Philosophy in an African Place

For Lisa, and in memory of Emmanuel Eze

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Liulefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Janz, Bruce B., 1960Philosophy in an African place I Bruce B. Janz. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-3668-3 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-3670-6 (electronic) 1. Philosophy, African. I. Title. B5305.1362009 199' .6-dc22

2009023213

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

I:

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

2:

Tradition in the Periphery

37

3:

Questioning Reason

63

4:

"Wisdom Is Actually Thought"

99

5:

Culture and the Problem of Universality

121

6:

Listening to Language

155

7:

Practicality: African Philosophy's Debts and Duties

185

8:

Locating African Philosophy

213

Bibliography

253

Index

265

vii

Acknowledgments

CHAPTERS 1 AND 2 Small excerpts from both of these chapters were published as "Philosophy as I f Place Mattered: The Situation of African Philosophy," Havi Carel and David Gomez, eds. What Philosophy Is (London: Continuum Publishers, 2004): [03-115. These excerpts are reprinted by the kind permission of the editors and of Continuum International Publishing Group.

CHAPTER 4 Chapter 4 has been published in slightly altered form as: "Thinking Wisdom: The Hermeneutical Basis of Sage Philosophy." African Philosophy 11, no. [ (June 1998): 57-71. Reprinted by the kind permission of Katherine Faull, e"ecutor of the estate of Emmanuel Eze.

CHAPTERS A few paragraphs in chapter 8 came from "Alterity, Dialogue, and African Philosophy," Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, Emmanuel Cflukwudi Eze, ed. (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1997): 221-238.

Several institutions supported research on this book or gave me office and library resources during the writing of the book. They include.; Augustana ix

x

Acknowledgments

University College (now the Augustana Faculty of the University of ~Ibe~a), University of Central Florida, University of Nairobi, Fordham Umverslty, and Rhodes University, South Africa. .. This would not have been possible without the input, support, and cntlque of several people. These include: Emmanuel Eze, Kai Kress~, Gail Presbe~, Pedro Tabensky, Ward Jones, John Pittman, Lisa Roney, Keith Harder, Phil Merklinger, Ross Emmett, Shaun Gallagher, Jay van Hook, !ennifer ~isa Vest, Kurt Young, Claudia Schippert, Shelley Park, Joseph Situma, Onare Nyarwath, and Bertold Bemreuter.

Chapter One

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

WHERE IS PHILOSOPHY'S APPROPRIATE PLACE? lJe:rrida, as he often does, asks the probing and incisive question: 1 will begin with the question "where?" Not directly with the question "where are we?" or "where have we come to?" but "where does the question of the right to philosophy take placeT' which can be immediately translated by "where ought it take placeT Where does it find today its most appropriate place?1

Where, he asks, does the question of the right to philosophy take place? Not "who has the right," but "where is the right?" One might be inclined to say, without much thought, that it can take place anywhere, that we are ull philosophers in our own ways, that philosophy is about abstractions and universals, which are available wherever there is someone to think them. Or, someone else might be inclined to say, again without much thought, that it cun only take place in the prescribed places, the departments sanctioned by the university and the discipline. Either anywhere or somewhere (but not nowhere). But from where does the conviction arise, that it can happen anywhere, and where do those stand who define that prescribed place? "Where" iii not so easily answered. Why should "where" matter to African philosophers? The history of Africlln philosophy has been the history of struggle to find a place, or to claim u place, or to assert the entitlement to a place, in the face of those who have muintained that it has no place. It is not everywhere, nor is it in any particular, privileged place, according to those we have grown accustomed to listen to. 11 iN nowhere. Not the nowhere of transcendence, nor the nowhere of primordlulity, or memory, or promise, but rather the nowhere of obliviqn, or at best

2

Chapter I

derivativeness. Even the traditions of African philosophy that are most likely to simply assert their entitlement to a place and willfully ignore the history of exclusion, must always have one eye on that which is being ignored. These traditions too come from a place, an intellectual place as well as a geographical and cultural one. That there might be a "where" of philosophy suggests that there can be a geography of philosophy (as opposed to a philosophy of geography, or some other Hegelian inheritance). The idea that philosophy itself might be the subject of the inquiry of some other discipline is not new; there is, after all, the sociology of philosophy,2 an anthropology of philosophy,3 and one might see the discussions concerning the end of philosophy as disciplinary attempts to break apart the hegemony of philosophy and its presumption to universality.4 Philosophy has always relied on texts; thus, it can be reduced to textual studies. It has predominantly been done by white males of a certain class; thus, it can be seen as products of desire or power. In each case, a hermeneutic of suspicion breaks apart philosophy's pretensions to uniquely access the universal, and if it has no more access to universals, its raison d' etre dissipates. Is this what is behind imagining a geography of philosophy, a breakdown or dissipation of philosophy? I do not think so. Asking "where does the question of the right to philosophy take place?" does not suggest that philosophy is reducible to the local beliefs of a group of people, nor that philosophy can be subsumed under other disciplinary interests. The geography of philosophy does not lead to ethnophilosophy. Placing philosophy in a geography suggests that it has contingent but not arbitrary interests, that it responds to and shapes a particular set of conditions of reflection. It is the contention of this book that philosophy must attend to the conditions in which its questions arise, and that this attention does not diminish philosophy's traditional (although never completely fulfilled) striving for universals. Imagining a geography of philosophy means asking a different question than philosophers are used to asking. The identity question "what is philosophy?" has long been a focus of philosophical activity. Certainly when it comes to judging whether a "marginal" area of inquiry should count as philosophy, that question has been central. But even in mainstream work, philosophers have always presumed that they have an identifiable domain, governed in part by the nature of the questions asked, in part by the identity of the citizens, both historical and current, and in part by the recognition afforded the field by those who are not philosophers. The questions asked, which count as philosophical, are those which fit into the broad categories that every first year student learns -ontology, epistemology, axiology, methodology. The citizens of the domain are those who have been recog-

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

3

lIized over time, whose work has sustained philosophical debate, and who currently engage the set of recognized questions and thinkers. The recognilion afforded philosophy by other disciplines is such that philosophy has been given a territory in relation to other territories, with disputed borderlands to be sure, but with a kind of integrity. What is not often noticed, though, is that the question "what is philosophy?" does not easily lend itself to the work it has to do in legitimating the field of philosophy. "What is (or what should count as) philosophy?" is essentially a metaphysical question (with, of course, moral and epistemological undertones), implying we can tind an essence, and it assumes a celtain kind or answer. It assumes that the question can be answered in the abstract before il is answered in the concrete, that any potential candidate might approach the bench and plead for inclusion, and the case will be judged against existing siandards. But there is a circularity-how can we ask "what is philosophy" apart from that which has been regarded as philosophy to this point? We tell our students that there is something intrinsic to philosophical questions that makes them philosophical rather than, say, psychological, political, or historical, but how could we tell the difference between our abstract image of philosophy and the one we have inherited from others in the West who have "Iso identified themselves as part of this enterprise? That metaphysical, abstract question, meant to establish a standard that all applicants must meet, seems to undermine itself, for it cannot be asked in the abstract anymore. Those who might be able to ask it are already immersed in a tradition. And, there are other problems: who are these judges, who would determine the legitimacy of "questionable" areas? Who appointed them? Are they able to stand beyond any tradition, and judge fairly? Of course not. For most philosophers, these questions are moot and uninteresting. Either we think we already know philosophy when we see it, or we have intemall:led the critical debates of the past decades, and the question of place reduces 11Ir us to the question of contextualizing conditions for the production of philosophy. In either case, we inherit an existing acknowledged tradition. Yel, for African philosophers, these questions are central. Africa has always lubored under the accusation of the West that it is incapable of generating a philosophy. Even now, African philosophy is as likely to be seen as a species of cultural or postcolonial studies, or of "self-studies" areas such as AfricanAmerican studies. 'The concern with philosophical identity and legitimacy is really a concern for one's place in a discipline, and in the academy. The "nowhere-ness" of AI'ricun philosophy, from the point of view of the discipline as a whole, must he countered by those who believe that African philosophy has or deserves u pluce on the philosophical map. But how? The options to thi~ point have

Chapter J

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

been clear-either show how one's work really does meet the standards of the discipline and always has ("we are really part of your country after all"), or show that one's work describes a new facet of philosophy, previously ignored ("your country's boundaries must extend to encompass us"), or assert that one's work predates and forms the basis of the discipline at large ("your country is really our country"), or finally argue that one's work has its own integrity, judged by its own standards, which nevertheless can be translated to the discipline at large ("we have our own country-now let's negotiate trade relations"). All these strategies are good spatial thinking. In each case, the metaphysical question, "Is there an African philosophy'?" guides the kind of research that is done. The research flows along one of the lines mentioned, and the ultimate goal is to establish that, in some way, African philosophy can carve out or claim a space on the academic map. Many African philosophers have felt uneasy about this; it is common to hear and read pleas to stop arguing about whether African philosophy exists, and start doing it. Some have gone further, and simply regarded the question of the existence and nature of African philosophy as alreadY answered, or as pointless, and have moved on to consider specific problems. The frustration is understandable, and points to the effort wasted on justifying one's existence, and the insult implied in answering someone else's challenge. And yet, can a philosopher ever stop asking what it is to philosophize? This is the fundamental question of the discipline. It is thought thinking itself. This is, finally, all that we do-ask fundamental questions, including questions about the nature of our questions and those doing the questioning. And it is no different for African philosophy, but therein lies the central problem. How can one ask the central question of philosophy, while not appearing to ask it as a response to a challenge from an otherwise indifferent discipline? The spatial, "mapping" strategies mentioned earlier left something out. Not another strategy for mapping African philosophy in the academic world, but rather the question of why anyone, most of all Africans, cares about philosophy at alL One might say that, like science, philosophy has a luster in Western society, that it represents reason at its most rigorous, and that any society that cannot say it has a philosophy is somehow not quite civilized. This is the progressivist inheritance of Hegel, and it is hard to shake. But there is another possible answer. One might ask what it is, from any given culture, that a person feels the need to use philosophical reason to analyze or reflect. How does philosophical reasoning emerge'? Where does it come from? As Derrida has already asked, "where does the question of the right to philosophy take place'?"

THINKING IN PLACE

4

5

One sense of being "in place" suggests a lack of motion. "Running in place" suggests expending energy but not really getting anywhere; "treading water" (swimming in place) is what a person does while waiting to be rescued. It is no wonder that we have thought of place as a static idea, as one which connotes lack of imagination, lack of "direction," or worst, impending morbidity. For philosophical travelers, this simply will not do. And yet, this book is about the importance of place, the idea that thinking in place is not only something to be desired, but which is ultimately unavoidable. What does "thinking in place" mean" In part, it means paying attention to where we are and who is around us. Philosophers have not been particularly good at listening, to our "informants" (to the extent that we even think we have informants), to our peers, to our audiences, to other disciplines, to other cultures. When philosophers think about interdisciplinarity, it usulilly takes the form of providing the "theory" for other disciplines. In other words, we think that our contribution is to help clarify the first principles or theoretical foundations of other disciplines. Science, for example, can use its tools to investigate the world, but it cannot scientifically inquire ubout science. That is a philosophical task, and the same goes for other disciplines. So, we have tended to think of other disciplines as the fodder for philosophical discussion. Notice the assumption here-philosophers clarify the methods or assumplions of other disciplines. Who clarifies philosophical methods or assumpliuns? Well, philosophers do. Philosophy, we think proudly, is the only truly He If-reflexive discipline. While philosophers may be willing to admit that philosophy happens in social contexts, it is still about ideas; while it may hllppen predominantly through texts, it is not reducible to literary theory; while ideas may have been used to justify the power of some over others, it IN not simply politics. Most philosophers paid little attention to the possibility thul philosophy might have ended, either as a result of a Hegelian completion of history or as the result of a postmodern fragmentation of disciplinary knowledge to the extent that philosophy's pretensions to universality were 110 longer relevant. For philosophers, by and large, these pronouncements of philosophy's demise went by unnoticed. And perhaps that is as it should be. Self-reflexive or not, a philosopher needs faith that his or her area of expertise still exists in order to carryon. But II' philosophers are the only ones who reflect on themselves, they are in the prCHumptuous and uncomfortable position of believing themselves to be, in M pl'Uctical sense, above method and disciplinarity, the self-thinking thought, the view from nowhere.

