Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation: On the Formation of Survival Units in Ghana [1st ed. 2022] 3658378484, 9783658378486

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Dieter Reicher · Adrian Jitschin Arjan Post · Behrouz Alikhani Eds.

Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation On the Formation of Survival Units in Ghana

Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation

Dieter Reicher · Adrian Jitschin · Arjan Post · Behrouz Alikhani Editors

Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation On the Formation of Survival Units in Ghana In collaboration with Stephen and Barbara Mennell

Editors

Dieter Reicher Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz Graz, Austria

Adrian Jitschin Norbert Elias Foundation Frankfurt, Germany

Arjan Post Norbert Elias Foundation Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Behrouz Alikhani Hannover, Germany

With Contrib. by Barbara Mennell Dublin, Ireland

Stephen Mennell University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

The photo on the cover page is from the 1970 exhibition catalogue by Norbert Elias (Leicester Museum and Art Gallery (1970) African Art from the Collection of Professor Norbert Elias: Catalogue of an Exhibition at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, April 24th-June 14th 1970, Leicester: Leicester Museum). The accompanying text reads: “Figure of a woman in labour with white eyes, holding on to her god”. It is part of a series of “Baule figures”. Figures that “are often said to correspond more closely to European naturalistic taste in sculpture than those of most other African peoples. But perhaps one can appreciate them best as a group in its own rights. ... Baule figures look less like awe-inspiring spirit beings than many other African figures and are, in a way, more human in character.” And further, “No. 114 is the figure of a woman in labour. It shows again [as additional examples] that African craftsmen tackle with great skill sculptural problems without precedent in European culture. She clutches her god whose eyes are also visible and her own eyes are made to show something of her effort and her anxiety.” (All quotes are on p. 18 of the catalogue by Elias) ISBN 978-3-658-37848-6 ISBN 978-3-658-37849-3  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3 © Norbert Elias Foundation 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Illustration: Norbert Elias Stiftung Responsible Editor: Cori Antonia Mackrodt This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Acknowledgements

Several people were of utter importance for the realisation of this book. Without their help, we would not have been able to finalise our project. In addition to our families, who had our backs over the years, we would like to thank Cori Mackrodt from Springer, who supervised the publishing of this book and generously tolerated delivery delays. Most important was the support of Stephen and Barbara Mennell. We feel grateful for their sharing of profound knowledge of the matter, advice, and corrections to our imperfect English language. Besides these, we want to thank the Archive staff and the Copy service at the DLA Marbach. In addition, we are grateful to Veit Arlt, Paul Jenkins, Helmut Kuzmics, Waldemar Sireis and Hubert Smeets for answering our questions and for their helpful support. Finally, we thank the Norbert Elias Foundation for support in manifold ways, including granting Behrouz Alikhani a two-month scholarship at the Marbach archive.

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Contents

A Professor in Ghana: Norbert Elias, civilising processes and the African challenge. An introduction by the editors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dieter Reicher, Adrian Jitschin, Arjan Post and Behrouz Alikhani

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Problems of Researching Traditional Societies Overcoming ‘Tribe’ and Other Static Categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Norbert Elias

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African Village-States: The Formation of Survival Units. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Norbert Elias and Hazel King

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The Krobo People. Socio- and Psychogeneses of a Stateless Society Outline of an Early State-Formation Process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Norbert Elias

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A Tribe on the Move: The Development of Krobo Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . Norbert Elias

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Fission and Fusion: The Next Stage of Tribe Formation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Norbert Elias

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Religion in a Village Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Norbert Elias Priests and Knowledge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Norbert Elias

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Emotions, Violence and Rituals: On Traditional Klama Songs. . . . . . . . . 165 Norbert Elias African and Western Civilising Processes The Formation of States and Changes in Restraint. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Norbert Elias Sociology and Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Norbert Elias Epilogue: Off to Ghana—the Encounter of Norbert Elias and Malcolm X. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Arjan Post Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

A Professor in Ghana: Norbert Elias, civilising processes and the African challenge. An introduction by the editors Dieter Reicher, Adrian Jitschin, Arjan Post and Behrouz Alikhani Norbert Elias (1897–1990) is now recognised as one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century. Such recognition, however, came very late in his long life. Only in the 1970s did his magnum opus, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation— although first published obscurely in 1939—become widely known in the German speaking world, and not until the 1980s was its English translation On the Process of Civilisation (or The Civilizing Process) widely read in English. There is much more to his work than that one famous book, and his publications run to no fewer than 18 volumes in the Collected Works in English.1 Yet there are even 1 In

the corresponding German Gesammelte Schriften, there are 19 volumes, because they also include his collected poetry and aphorisms, which have not been translated into English; see Gedichte und Sprüche, Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 18 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004). D. Reicher (*)  Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Graz, Austria e-mail: [email protected] A. Jitschin  Norbert Elias Foundation, Frankfurt am Main, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Post  Norbert Elias Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] B. Alikhani  Norbert Elias Foundation, Hannover, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_1

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more extensive unpublished papers—some written in German, some in English— now deposited in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA), Marbach am Neckar. Since Elias’s death, a few of these papers have been authorised for publication by the DLA and the Norbert Elias Foundation, Amsterdam. Among them are the contents of the present volume, all of which Elias wrote in English. The papers published here arose from an episode in Elias’s life before his belated fame, at a time when he was little known outside the circle of his personal acquaintance. He had only obtained his first secure academic post, at the University of Leicester at the extraordinarily late age of 57. By 1962, when he reached the compulsory retirement age of 65, he had reached the rank of Reader in Sociology, one rung below that of Professor. He then immediately seized on the chance to go out to Africa as Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana, with which the Leicester sociologists had an existing link. One of his motives was undoubtedly to secure for the first time the title of Professor, a lifetime ambition that had long eluded him. Yet he had had a long-term previous interest in non-European societies, though this was to be his first opportunity to study one closely. The two years he spent in Ghana were to make a considerable impression upon his thinking. Upon his return to Leicester in 1964, there is no doubt that Elias anticipated that substantial writing would come out of his time in Ghana. Indeed, in a letter quoted by Hermann Korte dating from 1965, he spoke of his ‘hope to bring out in the near future one or two books connected with my experiences’.2 Chapters 2, 3 and 11 of the present book had been drafted during the Ghana years. But like so many of his projects, he did not bring this to fruition in his lifetime. Except for some remarks in an interview given to Arend-Jan Heerma van Voss and Bram van Stolk, he had little to say publicly about his time in Africa.3 Only one essay appeared, an introduction to the brochure that accompanied a 1970 exhibition in Leicester of the large collection of African art that he had gathered in Ghana.4

2  See

Hermann Korte, Biographische Skizzen zu Norbert Elias, (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2013), pp. 61–62. 3 ‘Norbert Elias’s story of his life’ (1984), in Interviews and Autobiographical Reflections (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013 [Collected Works, vol. 17]), pp. 131–4. 4 ‘Introduction to the catalogue African Art from the Collection of Professor Norbert Elias, April 24th–June 14th 1970, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery’, in Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 16]), pp. 201–8.

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Yet he continued to reflect on his experiences in Africa. In 1975 he commenced a more substantial essay on African art, ‘Stages of African art, social and visual’,5 and in 1987—only three years before his death, when he was effectively blind— he dictated the substantial typescript about the Krobo, from which chapters 4–9 are derived. None of the writings included in this book has been published before, but together they are fundamental to our understanding of his understanding of human society in general, and of the relationship between colonial and postcolonial societies in particular. This book has a long history, and we believe it represents as far as possible the completion of a plan by Norbert Elias himself.

Elias’s Intellectual Route to Africa Norbert Elias was born in Breslau in 1897, in today’s Poland, but then a German city, as the son of a Jewish clothing manufacturer. Between 1918 and 1924, traumatised as a soldier in the First World War, he studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Breslau. He graduated and obtained a doctorate in philosophy, under the supervision of Richard Hönigswald (1875–1947), an Austro-Hungarian Neo-Kantian philosopher.6 During this period, Neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophical movement in Germany. Even while writing his thesis, however, Elias came to oppose Kantian epistemology, an opposition that ran as a consistent thread throughout his long intellectual career. Elias’s intellectual break with Kantianism was the result of several influences. One was Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), a relative of his from Breslau and a leading Neo-Kantian of this time, who had already made pioneering efforts to overcome Kant’s a priorism.7 Also, Elias’s medical training helped to overcome Kantianism by grounding his approach in essential bodily functions involving consciousness and emotions. Even as a sociologist focusing on long-term processes, he never lost sight of how social processes interlocked with bodily functions. Thus Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) structural model of psychic make-up, as well as his

5 Essays

III, pp. 209–32. Robert van Krieken, Norbert Elias (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 10–11. 7 ibid., p.11. Richard Kilminster, in Norbert Elias: Post-philosophical Sociology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 137–40, argues that, in developing his sociogenetic and psychogenetic view, Elias went beyond Cassirer, who never developed a sociological approach. 6 See

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writings about the role of civilisation in muting drives,8 became a starting point for Elias’s sociological approach. Here, too, Elias tried to modify Freud’s individualistic approach with a sociological insight into how individuals are always interwoven in social interdependences.9 In 1924, Elias moved to Heidelberg to study sociology. The so-called Heidelberg School,10 still under the influence of the recently deceased Max Weber (1864–1920), became both a primary reference for him and at the same time the intellectual rubbing stone against which he ground out his own ideas. Max Weber, following Kantian individualism, suggested deploying certain pure models or ideal types, in opposition to which Elias later advocated the use of ‘real types’ (Realtypen), real case studies. Max Weber’s rejection of any metaphysical teleology of history à la Hegel and Marx, and his notion of understanding subjective perspectives (Verstehen) was picked by Elias and combined with (Mannheimian) relationalism. Although not sharing their metaphysical teleology, in focusing on long-term processes Elias converges more substantially towards Hegel’s and Marx’s positions than with Weber. On the other hand, Elias’s focus on the formation of states and agencies of power shaping the personality make-up of people (‘habitus’) had derived from Max Weber’s writings (who himself referred to Nietzsche). In Heidelberg, Elias was accepted as an eventual Habilitation candidate by Weber’s younger brother Alfred (1868–1958), who developed an approach that he called ‘cultural sociology’ (Kultursoziologie). For Alfred Weber, neither a ‘process of civilisation’—long-term changes in science and technology—nor the ‘sphere of the social life’ are related to the ‘sphere of culture’ (Kultursphäre),

8 Notably

Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Vienna, Internationaler Psychanalytischer Verlag, 1930); trans. James Strachey, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002 [1930]). 9 Later, Elias made his critique of a certain type of psychiatry more explicit, referring to what he called ‘homo psychiatricus’. The term refers to the image of human beings ‘stripped of most attributes that one might call social’; see his essay ‘Sociology and psychiatry’, in Essays III, On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 16]), pp. 159–179, at p. 164. See also Marc Joly’s reconstruction of a text that Elias was dictating in the last months of his life: ‘Freud’s concept of society and beyond it’, in Supplements and Index to the Collected Works (Dublin: UCD Press, 2014 [Collected Works, vol. 18]), pp. 13–52. 10 Reinhard Blomert, Intellektuelle im Aufbruch: Karl Mannheim, Alfred Weber, Norbert Elias und die Heidelberger Sozialwissenschaften der Zwischenkriegszeit (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999).

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which he perceived as separate. One main topic in Elias’s writings is to demonstrate precisely that this interrelationship exists, a notion denied by Alfred Weber. In Weber’s circle, Elias met Károly (Karl) Mannheim (1893–1947), one of the early representatives of the German sociology of knowledge, whom he followed as an assistant to Frankfurt in 1930.11 In opposition to Alfred Weber, Mannheim pleaded for a relational approach to understanding culture and consciousness. In Frankfurt, Elias came into contact with members of the Institut für Sozialforschung, proponents of neo-Marxist critical theory, who came to be known as ‘the Frankfurt School’. He shared some common aspirations with them, like the attempt to incorporate Freud’s psychoanalysis as a source of inspiration for historical research. Along with Mannheim, however, Elias developed strong antagonism to the economic reductionism of critical theory. He started a new Habilitation project, a study that focused on the French royal court. His thesis was rushed through all but the last stage, the public lecture, of the process, but its final approval was incomplete when, in January 1933, the German Nazis came to power, and he was therefore forced into exile.12 In the late 1920s, there appeared Elias’s first—scanty and relatively slight— sociological publications. One of them shows how deep the roots were of his interest in non-European societies and, in particular, their art. This was a transcription of comments he made at the 1928 Deutsche Soziologentag (annual meeting of the German Sociological Association) in Zürich on a paper by the German anthropologist Richard Thurnwald on ‘Die Anfäng der Kunst’ (the beginning of art).13 In it, Elias adumbrates what was to become one of the underlying motifs of Über den Prozess der Zivilisation—that in order to understand oneself, it is necessary to go back far into the past.

11 Apart

from their friendship, one reason for the move was that Mannheim, as a new Professor, held out the possibility of an earlier Habilitation; there were many others ahead of Elias in Weber’s list. 12 In the course of his emigration the Habilitationsschrift was lost, and it was only rediscovered among his papers in the 1960s. It was finally published in 1969, with additions and many re-arrangements, as Die höfische Gesellschaft: Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie (Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969). Revised English edition, translated by Edmund Jephcott: The Court Society (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006 [Collected Works, vol. 2]). 13 ‘Beitrag zur Diskussion über Richard Thurnwald, Die Anfäng der Kunst’, Verhandlungen des 6. Deutschen Soziologentag vom 17.–19.9.1928 in Zürich (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1929), pp. 281–4. English translation: ‘On primitive art’, in Elias, Early Writings (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006 [Collected Works, vol. 1]), pp. 71–5.

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In 1935, Elias arrived in London, and with the meagre financial support of a Dutch refugee charity, he was able to continue his work on Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, which was finally published in Switzerland in 1939. As his later student and friend, the sociologist of religion Bryan Wilson, commented on Elias’s eightieth birthday, 1939 was ‘not the most propitious year for the publication of a large, two-volume work, in German, by a Jew, on, of all things, civilisation’.14 Although it was such a significant book, it received little attention. For many years it was almost forgotten.15 Shortly afterwards, in the early stages of World War II, Elias was detained for a time as an enemy alien. Meanwhile, his private tragedy unfolded: Elias’s father died in Breslau, and his mother was transported to a concentration camp where she was killed. This, Elias always said, was the great trauma of his life. For a time, Elias had a junior, temporary job at the London School of Economics, but then, no longer able to continue his academic career, he earned a precarious income teaching evening classes for the Workers’ Education Association and giving guest lectures at various universities in England. With Siegmund Heinrich Fuchs (known in England as S. H. Foulkes, 1898– 1976) and others, he participated in developing Group Therapy and co-founded the Group Analytic Society. In this initiative, Elias was again trying to relate psychoanalysis and sociology. Eventually, in 1954, after more than a decade of living in England, in his late fifties, he at last obtained his first permanent academic post when he was offered a position as a lecturer at the University of Leicester. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Norbert Elias rarely referred to broadly anthropological questions; indeed, compared with his last two decades, the 1970s and 1980s, he published relatively little (though he was constantly writing). In 1950 there appeared his essay ‘Studies in the genesis of the naval profession’, an outcome of research at the London School of Economics a decade earlier, showing how the role of the naval officer—and specifically the emergence of the rank of Midshipman for young boys in the British Navy was related to differences

14 Bryan

Wilson, ‘A tribute to Elias’, New Society, 7 July 1977, pp. 15–16. were only a few reviews of Prozess, including those by Franz Borkenau, S. H. Foulkes, Menno ter Braak and Raymond Aron; see Korte, Biographische Skizzen zu Norbert Elias, pp. 18, 21, 24. In English, see Johan Goudsblom, ‘Responses to Norbert Elias’s work in England, Germany, the Netherlands and France’, in Human Figurations: Essays for/Aufsätze für Norbert Elias (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Sociologisch Tijdschrift, 1997), pp. 37–97. 15 There

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in the long-term development of British and French society on land.16 His 1956 essay on ‘Problems of involvement and detachment’ marked the first airing of his sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences, which had been germinating in his mind since the 1920s.17 Elias argues that the growth of knowledge necessitates scientists making a ‘detour via detachment’ and maintaining a balance between involvement and detachment. But this is not to be understood as an individual, psychological, capacity—as Max Weber’s essays on ‘value freedom’ and so on often make it appear—but is closely connected with the level of danger in a society’s everyday life, and the corresponding level of fear. Without an adequate level of everyday security, the stock of reliable knowledge can grow at best only slowly. As will be seen, this idea is central to much of the discussion in the chapters in this book. Shortly before Elias left for Africa, he had supervised John L. Scotson’s MA thesis, a study of a community near Leicester, in which two principal parts of the working-class population differed only in the length of time they had lived in the area. With additional material by Elias, their book The Established and the Outsiders was published in 1965 soon after his return.18 Elias outlines the dynamics ‘group charisma’ and ‘group disgrace’, and in particular the role that gossip plays in the stigmatisation of the less powerful group by the more powerful.19 Finally, in these years Elias pioneered the development of the sociology of sport and

16 Elias,

‘Studies in the genesis of the naval profession: gentlemen and tarpaulins’, British Journal of Sociology, 1: 4 (1950), pp. 291–309. This essay was reprinted, together with unpublished papers from the naval profession project, in The Genesis of the Naval Profession, eds René Moelker and Stephen Mennell (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007). 17 Reprinted in Elias, Involvement and Detachment (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007 [Collected Works, vol. 8], pp. 68–104. The other major essay in that book, ‘The fishermen in the maelstrom’ written in 1980–1, is very directly relevant to the question of fears and dangers as impediments to the detours via detachment necessary for the growth of knowledge, and thus to the chapters on the development of Krobo society. 18 Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems, London: Frank Cass, 1965; enlarged edition, Dublin, UCD Press, 2008 [Collected Works, vol. 4]). 19 See also ‘Group charisma and group disgrace’, in Elias, Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol 16]), pp. 73–8. This originated as a lecture given in 1964 at the German conference in Heidelberg marking the centenary of Max Weber.

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leisure, until then little regarded but today a thriving sub-field of sociology globally.20 In collaboration with Eric Dunning, he began a series of studies of sports as a central institution of modern societies, but also reaching back into the ancient world and tracing back the development of sports, especially to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.21 These essays were finally brought together in 1986, but the germs of key ideas can be traced back as far as a talk Elias gave in 1957 on ‘Spontaneity and self-consciousness’,22 in which he compares music, dancing and many other leisure activities in modern societies with the forms found in less complex, pre-modern ones. This, especially, points to why Elias was so receptive to what he observed and experienced in Ghana.

A Note on the Texts None of the papers included in this volume has been published previously.23 They were selected from about 30 typescripts concerning Africa contained in two folders in the Elias archive at the DLA, Marbach. After examining all the material, the editors chose eight of them for this publication, according to their content, richness, and completeness. It must be borne in mind when reading these papers that Elias did not ready them for final publication, nor specifically authorise them for publication. The editors of the Elias Gesammelte Schriften—his collected works in German, published by Surhrkamp (1997–2010)—took a strict line, including only those works that Elias himself had specifically authorised for publication. The editors of the Collected Works in English, published by UCD Press (2006–14) took a slightly

20 See

also the earlier study on kitsch style: ‘The kitsch style and the age of kitsch’ (1936), in Elias, Early Writings, pp. 85–96. 21 Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process, enlarged edition (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008 [Collected Works, vol. 7]). 22 Published posthumously in Jan Haut, Paddy Dolan, Dieter Reicher and Raúl Sánchez García, eds, Excitement Processes: Norbert Elias’s Unpublished Works on Sports, Leisure, Body, Culture (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2018), pp. 23–76. 23 A minor exception is chapter 10, ‘The formation of states and changes in restraint’, a paper given by Elias at the conference on ‘Civilisations and Civilising Processes’ that he hosted at Bielefeld in 1984. The proceedings of the conference have recently been published in Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity—A Debate (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), edited by Artur Bogner and Stephen Mennell.

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more liberal line: they included a few items that had been authorised for publication by the Norbert Elias Foundation after Elias’s death; in general Elias had made careful revisions even to those. The present selection of unpublished papers presented a more mixed picture. In preparing them for publication, as far as possible we followed the practices outlined by Stephen Mennell for editing Elias’s English texts in the Collected Works.24 By the time Elias went to Africa, he had been living in Britain for more than a quarter of a century and had become a British citizen. He had acquired excellent spoken English—albeit with a German accent that he was the first to acknowledge—and an impressive English vocabulary and command of English idioms. Yet when he wrote academic work in English, it sometimes seems that he was still to some extent thinking in German. There are minor errors of word order, and sometimes he wrote sentences too long for English readers easily to cope with. But corrections can usually be made without in any way changing his intended meaning. More serious problems arise from his characteristic method of working. He typically made numerous drafts of every chapter and essay he was writing.25 This was true of chapters 2, 3 and 11, dating from the 1960s. Elias would type out a first draft and a carbon copy, and then make revisions in his very difficult handwriting—sometimes making amendments on both the top copy and the carbon—and/or type new sheets to be inserted, then perhaps retype the whole text, before starting the whole sequence again. The process is not to be dismissed: he was endlessly seeking to find better ways of expressing more exactly his important ideas. But sometimes it made it difficult for later editors to establish what were his final thoughts, or indeed even to decipher his manuscript additions. The most extreme case in this book is the text of chapter 3 on African village-states, which he co-authored with Hazel King, his assistant at the University of Ghana. Although it was possible to establish what had initially been the relatively short, clear and important argument that appears here—amounting to about 17 pages of typing—the file contained as many as 63 sheets, including many duplications as well as supplementary passages. We attempted to integrate this mass into a single text, but the result was an unclear, incoherent, over-complicated argument. We decided it was not even certain that all the additional sheets typed by Elias (and

24 Stephen

Mennell, ‘The Collected Works: note on editorial policy’, in Supplements and Index to the Collected Works (Dublin: UCD Press, 2014 [Collected Works, vol. 18]), pp. ix–xiv. 25 When he was supervising Eric Dunning’s MA thesis in the early 1960s, Elias told him he should expect to make about eight drafts.

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perhaps by Hazel King) had been intended to be fitted together into a single text. So we reverted to their first thoughts.26 The problems encountered with the typescripts of chapters 4–9, dating from 1987, are rather different. By this time, Elias was effectively blind, with only a limited capacity to read a little using a powerful lens. These chapters were dictated to relays of Dutch student assistants.27 Now the problem was the opposite— not enough amendments by Elias. There are not many signs that he was able to read over, correct and approve the previous day’s work, as had been his practice. And although his changing team of assistants were all (in Richard Kilminster’s words) ‘highly intelligent, dedicated and multilingual’, they inevitably misheard, misunderstood, or simply missed some words and passages. Nevertheless, with care, it was possible to establish texts of which, we hope, Elias might have approved. Part I of this book consists of two typescripts that focus on methodological, conceptual and systematic problems. Elias positions himself in contrast to British functionalism and static categories. Here, he does not refer to his theory of civilising processes—not widely known at the time—but draws a broad comparativehistorical picture. Chapter 2, Overcoming ‘tribe’ and other static categories, appears to have been planned as a preface.28 Elias says at the beginning of this typescript that fixed categories like ‘tribe’ are common in anthropology. Yet he does not consider them suitable to study traditional African societies. Polemically, Elias states that even African novelists describe realities more adequately than anthropologists. For him, the ongoing differentiation in society is mirrored in the dissociation of subfields of the social sciences, with each of their canons of research mainly dealing with ahistorical and universal categories. Thus analysis is hardly ever followed by any synthesis. Further, Elias stresses that, as the power balance between European and African societies shrinks, traditional and value-loaded categories lose meaning.

26 Scholars

may of course examine the whole file at the DLA, Marbach; the document reference is GHAN–ESSAYS 3/a. 27 Richard Kilminster interviewed some of Elias’s last assistants about the modus operandi in his last years, which were plainly quite difficult. See his Note on the Text in The Symbol Theory, rev. edn (Dublin: UCD Press, 2011 [Collected Works, vol. 13]), pp. xx–xxii. 28 This chapter is the typescript archived under the number Ghan-ESSAYS’ no. 2a (Preface, 10 pp.) (1964), Preface to Ghanaian essays, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar Orig.: Preface to Ghanaian Essays, GHAN-ESSAYS, no. 2, 1964-M-eng-3.

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Simultaneously, newly independent African states are also producing distorting pictures of reality. Therefore, Elias advocates a detached comparative-historical approach, avoiding the idea of mystical ‘otherness’. He concludes that in the end studying traditional Ghanaian societies results in a better understanding of ‘modern’Western societies. Chapter 3, African village-states: the formation of survival units,29 was written together with Hazel King,30 who served as Elias’s assistant in Ghana. They develop the arguments of the previous chapter. They assert that the static category ‘tribe’ does not take into account the functions of violence control. In pre-colonial Africa, ‘village-states’ organised military activities and laid the folundations for collective identification. Subsequently, Elias and King make a rare reference to the Akosombo-dam project. Because not tribes, but villages ‘are the most important units of identity’, resettlements were organised according to this category. Further, Elias and King criticise the one-sided use of terms like ‘development’ and ‘social change’, highlighting a mistaken focus on pre-economic aspects. Instead, words used for analysis should refer to the processual transformation of simpler social units into a more complex one. Further conceptual problems are linked to expressions like ‘family’ and ‘chief’ too, which in such less complex societies denominate not specialised institutions but units with general survival functions. Pre-colonial African villages formed a kind of miniature state. Later, their tasks were transferred partially to the new Ghanaian nation state. Part II contains chapters that, with one exception, derive from the typescripts dictated in 1987, together labelled ‘KroboPlan’ in the DLA Elias archive. Here, Elias focuses mainly on the Krobo people. He presents the process of ‘villagestate formation’ as an example of a civilising process, without however it leading to a monopoly of violence and a state organisation in the modern European sense. Chapter 4, Outline of an Early State Formation Process,31 starts by comparing the Krobo people with ancient Athenians and Romans. Elias points to the fact that

29 Chapter

3 is a shortened version of the document archived under the number GhanEssays, no. 3a (1964), Problems of Ghanaian communities, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. 30 We have to thank Barbara and Stephen Mennell who were able to find out the identity of this second author who was only named on the manuscript as H. King. 31 Chapter 4 is the first part of the manuscript archived under the number 802 (up to page Krobo 9), A Tribe on the Move: Outline of an early state formation process, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar.

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they, too, migrated, settled on a fortified hilltop, and claimed these territories as their own. To Elias, one of his sources, Noa Azu, resembles an ancient Athenian historian as the eyewitness of a golden age. For Azu, even memories from the transition into a sedentary society were relatively fresh. ‘Prehistory’ and ‘history’ as static categories are unreliable for assessing Azu’s account.32 Further, sociology should acknowledge that all societies are the result of long processes. Elias assumes that people living in a time of the more significant division of tasks will never understand themselves as long as social scientists do not, or cannot, reconstruct earlier stages. Therefore, studying ‘prehistory’ and premodern non-European societies yields information about modern Western societies. Chapter 5, A Tribe on the move: The development of Krobo society,33 focuses on the development of the proto-Krobo as a migrating group not yet separated from the other Adangbe people. These migrating groups lived in a dangerous environment. While their type of ‘survival unit’ differed from nomads because they were trying to settle down permanently, they still shared several features. The name ‘Krobo’ was invented only after settlement, which allows Elias to argue that group identities are never eternal and unchanging. Only the inclusion of a process-sociological perspective may grasp such fluidity and looseness. Only a minority of groups successfully developed stable survival units in the Ghanaian case, while many others failed. Elias concludes that most research approaches cannot grasp such processes of becoming and disappearing. Chapter 6, Fission and Fusion: The next stage of tribe-formation,34 Elias argues that not unlike in antiquity, Krobo priests promoted processes of fusion and integration of newcomers into the survival unit, which made them stronger. Rituals of assimilation, like the ‘dipo custom’, managed this task. They helped in regulating conflicts between status groups and controlled violence. For the pre-colonial Krobo people, the ‘quest for physical security’ was of great impor-

32 Noa

Akunor Aguae Azu, Adangbe (Adangme) History (Accra: Government Printing Office, 1929). 33 This chapter is is archived under the number 805, Krobo Introduction: The development of Krobo society [‘A Tribe on the Move’, Manuscript 3], in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. 34 Fission and Fusion contains the second part of the manuscript archived under the number 802 (from the page Krobo 16 onwards), A Tribe on the Move: Outline of an early state formation process, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar.

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tance. Still, sociology tends too strongly to follow economic reductionism, and to neglect such unplanned long-term village formation and state formation processes. Traditional villages maintained defence and attack functions; they had institutions to establish a peaceful order utilising symbols and rituals. In intertribe conflicts, priests entered into competition with warrior leaders to set the course of the community. While in early colonial time, the power balance tended to tilt towards the warriors, this may not have been so over the whole period. Instead, it seems as if priests had dominated these conflicts for most of the time. The split between Krobo subtribes may reflect this period of integration. By creating a polytheistic society, the integration of newcomers was relatively easy. They could add new gods to the deity and entrench priestly rule. Once Christianity was established, the power balance between priests and warrior leaders shifted in favour of the warriors by promoting ‘kings’ from their ranks, who had better cards to play in dealing with the colonial powers. In chapter 7, Religion in a Village Society,35 Elias discusses more specifically the function of priests in controlling violence and conflict. Krobo people already had laws prohibiting killings within the group. Priests collectively as a theocracy performed juridical functions in a council—not unlike the ancient Hebrews in the pre-monarchical era. As in the case of the prophet Samuel, who applied the law in the biblical pre-king era,36 the ‘dipo rites’ show priests to ‘monopolise the social legitimacy of sexual intercourse’. Their still extensive tolerance of incest shows that ‘superego formation’ in traditional Krobo society differs from that of Europeans in intensity and the role of the guilt taboo for conscience-formation. As Elias states, feelings of shame could be eliminated by blaming ‘evil-doers’ and assuring themselves that they had not been abandoned by their gods—in a way comparable to when children assure themselves that their parents are still with them. In sharp contrast to this tradition, the advent of Christianity quickly promoted internalisation and individualisation of guilt feelings quickly. What remained of Krobo ceremonies can be seen as final ‘dramatic displays’ interpreted by Elias as ‘civilising spurts’. They are moves ‘towards social regulations of a person’s selfregulation’, at a stage when the Christian superego has not been fully internalised of modern ethics of tribes.

35 The

original text of chapter 7 is archived under the number 807 until pg. KII 41, Stage II: Development of a hill-top tribe, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. 36 Bible, 1 Samuel.

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In chapter 8, Priests and Knowledge,37 Elias dedicates himself to what he calls the ‘social fund of knowledge’. He introduces new terms that he considers universal, but are explained here using the example of the Krobo Society. Elias distinguishes between ‘reality-congruent’ and ‘fantasy’ knowledge (which, however, is not irrational). Fantasy helped to mitigate the ‘horror of unknowingness’, limit fear, and curb anxiety. Thus fantasy becomes the unplanned fundament, or ‘social fund’, to cope with reality until reality-congruent knowledge develops. Elias says that human self-regulation is the basis of learning a language and forming a conscience. Going beyond Freud, he relates stage of conscience-formation to stages of social formation. In modern societies, the internalisation of parental control leads to forming an ‘inner voice’. In traditional Krobo society, the parental character was still outside the self and the individual’s bad conscience. Invisible external ‘gods’ existed as projections of evil-doers—not unlike the Mosaic ritual of the goat, on which the chief priest had laid the sins and impurities of the people.38 According to Elias, Freud was wrong by comparing his patients’ individual fantasies with the collective fantasies of Australian tribes, who could distinguish fantasy from reality. Krobo knowledge bounded by priests and hierarchy was highly formalised in rituals and emotionalised during ceremonies. This form of coping with adversity helped reduce anxieties and ensured all tribe members were deemed innocent. The control of the warrior’s feeling of guilt about his killing is minimised by ceremonies. Rituals constitute a ‘reaction formation’ and help manage social conflicts; their cathartic effects promote self-regulation and solidarity. Elias concludes that there is a shared need for a controlled decontrolling of emotions and affects. Krobo ceremonies satisfied the same emotional demands of losing restraints as do ‘modern’ leisure activities. Chapter 9, Emotions, violence and rituals: on traditional Klama songs,39 belongs to the papers written in 1964. In the beginning, Elias draws a broader picture of the Akwapim kingdom following a missionary report40 that situated it in the ‘trap’ of permanent warfare. Religious rituals served for violence control. The

37 The

original text of chapter 8 is archived under the number 807 from pg. KII 41 onwards, Stage II: Development of a hill-top tribe, in the DLA, Marbach. 38 Leviticus, 16. 39 The original text is archived under the number Ghan-Essays 22 (1964), Notes for the essay on Dente, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. 40 Wilhelm Rottmann, Der Götze Odente: Ein Bild aus dem westafrikanischen Heidentum (Basel: Verlag der Missionsbuchhandlung, 1894).

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arrival of colonial powers put priests into competition with ‘chiefs’. The missionary report traces how such a competition developed among the Larteh tribe. On this point, Elias changes the focus towards the Krobo people and their traditional Klama songs and proverbs. For him, they can be seen as what he calls ‘generalised experiences’, allowing predictions of outcomes of particular behaviour patterns under certain conditions. In contrast to these pre-modern tribes, art is split from science in Western societies, which leads to a loss of imagination and a ‘departmentalisation’ of thinking. To Elias, traditional Krobo funeral songs serve as a source to access to ‘generalised experiences’, something he compares to modern European rituals of grief. Above all, songs indicate traditional emotions. Elias argues that modern standards of art and music tend to inhibit spontaneity and moralise these activities.41 In contrast, the Klama song traditions exemplify a lifestyle still open to the spontaneous expression of feelings. Part III comprises two lectures in which Elias gives a comparative perspective on the theory of civilising processes, going beyond European cases and bringing the case of the Krobo into his broader scheme. Chapter 10, The Formation of States and Changes in Restraint,42 is a talk given at a conference in Bielefeld in 1986. Here, Elias does not deal with any particular Ghanaian society but instead refers to the concept of ‘village-state’ in general. He sketches a very long-term process perspective from the ‘village-state’ as a heuristic tool with the ‘survival unit’ concept in its centre. He confronts the economic reductionism of Marxists like V. Gordon Childe (1950),43 and contrasts them with William H. McNeill’s study of the long-term relationship between nomad warrior tribes and sedentary peoples.44 McNeill’s long-term ‘sociological cycles’ are ‘testable models of period-transcending processes’. In Ghanaian village-states, elders and priests were the first political part-time specialists not

41 Elias,

‘Spontaneity and self-consciousness’, pp. 23–76. original text is archived under the number 708, ‘The Formation of States and Changes in Restraint. Speech by Professor Elias’ (Korrekturen vom Juni 1986), in the DLA, Marbach. It was edited by Artur Bogner and Stephen Mennell and published in Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity—A Debate (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 65–79. 43 V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London: Watts, 1936). 44 William H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier: 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 42  The

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yet ‘permanently differentiated for this end’. As Elias argues, the break-up of the Roman Empire into smaller units did not lead to disintegration on a level of social village roles that existed before. Instead, the level of civilisation that the Empire had established continued to live in a new form. Likewise, when African states received their independence, they did not disintegrate into pre-colonial societies. Elias outlines three possible developments of future communities: relatively high fragmentation, the emergence of large world-empires, and the ‘utopian’ option of a ‘world federation’. Optimistically Elias concludes that such possible developments may result in the long run in the exclusion of war and ‘ideological disarmament’. Chapter 11, Sociology and Anthropology,45 was written in 1963 as a lecture for the Second Annual Conference of the Ghana Sociological Association. Here, Elias opposes (British) anthropology. He contrast it with his research programme, which he labelled ‘developmental sociology’. Whereas classical sociologists still followed a developmental approach, anthropology confined itself to studying simpler societies—collecting information needed by colonial powers. In Britain, sociology had relatively low prestige, while anthropology was required for colonial purposes and therefore had high status. Yet it yielded an ‘unreal and artificial’ picture and no unified understanding of all societies. As a result, former anthropologists may have had a more ‘detached’ relationship as ‘white outsiders’. However, as the power ratio between the researcher and the members of colonial societies decreased, the degree of involvement in anthropology rose. Thus, the ability to build integrative theories lessened and kinship relations were regarded as the ‘basic organisational form of society’, unrelated to ‘political systems’. Meanwhile, in sociology, statistical methods became dominant, leading to an ‘immense impoverishment’ with its ‘surface similarities’ to the scientific techniques of physics. The Epilogue, ‘Off to Ghana: The encounter of Norbert Elias and Malcolm X’ is not by Elias, but rather an essay by Arjan Post discussing the intriguing encounter between Elias and Malcom X in 1964, not very long before the famous American civil rights leader was to be assassinated. That their chance meeting took place is certain, but Elias made only scant remarks about it.

45 The

original text is archived under Soc.Anthrop., no. 1 (pp. 1–23), Sociology and Anthropology (1963-eng-1, Sig. MISC-E XI) in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar.

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Elias and the Krobo Elias saw his stay in Ghana as very fruitful. In late 1962, in a letter to the prominent German sociologist René König,46 he wrote: I would never have believed that my knowledge of human beings and society, acquired mainly on the basis of European evidence, could prove so limited as it in fact proves to be here. I should not have believed that I have so much to learn from Africa.

He continues: So far, Africa has been left to the anthropologists, and they have left a great deal undone. It is time the sociologists took over.47

Earlier in 1963, in his lecture to the Ghana Sociological Association reprinted as chapter 11 in this book, Elias had presented a detailed critique of anthropology. He proposed that the discipline be replaced by a ‘developmental sociology’. He advocated that researchers should not focus on a single tribe or traditional society, but also apply a comparative-historical approach, encompassing the full range of traditional and modern Western societies: ‘I do [know] that one should not teach sociology in advanced societies without a good understanding of pre-industrial societies. And of course, all that I’m learning here—and I am learning all the time—is water on my mills of developmental sociology.’48 This critical attitude towards anthropology may have alienated students and colleagues from Elias’s work in Ghana. Although Elias’s criticism focuses mainly on British functionalism, by widely ignoring the other varieties of ethnological approach that already existed in the 1960s, his attacks may have produced the impression of a very general and absolute attack on the discipline. Jack Goody, who was at the same time

46 René

König (1906–2002), Professor of Sociology at Cologne University, founder of the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie and, at the time Elias wrote to him, President of the International Sociological Association. 47 Elias, letter of 1 November 1962 to René König, quoted by Hermann Korte,‘Der ethnologische Blick bei Norbert Elias’, Biographische Skizzen zu Norbert Elias (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2013), p. 61. 48 Ibid.

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in Ghana, reported having been alienated from Elias because of his attacks on anthropology.49 Elias’s early Ghanaian typescripts reflect a country that had gained independence only recently, in 1957. Its president then was Kwame Nkrumah (1909–72), a charismatic leader, prominent Pan-Africanist and socialist50 who chose the name of Ghana for the former Gold Coast colony.51 Under his government, the gigantic Akosombo dam on the river Volta was completed, enclosing what was at the time the world’s largest reservoir. This project had already been planned during the colonial era, but construction began only in 1961 and was finished in 1965. The dam was seen as an instrument to transform the colonial economy into a modern industrial state.52

49 Goody,

‘Elias and the Anthropological Tradition’, Anthropological Theory 4: 2 (2002), pp. 401–12. Sir Jack Goody (1919–2015) was already teaching at the University of Cambridge, becoming William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in 1973. He was a prolific author and came to be regarded as the doyen of British anthropologists; in his later writings he paid increasing attention to Elias—see The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), without ever quite overcoming his initial impressions. 50 Nkrumah was influenced by Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868– 1963); see Jeffrey S. Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017). Nkrumah was seen as the ‘father of African nationalism’; see David Birmingham, Kwame Nkrumah: The Father of African Nationalism (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998). 51 Indeed, Nkrumah linked the country’s name with the historical empire of Ghana which, however, was located far away in todays Mauritania and in the Northwest of Mali. Ancient Ghana had no real connections to modern Ghana; see: Harcourt Fuller, Building the Ghanaian Nation-State: Kwame Nkrumah’s Symbolic Nationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 52 The erection of the Akosombo Dam led to some social and environmental problems. The megalomania of the dam project was result of Nkrumah’s modernist doctrine, his naive belief in technical progress, the cult of the political leader, and his Pan-African socialism. Like Nasser’s Aswan Dam project or Chinese Banqiao Dam, erected at the same time, the Volta dam did not fulfil its promise. People living close to the Volta suffered from bad harvests caused from drying of water sources, from Schistosomiasis (snail fever), from disruption of its farming and fishing economy—and above all from the loss of dignity. Many people were forced to resettle. The government promised modern housing conditions, but many of these housing projects never were realised. Instead tens of thousands of inhabitants of these areas had to migrate into big cities; see Joe Geker ‘The Effects of the Volta Dam on the People of the Lower Volta’, in Chris Gordon and Julius K. Amatekpor, eds., The Sustainable Integrated Development of the Volta Basin in Ghana (Accra: University of Ghana, 1999), pp. 122–5.

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One interpreter of Elias, van Loyen, connects the dam project with Elias’s study of South Ghanian ethnic groups. He also situates Elias close to the policy of Nkrumah, his colossal dam project, and his nationalistic visions.53 However, this interpretation does not capture Elias’s intentions and motives. No evidence has been found to supports van Loyen’s assertion. On the contrary, the sources show that Elias’s main interests were not so much in the dam project or the project of nation-building, but in the multitude of ethnic groups and their development in pre-colonial time.54 The Krobo people (also called Klo) were central to Elias’s writings. They belong to the linguistic group of the Dangme. They initially settled on the Krobo Mountain, a small hill with two sections located in the eastern part of the Accra Plains, about 70 kms away from the University of Ghana in Legon.

53 Ulrich

van Loyen, Strände der Vernunft: Norbert Elias im inneren Afrika (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2012), p. 17. However, van Loyen was perhaps right in pointing out that it was the intensity of the art, the songs, and the rituals of Ghanaian traditional societies that fascinated Elias. In his eyes all these resemble the art and rituals of ancient Greeks, a civilisation Elias had studies and admired from his schooldays (ibid. 14–15); see also Elias, Interviews and Autobiographical Reflections, p. 131. 54 In today’s Ghana, the group of Akan speakers is the biggest ethnic group (48 per cent). The Akan speakers consist of 11 subgroups like the Asanthe, Fante, Denkyira, the Akyem, or the Akwamu. The Mole-Dagbani living in northern Ghana are the second largest ethnolinguistic group of the country (about 17 per cent). They comprise Dangimba and other traditional Islamic cattle-rising peoples. In contrast to the matrilineal system of the Akan, the Dangimba organise their family system patrilineally. The Ewe (about 14 per cent) is the third largest socio-linguistic group in Ghana. They traditionally settled east of the Volta river. Apart from a few hints, Elias did not focus on these groups either. The Ga-Dangme (7 per cent) is the fourth largest ethnic group. The Ga settled in today’s Accra region. Like the Fante, they also served as middlemen towards the Europeans and converted early to Christianity. The Ga-Dangme belong to the West Kwa language family (like the Ewe). They are subdivided into Ga and the Dangme (Adangme) speakers living in the Accra Plains in Southeast of Ghana. The Krobo people, the most important of these groups for Eliases writings, belong linguistically to the Adangme. Although the Ga and the Dangme peoples traditionally organised their family structure according to a patrilineal system, due to Akan influence and inter-ethnic marriages they partly adopted matrilineality. Ga and Dangme have adopted many other feature of Akan tradition, like symbols and insignia of power (such as ‘stools’) or words from the Twi language. Ga, Dangme, and Krobo were the groups living closest to Elias’s own residence.

