Ajàlá's Heads: Reflections on Anthropology and Philosophy in a West African Setting

Michael Jackson

Dunia toge ma dunia; a toge le a dununia.

—Kuranko adage

In Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Clifford Geertz (2000: ix) observes that anthropology and philosophy share "an ambition to connect just about everything with everything else," leaving both disciplines unsure of their identity and constantly besieged by more specialized sciences that achieve better results by defining their focus and purviews more parsimoniously. Geertz's way of "narrowing the gap" between excessive generalization and overspecialization is to follow Wittgenstein's ([1958] 1973: 46e) exhortation to get ourselves off the "slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk," and to get back "to the rough ground" where our feet, and our thoughts, can gain some purchase. In brief, Geertz sees ethnographic fieldwork as a way of steering a course between the Scylla of empty theorizing and the Charybdis of not being able to see the woods for the trees. But what both Wittgenstein and Geertz seem to overlook is the natural tendency of human consciousness to oscillate between moments of complete absorption in an immediate situation and moments of detachment—when we stand back and take stock of what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why. This dialectic between engagement and disengagement is native to how we experience our being-in-the-world before it is consciously transformed into a scientific method of subjecting a hypothesis to empirical testing, or into the kind of disciplined and systematic reflection (the vita contemplativa) that characterizes the Western philosophical tradition. Scientific methods of induction and deduction also have pedestrian origins. People typically experience themselves as beings to whom life simply happens or feel that the world impresses itself upon their consciousness, disclosing hitherto invisible or underlying causes, motives, rules, or ordering principles. Just as typically, they experience themselves as viewing their lives from afar, as if their very existence could be made an object of contemplation. But neither of these modes of experience necessarily entails scientific methods or philosophical truths. They are simply alternating forms of consciousness, either of which may provide a fleeting and consoling sense that we may comprehend our relationship to the world. They echo a distinction that precedes the development of modern science and is recognized in all human societies: that we are creatures who suffer an existence we have not chosen, fated to exercise patience in the hope that we may, in the fullness of time or by the grace of God, be indemnified for our pains and that we are creators of our own lives, responsible for our actions, and capable of knowing and controlling with increasingly higher degrees of certainty the world in which we move.

Accordingly I construe philosophy not as a method for forming concepts but as a strategy for distancing ourselves from the world of immediate experience—social as well as sensory—in order to gain some kind of perspective or purchase on it. By contrast, ethnography is a strategy for close encounters and intersubjective engagements. Whereas ethnography demands immersion in a world of others or otherness, philosophy saves us from drowning by providing us with means of regaining our sense of comprehension, composure, and command in a world of confusing and confounding experience. As such, the turn to philosophy may be compared with the turn to analogy, whereby we grasp the familiar by way of the strange, or with narrative conventions of framing an account of reality by invoking a place and time distant from our own.

IN NORTHERN SIERRA LEONE

Translated literally, Dunia toge ma dunia; a toge le a dununia means "The name of the world is not world; its name is load." The Kuranko adage exploits oxymoron and pun (dunia, "world," and dununia, "load," are near homophones) to imply that the world is like a head-load, the weight of which depends both on the nature of the load and on the way one chooses to carry it. Such an attitude is suggestive of an existential view that human beings are never identical with the conditions that bear upon them; existence is a vital relationship with such conditions, and it is the character of this relationship that it is our task to fathom. This view is also implied by the Kuranko word that most closely translates our words custom and tradition: namui. The word is from na (mother) and the verb ka mui (to give birth), as in the term muinyorgoye, literally "birth partnership," that is, close agnatic kinship, or "the bond between children of the same father and mother." Namui suggests that a person is born into a world of established customs in the same way he or she is born into the father's kin group. While one's social status and name are given through descent, one's temperament and destiny are shaped by one's mother's influence, hence the adage Ke l dan sia; musi don den; ke l dan wo bolo (A man has many children; a woman nurtures them; his children are in her hands) and the frequent attribution in Kuranko life of a person's fortunes to his mother's influence. Because it is the dynamic interplay of formal determinants and informal influences that decides a person's destiny, Kuranko would readily assent to Merleau-Ponty's (1962: 453) view that "to be born is both to be born to the world and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities."

From this arise many of the existential dilemmas of everyday Kuranko...