6

Chapter 1

But the fact is, philosophy is not from nowhere, Philosophy always comes from a place, and that place is never completely covered over by abstraction. It is never irrelevant, even if it has been ignored. Not that there is some necessary causal connection or geographical determinism, as if by figuring out the place from which philosophy comes, we can encapsulate it, know it, and need not attend to its actual content Place is a far more complex notion than what can be contained in geography. Philosophy is not reducible to place; there is no genetic fallacy or geographical determinism here. Philosophy remains a reflection on its place, geographically, culturally, disciplinarily, and intellectually. If this is true, reflecting on the place(s) that philosophy finds itself in might tell us something crucial about its possibilities. African philosophy is a particularly good context in which to take on this task, as I will argue shortly, since (whether its practitioners put it in explicit terms or not) it is consumed with its place in the world of philosophy in general, its place in relation to its cultural origins and present milieu, its place in the formation of the identities of its practitioners. At the same time, 1 believe it has tried to contain the troublesome and mUltiplying questions about place by appealing to space and the onto-theological guarantees that such a move affords. Philosophy resides primarily in the questions that make particular concepts viable, not in its dogmas, proponents, or history. Because of this, it is possible to regard philosophy as taking place seriously. Philosophy has usually been seen as a set of practices which abstract from place. To the extent that place is taken seriously, one is not doing philosophy, but rather something else-political studies, literature, anthropology, or some other discipline. Philosophy is not reducible to place in some determinist fashion, nor is philosophy-inplace against abstraction. All abstraction is itself derivative on the conditions in which ideas form. Philosophical questions are necessarily questions that have some element of abstraction in them, and that includes both analytic philosophy as well as interpretive thought as it appears in various traditions. So what might place mean, when it comes to philosophy? Jeffrey Malpas, in Place and Experience,S argues that our sense of self. space and time, agency, objectivity are all tied to our sense of place. These central aspects of human experience, then, the ones which have been of intense interest to philosophers, must take place seriously. Malpas is not the first to see place as integrally and fundamentally related to the human condition. The later Heidegger, in shifting his emphasis from time to place, came to regard dwelling as a central feature of being human in the world, and wrote about the ways in which technology can serve to cover over dwelling. Since Heidegger, a steady stream of philosophers have addressed various aspects of the relationship between subjectivity and place, but the question of philosophy's own place is still largely unexplored.

Introduction: Philosophy-In-Place

7

The traditional question put before African philosophers concerning their I1cld is this: What is the identity of African philosophy? Almost all thinkers Mart from this point, if only to express frustration that the question cannot be II voided. Variations on statements such as the following are common at the hcginning of work on African philosophy: Thus in almost all the institutions of higher learning in Africa, COUl1ies in African philosophy are designed, but topped with questions such as: What is African philosophy? Does African philosophy exist? Who is an Mrican philosopher?6

Questions such as these already assume an essentialist stance. They assume that an identity will be found, or at least posited, SO that the task of reflection ..:un take place. The task of this book is to survey the ways in which such essentialism has caused problems for African philosophy. The impulse to find an essential foundation, to map terrain, to carve out a bit of intellectual tcrritory from an otherwise recalcitrant discipline, has led to the continuing nced for self-justification. This ultimately casts the conversation between Africa and the rest of the philosophical world as one in which self and other ure in an opposition whose only resolution can be found in the diminution of the other. So, African philosophy ties its hopes to finding a niche that has not heen explored, or has been abandoned, or has been forcibly co-opted at some puint in the past. The reaction by the philosophical establishment has either been bemused tolerance or active resistance. Either way, the strategy of using metaphysics to establish the credentials of this area only serves to further the essentialist malaise, and continues to render the area as a marginal pursuit. This is violent philosophy, and it only breeds more violence. Is there another way? I believe there is. The question of African philosophy needs to be re-asked, not from an essentialist but from a phenomenological lind hermeneutical point of view. Instead of carving territory, there should be Ii way to rethink this nascent field through its own theoretical structures, ruther than through a metaphysical attitude inherited from elsewhere. If this cun be done, then the conversations that African philosophy has with other IJhilosophical pursuits, other disciplines, and other sets of commitments, can yield It positive result. Rather than asking "What is the identity of African phiIU!lophy?" one might instead ask "What is it to do philosophy in this (African) plu..:e?" The concept of place has received comparatively little philosophical auention until this century, possibly because the problem of how to reconcile the particular and the universal in philosophy tended to be solved by opting fur the universal. Space was, of course, much discussed. But place was left to Ihe ilrtist to represent, to the literary figure to describe, and to the colonist to lIubHume under a universalizing structure of reason. And yet, the question of

8

Chapter I

"how it is done here" continues to be the operative epistemology for the vast majority of the world. Heidegger, perhaps, gives the first systematic glimpse into place, but it falls to Merleau-Ponty to make the concept the centerpiece of a philosophical system. One might take his notion of embodied knowledge as requiring a sense of place for fulfillment. The two together, along with any mediating devices (such as technology) that make the connection between body and place possible, we will call the "milieu." When we ask about place, therefore, we ask about the type of knowledge that is made possible in a particular milieu. To a certain extent, the knowledge itself will be a function of the milieu, and both the place and the body that knows the place will tind their identity in the kind of relationships possible in the milieu. How does philosophy fit into the milieu? If it is true that everyone reflects on a world of meaning, and at the same time the place and subject are defined reciprocally, where does philosophical retlection fit? The critique of ethnophilosophy, that reflection must be in some way different from the day-to-day practice of life, is surely correct. Philosophy becomes a particular kind of reflection in the milieu. It is not abstracted reflection, which severs the ties between meaning and structure; it is universal reflection, in which the goal is not day-to-day coping but rather the larger project of self-conscious reflection on and maintenance of the milieu itself. It is the reflection that allows the thinker to transcend cultural boundaries while at the same time being forever tied to them. If philosophy becomes a unique sort of reflection on the milieu, we might ask just where this can be found. I have already alluded to the possibility that the sages might point toward this, but 1 would not want to set this up as another example of a traditional/modem split. in which the "traditional" has some access to some sort of pure identity that can be articulated only through the auspices of the professional (modem) philosopher. Serequeberhan advocates something like this in theory. and current sage philosophy practices it. . Roles, however, cannot so easily be defined. There is no purity in African philosophy. But this dialectic serves not only to lionize the traditional as some sort of well-spring of true African thought (which may in fact not be the case), but also is a kind of false humility on the part of the modern philosopher (who is usually the one advocating this position). It is humility because the locus of knowledge seems to be placed outside of the training of the modem philosopher; it is false because in fact the knowledge of the traditional is vindicated and constructed in the institutions of philosophy that only the modem philosopher has access to. This dichotomy is an attempt to reify a dialectic, and in doing so the conversation moves from hermeneutic to metaphysical. In this move, the access to the universal is lost.

lmroduction: PJlilosophy-in-Place

9

If philosophical reflection is not as easy as identifying a traditional/modem dichotomy, where can we find it? The milieu will not be investigated simply hy considering the various forms of opposition that are possible within it. This at best is an attempt to catalogue modalities, or expressions, of the milieu, without attempting to enter into it and understand the possibilities. But this does not mean that we cannot ask the central question of this chapter. What is it to do philosophy in this place? The "place" alluded to here does not suggest a limit to the modalities. The place is not traditional; nor is it modem. These are attempts to fix the place by referring to another place that serves liS an opposition. Where is this place? Put another way, more colloquially, where am 11 At one level, one might limit the discussion of place to immediate geographical location. 1 am wherever my body is. I am here. But where is here? How do I define "hereness"? Usually it has something to do with geography. Most people would answer that question referring to physical placement. But how do we do that? We sometimes give names-University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya, Africa. "Where" indicates familiarity with these political structures. Someone 1000 years ago could be standing in exactly this spot, and if asked "where are you" would not understand the answers we give now. This suggests a couple of things-our sense of place is time-dependent (we label it using temporally indexed indicators). Our sense of place is also dependent on some sort of common knowledge. If you go half way around the world, and someone asks you where you are from, saying "Nairobi" may not mean much to them. There is something else-my answer to the question "where am I?" also depends on a sense of purpose. Who wants to know, and why? This seems to suggest that there are many places, and I choose my answer depending on the occasion. Where am I? I am beside X, either another person, or another thing. Sometlllles we give location not as a label, but as a relation. Of course, someone might wonder where X is then, but the chain of relations could continue on. We give relational locations in other ways as well. If we want to know identity, you might say "I am the sisterlbrother of X, the child of Y." This locates Y')U, not physically, but in terms of some other principle of place. In fact, in this sense, you are placed, and therefore understood, due to your relation to your relatives. 'This suggests that place has something to do with identity. Where you are defines who you are. For some people and cultures, your place in the family trec is (werwhelmingly your identity. People from specific backgrounds often nnd themselves determining placement when they meet others from the same ethnic or national group. Who are you related to, who did your ~other's aunt

11

Chapter I

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

Inurry, did your family name's spelling change over time? This is placement,

some sort of foundational structure that asserts the legitimacy of a claim and obscures the inherent oppositions in that legitimacy. Being present, on the lither hand, suggests a set of commitments and meanings not derived from some abstract structure. It precedes them. Place, then, brings a great deal with it. In various ways, to address place we must also address identity, history, memory, aspiration, family and social connection. Places stand in for all of these things-disparaging someone's place is often tantamount to disparaging all these others as well. But it is not only II matter of subjectivity. Place is important also because it is the site for the meeting between incommensurables-materiality and idea, part and whole, sdf and other. Place cannot be understood without these tensions. Therefore, if we are to understand any philosophy, particularly African philosophy, we would do well to pay attention to the site on which the fundamental tensions of life and thought are played out.

10

and a sort of identity. This is seen in more places than just genealogy. Your place in the world of work may be important to you and others. "Student," for many people, carries certain implications. A student is placed in the world. This is a label, like giving a place name, but also a relation. Where am I? I am at a specific set of coordinates. We could give our place in the world via a mathematical grid. This is what you would get if you used the global positioning system (GPS), for example. This assigns place in terms of space, and might be seen as a form of place by relation. But one might point out that, while the relations spoken of earlier are relations to (as Heidegger might put it) what we care about, defining place in terms of space gives relations that we do not care about, except in an indirect manner. If I fix my place on the ocean using a GPS, what matters to me is my point of origin, my destination, and perhaps the nearest safe haven if my craft is in trouble. The careless information is converted into careful wisdom. In itself, this is a useful activity-a GPS is a bit of technology that enables the milieu to function. But like any technology, it only makes sense out of a prior sense of place. Where am I? I am where I am from. In some way, we carry a sense of place with us. There are many writers, from Wallace Stegner and Wendell Berry in the West to Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Okot p'Bitek in East Africa who evoke in their writings a sense of place. They usually write about places that are not "exciting" in any ordinary sense. They write about rural places, about prairies and lonely mountains, about places that are not known as vacation spots or centers of commerce, government, or learning. In short, they are not the places that tend to show up on the news as the places where "important" things happen. And yet, these writers speak eloquently about the way that place affects how we understand the world. We are necessarily rooted in place, in the sense that we necessarily come at the world from an understanding, from a set of commitments. We come caring about something, no matter how dispassionate we try to be. We come from a place. It is no accident that one of the great virtues of the Enlightenment was cosmopolitanism. People thought that knowledge meant that you could draw back from any particular commitments, and be a citizen of the world. Hume, Ben Franklin. and Voltaire alI thought of themselves this way. And yet, they could not escape their place. These commitments may not be completely realizable-it may be that we cannot articulate them. Our place is something larger than we can put our fingers on. Or smalIer. We may have a sense of place connected to the house in which we grew up. It represents things, and its physical structure resonates. Where am I? I am where I am present. One need not buy into a "metaphysics of presence" to talk about being present. Metaphysics of presence assumes

THE PLACE OF PLACE The literature on place, in both philosophy and many other disciplines, is enormous, diverse, and for the most part fragmented. Put more positively, discourse about place has followed disciplinary trajectories and conversalions, often driven by resistance to dominant modes of thought and informed hy a need to recover the particularity (and in some cases, the integrity) of the subject in the face of disciplinary ways of knowing that would obscure or obliterate it. These disciplinary conversations have not necessarily been myopic, for they have drawn on work outside of their own immediate frames of reference; nevertheless, the set of connections has been limited, given the runge of work that has been done on place. 7 The person who embarks on a study of the concept of place across the disciplines might expect that some disciplines would be more "naturally" relevant than others. Geography,S for instance, and architecture 9 have always had to face up to the question of how particular places relate to those who dwell in them, or have dwelt, or in some cases (such as in the discussion of wilderness JO) do not dwell in them. These disciplines have built up a vocabuJury and set of texts that deal with place, perhaps not always by that name, hut always recognizing that the human cannot be extricated from the spatial, thut it is precisely the human that transforms the spatial into the platial (or, perhaps, it is the removal of the human that transforms the platial into the IIIputial). What is "the human," in this context? In a classic case of the hermeneutical circle, that cannot be answered apart from the platial. To be human III to be in a place.

