Ethnography and the Historical Imagination.

This collection of essays by two anthropologists at Chicago focuses on theory and method but always in reference to the Tshidi of South Africa, with whom the have done field work since 1969. The topic is historical change and about how i is confronted both by historical actors and by scholars who write about them. The juxtaposition of theory with both field data and historical (mostly published) sources makes this a very unusual book.

The Comaroffs develop an explicit theoretical position that owes a little to Marx and Foucault and somewhat more to Bourdieu and Gramsci. They argue that culture is not primordial or analytically separable from the social world; huma action is partly determined, purposive and coherent, partly indeterminate, haphazard and fragmentary; and daily practice and cultural forms continually produce each other. Unlike some current anthropology, there is no attempt to speak for the subjects of study, or to let them speak in their own words; but a in some postmodern writing the ethnographers' gaze is turned back self-consciously onto the metropolitan societies. The Comaroffs define their anthropological stance as "neomodern."

Colonialism, as historical scholarship elsewhere has shown, is complex and many-sided. Rejecting the popular conception of energetic modernity imposing itself by gun and bible on stagnant tradition, the authors depict complex societies interacting and evolving over many decades. In southern Africa they find not one but three colonialisms, those of settlers, colonial governments, and missionaries, animated by competing ideologies and bringing about varied an often unexpected effects. The Comaroffs deal mainly with the missionary colonialism (that of Nonconformism) which touched the Tshidi (part of the Southern Tswana) most directly, showing it to be the expression of enlightened bourgeois values of middling social classes in Victorian England. The colonized responded not simply by accepting or rejecting metropolitan images and practice but by adapting them to local use and local culture. Adaptation showed considerable ingenuity and, in the eyes of these authors, a sense of resistance to domination. With the chiefly court gone and pastoralism largely replaced by an agricultural system that could support only a minority, many Tshidi became migrant workers, yet forged new identities for themselves. The most notable example is the subject of Jean Comaroff's 1985 book, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Adapting American Protestant Zionism to their own purposes the Tshidi practice rituals that simultaneously heal the body and the community. The authors argue persuasively that such practices counter the anomi of migrant labor. They force us to take seriously, even from the vantage of the post-apartheid 1990s, the implicit challenge popular Zionism posed to the dominant White system.

In the tradition of cultural anthropology--as well as the history of mentalitie the Comaroffs are at least as interested in unconscious, taken-for-granted notions and practices as in (consciously articulated) ideology. They are careful, as they say, not to represent signs and symbols as neutral and somewhere outside history. Notions of the body, for example, not only differed between colonizer and colonized, but changed among the Tshidi and found expression in new practices such as the Zionist movement just noted (see Chapte 3, "Bodily Reform as Historical Practice" and Chapter 8 on "Medicine, Colonialism and the Black Body"). The authors are expert in exploring cultural confrontation, e.g., in the question of rainmaking versus irrigation (Chapter 9), where the Tshidi tried to appropriate Western success without relinquishing chiefly authority, yet found themselves obliged to shift to the terms of the outsider. They are attentive to linguistic distinctions, as in Chapter 6 betwee "traditional" work, a complex concept only feebly suggested by the English term and cheerless Western-style mining labor. They explore the social implications of the parallel shift from cattle to money as a measure of value (Chapter 5), showing how abstract "legless cattle" were still used after the demise of widespread pastoralism in transactions like bridewealth that entailed a change of status. Tshidi life is transformed but instead of being reduced to active resisters or docile victims, the Tshidi people struggle to maintain conceptual control over a part-alien, changing world.

This is a kind of local history that never allows the reader to forget the wide world. An arresting chapter (Chapter 10) traces the colonial transposition of the cult of domesticity. Social historians of Europe, we are reminded, have rea modernity variously in sanitation, table manners, and the sense of Home. Missionaries in southern Africa themselves "naturalized" such practices and beliefs as the proper order of things as against the "unnatural" practices they encountered, such as female employment and chaotic settlements lacking privacy and separation from animals, and made them central to their efforts at educatio and reform, helping to produce "new forms of production, new structures of inequality" among the Tshidi. Metropoliran and colonial policies were not unconnected. The bourgeois effort to "colonize bodies and buildings" in South Africa was conducted in the same language as the reforming of the poor and vagrant in the urban "jungles" of England. It was, they argue persuasively, the same project: to remake "savage life" along enlightened bourgeois lines.

Historians are likely to find refreshing the clarity about methodology, and unless they are allergic to theory, they should be able to swallow the theoretical discussions, which are respectful to a wide range of historians, anthropologists and sociologists, and not prone to jargon. Some arguments are suggestive but not fully persuasive in the absence of chronological discussion. The sociological Chapter 4, for example, dismisses the idea of a millennially static native "traditional society" in favor of a model of cyclical alternation between coexisiting centralized (agnatic) and a diffuse (matrilateral) principles, but without offering detailed supporting evidence. Seekers of more empirical backing than this book supplies may wish to refer to the Comaroffs' other work, such as Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1 (1990), but for analyses of the history of colonialism one should look elsewhere, for the Comaroffs are concemed less with events than with "meaningful practices" such a those I have mentioned. But social historians will be stimulated by their concern with consciousness in its formation, and impressed by their refusal to simplify cultural contact and cultural change. This book will reinforce the impression, sustained by the recent work of Marshall Sahlins, Bernard Cohn and Ronald Inden, that historical anthropology is something of a "Chicago-cult," in spite of the Comaroffs' denial. It may not remain so. Work of this quality will likely exercise a wide influence among cultural historians jaded with the Balinese cockfight and deep Geertzian play, though with results as unpredictabl as Zionist evangelicalism among the Tshidi.

Donald S. Sutton Carnegie Mellon University