THE METAPHOR

In 1900, twenty-one-year-old Raden Adjeng Kartini, who liked best to think of herself as a young wild horse, a daughter of the Javanese regent of Japara, a woman who after her death became an anointed “mother of Indonesian nationalism, ” wrote to a friend, Henri van Kol, a Dutch parliamentarian and European socialist expert on colonialism that “it would seem as though an invisible telephone cable ran from here to Lali Djiwa and back again.”Raden Adjeng Kartini, Letters of a Javanese Princess (New York: W. W. Morton, 1964), 190. By “here,” Kartini meant her father's palace on the north coast of the Netherlands East Indies' main island; Lali Djiwa was van Kol's residence in Prinsenhage in Holland. A few months earlier, Kartini had written to another friend, a Dutch feminist who worked at the city post office in Amsterdam, describing the closeness she felt between herself and her father — as if “a wire” connected their hearts.H. Bouman, Meer licht over Kartini (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1954). It was the opening of a new century, and Kartini's mode of expression reflected what seemed to be a distinct mood of the time. Hers appeared to be a good case of what Søren Kierkegaard once defined as “enthusiasm of imagination,” a nostalgia for the mythical, a stepping “forth in a new form, that is, as a metaphor.”Kierkegaard's explanation of his and Hegel's view of metaphor in The Concept of Irony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 101–3.

In 1812 a Russian army inflicted two decisive defeats on the Persian army. The resulting Treaty of Gulistan shifted tsarist borders 250 miles south and secured Russian control over Georgia and the Caspian Sea littoral. The commanding general, Piotr Kotliarevsky, received a second St. George Cross (the equivalent of the Victoria Cross) for this accomplishment—wounded in the battle, surgeons removed forty pieces of bone from his skull to save his life. The Persians were allied to Britain, who, fearing Russian and French designs on India, had sent a mission in 1810 headed by General John Malcolm, to the Shah. Charles Christie, a military advisor on the mission was killed in battle. Whereas Malcolm was an important agent of British policy in Central Asia and India, Christie was one of the first Europeans to travel and map the Afghano–Persian frontier. These achievements are normally logged into Russian and English history, but the men behind them were not native Russians nor Englishmen. Kotliarevsky was born into a lesser Ukrainian noble family in Kharkiv (Kharkov) province, while Malcolm and Christie were Scots. Like thousands of their countrymen, they served and made careers in the empires that ruled their native lands. A Ukrainian was Peter I's principal panegyrist. Scots wrote Rule Britannia and created “John Bull.”

The scene was Chongqing, China's wartime capital; and the time was 1942, the fifth year of the Sino–Japanese War (1937–45, known in China as the War of Resistance against Japan). An anti-Japanese woodcut exhibition was held at the Sino–Soviet Cultural Association (Zhong-Su wenhua xiehui) from October 10 to 17 to rally people's support for the war. With 54 artists participating and a total of 255 pieces of work on display, this was an unprecedented event, capturing widespread attention in this inland river city at an uncertain time.Yu (1942:4). See also Li Hua (1946:38). Besides being uncommonly large, the show was unusual because it included woodcuts from the Communist-controlled territories, among them the works of Gu Yuan (1919–96) and Li Qun (1912– ).

As most tell the story, the mysterious and fearful twilight of Sukarno's Indonesia began in Jakarta sometime after sundown on the last day of September 1965. That night and in the early hours of October 1, a group led by leftist, middle-ranking military officers calling themselves the September Thirtieth Movement kidnapped and killed six generals in an attempted putsch. In its radio broadcasts the following morning, the movement announced its loyalty to President Sukarno and claimed that it had acted in order to thwart a coup planned by a ‘Council of Generals.’ In the year leading up to the putsch, the president's hold on power had been strained by the increasing polarization between the army and disaffected Muslims on the one hand, and Sukarno and the PKI—the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Kommunis Indonesia)— on the other. Sukarno's ill health, factionalism within military ranks, and the shadow of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) only added to the anxiety and uncertainty. It is unclear whether this Council of Generals had anything more than a phantom existence. What is clear is that the head of the strategic reserve command in Jakarta, Major General Soeharto, was quick to manipulate the situation and bring the movement to a halt within hours. In an evening radio broadcast on October 1, Soeharto described the putsch as a counter-revolutionary movement and told listeners that the army and police under his leadership had regained control.