12

Chapter I

But it is not only geography and architecture that have faced the implications of place for human meaning. Anthropology,1I art,12 cultural studiesp Iiterature,14 psychology,lS and sociology,16 among many other disciplines, have made use of place to illuminate comers of their disciplines previously overlooked. Most of this work is quite recent. And what of philosophy? Philosophical reflection on place goes back to the beginning of the tradition itselfY Edward CaseylS has provided an overview of the history of place in Western philosophy, and so that task need not be revisited here. A host of recent thinkers have theorized place-related concepts such as territory (Deleuze), region, milieu (Deleuze again), home and dwelling (Heidegger), and lived space (Bollnow). Place has been imagined as present (Dubos), absent (Auge), and lost (Relph), as location (Graeme Forbes), embodiment (Merleau-Ponty),19 a stable system of signs,20 situation,21 and the basis for agency (Malpas).22 Philosophy's interest in place is clearly strong and longstanding. Philosophy-in-place is more than the philosophical analysis of the concept of place. It turns the concept back on the practices of philosophy itself. It is the realization that we always stand on shifting ground as we philosophize, that we are always implicated by the concepts we use, and that they never remain stable. We add to the interpretive possibilities of concepts, the provenance, as we use them, and this accumulation is more than just accretion. Furthermore, the concepts that we analyze as philosophers frequently travel across discursive boundaries, whether they be disciplinary or cultural, and that travel means that a concept will always get used metaphorically (and metonymically, as the concept stands in for a larger discourse, or even comes to signify a life-world). All of this means that philosophers need to work at several levels at once. Standard philosophical conceptual analysis needs to come with retlectiveness on the place of those concepts. We must engage with the direct meaning of concepts, their provenance, and at the same time allow the concepts to raise our own place to question. Ultimately, platial analysis makes possible rigorous, open-ended creation of new concepts, ones which make universals available (that is, allow us to recognize and build on connections across cultural, disciplinary, and other boundaries), and also clarifies and establishes one's own identity. A first step in establishing this philosophy-in-place is to understand the nuances of the concept of place. It has often simply been regarded as particular physical location, and so might seem resistant to philosophical analysis (what, after all, can a philosopher say about physical particularity that does not become arid and uninteresting?) But it is in the varied uses of the concept of place that its philosophical possibilities become apparent. These uses give

InJroduClion: Philosophy-in-Place

13

cvidence of human concern, and the way that place is cast, both in academic lind non-academic settings, does not just enable us to understand the external world, but also the self and the social world. Philosophically, philosophy-inplace recognizes that there are a set of problems that do not admit of conclusive solutions, but are closer to what Gabriel Marcel termed "mysteries." As we render the world meaningful, and question its received meanings, we are III ways in the process of creating that world, thus causing our analysis to be pal1ial, yet suggestive. The various forms of the concept of place offer a way into that evolving human construction of meaning. Attention to place requires that meaning not simply be a flight of fancy, but be rooted in human concerns. The differing lind competing senses of place can be understood as ways of addressing some ccntral questions, some of which owe their roots to disciplines other than philosophy (questions have a place too), but which in the end are crucial to philosophy. Elsewhere I sketched out some of the uses of place,23 but here I wish to recast those uses in the form of philosophical questions about place which are simultaneously constitutive questions for philosophy itself (so that we are not simply doing "philosophy of place," but "philosophy-in-place"). I will illustrate the relevance of each of these in terms of African philosophy.

Question of the Topeme What is the smallest intelligible unit of a place that is intelligible as a place? Where does the legibility of place begin? Places, we imagine, are intelligible in themselves, but there is a point below which they are not intelligible. If we ure retlecting philosophically on a place, we will have to determine what the HlIlullest point of meaningfulness is. Is it, as in most modem liberal democrucies, the individual? Do we assume that places are the outworking of the I:onscious will of individuals? African philosophy famously claims the perNpcctive of "I am because we are." Is this too an imaginative construction? If we think of African philosophy as the critical rational reflection on an African life-world, what is that based on? What is a life-world? The "smallest intelligible unit of place" question (which I am calling the "lopeme") also raises the issue of the exclusivity of place. For Aristotle, the defining feature of a place was that no two things could claim it at once. It wus like a skin that wrapped itself around an object, and was shed when the uhjecI moved, only to wrap itself around whatever came past next. For our purposes, though, this raises a question for philosophy-in-place-do the intelligible places we inhabit admit of unique significance, utterly unrelated to thul of other places? Place is not space, after all, and if we start with the idea thut philosophy comes from place, are we also faced with the i!Dpossibility

]4

Introduction: Philosophy-tn-Place

Chapter I

of finding common ground for those places? In short, if we start from place, and ask about the place(s) of African philosophy, our problem becomes how (or whether) those places can relate to each other. This is vastly different from the European starting point, which assumes that philosophy has a universal character, and that Africa simply has to measure up. If place were left as a metaphysical entity, we would be faced with all the epistemological problems of nominalism. Philosophy-in-place, however, does not start from the assumption that place is metaphysical. The question of the topeme also raises the issue of the distinction between space and place. Space is sometimes seen to be allied with, or a function of, modernity, while place is seen as more traditional. This might suggest that a place is an irreducible unit of cultural meaning, which is being destroyed by spatial thinking in the form of globalization (or in philosophical terms, by the tendency toward globalized thought which reduces local thought to cases in point). In fact. though, while spatialization can have that effect (a~d as I will argue later, the spatial tendency in African philosophy can result 10 a lack of attention to place), it will also be important to resist the idea that philosophy-in-place is solely about finding irreducible units of cultur.al (or philosophical) meaning. Place is like a language, but that langu~ge IS not reductionist. Indeed, even as there are topemes, there are assemblIes, or aggregations. which allow philosophical traditions to respond to the pro~ises and threats of new places while remaining true to the debts and dutIes of the present place.

Question of Aggregation What do we bring together to constitute place? Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams argues that "Place is collectively made up of the conglomeration of many different elements within this locale."24 Despite the sense that places are irreducibly atomistic, in fact experienced places are aggregates of meaningful experiences encoded into material or legible structures. Our places are made meaningful as much as they are discovered as meaningful. Place often designates uniqueness, in a romantic sense, but in fact even those unique places are aggregates, productions that have constituent pa~s. The quest~on of aggregation follows on the question of the topeme. and IS not ~ questl~n of place as such, but of philosophy-in-place. In other words. my mterest IS not in proposing an analytics of place, but in establishing that philosophy which attends to its place is faced with the ways in which its concepts are produced, in particular the ways in which fecund concepts are produced (that is, concepts that lead to the production of more concepts. rather than rendering philosophical reflection arid and uninteresting).

]5

In African philosophy, the aggregation of place implies that we are always working with an assembly. That means that the search for a pure cultural experience will fail, even though the search for cultural experience with integrity has every chance of succeeding. Integrity is a cohesion of the aggregation, rather than a denial of it. Later I will argue against the idea of purity in l'ullure while at the same time maintaining that integrity is possible through the reenactment of reflective thought. The important thing to realize, though, IN that aggregations can also be used in tension with each other, and that tenNilll! is a productive moment.

Question of Scale What level of place is significant? How do various levels of place inscribe themselves on each other? Place often refers to what is near me or those with whom I identify. Rather thun referring to a discrete "thing," place may be thought of as a continuum, with "closer" and "further." The local also comes with metaphorical impliI:utions-it is not simply proximity, but emotional or meaningful nearness. f .Ul~y Lippard, in The Lure of the Locai,25 does not see the local as just about proximity, but about the aspects of the proximate which endure. for good I·cusons. and which speak of intimate human relations rather than bureaucratic nr technological relations. We furthermore think of all of our places as models of our closest and most Immediate place. We inscribe local place on higher levels of place as well. The state becomes like the home, and the leader like the father. The region becomes like a family, with distant cousins, aunts, and uncles. Home is inhuhited. the lived place made livable (and expressed as livable) by the habits we bring. There is a reciprocal relationship between ourselves and the places Ihut we "dwell." In other words, just as we transform our environment into "home" at the same time our environment serves to create us as well. 26 True place, then, has some features of "home" to it, for some people, and the extent to which we are "un-homed" (unheimlich, to use a Heideggerian term) is the extent to which we are also "dis-placed." We must, to use another lit' Heidegger's terms, dwell, and find what it means to dwelI.27 The very term "African philosophy" speaks to the problem of scale. "AfI'lean" is a construct. and yet an ever-present reality. It was constructed from Huropean interests (the best account of this is V. Y. Mudimbe's The Invention olAfrica), and yet has deep indigenous roots. It becomes almost fractal in the ,,,-Inscriptions of concerns at higher and lower levels. Issues of identity, for InNtunce, are written at the most local level, and at the highest level as well, liN If they lire basically the same issue. As Africans articulate a ~ife-world, it

Chapter I

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

will be important to examine how these metaphors of place trdnsfer to other levels, and also to examine the ways in which the different levels of African place respond to different forces. Being African at the local level may become inscribed on a national or international level, but the philosophical concepts that arise from those levels will mutate based on the differing forms of intensity that can be found.

nUlubiographical account of her life from inside "the bone house" or the body a place from where her story can be told. 29 In fact, that bone house is more lllan just a narrative locus. Philosophy-in-place requires a consideration not only of geographical and historical context of ideas, and their relation to the production of their own context, but also the embodied emplacement of those ideas, and the consequences of that embodiment as a (forgotten) metaphor for higher level philosophical knowledge. This embodiment orients us in particular ways. Place points to "what we nrc loyal to," "what we care about," or "what matters." This sense of meaning may be expressed as subjectivity (vs. objectivity) or habit(us) (vs. space us the reflexive or known). It may point to a personal sense of freedom, over ngainst a "spatialization" which locks a person into external causes. Places, fur many, are tied to the stories that can be told about them, or that they evoke. So, place may in some cases be the site (or more properly, situation) of personal meaning, or for others the cause of personal meaning, or for others the precondition of personal meaning. This significance mayor may not be recognized, or mayor may not be l'n:ated by the subject. Many people speak of a "sense of place," which suggests that some can recognize or feel the "placeness" of (a) place, that is, its Nignificance as a place rather than as an interchangeable aspect of space. The milieu is not only about geographical location, then, but also what huppens, and how we decide on what is worthy of attention. One geographil'ul point may be several places; one place may have several locations. Places muy "quote" or refer to other places ("little Italy," "Chinatown"). Place also IIccms to be inextricably linked to social roles, and with the shattering of these tl'llditional roles comes the profound sense of "placelessness."3o Placelessness finy be the loss of a milieu (or the incommensurability of one milieu with the perceived forms of understanding held by those around), or it may be 'iremdhf'il," foreignness which has both corrosive and creative possibilities. More is needed than scientific method to overcome this version of placelessness. We cunnot just re-appropriate a place by rationally investigating it. The milieu must be re-presented, and made meaningful again. The idea of the milieu stands in contrast to the idea of the center. A center is Ntutic, and centripetal. A milieu is fluid, and centrifugal, that is, its coherence comes not from identifying and preserving itself, but from reenacting itself in new forms. So, while we model our place-knowledge on our most immediate I'mrns of knowledge, we do not simply project our subjectivity on the world In ~ume idealist manner. Philosophy-in-place begins from what matters, whatever that may be. Clearly a milieu under the condition of placelessness struggles to find what Ihut may be. What "matters" is not determined by introspection; put in a suf-

16

Question of Borders How do we distinguish places from each other? How does thought flow across places, so that what is an expression of a life-world in one place becomes foreign in another? Where does that change happen, and what happens there? Many uses of "place" are really about personal, community, regional, or national identity. This identity can be understood either as accruing from place in a relatively linear or causal manner, or more commonly that the construction of place is also the construction of self, so that place and identity need to be approached dialectically or reciprocally. Regionalism, in particular, has been a popular way of linking place and identity, as regions seem less constructed by mechanisms of state formation and more by the practices of people. The sense of identity is reinforced by considering the "liminal" or borderline "places," the events in a person's life of transition or change or movement from one role to another. There is disruption here, a contradiction between the identity maintained and the identity exchanged. On the other hand, for some, place means indigeneity, itself a category understandable by its threatened status. 28 In African philosophy, borders are very important. One might say that they are an ever-present concern. Many thinkers have been very concerned with the borders between African and non-African thought, between forms of African thought, as well as the borders between traditional and modern thought. Taxonomies such as Odera Oruka's "Trends" seek to establish the map of African thought, simultaneously demarcating it from other forms of thought and distinguishing (even hierarchicalizing) internal forms of thought. These forms are treated as solitudes, but the more interesting question comes when we look on the borders of these forms.

