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14 Africa Institute of South Africa The critique of anthropology The critique of anthropology and alterity and alterity In examining Mafeje’s contribution to the critique of Anthropology, one must understand his growing sense of identity as an African. One also needs to understand the central concern he had against the particular use of academic disciplines as an external attempt to exclude the Africans from knowing themselves as subjects, and not objects to be studied by others. It’s already apparent that he struggled to find ways in which the Africans could look at and express themselves internally. As viewed by Mafeje, the problem of Anthropology lay in the fact that unlike the other social sciences and humanities, Anthropology was created specifically for the colonised ‘others’ who were not permitted to understand themselves except through the eye of the coloniser. This was the essence of the assertion by the British that in order to exercise power over Egypt, they had first and foremost to ‘know Egypt’ and the oriental ‘other’ in order to exercise political control. The concept of race had to be created in order to accommodate the external power over the natives. Therefore properly defined, Anthropology was the colonisers ‘political power over the natives’, whatever their race. That is why, according to Adesina, Mafeje regarded the alterity associated with Anthropology as ‘immanent’ rather than accidental or temporal34. Mafeje’s early contribution as a young anthropologist was a groundbreaking article he wrote in 1971 for the Journal of Modern African Studies entitled ‘The Ideology of Tribalism’, which stimulated wide-ranging debate challenging the anthropological concept of ‘a dual economy’ and the alleged static nature of African society that the concepts of ‘tribe’ and ‘tribalism’ implied. It was a self-conscious critique of the continued use of concepts of ‘tribes’ 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. It has been pointed out that Mafeje was not the first to critique tribalism, since other African scholars such as Magubane (1968) and Onoge (1971) had criticised the use of these concepts already. Sally Falk Moore, in her 15 The critique of anthropology and alterity Dani W Nabudere debates with Mafeje, also challenged Mafeje that there were other Western anthropologists who had begun to question the use of these concepts for at least a decade before Mafeje wrote his article. These scholars, Moore contended, included academics such as Joan Vincent who stated that by 1968, ‘the political anthropology’s stance was almost wholly revisionists’ and that ‘the politics of ethnicity had emerged and begun to replace what was previously called tribalism’.35 Moore also referred to the book edited by Leo Kuper and M. G. Smith, entitled ‘Pluralism in Africa’, which Moore suggests demonstrated that anthropologists were already engaged with politics of colonialism and ethnicity by the sixties ‘without the benefit of instruction from Mafeje’s very brief 1971 article’. Eric Masinde Asoka and Godwin Rapando Murunga (2008:99–101) dismissed Moore’s argument as being ‘short-handed’. They point out that other scholars may have talked (and written) about these distortions, but not with the experiential thoroughness ‘evident in the articles of Mafeje of 1971 and Magubane in the same year’ – one from an anthropological angle and the other from the angle of sociology: In their view, Anthropology was misplaced in Africa given its lack of appreciation of change in Africa. Anthropology, they argued, was a curse of African studies.36 If then Anthropology, according to Raymond Firth (1972), was a ‘child of the Enlightenment’, it is because the Enlightenment in its own search for the new European identity of the ‘individual self’ also needed the ‘other’ (opposite) as a mirror through which that new identity could contrast itself by as the subject ‘self’. The Enlightenment was not just the emergence of European modern identity as such, without its ‘opposite’. Without this ‘other’ inferior opposite, it could not justify and legitimise its plunder and colonisation of the resources of the regions it sought to rule and control. Structural functional anthropology had to be invented precisely to justify the process of dehumanisation and domination. This dehumanisation, through race, enabled the European ‘self’ to command the use of the colony human labour by designating it as ‘slave’ or a ‘commodity’ that could be appropriated freely or bought at a low price, or paid a low wage to produce new products for the ‘mother’ industries and...

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