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Since about 1760, the Krobo people had started to settle beyond the Accra Plains in the Akuapem range and the Afram Basin.55 The Krobo people are divided into Yilo and Manya Krobo. Each of these two branches was further divided into six sub-divisions.56 However, the origin of the split between Manya Krobo and Yilo Krobo is not clear.57 The distinction may reflect that in the eighteenth century, several waves of refugees from the Akan wars were integrated into traditional Krobo society.58 Others assume that the origin of the split is more recent and goes back to the nineteenth-century competition between Odonkor Azu and Ologo Patu, two big men and rivals for economic success in growing cash crops, acquiring land, and luring missionaries to their main villages Odumase and Sra.59 Whatever may have been the case, in the eighteenth century, the Krobo people were still living as a small community on the Krobo Mountain, starting to integrate refugees.60 These migrants settled on the second and more rocky hill on the Krobo mountain called Bose. The already-established settlers called themselves Dose (perhaps the later Manya Krobo).61 In this period, a group of priests (djemeli) ruled Krobo society until the 1840s. Dose and Bose also differentiate into six subtribes led by a chief (matse) having juridical functions. Each subtribe or family tree (wetcho) consists of several different clans (kasi) ruled by a subchief (asafo-tse). Every kasi is composed of houses (we), each having its leader, the house elder (we-nokotoma), as well as a deity’s priest (wono) or priestess (woyo). The traditional pantheon of gods therefore corresponds with the different branches of clans and houses.62 The Krobo pantheon evolved along with the integration of new lineages and groups. For Elias, the clan structure was of

55 Johnson

Narh, Yilo Krobo Past and Present. An Anthropological Study of a West African People (Charleston: Create Space, 2017), p. 51. 56 Hugo Huber, The Krobo: Traditional Social and Religious Life of a West African people, (St Augustin: Anthropos Institute, 1973), pp. 24–26. 57 Veit Arlt, Christianity, Imperialism and Culture. The Expansion of the Two Krobo States in Ghana, c. 1830 to 1930 (Basel: Copy Quick, doctoral dissertation, 2005), p. 42. 58 Wilson (1987: 475) in Louis E. Wilson, ‘The Rise of Paramount Chiefs among the Krobo (Ghana)’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 20(3) (1987), pp. 471– 495. 59 Arlt, Christianity, p. 58. 60 Narh, Yilo Krobo, p. 42. 61 Wilson, The Krobo People of Ghana to 1892. A Political and Social History (Athens, OH: Center for International Studies, 1991), p. 16. 62 Ibid., p.17.

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importance insofar as it expresses status relationships according to those groups who settled first and came later as refugees to the Krobo Mountain. In this respect, he applied the argument of his community study, The Established and the Outsiders. For him, anthropologists focused too much on family systems and too little on the development of the political structure.63 Van Loyen speculated that in the eyes of Elias, the Krobo people resembled the old Hebrews, and this similarity attracted his attention.64 Van Loyen further assumes the construction of the dam initiated Elias’s research. Elias was ‘entrusted’ with a ‘not irrelevant function’ in the vast Volta dam project.65 What is known is that Elias as the new professor, commissioned students with questionnaires to visit the villages in this region in the framework of the Volta dam research project. However, in the material found in the archive, there is hardly any evidence connecting the dam project to Elias’s community studies. In the typescripts, Elias does not mention these student projects. Instead, he focuses on pre-colonial and early colonial times, the inner-tribal competitions, the inter-tribal warfare between ‘survival units’, and the consequences of colonial subjugation for traditional forms of domination. Unlike many functionalist anthropologists, Elias draws a dynamic picture of the pre-colonial past and reflects the influence of colonial powers’ impact on the social structure of traditional societies. Within this picture, for Elias, cultural and organisational features of successful ‘survival units’ were adopted by other groups; for example, the three-wing structure of the Ashanti army came to be adopted by other village-states. Further, elimination struggles and the increasing contact with Europeans promoted the position of ‘chiefs’ and ‘kings’ in contrast

63 Elias

also criticised Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism as ahistorical in attributing ‘to mind a structure prior to all learned knowledge’; see The Symbol Theory, p. 87. 64 Van Loyen, Strände der Vernunft, pp. 75–7. 65 Van Loyen remains unclear. He draws the picture of Elias as an agent of Nkrumah’s megalomanic, nationalist policy and as an intellectual supporter of the systematic replacement of traditional local chieftaincies in favour of a ‘centralised government order along the idea of the Führerprinzip (the leader/Führer principle)’. Van Loyen reports that 78,000 persons were transferred from their traditional villages into ‘faceless’ multi-storey buildings. He implies that Elias supported this policy, which resembled his concept of the ‘integration into a higher level’. Van Loyen asks about the responsibility of researchers in such an environment. He refers to anthropologists (without quotations or mentioning specific names) who have warned that such kinds of projects detract from any protection for traditional societies. As a result, Van Loyen moves Elias close to Nazism. He states that this type of Ghanaian policy provoked dreams of Führerapologeten (apologists of the Führer); see Van Loyen, Strände der Vernunft, pp. 17–18.

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to priests. As Elias speculates, later sub-tribe divisions may have echoed these earlier assimilation processes. For him, under the older polytheistic religion, it was easier for these societies to integrate new groups by assimilating their deities. He emphasised that Christian missionaries changed this logic of symbolic integration. For ‘kings’, it became more challenging to balance the interests of different sub-groups, especially between priests and themselves. In the context of all these tribal societies, the Krobo people seemed to have had some unique developments. As priests were bound to stay at the Krobo mountains, ‘chiefs’ and farmers had more freedom. Thus, farmers became entrepreneurs, built up the huza organisations, and developed into ‘kings’, forming their own power-centres. Elias concludes the discussion of the psychogenetic aspects of social integration by referring to violence, marriage, and mourning, drawing upon traditional heritage such as song lyrics. Following Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s critique of the idea of ‘the logical unity of humankind’66 he was interested in different modes of thinking relating to changes in social structure.67 Following his own earlier writings,68 in the 1987 typescript catalogued as KroboPlan, Elias discusses the meaning of ‘rationalisation’ in the context of traditional Krobo society. In summary, Elias’s main focus differed significantly from that of the functional anthropology of his time by: • Following an historical perspective on social processes. • Emphasising power structures rather than the family systems or simply economic functions, treating ‘tribes’ not as isolated units but as competing ‘village states’. • Inclusion of colonial powers in the picture.

66 Lévy-Bruhl,

Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris: F. Alcan, 1910), translated as How Natives Think (Eastford: Martino Fine Books, 2015 [1926]); and La mentalité primitive (Paris: F. Alcan,1922), translated as Primitive Mythology: The Mythic World of the Australian and Papuan Natives (Brisbane: University of Queensland, 1984). It should be noted that the phrase ‘the question of the logical unity of humankind’ is not Lévy-Bruhl’s own, but is rather an encapsulation by the British anthropologist Rodney Needham of the question posed by Lévy-Bruhl: see Needham’s Belief, Language and Experience (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), p. 160. 67 Elias’s view on Lévy-Bruhl can be found in: ‘Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and ‘the question of the logical unity of humankind’, in Supplements and Index to the Collected Works, pp. 53–140. 68 Elias, The Court Society (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006 [Collected Works, vol. 2]), pp. 120– 3, to which he also refers on On the Process of Civilisation, pp. 449–56.

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• Denying the ‘logical unity of humankind’ of evolutionism and functionalism, and instead focusing on how modes of thinking change in the course of sociogenesis. • Using archive material, historical eyewitness accounts,69 and Klama songs instead of participant observation (which had been the holy grail of anthropological research since Bronisław Malinowski).

The Impact of Elias’s African Experiences on his Later Thinking While Elias was plainly viewing Ghana through the lens of his theory of civilising processes, his later writings often show him looking through the lens of Ghana. As early as 1939 in Über den Prozess der Zivilisation there are numerous references to non-European societies in Elias’s work. It is noteworthy that in his later writing—that is, after his time in Ghana—such remarks increased markedly, as Elias broadened his scope to the whole human species and its general longterm development. As an early clue to his thinking about Africa, only his introduction to the Leicester Museum’s exhibition of his collection of African Art appeared fairly soon after he returned to his base in England.70 In it he emphasised the similarity between traditional African objects of art production and contemporary art. He confesses that, in the beginning, it was not easy for him to recognise the criteria of quality as he lacked experience. He says that traditional African art is craftsman’s art made of ephemeral wood instead of terracotta or stone. In Europe, this type of craftsmanship had already disappeared and had become associated with

69 Especially

Noa Akunor Aguae Azu, Adangbe (Adangme) History (Accra: Government Printing Office, 1929). 70 Leicester Museum and Art Gallery (1970) African Art from the Collection of Professor Norbert Elias, Catalogue of an Exhibition at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, April 24th–June 14th 1970 (Leicester: Leicester Museum, 1970). Elias’s introduction to the catalogue is reprinted in Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 16]), pp. 201–8. In 2002 the introduction was first re-published and translated into French by Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo and Françoise Armengaud by including photos and comments about masks and figures: Elias, Ècrits Sur L’Art Africain (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2003).

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strong negative value judgements. ‘Modern’ European people are in emotional resonance with such material as it contrasted with their ideas of value. Yet Elias declares that most of these pieces are made with a feeling for artistic design. Affection went from woodcarvers to their material. In their eyes, this kind of wood was not seen solely as a piece of material. On the contrary, their work was an emotional dialogue. Elias broadens the perspective in stating that modern artists struggle between self-consciousness and spontaneity. Picasso would be a representative of a modern artist who found the appropriate cultural balance.71 In modern art, sculptures and paintings must imprint individual personality and self-consciousness. ‘African craftsmen have no such problems’, Elias stated,72 because they are guided by tradition and the shapes of their ancestors: ‘one can feel the emotional spontaneity of its appeal’. European art, in contrast, is related to mental projections. The artist does not work on the material from which an existing structure emerges; he creates something completely new on an empty uniform canvas. Even today, ‘the loosening of the old taboos is done most self-consciously’. The modern human is trained since childhood to distinguish between ‘fantasies and facts’. More substantial is the essay ‘Stages of African art, social and visual’, which originated as a talk to a conference in Leicester in 1975, but remained unpublished until after his death.73 Elias underlines how in Europe, the transition from religious and anonymous craftsmen’s art with wooden materials to individualised art took longer than in Africa. Besides newly erected museums, artists trained in art schools are part of global art markets, producing art of an already individualised and secular character. In Africa, too, greater complexity in society goes along with declining existential outside threats but with more need for self-control and conscience-formation. Elias distinguishes four stages in the development of African art: 1) Traditional craftsmen’s art, mystic (religious, magical) in character and produced mainly for the craftsman’s community; 2) commercial craftsmen’s art, imitating traditional art but traded beyond their own community primarily targeted at tourists; 3) commercial craftsmen’s art, emancipating itself from tradition

71 Elias

formulated the same argument in a paper written before he went to Ghana, ‘Spontaneity and Self-Consciousness’, p. 67. 72 Elias, ‘African Art’, p. 207. 73 See Stephen Mennell, ‘Elias and the counter-ego’, History of the Human Sciences, 19: 2 (2006), pp. 73–91. It was finally published in Essays III, On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin; UCD Press, pp. 209–23.

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and with individual innovations; 4) artist’s art, individualised and secularised, made by artists trained in professional art schools and produced for an international market of private collectors or galleries. For Elias, the first type of art production in black Africa still exists, while it had disappeared in Europe. It could be argued that some European artists—Picasso among them—were inspired by African art. But those who rejected modern Western art also deviated from African art, because these kinds of art did not fit into any canon of idealised depictions of a ‘good society’. According to Elias, contemporary art and African art must have experienced inflicted an ‘emotional shock’ on the viewer, breaking ‘the all-around armour of taboos and restraints’. The development of art markets gave artists like Picasso more freedom by producing for anonymous customers rather than for specific high-ranking patrons.74 This change allowed the interplay of traditional African art with a modern contemporary one. Traditional African art objects carry a ‘message to the level of elementary fantasies’ that it is difficult ‘to remain emotionally indifferent.’ Some of the masks convey an ‘image of a superego’, an embodiment of ‘collective imagination’, and the communal power to reinforce self-control. For modern people, this dimension no longer exists, as they already have firmly built-in agencies of self-control. Modern art is highly individualised. Elias concludes that cultural relativism and evolutionism overlook the shared level of experience allowing all human beings to respond to African art and any such mythic art. Less immediately obvious are the many instances where the experience of Ghana influenced later writings that are not directly concerned either with Africa or its art. One example is What is Sociology?, Elias’s major theoretical statement of his basic approach to sociology (masquerading, however, as an introductory student textbook), first published in German in 1970. In the remarkable chapter 3, ‘Game models’, he begins with what he called the Vorspiel or ‘Primal contest’, a ‘model of interweaving processes without norms’.75 It is a thought experiment in which two rival groups of migrant people roaming neighbouring territories

74 The

same argument was made by Elias in ‘Spontaneity and self-consciousness’, p. 32ff., as well as in Mozart: The Sociology of a Genius, in Mozart and other Essays on Courtly Art (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010 [Collected Works, vol. 12]), which he had drafted in the late 1970s although it remained unpublished until after his death. 75 Elias, What is Sociology? (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006 [1970] [Collected Works, vol. 5], pp. 71–5. How to translate the word Vorspiel was the topic of prolonged and sometimes hilarious discussion between Elias and Stephen Mennell; ‘primal contest’, though far from literal, was Elias’s own choice for solving the problem.

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are brought into deadly struggle with each other as they compete for food that is becoming scarcer (perhaps as a result of climate change, for example). No norms govern their conflict, and they may not even be able to understand each other’s languages. This model was intended to contradict the assumption of the then still dominant school of Talcott Parsons and much of American sociology that ‘shared values’ are inevitably built into any form of human interdependence. Elias claims that both groups in the primal contest are ‘functionally’ bound to each other, because the moves of the one side have to be considered by the other for their strategic planning and vice versa.76 Although Elias makes no mention here of his Ghanaian studies, the primal contest seems to be a direct offshoot of them. In the papers collected in the present book, Elias drew heavily upon the depiction in Noa Azu’s Andangbe History of migrating people roaming the West African rainforest before they settled. In Humana Conditio,77 Elias elaborated on functional integration as an outcome of geopolitical rivalries in the context of the Cold War. As in his writings about traditional Ghanaian societies, he emphasised that such rivalries may lead to an ‘integration into a higher level’. In An Essay on Time, first written in the early 1970s, Elias explains the function of priests and ‘priests’ knowledge’ in developing the calendar system, as one step towards the modern meaning of time, clearly thinking directly referring to the Ghanaian Krobo people.78 In The Symbol Theory, written right at the end of his life, Elias only once addresses Ghana and African ‘village societies’.79 Yet that volume is full of allusions to his experiences in Africa. For example, Elias distinguishes ‘reality congruent knowledge’ from ‘fantasy knowledge’, as he had outlined empirically in the 1987 ‘KroboPlan’ typescript. In The Symbol Theory, he relates the Ghanian argument to the examples of ancient Mesopotamia

76 The

term of ‘function’ is used by Elias quite in contrast to its meaning in functionalism. It is closer to its mathematical usage expressing a relation between different elements. In particular, Elias always stressed that all human interdependencies involve power balances, relatively equal or unequal and always changing and fluctuating. See What is Sociology?, pp. 72–3, 121–3. 77 Humana Conditio: Observations on the development of humanity on the fortieth anniversary of the end of a war (8 May, 1945), in The Loneliness of the Dying and Humana Conditio (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010 [Collected Works, vol. 6]). 78 Elias, An Essay on Time (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007 [Collected Works, vol. 9]), pp. 43–4. 79 Elias, The Symbol Theory (Dublin: UCD Press, 2011 [Collected Works, vol. 13]), pp. 166–7.

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and Egypt, and generalises it with reference to Auguste Comte’s ‘Law of Three Stages’, which he sees as a pioneering model of the long-term growth of knowledge and the sciences.80

Do African Processes of Civilisation Exist? One important reason for publishing these papers is that they shed new light on the controversies that have always swirled around Elias’s theory of civilising processes from its first articulation in his magnum opus, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Whether, in the present febrile, highly involved state of sociology, they will serve to still the many disputes that largely stem from misunderstandings, is questionable—but we still believe it is important that these papers be made available. Obviously, Elias did not mention anything about Ghanaian societies in his magnum opus. Instead, he argued that in the course of a civilising process, the distance that young children have to travel to attain the prevailing standard of behaviour and feeling increase. Children must learn more in order to orientate themselves in a more complex social environment. Elias continues that in less complex societies, no ‘heavy censorship’ acts on people and, therefore, they appear more ‘childlike’ and ‘younger’.81 This remark anticipates Elias’s later discussion of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.82 The primary idea that Elias shared with LévyBruhl was that no unchanging universal standards of human consciousness and pattern of thinking exist.83 For both of them, this idea separated their thinking from the nineteenth-century doctrine of evolutionism. Mentioning this seems relevant to us, as several scholars have criticised Elias for being an evolutionist in

80 See

also his detailed discussion of Comte in chapter 1 of What is Sociology? On the Process of Civilisation, pp. 4–5. Elias points out that each person undergoes an ‘individual civilising process’. Therefore, ‘the structure of a child’s affect and consciousness no doubt bears a certain resemblance to that of “uncivilised’ peoples…” (ibid.)—but it is not the same. The term ‘censorship’ undoubtedly proves that Elias was not an advocate of European civilisation or colonialism. He emphasis that the process of civilisation goes along with a heavy price people have to pay. For the costs of such a process of civilisation, see also Helmut Kuzmics, Der Preis der Zivilisation: Die Zwänge der Moderne im theoretischen Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1988). 82  Elias, ‘Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and “the question of the logical unity of humankind”’, pp. 53–140. 83 Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think. 81 Elias,

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the tradition of the nineteenth century.84 However, this allegation of Elias’s evolutionism entirely misinterprets Elias’s conception of the ‘process of civilisation’, and ignores all his careful conceptual differentiation between biological evolution and social development.85 Besides the accusation of ‘evolutionism’, we can distinguish six further objections formulated against the theory of civilising processes. These are: 1. Elias’s allegedly sole focus on ‘Western’ state formation and his supposed neglect of stateless societies. 2. The normative, Eurocentric and colonialist character of the term civilisation. 3. The idea of social processes in general and civilising processes in particular. 4. Elias’s use of the Freudian concept of the self. 5. The nature of shame, consciousness and superego formation. 6. Elias’s treatment of historical and anthropological sources. In more detail: 1) The first objection says that Elias links violence-control and the formation of restraints solely to the agencies of a centralised state, thus neglecting religion and other institutions of violence prevention in stateless societies.86 In the manuscripts on hand, Elias contradicts these accusations. He does, however, depart from Weber’s definition of the state as ‘a compulsory political organisation with … [an] administrative staff [that] successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force …‘,87 which covers mainly modern Western

84  See

Peter Burke, ‘Civilisation, discipline, disorder: three case studies in history and social theory’, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 87 (1996), pp. 21–35. Burke judges that ‘Elias accepted the idea of social or cultural evolution’ (p. 23). Jack Goody contended that ‘One problem about the thesis is that it is seen as one of unilineal development that took off in Europe, at the time of the Renaissance’; see: Jack Goody, ‘The ‘Civilizing Process’ in Ghana’, European Journal of Sociology, 44: 1 (2003), pp. 61–73. And according to Gerd Schwerhoff, the civilising theory is ‘old-fashioned’ evolutionism; see Schwerhoff, ‘Zivilisationsprozeß und Geschichtswissenschaft: Norbert Elias’s Forschungsparadigma in historischer Sicht’, Historische Zeitschrift Band 266 (1998), pp. 561–605, at p. 595. 85 Elias, ‘Towards a theory of social processes’, in Essays III, pp. 9–39. 86 Hans-Peter Duerr Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß. Band 3: Obszönität und Gewalt (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997). 87 Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), vol. I, p. 54.

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states. Elias chose not to apply such a static definition. Instead, he applies a processual concept in the form of a ‘state-formation process’. In Ghana, state formation was foreshadowed by the formation of so-called ‘village-states’, some of which even developed into empires, like the Ashanti. For his processual analysis, Elias introduced the pragmatic category of ‘survival unit’, a general term for any level of organisation that gives its members: (a) protection against the power of nature and to fulfil ‘economic’ tasks; (b) protection against attacks by other human groups, as well as the capacity to attack them; (c) means of orientation, learning and the ability to understand the symbol system; and (d) self-organisation and the capacity to control affects and to plan in advance (‘rationality’). Elias shows in the empirical example of African ‘village-states’ how they managed social integration by religious rituals and organised military capacities. Both central functions were later transferred to the Ghanaian state. 2) and 3) The second objection purports to show that Elias’s theory is eurocentrist, colonialist, and normative by evaluating ‘civilisation’ as something good or even ‘superior’.88 Jack Goody criticised Elias’s remark that members of less complex societies appear ‘childlike’ as a ‘colonialist attitude’.89 This objection is quite close to the third, against the term ‘civilisation’ in itself. This term, it is alleged, neglects non-European societies’ ways of managing a peaceful coexistence and

88 For Anton

Blok’s accusation of eurocentrism see Nico Wilterdink, ‘Die Zivilisationstheorie im Kreuzfeuer der Diskussion: Ein Bericht vom Kongreß über Zivilisationsprozesse in Amsterdam’, in Peter Gleichmann, Johann Goudsblom and Hermann Korte, eds., Macht und Zivilisation. Materialien zu Norbert Elias’ Zivilisationstheorie 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 280–304 (at p. 287ff). An English summary can be found in Stephen Mennell, Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-Image (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 228–31. (Later editions published as Norbert Elias: An Introduction.) Other such accusations can be found in Boike Rehbein, ‘Eurozentrismus in Norbert Elias’ Zivilisationstheorie, in Helmut Staubmann, ed., Soziologie in Österreich—Internationale Verflechtungen (Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 2016), pp. 171–80. 89 Goody (2003: 70) erroneously writes ‘childish’, the meaning is subtly different from ‘childlike’; see Jack Goody, ‘The ‘Civilizing Process’ in Ghana’, pp. 61–73. For more criticism of Elias by Goody see Goody, ‘Elias and the anthropological tradition, and Goody, The Theft of History, pp. 154–79. For reactions to Goody’s critique, see Eric Dunning, ‘Some comments on Jack Goody’s “Elias and the anthropological tradition”’, Anthropology Today, 2: 4 (2002), pp. 413–20, and Katie Liston and Stephen Mennell ‘Ill Met in Ghana: Jack Goody and Norbert Elias on Process and Progress in Africa’, Theory, Culture & Society 26: 7–8 (2009), pp. 52–70.

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confirms the imperialist’s narrative of the ‘white man’s burden’.90 Elias’s writings about traditional Ghanaian societies indicate that Elias implied that the Krobo people and their neighbours had a specific civilising process, but colonial powers interrupted it. Elias did not judge either British influence or the Ghanaian nation state. Nor did he imply a necessary or linear evolutionary process from tribal societies via colonial domination to the modern nation state. 4) As for the imputed usage of the Freudian sense of self in On the Process of Civilisation, this cannot be dismissed entirely. Elias revisits Freud’s assumptions about civilisation’s function in muting affects and drives, and its role in inculcating a guilty conscience as the unpleasant price of gaining security.91 Yet Elias changes the scope of this idea because, for him, Freud’s approach is too individualistic and ahistorical. In his opinion, it lacks a sociological perspective.92 Critics have stressed that Elias only focused on the formation of the superego and therefore neglected developments of the ‘ego’.93 This assertion means not only discounting Elias’s processual approach to Freudian categories but to overlook his focus on the inner-psychic tensions and the dynamics between individuality and internalised collective constraints labelled as the ‘we–I balance’.94 Such tensions

90 Hans-Peter Duerr, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß. Bd. 1: Nacktheit und Scham (1988); Bd. 2: Intimität (1990); Bd. 3: Obszönität und Gewalt (1997); Bd: 4: Der erotische Leib (1999); Bd. 5: Die Tatsachen des Lebens (2002), all published by Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. See Elias’s response in ‘What I mean by civilisation: reply to Hans Peter Duerr’, in Essays II, pp. 8–13, and also Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell, ‘Civilising Processes—Myth or Reality?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 39: 4 (1997), pp. 727–31. 91 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. 92 Elias, On the Process of Civilisation, pp. 569–70. See the more detailed discussion in Elias, ‘Freud’s concept of society and beyond it’. 93  Schwerhoff, ‘Zivilisationsprozeß und Geschichtswissenschaft’, p. 596; and Axel T. Paul, ‘Die Gewalt der Scham: Elias, Duerr und das Problem der Historizität menschlicher Gefühle’, Mittelweg 36, Zeitschrift des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, 16 (2007), pp. 77–99. See also Hans-Peter Waldhoff, Fremde und Zivilisierung: Wissenssoziologische Studien über das Verarbeiten von Gefühlen der Fremdheit: Probleme der modernen Peripherie-Zentrums-Migration am türkisch-deutschen Beispiel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). 94 Elias, Involvement and Detachment, pp. 58 and The Society of Individuals, pp. 176–77, 180–81; see also Elias, Studies on the Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013 [Collected Works, vol. 11]), p. 281 (original German, 1989).

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derive from identifications with collective units on the one hand and from a developing self-consciousness on the other. To Elias, we–I balances are different in particular societies and may change in the course of social changes. In his writings about the Krobo, Elias discussed the same sort of tensions between superego formation and the ego by analysing traditional songs. For him, the ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ is necessary for all societies and not only modern ones. 5) Duerr, one of Elias’s most elaborate critics, assumes shame to be universal and timeless. It does not change over time, as Elias argues. Therefore, for Duerr there are also shame feelings in less complex societies. Duerr contrasts two concepts: free and easy shame with modern shamelessness. Besides its evaluative character, Duerr’s critique seems to be overstretched in its holistic claims. Elias does not deny a biological base for shame shared by all human beings. But, as Wouters argues in defence of Elias, the point is not whether all human beings share shame feelings in general. Instead, it is essential to stress how certain feelings change in intensity over time.95 Wouters underlines that it is wrong to accuse Elias of assuming that pre-modern people did not feel shame in nakedness, sexuality, or defecation. Now, this book clearly shows how Elias had focused on shame in pre-modern societies too. He argues that in the course of village-state formation, even before European contact with most tribes, a unique, regional-based process of civilisation had shaped patterns of shame. In modern times, Elias continues, individualised guilt feelings under the influence of Christianity became more significant in displacing older types of superego formation. 6) A group of historians has put forward the sixth object of criticism, concerning Elias’s dealing with historical sources. Their main point is that Elias did not correctly apply the historical method.96 Among anthropologists, Jack Goody made a similar accusation by stating that Elias did not approach fieldwork in accordance with the standards of ethnology.97 The two have in common that established experts criticised an outsider from sociology and saw him as an

95 Cas

Wouters, ‘Duerr und Elias: Scham und Gewalt in Zivilisationsprozeßen’, Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 7: 3 (1994), pp. 203–16. 96 Schwerhoff, Zivilisationsprozeß und Geschichtswissenschaft, pp. 561–605. 97 ‘He recalls driving to a village “deep in the jungle” with his chauffeur (there is a picture of the author with his cook and driver)’, in Jack Goody, The Civilizing Process in Ghana, p. 69.

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intruder into their particular academic field. In contrast, for Elias, there should be a synthesis of disciplines. He called for Menschenwissenschaften, human sciences, a grand scheme comprehending sociology, history, anthropology, medicine, psychology, economics and even more disciplines in the synthetic frame of the perspective of long-term processes. At first glance, his approach seems to be similar to nineteenth-century evolutionism, though it deviates significantly from that. Elias did not notice (or was not willing to discuss) that there already was an epistemological tradition of rejection and objection against such grand schemes within the anthropology of his time.98 It is understandable (tough, not correct) to blame the ignorance of research standards on Elias in this context.

Conclusion Finally, we have to acknowledge again one major problem relating to posthumous publications in general. The original author no longer has the chance to decide which material should be included, in what way it should be presented to the readers, or whether the texts should be made public to the reader at all. The fact is that Elias himself never published these manuscripts. His attempts to complete the book, mainly from 1962 to 1964 and again in 1987, do not in themselves contain enough material to create a single unified book. However, the author’s staunch will to finalise this endeavour is apparent in the 1987 text. At over 90 years of age, almost entirely blind, Elias expended great energy to rewrite the text, which he regarded as central to his oeuvre. Yet—as he often did in other contexts too—he ignored all the progress he had made two decades before and tried to write everything again from scratch. We have been attempting to replace his lack of overview. We tried to identify his main lines of thought, thereby completing the volume he was striving for. Ultimately, of course, the authenticity lies with the original typescripts, which remain available for divergent interpretation at the Deutsche Literaturarchiv, Marbach.

98 Most

notably the anti-evolutionism of Franz Boas (1858–1942) anti-evolutionism, following on from the approach of Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) and Johann Gottfried von Herder’s (1744–1803) to ‘culture’ (Kultur).

Overcoming ‘Tribe’ and Other Static Categories Norbert Elias

I Remarks About Research in Ghana I have chosen for this book the title Ghanaian Essays not simply because the pieces collected here are concerned with Ghanaian societies, but in the first place because they were planned and to some extent written while I lived in Ghana, and because, in a small measure, they are an attempt to express, to put in writing some of things I learned there.1 If I were not a sociologist—by vocation as well as by profession—I might have preferred to express my experiences in the form of a novel or perhaps of memoirs rather than in the form of sociological essays. But that would have meant avoiding the issue. For literature need not be concerned with the building of general models (though it can be), as much as it is with the optimal presentation of a nexus of observed events. My problem—my central problem if I can call it that—was how to do justice to the rich, fresh and often quite novel experiences I had there and to break the deadening influence of

1 In

1964, at the beginning of the text, Norbert Elias expressed his intention to write a whole book with the title Ghanaian Essays.—eds. This manuscript is archived under the number Ghan-ESSAYS no. 2a (Preface, 10 pp.) (1964), Preface to Ghanaian essays, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. Sub-headings have been added by the Editors. This manuscript was mainly edited by Dieter Reicher.—eds. N. Elias † (*)  Wiesbaden, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_2

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the prevalent social type of classifications and abstractions on these experiences. I have known for quite a while that the kind of pigeonholes which we use and, also as sociologists, into which we almost automatically put what we perceive—so as to bring order and orientate ourselves in the continuous flow of events—are still pretty inadequate for their task. Most of them are built, as it were, on Linnaean lines. The traditional habits of thinking seem to impress upon us as unavoidable the idea that the flow of events can be ordered in reflection and study only if one deprives it of its character as a flow. We still proceed as if the scientist’s task everywhere was to discover unchanging general laws, rules, principles or such like. We take it for granted that classificatory nouns which refer to supposedly distinct spheres of human life, nouns such as politics, economics, religion and art, corres­ pond everywhere among humans to phenomena which are in fact as distinct and as divided as the concepts suggest. One of the first things one could learn in Ghana was that the application of these ordering categories distorts what one actually observes. There are so many Procrustean beds. There are many other experiences of this kind. I had been aware for some time already in Europe that many problems with which one wrest­les in vain in sociology, as in other social sciences, remain insoluble not because we lack empirical evidence which would enable us to find an answer, but because our traditional ways of thinking and in particular our ways of categorising are at fault. The eternal conundrum about the relationship of individual and society is an example. Not our observations, but the categories into which we are pressing them are at fault. But if one comes to societies at a different stage of development, such as the traditional Ghanaian societies, the deadening effect on one’s observations of the ruling techniques of ordering social data become even more apparent.

II ‘Tribe’ as a False Category: Categories in Anthropology One has read so much about tribes and tribal societies in Africa that one expects tribes to play approximately the same role in Africa, before the coming of Europeans and probably a long time afterwards, as states or nations play in Europe. I must confess that from the reading of the anthropological literature it had never become quite clear to me what kind of social unit or social organisation was meant by ‘tribe’. As far as one could see a tribe could mean in terms of structure so many different things from a small band to mighty powerful states. But I readily accepted the authority of social anthropologists who evidently knew what they were talking about when they spoke of tribal societies.

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When I had lived for a time in Ghana my doubts grew about the adequacy of an attempt to treat the term ‘tribe’ as the main ordering category for traditional African societies. I did some fieldwork in a small village called Moree.2 It took me some time to understand that the inhabitants, although they spoke Fante,3 did not regard themselves as belonging to what one might regard as a tribal unit, the Fante. Insofar as they admitted to belonging to something else but Moree, they said they were Asebus,4 which meant that they belonged to a small state. But all in all the chief, the elders, the town clerk and many villagers to whom we talked spoke of their village, Moree, almost as if it were a kind of nation or a state by itself. If one had very strong antiquarian interests, one could discover that part of the Morees had links with an older pre-Fante tribe. But evidently for their actual social life these ancient tribal bonds played a relatively minor part. And the social unit which played the primary part in their lives, their loyalties and their feeling of identity was their village. And the longer I lived in Ghana the more was this impression confirmed. One found almost everywhere memories of a common origin with other people now living in different places who spoke the same language and had in some respects similar customs and traditions. But the primary social unit which commanded their attention and their allegiance was undoubtedly their own community, village or town and to some extent the traditional state to which their community belonged, although most communities at present enjoy a larger degree of autonomy in relation to their respective states than do European villages. So far as Ghana was concerned it seemed to me preferable to think of the traditional societies as village societies rather than as tribal societies. But this is only one example of many of the challenge which African societies seemed to hold out to the European sociologist, the challenge not to take for granted one’s traditional ways of thinking about societies and to think anew, to strive for classifications more appropriate to what one actually observed and not to accept blindly the conventional categories. When I went into the villages and talked with the people who lived there, I felt that most of the present writings about African societies, although full of relevant and significant information, missed a good deal of what seemed to be essential

2 Moree

is a town located on the coast in the Central Region west of Accra. It was the place where the Dutch founded Fort Nassau, the first fort in the Dutch Gold Coast.—eds. 3 Fante is a dialect of Akan that is commonly spoken by the people of the Fante region.— eds. 4 Asebu was a chiefdom which in 1612 signed a treaty with the Dutch leading to the foundation of Ford Nassau.—eds.

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if one came actually face to face with the people concerned. They were often so remote from the living societies, captured so little of the flavour and the atmosphere of the people themselves whom they intended to present to the wider public for which social scientists are supposed to write, that this became, as it were, a problem of overriding importance. Why is the gap between African societies as presented in the anthropological literature and as they actually are so great? I saw the difficulties. I experienced them myself. For I spoke none of the indigenous languages. Nevertheless there are certain factors which make up for such deficiencies. One of them was the help of my students. It was quite invaluable. For almost all of them had an enormous store of sociologically relevant knowledge although they were hardly aware of it as such. Their roots in the way of life of traditional societies were still strong enough for them to become both informants in their own right and intermediaries in relation to people in the villages who did not speak English or did not speak English well. If they learned something from me, I learnt as least much from them. Apart from the people themselves whom we studied, my students were my first teachers. And once they saw what I was aiming at, they entered into the spirit of the thing with great enthusiasm, helped by the fresh and lively intelligence which is characteristic of so many Ghanaians and which I sometimes, probably quite wrongly, believed bore some relationship to the particular fruitfulness of virgin land freshly cultivated. Though most probably wrong, that was what one felt. It was still what one might call a surface rationality. But there was zest and freshness in how they approached the intellectual problems with which they were confronted. And they too were enchanted by the discovery of how many unexpected new angles and facts could be discovered about their own societies, once one approached them— in the true sense of the word—sociologically. When I reflected on the gap between most anthropological writings and what one cannot help calling the realities of African societies, the first answer that came to hand was that such a gap is characteristic of all scientific endeavour and particularly of all social sciences. Obviously someone who writes fiction may paradoxically enough come nearer to these realities than a social scientist. And indeed, I found that some of the recent novels from African writers—like Jagua Nana5 or Things Fall Apart6—provided better information, came closer to the

5 Jagua

Nana (London: Heinemann, 1961), novel by the Nigerian author Cyprian Ekwensi (1921–2007). 6 Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958), a novel by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (1930–2013); see also references to Achebes Arrow of God (New York: Anchor, 1989 [orig. 1964]) in ch. 4, ch. 6 and ch. 8 below.

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actual life of people, than any anthropological book. It may be said that is simply due to the fact that the social scientist has to classify, has to establish some kind of order in what is essentially an infinite multitude of sequences of events. The scientist has to use his discretion in selecting, in describing and analysing what he observes. But need the gap be so great? Need the ordering have such a deadening effect that the description bears at the most the same relationship to the realities as a somewhat dusty collection of dried and catalogued flowers and butterflies have to the living things? Can it be that our method of ordering is unsuited to the inherent properties of what we try to order? Does one ever deliberately examine the categories used for ordering observations about African—or indeed other— societies in relation to their subject matter? Or does one simply go on, using as a matter of course modes of thinking, of ordering social data, and of analysing them unexamined whether they are appropriate or not? Long before I came to Africa I had been convinced that the gap between the scientific presentation and the ‘realities’ in sociology and anthropology was not in the first instance the fault—as it often appears—of the nature of the subject matter, but rather due to the instruments we use in order to come to grips with the subject matter. These instruments are fashioned in accordance with certain ideas as to what is scientific and scholarly. By and large these ideas revolve around the provision of evidence which in accordance with certain canons can be passed as accurate and reliable for scientific analysis. But the canons of accuracy and reliability of evidence, as well as those of analysis, differ widely in the various social sciences. If one got down to a systematic comparison one would probably find that in the field of social sciences—in contrast to that of the natural sciences— each academic discipline has canons of research work deemed to be ‘scientific’ which differ from most of the others. The anthropologists’ canons are different from those of sociologists, the sociologists’ from those of economists and these again from the canons of historians (even where both are concerned with processes or developments), of social geographers, archaeologists, students of classical antiquity, and of many other groups of social scientists. That their subject matter and their problems are connected, that they all are concerned in one or other of their aspects and manifestations with groups of people is fairly obvious. But each of these academic fields is surrounded—as a fortress by its walls—by its own canons of procedure in teaching and research. Each has its own pantheon of ancestral great men to whom they look up as models and who help to justify their autonomy in relation to the other academic branches (in the same way in which people look up to their own ancestors in most ‘tribal’ and in many ‘national’ societies as the great representatives of their own separate identity). And it is a problem which might well repay closer investigation: to what extent the differences in the accepted canons of scientific or scholarly research are due to the nature of the

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subject matter itself and to what extent they are due to the need for defining one’s frontier—one’s autonomy as an academic field with its own academic positions, institutions, journals, and rewards—against the danger of being swamped and swallowed by the representatives of another field. At present these contribute not a little to the frequent failure of most attempts, of almost any attempt, at connecting the various social sciences with each other and at developing—like the physical and the biological sciences in their fields—a unified theoretical framework for the study of social phenomena. One can certainly say that the canons of teaching and research that are accepted in each social science as ‘academic’ are often accepted as such for long periods, more because they are hallowed as scientifically respectable by the consensus of the thoroughly critical established authorities in each field than by a systematic scrutiny of their suitability for the making of new discoveries and the advancement of knowledge generally in each field. It may well be that the largeness of the gap between the academically respectable and acceptable forms of doing and presenting research on African societies and the actual life of these societies, in the past and in the present, is due in part to the fact that certain canons for reliable presenting and collecting accurate forms of evidence and for analysing and ordering it have come to be accepted in accordance with the precedents set by a few great ancestors. They are preserved more because they are the hallmark of the separateness and autonomy of social anthropology than because they have been systematically tested as to their suitability for research in simpler societies and found to be the canons best suited to the study and understanding of societies of this kind. [Such canons should] allow the student to come to grips as closely as possible with the specific problems of these societies and to explain how and why these problems were in certain respects different from those of societies in which people live and cohere with each other in a different way.7

7 In

the original manuscript, this whole paragraph was a gigantic single sentence, in which Elias himself became a bit lost, though his line of thought is clear. We have broken up the sentence to conform better with English norms, but only the short phrase in square brackets is not to be found in Elias’s typescript. The paragraph ends with Elias apparently advocating comparison of those traditional Ghanaian/African societies (designated as ‘tribes’) with more complex ones.—eds.

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Everyone who works in Africa owes a great deal to the knowledge brought to light by generations of anthropologists. The material brought to light is immense. Without this work much would have been irredeemably lost by now. The rapid development of African societies, the passing of an old and the emergence of a new order, makes it imperative that more work should be done in this field and that it should be done quickly. But I have little doubt that the canons of research could be improved. What they cover is often invaluable. But as they stand at present they leave out a great deal. The selection of observations based on them is limited, and to some extent arbitrary. And the system of categories, the type of classifying the evidence collected is in many respects inappropriate to the type of societies, the starting point from which present developments begin; and it is apt to distort and dehumanise the actual experiences.8 The so-called scientific social research procedures habitually dissect into discontinuous fragments what in the actual conduct and experience of people in the societies concerned are wholly inseparable and coherent. In many cases these segments are studied in isolation, and in these studies they are treated as if they actually functioned and operated in isolation, independently of other aspects or segments of the same societies. Such procedures are misleading enough if they are used in the study of highly differentiated societies. But in investigating such societies, there is at least a grain of justification. Family and household in differentiated societies have assumed specific functions; so have groups devoted to what one might call economic activities such as managers and workers; lawyers and judges are specialists in what we like to call the legal sphere; and there are in many cases professional politicians and special institutions manned by people who are often nothing else. Thus in the study of societies with a high division of functions there is a certain justification for thinking in terms of a legal, economic, religious, or political sphere. Even there, research in these different aspects often goes far beyond what is justified by the evidence in isolating these various spheres or aspects from each other. There is no doubt that the institutionalised separation of these aspects in the form of different academic disciplines

8 At

this point in the original manuscript, Elias left a note saying to ‘introduce here as next point the use of traditional classification themes for research and teaching which stands in contrast to the coherence of what one actually observes.’ Elias also made a note to introduce ‘studies of family and kinship in tribe A’.—eds.