Question of the Milieu How does the place (and in particular, human place) relate to its surroundings? How does our notion of place extend outward from our bodily knowledge to encompass all that we find ourselves in the middle of? Nancy Mairs has an

liS

17

18

Chapter 1

ficiently alienating place, the ability to organize significance is compromised. In a situation of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, the milieu may be murky indeed. Achille Mbembe speaks to this in On the Posteolony. It is sufficient here to say that philosophy-in-place in Africa will necessarily have to take into account the corroded (but not lost) milieu that many feel at the personal and public levels.

Question of Intensity How is human place characterized by irreducible differences that come into play and create new places? An intensity (following Deleuze and Guattari) is a quantity that requires difference to produce change (think of the requirement of a battery to have an anode and cathode to produce power). In African philosophy, the search for place has often focused on delving into tradition and culture to ground or substantiate the claim of Africa to a philosophical heritage. In fact, though, platial thinking would look for intensities, the locations of difference across borders that offer the possibility of creative production. So, it is not the claim of history on the African present that matters as much as the tension between the past and the present, or the rural and the urban, or the practical and the theoretical, or even the "us" and the "them," that renders philosophy productive. That tension becomes manifest only as we uncover the questions that specific concepts are answers to. And, if we give up on the assumption that Western philosophy exists in a kind of equilibrium (that is, a "mature" balance in the academic field of knowledge production) while African philosophy strives to attain that equilibrium, we can also recognize that intensities do not themselves strive for balance, but continued production. The battery in balance is a useless and dead battery, and philosophy that has lost its sense of the active sites of the creation of concepts is dead philosophy. Aristotle's sense of place assumed that it was static, a resting point; this assumption about place is one that must be resisted as we tie philosophy to place.

Question of Provenance How does a place contain the signifiers of its past? How does place relate to time? How do our present modes of thought emerge from our traditions? Which hands has a concept passed through, and what marks of provenance does the concept bear? Does the concept have a terroir? The ways in which place becomes time are extensive. Place can imply recovery of the past, experience of the present, and anticipation of the future. Place often evokes references to the passing of time, to the difference that the

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

19

place represents in different times, and to the necessity of memory in establishing a place. It can encode time in a fairly static or controlled form, as in a munument or memorial, or in a more fluid form, such as that made available ill tradition. It can take the form of nostalgia or romanticism (the place marks a particular past time, one that was preferable in some way). History may be encoded in place: "Place is significant in that, for the Apache, history is conceptualized spatially."31 "For the Foi, place is the more tangible expression of lemporality which can be expressed through poetic images."32 Provenance is more than the realization of history'S effects on the present. In fact, there is always more to the effect of history than what we realize. Specifically, we do not simply examine history as if it were an object. Our methods of examination themselves come out of provenance. Even more importantly, the questions we can ask come out of provenance. This is important In realize in all areas of philosophy, especially since we tend to think that our questions come from no-place. Philosophy-in-place in Africa will require thinking African questions, which includes developing modes of analysis 111111 come out of those questions. This will not mean ignoring the resources Ihat may be available from other world traditions, but it will mean that those rcsources must be seen as answers to other questions. Philosophy-in-place in Africa will have to focus on African questions, rather than claims or beliefs, us the starting point of thought. Traditions of thought developed in the West Nuch as hermeneutics may prove useful in Africa, but only if we first recogni.,;c that such traditions may have been developed in a different milieu, addressing different questions. Then, the issue of the border becomes important. I low can an approach which emerged to answer different questions find its home in a new soil?

Question of Self and Other I low does place function as an irreducible contrast in the construction of self? For some thinkers, places must resist total sUbsumption under the self. Place must bear a sense of foreignness. Place must not be inunediately or intuitively kn(lWn (and thus be completely brought into or identified with the self), but rUlher it should let itself be shown forth. It stands at a distance from the self.JJ Place, as a theoretical concept, is often oppositional, sometimes to disI:lplinary methods or structures (perceived as alienating or as insufficiently lihle 10 access human meaning), or modernity (perceived as overly concerned with structural components at the expense of individual experience), or even pUNt-modernity (perceived as too willing to frolic in irony and the free-play lit' lIignifiers, and not sufficiently interested in anything that might matter to lIomeone). It is disruptive of received ways of understanding the w.orld or even

20

Chapter 1

of other places. Place resists the homogenization ~f cul~re. ·'Ne.w sp~ces of resistance are being opened up, where our 'place' (tn all Its meanmgs) IS considered fundamentally important to our perspective, our location in the world, . d' f "34 and our right and ability to challenge dommant Iscourses a power. In philosophy-in-place in Africa, the border"of self and ~th~r has always been a contested one. If "I am because we are holds any slgmficance. then there is no Archirnedean point in the discrete self of liberal democracy. No one can build the institutions of society, or the places of culture, from the foundation of an individual self. And, as Fanon, Mbembe, and others have astutely pointed out, the corrosion of the self under colonialism puts us even further away from the triumphalist narrative of identity construction i~ the 'Yest. Philosophy-in-place is also not intercultural or comparative p~tlosophy. If it were, the question of self and other would become the questton. of the means and basis for the comparison of places. We would be meaSUrIng the relative proximity of places to each other, and reporting on similarities and differences, perhaps even judging superiority or inferiority. This is not the self and other question that I have in mind here, since this is only a mediated self, already identified with some place or other and put in contrast with another place. Just as we cannot construct a place out of the building blocks of already existing selves, we also cannot collectivize and abstract those selves and put them in contrast to abstractions from other places. Place must remain both an irreducible other to the self, and a constitutive part of the self. This paradox is a difficult one to maintain in practice, ~ut to fail in maintaining it means that we either impose a Western conceptIOn of liberalism on African places, and thus systematically misunderstand the~, or we make places into abstractions of the self, comparable to other abstractions elsewhere, and thus lose the site of concept creation. Ideally, the place must interrogate the self. And as we have already seen, the topemic level and provenance of place render that interrogation complex, but ultimately far more productive and interesting. . ' . . Any place, then, will be something of a mystery, a foretgn place, m Its Irreducible otherness. There is no interrogation without otherness. To the extent that we might think that our own place is merely an extension of the self and thus transparent, we have yet to allow a real interrogation to occur. In ~his, a central tenet of Boasian anthropology still has legitimacy, since we strive to make the familiar unfamiliar, and to make the unfamiliar familiar.

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

21

lind read place, and what are the limits of these metaphors? As has already l~ecn argued, plac~ is like a language (among other things)-the topeme, like the phoneme, IS an element of intelligible construction. Place has often ~I!cn regarded as a text, as legible at various levels to those who engage it. In IlIct, though, the metaphor of textuality is less useful for philosophy-in-place 111iI? the metaphor of speaking and listening. Philosophy-in-place is a topic, II thscourse on something, or perhaps more usefully, a discourse somewhere. ~)iscourse has tended to emphasize speaking, but in fact listening must take lis proper place in questioning . . Bu~ to ~hat: or to whom, are we listening? In philosophy-in-place in Af1'It.:1l, hstenmg 10 part refers to listening to place. That means listening to real humans as they express their concerns, but it means more specifically listening 10 ~he questions they are asking as those concerns are expressed. To what lire thetr concerns and concepts an answer? And how are the questions that we us philosophers bring to those discussions illuminated? How do we misunderstand, as well as understand? The topic may not even be the one we think it is, as we listen to expressions of life in a place. Philosophers are inclined to come to life with a set of categories, inherited from our training. We pattcrn-match-the concern that one person has over government corruption is 1111 ethical and social question based in a conception of fairness and distribuliye justice; the concern that another has about differing structures of value is rcully an epistemological and moral difference, solvable if assumptions and hc:lief structures are identified. Those patterns that we find invariably fit into the training we have. But the topic may not be the same. What would it mean for us to create ncw concepts, to come to the expressed problems of society in a manner that di~ ?ot sta::.wi~ philosophical cate~ories: but. with the skills of listening, the Itl'ul!ty to hst, to alter ourselves m a direction, or alternately, to organize lind order? We may then have a true topic, a place for listening and speaking where pe~ple meet. Ther~ are, of course, all sorts of barriers to such a place (liUer, I :-VIII address the dtfference between listening/speaking and dialogue); all of thts has been well established by Habermas and others. But in fact the difficulties of establishing such places may have been as much due to st~jng with philosophical assumptions about what those places should look like, as they may be due to real incommensurabilities in language.

Question of the Trace Question of Listening and Speaking How does place function as an extension of the self, as a metaphoric and metonymic imprint and mirror of bodily knowledge? How do we speak, hear.

Where can the evidence of past and other places be seen? The trace may be a trace of nature. There is an a1most Rousseauian sense uf authenticity and primordiality which is tied to Nature, whic~ makes all

22,

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

Chapter I

other places derivative, and in many cases, alienating. Some writers regard nature as the quintessential place, the place which draws out a "truer" self or subjectivity. Wilderness is sometimes seen in this way, as a necessary place for the true human self (e.g., Thoreau). Landscape is nature viewed or nature experienced. It could be considered to be place created, as a landscape painter makes nature into a place. The traces may not be romantic ones, though. Place is space invested with symbolic meaning, and that meaning becomes inscribed in a variety of ways, ranging from highly codified or ritualized ways to very fleeting ways. Michel de Certeau refers to space as "practiced place," or place that has had the meaning of practices imposed upon it. A street is a place that becomes a space when people walk on it and use it. 35 Place is culture-the earth is "terra incognita," empty space, until culture (or in some cases, a particular culture) places its imprint. Culture may be the difference between the "place" of animals, which we call their habitat, and the place of humans, and to the extent that we are willing to see symbolic order in the animal world (through bio- or zoo-semiotics), we may also speak of them as having place. Other planets are "no-place" until they at least can be described, and perhaps until there is a human imprint that leaves an indication of symbolic order. And, place may be understood as the trace of the divine. Place has been experienced as a voice, a healer, and a mystical guide. Among some religious thinkers, place becomes immanence or incarnation, the spirit made flesh dwelling among us. "Place is significant in that God made entry into time and space (the combination of which constitutes place) with His incarnation into Christ."J6 And groups such as the Pintupi in Australia hold that the songlines, discernable to those who have the proper relationship to the land, stretch not 37 only over geography but through time, back to the creation of the world. If these questions have been useful ones, it should be clear that thought must leave its traces in places. We listen to those traces, and find ways of expressing new concepts, that is, new fonns of life that re-inscribe a life-world by making it new, by reenacting it given a new set of conditions. To take the question of place seriously means to try to think anew what it is like when thought and circumslance meet. This work on African philosophy will not just ask about the place of thought in Africa, or the place of African philosophy within the discipline. It will also ask what we might learn anew about thinking from a place, when we take that place seriously. The other reason for listing questions about place is to problematize place as a geographical concept. Place is, of course, tied to physicality in some important sense, but it is not reducible to it. Our places have as much to do with the narratives, histories, and practices we attach to them as with the geographical features. Our places are contextual-one may be "African" to

23

non-African, "Kenyan" to a Nigerian, and Kikuyu to another Kenyan. Or, lIlore likely, one may be displaced, partaking in more than one place at once cven while being located in a single geographical spot. This is not just the sluff of cultural theory, but of philosophy, if we are willing to recognize that Ihought and our complex sense of life in place necessarily come together. The most useful thing a list like this does is to raise the question of what scnse of place we mean, or need, when we ask the question, "What is it like In do philosophy in this place 7" Questions are at the core of thi s project-the uhility to ask good questions, even the "right" question, the ability to recoglIize the nuances and implications of a question, and the ability to identify philosophical questions. Heidegger's most important legacy may just be Ihat he pointed us to the significance of questions not just for justifying our knowledge, but for recognizing our human experience as such. Questioning, us he says, builds a way. II

TWO PROJECTS As I have already suggested, there are two parallel projects in evidence in this hook, which operate in a reciprocal relationship. Each assumes the success of Ihe other. The project is obviously made more difficult by this fact, yet there was no other way to proceed. One project has to do with the relationship between philosophy and place. Philosophers' engagement with place has primarily been one of analysis. While other disciplines have reflected on their place, intellectually, historicully, and in relation to their subjects, philosophy has not done this to any "reat degree. Only recently have projects such as Edward Casey's Getting IJuck into Place and Jeffrey Malpas' Place and Philosophy; A PhilosophiI'UI Topography begun to gather the phenomenological work that could be "leaned from thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze, lind others. But even these have not dealt to any great extent with the place til' philosophy. There is one paper, by Eduardo Mendiata, which raises the question in a specific (urban) setting. 3K Derrida's question, "where does [phiItlsophy] today find its most appropriate place?" has not been answered, or even taken very seriously. It is the intention of this book to give one example of an appropriate place for philosophy, and in some signifIcant sense its "most appropriate" place. Perhaps surprisingly (to some), this place is African philosophy. The second uf the two parallel projects is to work through this place, this African place, llli one which is appropriate for philosophy and always has been. Why this

",huice?

