Artefacts from the People without History

The glare from the glass case prevents us from seeing it clearly, but the object in the photo above is a lady's hat made out of twigs and spiderwebs. It was made in the early 20th century by a San tribesmember in southern Africa, and is currently on display in the Africa Room of the British Museum. This room appears not to attract very many visitors, for reasons I'll get to soon, but I wanted to dwell on this curious hat for a moment still.

Whether or not it meets the formal criteria for qualification as such, this hat is something very close to a cargo-cult object: a reproduction by members of a technologically simple culture, from naturally available materials, of an artefact associated with a dominant, technologically advanced culture. The first cargo cults were identified by western anthropologists in New Guinea, when, shortly after the end of World War II and the disappearance of the goods that the Japanese and American troops had brought into the region, the tribespeople attempted to summon them back by building non-functioning simulations of airports.

The British Museum's labelling tells us that we are supposed to admire the spiderweb hat, in more or less the same way we are supposed to praise the plaques made by casters in the brass foundries of the highly complex early modern Kingdom of Benin. The general message of the Africa Room --which is in fact the Africa Basement-- is that, first of all, there is a cohesive, unitary, and stable thing called 'Africa', and, second of all, that everything that comes out of Africa, whether made of brass or of spiderwebs, is equally and perfectly good.

This lesson is one that is very different from what we are taught in the other halls of the museum, where the labels carefully and conscientiously spell out for us the different stages in the rise and decline of classical Assyrian, Egyptian, and Mesoamerican civilizations. In this respect, the well-meaning 'Africa is good' message in fact perpetuates the myth of stagnation that Eric Wolf sought to dispel in his masterful book, Europe and the People without History of 1982.

There are significant differences between brass art and spiderweb art, as there are between societies with metal foundries, on the one hand, and, on the other, societies, dubbed 'resourceful' by the British Museum, whose technology involves only the transformation of things found in the immediate natural environment. If Africa were depicted as a historical rather than a stagnant continent, one thing visitors to the British Museum might learn is that it is members of the broader ethnic family that includes the former inhabitants of the Kingdom of Benin --namely, the Niger-Congo family-- that overran southern Africa long before the era of European expansion, and left the indigenous San and other Khoisan peoples only in isolated pockets or in areas too inhospitable to invite competition for resources. The European arrival at the Cape, then, was not the first time an indigenous people had been displaced or had its way of life disrupted in sub-Saharan Africa. As I always insist, ethnic cleansing is the default activity of humanity, not some unusual disruption of our ordinary commitment to harmonious sharing.

But what I had wanted to say is that, while the spiderweb hat is a fascinating thing that reveals something about humanity worth reflecting on, the brass plaques from 16th-century Benin are, for their part, formidable works of art. I am prepared to say that they are better than the Sans' spiderweb hats. And this brings me to something I'd been thinking about very much recently, prior to entering the Africa Room: how is it that one can compare cultures, make judgments as to the relative merit of their attainments, without lapsing away from one's ordinary commitment to universal equality?

There is a sort of illusion, whereby we believe that a society is a certain way because each of its members, individually, are a certain way. But it's much more likely that each individual is whatever way she or he is because of structural or institutional limitations on how one might be within a given society: the availability of basic goods, access to information about the outside world, and so on. Correlatively, the greatness of a society, which might be measured in its technologies and  accomplishments (going to the moon, etc.), says nothing about the greatness of individuals who belong to that society. I, for example, have never been to the moon, or helped in any way with the project of sending someone else there.

And correlative to this, I note, is a point about the supposed greatness of the human species: it is true that humans have come up with vastly more impressive inventions than have chimpanzees, but this is a cumulative record, and not a measure of the relative greatness of any given human brought into comparison with any chimpanzee. If you leave me to fend for myself on a desert island, what I will be able to come up with over the course of my life will not be much more impressive than what a chimp in similar circumstances might do; I would not invent the internet, or nuclear power, or the space shuttle, but at best some scrappy hut made out of twigs.

Matched one-to-one with other animals, humans really are nothing special; similarly matched, members of metal-forging societies have no obvious advantage over hunter-gatherers. What makes societal attainments possible is only a certain slow, quantitative build-up that happens now in one region, now in another, for reasons that are ultimately rooted in features of the natural environment. In this respect, it is to get things backwards to congratulate oneself on coming from a technologically advanced society, or to pity a member of a society capable only of basic transformations of the natural world.

I suspect that domination and exploitation, both within the human species and across species, flow to no small extent from a mistaken judgment about the way individuals living in technologically complex societies must be. We suppose that our society's complexity is a measure of our own individual complexity, and we suppose that failure to participate in an equally complex society must result from the fact that a given human or animal is, individually, quite simple. But once we see that it is in fact the other way around, it becomes perfectly easy at the same time to see how it is possible to go on with one's commitment to equality while nonetheless admitting to being more impressed by metal-forging societies than by web-gathering ones.

Admitting this much, though, would require a certain reorganization of the Africa Room of the British Museum, which, given that this is hardly that august institution's main attraction, probably will not be happening anytime soon.

Comments

[Cyrus Hall]

While I agree with your general thesis, you do leave out the important interplay between the "complex" individual and the complex society. The individual is, by birth, granted many things (an education, technology, philosophy), a very small subset of which they could reasonably be expected to develop on their own. Through a lifetime of work those boons are echoed back to the host society, often amplified by synthesis and context. These echoes are what drive social change. (I'll resist making a Kurzweilian argument about rate of change here, as I think that confuses technology with society, although that boundary seems to be getting fuzzier.)

None of this is counter to your argument, but is rather a little nuance that may help to explain the common interpretation that you seek to dispel. If the echoing of societies complexity from the individual is mistaken as personal greatness (and it often is), it would be little wonder that many interpret the individual as the basis for a societies status.

[Justin Smith]

Cyrus: I probably did state the case a bit too radically. After all, I agree that a complex society works in complex ways on the individuals who make it up. But in the end I think we both agree that it's just a matter of 'same brains, different circumstances'.