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contributed greatly to the rigidity with which we are apt to separate these spheres in our thinking. There are departments of economics, politics, sociology, psychology, history and geography in most universities, and therefore the idea has come to be accepted almost as a matter of course that economic, political, historical, and other problems are as separate from each other as these departments. But if there is an element of justification for this fragmentation of research if one studies societies with a very high division of functions, its counterpart in the study of less differentiated societies—where the same people perform family functions, economic functions, political and perhaps legal functions as well—creates a highly artificial system of categories quite inappropriate to what actually goes on in these societies. It is one example of the kind of approach which is responsible for the size of the gap between scientific research in this field and the realities. People go into the field, or send out students to study ‘the religion of tribe A’. Or family and kinship in tribe B. Or the political institutions of the simpler people—as if in fact political, religious, family and other institutions functioned separately. At most, a certain tribe is studied, and these divisions— whose appropriateness as ordering instruments is mostly taken for granted—serve as chapter headings, so that again first one and then the other is studied, as if they existed in a juxtaposition comparable to that of the chapters of a book, and they hardly ever lead from the analysis to a synthesis. Rarely is the trouble taken to show how what have been artificially separated as religious, economic, political, or kinship institutions are joined to each other. The argument often used in this context is: ‘Surely, people say, one cannot study sociologically or anthropologically the whole of a society. We have to concentrate on this or that aspect.’ The argument would be convincing if dissecting operations were ever followed or were accompanied by an equal attempt at connecting operations, if analysis and synthesis followed each other in a continuous dialectical order. Instead things are broken into pieces without any attempt at mending the breakage again. One of the strongest impressions I received while living in Africa was how inappropriate was the departmentalisation of thinking through which we are used to seeing traditional types of society. And that was not only true of social functions such as those I have mentioned before. In the experience of most human beings living in rather small traditional societies, departmentalisations such as those to which Europeans are accustomed—and which have their shortcomings even there—simply do not exist, although with increasing development, with increasing division of labour, they may become a little more appropriate. This is another point which to some extent defeats the traditional anthropological approach. African societies are in a state of flux. They are changing. But although by now observations of social change have come to be accepted as a

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respectable subject of research, they do not easily fit into a tradition of research which is essentially static and, with one or two notable exceptions (particularly M. G. Smith’s Government in Zazzau),9 unhistorical.

III Shifting Power Balances and the Decline of Race as an Argument for Differences To Europeans who came and come to live in Africa, many of the customs, institutions, attitudes and beliefs they encounter there seem unfamiliar and strange. Travellers’ books in the past, anthropologists’ books in the present, record these differences. In fact they have often concentrated in their observations most on those features of African societies which appeared to them particularly unfamiliar and strange. But up to this day, they rarely, if ever, set out systematically to explain why African societies have a different character from European societies. Perhaps they did not even regard it as a feasible task to ask systematically for explanations of these differences in the structure and conduct of different types of societies. For in many cases, people in Europe, and nowadays in Africa as well, appeared to have at the back of their minds the idea that these differences in the character and the pattern of life of different groups of people are something that has to be taken for granted. It was not always said explicitly that they were natural differences, differences in the innate characteristics of these groups of people, but they proceeded as if they were in fact just that—as if the observable differences in the manner of life of Europeans and Africans were in the last resort due to some differences in their nature, their personality, their mind, in short racial or inborn differences. On that assumption the attempt to explain the observable differences between African and European societies seemed superfluous. People believed they already had the explanation. Of course, no one has ever produced any evidence for the fact that the differences in the manner of life, and the social relations and institutions which could be observed were due to some inherently different qualities, some inborn or racial differences. But by not enquiring into the reasons for these sociological differences and the corresponding differences in outlook and behaviour, room was left for the assumption that there were

9 Michael

Garfield Smith, Government in Zazzau, 1800–1950 (published for the International African Institute). New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.—eds.

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ultimately some natural differences or other mysterious forces responsible for observable differences. Moreover, from early days on, the problem of the factual differences observed was wrapped up with often unspoken ideas about the relative value of the different modes of social life and behaviour observed in different societies. For a long time Europeans, being more powerful, felt as a matter of course that morally and in terms of achievement their own forms of life and behaviour were ‘better’. Nowadays with the rising power of African countries, they very understandably develop ideologies of their own. The question is whether the truth is not good enough. The questions which African no less than European countries must ask themselves, if they propagate their national ideologies among themselves, are: What are they afraid of? What do they all want to hide? For if they did not want to conceal the facts about themselves, why should they have to invent ideologies? […]

IV Pseudo-metaphysical Explanations, the ‘Otherness’ and Short-lived Political Evaluations A considerable amount of the effort that goes into the study of African societies is concerned simply with the collection of facts. And the field is so vast that, in spite of the efforts made so far, one can well say that large groups of African societies—in terms of numbers perhaps the majority—have remained wholly or partially unexplored. There are so many of them. The amount of the new facts to be collected still seems quite enormous. In Europe, every period, every country, every province, village and town—in fact most topics regarded as worth studying—have already been studied by someone and a whole host of books have been written about them.10 Research in African societies is in a different stage. It is only at the beginning. And if one finds it exciting and rewarding to venture into new territories, to explore societies which have never been explored before, to grapple with human problems and situations one had no opportunity of perceiving in vivo and rarely taken into account in textbooks—provided one can approach them with a fresh mind—one will find research in Africa rewarding.

10 Some

unclear words were deleted following this phrase.—eds.

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But the sociologist’s task will only be fulfilled if any particular social problem is approached in such a manner that the results are of interest and are valid for all human beings. The people with whom one comes into contact, and whose lives with each other one studies, are relevant because they represent one way in which human beings cohere and behave with each other. The sociologist’s task is not to study Africans because they are Africans, but to study them because they are human beings. And just as Africans can learn a great deal about themselves from sociological studies of Europeans, so Europeans can learn a great deal about themselves—they can learn a great deal about human beings from the study of African societies. Often enough members of societies with different ways of life look upon each other as strangers. And at the back of people’s minds, though never clearly formulated, there exist as barriers to human communication a vague set of mythologies surrounding the name of continents which make it appear that Africans, Asians, Americans or Europeans are, as it were, fundamentally different types of human beings. Present political international problems, struggles and conflicts between different groups of nations in international relations are raised into an eternal, pseudo-metaphysical level where terms like ‘Western’, ‘African’, ‘Asian’ and others are endowed with a mystical quality which makes it appear that what are in fact contemporary political divisions are eternal divisions between different kinds of human beings. Sociological studies can have no truck with these shifting and short-lived alignments of the day and with the masking of the basic unity of all human problems, the basic relevance of the problems one discovers in one continent for people living in another. At present, the prescribed canons of collecting and selecting evidence from African societies are often concentrated on areas of innocuous strangeness. They are, moreover, so arranged that they note down what is ‘strange’ in the eyes of Europeans, to describe it in an orderly manner but nothing more. This is the character of most anthropological fieldwork. It is a more or less systematic quest for collecting data almost unaffected by the need to explain them. In sociological terms the quest for explanations is an indispensable determinant of the mode of collecting data, of what is regarded as significant in selecting data for collection. In fact this mode of procedure, the selection of social data without regard to possible explanations, is one of the reasons for the impoverishment that the evidence suffers in presentation. For if one is content with describing the strangeness or ‘otherness’ of other societies, without trying to explain why they are different, leaves room for all the semi-mythological explanations for differences between human groups which like weeds in an uncared for garden—a wild undergrowth of feelings—crop up everywhere. They crop up wherever answers

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to urgent questions based on research and founded on adequate evidence are not forthcoming. The anthropological literature on Africa is full of instances which leave the reader with the feeling that it is all very strange. Very few studies on African societies set out to explain systematically in what way and why African societies differ from present-day European societies. In this respect, the studies have hardly made a beginning. They do not set out to explore systematically the specific conditions under which societies of this particular sort, or for that matter specific institutions, were formed and persisted. They do not refer to the fact that, or to explain why, people of European stock—living under similar conditions—in many cases developed similar modes of living and similar institutions. For all we know, they might have produced similar institutions and modes of conduct if their descendants had to live under similar conditions. By not including in their programme of work a systematic consideration of ‘why-questions’, the way is left open to all those assumptions that one group of people live in a different manner from another because they are inherently more intelligent, or morally better, or the favourites of God, nature or history. Take for example a problem to which the essays frequently allude, the problem which in European languages is summed up by terms like ‘human sacrifice’. As a statement of fact one can say that religious customs of this kind were a standing phenomenon in traditional Ghanaian societies. Stated in this manner—that is, without any attempt at explaining them—they arouse in Europeans a vague [or more specific] feeling of their own superiority, and in many Africans a feeling that this is something one ought to hide, something one should better not rake up. As things are today, perhaps someone might be inclined to regard this as a product of colonialism, and it certainly would not enter the peculiarly selective canons of what is today presented as ‘the African mind’ or ‘the African personality’. In sociological research one cannot take account of these short-lived political evaluations. One must refuse to have anything to do with them.

African Village-States: The Formation of Survival Units Norbert Elias and Hazel King

I Introduction The self-interpretation of Africans, no less than the interpretation of African living conditions by non-Africans are deeply coloured by the subjection in which Africans and people of African descent have lived for several centuries and by their subsequent struggle of emancipation and liberation. Both subjection and liberation have tended to overstress in the public image which Africans have of themselves and which others have as Africans what is different in Africans from the rest of humankind, with an accent either on what appears as blameworthy or on what appears as praiseworthy. In colonial times it was stressed in order to justify the subjection, in post-colonial times it was stressed by Africans themselves because it was necessary for them to find their own pride and identity.

This manuscript is a shortened version of the document archived under the number Ghan-Essays, no. 3a (1964), Problems of Ghanaian communities, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. Hazel King was a postgraduate student and Elias’s paid assistant in the Department of Sociology at the University of Ghana. Sub-headings except the first, ‘Introduction’, were added by the editors. This manuscript was mainly edited by Adrian Jitschin. -eds. N. Elias (*) · H. King  Wiesbaden, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_3

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II Tribe as a Category It may be too early to study African conditions without regard for either of these two needs of pride and identity. It may be too early to attempt to break away from certain anthropological traditions which tended to accentuate the particular strangeness of African peoples for European observers—we are still a long way from the time when Africa will be studied by teams of Africans and non-Africans together working in complete equality, neither as colonialists nor as African nationalists. We are still a long time away from the moment when one will be able to study African peoples simply as human groups with special characteristics, which can be explained like those of all other human groups in terms of the special conditions of their development unperturbed by any of the strong pressures towards romanticising Africans which prevail today—towards romanticising them either as strangely attractive, while primitive, or as strangely attractive because they are endowed with a supraindividual ‘African personality’ or possessed by a mysterious ‘African mind.’ Given all these pressures, one may well say that a sociological study, especially a study of a few rather small African communities, should confine itself to a simple description of facts one has gathered; and, indeed, so great are the gaps in the present knowledge of facts about African people that the simple recording of data before it is too late may well be regarded as a worthwhile task. But as soon as one is engaged in a piece of fieldwork and begins to take notes, whether one is aware of it or not, one tends to make use of one or the other general models for gathering data about African societies. One never simply opens one’s eyes and records what one happens to perceive. Observations are selective. Even if one believes oneself free from theoretical ideas, fact gathering is inevitably guided by them and the less conscious one is of them, the more likely is it that one is led by them blindly because they are in general use and the more limited is one’s freedom to revise them in light of new observations of fact. As we proceeded with our task, it became increasingly clear that what we found did not always fit smoothly into what we had come to expect in accordance with the concepts currently used for the study of African societies, and that we might be unable to put on record and to organise adequately the data we were collecting unless we made some attempt at the same time to examine these concepts.

III Development of Categories as a Process A good example of this lack of congruity between [on the one hand] the expectations we had as a result of a conventional concept which we applied to our task and [on the other hand] the observations we made on the spot was the use of the

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concept ‘tribe’. The impression one gains from the present literature on African societies is that ‘the tribe’ is the principal unit with which Africans living in their traditional manner identify themselves. And as one has come to consider ‘tribes’ as principal reference groups of African peoples, they are also treated as principal reference groups of research into African peoples. The anthropological literature abounds with records centred on tribal units: all those selected aspects of social life which social anthropologists consider as relevant subjects of research are studied by them almost exclusively as aspects of ‘tribes’. One studies ‘the marriage customs of the Bemba tribe’, ‘the religious beliefs of the Yoruba’ or, in more general terms, ‘government and politics in tribal societies’ and ‘tribes without rulers’.1 Our observations indicated that the role of ‘tribes’ as primary reference groups of African peoples was not as unequivocal and uncontroversial as we had been led to expect. The tendency to treat ‘tribes’ as the main reference unit of research appeared to oversimplify the situation, and the term ‘tribe’ itself, the more one came to think of it, seemed far from clear. Although everywhere among the peoples we studied memories of links with tribal units and tribal traditions were kept alive, quite often links with their local community, with their village or town, appeared to play a much stronger, much more immediate part in their lives than tribal links. Both tribe as well as local community constituted levels of grouping with which people identified themselves and with which they were identified by others. And so did their kinship groups, whatever form they took. But the differentiation and the balance between them was not always the same. Which level of identification stood out, which had priority, depended on the structure of a group or its actual situation or stage of its social development. Among the peoples we studied were no nomadic bands, no tribes on the move. In their case, one can assume, the conceptual distinction between ‘tribe’ and ‘community’ does not apply. We had to deal with settled groups and often enough with groups which had been settled where they now lived for a century. Applied to what we found

1 Although

Elias does not cite authors by name, these are all allusions to notable works by prominent British anthropologists: Audrey I. Richards, Chisungu: A Girls’ Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia (London: Faber and Faber, 1956); Daryll Ford, The Yoruba-speaking Peoples of South-Western Nigeria (London: International African Institute, 1951); John Middleton, ed., Tribes Without Rulers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); Isaac Schapera, Government and Politics in Tribal Societies (London: C. A. Watts, 1956); and (mentioned below), Meyer Fortes, The Dynamics of Kinship among the Tallensi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945).—eds.

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there, current anthropological usages seemed to overplay the tribal and to underplay the community level as a frame of reference of the people themselves and as a frame of reference of research. There is no lack of anthropological observations on the community level. It is the conceptualisation and its influence on the collection of information, on the gathering of material at community level which seem at fault.2 The reason is fairly obvious. In spite of a growing emphasis on the study of human relationships, on problems of social structure and social change, the conceptual equipment and with it the dominant conventions of social research in anthropology, and perhaps conventions with the use of concepts, remain strongly influenced by a traditional emphasis on ‘culture’ rather than on structure and on unchanging group characteristics rather than on processes. The over-emphasis on ‘tribes’ as reference groups of research is characteristic of this inheritance. In the relatively loose sense in which the term is used today, ‘tribe’ means, as a rule, a grouping of people with a common cultural heritage which distinguishes them

2 It may be enough to mention one of the many examples one could give of these conceptual difficulties. Isaac Schapera in Government and Politics in Tribal Societies, in a chapter entitled ‘Forms of Tribal Government’ (Chapter VI) sums up what—if one considers the structure of the reference groups—are largely observations on the community level. The opening sentences, read critically, indicate the conceptual difficulties well enough. Having reviewed the main aspects of tribal government in South Africa, we can now summarise the conclusion reached and make a final comparison of the systems described. I started with the assumption that in any comparative study of the kind here attempted the first essential is to identify the units to be discussed. Whatever may be the case elsewhere in primitive society—we are told, for example, that the Logoli of Kenya and the Tallensi of the Gold Coast ‘have no clear spatially defined political units’—the problem is easy to solve for South Africa. The four peoples with whom we have been concerned are all divided into separate ‘political communities’, each claiming exclusive rights to a given territory and managing its affairs independently of external control. The members of a ‘political community’ (I use the term for what of something more suitable) share certain other rights’ and duties that do not extend to outsiders, and they all co-operate in certain activities. But that can also be said of such local segments as Hottentot clans or Bantu villages; hence, I regard as the distinctive criterion of the community the fact that, unlike any of its subdivisions, it is not subject to the overriding of someone outside its own geographical boundaries.’ One can add that the Tallensi of Ghana, too, have a form of community organisation. It would need further research in order to establish whether, and how far, the picture of the Tallensi which we owe to Professor Fortes would be different if the conceptual scheme with which one approached them and, in particular, the balance in one’s attention to the tribal level and the community level were different.

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from others, and which is envisaged almost as if it had been, and would be for ever, in the form in which it had been found by anthropologists today, the distinguishing feature of this particular tribe. The relationship of the concept of tribe to specific structuring to the organisation of a group remains ill-defined. In spite of a great number of investigations into tribes, the sociological concept of ‘tribe’ itself is elusive and equivocal. It can be used with reference to a wide spectrum of groups with different social structures, ranging from small nomadic bands of the type found among the Australian aborigines to dynastic state societies of the Ashanti or Fulani type. In newly emerging national state societies, such as Ghana, references to tribal units begin to serve as distinguishing descent badges of different, often competing groups of intellectuals and professional men. They point to a future when tribal differences in African states, such as those between Yoruba and Ibo in Nigeria, or Gha, Ewe and Ashante in Ghana, may not mean much more than the differences between the Welsh and the English or between Bavarians and Saxons in European states.3 So far, the series of structures, of organisational types to which the term ‘tribe’ may refer has not been sufficiently determined. Nor, as far as one can see, have any attempts been made to enquire even tentatively with the aim of producing a provisional working hypothesis into the connections which may exist between the various types of grouping to which the term ‘tribe’ is conventionally applied. Although one can clearly distinguish between less and more complex types of tribal organisation and although, in some cases at least, the evidence suggests that tribal units have developed from a simpler to more complex form of organisation, ‘development’ as a category for the ordering of observations about African societies is still largely absent from anthropological studies, perhaps in reaction against the widespread misconception of the term during the nineteenth century. In spite of the fact that African societies are visibly in a state of flux and that many aspects of the changes which they undergo in the educational, economic, administrative and other fields are classed as ‘developments’ in society at large,

3 The

undifferentiated use of the term ‘tribe’ has its drawbacks, not only for the purposes of research, but also increasingly as a term used conversationally in African societies at large. It has never lost, and is widely used even in anthropological literature in association with the term ‘primitive’. To enquire of Africans from which ‘tribe’ they come, if one knows of the associations which go with it, can cause a flutter of embarrassment because of the ambiguity of the term and the implied evaluations. An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, reports how a foreign visitor asked a Ghanaian High Court Judge to which tribe he belonged and received the answer ‘To Ghana’.

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the problems raised by the use of the concept ‘development’ with reference to African societies have rarely been taken up by those who are professionally engaged in the study of these societies—with the exception of the economists. Sociologists and anthropologists, in so far as they have taken note of ‘developments’ in African societies at all, tend to deal with them under the heading of ‘social change’. However, the two concepts are by no means identical. Some, but not all, social changes have the character of ‘developments’. Without distinguishing between those changes which have and those which do not have the character of a ‘development’, without reference to differences in the level of social differentiation and complexity and to the possibility that societies may change from one level to the other in either direction, much that is observed in African as in other societies remains incomprehensible. The lack of process concepts such as ‘development’ in the study of African societies is one of the factors that accounts for the largely static character of concepts such as ‘tribe’. According to the present conventions for classifying African societies, all tribes appear to be organisations more or less on the same level, whether they have a non-centralised ‘segmentary’ organisation, or that of a loosely centralised dynastic state, or veer towards that of an industrial nation state. Present typologies of ‘tribal societies’ are largely Linnean in character. They aim at a purely descriptive juxtaposition of types. They order societies as if they all represented the same level of differentiation and complexity. They do not allow for the possibility that different types of tribal organisations may be connected with each other, and with ‘non-tribal’ types, by a developmental type of linkages—that the more complex types of organisation may have developed from simpler types and may revert again to simpler types as a result of invasions, conquest, dissensions and feuds. At present, indeed, we have no means of distinguishing between types of ‘stateless’ tribal organisations which never passed through a stage in which they were organised as states and those which passed through such a phase, whose organisation is descended from that of a state organisation which has lapsed or broken down. Without criteria which enable sociologists to distinguish clearly between differences such as these, without categories which take account of the process character of societies, much of the labour will be wasted. As we shall see, even within the limited framework of studies on small Ghanaian communities, we were confronted with specific problems which were due not to limitations of the evidence but to limitations of the concepts used in collecting and organising it. One could not help taking note of these limitations if one started to study groups in a country such as Ghana at present involved in a fairly rapid development. In particular, the problem of resettlement of about 70,000 people in the

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Volta Basin in connection with the building of a dam and a power station at Akosambo raised, together with a number of immediate practical problems, quite a number of wider conceptual problems. The need to question the predominance of references to ‘tribes’ as principal identification units for the groups we encountered was the direct outcome of what we observed in the Volta Basin, as well as in many other parts of Ghana. The community was the primary unit of resettlement. One may think that this was simply a matter of administrative expediency. But in this case the administrative arrangements corresponded to the requirements and the structure of the groups of people with which these arrangements were concerned. It was convenient to try moving and resettling people as villages or towns because these communities formed in fact the primary framework for all the routines of their lives. Tribal allegiances played their part in the problems of resettlement, but they arose largely with reference to specific communities as tensions within villages or between villages and in many cases communal tensions bore no references to tribal differences at all. They were tensions between communities or between sections of a community who belonged to the same tribe. If one probed more deeply into the problem of why in Ghana, and probably in many other parts of Africa too, communities, particularly village communities, played a very large part in the lives of people who lived there, one came across some simple structural characteristics in which the Ghanaian village communities appeared to differ from village communities in the more advanced state societies of Europe and North America. Types of differences more often noted with reference to the structure of families in traditional and in industrial societies had their counterpart in those of communities. It has often been observed that families have in less differentiated societies many functions rolled into one, which in more differentiated societies are performed by a number of different agencies outside the family. In fact, families themselves in industrial societies are more specialised in certain directions—as organisations of sexual and affective relations, of reproduction and of socialisation of children—than they are in pre-industrial societies. Similarly, many traditional village and town communities in Ghana as in other parts of Africa performed, and still perform, many undivided functions that in villages and towns of industrial societies have become more sharply differentiated and to some extent attached to specialised agencies. If one tries to express developmental problems such as this clearly, one comes up against the lack of precision in classifications such as ‘industrial’ and ‘non-industrial’ or, for that matter, of ‘European’ and ‘African’ societies. Not all industrial societies and not all European societies represent the same stage of development. Nor are all pre-industrial or all African societies representative of

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the same developmental stage and therefore identical in their broad structural characteristics. Until a more accurate developmental model for differences such as these has been evolved, one can only point to the limitations of the conventional type of classifications. One cannot simply speak of ‘European village communities’ as distinct from ‘African village communities’. For in none of these continental groups are all villages of a kind. Village and small-town communities in the south of Italy or parts of Spain are often less differentiated and more self-sufficient than similar communities in England. At the same time the community organisation of all of them has lost certain social functions which still form or formed until very recently, an integral part of West African village organisation. Almost everywhere in European societies villages have lost their own military and juridical institutions, together with many of their welfare and educational agencies to state-controlled institutions and agencies. They have lost their own community deities and rites to churches and other religious organisations controlled from social levels above those of villages and small towns. Rural communities have lost these and other functions together with the high degree of self-sufficiency in the production of food, clothes and other daily requirements, which they once had, and the loss in what we call economic self-sufficiency in turn was closely connected with the increasing effectiveness of the control which state governments were able to exercise through their agencies over the whole realm of the state; they were closely connected with advances in social techniques that enabled people to organise themselves with a fairly high degree of stability into the larger and more complex social units which we call states and which have now … in more and more parts of the world in the form of nation states. Within these highly centralised organisations a centrally directed educational system, along with centrally directed information and communication services, are usually able to produce and to maintain a fairly high degree of uniformity in certain basic attitudes and ideas over the whole state territory which then appear to others as ‘national characteristics’. They also help to produce strong dispositions and strong pressures towards identification with the nation as a whole even among the inhabitants of rural areas. Local and parochial identification on the village level does not disappear, but within the framework of a nation state its part in the lives of villagers diminishes as that of national identification grows. In many parts of Africa, and most certainly in many parts of Ghana, the identification of the inhabitants with their own locality, village or town has, until now, remained stronger simply because the higher levels of organisation have either not attained the relatively high stability and effectiveness of control characteristic of those nation states, or have not developed at all. And the stronger identification

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of people with their community itself was merely one aspect of a situation where communities in fact still performed many of the functions which in nation states are performed under the control of levels of organisation above that of villages or small towns. Like other African countries, Ghana was at the time of this research, and probably [will be] for a fairly long time to come, in a state of transition during which many of the functions traditionally performed locally at the level of village or town were, sometimes gradually and sometimes more abruptly, taken over by agencies of a central government. The resettlement of hundreds of village communities from the Volta valley, for reasons of state, was only one of the many lessons of state formation. The present inclination of sociologists with a slight over-emphasis on what are called the economic aspects of social development tends to blur the structure of sociological processes such as that of state formation. According to an older sociological tradition, the structure and motive forces of organisational developments such as the formation of states tend to be presented in terms of ‘economic developments’, partly because in the older countries the study of ‘economics’ has reached a fairly high degree of precision and because, as a result, it is often implicitly believed that economic processes themselves possess a higher degree of regularity, that they are more firmly structured than any other sphere of society. But that is by no means the case. Developments such as those of the transfer of function from the community level to higher levels of organisation and, particularly in Ghana, to the highest level of an emergent nation state had inherent regularities capable of being stated with the same precision as the regularities of economic developments. In fact, the separate study of these and other aspects of the same development under different headings, in the light of observations such as these, appeared as highly artificial. Neither of these aspects of African developments can be studied in sociological terms without reference to the inherent tensions and conflicts which they invariably produce. One of the difficulties which one had to clear out of the way was due to the still prevailing tendency of European and American sociological research to think of what are called ‘economic functions’ as a differentiated and separate field of social functions, which is very often conventionally endowed with the magic quality of a causal field from which the pattern of other fields of functions seem to spring as their effects or consequences. In that vein one may easily incline to the conclusion that the state-like character of many African communities was due to what are often classified as a specifically economic characteristic—namely to their need for themselves growing most of the food which they consume and for providing altogether for themselves their clothes, their huts, their tools, as well as

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many other requirements in varying degrees. There may be an inclination to give priority in one’s explanations to what has become standardised under the heading of ‘economic self-sufficiency’. But this conceptualisation of economic functions as a separate field of functions is only appropriate in studies of highly differentiated societies where specialised groups of merchants or businessmen not only have specialised functions, but also as a group have a fairly high degree of power within a state. One need not go here into the sociology of economics as a science or into the development of the term ‘economics’ to its present use.4 But it is relevant to the study of African societies to say that the term ‘economics’ loses its usefulness as a term referring to a distinct set of social functions with distinct regularities of their own if it is applied to societies at a stage of development at which the differentiation of social functions has not gone far enough for the emergence of specialised social groups who only produce and distribute goods as distinct from those who are specialised in the military defence of their group in the case of attack, and again from others who have specialised functions in taking what we call ‘political’ decisions or in administering a group. If one speaks of some types of African communities as ‘village states’, it is precisely because in their case what we conceptually divide as economic, political, military and other types of specialised organisational was not yet divided. They had to provide for themselves—they had a high degree of ‘self-sufficiency’ with regard to all of them. That Ghana, like other African territories had gone through a colonial phase—in which the use of physical group violence, of military actions between sections of the ‘colonial’ population, was discouraged or punished—had not yet affected the traditional organisation of communities deeply enough to extinguish the characteristics of the community organisation. These characteristics were due to the fact that traditionally villages and small towns had not only to cater for their own ‘economic’ but also their own ‘military’ needs both rolled into one and fused inseparably with religious, juridical and other organisations for which we have separate terms. [These fused functions] formed the key positions of the community organisation. If one considers once more the problems of the distinguishing characteristics of African ‘chiefs’

4 The

problem has been discussed in a paper, ‘On the sociogenesis of sociology’, in Elias, Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 16]), pp. 43–69, a revised version of ‘The “break with traditionalism” and the origins of sociology’, written for the Fifth World Congress of Sociology, Washington DC, September 1962.

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compared with the leadership roles of European villages and town communities, one has to say that in connection with the specific development of African societies African communities had to take many more decisions for themselves. In many cases they could not rely, as the members of many European communities do willingly or not, on decisions taken for them at a higher level. And, among the decisions which communities had often enough to take for themselves, were decisions which in the usual language one might call political and military decisions. [That was] certainly true prior to the ‘pacification’ attempted by a colonial power and quite often when its rule had been fully established. The role of a chief corresponded to this stage of development.

The Krobo People. Socio- and Psychogeneses of a Stateless Society

Outline of an Early State-Formation Process Norbert Elias

I Hilltop Settlements as the First Stations to Statehood If one looks back far enough into the ancestral past, one always encounters a stage in the development of societies during which ancestral generations were not yet sedentary, but were migrants temporarily or permanently on the move. Eventually they all immigrated into the territory where one encounters their descendants at a later stage as permanently settled inhabitants, often claiming an eternal and exclusive right of possession of this territory. Vague memories of the ancestral migrations are usually kept alive in their history books. Thus one may remember that once upon a time the Hellenic forefathers of the ancient Athenians were migrant clans or tribes, some of whose members settled on the hilltop, now known as the Acropolis. The Athenian identity was not entirely unconnected with the continuity of their social existence, which they owed to some extent to the protective potential of their hilltop fortress. In the same way the people who are now known as Romans were a branch of Italic-speaking immigrants into the

This chapter contains the first part of the manuscript archived under the number 802 (up to page Krobo 9), A Tribe on the Move: Outline of an early state formation process, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. The pages 10 to 15 of this manuscript are not included in this volume because its content overlaps mainly with the content of Chap. 5 in this book. The manuscript was dictated in 1987. Sub-headings have been added by the editors. This manuscript was mainly edited by Arjan Post. -eds.

N. Elias (*)  Wiesbaden, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_4

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European peninsula which now bears the name of Italy. The Romans were the offspring of people living in various hilltop villages near the Tiber, which, like islands, offered a better chance of survival in the turmoil of migratory movements than a settlement in the plain, at least as long as the people concerned had not yet reached the stage of social development where they could build strong stone walls around their settlements. What made them wander? And what drove them in one direction rather than others? In many cases the migration came to an end when they found a place where they could settle reasonably safely. In these and other cases one encounters a specific sequential order. Migrant tribal people perhaps led by priests, or by more secular war-leaders, who had the good fortune to discover in the course of their migrations a hill or a mountain, if possible with a high plateau—a hilltop home that was neither too high nor too low, neither too distant nor too easy to reach from the ground. Even a relatively small group could make use of the protective propensity of such a natural excrescence. The new settlers could try to get whatever sustenance they were able to wrest from the surrounding countryside, mostly as peasants or hunters and, if necessary, withdraw to their hill-fortress whenever the people on guard announced the approach of suspicious strangers. They might find water or dig wells. If conditions were favourable, if the population grew perhaps through further immigration, they could hold their own in the frequent struggles with invaders. The tribal hilltop villages could merge, peacefully or not, as they did in the case of Rome and form with each other a unitary city or territorial state. Not only for the Athenians and Romans, but for other people as well, hilltop settlements were the first stations on the road from migrating tribe to statehood.1

II Sociology and History in Studying ‘Prehistoric’ African Societies History books, as I have said, usually preserve some memories of the earlier migratory past of all human societies. But written evidence from this stage of development is scarce. Hence, in our classificatory schema, the migratory phases in the development of human societies are usually registered as parts of human ‘prehistory’. That gives the impression of a developmental break which did not, or does not, exist. Sociologists and anthropologists, as a rule, do not pay much

1 For

a more detailed elaboration of this argument, see chap. 7 below.—eds.

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attention to the earlier conditions of human societies in which permanently settled groups, if they existed at all, were few and far between. The best known present standard category for migrating groups, albeit far from adequate, is ‘nomadic pastoralists’. In fact, by reading present standard texts on the prevailing schema of social development one may get the impression that agricultural people from early days were always permanently settled. Sociologists and anthropologists, too, are apt to turn a blind eye to the continuity of developmental processes leading from one social formation to another, such as that from ‘tribe’ to ‘state’ or from largely migratory to permanently settled groups. Their preferred conceptual equipment has a chest-of-drawers-like character. Their classificatory schemes or of a Linnaean type. Each social category, each type of society is made to appear as eternally unchanging; it is neatly put in one drawer next to the other. In contrast to the Darwinian type of classification, no transition is possible from one class to another, no room is left for continuous processes in the sequence of time. The bent for static categories shows itself less strikingly in the theoretical models with which social scientists work. They are, with few exceptions, always models of sedentary societies, permanently cast into a specific organisational and cultural mode. Whether such theories are concerned with social groupings in the organisational form of tribes or nation states, they are apt to treat them almost as if they were natural objects. Early agriculturalists were, in fact, often migratory agriculturalists. After a few harvests the yield of their labour often decreased. Given the simplicity of their instruments and their methods of sowing, the soil might yield less and less, and the peasant families were forced to migrate elsewhere. At that stage of development there was in many regions no scarcity of land, and at the same time there was the threat of strange forces. The impression that agricultural people, as mentioned, were from early days permanently settled, in contrast to herdsmen, also implies that peasants and warriors played no part whatsoever in the development of humanity, quite particularly in its ‘prehistory’. What we call ‘prehistory’ lasted in many parts of humanity until the nineteenth century and even in the twentieth century. Tropical Africa is an example. Here migrating agricultural societies were even in the nineteenth century anything but rare. As they had no writing, and left no existing record according to our present classificatory schemes, they fortunately form part of human prehistory. It is fortunate that in some cases traces of the oral tradition of these ‘prehistoric societies’ survive to this day, sometimes even in written form, while as a rule we are dependent for our understanding of human problems of this long period almost exclusively on the silent fragments brought to light by archaeologists.

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The dominant preference for stationary categories shows itself most strikingly in the theoretical models with which social scientists work. They are almost without exception models of sedentary societies, permanently cast into a specific organisational and cultural mould. Whether such theories are concerned with social groupings in the organisational form of tribes or nation states, they tend to suggest that such entities were natural and, in fact, unchanged objects. They are conceptually represented as if they were normally stationary, and also normally as well and truly integrated as essentially unchanging social units. Societies thus usually appear always as firmly settled within clearly circumscribed territorial boundaries. Tacitly the essentially stationary character of human societies is often treated as if it were self-evident, an eternally given condition of human societies. As a result, the aim of social sciences seems for too many of its representatives in one crucial aspect as almost identical with that of physics in its classical form. One selects for attention as the most relevant aspect of societies to be studied, what one can reasonably believe to be their unchanging characteristics. In accordance with the models set by classical physics, the condition of flux and thus the only truly permanent condition of the social life of humans is almost treated as if it were an accident, and thus as inessential compared with what one can represent as their unchanging and permanent features. In actual fact every single nonbiological aspect of any society one encounters today on earth is never a permanent, eternally given datum. All social properties of societies as we encounter them today are the transient result of a long process in the course of which a given society has become what it is today. It has quite the structural characteristics which we can discover today, and which are often falsely presented as if they were the unvarying properties of a natural object. But they have become what they are today over a long period of time. And yet they will remain a mystery and inexplicable, as long as one does not attempt to reconstruct the process of their becoming. I have heard social scientists say that they cannot do this, that they have not enough evidence in order to present testable models of the process, during which human societies became what they are at a later stage. But the scarcity or maybe the absence of evidence does not give scientists licence to pretend that—and to proceed as if—such processes have not taken place. One need not give up restoring the process character of all things social before one has even started. If one looks for long-term processes one discovers that a great deal of material, which can help in the reconstruction of long-term processes, is overlooked and left lying fallow, because the models of scientific enquiry, which custom has established in our age, reinforced by a certain intellectual lethargy, which makes one prefer point-like or short-term enquiries over enquiries with a long-term perspective,

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have resulted in a public opinion and a scientific market which rewards social scientific inquiries which reduce all processes to static conditions. In short, it is not as much the absence of empirical evidence which accounts for the scarcity of process enquiries in social sciences such as sociology and anthropology, but the prevalent theoretical models of a scientific enquiry. They play a considerable part in the selection and the utilisation of empirical evidence. In other words, the very fact that the material, which is required for the study and reconstruction of state-formation processes according to the traditional scheme of classification, is classified as ‘historical’. I still have to convince my listeners and readers that enquiries into events which lie in the past have not necessarily the character of historical enquiries. A sociologist’s interests in events of the past, although he or she may make use of the historians’ work, is decidedly different from the historian’s interest. My own studies, in which I tried to establish the character and structure of civilising processes and of the related state-formation processes, relied a good deal on evidence from past centuries. But not only did I use evidence from the past, which historians had spurned. It was there for everyone to see. But from the historian’s point of view, it was of little interest for the study of the past, in accordance with their conception of history. The evidence which helped me to discover characteristics of civilizing processes was at the most marginal to the study of the past. A study of manners books, in their view, belonged at the most to the odd byways of history without much relevance for its course. From a sociological point of view, on the other hand, this material had a very high cognitive value. It showed something historians largely ignore in their studies of the past, namely a specific direction of changes. Changes which in one direction or another may go, often for many generations and sometimes for thousands of years, in spite of many counter-movements in the same direction, connect what historians separate. Thus civilising spurts may occur in contemporary societies no less than in societies of past ages. What I discovered by using material dating back to the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth centuries might conceivably have been discovered with the help of material from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or from the first five centuries BC. The historian’s approach to the past is concentrated on the reliable and accurate discovery of details within the conceptual framework of an epoch. The sociologist’s approach to the past is based on the recognition that, so far as changes in societies are concerned, past, present and future are inseparable. Sociologists often utilise the historians’ accurate discovery of details, but their approach is never historical. Their approach is the same to the past as it is to the present: they are concerned with the study of processes, linking details of all ages to each other. They seek to discover not only how, but also why aspects

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of human societies have become what they are at any given time. Theirs is an integrating and explanatory task. The present indiscriminate use of the term ‘historical’ for all studies which use evidence from the past obscures the crucial differences between an historical and a sociological or anthropological use of past material. It is worth making the point in this context, for I am going to use evidence from the past to illuminate aspects of a state-formation process, for which examples may still be found in our own time. As in my ‘civilizing book’ I am using material which, though it has not been entirely neglected by anthropologists concerned with the same tribal unit, has not yet found the relatively wide attention, which it in my view deserves.2 Now, in the centre of my inquiry here stands the early phases of a state-formation process, or in other words the transition from a migrating tribe to a settled tribal village-state, with some observations about the next phase, that of a small territorial state under colonial rule. It was a process not unlike that to which I have already referred, when I spoke of the transformation of the ancient Athenians and Romans from a migrating tribal group to a settled group of hilltop villagers in Athenian and Roman antiquity. I am relying to some extent on one of the few accounts of the past of his own people, written by the Ghanaian author Noa Akunor Azu.3 Also I have consulted contemporary reports by missionaries, as well as letters and other material I found in the Ghanaian state archives. Here I will utilise this material for a brief and in many ways preliminary, study of a process leading a migrant tribal group over the generations to transform itself into an early type of state-society. This material has been largely left unused by social scientists. Among the sources of the enquiry in the early phases of a stateformation process—the transition from a migrating tribe to a settled tribal villagestate and from there into a small incipient territorial state under colonial rule—is the aforementioned written account of the tribe’s oral tradition about the early phases of its development. This little book, Adangbe History, with the photograph of its author has been mentioned and has been occasionally used by anthropologists concerned with this very tribe, the Krobo, but I am inclined to believe that it has not found the attention it deserves. It undoubtedly contains legendary tales

2 Norbert

Elias, On the Process of Civilisation: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Dublin: UCD Press, 2012 [Collected Works, vol. 3])—original German 1939. 3 Noa Akunor Aquae Azu, Adangbe (Adangme) History, trans. and ed. Enoch Azu, in The Gold Coast Review no. 2 (Accra: Government Printing Office, 1929).

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and its author’s ideological position within the power-struggles of his people can be clearly recognised. Yet it is among the very few histories of an African people written by an African. It is as if an old Athenian living many generations before Herodotus had put on record what had been orally transmitted to him about the settlement period of his Hellenic ancestors. From the historian’s point of view such an account may appear simply as a legendary and unreliable source for the reconstruction of early Athenian history. The sociologist can hardly fail to notice that it contains a good deal of reliable information about such a group’s social development. The same can be said about the sociological or anthropological, as distinct from the historical, relevance of the African writer’s account of his people’s past to which I have referred. Adangbe History is concerned with the development of one of the nonliterate societies of tropical West Africa, coexisting with societies at a later stage of development in many other parts of the world. The society I have singled out for attention is the Krobo, a people of South-East Ghana which in its own way played a pioneering part in the development of Ghana’s agriculture. One of their members has left the written account I’ve referred to above of one of the oral traditions of his people. Like any other oral tradition, it is biased. But the bias is recognisable and understandable. It would probably be difficult to use this document as evidence if one wished to write the history of this people. As sociological evidence it is invaluable. It opens up human problems of ‘prehistoric’ people on their road into the historical stage in a way which usefully supplements the silent archaeological evidence. One might feel that the human problems of ‘prehistoric’ people are too remote from the problems of societies at a later stage of development to be of much interest to sociologists, anthropologists and other students of human societies. The view which has induced the writing of the text that follows and the publishing of the accompanying documents is rather that people who used to live at a later stage of development, above all at that of an industrial nation state, will never be able to understand themselves as long as social scientists do not offer them easily accessible reconstructions of earlier stages of development, and explanations of the reasons for the emerging differences, without familiarity with the human problems with which people had to wrestle at earlier stages of development. Many features of later societies are simply taken for granted or treated as universal features of humanity, and perhaps even of human nature. I am trying to present first a largely narrative account of the development of the Krobo people from its condition as a migrating group (scenario 1) to its condition as a sedentary tribal society of hilltop villages (scenario 2), and finally to

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that of a tribal territorial state with a limited degree of self-rule within the British colony of the Gold Coast [after independence, Ghana] (scenario 3). It may be helpful and, in fact, may well be indispensable for the understanding of the narrative part if I mention at least two of the conditions with a characteristic of the first and the second phase in the development of the Krobo people, which are radically different from those which usually present themselves as self-evident to people only familiar with the stages of social development usually known as history. I am referring, firstly, to the fact that at the stage of development represented here by scenario 1 and 2, unused arable land was easy to come by. I have found that too many people growing up with the lessons of European history firmly entrenched in their mind take it for granted even the smallest piece of land is not only the legal property of someone, but, as a rule, is also used by someone with the permission of the owner for one purpose or another. The conditions which we encounter at the stage at which the ancestors of the Krobo were a small migrating group and also at the earlier part of the stage at which the Krobo settled down at the mountain fortress, the finding of arable land for the growth of the food they needed was no major problem for them. There was no Bodensperre,4 no monopolistic ownership blocking to others the access to usable land in the region through which the migrating ancestors passed. Nor was there such a blockage around the mountain when the Krobo came to settle there, though while they lived there and increased in numbers available land became scarcer. A statistical account of the agricultural situation in Ghana at the end of the nineteenth century states that at that time not more than 35 per cent of the usable land of Ghana was actually used. This condition is so radically different from that taken into consideration when human problems are discussed, or theories of societies drafted in the tradition of what are now highly developed industrial nation states, that it seems useful to draw attention to this fact. It is one of several examples indicating that, without knowledge of earlier phases of social development, one may easily consider [something to be] a universal human condition, [but] which is in fact the structural characteristic of a specific stage of development.