24

Chapter I

One important reason is the history of philosophical reflection on Africa. Africa has not been regarded as an appropriate place for philosophy, and Africans have not been seen as appropriate practitioners. Such sentiments are most forcefully expressed by Hume, Kant, Hegel, and others writing in the late Enlightenment and early nineteenth century. Africa is a good starting point for this study precisely because of the history of its dismissal. It should be noted that this reason in itself may well make some African philosophers uneasy. Does Africa have nothing in its own right that makes it worth studying? Is it only worthwhile because of this history of dismissal by non-Africans? Certainly, African reflective and abstract thought has its own integrity and merit, and its study does not need to be justified because of previous marginalization by Europe. At the same time, history cannot be ignored. We cannot pretend that this marginalization never happened, and suppose that there is some pure African thought that we can access outside of the history of its interactions, not only with Western philosophy but with other philosophical traditions. African philosophy has emerged as the result of a series of inter- and intra-cultural conversations, and its place cannot be abstracted from those in favor of finding some sort of place-less, time-less African philosophy. The second reason why this choice is an appropriate one is that written African philosophy has a recent history. This is not to say that African philosophy did not happen before the 1940s when Placide Tempels decided to imagine a Bantu philosophy, against the wishes and inclination of his church. Europe did not give birth to African philosophy. However, the history of written African philosophy is recent, and that presents some interesting opportunities. For one, the interpretive history, the set of texts that African philosophers today use as reference points and regard as canonical within the field, is comparatively small. Of course, one might point to Kemetic texts, one might claim Augustine as an African philosopher (despite his own wish), one might point to Zara Yacob and Ethiopian philosophy in the seventeenth century, one might point to William Amo's work in Germany, and one might point to diasporic writings as evidence that African philosophy was written long before the twentieth century, and these facts would be undeniable. However, these texts tend not to describe an interpretive history or conversation, but rather isolated (although potentially interesting in their own right) events. And what about oral tradition? It is also important, and as Odera Oruka and others have argued, that tradition contains important elements of critique and abstraction which are as philosophical as anything else. 39 However, that oral work is accessed by scholars today, and the texts exist today. The actual reflective work of scholars such as Oruka and Gyekye is current work on concepts accessed through unusual (for philosophers) means- interviews, the

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

25

l'ollection of proverbs, and so forth. None of this suggests that the work is any less interesting or philosophical; as I hope to argue throughout the book, the question of whether it is philosophical or not actually deters us from treating it as philosophical, and doing the phenomenological work that gives access 10 and allows the creation of new concepts. Given these caveats, that I am not suggesting that no written work in African philosophy precedes the 194Os, and that I am not saying that philosophy requires written records, I might return to my original observation, Ihat African philosophy has a recent textual history. Why is this important? Because the recent textual history means that African philosophers are still working out how to deal with both the written texts and the other texts that form the basis of the discipline. The nature of textuality and its relationship to philosophical discourse is a live issue with practical consequences for African philosophy, in different ways than may be the case for Western philosophy, While there certainly are works that are respected in the discipline, they have not tended to collect around them the kind of critical interpretive work that make a conversation. They are respected without being landmarks. This is nol because they cannot support such critical work; quite the opposite. It is hecause African philosophy has tended to focus on subject matter outside of ilself, and not seen its own work as supporting philosophical reflection. The work that has emerged from reading Fanon is perhaps the exception to this, for certain kinds of questions about existence in Africa, but there are few others one can point to who have provided the disciplinary and thematic organitUlion. This will change, as writers from the past few decades are recognized for the creative energy they have brought to the field and as they become generally recognized intellectual markers along the way. In reflecting on (its) place, African philosophy also has the opportunity 10 work out its own history, and come to terms with some generally acknowledged frustrations. The third reason why African philosophy is a good choice for this project is that I believe it is at the point of a new kind of selfconsciousness, the kind that happens when a group of scholars move from JUslification or legitimation of their activities to a hostile world, to the ability tu generate new insights for their own purposes. Feminism is a good com(,urison on this point. There came a time when feminist scholars moved from Juslification of the right to the place that they had, the right to speak from a l'"rlicular place, and began to actually speak from that place. One result of Ihi!! is that feminism became much more internally critical, willing to sustain difference and explore commonalities in new ways. It also meant that the crith·lue of existing conditions was not the only hallmark of feminist philosophy. II became productive and creative. Thinkers began to consider the work of Irlguruy, Butler, MacKinnon, and others not just to figure out whether they

26

Chapter I

"got it right," whatever "it" was, but to see what kind of worlds these thinkers opened up, what new ways of imagining (women's, and also human) experience were offered. Feminism became jazz, in which the players improvised off of each other, using difference not as a shibboleth but as a way of creating new ideas. And all philosophy became richer for this new music. African philosophers have always been willing to differ with one another. There has always been a strong critical trend that has been the life-blood of the field. However, the argument of this book will be that the nature of the critical engagement has been chiefly in the service of searching for a metaphysical grounding to legitimate the field. The unasked question has always been, how can we best establish African philosophy as truly African and truly philosophical? My argument here is that that question itself has distracted scholars from moving to a more creative and less defensive posture, one which can truly examine the interesting and useful ideas that might come from the sages, from the proverbs, or from the academy. One sourCe of these new insights is from African philosophers themselves. It is ironic that much African philosophy has been focused on explicating "the tradition," whatever a particular thinker believes that to be. In doing so, the philosophers themselves have either viewed each other's writings as writing about philosophy, but not philosophy itself, or as something to build upon to further a particular argument. Odera Oruka, for example, writes about the sages as philosophers, but writes about other published philosophers as commentators on philosophy, whose arguments more or less adequately support the overall goal of characterizing what is truly African and truly philosophical about African philosophy. He is not the only one that could be seen in this way; many have done this. Very few, on the other hand, have analyzed the texts of other philosophers the way that someone might read and consider the texts of Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, or others. Few, even African philosophers themselves, have considered the writings of other African philosophers to be worthy of analysis, and if they are considered, they tend not to be writers who published on the continent. This has been the case because of commitment, often unspoken, to the idea of cultural purity. If real African philosophy comes from real Africans, and these people can be identified by being "uncontaminated" by Western thought, then treating African philosophers' writings as philosophy becomes much more difficult because almost all of these people have been trained in the Western world and, therefore, are contaminated. This criticism could be taken a step further, and put in tenns of a longcontested term within African philosophical circles-ethnophilosophy. The debate, as is generally known, is over whether philosophy must be textual, personal, and critical, or whether a broader definition of philosophy might include cultures in which oral, communal, and descriptive world views seem

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

27

lIlore available. While I do not want to preview my own later comments about Ihis debate, it does seem that there is another kind of ethnophilosophy current within a field that regards philosophically important or interesting material 10 be located at a distance from the written work of philosophers, contained in culture or folkways. It is not that these are not philosophically interesting, hut philosophy (as I will argue later) is a practiced activity, not an object. No purticular belief or intellectual artifact of any culture (whether commonly or illdividually held) is inherently philosophical, but rather it becomes philosophical as it becomes part of philosophical discourse or philosophical queslioning. The main criticism that Hountondji's critique of ethnophilosophy Icvels, as I see it, is not that the objects of reflection that Tempels, Mbiti and others find philosophically interesting are not in fact interesting to philosophy (hut rather only are the province of anthropology, religion, etc.), but that the location of philosophy has been misplaced, in objects of reflection rather than in the reflective process itself. In that sense, to not treat work of philosophers liS worthy of critical reflection and analysis is to engage in the spirit, if not Ihe letter, of ethnophilosophy in its pejorative sense. So, this book will take African philosophers seriously as philosophers, ruther than as commentators on or apologists for African philosophy. This IIpplies especially to writers who have published on the continent of Africa. '111cre is no special virtue of having written in Africa itself;40 however, that is 1.1 group that has been systematically ignored, if only because their work Is often so difficult to obtain. Taking these thinkers seriously does not mean IIt!reeing with them, nor does it mean necessarily disagreeing either. It means finding the most sympathetic reading possible of their work, while at the Nume time assessing it with an eye to such questions as: what question(s) is Ihis work an answer to? What, from this work, is not readily accessible to a Western audience, and can be clarified so as to make a sympathetic reading pussible? What are the ambiguities, what is not being said in this writing? Who is the audience? What rhetorical strategies is the writer using? What Irudition(s) of philosophy is the writer assuming? This is not simply attention IU the rhetorical features of philosophy, although those are important as well. This is the procedure oLphilosophy-in-place which remains consistent with Ihe idea that philosophy is in the experience, in the doing, and that must oc~upy centre stage. We would do no less with important thinkers elsewhere in Ihe world; we should be doing this with African philosophers as well.41 A fourth reason why African philosophy is a good choice for a project on Ihe place(s) of philosophy is that I believe African philosophy has a great deal I" ~ontribute to philosophy in general, which the rest of the world has not yet hud the ears to hear. All philosophy reflects on itself as philosophy. That has heen u constant since the beginning. However, African philosophers have a

29

Chapter 1

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

unique context in which to engage in this reflection. There is the already mentioned history of exclusion. That has several aspects to it that have shaped the recent history of African thought African philosophers have had to deal with questions such as: What do we make of the relative lack of textual hist?ry? What do we make of the obvious interaction between Western and African thought-does this suggest that African thought is simply derivative? Which place(s) are hospitable to philosophy-universities? Villages? Newspapers? Which places are inhospitable? The paradox of this book is that the two projects, the attempt to reflect on the place(s) from which philosophy can appropriately emerge, and the specific place of African philosophy, each require the other to be successful. One cannot reflect on the place(s) of philosophy solely in the abstract-this must reference a specific place, or the concepts have no legitimacy. Philosophy-in-place must begin from a place, without falling for the equally m~ta­ physical position that particularity is some sort of bedrock or anchor-pomt. So, that project requires that the chosen place, African philosophy, already be worked out at some level. On the other hand, one cannot reflect on the place of African philosophy without some concepts that can aid that reflection. African philosophy does not emerge as unrelated to other places, nor does it emerge as unrelated to the set of concepts that philosophers have historically investigated. Despite the conceptual paradoxes of this book, I believe a coherent account can be woven. I wish to tum next to a brief overview of the account I intend to weave.

The concepts in the central part of the book are ones which I believe have IiCrved as the putative metaphysical grounding of the field of African philosophy. They have been the focus of most of the discussion, and that discussion has Inken the form of trying to work out some anchor-point that can guarantee that Ihe project of African philosophy is both truly African and truly philosophical. The working out of such anchor points is itself philosophical work; however, what it has in effect done is to distract attention from the activity of philosophy Ilself. African philosophy has to a great extent been taken up with the question "Is there an African philosophy?", even in the work of those who have decried lhul question as pointless, unproductive, inSUlting, or incoherent. The search for Ihat which is truly African and truly philosophical can be understood using an illluge which will come up regularly in this book, that of the map. Maps, in the modem era, have often been used to lay claim to territory or region, to establish legitimacy, provide the basis for citizenship, and create i(lentity. In the modem world, one in which we assume that what is important I!> "out there" and it is our job to represent it faithfully, impartially, and accurutely, we have developed maps that visually and textually reinforce claims 10 territory. Of course, a great deal has been done to show that this notion of Ihe map as the impartial reporter is seriously flawed;42 still, the image holds fur much of the public. Philosophy could be imagined as a territory which has been mapped. Most uf Ihe world of philosophy rarely thinks about the fact that it has been mapped; II hus been internalized to the extent that a map is only needed when outside ur our "home" subdisciplines. Philosophers have given more attention to the mapping of philosophy when it comes to the jurisdiction of philosophy over "orne methods or content, or the assigning of methods or content to others. Hvcn when teaching first-year classes, we likely tell our students how what We are doing is not psychology, or theology, or science, even though at points philosophy resembles all of these and more. We know where the borders are, we know who the citizens are, and within the nation of philosophy, we know Ihe rules, customs, traditions, languages and local dialects. 43 It should not be a surprise, then, that Africans, who since at least the Enlightenment have been teld that they are not capable of generating coherent philosophical thought, would want membership in this country. This memberNhip either has to be earned (which some do by the usual channels), or it must he shown that Africans have been members all along. and that those who tlrew this map in the first place did not draw the lines inclusively enough. In It lime when real maps are, for the most part, increasingly fragmented, this map seems to be moving in the opposite direction. This process is all about space, at least metaphorically. African philosophy hlt/i a space in the world of philosophy, it has just not yet been recognized.

