The Postcolonial Turn: Re-Imagining Anthropology and Africa

Chapter 8. The Shared Borderspace, a Rejoinder

197 8 The Shared Borderspace, a Rejoinder1 René Devisch I am very grateful for the great tribute extended me by distinguished colleagues who have offered a wealth of comments and questions on my stance as a postcolonial anthropologist. In order to clarify such a stance, I may venture to place those comments and, indeed, questions within the context of a ‘borderspace’ –an expression coined by Bracha Ettinger (2006a)– that seeks to interconnect the plurality of worlds, thoughts and disciplines that involve, if not overwhelm us. I would also like to examine how some relations between the unconscious in subjects and their society are culturally shaped. Leaving aside the incidental epic, anecdotal and aesthetisising style that has set the tone of my festive Academic Lecture, I now wish tightly to articulate in four stages my response to the queries put by colleagues. My argument is particularly prompted by the thoughtful comments, figuring in this chapter, from Mudimbe and van Binsbergen. First, I would like to address the question of the anthropologist’s implication in intercultural polylogue -and the ‘Ethic of Desire’ (a Lacanian notion). The latter qualifies in culture-specific ways the subject’s suggestible and greatly unconscious, open-ended and unreflecting stance towards situations of indeterminacy or appeal, and in particular towards the unnameable allowing Desire to emerge. It is a stance in life that also grounds ritually effected homoeopathic reversal or redress in contexts of fright, ill health, misfortune, evil, or even cultural ambiguation. Second, I see anthropology as a coaffecting , co-implicating and ‘response-able’ encounter with the ‘other’, in the double sense of the sociocultural originality in the host group, –that is variously otherised by some public opinion as 198 The Postcolonial Turn exemplary or adversarial–, and of the researcher’s own ‘Extimacy’2 or Otherness in him- or herself. This bifocal perspective urges one to go beyond a representational account so as to include the unthought-in-thought, the unnameable or unknowingly said, or the untellable in each becoming. Hence, this bifocal perspective urges to address the unconscious with its indescribable shadowy side or holes at play in the passionate, simulating, or self-censuring subjects in the encounter. Third, an attempt will be made to approach the issue of local knowledge forms and practices. Fourth, I will examine the contribution that anthropology could make toward intercultural co-implication and ‘response-ability’, in line with an espousal of culture-sensitive learning and understanding, self-reflective comprehending and sharing of insight. To put my response in context, let me confess how much my coaffecting co-implication and reflective stance remains haunted by the postcolonial unconscious, and this is a concern that gripped me –persistently from the 1980s on– prior to my acute awareness of the gender gap. Arriving as a young man in DR Congo in the early 1960s, in the aftermath of that country’s independence, I was offered hospitality by people whom my compatriots had colonised for the half-century ending only five years previous. I hereby became a witness to the colonial trauma, and to the responses of a colonised people that alternated between overt rejection and melancholic resignation. For me, the trauma of my Congolese hosts acted as a silent call to empathy and duty that was so challenging that I could not help feeling an obligation to shoulder my part of the heavy moral debt. And the dawn of the African continent then appeared to us, through a contract of united confidence in social and cultural resilience and inventiveness, to be resting on each and everyone’s shoulders. From January 1971 until October 1974, I was offered hospitality for participant observation in the household-centric Yaka society of southwestern Congo, followed from 1996 till 2003 by annual research sojourns of some three weeks each among Yaka and Kongo people in the capital city of Kinshasa’s shantytowns. To further situate the anthropological position from which I intend to respond, we should acknowledge how much the anthropological endeavour in Africa –by both African and nonAfrican researchers– has actually evolved through the successive 199 Chapter 8: The Shared Borderspace, a Rejoinder generations following Black Africa’s political independence around 1960. Let us remind ourselves that anthropology is an intercultural scientific enterprise that urges us, in each society and generation, to readjust and redefine the disposition, procedures, perspectives, concepts and epistemology of our discipline, and to assure the production of valid information and research...