“It is one thing to be one of the Great; it is another to be noble.” The first are perhaps nobles as defined by locality, but they are not loved nor recognized by the People or by the Prince; the others are “well regarded and appreciated,” their nobility being linked not only to their birth but also to the recognition of their titles and merits. According to Bartolo, the Florentine jurist Lap da Castiglionchio attempted, around 1370, the difficult exercise of combining the rival definitions of nobility that circulated in the Italy of his times, and the justification of his own nobility. He wanted very much to be noble, but not “great”. Who then are these great people from whom these nobles mean to distinguish themselves?

From the time of the Spanish invasion, in the Andean world as in Mexico, a mere handful of conquistadores came to impose their domination upon the indigent masses. One cannot, therefore, begin by speaking of minorities nor of the marginalization of Amerindian populations, even when these decrease dramatically following the demographic catastrophe of the sixteenth century, for in spite of this they remain significantly more numerous than the Spanish. Yet it is true that the term Indian appears, from its origins even, as a derogatory term (see the flood of contemporary literature on savages, idolaters, and so forth) and that it is in fact applied even now in countries such as Peru and Bolivia, where the autochthonous substratum survives in many regions, to the populations least integrated into national life, who might be considered, in this sense, as “marginal.” What, then, has taken place during these last five centuries?

Modern nations have often been explicitly imagined through familial metaphors. In particular, the construction of the national community as a brotherhood (a fraternity) has pointed both to the centrality of male bonding in the production of nationalist sentiment and to the exclusion of women from the social contract. Within that contract not only were women “subject to men's power; it also implied complementary bonds between men;… women had no place in the new political and social order except as markers of social relations between men.”

Hunt's observation recalls Sedgwick's analysis of how male bonding is mediated through the figure of woman. In nationalist discourse representing the homeland as a female body has often been used to construct a national identity based on male bonding among a nation of brothers.

In the political tradition of black South Africa, such ideological positions as liberalism, socialism, and nationalism are secondary to those themes emerging from the conjuncture of race and class. At the core of black political thought there are two interrelated and recurring visions of liberation: one, the image of multiracial union; the other, black republican identity.I am aware of the contentious nature of the terms multiracial and nonracial within the context of black South African political debate. Nonetheless, I have decided to use multiracial union because, in my judgment, it provides a more realistic picture of the actual appeal and vision of this strand of thought. I do not assume that either black republicans or multiracial unionists are uncommitted to the ideal of a nonracial society. While adherents to both visions espouse the ideal of a genuinely nonracial society, they disagree over the question of whether intra-racial versus inter-racial class solidarity is the means to attain this end.

The impact of Christianity on the functioning of the later Roman empire has been examined by historians ever since Gibbon published his Decline and Fall. Had the Christians hastened the decline and fall of Rome? Outlining some themes of his projected work, Gibbon suggested before 1774 that indeed they had. In 1776, when publishing the first volume of his history, he touched on this same issue with considerable circumspection; but five years later, his earlier opinion appeared in print under the heading of “General Observations on the Decline of the Empire in the West” by way of concluding the third volume of the work. Here, Gibbon stated:

As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear, without surprise or scandal, that the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged: and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

Religion … appears in all different sorts in Syria: Turks, Jews, Heretics, Schismatics, Naturalists, Idolaters; or to be more exact these are genera that have their species in great number, for in Aleppo alone we counted sixteen types of religions of which four were Turks different from each other; of Idolaters, there remains only one sort which worships the sun; of Naturalists, those who maintain the natural essence of God with some superstition concerning cows and who come from this side of the borders of Mogor; and the others without superstitions named Druze, living in Anti-Lebanon under a prince called the Emir. They pay a tribute to the Great Lord, and live in their own manner, naturally. From this one can see how necessary it is to have good missionaries, and virtuous ones, for all the scandals that go on in this Babylon, and learned men to refute so many errors. There are fourteen Sects or Nations differing from each other completely in Religion, in rite, in language, and in their manner of dressing: seven of these are Infidels, and seven Christians. The Infidels are Turks or Ottomans. Arabs, Kurds, Turcomans, Jezides, Druze and Jews. Among the Turks there are, moreover, several sects and cabals affecting Religious sentiments just as there are among the Jews.

In 1987, there was an uprising of sorts in the remote interior headwaters of Sarawak, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. In March of that year, Penan hunter-gatherers in the Baram and Limbang Districts of Sarawak suddenly erected more than a dozen blockades against logging companies. Since that time, scores of Penan have been arrested for resisting the activities of these companies by erecting more blockades and engaging in other acts of civil disobedience. In doing so, they have achieved a great deal of international reknown among environmentalists, indigenous rights activists, and the Euramerican public at large. Their story has received broad international media coverage, and scores of celebrities, from politician Al Gore and musician Jerry Garcia to Prince Charles, have spoken out on their behalf. The Malaysian government has responded to these efforts with a vigorous media campaign of its own and, in the process, has come to play an increasingly visible role as a critic of what is portrayed as neocolonialist attempts at control over environmental affairs in the South.

