Book Reviews

REVIEW ESSAYS

Poststructuralism as a Historical Condition

CATHERINE BOONE University of Texas at Austin Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories: Contemporary Africa in Focus. George Clement Bond and Nigel C. Gibson, eds. Boulder: Westview Press, 2002. 474 pp. Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa. Thomas Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir, and Robert Latham, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 322 pp. Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa. Richard Werbner, ed. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 244 pp. These three edited volumes published in 2002 put forward arguments about Africa, as well as about African studies. All are positioned as critiques of reigning master concepts in social science, and they gather much of their intellectual force by showing how social science theory and practice can be remade through engagement with Africa. Taken together, the volumes help to show why African studies remains at the forefront of theoretical innovation within and across the disciplines. Realities of Africa's economic and political situation are driving the demand to rethink theoretical and conceptual architecture in political science and anthropology, two disciplines that are well represented in the volumes under review. The meltdown of the neocolonial economy and weakening of the postcolonial state have resulted in a pervasive structural instability. It works to subvert interstate boundaries, class structures, patron-client relations, and even the state itself. In these settings, political science loses its traditional analytic moorings. Many scholars end up engaging "poststructuralism" not as an ontology or analytic strategy but, rather, as an objective feature of Africa's political and social reality. The old questions about where authority lies and how local order is produced beg for new answers. For the anthropologists featured in Postcolonial Subjectivities, the challenge is theorizing agency and subjectivity when individual lives are enmeshed in dense social networks that are also unstable and subjected to the same pervasive structural instabilities and uncertainties. These conditions could not be more imlike the coherent, rule-bound orders imagined in traditional anthropology. Richard Werbner proposes thinking of the subject as "living in the subjunctive," in which contingency itself is a defining feature of social context. Force of circumstance leads both political scientists and anthropologists including many of the contributors to Contested Terrains and Constructed Categoriesto seek new ways to theorize social context and social order in settings defined by instability, flux, and destructuration. The quest for theoretical innovation under these circumstances is perhaps what unites the 45 chapters presented in these three volumes. Thomas Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir, and Robert Latham's Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa grew out of two units within the Social Science Research Council: the Program on International Cooperation and Global Security and the African Studies Program. The volume opens with a critique of the master concepts of the juridical state and state sovereignty. Taken together, the chapters stress the fact that the African state does not necessarily exercise territorial control, that it often exercises power via means other than those sanctioned by law, and that it shares power with a myriad of other kinds of formal and informal institutions (which are typologized in the editors' introduction) that compromise state sovereignty. The chapters show that institutions in Africa are criss-crossed by transnational or global-local linkages that take a myriad of forms (typologized in the chapter by Latham, who distinguishes among transnational networks, arenas, and "deployments"). Linkages erode external state sovereignty and impact local politics in highly ambivalent ways. In these settings, classic questions of political scienceWho governs? How is authority constituted?present themselves in uniquely compelling ways. If we follow Michael Barnett's injunction (p. 48) to separate the concepts of state, authority, and territory, then almost anything is possible. Chapters by William Reno, Carolyn Nordstrom, and Janet Roitman reflect on how each author's earlier empirical work (on state breakdown in Liberia, civil war in Mozambique, and informal "regulatory networks" that govern trade and plunder in the Chad Basin, respectively) speaks to questions of state sovereignty. All three focus on nonstate actors who establish territorial control in war