4 The

term Bodensperre (the ‘blocking of the soil’) comes from Franz Oppenheimer in his 1907 book Der Staat (in Franz Oppenheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. II, Politische Schriften (Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1996:), pp. 309–385; English translation by John M. Gitterman, The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically (New York: Arno Press, 1972).

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The second characteristic of the earlier stage of development which may be of interest in this context is the fact that the standards of human feelings of identification with other human beings, under the dangerous conditions in which human groups had to live at the earlier stage, are different from ours. Thus we find that a human group may be asked to hand over five or six of their members to the ruler of another society through whose territory the tribal group wishes to pass. People at that stage of development may have few other goods with which they can pay for other people’s services or for goods they wish to acquire than some of the fellow members of their group. In the same vein an African chief is credited with the saying: ‘There are three things we want from the Europeans, and three things we will give them in return. We want from them guns, powder and rum. We give them in return men, women and children.’

III Notes on Noa Azu and his Adangbe History Krobo is the name under which the people are known today. According to the Ghanaian census there were about 100,000 of them in the 1960s living in Ghana. But the author of the written account of the Krobo history was well aware that the ancestors of the Krobo were initially a small branch of an older unit called Adangbe. Hence he called his little book Adangbe (Adangme) History. It is as if a writer on Athenian history called his book Ionian History. Perhaps for a time the ancestral Adangbe lived and migrated together. Some of their splinter groups found different domiciles. The Krobo were one of them. Their identity and their fortune were in fact to a very high extent determined by the location and the mode of their settlement. The ancestral Adangbe group decided to seek safety and to settle on the high plateau of a rocky mountain with an altitude of a bit more than a thousand miles. When they invaded it, it was for them nameless. If one can trust the account, they did not find anyone living there. But there were undoubted remnants of previous habitation. Let me say a few words about the author of the Adangbe History (1929). His name was Noa Akunor Aquae Azu. He was born in 1836 and died on the 28 June 1917. His son Enoch Azu translated the book into English. It was published first in the Gold Coast Review in instalments between 1926 and 1928. The Government Printing Office published it as a book in 1929. One of my students was his descendant. I am grateful to the Azu family, who let me have a photocopy of the handwritten original and some original material from the hand of Azu. It was not uncommon for European missionaries to ask tribal leaders for one of their sons so that they could train him as a Christian and as a teacher of his

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compatriots. Chinua Achebe5 tells in his novel Arrow of the Lord (1964) of the head-priest of an Ibo village, whose son, at his father’s request, went with the missionaries with highly disturbing consequences. It was Noa Azu who went with tears in his eyes with the missionaries at the request of his father, King Odonkol. He was the third of his father’s sons who became a Christian. But in his case the circumstances were in some respect unusual. He had to abandon his wife and child when he went with the missionaries. But the strangest aspect of his conversion was that from childhood on he had been trained for the priesthood of one of his people’s main gods. His father’s sister was a priestess. We hear that she lived in a cave. Together with some wise men she trained Noa Azu in secret love of his people. It was thus that he learnt by heart the oral tradition of his tribe and also thousands of its traditional songs and proverbs, many of which reflect and can serve as source material for the tribal past. Later as a pupil of the Christian missionaries he learned, among other things, to read and to write. For all we know he became a devoted Christian and, for thirty years, a teacher of his people. Yet, like many other members of his tribe, he was very proud of his Krobo identity. Evidently he felt while acting as a Christian teacher that his people’s oral tradition deserved not to perish. Hence he wrote down for the benefit of the young a great part of his people’s oral tradition, preserved in his memory. By doing so, he broke a severe taboo, for in their original form, the history, the songs and proverbs of his people were understood as secret knowledge, reserved for priests of the traditional gods. He was well aware that he broke a taboo by publishing the priestly knowledge. Of course, his own considerations and his mental processes are closed to us. But whatever they were, we owe to the fact that here, for once, parts of the oral tradition of an African people were written down thanks to the decision of a man who after being the priest of an African god became a Christian catechist.

5  Chinua

Achebe (1930–2013) was a Nigerian writer, academic and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958) is one of the most widely read and admired books in modern African literature. In 1975 he wrote a notable critique of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, in which he described Conrad as a ‘thoroughgoing racist’. Achebe’s essay is regarded as a landmark in postcolonial discourse. See ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, reprinted in Achebe’s book Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. London: Heinemann, 1988).—eds.

A Tribe on the Move: The Development of Krobo Society Norbert Elias

I The Journey Begins Reading Noa Azu’s Adangbe History for the third time I noticed some striking details which had escaped my attention before when I was still captivated by the simple strangeness of Azu’s story of his people. He described how the group of ancestors decided to leave their homes in the eastern parts of West Africa and to look for another place to settle because the rule of the King of Dahomey had become too oppressive. That was not particularly strange. People of the twentieth century like previous generations are no strangers to oppression or to attempts at escaping from it. There are many examples. I was reminded of a message by the people of Dover to the King of England, which I had read years ago in the English State Papers. The gist of it was that the king’s Warden, his governor, was too greedy. The levies he demanded were too high, his rule too oppressive. If the king did not stop it, they and their families would pack their belongings, take to the boats and sail away in search of a better place. It was not difficult for fishermen to find food in the sea. Security was

The manuscript is archived under the number 805, Krobo Introduction: The development of Krobo society [“A Tribe on the Move”, Manuscript 3], in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. The manuscript was dictated in 1987. Sub-headings have been added by the editors. This manuscript was mainly edited by Behrouz Alikhani. -eds. N. Elias (*)  Wiesbaden, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_5

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a problem. There was no lack of sea robbers. But by and large there were fewer people then. On land they might still find empty places which gave protection. They might find a safe place in the marshland of a river mouth or perhaps even on an uninhabited island. In that respect flight from oppression was easier then. Most people had fewer personal belongings. But as I read on in Azu’s chronicle I found a brief reference to an episode which was strange and unfamiliar. Azu mentioned in passing that the chief of a territory through which the ancestral group wanted to pass demanded as price for his permission seven people. The story had not caught my attention before. Azu’s simple language, which only on rare occasions shows emotions, may easily disguise the human implications of a story. Suddenly I recognised that his casual words referred to an event which threw a striking light on the difference between stages in the development of human societies. The migrating group evidently did not have many marketable belongings. Human beings, at that stage, were one of the few group possessions which they could hand over in exchange for the right of passage. It was the first of several casual remarks to be found in Azu’s history book which indicated that at an earlier stage at which people were relatively rare and had relatively few possessions, healthy human beings were one of the most valuable assets and thus, in a sense, also a marketable asset which a group possessed. A group consisting of a greater number of strong people than another was not only physically stronger in case of a struggle. It was also potentially richer. At that stage wealth and physical strength were closely linked to each other. Our theoretical preoccupation with largely impersonal economic assets brings to mind questions about the possession of land and the increase in agricultural land which was needed to feed seven additional mouths acquired as tribute from a passing group. Today that may seem the decisive question. The balance between agricultural land and human beings underlying our theoretical position is modelled on a condition where land is scarce and, in relation to it, humans abundant. Azu’s nomadic ancestral group belongs to a stage at which, in relation to the number of humans, potentially fruitful agricultural land was abundant, while humans themselves, in many cases, were scarce. For one reason or another large tracts of potentially fertile African land were still unused and uninhabited. There was also a wealth of wild animals which could provide food if there were sufficient hunters available. The balance between food resources and the number of human beings can vary greatly. The same can be said of the balance between food resources or, in other words, the means of production and the means of physical security. We are not explicitly told by Azu where the ancestral group whose migrations he briefly described were heading. We do not know whether they had any specific goal in

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mind. But he made it very clear that foremost in their mind was not the search for fertile land, but the search for a condition of greater physical security combined with the security of self-rule. As far as one can see acres where they could grow food, land where they could collect edibles or hunt animals were never a great problem for them. The great problem for the time being was physical security as a self-ruling group and the increase in numbers which contributed to that security. Azu’s description makes it very clear that one of the reasons why the ancestral group of the Krobo felt threatened and insecure was its relatively small size. As one shall see, it was a main concern of the migrating Krobo ancestors and for a time of the Krobo themselves how to induce other groups to join them, thus increasing their military potential without losing their own tradition and identity. It was probably no small matter for them to hand over to an alien chief seven of their members as price for the right to pass through his territory. Maybe they had no choice. They continued their passage eastwards, apparently leaving seven people behind. We are not told who selected them or what they felt when they were handed over to a group of strangers. That is one of the characteristic questions of our own age, where a rich array of rules protects every single human being at least in the more developed countries. So they marched on through the vast country which might have appeared to us as half-empty. At one time the migrants reached another place after a march of ten days, a human settlement called Akpe which they promptly attacked. They defeated the inhabitants and took the Akpe-people with them on their journey, perhaps as carriers, perhaps as warriors to increase their military strength. How did they protect themselves by day and by night from beasts of prey? Or from hunting humans? What about their children, did they carry the little ones on their back when they were tired from a long march? Did they know where they were going? Why always eastwards, not westwards? Was there a rumour in their ear, some dream of an uninhabited island or an empty hilltop where they could live in greater safety? All we are told, all that Azu’s people remembered in their oral tradition are fragmented episodes. For a while the ancestral group stayed at a place called Kpesi. Then they persuaded the Kpesi people too to come with them on their march. Again, one cannot help wondering what lure, what picture of a better homeland they offered to their new fellow-travellers. Perhaps one is wrong to impute to these wandering groups long-term aims beyond food and security. Group-identity and, as its part, territorial allegiance were, it seems, more easily changeable for these nomadic or semi-nomadic people. Describing the itinerary of the ancestral group, Azu mentions specifically that it passed and lived for a while in what is now Togoland, but he does not refer to a small mystery which may or may not be connected with their stay in Togoland.

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A town situated in that country bears exactly the same name as the group of tribes to which the Krobo belong and as the group of languages or dialects spoken by these tribal groups. The town is called Adangbe.1 The difficulty is that the inhabitants of this town do not belong to one of the Adangbe tribes and do not speak an Adangbe language. The inhabitants of the town Adangbe belong the Ewe tribe.2 As one of the scholars investigating the puzzle observed, the Togoland town Adangbe lies in the heartland of the Ewe people.3 Azu not only mentions that the ancestral group of the Krobo came to Ghana from Togoland, he also refers to the fact that all the other Adangbe tribes came to Ghana from the east by crossing the Volta river—that is, from Togoland. It would be tempting to assume that the Adangbe-speaking tribes or at least their ancestors, at some time in the past, lived together in Togoland in and around the town carrying their name and that they crossed the river Volta in search of a new home after their town had been taken over, peacefully or not, by Ewe-speaking people. However, there is not the slightest evidence for such a takeover in the oral tradition of the Adangbe people. There is thus no solid reason to assume such a sequence of events. It is true that oral tradition tends to preserve victory, while defeats like other events which do not enhance the stature of one’s own people are more likely to be forgotten. It is perhaps worth noting that Azu refers to the Adangbe tribes in the plural for the first time only in connection with the crossing of the Volta river, with their exit from Togoland, and their entry into what became Ghana. Up to that point he referred to ‘the Krobos’ only, not to any other of the Adangbe tribes. He spoke of some adventures which ‘the Krobos’ had on an island in the Volta river where they left some companions who had marched with them all the way from their home-island. Then they looked for a way to cross the big river. In the end they found a ferryman who transported them to the east bank of the river in hollowed trunks of the date palm. Thus, the Krobos, as Azu proudly remarked, were the pioneers among the Adangbe tribes, the first to cross the river Volta. All this, according to him, took place about 700 to 800 years ago. Thus, legend mingles with what might be history. As far as one can make out, the kings of Dahomey, the oppressors of the Krobos, rose to power and became a threat to their subjects

1 North-west

of Lome in southwest Togo.—eds. of the Ewe people live in Ghana and in Togo. Their language belongs to the group of Gbe languages unlike the Krobos who belongs to the Ga-Adangbe linguistic group.—eds. 3 R. G. S. Sprigge, ‘Eweland’s Adangbe: an enquiry into an oral tradition’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, vol. 10 (1969), pp. 87–128. 2 Most

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and their neighbours alike perhaps in the sixteenth, certainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although there may be remnants of a very old tradition in what Noa Azu wrote down, the bulk of the oral tradition which he tried to preserve may not go back much beyond that time.

II Interstation Having crossed the big river and thus turned their back on Eweland, the Krobos and the other Adangbe clans may have hoped for a safer life. If so, they were to be disappointed. The Krobo tried to settle in a place where water was scarce, so they dug a well some way outside of it. One day when the young girls went there to fill their vessels with water, they found that the well had run dry. They waited till it had filled again with water. Meanwhile they tried to entertain themselves, probably with singing and dancing, as young girls like to do, also, as we are told, with their skipping ropes they had brought for this purpose to the well. Suddenly there appeared some robbers and bundled the girls up with their own ropes. So, there was no safety. The memory of this episode, like that of many others was preserved by the oral tradition of the Krobo people in the form of a little song. Apart from his Adangbe history Noa Azu has also left us a large collection of these traditional songs of his people. They were on appropriate occasions not only sung, but also with dancing movements appropriately performed. Each of these songs, called Klama songs, was very short; many of them had no more than two lines. One had to be brought up in the Krobo tradition in order to understand them fully. In contrast to what Europeans tend to consider as folksongs they were totally unsentimental. Many of them were sharp-witted and contained a very direct attack, like the following, which was probably sometimes used as a warning to the young female population evidently not without a touch of Schadenfreude: Skipping on the banks of Kunye (the well) is bad. I skipped and fell into the skipping rope.

Thus, feeling still in danger, the Krobo group continued their migration and were lucky enough to find a place which appeared to satisfy their needs. It became part of their oral tradition that their forefathers discovered a couple of foothills of a still far-off mountain range. They were remembered under the name of Lollovor Hills. Although their shape was not all that convenient for a settlement, a hilltop provided in any case greater security than any settlement in the plain. One

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could see an unfriendly-looking group approaching from some distance, could put blockages or even traps in every ascending path leading to a settlement. We are not explicitly told that there was unused land around the hills where sowing and harvesting could provide sufficient food for the people. But we are told that here for the first time the Krobo ancestors recovered from the strains and stresses of the long migration. The group, we are told, became stronger which probably means, among other things, that its numbers increased. A better-protected life often results in a growth of population. And as the people on the Lollovor Hills became stronger, they in turn became more aggressive. It was part of their selfdefence, of their incessant struggle for survival, that they made themselves feared in their region. It was useful for a group to become renowned for the courage and ruthlessness of its fighting men. To strike fear in the heart of possible enemies by acquiring a terrifying name was at this stage part of the strategy of survival. According to their tradition, the Krobo ancestors began at the Lollovor Hills to acquire the reputation as fierce and invincible warriors. They gave themselves praise-names, such as ‘The Killer of Lollovor’, ‘The Priest from the East’, ‘The Strongest of the Braves’. In the development of societies, one may perhaps distinguish a stage where people for their survival are as passively dependent on the offerings of nature, in contrast to a later stage when they are able to construct actively defences of their own, such as heavy walls around their settlements. That time had not yet come in the development of the Krobo ancestors. The group who happened to discover an uninhabited hilltop, which even a comparatively small group might successfully defend against invaders, increased not only their survival chances here and now, it also increased the chance of a continuous development of a group and its culture and thus of its group identity over the generations. Although the Krobo tradition stresses the fact that the settlement on the Lollovor Hills was a great improvement of their condition, the group it seems was not yet wholly satisfied with their homestead. They apparently did not stop looking for a hill which was more convenient and more secure as a place of settlement than the Lollovor Hills and were lucky enough to find such a place. They discovered at some distance a rocky hill which rose steeply from the plain to a height of about 1000 feet. The ascent was difficult and, in some places, dangerous. One of its great advantages was that it had a kind of high plateau at the top which greatly facilitated the building of huts or houses and generally the establishment of a tightly woven communal life. The great disadvantage of the still nameless hill was that it had no fresh water resources of its own. But water could be collected from not too distant rivers and stored in basins and pots. People could take care of the water problem. But the

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hill was a gift of nature; it had the making of a natural fortress. Thus, the Krobo group, after one of their leaders had given them sufficient information, decided to abandon Lollovor and to move to the nameless hill.

III Group Identity and Settlement The man who had given them the information that this hill would be a suitable place where they could settle was called Akro, the eponymous hero of the Krobo people. For when they had followed him to their new home and found that it satisfied their needs, in particular that they could enjoy their greater security than they had found before, they decided to change their name in his honour and to call themselves Akro’s people, which through the use by others gave rise to the name by which they became known, to the name Krobo. The same name attached itself to their mountain-home. It became known, according to taste, as the Krobo hill or the Krobo mountain. Their fortune as inhabitants of this mountain amply justified Akro’s assessment. The use which the Krobo people made of the mountain’s natural properties enabled them to repulse the most formidable attacks— until the Europeans came with their firearms. However, the fact that they assumed the name Krobo, as Azu himself reports, only after they settled on their mountain, brings to light a rather basic problem of human societies, that of their continuity as societies: if the Krobo assumed their name only after they settled on this mountain who were they before? What was the identity of the group or groups who settled on that mountain? Azu himself, as it seems, was unaware of the problem. In fact, our linguistic usages make it difficult to deal with problems of this kind. One may have noticed that I sometimes tried to avoid saying that the Krobo came, according to their tradition, from an island near Dahomey, or that the Krobo lived for a time in Togoland. I used cumbersome expressions such as ‘The ancestral group of the Krobo’ as a way of coping with this difficulty. In that respect Azu has no scruples. According to him the Krobos came from somewhere near Dahomey, the Krobos lived for a time in Togoland and the Krobos were the first Adangbe tribe to cross the Volta river. Nor is he alone. A present-centred perspective, entailing a projection of present conditions, indeed a backward projection of present conditions into the past, is not rare among historians or, for that matter, among sociologists. One could perhaps say it is a common characteristic of public knowledge in our age. Nor is a past-centred or a future-centred perspective more appropriate. The process-sociological task one encounters here is more difficult. What is needed are models of the open-ended

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processes which lead from the past through the present time towards possible futures. If that is the guideline, one is once more confronted by the question of who after all were the people who under the leadership of Akro came as first settlers to the strange mountain and there assumed the name of Krobo? Thinking from the past towards present and future is not the only difficulty which one encounters in this context. Closely connected with it is the difficulty of visualising social units in other terms than those which correspond most closely to the current ideals of nation states or tribes. In accordance to them one is apt to assume that all societies possess the same, firm developmental continuity and stability within given territorial frontiers from generation to generation which we like to attribute to modern nation states. However, this picture contrasts sharply with the relative fluidity and looseness of association which characterises in Azu’s description the group which he calls Krobos before they assumed that name and thus as long as they were, with some interruptions, migrants. Azu refers repeatedly to the fact that the ancestral group forces or persuades another group to join them in their wanderings. We hear of situations where they expected to meet part of their own group who, we do not know why, had gone elsewhere, but they did not arrive. The nomadic or semi-nomadic groups one encounters here can be clearly distinguished from nomadic groups, such as Bedouins in the desert who migrate, at least in recent times, within fairly clearly circumscribed territorial boundaries and not with the aim of settling permanently at a suitable place. Azu’s nomadic agriculturalists, like the ancestral groups of the Athenians or the Romans before they founded their hilltop villages, or like many of the migrant tribes of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, went in search of booty as well as of a convenient place of settlement. The Krobo too achieved the greater continuity and firmness of association which we tend to attribute to all societies only after they found a place of settlement which allowed them to defend their group-identity generation after generation, and which thus came to be regarded as their permanent home. There are not many indications of the identity of the groups which settled on the Krobo mountain and there assumed the Krobo name. Even our languages and the attitudes enshrined in them, as one may notice, are not particularly well suited for dealing with problems of this kind. They make us inclined to think and to speak as if group-identities were eternal and unchanging throughout the centuries. Few people may know who the Angles were whose name has been preserved in Anglia or in Angleterre, and together with that of the Saxons in Anglo-Saxons. All one may remember is the fact that the Anglo-Saxons, like their cousins the German Saxons, were wandering Germanic tribes, some of whom of settled on the European continent while others defeated the Celts on the British Isles and

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settled there. The long process in the course of which the tribal Anglo-Saxons transformed themselves into the industrial Anglo-Saxons is history. Even words like England or l’Angleterre preserve the old linguistic root. But the continuity thus preserved is often understood only or mainly as a biological continuity. In actual fact biological continuity, in the case of human groups, is always dependent on social continuity, on the continuity of such survival units as tribes or states. It is not without significance who first settled on the hill which became known as the Krobo Mountain when settling there gave themselves a new name. They assumed in fact a new group-identity, but their old identity did not entirely disappear. Part-units preserved memories of the old names. If one reconstructs the sequence of events not by projecting present conditions into the past, but by reconstructing the real sequence by showing how past conditions developed into present conditions—past into present figurations—then it becomes much easier to understand what really happened when the apparently empty hill was first settled by human groups and why these groups assumed a new name and a new identity. The older names now appear as names of subgroups of the Krobo. Two of these subgroups were traditionally regarded as the groups who first arrived and settled on the mountain. They were called Djebian and Manya. In all likelihood they gave themselves a new name not only because the settlement on their new mountain home represented a new chapter of their history, a new stage of their development, but also and perhaps above all because the two groups decided there and then to join hands in settling on, and above all defending, their new mountain home. It would have been possible that one of them imposed its name upon the whole community. Thus, in some countries Britain is still called England, or the Netherlands Holland. But that could have only happened if one of the two core groups had an indisputable power superiority, acquired peacefully or in violent battle. We have no account of the early negotiations between what appear to be the two founding groups of the settlement on the mountain. Both may or may not been born of Adangbe stock, appear to have spoken the same language or related languages, and to have come to their new home from the Lollovor Hills. What one can assume is that both were very conscious of the fact that each of them, and that even both together, had not enough fighting men to defend their possession of this unique mountain fortress against stronger invading groups determined to drive them out and to take it away from them. It is not implausible to assume that this awareness induced the leaders, priests and warriors, to become allies. One has the impression that from early days it was a main concern of the Krobo leaders how to increase their numbers not only through their own children, but also through the absorption of other groups without losing to them the rule and control over the mountain society, and thus also of social identity,

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their continuous tradition and culture. For the mountain territory to be successfully defended against attacks was too large [a task] in relation to both, let alone for one, of the two founding groups. One can assume that the leaders of the two groups, the Djebian group which itself consisted of three clans, and the Manya group which in olden days was probably called Madja, came to a kind of compromise agreement about living together at the high plateau of their mountain with their gods and thus effectively their priests as guardians of the rules. And they agreed on some regulations for admitting other immigrant groups as settlers on the mountain which satisfied their need for more people and, at the same time, diminished the danger that one of the immigrant groups would gain a dominant position, thus changing the traditional structure and above all the power figuration of the human mountain society.

IV Rivalry and Alliance Between Manya and Djebian As far as is known the Krobo rules for admission and assimilation of foreign groups proved reasonably effective. So, did the compromise between the two founding groups. At least the available sources do not contain any evidence of fighting, of violent action, between the two groups, between the Manya and the Djebian components of the Krobo people. However, what emerges quite clearly is the long-standing rivalry between the two groups, their struggle for seniority in status and power. It has left its mark on the older, evidence-scarce as it is, and emerges quite clearly in some of the more recent evidence. The rivalry found expression in what was in all likelihood an ongoing dispute as to which of the two groups was responsible for the discovery of the then still nameless Krobo Mountain as a suitable place of settlement for the wandering groups. Hugo Huber in The Krobo4 has brought to light two antagonistic versions of a Klama song about the mountain’s discovery, which gives substance to the assumption that these two groups, the people of Madza and the people of Akro Muase, had a share in founding the settlement on the mountain and that each of them claimed to have been the first to discover the mountain, and, by implication, also the first to settle there. Akro Muase, or (according to other versions) Akro

4 Hugo

Huber, The Krobo: Traditional and Religious Life of a West African People. (Fribourg: Fribourg University Press, 1973), pp. 18, 270.

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Natebi, was the ancestral leader and hero of the Djebian subtribe. Madza was the great ancestral father figure of the Madza subtribe. It is an open question whether one has to envisage these ancient leaders more as warriors or more as priests. Perhaps they belong to a stage of development at which the two social functions, that of a high priest and that of a war leader, were not yet distinct and specialised occupations to the extent and in the sense evoked by these two occupational terms in a modern language. Perhaps functional differentiation of society at the lifetime of Akro and Madza had not gone all that far. Both may have been warrior-priests or priest-warriors, and it may be only the compelling force of linguistic usages at a later stage of development which forced discussions into the iron mould of an either–or. Azu in his Adangbe History observed that the Adangbe tribes were led by priests and in times of war by war leaders. But Akro and Madza seem to belong to an age when the danger of war on a large or a small scale was endemic, and thus more or less permanent. So, like Samuel, both could perhaps be characterised as priest-warriors. However, according to a shared oral tradition of the Krobo, the man who discovered their mountain was Akro Muase. According to legend, he had promised to lighten a big fire at the top of the mountain, if he found it suitable for settlement. According to Krobo tradition that was what he did. But among the successors of the two founding groups opinions differed as to who was in command at the time when the Krobo ancestors took possession of their mountain. According to a version under Djebian influence it was Akro himself, the ancestral head of the Djebian subtribe who on his own initiative and under his own responsibility discovered the mountain and led his own people as well as the Manya people to the mountain-top. This version appears to have become the dominant version in a period in which the festival of the Dzebian war god, called Nadu, virtually assumed the characteristics of a Krobo tribal or national festival. Roughly in the same period, moreover, a Djebian dynasty, the Azu family, came to occupy the position of king or paramount chief among the Krobo. But the rival tradition which gave to Madza, the eponymous ancestor of the Manya subtribe, the position of precedence and seniority did not die out. According to it, Akro acted in a subordinate position on the initiative of Madza, when he explored and discovered the mountain’s suitability for settlement. The following is a version of the relevant Klama song representing Dzebiam dominance and ideology: Muase lighted the fire for Madza so that he saw the Mountain Madza claimed that the mountain is his But Muase is the owner of the Mountain.

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And this is a version of the Klama song representing the rival tradition which claimed precedence and seniority for Madza, the man and the subtribe: Muase lighted the fire for Madza so that he saw the Mountain the Mountain belongs to Madza.

As allies and rivals, these two groups—or at least priests, chiefs or elders as their representatives—formed the core-groups around which the Krobo people developed first into one of the region’s major tribes, and then into a small territorial state. As one shall see controlled immigration and cultural assimilation of other homeless groups seeking a refuge played a major part in this process of tribeand state-formation. In relation to these newcomers, members of these two coregroups assumed the characteristics of an old establishment. As time went on former outsider groups came to be accepted by, and became themselves, part of the Krobo establishment as its more recent components. One encounters here, in other words, an example of the function which those aspects of society we are accustomed to calling ‘culture’, language, religion and other means of orientation among them, have within integration processes such as those of tribe formation and state formation.

V The Krobos as Survival Unit and Evaluating Historical Records But that is to come. At present we have reached a point at which a wandering group had found what it was apparently looking for, a suitable home where it could settle and become sedentary. Its pilgrimage, one might say, had come to an end. It is at least easy enough to perceive the restless wanderings of a human group in this way. Yet by doing so is one not once more in danger of reading history backwards, of projecting one’s knowledge of what came later into one’s perception of what happened earlier? That is, by implying, as legends often do, that in the end the Krobo found what they had been looking for, unintentionally personify a group? Once more one is confronted by the question: to whom does one refer if one speaks in that sense of the Krobo? Even if one accepts for a moment legend as a fact, it is easy to see that a long period of time and thus also a long line of generations lie between a migrating group departing from somewhere near Dahomey and the group or groups which settled on the Krobo mountain, thus giving rise to the emergence of the Krobo tribe and the Krobo state.

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By saying the Krobo migrated and then they settled, is one thus not in fact presenting a long intergenerational sequence as if it were a single person? Would it not be more plausible if one assumed that some human groups whose name and identity are difficult to determine were doing their best to survive in a peaceless world of few large and many small groups at a high level of physical insecurity? Many of them probably tried to settle for a while and were forced to move again by circumstances beyond their control, by unfavourable conditions of one kind or another. The only difference between the small groups who happened to settle on what then became the Krobo mountain, and smaller groups that had tried to settle elsewhere, was that in the former case the strategies of survival proved successful. In spite of repeated attacks, the two groups who first decided to settle on that mountain although it was waterless, together with later arrivals, achieved continuity of survival at the same place generation after generation. Each generation was exposed to the risk of being extinguished or driven out by a stronger group. Each succeeded. As the group became stronger and larger, and also internally more appropriately organised, the risk diminished. It did not disappear. It has not disappeared today anywhere on this earth. There are two ways in which one can look at the development of survival units such as a tribe or a state. I am not going to discuss here the theoretical significance of this difference. Readers may like to form their own judgement, but I can perhaps say that of the two ways of perceiving social data to which I refer, one is traditionally called historical. The other is figurational or sociological. The first pays attention above all to the individual case whether it is the individual case of a specific person or a specific group of persons. That is the normal way of writing what is called history. Whether it is American, Russian or Krobo history, attention is focused on the fortunes of an individual society. Other societies may be and almost invariably are of course mentioned. But they do not serve as a conscious frame of reference as the story unfolds itself. But it is quite possible to do that. One can for instance use as frame of reference the whole field of groups to which the Krobo belong. One can say that it was a field which was formed by a small number of larger and a large number of smaller groups struggling for survival. Some of them succeeded. Others were dispersed or disintegrated from within. Perhaps the human debris formed together with others a new group. Processes of integration and disintegration of this kind went on all the time in the field from which the Krobo ancestors emerged as Krobo. It was a highly unstable and volatile field. But if one omits to evoke its image, one misses an essential aspect of the tribe-formation processes which went on here in general and, in particular, of the formation of the Krobo tribe. It is only if one keeps in mind the whole figuration within which the Krobo emerged as a self-ruling group that one can represent groups which did

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not survive as an essential element of the figuration. Only then can one correct the one-sided selectivity of the historical aspect in favour of the survivors. As a rule, one only has sufficient data to write a history and also one thinks it is worthwhile to do that in the case of those who emerged from the struggle as long-term survivors. But it is very necessary to say that explicitly. The tribe-formation process of the Krobo gains a different dimension if one is made aware of the fact that the group we know as Krobo was at the outset one of a great number of such groups struggling for survival, one of the few who succeeded in surviving as a self-ruling unit over a fairly long period of time. Perhaps I can illuminate the point by adding two examples from the fortunes of other Adangbe tribes. In both cases Azu’s Adangbe History is the source. According to Azu, another Adangbe tribe called Osu was for a time just as restless as the Krobo ancestors.5 They settled first somewhere near the Krobo mountain, then went to a mountain of their own and, perhaps somewhere in the neighbourhood, built a village of their own. According to Azu, a buffalo-hunter called Tungba on one of his hunting expeditions discovered the fortress which the Danes had built at the coast as strongpoint for their commercial activities and after the Danish king had called Christiansborg. He came back to his people and told them what he had seen: ‘One of the seven wonders of the world a city with high walls all around it.’ He suggested to his people that they could enjoy greater safety if they would settle near that fortress. If an attack was imminent, they could find refuge within the fortress’s walls. For the white men that lived there were friendly. The Osu followed his advice and their name, like the name Christiansborg, attached itself to their locality, which in course of time became an integral part of Accra, now the capital of Ghana. My second example refers to another Adangbe tribe, the La, which was not so lucky. The Las got involved in a war with some neighbouring tribes and were defeated. Their army was scattered, their hometown was threatened by an invasion. On the day following the battle, the allied armies of the victorious tribes threatened to take it. So, during the night, the La left their town with all the belongings they could carry. Apparently in desperation the La, as Azu reported, gave themselves up to a tribe who lived on another mountain range which probably meant that they lived in some kind of subjection to the dominant tribe, but also could count on their protection. They were given land by their new protectors

5 Noa

Akunor Aquae Azu, Adangbe (Adangme) History, trans. and ed. Enoch Azu, in The Gold Coast Review no. 2 (Accra: Government Printing Office, 1929), Chapter X.

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so that they could build their homes and grow their food, a standard gesture in such a situation, as showing the abundance of land in relation to the number of people to live here, probably paying some tribute from it to the owners. After some time, the La felt strong enough to declare a war of vengeance against the enemies who had defeated them. But before the battle they were left by their allies and it came to nothing. In a further adventure the La were once more dispersed and defeated. After some further unlucky adventures, they apparently sank lower in the status hierarchy of the tribes in their region. They were good farmers, but apparently lived in some kind of subjection. Azu, summing up what corresponded to our ‘national characteristics’, the tribal character of the La, wrote of them: ‘They were known to be meek and humble, yet very cunning.’ Evidently at this stage distinguishing tribal characteristics were no less pronounced than national characteristics are at the present stage, and, in this case, the tribal characteristics match very well with what is known about the history of this tribe. It is fortunate that we possess Azu’s Adangbe History6 and a few other sources which enable us to perceive at least aspects of a tribe formation process. Tradition has accustomed us to the notion that a tribe is a tribe is a tribe. Its customs, its rituals, its social organisation and the form of its self-rule thus appears as essentially always the same. The question of how to explain the differential attitudes of one tribal unit compared with others is swept under the carpet. Traditional anthropologists like traditional sociologists are satisfied with descriptive accounts of a tribe or a nation as it presently is. But in order to explain differences between tribes as between nations, one has to build up models of the different fortunes, of the different ways in which they have become, largely unplanned, what they are at the present time. The reconstruction of the process of becoming is the main road to the discovery the reasons why they have become what they at present are. The reconstruction of the process of becoming, in other words, has an explanatory function.

6 I

need hardly say that the Adangbe History is only selectively usable as a source of information for anthropological or sociological research. Much of what he reports about his father, Odonkor Azu, and particularly his stories about King Odonkor Azu’s elevation to the position of king, and his relationship with the Danish governor has the aura of one of the cheaper ethical or religious tracts of Azu’s time. It is very evident that his wish to transmit to the younger generation as much as possible of the people’s traditional history, which he had stored in his unusually receptive memory, vied with the equally strong wish to hand on as much praise-gossip as possible about the Djebian subgroup of the Krobo people, of his father king Odonkor and of those branches of Odonkor’s large family with which Noa Azu identified.

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Also, it is the only way in which later generations can reconstitute for their own understanding the manner of living and of experience of a group at a different stage, which may well be very different from their own and alien to oneself. Nevertheless, it may well be an antecedent condition of one’s own mode of existence and thus indispensable for a full understanding and explanation of that mode. If one reads Azu’s history with some detachment and has been able clearly to establish for one’s own understanding the ideological perspective implicit in his presentation of the oral tradition of his group, one becomes soon aware that a good deal of it represents the oral tradition of a priestly group and already in that sense is sociologically relevant.

Fission and Fusion: The Next Stage of Tribe Formation Norbert Elias

I The Fission and Fusion of Groups Provisionally I can say that without doubt priests played a central part in the earlier phases of the tribe and state formation process of the Krobo. Here I will give an account of some aspects of this process itself, of the process in the course of which the Krobo became a more or less unified people. In fact, the Krobo development and the evidence available for it enables us to see, more clearly than is possible in many other cases, a condition of early state societies which the traditional process-reducing approach of anthropologists can easily obscure. Just as states are not simply there as social formations which exist once and for all in the same manner, but instead form themselves over time and can therefore be adequately studied only as processes, so tribes are not simply there as social formations which exist once and for all in the same manner. The case of the Krobo is a striking example because our evidence still allows us to see why and in what manner people often of different stock, with different customs and languages, joined each other, merged with a core group to which they became assimilated but which itself, to some extent, changed in the course of this process.

This chapter contains the second part of the manuscript archived under the number 802 (from the page Krobo 16 onwards), A Tribe on the Move: Outline of an early state formation process, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. The manuscript was dictated in 1987. Sub-headings have been added by the editors. This manuscript was mainly edited by Arjan Post. -eds. N. Elias (*)  Wiesbaden, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_6

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There can be no doubt that priests and the assimilation of the cults, the rituals and beliefs of the core group played a significant part in the tribe formation and the early state-formation process of the Krobo. Let me say at once that it is by no means very clear who the core group actually was before they assumed the name of Krobo. But we have some information about the gods which they brought with them from the Lolovor [previously Lolover] hills and thus of the priests who were the guardians of the gods, of their rites and festivals. There can be no doubt that these rites and ceremonies and thus the priests and priestesses who, generation after generation, acted as the guardians of these traditions, played a central part in a process which integrated the Krobo, but which also allowed initially quite often disparate groups of people in the course of time and in spite of many remaining differences to identify themselves as Krobo. The discovery of a location which promised greater physical safety and the settling down process endowed the fortunes of the human group or groups, who had decided to make this mountain their home with a far greater steadiness and continuity over the generations than they had before in their nomadic life. The overwhelming impression which one gains from Noa Akunor Azu’s description in Adangbe History1 of the latter [the nomadic phase] is that of the fluidity of groups. It is difficult to handle this characteristic of the nomadic groups conceptually, because of our way of thinking and particularly [our way] of identifying human groups by means of names which suggest intergenerational continuity of the human stock, its collective memories and tradition over the centuries. The figurational characteristics of the wandering groups of which some traces are preserved in Azu’s rendering of his people’s oral tradition are different. Repeatedly, we hear of groups leaving or joining the migrant core group, and it is difficult to know exactly who forms the core group of the ancestral group. We have no other name for them than that of ‘Krobo’. and this we know the nameless people adopted only later when they stopped their wanderings and settled down on their mountain. Again and again, as Azu reports it, we hear of people left behind when the main group—and it is an assumption that it was the main group—marches on. We hear of people settled in a village or a town whom the ancestral group defeated and then compelled to join them in their wanderings. Fusion and fission of groups seems to be easier at this nomadic stage, whatever its reasons, than our customary vision is able to accommodate.

1 Noa

Akunor Aguae Azu, Andangbe (Adangme) History, arranged and translated by Enoch Azu (Accra/Gold Coast: Government Printing Office, 1929).

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Perhaps sociologists should take note of this greater group fluidity as one of the characteristics of an earlier stage of development. All the more so because, given the reversibility of social development, it can also return again. I have said before that Azu’s report, unreliable as it may be in the historians’ perspective, offers some relevant and reliable evidence of a human condition for which written sources are relatively rare. This is one example. The question is who formed the integrating core at a stage where physical violence is always around the corner and forms of group integration and disintegration a much more normal property of human groups. I have already suggested before that among those who have a high integrating function at a stage of development above that of kin-groups, priests and war leaders play a particularly prominent part. In that respect Azu’s report appears to me particularly valuable, because it preserves for us elements of the oral tradition of priests rather than of warriors. It has been written very clearly with the intention to establish the fact that Azu’s own village or subgroup of the Krobo people can claim priority of status among the various subgroups of the Krobo. He leaves no doubt about the fact that Akro Muase, the eponymous hero of the Krobo, was the forefather of the Djebian subtribe and that the competing subtribe, the Manya, who also claimed seniority of status among the Krobo people, was only descended from Akro’s nephew, whose group came a few years later to the mountain. But he also leaves no doubt that priests of the god Na or Nadu were the main upholders of Djebian tradition and pride. Azu quotes a praise song which the priest always is required to say before prayer with lines such as: We ever strove ahead! We Djebian alone we have heroic songs. […] Your fathers’ famous history will leave Its strength for Generations. For you the Worshippers of ‘Na’ Our glory-founded house, Knows men of bravery. Lo! Food and drink abundantly, Prominent as well as less prominent things.2

Azu did not fail to note down that the people of Akro Muase, who was also called Akro Natesi, were themselves called ‘Nams’, namely people who worship the god Na, and does not fail to add that Idsowi Na means ‘I have the power’. One

2 Azu,

Andangbe (Adangme) History, p. 10.