28

THE ARGUMENT OF THE BOOK Philosophy in an African Place is structured dialectically, recognizing the paradoxical argument I wish to make. The dialectic is between the concept of place itself and a set of concepts in African philosophy. In this introduction, I have tried to sketch out a schematic of place that I believe is useful in uncovering African philosophy. Then, for the bulk of the chapters, I consider a set of concepts within African philosophy which have been used "spatially" instead of "platially," that is, they have been used to establish and/or defend a territory known as "African Philosophy" rather than generate new concepts within African philosophy. The intention is not to reject those concepts, bm to redirect them. In the final chapter of the book I return to the question of the nature of place, with a new set of concepts provided by African philosophy, and consider what has been made available by the redirection of African philosophy.

•

30

Chapter 1

The move to establish the space of African philosophy has been the simultaneous move to establish borders, customs, gatekeepers, laws and citizenry. All this is behind the various attempts to answer the question "Is there an African philosophy?", even when that question is rejected as too simple or too insulting. The focus on space has played itself out in African philosophy as the search for a metaphysical grounding, a "first principle" that will establish the legitimacy of these borders and laws. Even if one argues that that principle has always been present, it has to be articulated in such a way that the rest of the philosophical world will recognize its legitimacy. It cannot simply be a claim or a will to power, not for this "country" to be truly part of the philosophical continent. One might not place much stock in the opinion of the rest of the world; nevertheless, the claim to or argument for space continues even for those who are just trying to work from "pure" African sources and develop thought which is relevant to Africa itself. Even these attempts (and I am thinking of some writers who develop philosophy out of the Ifa tradition, as well as some Kemetic philosophies) seem to require some prior sense of the purity of tradition, identity, culture, or language. Again, there is a metaphysical claim being made (or perhaps, uncritically assumed) that undergirds the research. One might say, so what? Aren't maps necessary? Yes, they are. However, the problem comes when we believe that maps are neutral tools, even in this metaphorical form, and that the result achieved can convince anyone that territory has been legitimately claimed. Maps are texts, they are tools, they are forms of knowledge that make possible some activities, and close off others. They fix and they inscribe, in a particular way, one which makes territory available under particular conditions. It is significant to consider the shift in the nature of maps between the modern and premodern eras. Before the modern Western impulse to exploration and colonization, maps tended to be records of significant places. They often did not record much water, for instance, because nothing happened there. They did not record mountains, except as places to avoid or as spaces of otherness, where gods dwelt (it is said that Petrarch was the first person who climbed a mountain just for its own sake). They were often circular, not to reflect the shape of the earth but to demonstrate a "wholeness," that this was all there was below the heavens. In short, to today's reader, they would not have looked very much like the territory they were meant to describe. And perhaps they were not intending to describe at all, at least, not the way we imagine description to take place. They were not reporting on the "objective" place, the place available to God or to a view from nowhere. The view was always in terms of human pursuits, even if those pursuits were of God. Now, maps are of God's pursuits, made possible through the auspices

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

31

Ill' scientific method (another mapping technique) and the universal pretense Ill' modern life. But those maps were reporting on some place, or places. In fact, they were I'~porting place, not space. They did not lay down an objective grid and just )lui in whatever happened to be there. They only put something in when it had human significance. As travel guides, they were probably not all that useful ttl ,lJIyone who did not already know the route (a traveler who did not know the route would have had to rely on talking to people along the way, another very human activity). As evocations of what human experience was like, of what was important, and of how the world was ordered, they were perhaps lIlore eloquent. African philosophy has proceeded as if it is drawing a modernist map. As I will argue, it has actually overlooked the local expression of significance III favor of answering the question "Is there an African philosophy?" in the ufl'irmative, and at the same time locating it both in terms of its internal inI~rcsts and its external references. This book is meant to try to ask a different IllIcstion. Rather than "Is there an African philosophy?", the guiding question will be "What is it to do philosophy in this placeT' So, the concepts in the central part of the book are ones which have been cundidates for a metaphysical anchor-point, that is, for the establishment und maintenance of spatial-philosophical maps. The first of these is tradition ("Tradition in the Periphery"). I consider Kwame Gyekye's discussion of tradition in Tradition and Modernity, noting its innovative character and limitations. "Questioning Reason," the next chapter, begins by expanding whut I have already said about mapping, and outlines various attempts at ~Ilnfiguring the field. I consider the central question in the field, the tension between universalism and particularism/relativism. This leads to considering lIume expressions of rationally ordering in the field: a conversation on "the I'ut ional path," some taxonomies of African philosophy. I finish by proposing lIume new questions about reason that might be more fruitful. In "Wisdom Is Actually Thought" I consider Odera Oruka's sage philosophy project as one which uses as its hinge a concept of critical reason inherent in truditional Africa. I argue that Oruka has explicitly responded to the spatial 'Iucslion ("is there an African philosophy?"), but that sage philosophy has the I(KIls to address the questions of place in African philosophy. "Culture and the Problem of Universality" begins by arguing against the Ideu that there is pure culture which can serve as a guarantee of the "'truly Afl'i":lm" half of the pairing. On the other side of the argument, I consider Kwasi Wlredu and Odera Oruka as exponents of "cultural universals," an attempt to Identify some element that would guarantee that African philosophy is part of lhe rest of the map of world philosophy.

32

Chapter I

"Listening to Language" considers those who locate unique philosophical thought in some aspect of language, First 1 address those who deal with language directly, such as Alexis Kagame. Second, I address exponents of the idea that proverbs could form the basis of African philosophy. Finally, I consider some issues raised by translation, as raised in part by Barry Hallen and I. O. Sodipo, and also by Wiredu. Finally, in "Practicality: African Philosophy's Debts and Duties," 1 address the often-heard injunction that African philosophy should be practicaL Many African philosophers are very committed to their practice as one which benefits the African, or African diaspora world. The relevance of philosophy is a constant theme, and might be seen as a kind of pragmatic grounding and mapping of African philosophy. This final chapter of the first section deals with the possibilities and limits of using philosophy's ability to work good in a community as its raison d' eire. None of these chapters intends to dismiss these concepts as irrelevant; in fact, quite the opposite. These are central and fundamental issues for African philosophy to engage. My intention is not to undermine them, but to undermine their essentialist, "mapping of space" function. 1 wish to retain the dynamic, creative nature of these concepts, as they transform themselves into adequate concepts for particular thought-lives, In the concluding chapter, 1 return to the fonns of place outlined earlier in this introduction, and use them to re-cast the various concepts discussed throughout the book. 1 argue that these concepts are crucial to a robust and creative African philosophy, and that thinking of concepts as having a place in the sense that I have outlined enables African philosophy to both remain true to the experience of Africans and also contribute something vital to other philosophical dialects.

NOTES I. Jacques Derrida, "Of the Humanities and the Philosophical Discipline: The Right to Philosophy from the Cosmopolitical Point of View (the Example of an International Institution)," Surfaces IV, 310 Folio 1 (1994), MontreaL www.pum. umontreaLcairevues/surfaces/vol4/derridaa.html (December 22, 2008). 2. Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philo,wphies: A Global Theory of I ntellectual Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 3. Kai Kresse, "Towards an 'Anthropology of Philosophy"; The Ethnography of Critical Discourse and Intellectual Practice in Africa," in Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 4, Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy. After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

33

5. Jeffrey Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6. Godwin Sogolo, Foundations of African Philosophy: A Definitive Analysis I{ Conceptual Issues in African Thought (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 11)l)3), xi. 7. See "Research on Place and Space" at http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/-janzb/place/ K Many examples of work on place could be given in geography; a very seleclive few might include: John A. Agnew and James Duncan, eds. The Power of Place lIIuston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); David Black, Donald Kunze, and John Pickles, eds. e'mllmonplaces: Essays on the Nature of Place (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989); Nicholas J. Entrikin. The Betweenness of Place: Towards A Geogral,lly of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Relph, Edward. "lua and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976); Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The "!'I'.I'pective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). 9. The discussion of place in architecture includes (among many others): Karsten Ilurries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997); Hobert Mugerauer, 111Ierpretations on Behalf of Place: Environmental Displacements (llid Alternative Responses (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994); Christian NorbergSdlUiz, Architecture: Meaning alld Place (New York: Rizzoli, 1988) (among many nlllCrs of Norberg-Schulz's); David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer, Dwelling, Place, (II/l/ Environment: Toward a Phenomenology of Person and World (New York: CoIUlllbia University Press, 1985); T. ThUs-Evensen, Archetypes in Architecture (Oslo: SCllndinavian University Press, 1987); F. VioIich, The Bridge to Dalmatia: A Search ./ill" the Meaning of Place (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998). 10. See, for example. William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the lIuman Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996); Edward Mooney, ed. Wilderness alld the Heart: Henry Bugbee's Philosophy of Place, Pres!'/In', and Memory (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1999); David Rothenberg. ed. Wild Ideas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Max OelNchlllgcr, The Idea ofWilderness: From Prehistory to the Age ofEcology (New Haven, ('\lI1I1.: Yale University Press, 1991). II. Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (I,!JItdon and New York:: Verso Books, ] 995); Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places (Albuquerque, N.Mex.: University of New Mexico, 1996); Eric Hirsch and Michael O'llunlon, eds. The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives an Place and Space «(hllord, England: Clarendon Press, 1995); James Weiner, The Empty Place: Poetry, ,\'jld(,(!, and Being among the Fo; of Papua New Guinea (Bloomington: Indiana UniVIHNity Press, ]991). J 2. Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Hcrkeiey, Calif.: University of Califomi a Press, 1996); Madeleine Grynsztejn, About flue!' (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1995); Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: ,\'I'tI,\'es of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997). D. J. P. Bourdieu and N. Alsayyad, eds. Dwellings, Settlements and Traditions: ('/tj,r.f-Cultural Perspectives (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989); Kim I>!IVCY, Framing Places (London: Routledge, 1999); James Duncan and David Ley,

Chapter I

Introduction: Philosophy-in-Place

eds. Place/CulturelRepresentation (New York: Routledge, 1993)~ William Vitek and Wes Jackson, cds. Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996). 14. John Barrell, The idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-/840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Robeno M. DianoUo, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); Deborah Lou Keahey, Making It Home: Place in Canadian Prairie Literature (Winnipeg, Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press, 1998); Tim Lilburn, Living in the World as If It Were Home: Essays (Dunvegan, Onlario: Cormorant Books, 1999); Kent C. Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing and the Sense of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Wallace Stegner and Page Stegner. American Places (New York: Dutton, 1981). 15. David Canter, The Psychology of Place (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977); Michael Godkin, "Identity and Place: Clinical Applications Based on Notions of Rootedness and Uprootedness," in The Human Experience of Space and Place, cd. Anne Buttimer and David Seamon (London: Croom Helm, 1980: 73-85); Allan Pred, "Structuration and Place: On the Becoming of Sense of Place and Structure of Feeling." Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 13 (1983): 45-68; David Seamon, "A Way of Seeing People and Place: Phenomenology in Environment-Behavior Research," in Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research, ed. S. Wapner, J. Demick, T. Yamamoto, and H. Minami (New York: Plenum, 2000), 157-78. 16. Herb Childress, Landscapes of Betrayal, Landscapes of Joy: Curtisville in the Lives of its Teenagers (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2000); M. L. Million, "It Was Home": A Phenomenology of Place and Involuntary Displacement as Illustrated by the Forced Dislocation of Five Southern Alberta Families in the Oldman River Dam Flood ,4rea. Doctoral dissertation (Saybrook Institute Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco, 1992); Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Pariors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989); G. L. Pocius, A Place to Belong: Community Order and Everyday Space in Calvert, Neuifoundland (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1986). 17. Although this, of course, does not prejudge the question of philosophy's own origins. 18. Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, Calif.: University of Califomia Press, 1997). 19. See also Pauli Tapani Karjalainen and Pauline von Bonsdorff, eds., Place and Embodiment (Saarijaarvi, Finland: University of Helsinki Lahti Research and Training Centre, 1997). 20. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984). See especially 117ff. 21. Joseph Grange, "Place, Body, and Situation" in David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer, Dwelling, Place, and Environment: Toward a Phenomenology of Person and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 71-84.