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American Anthropologist Vol. 105, No. 2 June 2003 resistance movement, and sowed local division, all under the spotlight of international scrutiny. Yet local actors can use global resources for better as well as for worse. Schmitz and Obi show that some activists have been able to gain some resources and some measure of protection from linkages to transnational civil society movements. In a chapter entitled "Networks, moral discourse, and history," Fred Cooper shows that transnational social discourse can be constitutive of new moral frames that help sustain and broaden the scope of local politics. Callaghy focuses on the emergence of an international debt regime that has provided mechanisms and resources for dealing with African macroeconomic crises since the 1970s. He traces the evolution of the debt regime over time and makes two important points about "transnationalism." First, he argues that the Paris Club's handling of Africa's debt problems in the 1970s ("the early debt crises") created much of the common law, normative consensus, appreciation of long-term consequences, social networking, and institutional linkages that made possible the swift and largely successful handling of subsequent crises, including the Mexican debt crisis of August 1982. Second, Callaghy highlights the important role that "principled-issue networks" and transnational civil societyin the form of Oxfam International and the Jubilee 2000 Coalition, for examplehave played in this process. Meanwhile, this debt regime has been imposed in subSaharan Africa in the form of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), which are both one cause and an effect of the diminished and compromised national sovereignties that the rest of this volume describes. In their conclusion to the volume, Kassimir and Latham write that outcomes are being generated "where international, local, and national forces operate coterminously" (p. 270). The editors recognize that of these, it is the nature of local power and sources of local power that remain particularly obscure (except, perhaps, when local power comes directly from the barrel of a gun). Kassimir and Latham indicate that we need "a more sophisticated analysis of what constitutes local order and authority" (p. 269). Although all three volumes reviewed here deal in different ways with global-local interconnections (or question the ontological status of these as separate categories), we still come away without much explicit theorization of, or systematic inquiry into, local-level logics of power, accumulation, representation, and authority. The challenge arises, in part, from the very erosion of local governmental or quasi-governmental institutions (like political party organs), informal political relations (like patron-client networks), and economic processes (like statecontrolled export crop marketing) that had long been viewed as important sites or sources of political cum social hierarchy at the local level. Contributors to Intervention and Transnationalism argue forcefully that these questions cannot be answered without acknowledging the ubiquity of transnational ties in constituting local power (and the

zones or on the periphery of war zones, in which business is to be had in the shadowy trading networks for guns, petrol, arms, and other contraband. Roitman shows that these networks can become institutionalized over time, but the main focus of these papers is on the deinstitutionalization of political authority and the breakdown of rulegoverned forms of political control over violence. Both weak state rulers and warlords can exploit transnational linkages to gain haid currency, weapons and logistical support, military reinforcements (in the form of foreign mercenaries, for example), and, in the case of those who happen to gain control of the capital city, even international recognition as the rulers of a "sovereign state." These chapters underscore the deeply internationalized nature of African warlordism, the regional wars, and the corrupt weak states. They also direct attention to territorial reconfigurations of political power, as de facto authority to regulate economic and social life is wielded by warlords "in the bush," or rogue state agents operating beyond the limits of their formal authority, rather than by national governments. The territorial scope of these nonstate or quasistate forms of authority is not defined by the boundaries of the juridical state. In a chapter on local politics and the Ugandan Catholic Church, Kassimir argues that the sources and agents of "nonstate governance have become increasingly transnational" (p. 95). Contributions to this volume develop this point in several different ways by pointing to the growing involvement of transnational NGOs, foreign mercenaries, and warlords who draw economic and military strength from international business networks, and the international financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) that assume governing functions where the state has been privatized or forsaken. Kassimir is on target in asking about how and whether nonstate actors and organizations, including "ethnic associations and communities" (p. 100), "represent" those they govern, and raising the question of whether political accountability is possible under these conditions. He insists on the importance of viewing nonstate "polities" as fields of power in themselves that can either reinforce or sap the authority of the juridical state. Two excellent chapters on government and opposition show the "ambivalent effects" of transnational linkage on opposition movements, and the difficulties of institutionalizing opposition politics in settings of high state violence, social fragmentation (related in part to ethnic and communal politics), and general weakness of "civil society" associations such as unions, producers associations, and civic associations that can provide building blocks for opposition politics. Hans Peter Schmitz argues that in the case of externally linked NGOs in Kenya, external ties produced the paradoxical effect of enhancing the visibility of NGOs while, at the same time, short-circuiting local institution building. Cyril I. Obi shows that massive state violence destroyed painstakingly built institutions of local identity and resistance in Ogoniland, decapitated a local

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contradictory effects of "linkage"), and that is indeed a critical point of departure for further analysis.
Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa completes a trilogy