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can also get a glimpse of the underlying rivalry between priests and war leaders from a little story which Azu thought worthwhile preserving. It concerns a group of kinsmen which initially belonged to the nameless ancestral group. Led by their war leader they refused to join those who decided to settle on the mountain, and later built a town of their own where they were apparently again and again involved in wars. His people, as Azu reports, got tired of war. They therefore cut off their war leader’s right hand because they said he was too fond of war, whereupon he cursed his wicked and ungrateful people, reminding them of the victories he had gained on their behalf with his right arm. It looks like a standard argument which priests used in their contest with warriors. We have no clear information about the size of the population in the period of the early settlement of the mountain. There is good reason to believe that the number of the original settlers was not very great. They were at any rate not large enough for an effective defence of the mountain against enemies. In this world the survival chances of a group were to a considerable extent dependent on the size of the fighting population in the case of attack. Human beings were valuable. Already during the migration period, the ancestral group of the Krobos, as we learn, forced another group to join them. A curious institution of the Krobo reflects this notion. The fact that the Krobo mountain offered its inhabitants a far greater physical security than that available to the groups roaming about in the plain found its expression in the recurrent appearance of struggling groups of people who asked to be admitted to the relative safety of the mountain. For the resident population of the Krobo, these demands represented a dilemma. They were very conscious of the dangers inherent in the fact that in case of emergency, a relatively small group had to defend a large mountain however much they were aided in their defence by its rocky nature and the difficult access. Thus, in principle, it was to their advantage to admit strangers to their mountain home and to allow them to settle there, provided one could be sure that they were willing to help in its defence. The problem was not so very different from that facing the Australians or the Americans. But there was always the danger that once admitted a foreign group would multiply and gain the supremacy over the older group. The Krobo had developed as Azu reports a rather subtle institutionalised policy to cope with this dilemma. Azu devotes a chapter to this problem; one could easily sum it up in our words. There are some rocks on this mountain on which sentinels are placed to inform the approach of an enemy or any passer-by. At the approach of an enemy the sentinel would see. Then the priests would be informed and consulted in reference to the steps to be taken. Sometimes they would send some hunters or scouts to detect them; at others they would wait to ascertain the strangers’

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purpose; and again, at other times, they would attack them at once with a special fighting force. The description as one may realise provides one graphic example of the fact that priests at this stage of the development of Krobo society had not only religious functions, but they also had ruling functions. They are first informed and they help to decide what attitude to adopt. In order to decide whether the strangers were suitable for admission to the Krobo community, the following procedures were adopted. The elders of the priests would meet them down the mountain and ask them, firstly, the cause of their leaving home. Secondly, whether some people were following them. They would not be allowed to drink water until they had confessed everything. If the elders were satisfied with the confession, then the strangers were given some water to drink. They were then presented with the conditions on which they could be received as inhabitants of the mountain. As examples, I mention the following: You are to be circumcised; You are to speak Adangbe only; Your daughters must undergo the Dipo custom3; You are not to send a messenger anywhere without permission; You are to call your children with Krobo names. What one encounters here is a clear policy of assimilation of the strangers to the core group. There is a very strong tendency to regard survival units, whether tribes, cities or nations, as eternally set in a specific mould. The question of how they have formed themselves, the formation process and as part of it the integration of smaller units, all these are widely neglected and yet they are central to an understanding of tribes and nations alike. In the case of the Krobo, the policy of planned integration was met with considerable success. Azu provides us with an enumeration of the very disparate groups which became integrated. It is fortunate that we possess Azu’s Adangbe History and a few other sources which enable us to perceive at least some aspects of a tribe-formation process.4

3 -

ern region of Ghana. For girls still virgins, it ushers in their puberty; for women who participate, it signifies they are in the age to be married. Priestesses play a crucial role in the ritual as well as testing a girl’s chastity.—eds. 4 I need hardly say that the Adangbe History is only selectively usable as a source of information for anthropological or sociological research. Much of what Azu reports about his father Odonkor Azu, and particularly his stories about King Odonkor Azu’s elevation to the position of king, and his relationship with the Danish governor, has the aura of one of the cheaper ethical or religious tracts of Azu’s time. It is very evident that his wish to transmit to the younger generation as much as possible of his people’s traditional history, which he had stored in his unusually retentive memory, vied with the equally strong wish to hand on as much praise-gossip as possible about the Djebian sub-group of the Krobo people, of his

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Tradition has accustomed us to the notion that a tribe is a tribe is a tribe. Its customs, its rituals, its social organisation and the form of its self-rule thus appears as essentially always the same. The question of how to explain the differential attitudes of one tribal unit compared with others is swept under the carpet. Traditional anthropologists, like traditional sociologists, are satisfied with descriptive accounts of a tribe or a nation as it presently is. But in order to explain differences between tribes as between nations one has to build up models of the different fortunes, of the different ways in which they have become, largely unplanned, what they are at the present time. The reconstruction of the process of becoming is the main road to the discovery of the reasons why they have become what they at present are. The reconstruction of the process of becoming, in other words, has an explanatory function. Also, it is the only way in which later generations can reconstitute for their own understanding the manner of living and of experience of a group at a different stage—which may be very different from their own, and alien to them. Nevertheless, it may well be an antecedent condition of their own mode of existence and thus indispensable for a full understanding and explanation of that mode. If one reads Azu’s history with some detachment and has been able clearly to establish for one’s own understanding the ideological perspective implicit in his presentation of the oral tradition of his group, one becomes soon aware that a good deal of it represents the oral tradition of a priestly group and already in that sense it is sociologically relevant and informative. It is a vivid scene he evokes through his account of the way in which the Krobo dealt with the problem of immigration, of people who ask for a refuge from the ever-present dangers which struggling human groups had to face in the open plain, where they were continuously exposed to attacks by slave hunters, robbers and other hostile groups. It is remarkable that the people who were the first to settle on the mountain, whose configuration promised greater protection from hostile groups, developed as a result of specific experiences a very precise and largely effective policy of assimilation and integration of groups requesting admission to the mountain refuge. One has the impression that this policy represented a more deliberate planning of the

father King Odonkor and of those branches of Odonkor’s large family with which Noa Azu identified.—NE [On Elias’s concept of ‘praise-gossip’, and its ‘blame-gossip’ counterpart, see Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson in their The Established and the Outsiders (2008 [1965]), chapter 7, ‘Observations on gossip’, pp. 122–36.—eds.].

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assimilation of immigrants than that which one encounters in contemporary state societies at a later stage of development which are also confronted with a need to absorb and to assimilate immigrant groups. It may be enough to mention as examples some of the institutionalised conditions which the resident groups imposed on alien groups at the foot of the mountain asking for asylum. They had devised a clear and effective ritual for such occasions. The newcomers would be closely questioned by the Krobo representatives about the circumstances which brought them to the Krobo mountain. A jug of water was placed in the middle of the assembly at the foot of the mountain that the newcomers were not allowed to drink before they had answered all the questions and accepted the traditional conditions for admission to the mountain home of the Krobo. These conditions were that the newcomers were to be circumcised. That they were to speak the Krobo language only. Their daughters had to undergo the lengthy initiation training for girls supervised by priestesses, which was one of the distinguishing customs of the Krobo. These conditions, as one may see, had clearly two aims. They were designed to ensure that the Krobo did not become embroiled in a war or in the brawl of the newcomers with their enemies or pursuers. They were designed, secondly, to ensure a speedy assimilation of the immigrants to the resident group—in short, to a change in their identity. One cannot help thinking that the Krobo tried to tackle the problems inherent in the integration of outsider groups with greater awareness and deliberation than many contemporary nation states. In the long run, they may well have contributed to the emergence of a fairly unitary Krobo state. In the short run, as one would expect and as Azu himself reports, many difficulties arose. Azu tells the story that one of the immigrant groups performed a kind of dance that Krobo women found extremely attractive. Some of them even left their husbands for the sake of the newcomers. Moreover, in spite of an ongoing process of assimilation and integration, the differences between the older and the newer groups did not entirely disappear. Azu himself refers to this fact. He indicates that the ruling groups explicitly prohibited references to the different origins of Krobo groups perhaps with some stigmatising undertones. In a rather moving passage, he explains why such prejudices were invidious and also dangerous. For once he addresses his potential readers directly. It was evidently for the younger generations of his people when he took the trouble of recording in a written form the secret oral tradition of his people’s history and songs as transmitted orally from generation to generation by the priests and priestesses of his tribe’s main god. Again, one is struck by the clear-sightedness and deliberation with which the leaders of the Krobo tackled the problems of their people’s security and integration.

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They tried to suppress divisive and stigmatising allusions to the fact that some of the subgroups which made up the Krobo people were the descendants of groups who came later to the mountain than the earlier groups, who in the course of time became the model-setting core groups of the Krobo people. [It is also easy to see] the motives which induced the leaders of the Krobo people to pursue systematically a policy of integration and assimilation. In terms of numbers, the human groups which settled first on the mountain must have been very small. It would be in vain to suggest numbers; we just do not know. It is perhaps no longer quite clear that under the condition of physical insecurity in which the Krobo and other groups lived at the time of their migration, and also their early settlement on their mountain, the number of people of the group had a decisive influence on their chances of survival. The earliest Adangbe groups who settled on what, thanks to them, became known as the Krobo mountain evidently felt themselves that they were not large enough for an effective defence of the mountain. Hence it became their established policy to admit others to the mountain so as to increase the number of its defenders. But to admit others to the mountain entailed serious dangers. Might the immigrants not try in the course of time to dominate over the original inhabitants? Would they not try to ensure for their own language and customs to gain dominance over those of the older groups who resided at the mountain? The conditions imposed upon newcomers were designed to prevent such a possibility. As far as one can see they ensured the gradual integration of the newcomers with the earlier residents, with the Krobo people.

II Violence Control and the Survival Function of Early States The processes of integration and assimilation which one encounters here are not only of great interest as empirical data, as historical information, as an episode in the life of a specific African tribe. They also have a specific sociological, and that means theoretical, significance. I shall confine myself here to two of their implications which have some theoretical significance. The first concerns the part played by the quest for physical security in the organisation and development of human societies. In present sociological theories of society, the quest for physical security is largely neglected. The quest for food or economic condition under which people live as a rule overshadows and often obscures the problems of violence and violence control as a primary constituent of the development and

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structure of human societies.5 That is understandable, for compared with previous ages and thus with earlier state societies, the organisation of violence control within contemporary state societies is so effective that a non-violent life has widely come to be regarded as the normal mode of life, and because it appears ‘normal’ one need not ask how a condition of violence control has come about or under which conditions it can be maintained. What seems to be needed are explanations about the conditions of a fairly effective violence control under which the emergence of the use of violence is regarded as abnormal. However, this approach reverses the observable sequence in the development of human societies. One could easily consider it as a caricature. Azu’s account of the history of his people can act as a reminder of the fact that a condition in which human groups, like animals in the wild, were in constant danger of being attacked, killed or subdued by other human groups was the primary or the normal condition of human life. The great problem is how and why in the course of time forms of violence control emerged and asserted themselves. Of course, some forms of violence control among wandering groups may have emerged very early. But these groups were small, and effective violence control of relations between groups emerged only very gradually. It is only too evident that institutionalised violence control in [modern] interstate relations has advanced beyond the condition of inter-state warfare between earlier state societies. Early […] warfare was a more permanent condition of states, while it has become more intermittent in the relations of most later-stage societies of the twentieth century. Moreover, expressions such as ‘violence’ and ‘violence control’ do not fully convey the full weight of the manners to which human beings were exposed in the early days when they lived as it were in the ‘wild’. In that respect, one small piece of information contained in the Adangbe History is particularly illuminating. Azu reports that the ruler of a particular region which the ancestral group wished to pass in their wanderings demanded seven people from the ancestral group as a price for his permission to pass through his territory. Expressions such as ‘selling into slavery’, indeed the very term ‘slavery’ itself, can make us forget that the use of human beings as a means of exchange and thus also as a property of other persons was in the earlier days a normal condition of the social life of human beings. We are used to regarding gold, ivory

5   10,

Restraint.—eds.

The Formation of States and Changes in

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or jewels as marketable goods whose value rises in conjunction with their rarity. Under conditions such as those under which the ancestral group of the Krobos lived, and indeed throughout the earlier phases of the development of humanity, human beings too had what one might call a commercial value. The forefathers of the Krobo probably had no other possession which they could hand over as price for an unimpeded passage to someone else’s territory some members of their own group. They themselves suffered a loss by handing over some of their members to another group. Azu’s account gives a very vivid impression of the fact that first the migrating ancestral group, and then the early Krobo settled on their mountain, were very conscious of the fact that they were a relatively small group and that a small group was particularly vulnerable under the conditions in which they lived. However strong and skilful their members were as warriors, and however powerful were the gods and the magic of their priests, if they encountered a larger warrior group in their migrations, they were doomed. In that setting large size of a group meant strength, small size weakness. That was the main reason why small groups of variant kinds came to the foot of the mountain asking to be admitted to the place of refuge and it was the main reason why the Krobo admitted some of them, provided they became Krobo and as loyal defenders of their mountain home increased the Krobo military strength. The evidence before us thus provides information about a process, about which evidence is rare and which, one may think, has received less attention than it deserves, the process of tribe formation. It is difficult to overlook that the traditional image of the social formation of a tribe as presented by anthropologists bears some similarity with that of a nation state. Members of the latter are inclined to regard their nation as a social unit which has been destined from time immemorial to exist on its present territory within its present frontiers as a selfruling unit with its own language and its distinct national characteristics. The concept of a tribe is usually constructed on the same lines. Thus it is useful to get, as in the case of the Krobo people, at least a glimpse of the process in the course of which first a tribe and then a small state emerges under specific conditions as a unitary survival unit from a variety of disparate social units with different cultural traditions and mostly of different stock. [The ethnologist Hugo] Huber, who has published what is so far probably the most extensive study of the Krobo based on a six year long stay in their country, sums up the present knowledge in the following manner: From the different records and from other contemporary sources of oral tradition it appears, that the present day Krobo are descendants of various groups of people and perhaps also of individuals, who at different times and from different places arrived to live or seek refuge on the Mountain. Though they all united under one rule and

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one language, and though they had to adhere to the customary rituals of the first settlers, new shrines and new forms of worship were not only tolerated, but partly even welcomed.6

So far hardly any clues have come to light which would allow us to associate the process in the course of which the founding groups became the core group of the integration, with a specific time scale. According to one report, one of the refugee groups which were allowed to settle on the Krobo mountain were remnants of a people (Denkwera) whom the Ashante defeated and dispersed about 1700. If that report is correct, the settlement and the tribe formation process on the Krobo mountain goes at least back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But in this context the process as such is of interest. One may be tempted to conclude that it was the geographical formation of the mountain that was the cause of the formation of the Krobo tribe and can serve as explanation. But this form of geographical determinism is based on a misunderstanding. It was not the mountain as such that induced people to settle there. No one lives there now. It was the social function which a medium sized mountain had for human beings at a specific stage of social development which induced them to settle there—the survival function. Under conditions in which the relative physical strength and so also the numerical strength of a group was of primary importance for its survival. The physical protection against attacks, especially against surprise attacks, which the steep and rock mountain provided, enhanced the survival chances of its inhabitants, especially of relatively small groups. It is in that respect that the doctrine which diagnoses to food resources, and in a wider sense the means of economic production, alone as the root source of group survival and which classifies other conditions of survival as a superstructure reducible to specific economic conditions is particularly at fault. Throughout the whole development of humanity, the condition of physical security played as great a part in the survival of human groups as food and drink or as the means of production. To be sure, the Krobo could not have survived if the soil at the foot of their mountain, made fruitful through their labour, would not have provided them year after year with sufficient food. But in a field of endemic violence, the continuity of their survival as a group like that of other groups in the neighbourhood was ensured by the protective propensity of their mountain fortress. To put it more clearly, there is not one basic sphere of social development which determines all others. There are several, of which the organisation of physical security is one.

6 Hugo

Huber, The Krobo: Traditional Social and Religious Life of a West African People (St Augustin: Anthropos Institute, 1973), pp. 17–18.

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The tribe-formation process of the Krobo offers a telling example of the fact that the prevailing tendency to treat the various conditions of survival of human groups under names such as political, economic, cognitive and others as if they existed in separation and as if one of them were superior in importance to all others represents a gross misorientation in theory and in practice. I have mentioned before other cases in which a security giving hilltop settlement played as great a part in the survival of groups as arable land and the continuity of knowledge transmission over the generations. The example of the Krobo shows very graphically how these three basic conditions continually interact and, interacting, make the survival or, under favourable conditions growth, of a people possible. The Krobo preserved in their songs very vividly the memory of their own growth as a people. This is the text of one of their Klama songs: Akro’s children come and see Peoples of the world: The nest of the tsutfwi bird Has become an eagle’s eyrie!7

The growth process of a people, too, is often understood in terms of the available food supply only. But in the case of the early Kobo the extension of the arable land, the clearing of the bush and later of forest land, probably presented less difficult problems than the increase of the people’s defensive and, inevitably, than its offensive capacity. That was the condition not only of a people’s continued survival and the continuity of knowledge transmission but also of the protection of the food giving land and its harvest from invasions by hostile groups and of the possibility to bring in the harvest from the country around the mountain without threat and molestation from hostile groups. It also depended on the establishment and the maintenance of a relatively peaceful order among the settlers on the mountain themselves, and on the transmission of knowledge of rules safeguarding international order and effective sanctions against offenders. The process of integration and growth which the Krobo people underwent, like other integration and growth processes of this kind, is largely hidden from our view because it took place in the period we call prehistory. People’s experiences in that period were not committed to writing, but they were to some extent preserved by the people’s oral tradition and especially in the songs of a people. In

7 Huber,

Krobo, p. 270.

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the case of the Krobo, Azu and his son Enoch have been instrumental in committing this heritage to writing. Hugo Huber in his book The Krobo has presented the fruits of six years’ research among them. The fact that most tribe-formation processes took place in so-called prehistoric times need not induce us to pretend that these processes did not exist. Though our evidence is fragmentary, it is enough for us to draw testable models of such a process. In the case of the Krobo two of their subgroups, the subtribe of the Djebian and of the Manya, claim priority. It is possible that the ancestors of these two subtribes of the Krobo people discovered the mountain simultaneously or one after another within a short interval of time. Both were then relatively small groups. One has no means of knowing whether they consisted of 50, 100 or more. Settling on the mountain they had to take a decision. They could either fight each other for possession of the mountain or join hands in defending the mountain against intruders. Evidently, they opted for common defence and agreed on certain rules about the common defence, about their gods and their conduct towards each other. Their dilemma was, as one can infer, that even if they joined hands, they were numerically still far too weak for an effective defence of their mountain against a larger army. At that stage of development—and to some extent still in ours—the number of people who formed a survival unit was an important element of its military potential. The smaller a group, the weaker it was in the struggle for survival. Practical necessity induced them to welcome the increase in numbers and thus the greater military potential they could expect from allowing other groups to settle in their midst. But the admission of newcomers always entailed a risk. They could try to gain dominance over the older, original settlers; they could disturb the accepted order and peace. They could even try to drive the original settlers away. The latter, therefore, had to adopt a very carefully thought-out policy in welcoming strangers and thus increasing their own military potential and thus improving their own safety and their chances of survival. I have outlined this policy before. They ruthlessly attacked strangers who sought admission to the mountain if they regarded them as dangerous for themselves. They admitted strugglers and refugees provided they were willing to give up their own separate group identity and to assume Krobo identity.

III Integration Under the Rule of Priests It is interesting to observe that among the conditions for admission to the mountain was not that of giving up their gods or their religious beliefs. The conditions were centred largely on practices of relevance for people’s group identity.

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The social function of circumcision, [according to the Dipo custom],8 has puzzled many people. In this context one can see very clearly that, like tribal marks, one of the main functions of circumcision was that of an indelible sign of group identity. As such, it became deeply rooted in the personality structure of the individual. We hear of a high Krobo priest who was preceded by an assistant when he had to walk on a road where he was likely to encounter strangers. The assistant had to warn him of the approach of an uncircumcised person so that he could turn his back to the road in order not to see the offensive sight. For centuries, Akan-speaking groups such as the Akim settled on another mountain range, and the feared Ashanti warriors were the archenemies of the Krobo. They did not practice circumcision. Thus in Krobo society a circumcised male meant a friend, an uncircumcised person an enemy. As one can see, circumcision had a strongly socialising function. It bound a person firmly to his group. It originated in a time and perhaps also in regions where it was not normal to conceal the lower parts of one’s body, when people in that sense went naked. Circumcision was therefore one of the main rituals of initiation. According to Azu, people from the east who were already circumcised were treated with greater friendliness than those from the North-West, mostly Akanspeaking people who were not circumcised and who, if they were admitted by a delegation of Krobo priests, had to submit to circumcision at the foot of the mountain. Another main postulate for the admission of strangers was the submission of young unmarried girls to the Dipo customs. They too represented a very intense form of socialisation and integration into the Krobo community. For more than a year, young unmarried girls were trained in all the skills and duties expected of Krobo wives under the supervision of the priestesses. Some of the other demands on which the admission of strangers depended were the exclusive use of the Krobo language and the use of Krobo names. It was a very effective, very clearly thought-out programme of assimilation and integration of strangers. It was one of the many symptoms of the practical wisdom of the ruling group of the Krobo. They welcomed strangers seeking asylum from the uncertainties of a wandering group in the plain, but they had to make sure that these strangers once admitted did not become a divisive and disturbing element in their midst, that they would really become Krobo, fight and stand together with the older sections of the Krobos in the incessant wars and never-ending feuds.

8 See

note 3 in this chapter above.—eds.

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The main upholders of these rules of socialisation and so of the building of the Krobo nation were the priests, and particular the priests of the senior subgroup of the Krobo people. It has not yet been stated with sufficient emphasis that not only in the case of the Krobos but also in that of many other tribal groups. Priests usually were for a time the tribe’s real rulers. They were for a time a kind of Krobo aristocracy in close alliance with the clan elders. It was partly an hereditary aristocracy. Possession by a god who declared the possessed person as the chosen priest could under certain conditions break through the established order of the priestly aristocracy. The Krobo had a name for this aristocracy. They called them Dzemeli. Their council combined in its hand most of the ruling functions concerning the whole tribe. They were distinguished from other people by their special white dress—white being the colour of blessing with magical undertones. According to Azu, they decided whether or not strangers asking asylum should be admitted. They saw to it that the rituals were observed in the traditional manner. They took political decisions about relations with neighbouring tribes. If they could not agree among themselves, they went and submitted their case to an old lady, the chief priestess of one of the main deities. They played a special role in the great festivals such as the sowing and harvest festivals or the spectacular festivals of the war god Nadu, the best of them excelled in their dancing performance. Chinua Achebe in Arrow of God9 has a very vivid description of the dancing performance at the festival of the pumpkin leaves. Above all they had judicial functions. They sat in judgement over the disturbers of public order and also about murderers. One of them, the Okumo priest, who specialised in such cases and famous as the main executioner in murder cases when [someone was] condemned to death. When condemned, [the person] was solemnly touched by the priest with his killing staff, and was then put to death by him. [The priests] derived their income to a considerable extent from the large fine they could impose on people who had been convicted of a serious misbehaviour. They derived their power from their special relationship to their gods. They were feared because of their magical powers. There is a Klama song which says: Okumo is coming on the way With his killing staff Run quick!

9 Chinua Achebe,

Arrow of God (New York: Anchor, 1989 [orig. 1964]).

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Their special relationship to their gods was often understood as a kind of marriage relationship. There is a Klama song which contains a warning to another god: ‘Do not take possession of me, because I am married to my god.’ Documents such as this are of interest far beyond the development of the Krobo. We know that in ancient Sumer, too, integration of an early state-like group under the rule of priests preceded integration under the rule of war leaders or kings. An analogous development took place among the Krobo. It is only by using all available resources from antiquity as well as from recent ages [that we can] gain a better understanding of sequences of events such as that which put the integrating and ruling functions into the hands of priests. The conception of a mystical marriage relationship between a god and priest may help towards a better understanding of the fact that in ancient Sumer goddesses had male priests and gods female priestesses. … The power resources of priests in the earlier phases of a tribe-formation process expressed vividly the immense urgency and strength of the need to know, in the great uncertainty in which they lived, what were the intentions of the invisible powers which brought blessings as well as misfortunes and suffering. One might say that the power level of priests corresponds to the overall level of danger and insecurity of the group over which they rule. However, in Krobo land as in other societies at the same level of development, the supremacy of the priests was never entirely undisputed. The struggle for survival not only in terms of food resources, but also in terms of encounters and possibly hostile encounters with other human groups, demanded skills and above all leadership skills, which were not identical with the special skills of priests—with those whose special gift it was to commune with the spirit world—although it was not impossible that one and the same person mastered both types of skills at the same time. In earlier state societies [this entails], in other words, two types of social needs. [First] the need to survive victoriously the struggles with other human groups or, for that matter, with dangerous non-human animals; and, [second], the need to survive as a group all the other dangers and misfortunes which could befall human groups for no immediately intelligible reasons and thus usually ascribed by them to unseen powers, to the actions of more or less powerful spirits or gods. The intensity and urgency of these two types of needs in earlier stage societies found its expression in the fact that persons capable of catering for these two sets of needs were usually able to combine the performance of these two functions, the functions as war-leaders and in earlier days also as leaders in the hunting of big game, and the function as priests usually combined these two types of specialised functions with the more general function as leaders of their group.

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War leaders and high priests in a great variety of combinations usually performed the highest ruling functions all-round in these societies. The fact that the nature of earlier state societies entailed two sets of functions which endowed their practitioners with an exceptionally high power potential resulted in a great variety of constellations. There were societies in which priests and warriors divided the ruling functions among themselves relatively peacefully. There were others where traditionally people with the functions of a war leader or with functions derived from them traditionally combined these functions with those of high priests. But almost everywhere one encounters in the societies signs of an open or a hidden tug-of-war, a competition between the ancient elite cadres for the access to and the possession of the overall ruling functions of their societies. It was the study of the tribe- and state-formation process of the Krobo which first put me on the track leading to the discovery of the near-universal character of this primeval struggle between priests and warriors for a more or less monopolistic possession of the ruling functions. Many people have observed in the case of specific societies that one or other of these two groups performed ruling functions or that there was a changeover in the possession of ruling functions from war leaders to high priests or vice versa, to paramount chiefs and kings. Thus it has long been noticed that, in the case of Sumer and many other Mesopotamian states, the masters of the temple and the masters of the palace—priests and kings—to some extent played a leading part in these societies. One has also noticed that in all probability the earliest urban settlements were built around the temple and headed by priests, and that in course of time war leaders—or in our language, kings—gained precedence and access to power chances in relation to priests. A very similar changeover can be observed in the case of the tribe- and stateformation process of the Krobo. As I said, it put me early on the track of the basic problem. Huber in his book The Krobo also noticed this fact. He referred to it in a manner not uncharacteristic for those who are concerned with a development of one society only and on the whole unaware of the more universal character of the problem. Thus he describes the change in the balance of power between priests and warriors in the case of the Krobo people as if chieftaincy were a new institution introduced into Krobo society at some time perhaps from the Ashante or other Akan-speaking peoples to whom they were linked by a longlasting enmity. But this is a case where the problem raised by such a change in the balance of power between two ruling groups remains inexplicable if attention and knowledge are confined to one particular society and one is unaware of the fact that structurally identical or related problems can be observed also in many

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other societies. Indeed, the fact that a change in the balance of power between priests and warriors, in the course of which precedence moves from one set of social functionaries, the priests, to another, the paramount chiefs or kings, can be observed in ancient Sumer at the transition from prehistory to history. And many thousand years later again at the transition from prehistory to history in the stateformation process of the Krobo is a good example of the fact that some salient facts remain invisible as long as social scientists focus attention on only one society. It may be useful to say it explicitly that in my case the intensive occupation with the development of one society, the tribe-formation process of the Krobo, important as it is as such, is highly instructive at the same time because it sharpens attention for what can be relevant in the case of other tribe- and state-formation processes. Thus the tribe-formation process of the Krobo not only offers a telling example of the emergence of a unitary people first as a tribe and then as a state, through integration and assimilation from a variety of initially disparate groups. The awareness of this integration process raises also, once more, the question of who were the core groups whose customs and traditions provided the models for the assimilation of other groups. And who were leading groups who devised, controlled and, if necessary, enforced over a lengthy period the observance of this policy of assimilation? It seems most likely that the continuity of this immigration and integration policy was ensured and, if necessary, enforced by a body of high priests. The Krobo like most societies at the same pre-literate or pre-historic level had many gods and goddesses on a variety of levels. As the high plateau where they built their villages or towns was divided into two parts by a kind of valley, the Krobo people itself was divided into two parts: Manya-Krobo and Yilo-Krobo, each with about six subtribes. Each of which was in turn divided into a greater or smaller number of clans. Each subtribe also had its own gods. But some of them, as for instance the war god Nadu of the Djebian subtribe or Nana Kloveki of the Susui subtribe or perhaps more exactly their priests, had acquired what one might call ‘national’ significance for the whole Krobo people or at least for the whole Manya or Yilo section. There was a time when a council of priests, perhaps assisted by the clan elders, directed the fortunes of the Krobo tribe. Priests and priestesses were also the guardians and teachers of a subtribe’s secret oral tradition; they handed it on in a training period of many years to the young people who were chosen by a privileged clan who traditionally had this right, probably in consultation with the priests themselves as potential successors of the present holders of the priestly office, when the latter died or became too old to perform their duties adequately.

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IV Priests and Warriors as Competitors for Ruling Functions In the development of the Krobo people groups of priests thus not only performed, probably for several centuries, most of the ruling functions, they also acted as the main channel for the transmission from generation to generation of a fund of secret knowledge concerning their subtribe’s descent, its past fortunes, its gods and goddesses, its heroic deeds, its rituals and its blame gossip about other subtribes or about enemies. Azu’s record of the oral tradition of the Djebian subtribe differs in some respects markedly from an anonymous brief account of the origin of the Krobos and their customs evidently representing an abstract from the tradition of the Manya subtribe. Both reports agree that Akro-Muase was the discoverer of the mountain home of the Krobo, but Azu represents him as the ancestor of the Djebian while the anonymous report represents chief Madja as the man who required Akro to explore the mountain. When the latter lit a bonfire as the agreed sign that the mountain was suitable, chief Madja and his followers went there. Madja (later Manya) built four villages on the mountain. Thus he became king and head priest at the same time. This, in all likelihood, is the remnant of a non-priestly tradition. A chief, a war leader is represented as the actual discoverer of the Krobo mountain and the man who ordered its exploration and founded the first settlements there. There are other signs of the hidden struggle between priests and warriors in the Krobo past. According to Huber one of his Krobo informants remembered hearing of a society formed by big game hunters and warriors. The Krobo fought many wars. They even succeeded in warding off attacks against their mountain by the Ashante. It is most unlikely that they lacked war leaders who, openly or not, tried to loosen the hold which groups of priests appeared to have gained over many of the ruling functions of Krobo society. The Madja report is much more openly hostile towards foreign elements, the ‘ethnic minorities’ of Krobo society. There is no trace of Azu’s priestly tradition which warned Krobo people against mentioning other Krobos’ foreign descent, because after all it was the influx of foreigners transformed into Krobo who helped the whole tribe to withstand the repeated onslaught of its enemies. It is not unlikely, therefore, that it was the ruling council of priests, perhaps assisted by clan elders, who devised the policy of assimilation of selected foreign groups whose rules Azu records as condition for their admission to Krobo mountain. Two of the demands to which immigrants had to submit in order to be admitted to the mountain home of the Krobo were measures under the control of

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priests: the circumcision of all male immigrants and the obligation imposed on all parents to give their unmarried daughters for a year to those in charge of the lengthy initiation rites for maturing girls. Initiation rites in general have civilising functions, as well as the function of preparing youngsters for their entry into the community of adults. The pattern of civilising restraints instilled into young persons by means of initiation rites differs from society to society. But the function of fixating in the personality structure of a young person, the newcomer to adult societies—often with the help of strong pain and fear experiences—those rules and restraints that are regarded as indispensable for an orderly adult life are probably the same in all tribal societies. This is not the place to reflect upon the differences between [on the one hand] simpler societies, which leave the main task of building in an adult conscience to the age of adolescence and to initiation rites which often implant the rules and prohibitions of adult life with the help of a very strong shock experience and [on the other hand] a very long process of civilising the individual, of building up adult restraints, a process which may last twenty years or longer that has become customary in nation states at a later stage of development. What is perhaps of some importance in this context is the fact that two of the conditions for admission to the Krobo homeland are closely linked to the traditional Krobo initiation rites. Ritual circumcision plays a central part in the initiation ceremonies of male adolescents, [and] the dipo custom was imposed on all female adolescents. Submission to both these priest-controlled rituals which was a normal condition for the entry of Krobo youngsters into Krobo adult society was also imposed upon foreigners as a condition for their admission to Krobo society. In this as in many other cases, priests and priest-controlled rituals and ceremonies formed an integral part of Krobo social life. The concepts with which we refer to this fact are often misleading, because priests during a lengthy period held ruling functions and played a central part in Krobo society. We may be inclined to say that religion played a central part in Krobo society. However, as this word is commonly used today, religion refers above all to specific beliefs in gods. In that respect it is instructive and illuminating that the Krobo made no demands on immigrants with regard to their religious beliefs. Nor were the foreign groups who were seeking refuge on the mountain asked to leave their gods behind, or as we might say, their religion. In all likelihood most of the Eve- or Akan-speaking groups who were admitted to the mountain brought with them some of their traditional gods or goddesses. In that respect polytheistic societies are usually much more tolerant than monotheistic societies. The Krobo priests and probably the Krobo people were not concerned with the immigrants’ religious beliefs, but with what later-stage societies call their national sentiment and identity. They might continue to worship their own traditional gods

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but they should also accept the rites, customs and above all the tribal festivals associated with the Krobo gods. It was one of the difficulties which later confronted the Christian missionaries, a difficulty whose nature, I believe, they did not always understand. In tribal and early state societies the links between the human and the spiritual world, and people’s concern with the latter, were not confined to a special sphere in people’s life. They had not the character suggested by the word ‘religion’, of a segment within a richly differentiated society whose other segments—such as politics, economy or culture—might be completely secularised and thus devoid of any connection with religion. I remember one characteristic episode in the development of Krobo society, which can help to illustrate this difference. King Sakite was well inclined towards the Basle missionaries. At some time, he attended fairly regularly their prayers and their lessons. Johannes Zimmermann,10 the nineteenth century resident Basle missionary, wrote in his report that he was full of hope. The king, he hoped, would soon be ready to undergo baptism. In that case it was likely that the whole Krobo people might follow him. But his superiors severely reprimanded him. How could he believe that a true conversion of people could be achieved in this manner? What they meant was that people could not be genuine believers if they merely followed their king. What they demanded, in other words, was a genuine individual conversion. It is possible that their highly individualised religious belief made them unaware of the extent to which in nineteenth-century Krobo society, although personal gods existed and most certainly deities belonging to one clan or one subtribe, the most powerful gods such as the gods whose priestess presided over the Dipo custom or the war god Nadu whose festival played a central part in the initiation of boys were tribal gods. Their festivals attracted the greater part of the Krobo nation. Lack of a developmental framework still makes it rather difficult to present clearly the difference between an earlier state society, where almost all important tribal occasions and most personal activities we might call private, have links with the spiritual world [and a modern state society]. As our term ‘religion’ receives its dominant meaning from the experience in a social world in which political, economic, cultural, childbearing and many other activities are almost completely secularised, and communication with the spiritual world in the life of

10  Johannes

Zimmermann (1825–76) was a missionary, clergyman, philologist and ethnolinguist of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society of Switzerland. He translated the Bible into the language of the Ga-Dangme people of south-eastern Ghana and wrote a Ga dictionary—eds.

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the great majority of people confined to special occasions mostly on Sundays and special holy days, it requires a strong effort of one’s imagination, if one seeks a genuine understanding of the function and meaning of religion in less secularised societies. In the pre-colonial era, the conversion to Christianity of a paramount chief, far from uniting his people as a Christian community, would almost certainly have led to fierce dissensions with the priests of the traditional tribal gods and their followers. I have already indicated that, in the case of tribal religions, belief is inseparable from ritual or ceremonial action. The first Christian paramount chief of the Krobo, like the first Christian king of the Ashante, had the backing and support of a colonial power. As a rule, these dignitaries were able to achieve a kind of compromise between the demands of Christian worship and the ritual or ceremonial demands of their tribal community, without which their people, their people’s priests and ancestors could not have recognised them as legitimate successors of the ancestral chiefs or kings. To remember this fact may make it easier to understand that the social functions of priests and war leaders were interdependent and at the same time conducive to rivalry, if they were performed by different people assisted by different groups of helpers. The interdependence resulted from the fact that those who exercised ruling functions within the society as war leaders, as judges, as spokesmen of their people in negotiations with other groups and in many other respects, needed the good will, the blessings, the active support of the invisible powers who determined the fortunes of humans and, in most cases priests were needed in order to evoke the good will of the gods through appropriate sacrifices and ceremonies. Priests for their part were only in rare cases the most suitable leaders in a war. Priests were skilled in magic. They knew how to influence the great and powerful spirits, how to reconcile the ill will and to pacify their wrath. But they were not necessarily the best fighters, skilled in the design of war strategies and strong in combat. In these and other respects, the functions of priests and warriors were interlocking. They might be united in the might of the same person or persons, but the skills they required were very different. More often than not they were performed by different groups of people. But both functions endowed those who could perform them with great chances of power. Both required the gift of leadership, a capacity for taking firm decisions and in that respect priests and war leaders were often competitors. They often found themselves in the situation where they had to compete for the ruling functions of a group. There are many other examples in the development of societies where specific groups of social functionaries are at the same time interdependent and competitors for ruling functions. Priests and warriors are probably the oldest, the primeval example of a relationship of this

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type, hence if one discusses the structure of tribal and early state societies one can never omit to ask: Which balance of power between priests and warriors shows itself in the structure of the tribal or state society? In many cases the institution of a society preserved for our understanding only the petrified result of the struggle between warriors and priests. In Greek and Roman society, for example, we find groups of warriors in firm possession of the ruling functions. The Pontifex Maximus,11 retained some power. But their scope is small compared with that of the assembled clan elders, who in relation to their family gods themselves assume the duties of a priest. The long period during which the ancestors of the Hellenic and Italic people were migrating tribes is hidden from view. We do not know when and why the balance of power between priests and warriors in their case shifted so decisively in favour of the warriors. In the case of the Krobo we have an example of a change in the balance of power between priests and warriors. Our sources, among them Azu’s Adangbe history and Huber’s The Krobo, show very clearly the appropriation by a council of priests of most ruling functions in the past, including that of executing murderers whereby one of the main priests [using] his staff himself acted as executioner. But we also see in this case very clearly the shift in the balance of power from the priest to the warrior.

11 The

chief high priest in ancient Rome.—eds.

Religion in a Village Society Norbert Elias

I A State in a Nascent Form: The Central Council of Okumo Priests Whether one should call the acclivity which became for a time the home of the Krobo people a hill or a mountain is a moot question. A high hill, a low mountain, there is no clear dividing line. The Krobo themselves apparently liked to speak of their mountain. … The two groups who first settled on the empty mountain cannot have been very large. We have no details about the Manya group. Akro’s group, the Djebian, we know,1 consisted of three probably quite large family groups, his own, that of his assistant and that of his nephew. Their names (Nam, Agbom and Yokwenya) became and remained the names of different clans of the Djebian sub-tribe. Shall we say between 150 and 250 people each? Whichever it was, even together, the two groups had not enough people successfully to defend their mountain if a larger group came along trying to drive them away or to subdue them.

1 Noa

Akunor Aquae Azu, Adangbe (Adangme) History, trans. and ed. Enoch Azu, in The Gold Coast Review no. 2 (Accra: Government Printing Office, 1929), p. 8.

The manuscript is archived under the number 807 until pg. KII 41, Stage II: Development of a Hill-Top Tribe, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. The manuscript was dictated in 1987. This manuscript was mainly edited by Adrian Jitschin. -eds. N. Elias (*)  Wiesbaden, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_7

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They had the choice to fight each other for possession of the mountain or to join hands and make rules for living together and for defending their mountain together. They chose the latter. Perhaps after a period of smouldering hostility, of bitter words and bargaining, their leaders, perhaps in the course of years or even of generations, came to an agreement. They were able to turn the balance between conflict and cooperation more or less effectively in the direction of the latter. Manya’s group and Akro’s group were able to make common cause in relation to third groups wishing to settle on the mountain. Tempering their rivalry, they worked out common rules for deciding all issues which concerned both groups. As in all such cases of emerging survival groups and among them of tribe-formation processes, one of the most important, most indispensable of these rules in all likelihood was the exclusion of war-like actions, of acts of violence, in particular of killing, from the relationship between the two groups, and the punishment of such acts as a crime. One of the most significant steps, in fact in the formation of any type of survival unit, is the clear and effective distinction between groupinternal acts of violence and especially of killing as a punishable and contemptible crime, and violent acts, especially killings of outsiders—above all of group enemies—as permissible and perhaps as an act of bravery. In recent times the monopoly of physical violence—the right and the power to kill the killer or to use other less violent forms of punishing murderers—has moved from the level of the tribe to the level of the state. In this particular case, it has moved from the level of the Krobo to that of Ghana. Prior to this shift, the Krobo had their own representatives of the monopoly of violence. It was, in organisation, perhaps not as effective and also not as impersonal as the law court of a relatively advanced state. It included, for instance, cases of murder by sorcery. But the boundary between group-internal killing—such as murder and dastardly crime—and group-external killing as an act that was sometimes permissible and even group-internally required, was fully established in Krobo society. It illuminates both the development and the power structure of traditional Krobo society, and perhaps those of a number of other tribal societies as well, that one of the highest priests, the Okumo priest as he was called, traditionally had the right not only to judge murder cases but also with his helpers to execute the person found guilty of murder. He was the spokesman of one of the highest Krobo deities, Nana Kloveki, and, in former days, was often called ‘Ruler of the Whole Town’.2 If the

2 Hugo

Huber, The Krobo: Traditional Social and Religious Life of a West African People (St Augustin: Anthropos Institute, 1973), p. 242.

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council of priests had condemned a man to death for murdering another Krobo, the Okumo priest touched him three times with a special staff as a sign that he was condemned. [The condemned] was then transported to a unique platform. To pour palm-oil over the bound man, which was then set alight by the priest, was one of the modes of executing condemned murderers. Burning the prisoner to death as a method of execution had the advantage that no blood was spilled. This was more difficult to avoid if another mode of execution was used, that of clubbing the condemned man to death. Spilling blood was apparently regarded as ritually dangerous. One can understand that the Okumo priest, the spokesman of the powerful goddess Kloveki, was feared among the Krobo. … In course of time, Nana Kloveki became a powerful goddess for the whole Krobo people. But her Manya origin was not forgotten. Traditionally the Okumo priest called himself the successor of Madza. Another almost equally high-ranking priest called Asa is taken from a clan of the Djebian sub-tribe. Among his main duties are the performances of purification and expiation rites. He has special knowledge of the herbs, the sacrifices and the ritual smoking devices needed for cleansing premises and people wherever prohibitions have been gravely broken, serious transgressions of a god’s ruling have been committed and thus the possible wrath of a god has been aroused. The Asa priest also presides over the burial and funeral rites in the case of a murder or a mortal accident. One cannot help feeling that one encounters here the results of a long process in the course of which a division of functions in power was slowly achieved by the leading representatives and the elders of Madza’s and Akro’s groups and their descendants. In course of time two more groups, probably after agreeing to a set of specific conditions, were allowed to join the two core-groups, the one called Susui, refugees of Ewe origin coming from east of the mountain, the other, the Bonya or Bose, probably refugees of Accan origin coming from the west.3 The high priests of these four groups formed for a time—that is probably until more groups seeking a refuge were admitted to the mountain-top—the ruling council of the Krobo people. A large, flat rock called Anikaka rock was their meeting place. On this rock were four smaller stones. There the four priests, white-robed, sat in council. There they worked out not unsuccessfully, but without doubt not smoothly, their differences, their struggles for power and status, their common decisions in the face of an approaching enemy or of any coming calamity. What happened if they could not agree? In

3 Azu,

Adangbe History, p. 9.

