type of research alone can yield: it can provide a view in time-depth, doing away with imaginary ethno- graphic presents, a basis for choice between equally satisfactory synchronic models, by ruling out some of them because they do not fit the time dimension. Slowly there is accumulating a vast body of accessible material concerning the past of many cultures which had been described at one point in time and for the first time we have now a chance to make society and culture tridimensional in vivo. The potentialities for anthropology as a discipline are as exciting as the discovery of the techniques of field-work was in its day. The prize should not be lost through sheer discouragement or still less through a lack of rigour in dealing with the evidence.

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ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND THE THIRD DIMENSION

Resume

LES ANTHROPOLOGUES ET LA TROISIEME DIMENSION

L'OUVRAGE de M. Balandier pose le probleme auquel fait face l'anthropologue social qui etudie une societe du passe. Une telle etude peut etre synchronique a une date donnee ou diachronique. Dans le premier cas l'analyse de l'integration fonctionnelle et structurelle sera le pivot de la recherche, dans le second l'examen de la nature meme et la phenomeno- logie du ' changement' sera au centre de l'etude.

M. Balandier ne s'est pas preoccupe de la synchronie et ne repond pas a mainte question d'analyse fonctionnelle ou structurelle posee par d'autres auteurs. De plus le probleme de la definition du ' present ethnographique ' ne s'est pas pose clairement. C'est l'alternative, le traitement diachronique, qui est plut6t suivi. Mais l'auteur ne suit pas cette approche a fond. I1 n'analyse pas quels sont les changements, quelle en est la nature, quelles en sont les causes historiques. La mutation du royaume entier en un autre systeme socio-politique apres I665 n'est pas etudiee. Enfin la formation historique laisse a desirer. I1 se fonde sur des ouvrages derives et relativement peu sur des sources primaires, sa critique des sources reste rudi- mentaire, sa technique qui est de se referer au savoir sociologique moderne pour interpreter le passe, l'empeche parfois de chercher les documents de l'epoque qui peuvent confirmer ou infirmer les hypotheses. La technique mene facilement a des anachronismes; elle favorise le nivellement chronologique et le refus de voir certains faits (p. ex. la succession royale).

L'anthropologue doit-il donc abandonner toute idee d'analyser une culture du passe? Non, mais sa documentation doit etre precise et la methode historique doit lui etre appliquee, le probleme du ' present ethnographique ' doit etre resolu. L'etude diachronique de cultures differentes apportera a l'anthropologue des donnees sur les types d'evolution et de change- ment, qu'il ne saurais obtenir d'aucune autre fapon. Elle ouvre de nouvelles perspectives pour le developpement de la theorie generale.

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