of volumes on identity, memory, and subjectivity that Richard Werbner has edited or coedited for the Zed Press series on "Postcolonial Encounters." Werbner and his collaborators set out to subvert not only classical anthropology's master concept of social and communal coherence but also the modernist notion of the "autonomous subject" that is present, they argue, in conventional postcolonial studies. Contributors to this volume insist on ways in which individual autonomy is constrained and conditioned by webs of social interdependence, and by the uncertainties of flux and destructuration that characterize the postcolonial context. With this analytic lens, the authors present an extended theoretical inquiry into postcolonial subjectivity in Africa that is, at the same time, grounded in history, political economy, and attention to the effects of state power. In the introduction, Werbner insists that uncertainty, flux, and social interconnectedness are not unique to the postcolonial predicamentcolonial and precolonial eras should be understood in similar terms. He does say, however, that Africa's postcolonial predicaments are distinctive. Here he seems to refer, at least in part, to a "condition of postmodernity" that is defined by a sense of modernity having come and gone, and not always left behind much by way of improvement. Indeed, much of this volume is about how marginalization, loss, and failure of modernity's promises are experienced by the individual, and at the level of social processes and consciousness. Economic hardship, state decline, and awareness of the often predatory and unpredictable nature of state power form the backdrop of most of the chapters. What becomes of agency, meaning, and moral frames in such contexts? This volume offers a few different reflections on this question. Some chapters foreground the social processes by which individuals or groups tenaciously hold onto their own interpretations of what is happening to them. This is read as a kind of assertion of the self, or social consciousness. "Subjectivity" so understood can be interpreted as a form of resistance to state hegemony, as a way of mitigating the impact of frustration, loss, or violence, or as a way of constructing personhood in highly constrained circumstances. Chapters in the first half of the volume, including one by Michael Lambek on historical consciousness as enacted by a spirit medium in Mayotte, and another by Heike Behrend on youth constructing photographic images of themselves in Mombasa, explore these themes. Two chapters on Sudan look at what happens to social consciousness under the pressure of endemic civil war. Akira Okazaki contrasts the cultural consciousness of the Nuba, understood through armed resistance to domination and the construction (or invention) of Nuba identity, to that of the Gamk, which relies on "dream consciousness" and healing rituals as a way of making sense of their political predicament.

Contributions by Susan Reynolds Whyte and Deborah Durham highlight a different aspect of subjectivity. These papers are less about the construction of "meaning" per se than about people who try to figure out what to do in the absence of a single, coherent model of meaning. In a moving chapter on seeking health care and dealing with HIV/AIDS in Uganda, Whyte shows that different understandings of disease and cure intermingle. People grope for explanations of what is happening to them (they "try out" different explanations). They devise plans of action that reflect uncertainties and contingencies of health and disease, of the Ugandan health care system, and of the interpersonal relationships that are necessary for survival. As Whyte puts it, the mood of action is "often more subjunctive than indicative or imperative" (p. 172). Durban senses a similar mood of uncertainty and tentativeness. She writes that in Botswana, where citizens are not subject to chronic state predation or violence, and where promises of progress and electoral democracy "have not been entirely abnegated," "people seem less assured of exactly who has power and what its exercise might look like" (p. 139). Competing models of political representation intermingle, giving rise to "puzzlement" over the causes of political outcomes "the moral grounds on which [individuals and communities] can take effective action" (p. 139). In both studies, people entertain many possible theories of why things happen. The implication for practical action is that they may simultaneously employ different, sometimes even apparently contradictory strategies, to the same end. The concept of "subjunctivity" is a way of focusing on the intermingling of intention, hope, and doubt. Francis B. Nyamnjoh's account of witchcraft narratives among the Msa, on the Bamenda grasslands in Cameroon, highlights contradiction or multiplicity in the moral frames within which Msa understand and evaluate personal success, civic action, and political identity. Nyamnjoh's semiautobiographical account shows how, in this setting, capitalism, accumulation, and individual advancement are understood as inherently predatory processes. What one "eats" comes at the expense of the rest of society (p. 120). This is a discourse of constraint and ambivalence regarding individual agency, about social dependencies and interdependencies, and a kind of uneasy coexistence of past and present moral frames. These chapters contain much by way of scholarly reflection on contemporary anthropology, postcolonial studies, and critical theory. The volume as a whole benefits from the strong unifying vision of Werbner, laid out in an introduction that situates the present volume in the context of the "Postcolonial Encounters" trilogy. Paul Stoller's concluding chapter employs an analytic lens that is even wider. Stoller explains how the authors' insistence on constrained and deeply contextualized subjectivitiesthat is, on the postcolonial subject who is constrained to act, think, and hope in the subjunctive, and in the context of webs of social relationstranscends some of the contradictions between structuralist anthropology,