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that case they brought their disagreements before the chief priestess of the goddess Kloveki and submitted to the wisdom of the old lady as a decision of the last resort. One can assume that the long learning process had taught them the suicidal dangers of dissensions among themselves, among the inhabitants of the hill-top villages or, in other words, among the various sub-groups and other social divisions of the developing Krobo tribal state. Its form of government resembled for some time that to which one traditionally applies the name of theocracy. Literally that means the rule of a God. In the case of the Krobo one would have to change it so that it could refer to the rule of the Gods or, more factually, to the rule of priests. As such, it might invite comparison with ancient Israel. There, too, one encounters a stage where the social functions of judges, priests and war leaders were not yet as clearly differentiated as our concepts suggest. A figure such as Samuel can perhaps be regarded as representative of this stage. One may venture to suggest that this unity of the three social functions, whether it is represented by one person or by a specific group of persons, can be maintained for any length of time only if a people’s confidence in the magical powers of their leaders is rewarded by their ability to keep enemies from their doorsteps. In the case of the Krobo, for a very considerable time that was, in fact, the case. Under the leadership of those we call priests and favoured by the fortress-like character of their mountain, the Krobo were in fact able to hold their own against all attempts by other tribal groups, including that of the mighty Ashante, to conquer their mountain home and to drive them from its high plateau. Until the British did that without any bloodshed in 1892, the Krobo tribal state, with the shrines and holy places on top of the mountain at its centre, remained intact. And although the coming of the Europeans and particularly that of the British, with their firm image of a traditional tribe ruled by essentially secular chiefs or kings, added weight to the power of the latter [the secular chiefs or kings], in the case of the Krobo, priests retained many ruling functions up to the end of the nineteenth century. When an acting governor in 1891 surveyed the Krobo scene and, in person, visited their homes and their sanctuaries at the top of the mountain, he observed in his report that the priests were much more powerful than the king. It was then that the colonial administration decided to make an end of it. If one looks closely at the condition of Krobo society prior to their forced descent from the mountain, one discovers a figuration for which we lack the right word. One can diagnose it only in processual terms. It was, one could perhaps say, a tribal state in the making. There were most of the characteristic structures of a state in a nascent form. The words one has to use may suggest a transitional stage, but one cannot discover in it any inherent necessity for it to change into a more fully developed tribal state. There were the rudiments of centralisation in

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the form of the two twin-monopolies of physical violence and of taxation. I have already spoken of the central council of high priests. They were concerned with conflict management, internal and external. The high-ranking Okumo priest, as I have indicated, had the right to kill the killer. That is one of the characteristics of the monopoly of physical violence. The threat or the actual use of licensed physical violence is used to prevent and, if necessary, to punish the use of unlicensed physical violence in the internal affairs of a survival unit. The devil is used to drive out old Nick, violence to achieve internal pacification of society. There is no other way until individual self-regulation has reached the stage at which the use of physical violence has faded from the equipment at the disposal of an individual for settling conflicts. Closely connected with the development of Krobo society was the development of a priestly aristocracy, which played some of the highest ruling functions into the hands of priests. The high priests together with their assistants, with their staff, assumed the characteristics of a caste-like social stratum, for a time the stratum highest in rank and power of Krobo society, which was essentially a society of free and selfruling peasants. It goes without saying that our knowledge of this development is confined to fragments and symptoms. However, seen together and connected with each other, these fragmentary details make it very plausible that for a time Krobo peasant society was ruled by a still loosely centralised priestly aristocracy. The Krobo had a distinct name for them. They were called Dzemeli,4 a name which in more recent times faded from the vocabulary of the Krobo, understandably because their power chances themselves diminished, and did so in spite of attempts by them to revive their status and distinction. But at an earlier stage of Krobo development the symptoms of a priestly aristocracy are hard to overlook. All priests, including their staff, were dressed differently from ordinary people. Ordinary people, particularly males in youth and manhood before the onset of old age, hardly needed many garments. Priests were dressed in white cloth. They also distinguished themselves by characteristic headgear. Thus in former centuries the Krobos, enjoying the comparative security of their mountain fortress and in spite of almost continuous feuds and wars with Akkan tribes in their neighbourhood, developed an oligarchic regime. One can only guess that their priestly representatives played a leading part in the policy designed to absorb immigrant groups admitted to the mountain into the Krobo tradition and in designing measures for internal and external conflict management. We learn of the development

4 Huber,

The Krobo, p. 242.

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of a priestly staff with police functions—a number of priestly officials were ‘in charge of controlling public order and of ritually re-establishing it in cases of violation’.5 These priestly functionaries, in a manner characteristic of an aristocracy, went about the villages but were trained to keep their distance from ordinary people, apart from the requirements of their official functions. The same may be said of the monopoly of taxation. No explicit taxation, no form of taxation designated as such existed in traditional Krobo society. The depths of the outrage which the Krobo felt when the British colonial administration instituted a poll tax cannot be fully understood if one does not remember that this deduction from their income demanded by a distant authority was as alien to Krobo tradition as [it was] to that of many other tribal societies. Nevertheless, rudimentary forms of taxation indicating the direction of the development from pre-state to state societies had a normal place in Krobo society. The social functions performed by priests could not have found a distinct representation as offices performed by specialised human beings, if these persons had not expected to receive and had not in fact received specific rewards for their social services. These rewards were not yet given to them by centralised agencies of a state. The stage of development represented by the tribal condition of tribal society was still far removed from that stage in which the central agencies of society can effectively levy taxes from its members. Preceding this highly centralised form of taxation as a characteristic stage of development are always customary dues which social functionaries expect and demand directly from those for whom they perform their services.

II Superego Formation and Learned Self-regulation in Krobo Society In Krobo society [social functionaries were], for instance for purification services, rewarded and expected to be rewarded by customary gifts in the form of parts of a sacrificial animal, a bottle of rum, a chicken, or a specific amount of cowries (the widely used early predecessor of metal currency). In the case of the Krobo, for instance, a high priest had acquired a highly original and apparently

5 ibid.

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wholly autochthonous type of monopolising the social legitimacy of sexual intercourse and its consequences in the case of the young female population. It had become accepted as one of the distinct characteristics of Krobo society that it was a punishable crime for a young Krobo girl to have intercourse with a man before she had undergone specific initiation rites, often lasting many months, which were connected with the worship of Nana Kloveki whose culmination—as far as is known—was the climbing by each girl of a particular rock and her sitting on it for a while. The rock was said in former days to have visibly grown and expanded when the girls were sitting on it. Apart from this the culminating Krobo ritual consisted of a great deal of traditional Krobo knowledge about the skills and behaviour of Krobo women transmitted by priestesses and priests mainly of the Kloveki deity. In former days a girl who was found to be pregnant or otherwise guilty of intercourse prior to undergoing the official initiation rites was—without mercy, without any possibility of appeal—expelled from the Krobo community and thus also from her family. If she was to survive at all, this meant that she might have to become a servant or a slave of aliens, perhaps a prostitute. Her lover, too, used to be sold into slavery. The Djebia rites which every adolescent Krobo girl had to undergo before she could marry might last as long as a year. During that period the Dipo girls, distinctly recognisable as a Krobo age-group, during that period were largely kept together under the supervision of the Kloveki priestess and her helpers. For long periods they had nothing to do but to sing, dance and play. In the nineteenth century some outside observers noted that the girls were kept in idleness. But in an informal way the priestesses transmitted a good deal of knowledge to the younger generation. And the formal ceremonies and rites, although relatively simple, were of the highest social and emotional significance for the girls concerned and for their families, both as a test of virginity and as a means of ‘opening the way for men’. The high point of the test was reached when each girl was made to sit for a short time on a sacred rock, to climb ‘the sacred stone’ as it was called. The girl dressed only in a tiny loincloth is told that by sitting down on the sacred stone and by getting up from it she can now become a true Krobo woman. As the Krobo population grew and the Krobo territory expanded beyond the neighbourhood of the mountain, more and more sacred Dipo stones were established in the Krobo homeland. They are said to contain splinters of the original Dipo stone on the mountain. The story is told that in ancient times the sacred stone grew and expanded when virginal Dipo girls were sitting on it, but that it began to shake or even to turn over, thus burying the girls seated on it, if one of them was hiding a pregnancy or an abortion. On the other hand, each girl was received back in triumph and with great rejoicing by her

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family and her friends if she had passed the test. The priestess or priest in charge received a tax for every girl seated on a sacred stone.6 As one may see, the Dipo initiation rites are a good example of a specific group monopolising the legitimacy of cohabitation. One may add that although social regulation of sexual relations is widespread, perhaps characteristic of human societies generally, monopolisation of socially sanctioned or approved sexual relationships by a particular social group is much rarer. In the case of the Krobo it did in no way extend to the whole field of sexual relationships. There is no known evidence that among the pre-Christian Krobo sexual relations or libidinal urges as such were regarded as sinful or at least were a minefield full of dangers for the human person, full of prohibitive regulations and therefore particularly liable to arouse feelings of guilt in connection with real or imagined transgressions. Parents tend to be rather tolerant with regard to sexual play between young brothers and sisters. In that respect incest taboos, as long as they do not run counter to Dipo rules, lack the special severity which they have assumed in the European tradition: Incest barriers, though they naturally exist between a father and his grown daughters, affect but little their everyday relationship. There is in their actual behaviour no question of a marked avoidance. In the case of necessity, a father may even, provided that none of his wives is with him, share with them the same bedroom. On the other hand, custom forbids him to pass the night with his wife in his son’s room.7

There is a characteristic difference in the superego formation whose symptoms appear in the Krobo tradition and that superego model characteristic of a late European stage, which one has come to regard as unchanging and universal, at least partly as a result of the work of Freud. It must be enough here to indicate briefly one of the salient points of this difference with the help of some of the evidence from one of the great and extremely impressive ceremonies of the Krobo. Huber wrote in that respect: Their [the Krobo’s] concepts of right and wrong, social conduct are nowhere more clearly than in the koda-kpami ceremony where all evil-doers and enemies of social

6 Huber, 7 Huber,

The Krobo, p. 177. The Krobo, p. 89; see also p. 80.

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peace are publicly cursed, and where priests and people solemnly exonerate themselves of such crimes.8

Among offenders and wrong-doers the following are particularly named: murderers and those who kill others through their secret power (witchcraft, evil medicine, evil spell), those who maliciously destroy a woman’s pregnancy or a man’s virility or a person’s health, wellbeing and face (good name), those who spoil a neighbour’s farm or a trader’s profits, further wives who slander and disgrace their co-wives etc. No social grouping of the human species, as I have indicated elsewhere, is possible without a specific pattern of teachable social regulation and of learned self-regulation.9 There is no reason to object if someone wishes to call these group-specific and changeable patterns of social regulation and self-regulation a code of morals. However, terms such as morals and morality are traditionally often used with the implication that the social prescriptions and prohibitions regulating individual behaviour are essentially the same in human societies of all kinds and at all stages of their development. The Ten Commandments10 and the laws of nature are often implicitly used as a model for what are called the moral laws; the term ‘moral’ assumes a meaning which is not compatible with the observable changeability and group-specificity of social regulations. In particular, the characteristic differences between different stages in the development of these standards of social and self-regulation become obscured by this use of terms like morals and morality. The Krobo koda-kpami ceremony can help to make stage differences of this kind more visible.11

8 Huber,

The Krobo, p. 295. ‘On human beings and their emotions: a process-sociological essay’, in Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 16]), pp. 141–58. 10 Elias uses the term Decalogue. —eds. 11 I am at the moment not so much concerned with the fact that the circumstances singled out for regulation in the case of the Krobo canon of regulations and prohibitions are somewhat different from those which rank highest in the code of regulation of an advanced industrial society, although such differences cannot be regarded as negligible. Nor am I concerned with the fact that the prohibition of murder, which may easily be regarded as a moral universal, can only be regarded as a universal social regulation in so far as human societies usually impose stronger sanctions of a member of one’s own group than they impose on the killing of members of other groups. In practice, as I shall have to indicate 9 Elias,

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The Krobo koda-kpami ceremony is one of those rituals which in the Jewish and Christian tradition has its counterpart in acts of worship by means of which the believers seek reconciliation with the deity by communally or individually ensuring the goodwill and the blessing of the deity through the confession of one’s guilt through transgression of the deity’s commandments, by asking forgiveness for these transgressions and by thus achieving reconciliation with the deity and thus regaining one’s peace of mind. The Jewish day of prayers called Yom Kippur or Day of Reconciliation is such a ceremony. So are the acts of confession embedded in prayers during the holy mass in Catholic Christianity. Other cults too have rituals with the similar function, that of calming the believers’ fear that they have broken, wittingly or not, some of the regulations imposed upon humans by god or gods. But the fear of having broken some important rules or laws, a nagging feeling of guilt in later-stage societies, is not confined to religious people. Freud discovered free-floating guilt feelings in virtually all his patients. He connected them individually with the fears experienced by every child because it has acted in fantasy or in actual fact against parental wishes or rules and fears of the punishment that may follow, just as believers fear the withdrawal of the blessings or even the anger and wrath of a deity. Freud went further. His theory of culture suggests that he came to regard a form of self-regulation, a conscience formation which arouses guilt feelings as an integral aspect of the human personality structure in all cultured or civilised societies. One cannot be completely sure whether or not he considered guilt feelings as part of the natural, the biological inheritance of human beings. One need not doubt that the Krobo, like members of other tribal societies, were often uncertain about the good will of their gods. They were exposed to illnesses, to harmful accidents, to drought and poor harvest, to all the sufferings human beings can experience. One need not doubt that the Krobo like all other human beings experienced feelings of guilt, i.e. lingering fear of punishment for acting contrary to the demands of some more powerful agency real or imaginary and including the lingering fear or anxiety aroused by one’s own person. Children

later, the Krobo regarded as permissible and even as laudable types of killing other human beings which in later-stage societies would be regarded as murder. As I have already indicated, I am trying to use some of the evidence most ably provided by Huber in order to advance a little the still largely blocked research into stages in the development of human self-regulation, in particular of that sector of self-regulation which in our reifying language is called conscience or superego.

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of the Krobo, too, acted in ways of which their parents would not approve and feared punishment. Experiences of this kind, no doubt, leave a residue of freefloating guilt feelings in all human beings. The interesting fact is that the Krobo, settling account with their protective deity and asking for her blessing, did not say directly or indirectly: ‘We are guilty of transgressions, please forgive us and give us your blessing.’ Instead they said in effect: ‘You must give us your blessing. We have always been obedient children. We are free of guilt. No act of transgression has been committed by us. If such acts have been committed it has been done by others: May they be cursed!’. Both the functional affinity of this Krobo ceremony with the reconciliation and confessional rites of the Christian and Jewish traditions and its marked difference from them deserve attention. As far as is known, the koda-kpami ceremony is an autochthonous growth of Krobo society. But whether it is or not, ceremonies ensuring or restoring collectively peace and harmony between human beings and their protective gods and goddesses are fairly widespread. Like children who again and again need the parental reassurance that they are still loved, that their offences are forgiven, that they have not been abandoned by their parents, so grown-up groups too seem to need from time to time the assurance that they have not been abandoned by their gods. Earlier stage societies on their part, if they are plagued by a long series of misfortunes, tend to abandon their old gods and to look out for new ones. How very difficult it is for humans to face up to the fact that the code of prescriptions to which they submit, like languages, in connection with a long learning process, are human-made, that for help and protection humans have to rely on each other—on human beings, and that it is by human beings that they may be abandoned.

III A Dramatic Ceremonial Performance as an Instructive Example of a Civilising Spurt The koda-kpami ceremony of the Krobo appears to have developed in connection with the rituals surrounding the planting of the traditional staple food of the Krobo, millet. It has the character of a dramatic performance, enacted first by the men and then by the women of a Krobo community under the leadership of priests and priestesses of their great goddess. But in contrast to many ancient tragedies in which gods often relentlessly pursue human beings for acting contrary to their demands, and punish the guilty person in the end even for transgression committed by ancestors or unwittingly, the Krobo ceremony is designed to demonstrate that priests and people are righteous and without guilt.

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They challenge the gods to inflict on them their punishment if they have wrongly pleaded not guilty. If any evil deeds have been committed, that have not be done by the worshippers and their priests, but by others, these others, the evildoers, the guilty are symbolically driven out with great noise and wild excitement. Thus, as all evil is driven out, and the people’s curse is put upon them, priests and worshippers themselves deserve the god’s blessing. And the gods are required to give it. The part of the lengthy ceremony of which the hooting and cursing ceremony forms part,12 begins on a Sunday morning in June or July prior to the traditional second planting of the millet seeds (which, however, has gradually lost to maize, root crops and a variety of other cereals its former role as staple food). Its location is a wide place. The head priest leads the congregation in solemn procession around a group of stone blocks in the centre of the place. His chief assistant, as a kind of herald, stands on one of the stone blocks, invites the congregation to hoot and curse evil doers, which they do. He then says the following: Come ye all to hoot koda! In the hours of the morning we hoot koda. In the hours of the evening we hoot koda For the seeds of the first season, for the seeds of the late season, Come ye all to hoot koda! Your curses fall on those who kill by spelling one’s name! Your curses fall on those who kill through evil ‘medicine’! Your curses fall on those who kill through witchcraft!

Then the head-priest steps forward and solemnly chants the following: Eh, I, Nana Kloveki’s priest, today I stand here to witness for myself. Should I who stand before you have slain anyone, or have killed one through ‘medicine’ should I ever have destroyed a woman’s pregnancy,

12 Huber,

The Krobo, p. 247ff.

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or spoiled my brother’s farm, or done evil things in this world – I who am in charge of Kloveki’s cult – it would be a sinful action on my part, a scandalous defilement of Kloveki. Should I really have done such things then call Nana’s koda curse upon my head!13

Upon this the congregation once more shows its approval by noisily hooting till the priest continues: If I, Kloveki’s priest, have never done such things: If I have never killed a person, never destroyed a pregnancy, never injured some one’s name, nor borne false witness against a person, and if in spite of it someone accuses me of having done such things, laying thus someone’s crimes to my charge, this would be a great offence on his part. Call Nana’s koda curse upon his head!14

This ends the head priest’s solemn chant. The congregation hoots, shouts and stamps the earth even more wildly. Then one of the elders may step forward and tell his story as for instance: I, T…, I have come from the Up-Countries. When I came, I came together with my child

13 Huber,

The Krobo, p. 249, to whom we owe the preservation and the translation of these texts, observes that this important part of the ceremony has been omitted in more recent times. His samples were recorded in 1956 at the shrine of Nana Kloveki. 14 Huber, The Krobo, p. 250.

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who was then perfectly well. But when we reached here, it fell sick and died. I consulted the diviner and was told, that a sorcerer was the cause. And the sorcerer also said, he would kill all my children and he would destroy my virility. That sorcerer has committed outrages. Call Nana’s koda curse upon his head!

Again, the audience shows its turbulent acclaim. Then the speaker continues: Furthermore, If I too have done wrong as for instance: When my brother made a farm and if, envious of his farm, I buried a “medicine” in it, in order that his crops might spoil if I have ever done such things, call Nana’s koda curse upon my head!

More men may come forward telling their personal story, publicly proclaiming their own innocence with regard to specific transgressions which evidently rank high in the Krobo list of offences. Then it is the women’s turn to do the same. This is an example: I, D…, I am from Okpe. If I, who am standing here, when a woman friend of mine sells meat and the meat which she is selling I look upon with grudge; If I seek to obtain her profits, or if I ever have killed one’s child, or if I ever have disgraced one on behalf of her marriage, or if I ever have bewitched a woman, – it would be a great offence what I have done.

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If I have really done such things, call Nana’s koda curse upon my head!

The women’s response is, if anything, even wilder than that of the men. Some may sit or lie on the ground and beat it with legs and arms. Others may hoot excitedly at the evildoer. Then solemnly the head priest’s assistants conclude the meeting with the following words: Eh today the men and women and the children all have come to bear witness, that they have committed no outrages. If they lie and their testimony is false, in order to hide their crimes, if in reality, they have committed such offences and thus outrageously defiled Nana call Nana’s koda curse upon their head! If really they have done no evil, and if the witness that they are bearing is true; but some people seek simply to tell such things in order to slander and to disgrace them before the people15 though they know that they have really not done such things, then those people commit great offence. Call Nana’s koda curse upon their heads’

15 Literally,

‘in this world’.

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This is a telling fragment, but nevertheless an instructive example of a civilising spurt, a move towards social regulation of a person’s self-regulation at one of the earlier stages of social development. As one may recognise, the feared transgressions of the social canon of right and wrong, of good and evil behaviour, are highly specific and thus highly characteristic of a community of a tribal state consisting mainly of relatively small towns, villages and other peasant communities of various kinds. Prescriptions have not the high level of generality characteristic of what is called a ‘moral code’. [In Krobo society] they are highly specific. One does not say ‘do not steal’ but ‘do not steal plants from your neighbour’s farm’. The balance between personal and social restraints is different from what one encounters in the large-scale societies at a later stage of development. One cannot expect conscience-formation to be the same in their structures at different stages of development. At the earlier stages, the self-regulation requires continuously a stronger support and reinforcement through agencies external to the person, real or imaginary. It may be the reinforcement through the public opinion of village or town. It can also be the reinforcement through a tribal—that is, through one’s own—god or goddess, or for that matter through their priests. The quotations show very clearly the function which priests have as those who help to reinforce the individual’s self-regulation. This is not to say that a conscience—an inner voice punishing or warning against transgressions—is lacking. It merely means that this voice, and thus the power of self-restraint, is weaker. The need for, and thus the weight of, external restraints is greater. Hence one also experiences what one might perceive at a later stage as a personal property, as an internal aspect of oneself, to a greater extent as external. That the poor man’s child suddenly dies on the journey is not experienced as due to the child’s sickness. It is as a matter of course attributed to someone else’s evildoing, to a sorcerer’s magic. This is one of the less understood and yet self-evident very obvious aspects of magical knowledge. Take a father’s feeling that has been aroused by the sudden death of his child. Human feelings are initially driving forces of action, a spur to movement—they activate people’s skeletal muscles. The primary human condition is: one feels strongly about something, one must do something about it. But the scientific concept of nature, as well as many other aspects of later-stage societies, dampen and delay feeling-inspired movements or inhibit them altogether. But if one has learned to accept the fact that one’s child has died, as we say, from natural causes, one has to restrain one’s urges to act in accordance with one’s grief. One’s urge to act has lost its aim; one’s wrath is without object. At an earlier stage of development, the urge to act in one’s grief, still less restrained, finds expression in the socially predetermined and approved form of explaining the child’s death as due to the action of someone. One can neither

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hate, nor avenge oneself on, a bacillus. But one can hate, and can avenge oneself on, a sorcerer or a witch as the author of the child’s death. Hence in the ceremony, too, evil is treated as if it were a person whom one can bodily drive out of the community. Hence in earlier-stage societies, although traditional ceremonies may on occasion impose extremely severe restrictions on movement, more often than not tradition allows and, on occasion, requires as in this case feeling-inspired movements of a strength and intensity which in later-stage societies are no longer available to the human individual and usually prohibited communally. At the earlier stages emotion is still, much more directly, closely linked to motion. Hence one can yell and, indeed, must, shout communally at the imaginary evildoers, and can beat and stamp on the earth in the heat of one’s excitement. At the later stages, feelings of guilt, smouldering fears of some kind of punishment for imagined or real offences, like grief and sorrow, are often buried in silence. In earlierstage societies, these feelings can be and often are acted out. The ceremony just described is an example. It gives participants the reassurance that they are innocent. So, they need not expect punishment. They need not fear that the gods will deny them a good harvest from the crops they are going to plant. If evil has been done, it has not been done by me or by us. It has been done by someone else. Let the gods punish him or her. One can see that the Ten Commandments reflect a somewhat later stage of development. Krobo society was not much concerned with a code of self-regulation at that level of generality, even less with that called more recently ethics or morals. Those brought up with a later-stage fund of knowledge, and thus familiar with discussions about social codes of norms in terms of morality and ethics, are often inclined to attach these labels as a matter of course to the social code for regulating feeling and conduct encountered in earlier societies. However, this projection of concepts from a higher level of generality into societies where concepts at the same level of generality are rare, perhaps non-existent, can greatly confuse understanding of the latter or block it altogether. Take as an example people’s conception of gods. Sky and earth gods are not unknown in earlier societies. They were also not unknown among the Krobo. But their rituals, their worship in general, lacked the emotional warmth, intensity and intimacy characteristic of the relationship of the Krobo with their goddesses and gods. A corresponding relationship can be observed with regard to the code of social regulations. Universal regulations are not unknown in earlier societies. But the intensity of love, fear, joy, gratefulness, hatred, despair and other feelings connected with them is lower, and the use made of [social regulations] in ceremonies and rituals rarer compared with the highly specific code of good and bad conduct related to their own gods. The socio-centricity, the relatedness of gods and norms to their own society, is

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higher. As the Krobo lived, and live, in relatively small communities, towns or villages, their code of good and bad conduct had less the character of a code of ethics or morals and more that of a code of praise- and blame-gossip. It looked less than Kant’s categorical imperative and more like the imperative not to steal fruit from a neighbour’s field, not to envy a woman-friend because she has better meat to offer at her market stall. The ceremony described before represented a strong and emotionally very satisfying assurance of one’s own integrity as much in the face of small-town gossip as in the face of the great goddess. There is much to say about the reasons, the implications and consequences of the peculiar abstractness which gives the traditional higher stage code of regulation in the form of morals or ethics the appearance of a code of general laws. But it need not be said here. What may be worth mentioning is the fact that the translation of Krobo texts reproduced here, which is likely to be quite excellent, can hardly give an adequate impression of the intensity of feeling and poetic power, which the conjuration of goddesses or gods in the Krobo original must have had when it was presented by a performer who stood in the line of tradition of African ritual chant and prayer. African priests and priestesses often felt themselves in very close contact with their deity. They knew their gods’ or goddesses’ voice and moods, which was part of their own person as group member and as individual. It was this intimacy with the deity—the intimacy with personified layers of their own ego and superego in combination with the narrower though more detailed reality-congruent knowledge and mastery of natural and social events—which contributed to differences in their personality structure, particularly in their own self-regulation, compared with our own. They lived in a social world in which the human responses to all—for them uncontrollable—natural and social events were identical with the responses to specific persons and to persons that were more or less known. In their knowledge and experience, in other words magical–mythical forms of knowledge, on balance, prevailed over reality-congruent forms. It would be surprising if the personality structure of human beings living at that stage, and in particular their conscience, did not also show specific differences compared with that of members of scientific societies. This dominance of magical–mythical knowledge in earlier societies is closely connected with the greater power chances at the disposal of priests and priestesses there. Priestly persons can often be found among the ruling groups of these societies. As a rule, some of them play a leading part in communal decisions. Figurationally, priests are usually bonded, as allies or rivals, to war leaders who form the second group with specialised functions which, like priests, fulfils at these stages basic social needs of the highest order. They are linked to warriors in a great variety of power-sharing arrangements and the changeable power balances

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connected with them. Often enough the relationship between priests, masters of specific means of orientation, and warriors, masters of the means of physical violence and security, is ambivalent. Representatives of each of these two groups may try to appropriate functions of the other; war leaders, such as kings or chiefs, may perform priestly functions, priests, perhaps together with some of the elders, functions of kings or chiefs. According to circumstances the results of such power struggles may freeze and become for a time institutionalised as a standing custom. Kings may unite in their person priestly functions with their functions as warriors, priests with their magic functions those of kings or chiefs. Whatever, at any given time, the specific figuration of priests and warriors may be in a particular society, the fact that social functionaries of these two types usually have great power chances and play a leading or even a ruling part in societies at an earlier stage of development, points to specific basic needs and recurrent structural characteristics of these societies.

IV The Arrival of the British Colonial Power (Scenario 3) and Understanding the Survival Function of Priests in the Traditional Krobo Society In the case of the Krobo, most of the struggles leading up to the more firmly instituted power-sharing arrangements between priests and chiefs are hidden from the sight of a later observer. However, even the customary and in that sense institutionalised division of labour and of co-operation between these two leading groups which is open to inspection does not conceal entirely the signs of a silent tug-of-war, of the balance of power struggles underneath. As one might expect, the coming of the Europeans, the establishment of a British colonial administration in the territories of present-day Ghana had a significant influence on the balance of power between priests and chiefs. From very early days on British colonial administrators tried to govern colonial territories with the help of the native rulers of the peoples who lived there and in accordance with what came to be known as customary law. Yet British administrators were inclined to regard as rulers of African peoples social functionaries akin to those who had ruling positions in their own country, functionaries such as chiefs or kings who derived their power chances in the first instance from their control of means of violence, of military or police forces. They were no longer very familiar with institutional arrangements which endowed priests with the function of rulers of people. At home, priests, though not without influence, had hardly any official share in parliamentary and governmental decisions. Anglican priests were still sitting

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in the House of Lords. But the time that a priest was the King’s chief minister lay way back in the past. Although some clerics might have taken on occasion a very active part in political decisions behind the scenes, British administrators did not expect to find priests overtly in ruling position. They had a preference for a monarchical regime with a secular person in charge, [a preference for] indigenous kings or chiefs whom they could hold responsible for what was going on in the territories under their rule. As Christians, moreover, many British administrators found African priests, like their practices and beliefs, rather strange, perhaps even a bit uncanny. The expression ‘fetish priests’ introduced by missionaries had decidedly negative undertones. Without being quite aware of it, colonial administrators remodelled what they believed to be native customary law, not only in accordance with their government’s interests but also following their own perceptions and ideals of a nominally self-ruling social unit. Some of them may have known as a fact of history that in societies at an earlier stage of development, including the European Middle Ages themselves, priests as well as war-leaders and noble warriors could have ruling functions. But that was a long time ago. One can probably say that in those societies which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to be regarded as most advanced, the range of social needs to be fulfilled by priests and thus their power-range narrowed rather markedly. So did their ruling functions. Priests became specialists in a particular type of non-scientific knowledge and its practical applications. Almost the whole knowledge of non-human nature and a considerable part of the knowledge of human beings had come under the control of non-priestly functionaries—of scientists. Correspondingly the social functions of priests shrank. [Their functions were] much more extensive in non-scientific societies. In these earlier stages, the world is not perceived in a dualistic manner. It was not yet perceived as divided into nature and culture, or nature and human society. It was still experienced as a unitary creation, a society of spirits, some of which were under normal conditions invisible and a way to contact and influence them was the privilege and in some cases the monopoly of priests. It has sometimes been argued that the power of priests in earlier societies can be explained simply in terms of their function for agriculture. The elevated rank of some priests and the high power chances connected with it were primarily due, thus the argument runs, to the function of a priest in the service of what is sometimes regarded as people’s most basic, most urgent and imperative need, the need for food alone, and this need is in that case often enough conceptually identified as an economic need whether it finds in a society its fulfilment mainly through food produced by one’s own family and without any of the more differentiated exchange transactions or with the help of more differentiated and specialised

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transactions which are called economic in the proper sense of the word. The explanation of the high status and the high power-chances which some priests have in many earlier societies as a consequence of their role in organising and in otherwise fostering the production of food under present conditions may strongly appeal to social scientists, firstly because it has the appearance of a causal explanation, and secondly because it has the appearance of an economic explanation. Both causal and economic explanation are much in fashion. They live up to the expectation that many people have of what explanations of social events should look like. It may evoke an immediate nod of recognition, a Eureka moment.16 One can say: the power of priests in earlier societies had an economic cause. That is convincing. In Krobo society one probably would have elicited a similar nod of approval if one had explained a rich harvest as a special favour of their goddess Nana Kloveki. The expectations which prevail in a particular society with regard to the type of explanation that is felt to be satisfying and elicits approval may be different at different stages of development. Some expected types of explanation are hardly open to a reality test; others are. The difficulty is that such a test may reveal a partial reality congruence of a type of explanation which before used to be accepted as exhaustive and exclusive. Causal, as well as economic, explanations in the social sciences are of this type. They are partly but not entirely and not exclusively reality congruent. In that respect social sciences have reached a turning point. We find ourselves, you might say, in the early stages of the process of transition from a stage where many people saw no limits to the use of causal explanations generally and in particular of economic explanation in the social sciences to another where such limits become more apparent, where the partial differences between the task of natural and that of social sciences lead to an emancipatory movement of the latter. One of its aspects is the search for discovery and standardisation of other models of explanation besides the economic and more generally the causal model. The development of Krobo society can serve as an empirical model which illuminates the limitations of economic and thus of causal models of explanation in the study of human societies. The study of this development, as one saw, has made it easier to perceive that the need for physical security, internal as well as external, is as basic a social need as food and other consumption needs often called material. It provides a good deal of evidence for the fact that these too are by no means the only universals of social survival and

16 Elias

actually wrote Aha-Erlebnis, or ‘an Aha! experience’. —eds.

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social development. It must be enough in this context to draw attention to two others. Yet although priests undoubtedly play a significant part in the agricultural activities of earlier societies, their help will be in vain if life and limb of the food producers remains vulnerable to enemy attacks and, indeed, if the harvest—the maturing plants in the open fields—is frequently exposed to robbery and destruction by other human groups. The need for physical security, for protection of life and limb from attacks by other human groups, is a social need that is just as basic as the need for food. The development of Krobo society from the ancestral stage of frequent and long migration to the stage of settlers in hilltop villages and towns where they occupied a position that could be more easily defended by relatively small groups is a good example of the intertwining of these two basic universal needs in the fortunes of a people—the need for physical security and for reasonable chances of producing adequate food. The Krobo had the good fortune of discovering a place of settlement which had the natural characteristics of a good fortress and which at the same time offered them in the neighbourhood sufficient fertile land with sufficient water supply, which could feed a growing population. For once they had discovered a relatively secure place of settlement, the Krobo population grew partly through a controlled form of immigration and partly, most probably, because life in greater safety allowed more children to grow up. Rituals and ceremonies organised by priests played a vital part in these spheres of social life, not only in the organisation of food production. Their cults and rituals played a part in the service of the Krobo war gods, in preparing the young men by means of quite formidable ceremonies (of which more shall be heard later) for their role as warriors in the almost endemic wars. The priests’ knowledge of how to secure the help and goodwill of war gods [was] borne out as true knowledge by the fact that prior to the coming of the Europeans the Krobo were able to hold their own in inter-tribal warfare. Their mountain was never conquered by any of their enemies in the region. Thus, in the experience of the Krobo people, the efficacy of the priests’ knowledge, of their rituals and sacrifices, and the power of the Krobo gods, was confirmed for all to see. Moreover, quite apart from the favour of the gods that priests could secure in the case of conflict with external enemies, they also played a key role in the management of internal conflicts, in the development of the internal pacification of Krobo society. Some of their representatives, as for instance the Okumo priest, acted as representatives of an early stage monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within the Krobo society. They were licensed, and they had the power resources to use physical force without licence. The need for a measure of internal physical security and thus of internal conflict management is as basic and universal a human

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need as the need for food and other elementary means of consumption, which if one likes can be called ‘economic’. One can never adequately explain the social means of satisfying one of these needs by referring—and thus by reducing them—to the development of the social means designed to satisfy the other need. The way the fulfilment of one of these basic social needs works into that of another, the patterns of their interdependence, can vary greatly from the development of one society to that of another. They never cease to affect each other. But changes to either one of them, whether the need for food or the need for physical security, can be represented as more basic than the other, nor as the cause of which changes in the other are the effect.17 They stand continuously in a variable balance relationship to each other. Thus, in Krobo development, the search for physical security took pride of place over the search for food, but that does not mean that the people ever stopped their quest for food. Alternatively, they may have sometimes found promising pieces of land which could have amply satisfied their food needs, but they could not stop there because the place was too insecure, too much exposed to attacks by other groups. It has become customary to think and to speak of the development of different social means of satisfying different social needs as different spheres of society. Thus the means of satisfying consumption needs are conceptualised as belonging to the economic sphere; those of satisfying security needs to the political sphere. But apart from the Marxian model which reduces all other spheres, with some minor qualifications, to the economic sphere, one18 has not got much beyond a chest-of-drawers-like classification of spheres. Most people may be aware that the development of societies provides ample evidence for the continuous functional interdependence of these spheres. Yet the customary model of society mostly looks as if each sphere existed all by itself in its own drawer, and came into contact with others only later by way of addition. It is of some advantage to put the traditional spheres squarely in their human context as social means satisfying the social needs of humans. It is easier to envisage these basic needs as inseparable if one places into the centre of one’s

17 This sentence, as recorded by whoever was taking dictation from Elias, was very confused. It read: ‘But none of the changes which one them, the means of satisfying the need for food and those of satisfying the need for physical security, undergoes can be represented as more basic than the other, nor as the cause of which changes of the other are the effect.’ —eds. 18 Here, by ‘one’ Elias emphatically does not mean himself, but rather other theorists. — eds.

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intellectual imagination the processes which a group of human beings, such as the Krobo, undergoes. Such a group may become more differentiated than the Krobo were. There may be groups of political specialists, of economic specialists, of religious and cultural specialists. But it remains an open question whether the habit of thinking in terms of spheres can survive for long if, in discussions on societies and their development, groups of human beings are consistently placed in the centre of the stage. That makes it easier to recognise that the sphere model represents an early form of conceptualising means of satisfying basic needs of groups of human beings. This sphere model is rather untidy. Is religion part of the cultural sphere? Is it meaningful to speak of a psychological sphere? Even without using the term sphere, twentieth-century discussions thrive on conceptual distinctions such as economic, political, cultural, psychological and so forth. Little thought is given to the relationship between the facts to which these classificatory labels refer. In that respect, references to basic social needs and the social means of satisfying them may allow better clarification. So far I have mentioned only two of them, the basic need of every society of physical security, for means of protecting itself against acts of physical violence from outside as well as from within, and secondly basic physiological needs of the individuals composing a group, such as hunger, thirst or protection from rain, snow or the extremes of hot or cold temperature. But there are at least three more universals of social development worth mentioning here. Some of them are difficult to fit into the traditional classificatory model. In addition to the two basic needs mentioned before, there are the basic needs for knowledge and for learned self-regulation, for social patterns of individual self-control. Attention to these four specific universals of social development need not make us forget that there is yet another more comprehensive social need for which human society must provide means of satisfaction if it is to survive as a society. That is the need for an overall organisation for structuring the relationship between the individual members of a society in a specific manner. A haphazard mass of ship-wrecked people thrown together willy-nilly on a previously uninhabited island have to work out a modus vivendi, accepted ways of doing things that affect each other. In all societies so far known to humans, the overall organisation is marked by certain common features. In the light of present-day social ideals, recognition of these features may be unwelcome. But sociology is, in the first instance, concerned with proving knowledge about human societies as they are. It is only if one knows the facts as they are that one is in a position to find out what one can do about aspects that are seen by some or all its members as false in their construction. So far, all human societies have a hierarchic character. They resemble a pyramid, whether it has a broad baseline

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and a very narrow tip at a considerable distance from the baseline or has a more trapezoidal form with a topline that is not very much shorter than the baseline and not very distant from it either. With great regularity, one can discover in every human society an uneven distribution of power chances and in connection with it a main axis—or axes—of tensions and conflicts, for example that between male and female subgroups of every society, between groups of younger and of older people, or between different social strata. In all these cases the relationship between basic social needs and basic individual needs is complex and easily misunderstood. They are inseparable yet distinguishable. Until now, measures taken to ensure the survival of a tribe, a nation state or any other form of survival unit may on occasion depend on the readiness of some of its members not to survive, to sacrifice their lives in order to ensure the continued existence of their society. Social needs, far from being a mere addition of individual needs, can override the latter. They are not easily reducible to individual needs. It would have been misleading in this context to mention only the four specific universals and not also, as a universal basic need of human beings, the need for an overall organisation. This is the aspect of Krobo society with which we are concerned, for example with the relationship, and thus also with conflict and collaboration between priests and warriors. They used to form the top line of Krobo society. Compared with other tribal societies the social distance between the groups forming this top layer and the mass of the Krobo population forming the base layer was not very great. This social distance appears to be even smaller if one compares it with the social distances one encounters in contemporary nation states. Many of the details of Krobo society that have been mentioned before fit into this context.

Priests and Knowledge Norbert Elias

I Knowledge as a Basic Need and as a Survival Function for Societies As a sociological topic, and perhaps also as a philosophical topic, knowledge has gone through a period of uncertainty if not of degradation. Among those who reflect upon such topics, the conviction has become widespread that in the last resort all human knowledge is uncertain. Many see knowledge as predetermined by certain givens of human nature, for instance by the immutable laws of human reasoning and thus flawed as a symbolic representation of a real world which exists independently of human reason. Others see knowledge, perhaps except their own, as a reflection of economic interest of the knowledge producers. It may seem strange in this intellectual climate of uncertainty, if knowledge is presented as the answer to a basic need of humanity, as vital and indispensable in fact as a need for physical security or for food. Scholastic arguments, witnesses of an all too narrow horizon bar the way to the recognition of the fact that human beings could not survive, that they could not become fully developed human beings if they had not acquired through learning from others knowledge that was absolutely accurate or,

The manuscript is archived under the number 807 from P. KII 41 onwards, Stage II: Development of a Hill-Top Tribe, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. The manuscript was dictated in 1987. Sub-headings have been added by the editors. This manuscript was mainly edited by Adrian Jitschin. -eds. N. Elias (*)  Wiesbaden, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_8

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as one used to say, true—that is to say if it was not a totally fitting symbolic representation of the world of which the human beings formed part. The social fund of knowledge of earlier-stage societies has an invariably narrower range than the social fund of knowledge characteristic of later-stage societies, though the latter is usually far less differentiated and detailed within the narrower range of reality-congruent knowledge of the former. Humanity lacks most, though not all, of the innate propensities for finding the right food and, more generally, for fitting into their particular niches on the earth. Instead, humans are by nature equipped with the propensity for acquiring and possibly developing further a social fund of knowledge with the help of which they can find their way through the changeable world in which they live. It is always a surprise for me if I see that learned men, who reflect upon knowledge, often seem unaware that human beings could not, without learning a great deal, without acquiring a large social fund of knowledge, orientate themselves in that world. Without it they could not find the right food nor could they protect themselves against the many dangers to which they are exposed. Animals do that mainly by instinct and to a relatively small extent as a result of learning. Humans do it to a very large extent by means of learned knowledge and only to a very small extent by means of unlearned propensities. The human equipment for learning knowledge has a very high survival value, for knowledge can be transmitted from one generation to another. Thus it can grow over the generations both in its range and its reality-congruence. Members of later-stage societies often fail to understand that the relatively high reality-congruence of part of their social knowledge, especially their knowledge of non-human nature, is a result of a millennial and continuous intergenerational transmission of knowledge, in the course of which the social fund of knowledge became larger and better fitting, at least in some of its sectors. No one who does not stand in the line of succession to such a long process of intergenerational knowledge transmission and knowledge growth can command the comparatively large fund of knowledge represented by the natural sciences and the technical development connected with them. The Krobo did not stand in the line of succession to the long intergenerational change of knowledge transmission and knowledge growth from which the present generation of more developed societies benefit, to which they owe in fact their relatively advanced developed societies. Such differences in knowledge have nothing to do with the innate properties of the people who live in societies at a later stage of development. These differences are entirely due to differences in the intergenerational development of knowledge to which a society is heir. It so happened that Europeans stood in the line of succession to a [process of] knowledge development which enabled them to develop knowledge of the non-human world to the highest

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level of reality-congruence attained so far by human beings, to the scientific level, while the Krobo and many other African people did not. Hence the structure of their knowledge is different from that knowledge acquired at the scientific stage. People born and bred in societies at the scientific stage of knowledge often have difficulties in understanding how and why members of tribal societies do not appear to see the obvious; they do not seem to be aware of the fact that the course of nature follows laws of its own and cannot be influenced by magical practices. They flatter their own ego by attributing to their own reasoning or rationality what is, in fact, the fruit of a long development of knowledge in which they participated, a continuous development with many ups and downs reaching back to antiquity. Those who already know find it difficult to understand those who do not know. Believing themselves rational, they dub those who do not know—who use imaginary, magic practices as a means of controlling nature or other human beings—irrational, whatever that may mean. In actual fact, people of earlier societies have no choice. If the knowledge heritage of a society does not provide its members with a relatively reality-adequate access to the nexus of events which has become known as ‘nature’, they have to fill the gaps of their realistic knowledge with fantasy-knowledge. It is terrifying not to know the nexus of events which directly affects the members of a society at the social as well as at the individual level. Human beings are by nature organised in such a way that they need to orientate themselves mainly by knowledge. The growth of reality-congruent knowledge is a very lengthy and often a rather slow process, particularly in the earlier stages. There always have been societies whose fund of knowledge provided no reality-congruent answer to problems posed by the natural universe. Their nature allowed them to temper the horror of not knowing by filling the gaps of their reality-knowledge with fantasy-knowledge. An example from Krobo tradition may help to make expressions such as ‘the horror of not knowing’ or ‘filling the gaps of reality-knowledge’ better understood. If a calamity such as a raging epidemic threatens the Krobo, their tradition prescribes certain rituals to drive the evil away and to block its possible ways to the mountain. They cut a path all around the Krobo mountain.1 The priests perform expiating and purification rites. One of the rituals is the continuous beating of a young goat while they are going all around the mountain until it is dead. They pour libations; they invoke one of their main goddesses, Nana Kloveki, by

1 Hugo

Huber, The Krobo: Traditional Social and Religious Life of a West African People (St Augustin: Anthropos Institute, 1973), p. 273.

