Negotiating the nation in local terms

Abstract

No abtract provided. The following is taken from the author's Introduction:

A related question is what sort of nationalism may come out of the overall nation-building process. Can we expect to see a universalist, multi- ethnic or supra-ethnic nationalism, encompassing social identities of different scale without suppressing them - as Anderson (1983) holds must be possible? Or will the result be a more particularistic, essentially ethnic nationalism, characterised by a dominant ethnic category of people -as Gellner (1983) suggests is the typical case. This question is investigated with reference to symbolic constructions of nationalism in chapter 3 and the politics of ethnic nationalism in chapter 8

Neither of the two approaches which in turn have dominated social science research in and on Namibia; colonialist and primordialist South African ethnology and anthropology, and narrowly economistic political economy research, has been able to fathom or represent properly the social and political importance of culture, ethnicity and nationalism in Namibia. Whereas works within the first tradition of research have tended to reify culture and ethnic identities and made little allowance for change and inter-dependencies in 'traditional' social systems, much research of the political economy school has tended to disregard culture and ethnicity altogether, often due to an orthodox Marxist definition of ideology as false consciousness, supposedly standing in the way of class consciousness and nationalist identifications. Neither have any of these schools of research investigated the phenomenon of nationalism to any satisfactory extent: where South African ethnologists and anthropologists have not dealt with it beyond associating it with SW APO and communism, political economists have tended to take it for granted as part of SWAPO's ideological basis. The research implications and political context of these kinds of research will be discussed further in chapter 2

Over the past decades, Foster notes in a review of recent anthropological works on nationalism and globalisation (1991:235), a definite shift has occurred in the way anthropologists conceptualise the central concept of culture. Questions about social agents, rather than the structural logic or functional coherence of normative and symbolic systems, now orient cultural inquiry. These days, culture is increasingly often treated as the changing outcome of practice -interested activity not reducible to rational calculation. This perspective has prompted consideration of nations as cultural products, and of nationalism as a cultural process of collective identity formation. Accordingly, the discursive practices of intellectuals and state officials in promoting national-cultural identities have been given close scrutiny in recent studies of ethnicity and nationalism, partly reflecting the fact that anthropologists and nationalists alike grant importance to culture. The same will apply to this thesis

In the perspective employed here, ethnicity and nationalism will be understood as socially constructed and ideologically practised forms of social classification and identification. The framework of analysis has been developed in particular from works by T. H. Eriksen. In accordance with Marxist conventions, the concept of ideology will refer to legitimisation of power-structures. However, ideologies necessarily derive their potential for popular mobilisation from their ability to organise and make sense of the immediate experiences of their adherents. In Geertz' terminology, ideologies represent explanations or models of the world, as well as models for or agendas for acting upon the world (d. Geertz 1973b:93-94). Ideologies thus have legitimising as well as motivating capacities. This is so because culture is continuously created and re-created through intentional agency, but it is simultaneously a necessary condition for all agency to be meaningful. Culture, in this sense, represents both an aspect of concrete, ongoing interaction and the meaning-context for the very same interaction (T. H. Eriksen 1991a:127). Since agents in all societies are 'social theorists' whose discursively articulated accounts are in some part constitutive of the social forms they reproduce in their conduct, it is never the case that they blindly enact and re-enact the routines of daily life. Even in the most traditional of cultures 'tradition' is reflexively appropriated and in some sense 'discursively understood' (Giddens 1985:12). In this way, cultural differences are socially relevant in Namibia to the extent that they are experienced as such by the people involved, not in respect of their 'objective' contents. I thus find that an interactive perspective, which allows for seeing ethnicity as both a source of identity and an idiom for politics, represents a: "powerful and important counter to those approaches which see the oppressed merely as powerless victims of domination or, as in some versions of structuralist Marxism, as dupes of system forces over which they have no control. It is crucial to note that even the harshest systems of oppression rarely leave their victims with no channels of resistance and that people do play a role in the making of their own history" (Mason 1986:8-9)