Recently I have been examining the international campaign that emerged around the Penan issue in the late 1980s. In a series of interviews with European and American environmentalists, Penan resistance to logging was repeatedly cited as an important influence in the growth of movements promoting rainforest preservation and indigenous rights. Virtually everyone describes the Penan as exemplars of how an indigenous people can assert control over their own destiny and, in the process, halt the loss of global biodiversity. In short, the Penan have become an icon of resistance for environmentalists worldwide.

Since Robert Dahl's seminal writings on democracy more than two decades ago, interest in the topic has emerged again, especially among scholars analyzing democratic transitions. Great strides have been made in revealing the uncertain nature of these transitions (O'Donnell et al. 1986; Malloy and Seligson 1987; Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1989; Hakim and Lowenthal 1991; O'Donnell 1994), in methodologically analyzing them as contested and “crafted” rather than spontaneous (Di Palma 1990), and in documenting the class and social forces that make democratic outcomes more likely (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; see also Moore 1966). Despite these advances, there has been little change in our theoretical understanding of democracy. As Bruce Cumings has perceptively noted, recent studies of democratic transition have “given way to atheoretical and idiosyncratic explanations of more or less successful democratic ‘openings’” in which little time is spent elaborating “the decision rule for saying this person is hard-line or soft-line, that system is ‘liberalized autocracy’ instead of ‘limited democracy,’” or for defining democracy itself. If scholars do bring theory into their writings “through the back door of the obscure but telling footnote,” he observes, “rather than advancing their own conception of democracy, [they] uniformly define democracy by reference to Robert Dahl's Polyarchy, a classic pluralist account of the North American system” (Cumings 1989:15–17).

A few thousand young Mexicans were standing together in large groups in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco in downtown Mexico City to remember the massacre which had brought the student movement of 1968 to a sudden end ten years before. Many turned their heads upward to the balcony of a residential building that faced the plaza to hear Carlos Monsiváis, a well-known intellectual who had savored the protests, tell them that they “no longer saw the state as a tyrannical and omnipresent father.” Still another ten years later, many of them, and others as well, read the words of Hugo Hiriart, a promising young journalist in 1968, who claimed that the students had “dared to lead in a frontal and uncompromising opposition to the paternal and authoritarian Mexican state.”

Central to much recent work in both anthropology and history is the concept of agency. This essay examines some problems with this concept that arise when we look for it across historical and ethnographic contexts. This study focuses on how agency is expressed in differences among the powers that people impute to spoken words and the kinds of subjects to which they attribute the authorship of words. In this article I want in particular to show how attention to the intersections between speech practices and speakers' beliefs about language can shed light on the historical and cultural worlds in which those speakers act.

The problem of agency is often raised by anthropologists and historians in the effort to be inclusive, to take account of “all the players in the game” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:9). Furthermore, the question of agency increasingly reflects an ethical imperative. As Talal Asad has recently remarked, “The doctrine of action has become essential to our recognition of other people's humanity” (1996:272). The anthropologist's quest for local agency is often portrayed as an antidote to earlier assumptions about tradition-bound natives and timeless structures or to triumphalist narratives of empire and modernity.

Mexico's most famous holiday is, without doubt, the Day of the Dead. At the end of October, large numbers of foreign visitors descend upon Mexico to witness colorful—some would say carnivalesque—ritual performances and artistic displays. Decorated breads, paper cutouts, and plastic toys, most of them humorously playing on the theme of death, are evident everywhere. Sculpted sugar candies in the form of skulls, skeletons, and caskets suggest an almost irreverent, macabre confrontation with mortality. During November 1 and November 2, Mexicans clean, decorate, and maintain vigil over the graves of relatives. Tombstones and burial sites are adorned with flowers, candles, and food, all aesthetically arranged in honor of the deceased. Some Mexicans claim that the souls of the departed watch over their living relatives during these few days. Negligent family members await punishment, whether on earth or in the afterlife. This belief is invoked throughout Mexico to explain the substantial time, money, and energy invested in the two-day ceremony.

ONE DEMOCRACY, MANY CULTURES?

This discussion is intended to convey a way of studying, thinking and writing about socio-political transformation in Africa that avoids the pitfalls of hasty and sweeping generalization and contributes to a more balanced understanding and informed appreciation of the complex process of liberalization and democratization in Africa in the late twentieth century. This assumes an urgent need for systematic documentation based on empirical investigation involving extended field work.