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saying ‘that the disease—we do not know its name—which has come from the sea to kill us, may return back to the sea’. They set up a bamboo pole with a strip of white cloth on each side of the road and also some food placed on the ground ‘to beg and to pacify any spirit of force that might try to harm the... people’. At public places of villages and towns on top of the mountain more libations are poured, and a white sheep is sacrificed to which all the people had contributed with their offerings. Their reaction is anything but irrational. One can well understand it. In earlier days, the Krobo people did not have any access to the intergenerational knowledge process which, in participant societies, led to the conceptual development of an impersonal causal nexus and, more specifically, to the discovery of bacilli and viruses as causes of epidemic diseases. Hence the Krobo people continued to use what is everywhere in the development of humanity the earlier, the primary form of explanation which corresponds more closely to the spontaneous feelings of human beings, to their affective and emotional needs. They used as explanation of what one at a later stage knows to be wholly impersonal, unintended purposeless natural events, more or less the same type of explanation which they used in their relations among themselves, in their dealings with persons, especially more powerful persons. Mutatis mutandis they used as means of explanation in the realm of nature the same type of explanation as in their own society. If a malevolent, harmful person came to one’s own community, one would try to drive the person away. If he or she proved to be more powerful than oneself one would try to pacify that person, to offer food and sacrificial gifts such as sheep, goats or chickens. The Krobo did both in relation to a raging epidemic as to other major calamities. They conceived the evil as the consequence of an intended action of a spirit or a spirit force. Their actions and thoughts had a perfectly clear and understandable inner consistency and coherence, no less clear and coherent than those of human societies at a later stage of development, who had at their disposal a much larger fund of reality-congruent knowledge about the explanation of human diseases and of many other aspects of non-human nature. The Krobo, as one can see, used both measures open to them in the case of a dangerous though powerful person, in order to cope with the unknown disease. They tried symbolically to drive the invisible, evidently powerful and ill-intentioned spirit or spirit force away and to block its way to the mountain. At the same time, they did their best to pacify the evil spirit by offering presents of various kinds. In that way they could avoid the most agonising aspects of a calamity such as an epidemic, which makes people suffer often in a terrible way and in most cases kills them; they could avoid the horror of not knowing who or what had hit them, and thus also of not having any focus for possible action.

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Some light is thus thrown on a rather neglected aspect of knowledge. It focuses action. Without it, human beings would only be capable of random actions. Alternatively, they might sit still and do nothing as if paralysed by fear. Knowledge limits fear. Inevitably human beings can work out more reality-congruent forms of knowledge about the world in which they live, including themselves, only in the course of a very long learning process. It is not imaginable that human beings, the only species of hominoids that survived, ever existed without a fund of reality-congruent knowledge. They are made that way—that is, with a need for knowledge—by their natural constitution. But throughout all the earlier stages of the development of humanity their fund of reality-congruent knowledge grew very slowly. It was comparatively small. Looking back, [one can see] enormous gaps in people’s knowledge-equipment. It is difficult [to imagine] that they could have survived without the natural gift of filling the gaps in their reality-congruent knowledge with fantasy-knowledge. The example from Krobo land shows very clearly that fantasy-knowledge, like realitycongruent knowledge—even at a stage in which the former is dominant—has a significant function for human beings. It may focus action in a wrong direction. It may even have disastrous consequences. In a word, it entails great risks. But human beings could not survive for long if they had to face up in a full measure to the extent of their not-knowing. Thus fantasy-knowledge, most particularly in the earlier stages of humanity’s development and despite the grave risks in its wake, has a survival function. Realisation of this fact may make it easier to understand … that in the case of human beings the need for knowledge, for means of orientation, is as basic a need as the need for physical security and the need for food.

II The Rise of a Priestly Aristocracy and Agricultural Surplus I have referred before to an attempt at explaining the relatively high powerchances of priests as the result of their function for agriculture. Priest-directed rites connected with sowing and harvesting can indeed be found in many pre-scientific societies. Often enough it is one of the tasks of priests to decide when the right time for sowing and, again, for harvesting has come, and no doubt such a task, the task of organising agricultural work, helps to increase the priest’s power chances. But this is only one of the tasks which priests have to perform in earlierstage societies as a result of their special knowledge of the spirit world and their capacity to turn in favour of their people the intentions of their gods, and to ward

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off their anger and wrath at human transgressions. But agriculture was not the only social sphere that required priestly guidance in order to secure the favour of gods and to avoid misfortune and disaster. Krobo society offers many examples that show not only the great variety of tasks which priests may have to fulfil in a tribal society; they also show that in course of time a division of labour may develop within the priesthood of tribal people. One of the highest priests, perhaps the highest priest of Krobo society, as I have already mentioned, had the highest judicial functions. He, the Okumo priest, together with some elders and his helpers, could sit in judgment if a major crime had been committed. He presided over the high court of the priests and played a leading role on many other occasions at the highest level of Krobo social life. He was in fact what one would call at a later stage a political leader. Another highranking priest specialised in the many purification and expiation rites, needed by Krobo people in accordance with their tradition and perhaps in order to preserve their peace of mind. Guarding their people’s extensive oral tradition, including the vast knowledge of all the traditional rituals, of the traditional songs, of the history of their people, and of much else was a privilege of priests. So was the transmission of this vast body of knowledge to the next generation of priests. If one asks for the main source of the considerable power-chances of the priestly aristocracy in Krobo society, one has to take account of the fact that their knowledge and their ritual or magic activities covered not only the production of food but virtually all facets of Krobo social life and many facets of the life of familygroups and of its individual members. Some young people training for the priesthood apparently learned, as the young Noa Azu did, to store this rich body of knowledge in their memory. It was forbidden to open up this knowledge to people who were not priests or priest-apprentices. Noa Azu, although he had become a good Christian, was still conscious of committing a transgression when he decided, aware of the changing times, to put into writing some sections of the secret oral tradition which he had memorised when training for the Krobo priesthood. It was the monopolisation of this vast body of knowledge, which the mass of the Krobo people felt they needed, that has to be kept in mind if one tries to explain the power-chances of priests. It was not only in Krobo society that priests could earn a privileged position through monopolisation of the means of orientation, of knowledge that was widely needed in their society. We have no certain knowledge of the way in which, from small beginnings, this powerful and differentiated priestly aristocracy developed. But one can be fairly sure that a development of many centuries was needed before the early figuration of two migrating groups, each led by its own priest-warrior or warriorpriest who made their peace with each other and decided to settle together on the

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mountain, transformed itself into the more complex and more populous figuration of a tribal state occupying fairly extensive and partly rather fertile territories in the neighbouring plain and even in some more distant highlands. It is difficult to determine exactly [when the Krobo had], during all these centuries in which the mountain remained the centre as well as the main symbol of the national existence, travelled [far enough] on the road towards the production of surplus food [to make] it possible for the families of an aristocracy, whether of priests or of warriors, to live exclusively on the surplus food and the surplus of other means of consumption produced by the labour of other families.2 One has the impression that the Krobo, during the whole period in which the mountain remained the centre of their rituals, their festivals, their social and political life and their only burial ground, did not develop beyond the stage where each family group needed a piece of land, its own farm in order to provide itself with the elementary wherewithal of life. It needed its own land, either to produce directly enough millet, maize, root crops—in short, enough of the staple food for all its members—or saleable goods such as palm oil, which enabled them to buy the needed foodstuffs at the market. A condition in which every family group is dependent for its survival on a piece of land on its own, a condition of high or exclusive kin group self-sufficiency, is a characteristic condition of most tribal societies. It means that such a society has not, or has only with regard to a few exceptional cases such as that of blacksmiths, reached a stage of organisational compulsion inducing those who work on the land to produce regularly more food than they need for themselves, thus setting war-chiefs, priests or craftsmen and their families free from work on the land and entirely for their non-agrarian occupation. There is evidence that in the nineteenth century a king of Manya Krobo, King Odonkor, not only owned a large farm, but also went there once a week to work with other members of his family; one of his grandsons later complained that he could not provide for his family because the land promised to him as part of his father’s heritage had been withheld from him. One might add that the Krobo, agricultural pioneers in other aspects, stuck to their tradition with regard to agricultural implements. Till the middle of the twentieth century they did not use ploughs, sickles or vehicles for transport. Of course, the climate and the insects of the region where they lived were unsuitable for draught animals.

2 This

sentence, as recorded in the dictated text, was lacking a clear subject and main verb, although the intended meaning was fairly clear.—eds.

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But [while] Krobo society did not reach the stage of development that one first encounters in ancient Sumer, the stage where the organisational development of society compels those who work on land with great regularity year by year to produce considerably more food than they needed for their own families, there can be no doubt that in the course of a lengthy development the Krobo learned to produce some surplus. Their forefathers had the good luck to settle in a region with a great deal of untouched fertile land. The small migrant groups who first settled on the mountain, increased in number by immigrant groups whom they permitted to settle among them, developed into a sturdy, hardworking and enterprising population of warrior peasants. Two harvests a year of millet or maize were the rule rather than the exception. A traditional saying among the Krobo was ‘No one need starve’. In other words, every individual belonged to a family group, to a ‘house’, and had a right to participate in its agricultural product. The emergence of a priestly aristocracy, whose distinct dress symbolised a certain distance from the mass of the people, would have hardly been possible without the production of some surplus wealth and without the ability of priests—and probably also of war chiefs or kings—to find means of compelling the mass of the population to channel part of the surplus in their direction. An example is the custom which punished every maturing Krobo girl with expulsion from Krobo land if she had contact with a man before going through a long initiation rite. Parents had to pay to the priest who supervised this rite a fairly heavy fee. As no girl could marry without passing through this ‘Dipo custom’, parents paid. There were fees, paid in the olden days in kind or by means of cowries, for expiation rights or funeral ceremonies and for other services.3 The details of the development towards greater prosperity of the Krobo people are no longer accessible to us. It is difficult to judge how far the Krobo people advanced in that direction in the period in which inter-tribal wars were frequent and to what extent their prosperity was due to the gradual cessation of inter-tribal warfare in colonial times. One can, at any rate, say with great assurance that growing prosperity, even if it occurred in the period of frequent inter-tribal wars, had not the character of an autonomous economic process which explains all other changes in Krobo society and among them the development of a priestly aristocracy.

3 Huber,

Krobo, p. 241: ‘A senior priest, in accordance with his status, normally has two, three or even more wives … Economically a priest is able to make a good living from the offerings of the people and particularly from the heavy fines or ransom sums in … ritual oath cases. But most priests apart from their main function do some farming near their residence.’

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In the case of developments such as this, causal explanations in general, and mono-causal in particular, are bound to fail. It was not only that agriculture, yielding a regular food supply and a modest surplus beyond the needs of the primary producers, was a condition of the development of a relatively large and prosperous priesthood. Priests together with chiefs on their part played a large role in the development and the maintenance of the organisation which, among other things, made agriculture with a modest surplus possible. In the case of social processes such as the Krobo development, the imagination has to work with power balances and with circular or spiral movements. Priests derived power chances from the fact that a people’s need for the means of orientation which at the stage of magical–mythical knowledge priests alone can provide is very great. But the need was reciprocated. Priests also needed the non-priestly Krobo people. They were exposed to [the people’s] constant pressure, and [to the risk] of prolonged failure of the gods whose confidants and representatives priests were, [which] could diminish and even seriously impair their power.4 This reciprocal dependence is characteristic of almost all power balances. It is usually uneven: the need of one side for what the other has to give is usually greater [than the other way round]. The pressure which the mass of Krobo people could exert upon priests was normally less great than that which priests could exert upon the people. But pressure it was, nonetheless.

III Self-Regulation and Conscience Formation Priests had a very considerable part to play in the pattern of self-regulation and thus in the conscience formation of the mass of the Krobo people, but the latter were not without influence on the self-regulation and thus on the conscience formation of priests. For this basic social need, the need for specific patterns of self-regulation, too, the Krobo can serve as example. As their pattern of self-regulation, the type of their conscience formation, was different in certain respects from that of people at a later stage of development, it may be of interest if I point out at least some of these differences. Human beings can learn individual self-regulation to a much greater extent than other living beings. Unlike the latter, humans also must learn much more

4 As

recorded by the person taking dictation, the sentence read: ‘They were exposed to its constant pressure and of prolonged failure of the gods whose confidants and representatives priests were could diminish and even seriously impair their power.’—eds.

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self-regulation than other creatures in order to actualise their natural human potential. They must, for instance, acquire through learning the main form of communication of their species, communication through a language that can differ greatly from society to society. All other species can rely for their communication within a group largely on unlearned [means of communication] common to all individuals throughout a species. Small variations do occur of the innate means of communication, due to learning processes, [but] they are never great enough to prevent an individual transplanted into a different group of the same species from communicating there with other individuals of the group in the species-specific manner. [In contrast] a Spaniard transplanted to China cannot communicate with individual Chinese without an interpreter (unless he has learned Chinese before). Biologists and psychologists concerned with the study of languages often suffer from a professional bias in favour of the innateness of language. They are not able to distinguish clearly between the fact that humans have an innate potential for mainly communicating through group-specific languages which have to be acquired through learning, and the assertion [by biologists and psychologists] that language itself is innate or, in other words, unlearned—a quite absurd proposition. The same goes for individual self-regulation in general and particularly that of its aspects we call conscience or superego. Humans have a natural potential for individually regulating drives, affects or emotions. But this potential remains mute unless it is activated by a learning process. Thus patterns of individual selfregulation, of which language communication is an example, differ considerably from society to society. What is more, they are different in a highly specific manner at different stages in the development of human societies. In this context a few examples from Krobo society must be enough to throw some light on such differences. In earlier societies where individuals normally live in relatively small and closely knit communities, and where individuals are seldom alone, individual self-regulation and the sets of personal structures that have the function to perform it—and to which we refer, in our reifying manner, by means of concepts such as reason or conscience—these self-regulating functions are usually to a higher extent dependent on social reinforcement than they are in the larger urbanised and industrialised societies characteristic of a later stage of development. The balance between social control—that is, control through others—and selfcontrol is in some respects different. By and large people of earlier societies are to a greater extent dependent on a condition of outside control for the stability of their self-control. And [because] a person whose self-control is defective can be a danger not only to others but also to him- or herself, they [people of earlier

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societies] supplement the social control supporting their self-control within their society, within the fellowship of humans, by the imagined control of very powerful superhuman beings. Their powerful capacity for projection enables them to imagine that powerful persons outside themselves demand [that they] behave in the socially prescribed manner, and are likely to punish them if they do not. Freud has described the internalisation of parents’ control by the growing-up child as a stage in the development of the agencies of individual self-control such as conscience or superego. At a later stage this process can lead to a complete internalisation and depersonalisation of the experienced parental voices. They may then be experienced as part of one’s own person, as an inner voice, as pricks or even bites of one’s conscience from which one cannot escape. At an earlier stage they may, in people’s experiences, retain the character of persons existing outside of oneself. The rich capacity for imagining objects and events not present here and now, with which human beings are endowed by nature, enables them, even when they have outgrown their parents’ care and control, to feel vividly and inescapably that maternal or paternal figures of some kind provide them with food, look after them and protect them, even if they are not present. One Krobo prayer vividly evokes the image of babies opening their mouths to be filled with the blessed food of their mothers: … our Krobo deities all together come to bless us! Nause, Kloveki, Manya-Tee Totroku, Hiono, Nako… All ye invisible beings, come and bless us! Ye men of this world, come! I am here with all the people’s mouths opening today, that from all products of their farms they may eat and get strength.5

In that case one is at peace with one’s own conscience, and thus also with its projection on the sky, with the invisible gods, but in the course of a year almost every

5 Huber,

The Krobo, pp. 262–3.

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member of a rather passionate people feels rising within themselves wishes and thoughts, or actually commit acts, which run counter to the accepted social code and thus to the will of the invisible gods. People are no longer at peace within themselves, and they are no longer at peace with their conscience. They have, as we say, a bad conscience, projecting it on to the world of invisible spirits upon which they call when they say: all ye invisible beings ye men of this world ye women of this world.

As children, bad wishes or bad deeds made them frightened of being punished by their elders. Now as adults they are frightened of being punished by the projected representatives of their own conscience, by those invisible beings, their gods. And so, as has been shown before, they come together and ease their own conscience by projecting, together with each other, all their own unwelcome and unacceptable wishes and actions on to an imaginary object, the personified Evil and solemnly drive it out, just as in the Mosaic ritual of the Day of Atonement, a goat—scapegoat—was symbolically made to carry the sins of the people and was driven away with its load of bad thoughts and bad deeds into the wilderness. Thus, by symbolically or, as we say, by magically driving away the Evil, people could again live in peace with their conscience. They could live without fear that the gods would punish them with headaches, bad harvests, diseases, or by choosing one of hundreds of other ways in which the invisible powers can punish human beings. One cannot forget that the level of uncertainty and danger at the stage of development at which we encounter the Krobo people is very much higher; that, expressed differently, their ability to control dangers particularly but not only at the levels of non-human nature, was much more limited than it is at later stages. In this relativistic age of ours—where progress of knowledge has become almost a dirty word—one is often not fully aware of the fact that solid reality-congruent knowledge limits fear and soothes uncertainty. Fantasy-knowledge and the magic practices connected with it have the same function: they too limit fear and soothe uncertainty. If human beings at the earlier stages of development of humanity had to face up in full the extent of their not knowing what was going on in their world, they would probably have died of fear. The extent of fantasy-knowledge in early societies underlines the fact that human beings by their very nature need knowledge in order to survive, even if it is knowledge that is recognisable at a later stage as imaginary or, as we say, as not true.

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IV Knowledge, Collective Fantasies, and Communal Rituals Mutatis mutandis this applies also to our own age. The fund of reality-congruent knowledge has become greater. It is hard to know the extent of our not-knowing because that is part of what we do not know. But one can be quite sure that although the scope of our reality-knowledge has become very much wider, and the area where humans can feel safe and secure has grown accordingly, the area of our not-knowing filled by fantasy-knowledge is indeterminate, which is no reason why one should not work with all one’s power for the extension of the area of certainty and the decrease of the area of myth.6 It may help to decrease the area of our not-knowing if I say explicitly that not knowing has not always the character of ignorance. By ignorance one usually means the individual lack of knowledge that is socially more or less firmly established, and which forms part of the public fund of knowledge of the society to which the individuals called ignorant belong. From this form of not-knowing one has to distinguish another, a condition in which a particular area or piece of knowledge, well established at a later stage of development, is still undiscovered and therefore socially not available to individuals. I would not wish to call the latter condition ignorance, for that term contains an element of reproach if not of contempt. It would be wrong to call the Krobo people ignorant, because as a society they did not possess a reality-congruent explanation of infectious diseases and thus not of their epidemic virulence. To do that would mean brushing aside the fact that at one time or another no society, no human being on earth did know the true nature of infectious diseases, nor indeed could know it. It is the basic weakness of all philosophical and of most of the existing theories of knowledge that they neglect the character of knowledge as a long-term process, a process with an inherent sequential order. Any particular area or piece of knowledge, including knowledge of the conceptual and particularly the categorial equipment, has its place within the sequential, the one-after-another order of knowledge development. However, in respect of knowledge as in other respects, the development of humanity is uneven. In the past, though not necessarily in the future, some societies have always been in advance of others. That is essentially

6 Cf.

Elias, What is Sociology?, enlarged edn (Dublin: UCD Press, 2012 [Collected Works, vol. 5]), chapter 2, ‘The sociologist as a hunter of myths’—eds.

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an aspect of the unplanned development of knowledge, of conditions which can be brought into the open by research at a later stage, but which have so far never been under the control of those who in their knowledge development are more advanced or are less advanced. It is possible that the specific long-term conditions to which the knowledge advances of a particular group of societies are due do not arise in the development of another. In that case, unless communicatory connections establish themselves between these different branches of humanity, between the more advanced and the less advanced group of societies, the latter can remain autonomously in their condition of lesser advanced for a very long time. It took about a thousand years before the knowledge of agricultural forms of food production travelling from the Near East established itself in northern European societies. Helped by the check on intertribal warfare, the Krobo developed a prosperous form of agriculture without the use of ploughs or vehicles. However, at the stage of development which they represent, the whole social personality structure of individuals, not only the superego functions but also the ego functions, work in some respects differently if the blend of fantasy and reality-congruent knowledge characteristic of a social fund of knowledge is dominated by the former. The range of reality-congruent knowledge is smaller. The ego-functions, roughly equivalent to the older, functionalist concept of reason, which mediate between personal needs such as hunger and thirst and the possible satisfactions the world at large has to offer are less stable—one might say less certain of themselves than they are at a later stage. There is a distinct relationship between the range and the reality-congruence of the social fund of knowledge—that is, of people’s means of orientation—and the ego-functions which with their help mediate between needs and satisfactions. The individual ego-functions remain comparatively weak. Perception is more easily impregnated with fantasies. The daughter of a priest, as Chinua Achebe describes it in one of his novels, has been in the forest and has seen there a spirit passing her.7 The father asks her to describe the spirit, which she does. The priest immediately recognises the spirit and, familiar with the customs of the spirit world, can tell her not only which spirit it was, but also that he probably was on his customary visit to another spirit equally well-known, and that she has nothing to fear from the encounter. In this as in other cases greater individual uncertainty is to some extent compensated through the support it receives from the collective fund of knowledge, whose

7  In

chapter 8 of Things Fall Apart (New York: Penguin Books, 1994 [1958]) Chinua Achebe describes the character Ezinma, a girl, who is believed to be an evil spirit (ọgbanje).—eds.

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principal guardians and spokesmen are priests. At a later stage, and thus for example in the Freudian fund of theoretical and empirical knowledge, fantasies are almost exclusively products of an autonomous individual, even where Freud deals with decidedly collective fantasies. For instance in Totem and Taboo,8 where he deals with the collective beliefs and rituals of Australian tribal groups, he does not see any essential difference between these collective fantasies and the individual fantasies of his patients. To some extent he projects the latter onto the former. However, the collective fantasies that one encounters everywhere in earlier societies as the dominant form of knowledge have in some respects distinctly different structural characteristics from the individual fantasies one encounters in highly individualised societies. The fact that, in the former case, fantasy-dominated knowledge is shared by many individuals, by a whole group of people—that these fantasies are institutionalised and that one can act upon them and act them out together with other people—distances them [the fantasies] to some extent from oneself, from the individual person, thus greatly strengthening the feeling that the figures and events suggested by these shared fantasies have an objective existence. The fantasy events enacted together with others, because they are communal activities, give the feeling of something that is really occurring. And it is. Communal rituals have ontological and emotional characteristics of reality, and the collective fantasies in forming the rituals participate in the shared feeling that they are real. Moreover, the fact that they are experienced as a form of reality gives these collective fantasies a power and a strength which enable them to support the self-regulating functions of individuals and to compensate for the relative weakness of the individual ego and superego functions. But the term weakness, as used here, has no evaluative implication. It has a purely structural and comparative meaning. At present we hardly know what is—or even whether there is—an optimal model of the complex balances between individual drive and affect functions, individual ego and superego functions, and natural and social pressures of the world at large. It is not impossible to imagine people at a later stage finding one day that their present ways of developing self-control functions are not conducive to an optimal balance. They may discover that their present standard forms of a person’s ego and superego functions receive too little social support and are, therefore, too harsh and unyielding. Krobo society, like many other societies at that stage, rather went in the opposite direction. Individual self-regulation throughout a person’s life was buttressed

8 Sigmund

Freud, Totem and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950)—original German, 1912–13. –eds.

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by a scaffolding of social rituals, ceremonies and other prescribed formalities. This high level of formalisation of human relations, as well as relations with gods, helped to diminish the uncertainties, the fears and anxieties that are a corollary of a relatively low control of the forces of nature, a relatively high incidence of violent conflicts between different human groups and, to a lesser extent, also within these groups—in short, [a corollary] of the higher danger level characteristic of that stage of development. Every major change in a person’s life, and within the regular cycle of social activities, as well as every exceptional change, such as an epidemic, elicits the performance of rituals. [These rituals] must have developed to the form we [have come] to know in response to communal needs, such as those of allaying fears and anxieties and supporting individual self-regulation, since the ancestral group first settled on the mountain. When we encounter them, the observance of these protective formalities is supported by the strictly hierarchic structure of Krobo society, by the elders within every ‘house’ or kin group, by chiefs and priests together with selected elders—on occasions which concerned subtribes or the tribe as a whole. The framework of formal rites and ceremonies, in turn, supports the hierarchic power structure. However, formalisation at this earlier stage of development differs in a specific way from that which one encounters at a later stage. Formal occasions at a later stage demand a high level of emotional restraint. The patterns of later[-stage] rituals and formalities of all kinds usually are, as far as possible, emptied of passion and affects of all kinds. Emotionally they are relatively dry. Many formal rituals of the Krobo people, on the other hand, are occasions of passionate pleading; some of them allow and even demand the show of strong feelings, of exuberant, wild excitation. They may embody boisterous and noisy dances, an open show of collective aggressiveness. Young men engaged in a war-dance may demonstrate their strength and manliness by beating a sacrificial animal, blow by blow, till it is dead. I have referred before to the koda-kpami ceremony.9 It is a purification ceremony which enables the assembled people to show the wild passion with which they condemn and drive out the evil from their midst. They hoot at all evildoers. They yell and stamp the earth. Together they all protest their own innocence. As one saw, the high priest himself steps forward and passionately asserts in front of the whole community his complete innocence. He attacks anyone who may say otherwise. He even challenges his own goddess to come down on him if he has committed any evil deed. He gravely proclaims— ‘I Nana Kloveki’s priest’—that

9 Huber,

Krobo, pp. 247–8.

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if someone should accuse him of having killed a person, either by direct attack or by magic, of having ever destroyed a woman’s pregnancy, or, by magic, damaged his brother’s farm, of having done any other wrong thing—if anyone should accuse him, of having spoken evil of another person and injured that person’s name, of having falsely accused others—if anyone should accuse him of having committed these or any other crime, [those would be grave offences, and] he pleads that the curse of his goddess may fall on his head. The formal profession of complete innocence on the part of the high priest and selected individuals, combined with a curse on anyone who dares to accuse them or bears them ill-will, and the collective portrayal by the whole congregation of a passionate drive against their own misdeeds, as if they were an alien thing existing independently of them, is an excellent example of a collective fantasy becoming social reality. One can well understand the social need, served by this joint oratory and pantomime. It lessens personal tensions; it eases anxieties. In the course of a year, feelings of conflicts with others and bad wishes—bad deeds against them— represented by open or hidden aggression or magical practices, accumulate in a community. They create tensions, fear of revenge of the gods [or] the injured spirits of persons. Perhaps the gods will cut off the food supply. Perhaps they will thwart people’s hope for a rich harvest. So, once a year, a few days before the seeds are planted in the good earth, people get together, led by their priests in order to drive all the evil away and to remind the gods that they all, priests and people, are innocent. That offers release of tensions; it secures relief from nagging guilt feelings, from the fear of vengeance by the gods for offences against their commands. Evil wishes, nasty deeds, have all been driven out. Offences have been committed by someone else, by an evil thing that has been sent away by our shouting and hooting and stamping the earth. We are clean. We are innocent. This transformation of collective fantasy into social reality presents a conceptual problem that has yet to be solved. If people in later-stage societies acted out their fantasies in this manner, thus showing that they could not clearly distinguish between fantasy and reality, one might suspect them of not being normal, perhaps of being psychotic. But the Krobo are perfectly sane. The present theory of psychosis as a condition in which people’s sense of reality,10 their capacity to

10 Cf. Freud’s concept of the ‘reality principle’ (Realitätsprinzip), which describes the individual ability to assess reality properly, and in consequence to act in accordance with this assessment. Freud contrasts the ‘reality principle’ with the ‘pleasure principle’ (Lustprinzip).—eds.

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distinguish between reality and fantasy, is impaired. But that applies only to the conditions of societies where fantasy knowledge has lost its dominance over reality knowledge to a large extent in the realm of non-human nature and to a much lesser extent also in the realm of human societies itself. Accordingly, the selfregulating functions—the ego and superego functions—of individuals in these societies are fashioned in such a way that they are less permeable by fantasies. Particularly in the field of nature, people’s sense of reality finds a secure mooring in a vast body of reality-congruent knowledge. Social reality is structured accordingly. If in these societies someone acts against this reality it denotes an individual breakdown of the self-regulating functions. But in societies at an earlier stage, self-regulating functions are geared to a social reality of a different kind. The people who participate in the Krobo koda-kpami ritual do not act against but with their social reality. They are sane. They have a completely well-established sense of social reality which at this stage provides a greater outlet for fantasies. But these fantasies are socially shared, and to a large extent socially and thus also personally controlled fantasies. To be sure, there are insane people in Krobo society. But although the character of the illness may be in some respects different from that known as psychosis in later societies, it too represents an individual breakdown of the pattern of ego and superego functions normal in Krobo society. It is not madness, but perfectly realistic that people feel cleansed and purified, freer of tensions and anxieties by enacting this ritual. The personified evil, the scapegoat, is being chased away with hooting and shouting and stamping. Priests and people can feel that they are innocent. Everyone who says otherwise has been cursed. The conviction of innocence has the character of a counter-reaction, in Freudian language of a reaction-formation, which are felt to be breaches of their social code, experienced as demands of their gods. The solemnity and intensity with which priests and people protest their innocence may be taken as a gauge of the strength of their tendency to feel, to wish, to do the opposite—something which could make them feel guilty. The great hooting ceremony, the collective projection of innocence with a detailed enumeration of possible offences helps them to control these tendencies. It supports their conscience in its struggle with these tendencies. On their high plateau, all the Krobo people lived in close propinquity with each other. As population—and thus the number of their villages— increased, the occasions for strife, for tensions and conflict between people, in all likelihood also increased. Yet they stood to lose everything if they were disunited. If animosity, anger and hatred among each other got out of hand, they would no longer be able to unite in common defence of their mountain home against outside enemies. The Krobo people on their mountain were under constant pressure to control the flare-up of internal conflicts and to curb bad feelings against each

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other. Thus a ritual such as that of the koda-kpami ceremony has to be seen as a result of a long collective learning process, a process in the course of which the various groups that made up the Krobo people learned to live with each other, in spite of all tensions and conflicts, without destroying each other. The koda-kpami ceremony ritual gives a powerful boost to the feeling of solidarity. It supported people’s ability to master their ill-will against each other. It strengthened their self-regulation in that sense, and at the same time it helped to lessen their fear of punishment by the gods for all those occasions where their self-regulation was too weak, where they gave way to the wish to fight or to harm their neighbours. The communal rejoicing in everybody’s innocence, including one’s own, helps people momentarily and perhaps for some time to come, to get rid of the nagging fear of the vengeance of gods, of ancestors or maybe of other people for hostile actions or wishes for delicts small or great, for breaches of the social code. With the help of the hooting ritual the burden of guilt feelings is transferred to someone else. All the evil one has done or has felt to have done, collectively or personally, is driven out and carried away by the embodied evil including all those which accuse innocent people like oneself of having done any wrong, is shamed by the collective hooting and yelling of the congregation, stamped on with their feet and [punched with] their fists, solemnly cursed by all and so finally driven off.11 The collective enactment of symbolic unloading of all misdeeds upon someone else’s shoulders most probably has a cathartic [effect]. At a stage where the level of danger and uncertainty is comparatively still very high, and at which all major and many minor misfortunes are largely experienced as a wilful act of punishment or aggression, the symbolic expulsion of all evil from their midst is likely to ease the fear of punishment for one’s offences by unseen powers, which is the essence of guilt feelings. In fact this fear assumes the character of guilt feelings most clearly at a later stage, when individual self-control functions attain a higher degree of autonomy in relation to social or outside control than it had in the case of the older Krobo society. There, individual self-control functions were still dependent, to relatively high extent, on the supporting controls of the community, of powerful priests or of the ever-present if invisible gods or ancestral or other spirits.

11 This

sentence in the dictated text is very unclear: to what does ‘all those’ refer, and what ‘is shamed’? It occurs in a part of the typescript where there is an unusually large incidence of typing mistakes and missing words. The explanation may simply be that the assistant taking the dictation was becoming tired.—eds.

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Perhaps, as one may see, the control of priests and people, though uneven, was reciprocal. Like the bulk of the Krobo people, the high priest too had to protest his innocence and to protect himself against blame gossip,12 often particularly virulent in smaller communities and to some extent countered here by a distancing etiquette. Even the priest, in other words, had to guard himself against whispered or loud accusations within the community of having done something he should not have done, and thus arousing the anger of the gods which could make the whole community suffer. Thus the high priest set an example. In the old ritual he was the first to cleanse himself of all suspicion by the rather daring device of publicly proclaiming his complete innocence of transgressions according to the Krobo canon. He even challenged his own goddess to show her wrath if he had committed any offence against her and he solemnly cursed anyone who accused him of such offences. Others followed him. In all likelihood, such a ritual had a liberating effect on the participants. It helped to lessen the fear of punishment of the gods for misdeeds imagined or real, which are an early form of what we call guilt feelings. It also offered an opportunity for collectively loosening the constraints of everyday life. Together one could shout, hoot, yell, even throw oneself to the ground and beat it. Like the wild war dances of another Krobo ritual, the hooting festival was a spectacular, wild and very noisy affair. Yet, in the form known to us, it was also a highly formalised ritual, well-orchestrated by priests and their helpers. Like the dances of young peasant warriors at the great festival of the Krobo god of war Nadu, where the priests’ assistants continuously pour out palm wine which in. days long-forgotten was drunk from the polished skulls of killed enemies, the hooting festival illuminates a crucial difference between the formalised rituals at earlier and at later stages of social development. Rituals and ceremonies at the earlier stages usually allow a significantly higher level of overt emotional, affective and, sometimes, libidinal behaviour than is usually allowed on ritualised and, more generally, formalised occasions at later stages of social development. In the former case a show of apparently unrestrained emotional excitement, of hectic bodily movement, of pantomime violence—or, in the case of sacrificial animals, real violence—may be permitted within the ritual’s formal framework. Yet the loosening of people’s individual self-control allowed on such occasions does not mean that they are out of control. In Krobo society, as in many other human

12 See

Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders, enlarged edn (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008 [Collected Works, vol. 4]), chapter 7, ‘Observations on gossip’.—eds.

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societies, the decontrolling of restraints of everyday life on such festive occasions remain within the boundaries of communal control. It is, in the case of the Krobo, usually controlled by priests and their assistants and also, to some extent, mutually by the participants themselves. Some people may get beyond the permitted level of unrestraint, some may get into trance and for these reasons require some help, but in all cases which threaten to go beyond the prescribed course of the ritual, and thus threaten to disrupt it, the priests’ assistants and other participants try to take care.

V The Need for Controlled Decontrolling of Affects and the Functions of Priests at War As far as one can see, most, perhaps all, human societies have developed rituals or institutions one of whose functions it is to allow, as I like to call it, a controlled decontrolling of affects, of emotions and sometimes of libidinal impulses.13 An occasional loosening of the restraints of everyday life, a quest for mostly collective mimetic excitement—not provoked by any real danger—in other words, a limited and temporary throwing off of some self-constraints appears to satisfy a deep-felt human need. Examples can be found in societies at all stages and all over the world. One may be inclined to believe that this is only a need at later stages of the civilising process. Members of later-stage societies may imagine that only they have built-in self-controls and repressive restraints—or perhaps even that people of earlier societies do not have any individual self-control, any restraints which curb some of their impulses. But that would be a mistake. No human baby can develop into a fully functioning human being without acquiring in the course of a learning process a capacity for self-regulation. It is never entirely independent of regulation from abroad, but the balance between selfregulation and social regulation can differ widely in different societies Whatever

13 Elias

used the idea of a controlled decontrolling of emotional controls especially in his work on sports and leisure; see Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process, enlarged edn. (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008 [Collected Works, vol.7]), and Jan Haut et al. (eds), Excitement Processes: Norbert Elias’s Unpublished Works on Sports, Leisure, Body, Culture (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2018). It has also been extensively invoked by Cas Wouters in his theory of informalising processes; see Informalisation: Manners and Emotions since 1890 (London: Sage, 2007), and Cas Wouters and Michael Dunning (eds), Civilisation and Informalisation: Connecting Longterm Social and Psychic Processes (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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the balance may be, self-regulation always entails some restraint on libidinal, affective or emotional impulses. One might say, it also entails repression. But the term repression is now widely used with a negative connotation. The term selfregulation is broader and less burdened with either positive or negative evaluative associations. This term, which has sufficient scope to accommodate unconscious or automatic forms of self-regulation, may make it easier to recognise that discussions centred on the alternatives, implied as it seems by Freud himself, ‘repression’ or ‘no repression’ [are inadequate].14 A person without self-regulation—without ‘repression’—would be even more disjointed, unhappy and incapacitated than a person with an overgrown self-regulation. This too is a question of balances, of too much or too little, not of either/or. It is not without interest to observe that societies can evolve in the course of a blind or unplanned process ways and means for occasionally changing their members’ ordinary balance between self-regulating functions and that which they regulate. As far as one can see, most human societies have social institutions and personal techniques satisfying the need for an occasional decontrolling of the restraints of everyday life. But they also have usually developed institutions and techniques for a controlled decontrolling of affective impulses at fairly regular intervals. At a guess one might say only those societies survived that developed ways and means of controlling the occasional decontrolling of normally controlled affective behaviour. Those who did not succeed in developing such civilising devices, in all likelihood, did not survive. Decontrolling affects without controls gave rise to great dangers for the human beings concerned, for their individual existence no less than for their existence as societies. Most of all the personal affect equilibrium appeared to be at risk without sufficient scope for controlled pleasurable excitement. In such cases the growing tension-balance of a section of the population was likely to seek an outlet in forms of uncontrolled, perhaps uncontrollable pleasurable excitement, often constituting a danger to human life.

14 At

about this point, Elias added a handwritten note on a separate sheet. It is only partly decipherable, but this indicates his general drift (eds): ‘The term “repression” has now become widely used with strong negative undertones. As Freud introduced it, from the start it was linked to his imaginative reconstruction of the primordial horde [in which] the father had no need to repress any impulses at all. That appeared as the ideal condition of humanity. Adam’s sin, the fall of man in the Freudian version, was the killing of the primordial father by his sons, the common guilt feeling—why actually should they feel guilty?…’.

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At a later stage, increasingly though not exclusively, leisure-time occupations have acquired the function of a controlled decontrolling of affects. As one may observe, such controls, if the stress in society at large increases, can break down and, in that case, the decontrolling of affects represents a grave danger for all people concerned. In earlier-stage societies the controlled decontrolling of emotions, largely though again not exclusively, is a function of rituals and festivals, which in terms of a later-stage classification are conceptualised as religious. They are mostly formal, customary occasions under the organisational control of priests. I have tried to provide evidence for the great variety of ritualised organising and controlling functions which priests fulfilled in the later phases of the second stage of the development of Krobo society—that is, the later phases of the development of the Krobo settlement in hilltop villages as the focal of their society. But they had already spread far beyond it in the plain below. One more function of priests may be worth mentioning. It throws some light on what at the later stages of social development is usually conceptualised as guilt feelings. One of the greatest dangers, perhaps the greatest danger next to the threat of famine, was the threat of war, of formalised or informal violence from outside. If war was imminent, priests had to lessen the fear of its dangers by ritually enlisting the help and protection of a war god, for example the god Nadu, and to strengthen the courage of young warriors by ritual ablutions and other magical operations. Special protection was needed for their heads. The high point of a battle among the tribal groups to which the Krobo belonged was not simply victory, not simply the dispersal or withdrawal of an enemy or a hostile army, but the cutting off of the heads of killed enemies as a visible sign of one’s triumph—a visible object that one could bring home for everyone to see. Thus before going into battle the warriors went to the shrine of the war god and symbolically offered him through the voice of the priest food and drink to enlist his favour. An example of the way in which the priest addressed the god while pouring the libation and thus inviting him to a drink, was this. Even for the ears of a later period the simplicity and directness of the evocation, its complete lack of pomposity or flattery, is greatly appealing: Sad news has come. Thus we have come to offer wine. Mau and his spouse the Earth, bless us! Nadu, accept and drink! Tete and Nate set out for the battle.

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Let their heads not remain on the field, but let them return!15

The deity, as one may see, has in this case not the character of an absolute ruler, of a king separated from his subjects by a great social distance. The god is seen as more powerful than any human being. Yet the social distance between him, his human followers and the priest mediating between them is not so very great. He is not quite their equal, but more so than the high gods of monarchical state societies. To be sure a high god, symbolising the heavens, and his spouse, the Earth, have their place among the Krobo deities. But their place is marginal. The affects and emotions directed towards them are weak and colourless, precisely because they exist at a greater distance. They are after all deities for all humans, and not gods specifically concerned with the Krobo people. That the latter are far less remote, that the emotions directed towards them are much more vivid, that they are much closer to their worshippers than the sky god and, although more powerful, much more their equal, is a reflection of the fact that the social distances in Krobo society itself—for instance that between priests or chiefs and the heads of family houses, the elders, or between the elders and the younger generations, the warriors, or even between the Krobo and their slaves—are markedly smaller than comparable distances between ruling groups such as kings or priests in fully fledged state societies. Priests also help to support and to strengthen the self-regulation of the warriors: Your eye be clear! Your heart be quiet! Your hand be firm! Your liver be steady!16

Again, priests help to control and thus to lessen the warriors’ fear of dangers which threaten them when they come home victoriously from the battlefield, triumphantly carrying with them the still bloody heads of enemies whom they have killed. What kind of fears are haunting victorious warriors who have slain their enemies? Freud imputes guilt feelings to the band of brothers who have killed their father. But the nature of guilt feelings remains somewhat obscure. Why

15 Huber, 16 Ibid.

Krobo, p. 267.