22. Jeffrey Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Camhridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 23. Bruce Janz, "Whistler's Fog and the Aesthetics of Place," Reconstructions NJlccial edition ("Rhetoric of Place," Michael Benton, ed.) 5, no. 3 (Summer 2005). hap:llreconstruction.eserver.org/053/janz.shtml (December 22, 2008). 24. Barry Lopez, ,4rctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Random House, 1986), 25. Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Socirty (New York: The New Press, 1997). 26. Robert Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness and Moral Concern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997). 27. Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" in Heidegger, Poetry, LanNI/IIge, Thought. Trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 28. David Welchman Gegeo, "Cultural Rupture and lndigeneity: The Challenge III' (Re)visioning 'Place' in the Pacific." The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (Fall 20(1): 491-507. 29. Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space (New York: Harper & Row, 1989; Beacon Press, 1995), 30. This is the argument in Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of /:l,'crIYJllic Media on Social Behaviour (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press,

34

35

IllK5). " J. Keith Basso, "Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape," III Sleven Feld and Keith H. Basso, Senses of Place (Santa Fe, N.Mex.: School of

American Research Press, 1996). 32. James Weiner, The Empty Place: Poetry, Space, and Being among the Foi of /'tI[lIW New Guinea (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 33, Sec Jane Howarth, "In Praise of Backyards: Toward a Phenomenology of l'lnce." www.lancs.ac.ukldepts/philosophy/awaymave/onlineresourceslin%20praise '/f,2I1of%20backyards,pdf (December 22, 2008), .44. Michael Keith and Steve Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity (New York: Noulledge, ] 993), 6. ]5. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley. Calif.: University IIf Clilifomia Press, 1984), 117. Jb. Geoffrey Lilburne, A Sense of Place: A Christian Theology of the Land (Nashville, Tenn,: Abingdon Press, 1989). .17. See Bruce Chatwin. The Songfines (London: Penguin Books, 1987); Fred Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics Among Western lJC',m·t Aborigines (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991). ,lH. Eduardo Mendieta, "The City and the Philosopher: On the Urbanism of PheIlCIIllcnology." Philosophy and Geography 4, no. 2 (2001): 203-218. :19. Or, maybe superior-see Gail Presbey, "Ways in which Oral Philosophy is Hurlerior to Written Philosophy." APA Newsletter: Philosophy and the Black Experi· "/1'1'. 96, no. I (1999). 40. It may seem contradictory to say this at the beginning of a book on the imporIIIIL:C of place, but as I will argue, we have too narrow a conception of place much

36

Chapler I

of the time. In a ccrtain sense, it always matters where we write from. My only point here is that writing on the continent does not in itself grant any special authority, as if there is unique access to a "pure" object." The notion of purity will come under scrutiny in chapter 4. 41. One might argue that works such as D. A. Masolo's African Philmophy in Search of Identity does exactly this, but in fact its purpose is to give an overview of significant texts and to place them in a narrative, a task which the book carries out quite well. Masolo docs engage in some textual critique in the process, but it is relatively limited. Perhaps only the works of V. Y. Mudimbe have been analyzed in the manner I mean here, as work whose philosophical value is located somewhere other than on the most superficial level. 42. See, for example, Denis Wood and John Fels, The Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 1992). 43. There was a story reported in (sadly defunct) Lingua Franca about a mysterious wealthy person who paid large sums of money to attract some philosophers to review a manuscript in speculative metaphysics. The writer of the article eventually figured out who this person was, and it came out that one of the reasons for this ruse was that he had tried to publish his manuscript through regular channels, but was told that he didn't have the proper credentials. He was frustrated that, in effect, he wasn't a citizen of the philosophical world, but thought that he had something to contribute anyway.

Chapter Two

Tradition in the Periphery

More than any other concept in African philosophy, tradition has been seen central, if only in the extent of its use. Writers use "traditional" and "tradilion" in connection with a whole range of concepts, and for the most part II simply serves as a distinguishing marker to differentiate what goes on in Alrica (particularly rural Africa) from what goes on in the West, or in areas Ilifluenced by the West. In some cases, it is that which is left after rational defense for action has been exhausted. For others, it is that which any ratiol1ul defense must ultimately appeal to. Sometimes tradition exists in tension with values such as modernity, progressiveness, or contemporaneousness. At Its worst, the term is little more than a somewhat more benign form of the "primitive" label so loved by anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth I:cntury. But what is it at its best? The question of the nature of tradition is something that has perhaps had lIIore attention outside of philosophy in Africa than inside, especially in Illerature. One could point to any number of novelists, poets, or storytellers who are concerned with charting the encounter between various aspects uf tradition and whatever its alternative is conceived to be, whether that is modernity, urbanism, Western ism, or post-colonialism. While this chapter IN about the explicit treatment of tradition in philosophy, it is worth at least noting that a useful and interesting philosophical study could be made of Ihe work of such writers as Grace Ogot, Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, ('hinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, and many others, and the ways in which Ihcy show forth the place(s) in which concepts come to have currency_ Sam Imho gives a good picture of how this might be done in his work on Okot p' Bilek, Oral Traditions as Philosophy: Okot p' Bitek's Legacy for African Plti/omphy. . liS

]7

39

Chapter 2

Tradition in the Periphery

The most extensive reflection on the concept of tradition in African philosophy is Kwame Gyekye's Tradition and Modernity,! although there are some briefer contributions (e.g., lean-Marie Makang,2 Samuel Onyango Ayany). The relative lack of reflection within African philosophy on this central topic mirrors the lack of discussion of tradition in philosophy in general. It seems to be taken for granted that it functions as an oppositional term to modernity, and it brings to mind other parallel oppositions: static and dynamic, conservative and progressive, cultural and rational. If the reference to anthropology of times past is correct, we might also add "primitive and advanced" to this list. But simply listing pairs of terms does not tell us much about how the term functions within African philosophy, nor does it necessarily make clear the points of tension, or what the term covers up, or what it makes possible for the philosopher. That will be the task of this chapter.

industrial and urbanized." He traces the distinction in part to the sociological distinction between the urban and the rural. It is this contrast which Gyekye argues is based on false assumptions. There is change in the traditional society, however slow that may be, and in I'uet every society must change at least to some extent. The static nature of the "traditional," he argues, along with the resultant opposition to modernity, is overstated, a position he holds in agreement with lean-Marie Makang (325). AlId, modern societies certainly recognize traditions as relevant and as posilive aspects rather than as obstacles to development (218), These false assumptions, though, only point to the fact that we need to reIhi nk the term. To do this, some excavation of recent uses of "tradition" are in Imler. The term preserves part ofthe Latin root, traditum, in making reference III that which is handed down from the past. The "past," moreover, must not "imply be the recent past, but is something that has endured through generaIluns (219). How many generations are needed is an open question. Gyekye (i1l agreement with Edward Shils) settles on at least three generations. The puint of arguing for a length of at least three generations is to distinguish Inluition from other cultural artifacts such as fashion. Tradition, for Gyekye, IN culture that lasts. Hut why does it last? Not necessarily because of some intrinsic merit, but ruther because it is found useful by succeeding generations. The transmisNibility of tradition does not owe to the intentions or wishes of any preceding IIIcl1eration, nor to something intrinsic to tradition itself. Those who appropriIItc the past are the real makers of tradition. Having said this, presumably tradition would not be adopted unless there was something perceived as Villuable by those later generations. Even though traditions may have "defects or imperfections" (223), they may still appeal to someone, and therefore be &:urried on. So, Gyekye is arguing for a kind of pragmatist account of tradition. At the IUllle time, though, his method of conceptual analysis seems to indicate that he thinks there is a kind of metaphysical reality to tradition. While it is maintulned by the choices of people (choices which do not always rely on very ",Icar thinking), once the choice is made, there is something real that exists. It also follows, although he does not emphasize it here, that tradition neces.lIrily occurs because appropriation necessarily occurs. Even those societies Ihut see themselves as having made a positive break with the past (Renais_II lice, Enlightenment) are simply appropriating different parts of the past thun they would see their forebears as wanting them to appropriate. Gyekye .rli\ues against Eric Hobsbawm's and Terence Ranger's notion of an "invented trudition"] on the grounds that if people believe something to be a tradition oven though it is of recent origin, they are just mistaken, or they are tuning in

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GYEKYE ON TRADITION Gyekye's Tradition and Modernity is, in a way, the most explicit treatment of an attitude to tradition that he has exemplified in the rest of his work. The issue he faces, simply put, is this: How is it possible to take cultural specificity, especially that which shows some endurance, as philosophically interesting? He is aware, as are most philosophers in this field, that it is no mean feat to walk the knife edge between a universalist philosophy that would reduce the specifics of culture to ephemera on the one hand, and a particularist philosophy that would reduce the rationality, moral force, and transmissibility of culture to a mere dream on the other. He finds his answer in the concept of tradition, unlike someone like Paulin Hountondji, for example, who is generally dismissive of tradition as playing any part in philosophical development (although, certainly, it is not without its interest for other reasons). For Gyekye, tradition holds the hope of offering something rational to African society which might address recurring problems. The problem, he thinks, is that there are incoherent versions of tradition extant which allow . various philosophers to dismiss tradition as philosophically uninteresting, . and Gyekye's task in Tradition and Modernity, especially in chapter 8, is to analyze the concept so that it is clear just how it can contribute to African philosophy. Specifically, the opposition between "tradition" and "modernity" suggests that there are some societies that maintain and cherish "values, practices, outlooks, and institutions bequeathed ... by previous generations and all or much of which on normative grounds it takes pride in, boasts of, and builds on," and there are some which do not (217). The modem, on the other hand, is "scientific, innovative, future oriented, culturally dynamic, and

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to something about that tradition that has a much longer lineage than that. An invention cannot be a tradition, and a tradition cannot be an invention. The role of the appropriating generation is more than that of simply preserving some practice. Critical examination must als.o occur, sin~e tra~ition exerts a regulative influence on the life of people. It IS therefore m the mterests of those who have the power of appropriation to reflect on what should be included. While tradition necessarily is passed down in one way or another, given that no one can create a form of life ex nihil~ (he argues ag~i~st cultural revolutions on these grounds as well), the neceSSIty of some tradItIon does not mean that we cannot critique and choose among the various aspects of tradition before us. It is therefore the task of the philosopher to provide a reasoned critique, so that those within a tradition can adopt the best aspects and leave the worst behind. From here Gyekye moves on to consider the various factors that playa part in cultural change. Following Shils, he recognizes both external and internal factors. He argues (contrary to what many other African philosophers seem to assume) that there is no such thing as a pure tradition, and that cultures develop in conversation with other cultures. The question is not whether a culture is pure, but what kind of conversations have produced the current state of things. He argues that there is an "adaptive capacity" (224) that cultures have to a greater or lesser degree, which enables them to adopt e,,~ments of different cultures, as well as the ability to critique and change tradItiOnS from the inside. While cultures are engaged in a variety of conversations, and their present is shaped not only by their conversation with their own past (appropriation) but also with all the historical and present encounters with other cultures (borrowing), this does not mean that tradition fragments unrecognizably. There is still a tradition within any particular culture, its coherence guaranteed by the fact that the elements have been adopted, for whatever reason. and are functioning within that culture. . ' There are two extreme positions, Gyekye argues, that descnbe the attItude of philosophers toward tradition. The "revivalists" (e.g., N. K. Dzobo) argue that it is only in tradition that Africa will find salvation. The past should be researched and as much as possible. adopted. The "anti-revivalists" (e.g., Paulin Hounto~dji, Marcien Towa), on the other hand, argue that Africa's. salvation lies in the abandonment of tradition as much as possible, and the move toward rational, scientific modernity. It is tradition that has held Africa? • society back, and to the extent we have control over it, we should expunge It . from our beliefs and practices. . Gyekye believes that each of these positions oversimplifies the situatio~, and that they furthermore both do so in a similar manner. Each reduces tradI-