Instead of viewing ideology as false consciousness, then, ethnic and nationalist ideologies will refer to (in principle) questionable and ambiguous symbolic structures perceived as normative. As such, they are a matter of opinion, they are negotiable, as opposed to the unquestioned symbolic bases of social life, doxa (Bourdieu 1977). On this background, I found it instructive to contrast ethnicity and nationalism in order to assess the content and relative social impact of such ideologies in independent Namibia. As conflicting principles for social organisation, nationalist and ethnic ideologies compete for the 'hearts and minds' of often ambivalent people. In making choices on strategies, strategically minded agents evaluate available ideologies critically in terms of alternative practical frames of reference in interaction with relevant others. Caught between different ideological orientations, it is assumed that Namibians relating discursively to ideologies oscillate situationally between the universalistic ethics of nationalism, and the particularistic ethics of ethnicity. Their choices are, however, not made in a social vacuum or uninhibited by power relations, but in contexts of perception, discourse and action which, following Bourdieu (1977), may be referred to as habitus. Thus agents may not fully comprehend or relate the motivations, limits and consequences of their actions, rather these factors form part of their practical consciousness, that is, "tacit knowledge that is skilfully applied in the enactment of courses of conduct, but which the actor is not able to formulate discursively" (Giddens 1979:57)

In this setting of competing ideologies, people within a class of cultural and political elites were found to be situated in different but often complementary structural positions. An elite is here understood as a "collectivity of persons who occupy commanding positions in some important sphere of social life, and who share a variety of interests arising from similarities of training, experience, public duties, and way of life" (Cohen 1981:xvi). Partly westernised in lifestyle and wielding influence in both ethnic and nationalist circles, they are, to a greater extent than most Namibians, positioned so as to be able to choose between ethnicity and nationalism as practical frames of reference for their actions. Well-educated and dominant in the construction and negotiation [3] of these ideologies, they act as cultural brokers or symbol interpreters for the population at large. Prominent among these elites are members of the dominant political parties; SWAPO, and the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA) -South Africa's former 'puppet government' partner inside Namibia, and, since, 1990, the official opposition in parliament. Public servants in the national and regional government bodies as well as people in the mass media may also be included here. In eastern Caprivi, the Mafwe and Masubiya 'tribal' chiefs and their councils (khutas) have a significant say in the running of affairs; through the authority they wield over their constituent ethnic communities. Associated with the khutas, the political parties and the state bureaucracy, in turn, are networks of political activists who act as negotiators or intermediaries between these 'traditionalist', [4] ethnically oriented, and modernist, nationalist milieus. Whatever their divergent or common interests or motivations, politicians, public servants and 'tribal' leaders were often found to be influential in each other's spheres of influence: thus Caprivian politicians in the national assembly were found to be actively involved in buttressing their constituencies through involvement in local ethnic disputes, public servants involved themselves in the affairs of the khutas, and the khutas, in turn, involved themselves in education and local government policies

Barth stresses the role of the entrepreneur in ethnopolitics: mobilisation of ethnic groups in collective action is undertaken by leaders promoting certain agendas of their own, which mayor may not be representative of the groups' cultural ideologies or the popular will (Barth 1994:175). In researching elite construction, negotiation and competition over ethnic and nationalist ideologies, I took care to remember that the power to define culture and society is unevenly distributed in any population. While the definitions of reality held by elites might be dominant in local and national discourses, I have not assumed that their rationalisations necessarily represented shared beliefs in the larger population (cf. Berreman 1971:23), or that their views were not contested in the groups represented by these elites. The aim of this study has, accordingly, not been to represent Mafwe, Masubiya, Caprivian or Namibian cultures as integrated wholes; the idea has rather been to highlight some of the social, political, cultural and historical contingents on the process of creating a viable nation-state. This has been attempted through investigating topics and issues regarding ethnicity, nationalism, and nation-building in Caprivi and Namibia at large which preoccupied informants and research participants. It is generally recognised that in these processes political elites, whether recruited from ethnically or nationalistically defined milieus, play a leading role anywhere in the world. [5] Therefore, the focus in this thesis is on the construction of ethnicity and nationalism as negotiated by political and cultural elites in Namibia

Footnotes:

1 United Nations Security Council Resolution 435/1978

2 New Era 19-25 May 1994

3 Negotiation in this thesis refers to the mediation, brokerage or arbitration between different ideologies and practical frames of reference such as ethnicity and nationalism

4Traditionalism in this context may be understood as a conscious, modernising return to remembered, presumed or invented traditions

5 See, for instance, the importance accorded to the role of the intelligentsia and elites in the construction of nationalism in general by Anderson (1983:116), Cohen (1981), Smith (1983, 1986 and 1991) and Eriksen & Neumann (1991), and with reference to Namibia, Totemeyer (1978)