Shibboleths: The Production of Culture

The ways in which a dominant ideology replicates itself include the generation of values taken for "common sense"—that is natural, normative, self-evident, and even self-creating. This holds as well for culture, the basis upon which an entire panoply of shibboleths about Africa has been generated over time. Culture, understood as that which is bound up in a particular people, requires an understanding of different groups as having distinct or discrete identities. We have for too long labored under the illusion of the culturalist and identitarian paradigm that has resulted in the division of Africans into different people, discretely organized into "tribes" with names, assigned specific traits, and located on the chart of world knowledge organized by those who have set for themselves the task of understanding others. This act of organizing knowledge did not come about by chance or gratuitously, but rather in response to the exigencies of the times, the pressures that molded understandings along certain paths, paths etched by the dominant tendencies within society. This essay looks at Islam, orality, and the politics of cultural identities so as to challenge prevailing epistemological constructions of Africa.