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American Anthropologist Vol. 105, No. 2 June 2003 by Franco Barchiesi identifies some of the ways in which economic decline and neoliberal restructuring actually do affect the structure and organization of societal interests, and the implications of this for politics. Barchiesi argues that "neoliberal policies themselves recursively modify the nature of 'civil society' and its forms of resistance" (p. 146). When it comes to class politics and organized labor, he says, some studies have focused on the radicalization produced by wage freezes and privatizations, but another consequence of neoliberal policies can be the decomposition of labor as a distinct social class or an organized, corporate social group. This comes as a consequence of deindustrialization, retrenchments, informalization of the economy, fragmentation of labor markets, unemployment, and return of jobless workers to the rural areas. In many countries, empirical referents for social categories like labor, middle class, civil service, or peasantry have become even more tenuous and elusive than they once were. One effect is to complicate the articulation of "group interests," and to erode structures for the institutionalized representation of collective interests. Social movement politics can develop in these settings, but in a conclusion that resonates strongly with the papers by Schmidt and Obi (Callaghy et al.) this will tend to be based on dynamics that are fluid, unpredictable, and difficult to institutionalize (Barchiesi, p. 150). The "decline of civil society linked to neoliberalism" tends to make political alignments unstable (p. 150). In an analysis of NGOs working with rural communities in South Africa, Kate Crehan arrived at the unsettling conclusion that "communities" as such did not always seem to exist. "Though the outlines of 'the community' might seem clear enough at a distance, close up they had a frustrating tendency to dissolve into messy incoherence" (p. 184). As one interviewee told the author, people "are essentially competing with one another" (p. 183). Crehan juxtaposes the reality of community as a discursive construct or "precipitate of the past" with "factions and shifting realities" of daily life at the local level in a context of extreme resource scarcity. In South Africa, she argues, realities of power at the local level are shifting "in favor of the more straightforward economic inequalities of any modern capitalist economy" (p. 193). This is one way in which South Africa may be an exception that helps prove the rule, for in most of the rest of the continent it would be difficult to discern such a clear trajectory. In a case study of the Asante region of Ghana, Sara Berry makes a different argument about the lived reality of structural instability and institutional contingency. She shows that here, property rights in land are continually contested, socially contingent, and encumbered by social obligations. People's access to property and their very livelihoods become enmeshed in social relationships that require continual investment, renewal, and renegotiation, which may not follow a predictable course. We learn that land is part of a process of constituting local relationships and local authority, but may not be the main source or

which emphasized constraining forces, and the poststructuialist project, which privileges agency, the individual, and creative subjectivity. George Clement Bond and Nigel C. Gibson's Contested
Terrains and Constructed Territories: Contemporary Africa in

Focus is a collection of 16 papers that were first presented as invited lectures at Columbia University's Institute of African Studies during the editors' tenure as Director and Assistant Director of the Institute. They cover the disciplinary waterfront in the humanities and social sciences and deal with issues of political economy, political organization and representation, health and the body, and the politics of knowledge. Like contributors to the two other volumes, most of the authors featured here eschew master concepts like state, civil society, institutions, property, ethnicity, and community. The editors' introduction identifies this critical stance vis-a-vis disciplinary paradigms and analytical constructs as what unites an otherwise disparate set of chapters. At the same time, it seems noteworthy that almost all the authors decline to advance alternative conceptual schema to describe society and social process, to make arguments about what alternative futures might look like, to identify "fundamental issues" or "basic" social cleavages, or to speculate about trajectories of change in political or social institutions. It seems to me that this is as much a sign of the times as the product of an a priori theoretical commitment to empiricism, to studying the particular, or an embrace of poststructural theory. The historical and empirical realities of structural instability in Africa todaydestructuration and deinstitutionalizationhave made it harder to rely on social science's standard toolkits, or, as many of the contributors to these three volumes would surely argue, served to underscore how limited the old tools were in the first place. Sayre Schatz and Oliver S. Saasa focus on the inescapable facts of Africa's post-1980 economic catastrophe and pervasive, grinding poverty on the continent. Schatz presents a devastating critique of structural adjustment programs and of the World Bank's continuing attempts to claim some success for two decades of neoliberal economic "restructuring" on the continent. Saasa reports that over half of the population in many countries lives below the national poverty line and notes that poverty is not merely a question of low income, but is instead highly correlated with economic exclusionhaving no job, no assets, or limited access to productive assets like land. The reality behind the statistics is one of pervasive economic disenfranchisement, the undermining of livelihoods, and chronic social and economic uncertainty about the future. This has implications for the structure and organization of social and political interests, for forms of cooperation and interdependence, and for engagement with the state. Irving Leonard Markovitz notes that in these contexts, hopes for the enactment of "liberal civil society theory," whereby politically moderate and well-organized interest groups help support an accountable and probusiness state, can be flights of ideological fantasy. An important chapter

