Archie Mafeje: Scholar, Activist and Thinker

Mafeje’s attempts to endogenise and deconstruct knowledge production

51 Dani W Nabudere Mafeje’s attempts to Mafeje’s attempts to endogenise and deconstruct endogenise and deconstruct knowledge production knowledge production In relation to the above ‘problematic’, which continued to afflict and evade Mafeje’s search for Africanity and endogeneity, let’s explore how Mafeje proposed Africans could get out of the alienation that Western imperialistic ‘othering’ had imposed on them, so as to recover their African-ness. In the article that he wrote in 1971 on ‘tribalism’, Mafeje and Magubane, a sociologist – had critiqued anthropology for its continued use of ‘dualistic’ concepts such as ‘tribe’ and ‘tribalism’, despite the fact that the African society was no longer isolated but part of the emergent ‘modern’ system, which was nevertheless dominated and colonised. In this critique, both Magubane and Mafeje had noted a change in the tone and direction of Anthropology, when the social anthropologists of the Manchester School, such as Mitchell, Epstein and Gluckman, began to write about the ‘social change’ that was occurring, especially in towns and mining areas of Central Africa. They were also writing about ‘unrecognised history’, which mainly came from urban settings. Mafeje noted that in order to set the stage for a possible African debate and research on questions of culture and development, it was necessary to indentify the relevant Western schools of thought on the matter, within which he identified the ‘social change’ school. The first of the four schools Mafeje identified was the modernisation theorists led by Talcot Parsons, which included a mixture of sociologists and institutional economists who relied on Parsons ‘pattern variables’, as expounded in his The Social System (1948), to inaugurate a new paradigm based on two polar ends or binary opposites of modernity and traditionalism. In this ‘system’, social change was supposed to occur only when there were ‘significant shifts from the traditional end of the spectrum towards the modern spectrum’. This was a departure from Max Weber’s ‘ideal types’ to Parsonian ‘real types’, for under Parson’s ‘pattern variables’ it was possible to measure along a progressive scale of modernity to reveal 52 Africa Institute of South Africa Archie Majefe: Scholar, Activist and Thinker how countries moved towards the modern capitalist society as it existed in the US, which was seen as the ‘terminus of development’. This model dispensed with cultural relativity and replaced it with an absolute ethnocentric standard, the universal modern bourgeois society, from which the standard of traditional was ‘othered’, just as the old functionalist anthropologists had done with ‘primitive’ society. Mafeje called the second school cultural anthropologists, who, according to him, were ‘infected’ with the Parsonian paradigm, especially the Chicago School, which adopted this new sub-discipline of Anthropology to analyse culture of ‘primitive society’. In their case, the traditional-primitive dichotomy was explicitly associated with the ‘low culture and little tradition’ of the traditional society against the ‘high culture’ and ‘great tradition’ of modern industrial society. With this liberal romanticism, the primitive or traditional societies were destined to be swept away by modern civilisation. This was supposed to occur in the way traditional societies were increasingly penetrated by metropolitan mores and values in the remote parts of the world. The model found expression in the so-called ‘ruralurban continuum’, which was associated with the Chicago School. Unlike the Parsonian modernisation theorists, the cultural anthropologists did not think of this development as either desirable or necessary ‘but inevitable’. In this respect, their view was more akin to that of Max Weber than that to that of Talcot Parsons. The third school, according to Mafeje, was the technological evolutionists, also referred to as the Columbia School, which also included anthropologists and some economists who derived some of their ideas from the instrumentalist theories of Professor C. E. Ayres. Their basic thesis was that social values of any society could be divided into two main categories: the ceremonial and the instrumental. Traditional societies were, according to this schema, characterised by the predominance of ‘ceremonial values’, which ‘militate against experimentation’, whereas ‘modern societies’ were said to be characterised by ‘instrumental values’, which encouraged experimentation and reward for techno-logical innovation. This was reminiscent of Talcot Parsons’ ‘effective’ versus ‘affective’ values and ‘achievement’ versus ‘prescriptive’ values. According to Mafeje, both schools ascribed social change to individual achievement: The only difference is that Parsonian technological progress is endemic in modern societies and this is how the ‘social system’ regulates itself in such a way that it maintains its equilibrium indefinitely. In contrast, the techno-logical evolutionists [18...