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lioll to one aspect, in one case the best and the other case the worst. Gyekye nrgues that we need not take everything or nothing, but rather have the ability to assess various aspects of tradition and decide what to adopt. As evidence of this stance, he moves on to list what he thinks is counterproductive and what, in his opinion, is worth keeping. The first list turns out to be considerubly longer than the second. It includes attitudes that detract from scientific IlIuJ technological advancement (in agreement with Hountondji, who he curlier excoriated for his anti-revivalist stance), as well as limitations in comnlllilitarian social organization and the excessive reliance on ancestors. The positive features include "the enjoyment of the human being," as evidenced In art and language and the humanist (as opposed to supernatural) nature of Mrican morality. Ciyekye recognizes that it is one thing to give a list of features, and it is IIlIother to give some idea of the criteria that can help assess tradition in Alcncral. The final portion of his discussion of tradition attempts to give such criteria. The two he identifies as crucial are "the fundamental nature of a set of pristine values and attitudes and the functionality of past ideas and institutiulls in the setting of the present" (260). In other words, are there values that IU'C fundamental and abiding ("perennial," if you wish) that must be present I'lli' a society to properly function, and can we identify aspects of the past that IIccm to survive and flourish in the present? The first is a conceptual analysis, luuJ the second a pragmatic one. Both allow a selective appropriation of the pust and, as it turns out, a selective appropriation from other cultures as well l'uI1kularly Western modernity. '

THE USES OF TRADITION Oyckye's analysis, even though it positions itself over against what it takes tu he the rest of the field, is in many ways typical of the use of the concept by most African philosophers. It is rare, in fact, to find many African phihlNophers willing to completely reject tradition, or completely advocate a ""lUrn to it. This typical account, though, leaves many questions unanswered, hcljinning with the question of the usefulness of tradition for African phiIUliuphers. Tradition, whatever else it does, functions as a foundational tenn for much Al'rkun philosophy, delimiting the scope of the field while at the same time 1I1llking possible the definition of a methodology within those limits. When philosophers use the tenn, they usually refer not to "tradition," but the "tra"!tlona/," They use the tenn to designate a certain kind of society, usually hI Inquire about an idea or .set of ideas that is taken as more or less clear in

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a modern setting, but in need of explication in the "traditional" setting. So, there are articles about the notion of the person, democracy, communalism, freedom, and other philosophical notions within the traditional setting. Historically in the West, tradition is contrasted with reason. This goes further back, and is part of the conversation among theologians. "What is passed down" (rradere) circumvents reason. In the Middle Ages, reason was seen as suspect by some, because the conclusions of reason were unpredictable. Ironically, Peter Lombard wrote Sic et Non, which also showed that the conclusions of tradition were equally unpredictable, and tradition needed reason to guide it. It was not until the beginning of the modem age, though, that the contrast passes from guarding against the relativism of reason, to guarding against the arbitrariness of the past. With the dawn of modernity, tradition progressively is seen as "that which is unexamined." Where previously we might be able to debate about the means we use to arrive at our moral ends, for instance, the moral ends themselves were beyond debate. No longer in the modern age. Within African philosophy the "traditional" is mainly used to designate a set of practices that differ from modem. So, for example, Makinde writes about "traditional medicine," Oruka inquires about "traditional wisdom." F. U. Okafor and Olufemi Taiwo talk of the "African legal tradition." Others refer to "traditional thought" (sometimes as distinct from philosophy, sometimes as a conceptual distinction that allows the question to be raised about whether African "thought" is philosophy), "traditional psychology," "traditional African aesthetics," and so forth. "Traditional" sometimes refers to people rather than practices. Oruka talks about the "traditional African sages." Others refer to the "traditional healers," or "traditional chiefs." These uses seem to indicate a place in a social structure. What makes a traditional African sage different from some other kind of sage, particularly a modem sage? Presumably that this person draws on a , particular body of knowledge or experience, and this person is recognized by a particular community as being a sage. Calling an individual "traditional," then, is a way of referring to the practices that person follows. People are traditional because of their practices, on this conventional reading; practices are not traditional because of the people that engage in them. "Tradition" is sometimes used to designate a set of practices that have a history. For example, some writers talk about a "moral tradition," and others discuss whether there is a "tradition of democracy" in African communities . of the past. Tradition, though, is not history, nor is history tradition, except within certain specific assumptions of modernity. The two are conflated, often to simultaneously draw on temporal priority and social value. Thus, someone might want to argue that American is a "Christian" nation, by whiCh they

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mean something about the desires of the founders (and there are attempts to IlUllport this historically) and also about a set of values that "real" Americans Ilhould just recognize and find resonant (making these values traditional). The significance of the difference between history and tradition should 1101 be overlooked. Even African philosophers sometimes conflate the two (Musolo, in his analysis of Anyany, despite many trenchant observations, muves back and forth between the two), as if any relationship with the past Ihlll we might have can be called either tradition or history. In fact, though, Ihe two rarely function the same way. In fact, we could imagine history as lluIIC traditionally, or in a modem way, and we could imagine tradition in which history is knowll, and tradition in which history is very indistinct or I:!ouded. One way to make the distinction is that history tends to be related to events and people, while tradition tends to be related to meanings and values "" cnded in ritual and story. Of course these two cannot be taken apart, as if history has nothing to do with meaning and tradition always deals in anonymity, but the key is to recognize that the two differ, and their functions differ. It is, of course, possible to make tradition a moment of history (as I argue he low), but that comes at a price. African philosophers have fairly clear patterns of use for the term. But it is nile thing to chronicle its use, and another to suggest how the term functions, m what role it serves for those who use it. There are several overlapping posIIlhilities. For example,

I. Tradition might propose solutions to contemporary problems that have resisted analysis in other ways. Gyekye, for example, tries to address the problem of corruption in African societies by showing that it was a moral problem in traditional societies (rather than a technical or social-scientific one, as in modem societies), and therefore is in need of a moral solution. 2. Tradition might be used to establish the identity of the members, implicitly against a dominating metanarrative (like that of a colonizer). It serves LIS a unifying point against the dissipating tendencies of modernity. 3. Tradition can also serve a unifying function in another way, not as a rl111ying point against the "other," but as a way of collectively referring 1o what might otherwise be seen as a disparate group of beliefs and practices. For example, "traditional African thought seeks unity through interiorization and interlinkage."4 4. Trudition might be used to avoid the negative implications of reason as a foundational element. Sometimes tradition functions as a way of halting critique-governments have invoked tradition, for example, as a hedge against rational (or even simply partisan) critique of their own policies or I1ctivities.

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5. Tradition might serve to establish a sense of continuity with a past to which European thought has no access, and over which it therefore has no formative influence. 6. Tradition might establish a link to diverse existing communities outside of Western (modernist) influence. Diasporas are seen to be bound together by tradition (and sometimes, little else), 7. Tradition might justify or legitimate a current life-world. It might be used to justify the status quo by arguing that it is rooted in past practices and should not be changed indiscriminately. 8. Tradition can serve to justify a conservative world-view. If modernity implies progress, and one does not like the direction progress is taking, it is easy to invoke trddition as a value that curbs change. 9. Tradition might be used to justify certain specific claims (e.g., land claims, use of cultural property), which might be embedded in an overall cultural defense, but which might not. 10. Tradition might serve to equate scientific reason with African thought, by arguing that not only does Africa have tradition (which uses its own internally defined standards of reason), but science is exactly the same (that is, it also has tradition that has internally defined rationality). 11. Tradition might be a way of learning about resistance to dominating structures. One writer points out that many traditions employ "tactics" rather than "strategy" for survival: , .. by carefully observing the tactics of tradition, valuable lessons can be learned regarding what might be called practical resistance-lessons in how to be oppositional in such a way as to challenge the dominant tendencies of the present without being destroyed by them. 5 Clearly, tradition is potentially a very useful concept What is more, the uses of the term can in some cases be diametrically opposed to each other. Some uses promote societal change, for example, while others resist it. Some promote a more closed attitude to those outside the tradition, while others promote a more open attitude. Some promote dialogue by establishing the grounds on which dialogue might take place, while others resist dialogue by suggesting that tradition is relatively inaccessible by those outside of it. The . diversity of uses (and the above list is by no means a complete catalogue) may actually indicate that we do not have a single concept at work here, but an ecology of related concepts. This might seem to suggest that we are in need of a definition of the term. Definitions, however, tend to be abstract, and so tend to ignore the actual contexts of understanding for a term. Particularly for a term such as tradition, it is worth resisting the impulse to essentialize. I am more interested in

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determining what would be required for an understanding of tradition. There is a reason for starting with the question of the uses of tradition instead of the dclinition. It serves to root the concept in a particular set of practices and in II particular kind of discussion. Pragmatism is surely correct about the need In contextuaiize concepts. This point is worth making particularly because of the tendency of some writers to make tradition into a metaphysical concept. Gyekye certainly approaches it this way; he is chiefly concerned with differentiating the concept fmm related ones such as culture, defining how long a concept has to be pussed down in order for it to become a tradition, and argues that there can be /10 such thing as an "invented tradition." Treating this concept as a metaphysi1.'/11 entity certainly seems to solve some problems. For one, if there really is NlII.:h a thing as tradition, it allows us to continue distinguishing between types nl' societies. African thought has a "real" source, which allows us to at least hupe for a space on the map of the world of philosophy. Nevertheless, treating tradition from a metaphysical point of view has the Mume problem that has dogged metaphysics for this entire century and, indeed, long before. Our ability to access and know that reality cannot proceed without taking into account the nature of our inquiry into the concept itself. This is more than just a request for identifying an initial point of view. Conct'ptual analysis intended to reveal the true essences of concepts ironically "ives us much less than the concept itself. It can give us only what conceptual ullulysis allows-a concept that is separated from the inquirer, that is separulcd from the uses it has in its context, and that is separated from any real IIhilily to critique it. It hides behind a facade of neutrality, whereas in fact it 1M I)cing used for an end, by people with agendas and projects, in a social conleltl Ihat allows certain implications and suppresses others, for a situation that nmyor may not be able to recognize itself in the analysis. In short, conceptual 1Ill11ysis itself has a history, has a politics, and cannot be considered a neutral wny of doing philosophy. My comments about metaphysics are not intended to suggest that we abanunll all conceptual analysis, but rather to point out that a method that is unaware of its own implications is liable to simply reproduce results that it does nul want. But what other options do we have? It is instructive to notice what Uyekye's analysis cannot account for. Take Hobsbawm and Ranger's book, '1'111' Invention o/Tratiition,6 for example. Gyekye reads their argument to be Ilying that traditions can just be made up. He correctly points out that nothing ",mnes from thin air, and if something is a tradition it had an origin in practice ur belief somewhere, and jf it is invented it never did, and therefore is not a Irlldition. But the fact is, people still recognize things as being traditions even Ihuugh "objective" research might show a very recent origin. Gyekye the

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metaphysician starts from what is real, irrespective of how tradition is apprehended or understood. But it is possible to start from what someone actually thinks; after all, philosophy since Kant has recognized that it is impossible to get to the real except through the experienced. So, tradition is perceived to have force and reality, despite the "fact" of recent origins. It seems clear that we need to take into account that we are inquiring about the nature of a human activity, from the standpoint of being human. We cannot pretend to stand back from tradition as if we were not involved in it, implicated in its processes and outcomes, and a product of its logic and whims. To speak in these terms seems to reify tradition, and again fall into metaphysical inquiry. Does tradition have whims or logic? Is tradition not either our product (in which case we can define it through conceptual analysis), or we are its product (in which case it has a larger existence than any individual)? These options again push us into a dichotomy in which the only two solutions are metaphysical ones. But there is more to contextualizing this particular concept than just identifying its uses. We might, for example, ask about its associations. Tradition is a concept with a provenance, specifically, a Western provenance. What we today call "traditional" societies often did not have an operative concept of tradition themselves, even if they do have well developed ways of accounting for the relationship between the past and the present. To apply or deploy the term "tradition" means to treat it as a concept outside of the realm of tradition itself, for it is used to designate a social force that can be put alongside other social forces. If we choose the traditions we want, or use tradition for specific purposes, they are no longer traditions, but merely the simulacra of traditions, Tradition makes sense only counterposed to modernity. If you are a "traditional" group that has no need for that opposition, the concept of tradition makes little sense. The concept of tradition in the West has a set of connotations that may not align very easily with the way the past is understood in these so-called "traditional" societies. Almost everyone who discusses the term points out its Latin roots as "tradere" and "tradition," a passing down or handing down. But that etymological nugget does not tell us why the term gained prominence. It emerged in the Christian West, as a way of establishing the tie between an ever-receding locus of authority and the present. How could a religion that recognized the interpreted character of its texts, the multiple· social settings in which it was applicable, and the translatability of its concepts manage to retain coherence? One might rely on dogma, of course, but that just pushes the problem back one step. Why this dogma rather than that, especiaUy in a world where cultural and intellectual variation was prized? The answer was to recognize an authoritative tie between the origin of the