Retroversion, Introversion, Extraversion: Three Aspects of African Anthropology

Abstract

Africa is more important to anthropology than anthropology is to Africa. (Barnard 2001: 163).Africa, as Barnard states, has provided anthropology with 'unparalleled' case material on almost every aspect of social life. Over its long history of engagement with the discipline Africa has arguably contributed more than any other region to the anthropological study of familiar topics such as witchcraft, ritual symbolism, descent theory, and the politics and law in 'small-scale' societies (163). But we may ask, with others, whether this regional significance is still justified (Southall 1983;Guyer 2004).Given developments within African Studies and anthropology itself over the past quarter century, along with the articulation of a range of critical voices directed at Africanist anthropology, does Africa retain its important place within anthropology? How well has the field escaped the dilemma that Africa presents 'classic' ethnographic examples in both the exemplary and timeless senses of the term? How has Africa extended its contributed to anthropology beyond its 'classic cases' -Azande witchcraft and sorcery, Barotse and Tiv judicial processes, Nuer and Tallensi lineage structure, Maasai age grades and Ndembu initiation? Anthropology's agenda was shaped by challenges raised in African research -'critical anthropology'.These shifts in the discipline, of course, are not tied simply to trends within the academy, but also to social, economic and political experience in Africa itself. No other region has undergone the length and intensity of turbulence that Africa has experienced since Independence. And in the period under review, broadly the past twenty-five years, Africa has experienced the most profound upheavals: the 1984 Ethiopian famine, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the Rwandan genocide, civil wars on the Guinea Coast, structural adjustment programmes, and the end the Cold War and Apartheid. Underscoring this history are volatile economic trajectories. The impetus towards extraversion of the contemporary anthropology reviewed in the third section has been to interpret the effects of these profound shifts on African societies, and on beliefs and youth in particular. In these contexts, as Guyer states, the challenge for the anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa has been to engage with 'the radical configuration of religious, economic and political life in a contingent relationship to global religions, global markets and global political dynamics ' (1999: 34). RetroversionRecent scholarship within Africanist anthropology has had a retroverted, backward looking perspective and has been as concerned with the discipline's colonial legacy as at any time since the independence era. The debate concerning the relationship between anthropology and colonialism has regularly revisited earlier critiques of