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even the main object of social power. Berry's contribution is a political-economy counterpart to themes of interdependence and "subjunctive subjectivity" developed by other contributors to the Werbner volume. Like most of those authors, Berry does not dwell on sources of structural instability specific to the last two decades. This suggests that in African studies, there is still plenty of room for debate between those who see a process of "destructuration" in post-1980 Africa, and those who never really subscribed to structuralist epistemologies in the first place. Two powerful chapters on Mozambique, one by Alcinda Honwana (on child soldiers) and the other by Mustafa Dhada (on a 1972 village massacre by the Portuguese) underscore the role of political violence in ripping apart the social fabric and shattering communities, families, and identities. Nigel Gibson's contribution on Merleau-Ponty, Mannoni, and the 1947 Malagasy massacre links these themes to the broad question of colonialism. George Bond and Joan Vincent trace the spatial and political geography of HIV/AIDS in Uganda, showing among other things that the political reach of the state and of HIV/AIDS research and treatment are confined mostly to the southern half of country. Generalizations about "Uganda" usually refer to the south, ignoring the reality of long periods of fighting in the north, refugee movements, insecurity, physical displacement, and the largely unmeasured spread of disease, including HIV/AIDS. Although all three volumes focus on issues of great contemporary relevance, most of the contributors are remarkably circumspect when it comes to embracing prescriptive visions of change, or making arguments about how progressive change could come about. Only a few of the 40-plus contributors to these volumes undertake to

identify particular social agentsAfrican governments, organizations, social collectivities, even outside actorsthat are well-positioned, likely, or willing to undertake action to redirect things toward some better future. This political circumspection on the part of scholars is surely another sign of the times. As Meredith Turshen suggests in a chapter on health and politics in Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories, without sovereign and effective governing institutions, it is harder to assign responsibility and accountability for change, and for political and policy failure. Nongovernmental organizations and the international financial institutions have become prominent and often heavy-handed actors on the African scene, but as Turshen points out, they are not accountable to African publics and their linkages to local political actors are murky, informal, and often shallow. Meanwhile, in countries that lack stable political institutions, cohesive social organizations, and structured class and political relationships, it is harder to identify social actors or groups that could be agents of directed change. At the same time, all three volumes are clear in insisting that without Africa, social science runs the risk of relying too much on master concepts that are actually quite partial and contingent in their scope of applicability, and of assuming too much about capitalism, the state, social organization, political authority, and individual subjectivity. What Bond and Gibson call "the innovative critical orientation" (p. xix) of African studies is precisely the effect of this sustained engagement with general social science theory. An insular and inward-looking "area studies" would not speak so forcefully to the disciplines, to disciplinary knowledge, or about disciplinary boundaries.

New Anthropological Perspectives on Southeastern Indians

CLAUDIO SAUNT

University of Georgia Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life. Margaret Bender. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 187 pp. Southern Indians and Anthropologists: Culture, Politics, and Identity. Lisa J. Lefler and Frederic W. Gleach, eds. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. 151 pp. Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Circe Sturm. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 249 pp. The three books reviewed here represent recent advances in the anthropology of Southeastern Indians, and they illustrate

that, after decades of neglect, the field is moving in promising new directions. After the pioneering work of James Mooney, John Swanton, and Frank Speck, the field fell into general neglect, and the few scholars working with Southeastern Indians or their Oklahoma descendents rarely addressed the concerns of contemporary anthropological scholarship. Ray Fogelson has long been a prominent exception, and now he is being joined by a number of other scholars. Circe Sturm, Margaret Bender, and the authors collected in Southern Indians and Anthropologists draw on writings by Benedict Anderson, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Brian Street, and others, reflecting a broad engagement with influential scholarship. Moreover, they tackle subjects such as gender, race, identity, and literacy that speak to general readers as well as to specialists on Southeastern Native America.