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should they feel guilty or, in other words, feel that they have broken a proscribed code of conduct17 if there is no-one to punish them for their transgression? And, indeed, the primeval father whom they have slain is dead. He has gone for good. Why should they feel guilty or, in other words, be afraid of punishment if there is no-one, no powerful father who can punish them any longer? One cannot help feeling that there is some gap, some link in the chain of reasoning that is missing in Freud’s imaginative tale of the primeval horde and the killing of the father. The missing link may be provided if one looks at the way in which Krobo priests sought ritually to cleanse the returning warriors from the stain of bloodshed. The faces of warriors who had killed an enemy were washed in sacred medicine water, and some of the soup was put into their mouths while the priest three times repeated the sentence: ‘The bloodstain with which you have come home, I wash it off from you so that no headache may trouble you.’ In former days, according to Huber,18 the warrior who brought home an enemy’s head was given rum mixed with some drops of the enemy’s blood to drink. This protected him against the avenging spirit of the beheaded enemy. It also gave the warrior special courage for future battles. This, in other words, is the missing link in Freud’s argument. What we call guilt feelings are in origin fears of punishment by someone, a tangible person or force for offences one has committed against a person or force which is strong enough to avenge himself on the transgressor. If the primordial father were truly dead and gone for good, his murder could hardly elicit any guilt feelings, any fear of being punished for offences against the father, if the father had no power to avenge himself. The mythology of guilt feelings which makes it appear as if such feelings were part of the innate heritage of human beings, often lacks an explicit statement to the effect that guilt feelings are nothing but a form of frozen fear: the fear of being punished by someone for transgressions committed against him or her, a fear that has settled down in the recesses of one’s memory and thus in the apparatus of the individual self-regulation. A human baby in the early stages of learning self-regulation has strong desires and also strong fears of the avenging parents for transgressions of their commands real or imagined. It is fears of this kind that may settle down in

17 The

phrase ‘broken a proscribed code of conduct’ is as recorded from Elias’s dictation but, even if its sense is clear, is obviously nonsensical English. No doubt Elias would have corrected it if he had re-read it closely. It could be amended to read something like ‘broken a prescribed code of conduct’ or even ‘committed a proscribed action’, but we decided to let it stand as dictated.—eds. 18 Huber, Krobo, p. 268.

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a person’s self-regulation, conscious or unconscious, in the form of guilt feelings. They are in that form almost wholly divorced from any external agent, real or imaginary. Instead they have the character of anxieties almost wholly aroused by a person’s own self-regulation apparatus, mainly by a person’s superego functions or, as we say, a person’s conscience. [They] are descended from fears of real or imagined attacks by an external agent which a person experiences during an early period of life. The fear of a Krobo warrior that the spirit of a man he has killed can try to avenge himself for the killing forms part of a personality structure, and a social condition which is almost universal at the stage of development, one of whose representatives is the old Krobo society settled on its mountain. At that stage of society, almost everywhere human beings assume that dead people can have a spirit existence of some kind. People’s fears are not yet securely limited by the comprehensive social fund of reality-congruent knowledge of nature which in industrial nation states is almost taken for granted. In the old Krobo society the area of not-knowing, the gaps in reality-congruent knowledge, were much greater. And greater therefore also the real dangers to which people were exposed from less controllable forces of non-human nature and, to some extent, also from less controllable human beings. At these earlier stages, the fear of people would have been intolerable if they had been aware of the full extent of their not-knowing, of the limitations of their reality-congruent knowledge. Fantasies came to their aid. As I have already mentioned, they filled the vast gaps of their reality-congruent knowledge with fantasy knowledge which to a large extent was standardised in their society and generally accepted as true by all members of a society. Its general acceptance as true within a specific society gave fantasy knowledge in the form of myth and magical rituals its totally convincing character for the members of that society. I raised earlier the question of the functions and the power resources of priests in earlier-stage societies. The selected examples which I have given of the functions of priests in Krobo society show how variegated these functions can be. By and large I am using Krobo society here as an empirical model. It helps to bring characteristic structures of societies of a comparable stage of development into focus. But it will need many more comparative studies before one can be sure which structures and functions are characteristic of all societies at a comparable stage of development, which to only some of them, [and which] even to Krobo society only. I am for instance quite certain that the power-balance between warleaders and priests, which the available evidence from Krobo society indicates, was not always the same in societies at a comparable stage of development. But the social functions of priests at that stage emerge somewhat more clearly than they used to be from a study of ancient Krobo society. The source of their

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power was very clearly their monopoly of the means of orientation. They were the guardians of a society’s social fund of knowledge in general and in particular of a society’s knowledge of the ways of the spirits and all of the gods of their own society. In Krobo society, at the stage of its mountain settlement, priests’ apprentices underwent a long and highly specialised training, learning by heart the history and customs of their people including knowledge of all, or at least of the major rituals appropriate to one of the many different occasions at which priests were required to officiate or to give a lead. They knew the chants and the magical formulas that were necessary to counter all the dangers due to the ill will of gods or to the activities of other spirits. As the last example, the protection of warriors from the vengeance of killed enemies showed, they were often able to calm people’s fears and to lessen the dangers imagined by the people of really threatening them. As one saw, they calmed the fears of the danger of a bad harvest. They knew how to calm the fear of the anger of the gods [at] all kinds of transgressions committed within a community. However, the social functions of priests in societies represented here by reference to the Krobo went far beyond the sphere which is now called religious. Their intimate knowledge of the ways of the gods, of their will, their wishes and their moods, enabled priests to play a leading part in virtually all aspects of their people’s lives, where danger threatened and decisions had to be taken. Even in the late sixties of the twentieth century, when Krobo land formed part of the state of Ghana and was ruled in accordance with the law of that state, people still remembered the time when four priests formed the highest court of the Krobo, and when one of them, the Okumo, judged murder cases and, if necessary, executed a murderer with his own hands. During a period lasting almost certainly several centuries, the Krobo were ruled by co-dominion of priests and chief or war leaders assisted by the highest-ranking elders, the heads of ‘houses’ or clans. It is not too difficult to say why in early societies these two groups of specialists, priests and warriors, gained the ascendancy over all other groups. And what were the boundaries of their co-rule in relation to each other? Priests were essentially the ruling group from which came those who, perhaps together with a council of elders and sometimes with the participation of the core of the warriors, the young men, gave a knowledge-based lead in all matters which concerned the internal affairs of the tribe or the state. This is not to say that they had no influence on their people’s relationship with other groups in war and peace.

Emotions, Violence and Rituals: On Traditional Klama Songs Norbert Elias

I Social Traps and Warfare The story of Odente, whose reintroduction in Date was intended by the pagan party to counteract the growing influence of Christianity, is an episode that took place from the end of 1885 to the beginning of 1887. (The story is told in the book Der Götze Odente [The Idol Odente] by the missionary Wilhelm Rottmann).1 Undoubtedly the narrative reflects the struggle in Date [Larteh],2 which was by no means resolved in the manner it is now, between what the editor calls the heathen or pagan party and the Christian party—perhaps one should call them the party of the old and the party of the new god.

1 Missionar

W. Rottmann, Der Götze Odente: Ein Bild aus dem westafrikanischen Heidentum (Basel: Verlag der Missionsbuchhandlung, 1894). [The word Götze is most often translated as ‘idol’, which seems appropriate here, though later on in the text Elias rendered it as ‘god’.—eds.]. 2 Larteh Akuapem is a town in the south of the Eastern Region of Ghana.—eds.

The manuscript is archived under the number Ghan-Essays 22 (1964), Notes for the essay on Dente, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. Some of the text is rather rough and almost in note form. Sub-headings were added by the editors. This manuscript was mainly edited by Dieter Reicher. – eds. N. Elias (*)  Wiesbaden, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_9

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The narrative contains passages which make the followers of the old god appear in a bad or a doubtful light, while those of the new god appear to be always on the side of the angels. And the balance of our judgement may be all the more weighted against the followers of the old god, as their actions run not only against what is today regarded as Christian morality, but also against what has gradually come to be accepted as standards of civilised behaviour over a great part of this earth. One of the great mistakes made by those who abide by these standards is the tendency to take it for granted that ‘one’ has these standards that they treated as a sign or outcome of one’s superior virtues or perhaps one’s superior intelligence and in fact seems to assume that ‘one’ could never act in any other but a civilised manner. The tendency of many members of the more advanced industrial countries to treat their civilised behaviour almost as if it were given to them by nature as part of the collective charisma of a socially superior group has received, one hopes, a good jolt by Hitler and his Teutonic Männer, by the unexpected—and for many people almost unbelievable—resurgence of barbarism among members of a highly developed country. The behaviour of the established groups towards outsider groups in South Africa shows that a quick decline of civilised behaviour is perfectly compatible with relatively high economic development at least for a time. And as symptoms of a similar regression in other developed countries are numerous, it seems time—instead of taking such standards for granted—to enquire into the conditions under which such standards can develop and maintain themselves. The study of African societies is one way of doing it. Because here, better perhaps than in any other cases, we learn to understand the standards of action in relations between human beings, singly and in groups. If human beings behaved in a manner that according to our lights is terrible, if they did so not in exceptional cases, but as part of their standard behaviour, as something which was done as it were normally, it was done because they could not solve—as societies—certain problems against which they came up again and again and from which they could not escape. I try to bring into the open the compulsion to certain forms of behaviour that lie in the structure of their societies, and which are unsolved. For the members of these societies these unsolved problems are traps at the time. And I regard it as one of the primary tasks of sociologists to study these traps. Perhaps I can make my meaning clearer if I refer to certain unsolved, and apparently for us at present insoluble, problems characteristic of the structure of humankind of our time. The most obvious example is the incidence of wars. That wars of the kind we have now, large and small—or for that matter wars of any kind—represent a breakdown of civilised standards of conduct is fairly evident. There is obviously, in wide parts of humankind, an enormous revulsion against wars. In spite of this

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revulsion, in spite of the fact that apparently—as people often say—‘no one any longer wants war’, [wars happen]; that is what I mean by a trap, by the compulsion exercised on humans by unsolved problems of their life together, their social life. For indeed we have not solved the problem of how to end wars. Many people do not even recognise it as a social problem, as a problem arising not from the intentions of a few bad individuals, as is sometimes believed—if only all people were people of good will. This is a complete misjudgement of the situation which rather prevents a solution than helps towards it. Nor is it a question of mysterious social forces or eternal human nature driving towards war. [Such notions] simply provide an alibi for those who do not want to enquire, who invent an answer without having first looked at the problem. The problem evidently is what in the relationship of human groups—in the configuration of their grouping—drives them again and again towards organised mass killings. And why can we not escape from the threat of these organised mass killings although if not all, at least a great number of people all over the world, dread it and are sick and tired of it. One cannot escape from these social traps without being aware first that there are such traps and secondly that they have to be studied as dispassionately as thunderstorms or epidemics before one can hope to find ways and means to loosen their thongs. Human sacrifices were symptoms of a similar situation. That they can be found in almost all societies at a certain stage of their development indicates that the phenomenon cannot be simply dismissed as a symptom of the nature of a particular group of people. It was and is a symptom of a particular type of social conditions (to use a familiar term) or a symptom of a specific configuration of human groups (to use a less familiar but perhaps more revealing term), and [a symptom] of the problems—the for them insoluble problems—that it raised for those who formed this configuration.3 Some features of this configuration have already been mentioned. Today Africa’s population is growing. In another hundred or two hundred years its vast spaces may fill up and its population density may come nearer to that of West and Central Europe. In the past, the overall picture was that of a vast landmass with a few—a very few—islands of relatively stable resident population and a social organisation strong and effectual enough to ensure a degree of continuity over

3 Note

that here Elias uses the expressions ‘configuration of human groups’ and ‘configuration’, not his later term ‘figuration’. He explained in conversation that con is Latin for ‘with’, but the term does not mean ‘with’ anything else, but rather something in itself, so he later shortened it.– eds.

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the centuries. For the rest, Africa’s vast empty spaces were inhabited by shifting populations. Particularly the spaces of tropical Africa south of the Sahara, [the] rainforests and [the] savannah country were inhabited by groups who settled for a time and then moved again either in search of better land or better defensible places or driven away by other invading groups. Apart from some Yoruba kingdoms, state formation of any duration was lacking. Groups came and left. There were enough empty spaces for them to clear the ground, stay for a while and move on. Newly immigrated groups fought with those they encountered or made common cause and fused with them. In this part of Africa, the age of the great migrations lasted till late in the nineteenth century. Few large settlements existed there prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the people who lived there were not cattle-breeding or horse-riding nomads. They were groups of peasants living in villages or hamlets. It is characteristic that it is part of the living tradition of almost every single ethnic group and every single village to remember that they came to this place not so long ago from this or that other place. Moreover, almost as many villages are the result of fusions of several groups who immigrated at different times, or of groups who helped each other in a war against other groups. This is one of the strongest impressions one receives from observations in the area which we now call Ghana and most probably in the neighbouring districts, too: wars were endemic—wars often between small groups. The strongest driving force of their migrations, as far as one can see, was not the quest for more fruitful land, in fact land was plentiful. But the quest for security, the simple quest for a place which could be easily defended in the turmoil of migrating groups—the quest for survival as a group was as imperative a need as the quest for food. In these continued encounters of one group with others, there was nothing which could restrain the stronger group from annihilating or enslaving the weaker group. In the more settled, more complex and differentiated societies of Europe and America, wars and the possibility of physical annihilation by an enemy comes from time to time in intervals which, to them, may appear short, but which by comparison with previous conditions, with the conditions of previous periods or with the conditions of African societies until very recently, are very long. Moreover, in Europe since the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries almost up to the war of 1939–45, the mass of the population of a country at war—women, children and older men—were only indirectly affected by the killing agencies of an enemy. The only risk of physical annihilation which individuals had to run were the risks of assassination by an outlaw, by someone we call a murderer, the greater risk of being killed or injured by accident in connection with one or other pieces of machinery—factory engines, motor cars, railways and so forth—which have become indispensable companions of people’s lives in

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these societies. Physical annihilation of people through enemy action, even in the epoch of the atomic threat, has become a very exceptional and abnormal event, even though the threat of such actions as a factor shaping the life of these societies is ever present. Nothing is more characteristic for this situation and for the ways of thinking derived from it than the fine distinctions which the members of these societies make in their manner of speaking, in the socially prescribed vocabulary between the killing of people which occurs in their normal everyday life and the killing of people in the course of an organised military action. The net result is always the same. A human being is killed by another, but according to the social evaluation of the act, too, one might almost say, the social status of the act, we designate killings of human beings in different situations with different names. Killings not authorised by state authorities are called murder or manslaughter. Killings with permission or ordered by the state authorities are called by various names: executions if they come to pass as a result of decisions by state-appointed legal agents, military actions if they are the result of wholesale authorisation to kill members of another group which is given by state authorities on those occasions which we call ‘wars’. Thus the attitude towards the killings of human beings by other human beings, prevalent in highly developed state societies, is thoroughly fashioned by the structure and situation of these societies themselves: their vocabulary is significant in that respect. The killing of human beings which are authorised by the state are not called murder. It is not unimportant that one should keep clearly in mind the specific social conditions which determine these attitudes. One cannot expect that they are the same in societies with a different structure internally as well as in relation to each other. What these relations were in the case of West African societies before European powers imposed their views and their standards upon them has already been said. Each group was in constant danger of being annihilated or enslaved by any other with which they came in contact. Europeans, only too apt to take their conditions for granted, may ask: why couldn’t they see reason? Why couldn’t they come to an agreement not to kill each other? But the same question mutatis mutandis one can, of course, put to the members of advanced societies themselves with regard to their wars: why can’t they come to an agreement, not to kill each other? These are in both cases unsolved problems with which people grapple often for centuries or even for thousands of years without making much progress towards their solution. I do not imply in the least that there is any ‘natural’ tendency of men to kill each other. The problem as it is seen here is not a problem

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of natural urges supposedly existing independently of any situation, it is a problem strictly concerned with the structure of the situation, with the configuration of groups. There were many reasons which brought human groups into conflict with each other. But whatever they were once they came into operation, as long as human beings themselves had not been able to evolve any machinery for settling conflicts without resort to violence, the conflicts inevitably resulted in violence, and people lived throughout their lives in the shadow of violence. The problem was then, as it is now, the problem of how to evolve an organisation which could ensure the settling of conflicts without resort to violence. That was the unsolved problem with which African societies were confronted prior to and for a long time even after the white man had imposed his solution for the problem, just as it is still the problem of the advanced societies themselves. The difference, and it is an important and significant difference, is only a difference between the sociological levels on which violence as a means for settling conflicts can be checked.

II Conflict Solution in Stateless Societies: Religious Rituals and Traditional Songs Because Europeans live in societies with state organisations of considerable stability who check the use of violence fairly effectively internally, they can hardly imagine what it means to live in societies in which violent attacks on human beings by human beings, singly or in groups, are, as it were, always round next corner—a possibility with which one has to reckon almost at any moment of one’s life. One aspect of what has been called here the ‘trap’ of such a situation is that if you must expect at any moment of your life a violent attack you also learn, from early days on, to use violence. But the fact that the chance of the use of violence, particularly in relations between different groups, was greater in relations between and within pre-state societies such as those with which we deal here does not mean that violence was in fact ever present or that it was the only way in which conflicts were settled. African societies, and in fact all human societies, have evolved their own specific institutions and customs, with that specific function—the specific function of settling conflicts without the use of force between those who are in conflict. Thus, in trying to understand the structure and situation of traditional African societies, one has to take into account the balance between the ubiquitous tendencies to the use of force and the specific checks to the use of force characteristic of that stage of development.

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The documents assembled in this volume4 provide many examples of this interplay between tendencies to resort to violence and social devices for checking the use of violence in human relations. The author of The Idol Odente justly observes that African peoples often prefer to have a chief even if he is guilty of a degree of partiality and arbitrariness. He justly observes that without a chief the whole community might easily dissolve into chaos. A chief, in fact, is one of the agencies for arbitration, for solving disputes without the use of force. It is most characteristic of at least a good many African villages that people seem to feel they might not be able to check their own anger, the strength of their feeling against someone with whom they are in conflict, and might under the pressure of their own feelings do something rash if there were no set authority sanctioned in the right manner by the ancestors and the gods. [Such is an authority] whom one can allow to decide between oneself and one’s opponent and to whom one must submit, who because of his authority can help one to curb one’s anger, one’s rage against the opponent. That does not in any way mean the chief himself has absolute power and goes unchecked. In fact, one of the most general characteristics of African communities, as of African state organisations, is that they embody an often rather complex balance of power system with many checks and counterchecks which is fragile and easily upset, but which people are afraid to upset because they feel that to upset it would result in widespread disorder. Again the vivid description of community life of Date (Larteh) can serve very well to show the complex balance between the various groups there. The picture is not complete. Certain aspects are not relevant to the story which it is intended to tell but the main features of the distribution of power in that community become quite apparent. The episode as one can see forms part of the struggle between the representatives of the new and the representatives of the old religion. From the evidence available it is not possible to say what was the social position within the community of Date of the people who became Christians. We know from some other examples that it is not necessarily the members of the highest-ranking families who are attracted to the new religion and allow themselves to be baptised. In Date, as it appears, a whole group of elders were on the side of the old religion and its representatives. Rottmann speaks of the ‘party of the scholars’.5 It is not

4 Elias

is referring to a volume that he himself was planning, not the present volume.—eds. Der Götze Odente.

5 Rottmann,

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N. Elias

unlikely that in Date as elsewhere the village nobility regarded the ‘scholars’ as a group of upstarts who threatened their authority. The chief evidently plays a double role. Officially, and up to a point, in fact, he plays the part of the arbitrator who is not involved in the disputes which come to him for arbitration. Again and again, the leaders of the Christian community turns to him and the council of the elders as to the official agency from which they expect satisfaction in the wrongs which they feel are done to them. At the same time, if one reads between the lines, it appears that the Christians thought that in fact the chief was on the side of their opponent and he was in favour of the coming of Odente. The picture which emerges from the example given in Rottmann’s article is very one-sided. I have left out some passages in which he seems to gloat over the defeat of the heathen in a manner we find today no longer quite bearable. They were unnecessary for the purpose [of] this article …. His partisanship is of no interest. But it shows itself, of course again and again, the manner in which he presents things. He slightly sneers at Odente ‘who hates goats’ and the way he presents the ritual prohibitions common to many African gods is apt to give the reader the feeling that such prohibitions are ridiculous superstitions. But they were no less serious and sincere than any other beliefs which we call religious. I have no evidence about the basic food prohibitions of the Dente cult. But I happen to have come across evidence that all the priests and under-priests of the great Krobo god Nadu were forbidden to eat goat’s meat. There was a story of an under-priest named Tei Mate who wilfully ate goat’s meat and as a result his belly became protuberant and he expired. The following song was sung to remind people to obey the god’s laws. Like many other Klama songs, the story is told in briefly and succinctly in the form of a short conversation. We hear the people themselves speak. Don’t eat! I will eat! Mr Tei Mate ate, his belly swoll (and he died).6 Again, he [Rottmann] has nothing but contempt for the procession of the heathen. But one might have given a similar description of many a Greek procession in terms which would rouse our admiration. African festivities are noisy. But the noise is merely part of the enormous enjoyment which Africans derive from their dances and rituals. Religious rituals are not, as ours are, divorced from singing,

6 Azu

and Azu (1929), Klama Lalai Part II, Song 15.

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dancing and laughing. Solemnity and laughter can blend. They are not formal and impersonal. They are informal, and highly personal. People are involved in them with their whole persons [beings]. Music, dancing, the rhythm of the drums, the swaying of the bodies form part of it. So does the drinking of palm wine, or rum and gin. When fools get drunk, as the comment to one of the Klama songs says, they go to bed or lean against trees and sleep so deeply that one would find it difficult to wake them up when duty calls. But the people of Tewuse, like wise priests, when they are drunk they dance, they perspire, they make the little bells on their feet dance and sound too. If people like Mr. Namasu are drunk They transfer their drunkenness to trees. We are Tewuse, the wise priests when we are drunk we transfer the drunkenness to the bells on our feet.7

There are Klama songs for every situation. They preserve for us a great deal of these situations and the feeling that went with them. As a corrective to the onesidedness of some of the descriptions which follow they are useful. Although they come from a different people, from the Krobos, not from the Guam,8 it is not too far-fetched to assume that some of these basic situations of African village life could be found everywhere in the area. Listen to the song which was sung at a village party to the players [and] spectators when a quarrel and disorder threatened. [verse 1] Madam Dede Awliki move quickly about in dance move quickly about and let us go home.

7 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part II, Song 41, p. 276. Elias means the Guang people, an ethnic group living in Ghana. Their language is Guan which is a Kwa language like that of the Krobos. They were settling in villages of the Akuapem (Akwapim) state like Larteh or Akropong.—eds. 8 Actually,

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N. Elias

[verse 2] Mr. Dugba Tete I have [?] invited friends to this dance for the purpose of creating a quarrel.9

We no longer know to which event in the history of the group the verse alluded, but the people understood. The occasions on which the following two songs were sung can be left to everybody’s imagination. There are no comments [to them]. We merry laughers! We discreet women We merry laughers! Lo, the foolish man says he is going to fall into the valley and die As for us since the creation Nothing has ever given us sorrow Lo, the foolish man says he is going to fall in the valley and die.10

The man evidently says he is going to fall from the Krobo mountain into the valley. And the discreet women tell him they could not care less. You went away and you were hanged Father told you, mother also told you You went away and hearken; You were hanged You were told, you refused to hear You were hanged.11

This was sung at a funeral. The players mean to say, as the comment [of Enoch Azu] says, that the cause of the death of the deceased could have been avoidable had he been obedient to his parents.12

9 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part II, Song 4. and Azu (1929), Part II, Song 50, p. 284. 11 Azu and Azu (1929), Song 15, p. 124. 12 If you want to understand ‘Liko yo’, which I have translated ‘hang’, see Andangbe History, chap. VII, wrote Enoch Azu. 10 Azu

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III The Problem of Generalisation13 [In poetry] a generalisation or abstraction is achieved by allusion to a past situation which is commonly remembered. This past situation compressed in a proverb or a Klama song serves as model—serves instead of the abstract and general models which we use—in order to make tentative prediction and precepts of action. Where we—or rather our ancestors—might allude to general principles of ethics or morality, traditional African societies provide the community with a store of reference proverbs or songs which serve the same purpose as abbreviated prescriptions: by means of reference to past situations which can serve as model for a present situation, they provide—as many of our abstractions, such as principles or laws or general rules do—a prediction as to what is likely to happen in the future, rolled into one with a prescription as to what ought to be done in such a situation. Philosophers of science often quite wrongly assume that what we call sciences are the only intellectual techniques for making predictions. In fact, all human societies of which we know have techniques for making predictions. They all hand on from one generation to another experiences which can be formulated in conditional sentences: when (a) happens, (b) is likely to follow. Pre-scientific knowledge differs from scientific knowledge only in the degree of certainty which they provide. In particular, what we call science is a technique by means of which the social fund of knowledge can be systematically extended and the extension can be controlled in such a way that—after many attempts in the form, for instance, of experiments—the socially accepted extension of knowledge usually has a high degree of appropriateness to the observable facts. But at present these techniques have a great disadvantage of an enormous departmentalisation of thinking and knowledge. This departmentalisation would not be as harmful, as distorting in relation to human experiences as it is, if we recognised it for what it is, as an artificial construction useful as a temporary step for the acquisition of knowledge with a high degree of certainty, but which, in order to fit our actual experiences, has to be followed by a reintegration of the artificially segregated parts of knowledge into models of the whole natural and social universe. Or, to put it in other words, scientific analysis has a specific distorting effect on our whole outlook unless it is associated as a continuous dialectic movement with scientific synopsis.

13 Unusually,

this sub-heading appears in Elias’s typescript.—eds.

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N. Elias

The ordering of experiences and perceptions characteristic of traditional societies at the stage in which we find them, for example in Africa prior to the increasing urbanisation and industrialisation which is now under way, is characterised by a lack of analytical differentiation and departmentalisation of thinking, by a corresponding lack of the ability to stand back from the fund of knowledge that has been handed on and to criticise it deliberately and intentionally. A person born into a society of this kind cannot help accepting the bulk of traditional knowledge that has been handed on. Unless he has migrated and lived for a considerable time somewhere else, he has no lever for any doubts with regard to the fundamentals of the tradition of his group which everybody else there believes. He always stands with others in a situation which is experienced as such as a whole, without attempt intellectually to departmentalise it in the manner we do. Order is provided by the wisdom of the elders, by what we now classify as ‘proverbs’, ‘folk tales’, ‘traditional songs’—we are fortunate that Noa and Enoch Azu’s efforts have preserved for us what was essentially a secret tradition handed on by priests to the initiated only, for knowledge in simpler even more than in highly differentiated societies constitutes power. This type of knowledge lacks the certainty and precision which knowledge has in scientific societies, but it also lacks its dryness and remoteness in relation to the actual situations in which human beings often find themselves. Much of the attractiveness which Greek thinking has for people living in the intellectual climate dominated by highly effective analytic techniques, unsupported by equally effective techniques and synthesis, is due to the fact that analytic techniques were just about to emerge without having as yet totally divorced themselves from the traditional techniques of thinking dominated by the experience of a whole situation and still embodying many of the feelings associated with it. We departmentalise this aspect as a ‘poetic’ quality because, according to the scheme of our departmentalisation, poetry is one of the methods by means of which we can still restore for our imagination the wholeness of a felt situation. The same can be said of a good deal of the traditional African ways of thinking. The Klama songs are a very good example. It requires a certain effort to understand the way in which they evoke a situation for a variety of reasons: (1) They are so intimately connected with the manner of life of the Adangbe that people with a very different range and form of experience naturally find it difficult to enter into the spirit of the song. (2) The nearest parallel to the use of proverbs and songs such as these which we have in highly differentiated societies is the use of quotations from great playwrights. A passage of Shakespeare or Keats quoted in the appropriate situation had very much the same function as the singing of the Klama songs. It also relies as

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these songs do and did on the peculiar intimacy which exists between people of the same tradition. Outsiders often cannot easily catch on to the meaning of a quotation used by one of the persons present in a particular situation. The same is true of Europeans listening to or reading these songs. They have grown out of the life of a group and are full of associations that only those who belong can fully understand and which are closed to the outsider. (3) There are difficulties due to the peculiar form of these songs. They are not verbal descriptions of a situation. They do not present a verbal picture of a situation painted by someone who stands outside of it, as does a good deal of the literature and even of the poetry of highly differentiated societies, although some forms of poetry are even today a verbal manifestation which even in highly differentiated societies comes nearer to an evocation of a whole situation rather than a description of a situation than almost any other use of words. The difficulty is that Klama songs often evoke a situation by means of techniques which are relatively new to Europeans and which it takes some time to grasp. One of these techniques is the use of a short dialogue as a means for the evocation. One line or even part of a line may be spoken by different a person than the other, and one has to switch over in order to understand the song in one’s imagination from one to the other. But even if the song is put into the mouth of a single person or even if it is fashioned so as to express the feeling and attitude of those who sing it here and now, it is always intensely personal in character and it is intended directly by means of words and the associations which they have both to express and to evoke feelings. This type of difficulty can easily be overcome. Even through the veil drawn over the meaning of the songs unavoidably by the translation into a different language, one can still experience, in some cases, the evocative power of these songs. (4) What is more difficult perhaps is to remember that, in the context of their society songs such as these cannot be simply classified in accordance with our notions as ‘poetry’ or ‘literature’. There is no harm in attempts which may be made and are made to study these and other traditional African songs under the heading of African literature and music, and one need not doubt that great benefit can be derived from a more intensive comparative study of their form or their visions. Again one may study them departmentally with regard to the information they provide about the history of the Krobos in the departmentalised sense in which we use the term ‘history’ today. Here, as one can see, they are seen as nearly as possible as a manifestation of the social life of the people, and as a source of information for their social life which, better than many others we have, restores for our imagination aspects of these situations and the experiences of, the meaning for, people in that situation which are otherwise lost—or which, if not already lost, are quickly disappearing. Thus there are difficulties for our understanding of these songs that one may find it hard to overcome, others that one can learn to overcome.

In course of time, more systematic studies of the Adangbe text and of the Ga translation may help to restore for our understanding the meaning of these jewels of man’s heritage more fully. For the present it must be enough to draw attention to them, to make use of them in the limited manner in which one can make use of

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them without knowledge of the original language, and to pay tribute to Noa and Enoch Azu whose efforts have preserved for humankind these fragments of the African heritage of which for lack of such efforts, a great deal has been lost or is in danger of being lost if not more efforts are made quickly to preserve them.

IV Comments About Klama Songs Let us take a few examples. A thunderstorm burst upon me, On the hill of a fanless date tree I was drenched like swimmer in the sea! Had I reached a fan-palm tree, I would have cut its branch.14

At first sight this, rendered into English, may be read simply as a small piece of poetry. But the comments show how difficult it is for the outsider, without the help of the initiated, to receive it with the richness of the associations which it initially had, and which gave to this song a different character. It was not simply a piece of literature. Someone was speaking about his personal experience. The personal experience contained a lesson for others but it was not a lesson in terms of what we might classify as moral prescriptions. It was a lesson in very practical terms with reference to a very specific situation. It was a song which presumably was sung in connection with the funeral festivities. Funeral festivities have a very different character from ours. They are not quite as predominantly as ours concerned with the emotions of the mourners. They are not as exclusively as ours occasions on which it is de rigueur to be serious and sad and from which laughter and rejoicing are banned. Death is much nearer to the everyday life of people and it seems to occur much more frequently than in developed societies during the life of a person. With us it is usual not to speak too much about the funeral expenses and who is going to bear them. In the face of death, with all the solemnity which this word evokes, the economic side of it, often treated as ‘sordid’, is as it were relegated into another department and as far as possible relegated behind the scenes (as the killing of animals is in relation to our meals). Occasionally a novelist may make it his business to reveal the ‘sordid’ aspects of those who make

14 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part IX, Song 26, p. 109 ff.

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money out of funerals. The little verse whose translation has been reproduced here shows a different attitude. This is the comment added to it by Enoch Azu: The fan-palm tree’s branches are used as umbrella when one is in the plain and it is raining; but the branches of the fanless date tree cannot be used for this purpose. This song teaches us that a loss of a son, or the like, came upon the chief mourner when he has not at all prepared to meet the funeral expenses.15

One can almost hear the slightly malicious Klama singers start this song in a case in which the chief mourner was a bit short of cash. One of the most pronounced differences between the characteristics of Europeans and of those of Africans in their traditional setting is the absence of sentimentality in the case of the latter. Note that Noah Azu in the text itself often speaks of the ‘Klama dance’ not simply Klama song. This is probably a more realistic description; in all likelihood the singing was always accompanied by some action and mostly by some dancing action—that is to say according to our departmentalisation: a song is something which only concerns the voice, the rest of the body is quiet. One would get a very wrong impression if one understood Klama songs in the same sense. They are songs sung in connection with something one does. It may be a ritual invocation of a god, it may be a song at a dancing party or in the battle to encourage the young warriors. The song is related to an action and a group action at that, not as it is often with us—or was before the assimilation of African traditions in the form of jazz and so on—a performance for a non-participant public. Hence the whole character of Klama songs is different from that of traditional European songs. In many cases it embodies an action. The lines, as has already been said, may be lines supposedly to be spoken by different people. Enoch Azu describes the nature of the Klama dance: When a band of men and women are playing the Klama dance each individual is at liberty to introduce a new song when one is over; but the songs must be arranged as ‘question and answer’. He who follows this method is reckoned an expert. If therefore two experts are met to sing each of them follows the prescribed method without blunder, it is said that they are of equal skill.16

Enoch Azu’s printed introduction and the warning of the child:

15 There

is no citation in the original typoscript written by Elias.—eds. Adangbe History, p. 8.

16 Enoch Azu,

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N. Elias

Children always suffer with reminder of the God Boa.

He alludes to this in a song which I find in the Brown Book: Thou Ayeki Dede—wench of fetish Boa! Get thee thy child; I’ll try Sir Tekper, Thou Ayeki Dede; wench of fetish Boa! Get thee thy child; I’ll try fetish Dseno. No grinding when thy child in hand! Get thee thy child, I’ll try him. No pounding when thy child in hand! Get thy child, I’ll try him.17

It was law of old that whenever a child had attained two or more years and unfortunately could not walk on its legs, the priest of the fetish Boa should by any means demand such child from the parents and throw it into some streams considered to be the home of Father Boa. It appears in this song that there was a woman who might have been barren for some time and that through the help of a certain medicine man or a fetish as generally said, became fruitful and got a child. The child could not walk when attained the age of two or three. In this song it plainly appears that the singer does not make the least allusion of any enforcement of the child’s destination by the fetish priests. Rather the mother in her despair was anxious to get rid of it and try for another one from another supposed better source (Dseno is an idol or fetish formerly belonging to the people of Labadi). One can, very provisionally and without understanding of the Adangbe text, necessarily most tentatively relate song and comment in the following manner (for at first glance the relationship is perhaps not too clear). The woman got her child with the help of the fetish Boa. The first line is an appellation to her. The second line represents her own answer. She speaks to Father Boa: Take your child I’ll try someone else. Lines 3 and 4 correspond to lines 1 and 2. This time she will not try another man but another god. And she goes on to describe her despair. I cannot grind corn when your child is there. Take it away. I cannot pound fufu18 when your child is there. Take it away I will try someone else. As the comments

17 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part IX, Song 54, p. 90 (in English). is a food common in Ghana and in other West African countries, a dough-like mixture typically made of fresh or fermented cassava with plantain (cooking banana) flour and cocoyam kneaded with water.—eds. 18 Fufu

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say, she is not compelled to let her child die. Life is hard, she cannot do her work if the child is there. She has long been barren. This was her first child. But the god has cheated her by giving her a child that is no good. I will try another man or another god, she is saying, perhaps he will give me a better child.

V Death and Emotions: Klama Funeral Songs and Marriage Songs Unless those who live the relatively gentle, relatively sheltered life of great advanced urban and industrial societies, where machines haven taken over more and more of the heavy physical work which was the human lot until a short time ago and where a highly developed state-organisation protects people against each other, at least so far as physical violence and physical weakness and deficiencies are concerned, understand how hard and how harsh the life of all people was in the past, they cannot understand themselves. One of the most perverse tendencies of civilised people is to build up for themselves a dream picture of the past by selecting from past ages aspects which seem to suggest that the ancestors had all that they miss in their own time and by firmly repressing from their memories, and often enough from their history writings, all aspects which might contradict the ideal picture of the past. The task before us is to build up a more balanced picture. It is completely beside the point to start from a position in long drawn out controversy as to whether past ages were better or worse than our own. This is one of those controversies fought out in the thin air of generalisations based on insufficient evidence. People who enter the controversy usually have taken their stand beforehand. They are either dogmatic believers in the golden age that was, or dogmatic believers in the golden age that will be. Before one can start to make pronouncements as to whether the world has become better or worse, one would require a much fuller picture as to how it really was, and why it was what it was. The quest for explanations must precede the quest for evaluations of the type implied in the futile controversy as to whether the past was, or the future will be, ‘better’ than the present. For the time being our factual knowledge of both our own and other societies, past and present, is still so permeated by unaccounted principles of selection that our pictures lack balance. Europeans who are nostalgic about the past form socially sanctioned canons for looking at the past which satisfies their preconceived beliefs. Europeans nostalgic about the future do the same by selecting as relevant only [what] the former suppress and relegating in the background what they put in the foreground of their attention. Africans want to see only what at present pleases them presently in their past because they want

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to find in the past the sources of their pride rather than in their actual achievements here and now. The primary task is to find out as nearly as possible how people really lived and having as clear a picture as possible to explain why they lived as they lived. In order to do that one has to abandon or at least to relegate into the background the question which now seems so terribly urgent—the question of whether they were ‘better’ than or ‘worse’ than we? Were they ‘happier’ or ‘unhappier’ than we? As a preliminary working hypothesis it might be useful to start from the assumption that the people of another society which one studies were neither better nor worse, neither happier nor unhappier than those who study them. Looking at the lives reflected in the Klama song, readers may feel how unhappy they must have been. But the fact that the reader would be unhappy if he had to live in this manner does not mean that those for whom that was the only way of life they knew were unhappy. They had sources of suffering which had been stopped; they also had sources of enjoyment which had been lost. They had fewer choices, but as they were embedded in their way of life firmly and were not conscious of any other, they did not hanker after another. There are many more comparisons of this kind one could draw. At present we have not enough and not a sufficiently balanced factual knowledge of Africa, or for that matter of other societies of the past, and not sufficiently cogent overall yardsticks to decide whether human suffering in general has decreased and the sources of and capacity for human enjoyment increased (to avoid the even vaguer word ‘happiness’ which refers to moments rather than to prolonged conditions of people) in the societies which we call ‘advanced’, with reference to certain limited but demonstrable and controllable criteria. In reading this paraphrase of Krobo Klama dances one should not let one’s understanding of the people with whom one comes face to face in these dance songs be marred by the preoccupation with the irrelevant question of whether they were inferior and oneself superior or whether they were ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than oneself. They were specimens of people like the writer and the reader living under conditions which they had not created and from which they could not escape. Ultimately, only by understanding deeply the life of people leading a different life from one’s own can one gain knowledge and understanding of one’s own. Only by going away from oneself can one come to oneself. Take suffering. The reaction to suffering in their setting was different. I shall go to Lene! My suffering is too great! I am going to Lene Too long is my suffering hidden in my fist

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I am going to Lene If I die, I shall never return to a womb to return to this world.19

Azu’s comment: Lene is a town where juju20 and poisons were formerly bought. The singer of this song appears to be exceedingly tired of this life through the miseries suffered successively; yet he has hope of obtaining some juju or charm from Lene which would enable him to face the supposed originator of his calamities. What do people do if they are stuck in a situation which makes them suffer and from which they cannot escape? Even in the more differentiated societies there is often enough for people no way out. There is no escape. But by and large, the structure of these societies provide more escape routes from an unbearable situation, more alternatives than less differentiated societies. No one who has not lived in Arica or in similar countries can fully grasp the complete helplessness with which people can be caught in the trap of a situation without the slightest hope that it will ever change. The woman whose husband has died when young and who has been given as part of the heritage to another man who does not care for her. She may run away, but perhaps she has no one to go to. The child who has been given to someone who treats it harshly. The old people becoming helpless and at the mercy of younger members of the family, who have enough to do with their own labour and their own worries as it is. The son whom the father, the daughter whom the mother does not like. Children are cheap because there are always many and valuable because they represent cheap labour. I came across many people young and old during the time I lived in Ghana who were in what was or seemed such a hopeless situation and tried desperately to get out of it. As long as there were no towns, and to live away from one’s village among strangers was risky and often dangerous. One’s own village, one’s own family house with all its incessant and in many cases hardened tensions and conflicts, constituted for many a setting, a trap whose teeth were growing deep into their flesh without any hope of a change—unless perhaps this or that person died. As so often if one has

19 This

is a paraphrase of Azu’s rendering which is: I shall go to Lene; My suffering is exceedingly great; I am going to Lene; My suffering is long since hidden in my fist; I am going to Lene; If I die, I shall never re-enter into a womb to return to the world (see: Azu and Azu (1929), Part IX, Song 11, p. 118). 20 The term ‘juju’ refers to priests whose destiny—in the eyes of village population—is connected magically to the good luck, the prosperity, and the fertility of the whole community and their harvest. – eds.

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no control over a situation which makes one suffer, one resorts to magic. That is what the singer in this song is going to do. Too long, he says, have I hidden my suffering in my clenched fist. I shall go to Lene and buy charms or perhaps magic poison and break the power of those who make me suffer. There is some doubt about the meaning of the last line. Perhaps the singer fears he may never enter a womb again because of his guilt, because he is using bad charms and poison, but he does not care. Perhaps he means he has suffered so much and does not wish ever to return to a womb and to return to this world. There is the suffering of the person whose beloved has died. Alas Afi! Alas Ami! We shall long for each other For a certain day gone by Not of today, but of the day gone by. We shall ever long for a certain day.21

Noa Azu comments: ‘“Afi” is a birthday name to one who is born on Friday and “Amen” or “Ami” is a birthday name to one who is born on Saturday. The singer sings to his beloved one who is dead. The dead body is lying on a bedstead while the singer is looking intently into her departing face. The singer with this song says that the love between them is of long standing. Again there are many instances that would renew his sorrow and remembrance every day and especially what has happened on a certain memorable day; and likewise would it be to the departed, until both of them have left this world behind them before the longing for each other shall cease to exist.’ If a strong feeling goes out to another person it is often very difficult to prevent oneself from feeling that the other person must know and must feel one’s own feeling. It is very difficult to acknowledge to oneself that one’s own feeling for somebody else or even for another thing, strong as it is, may be directed into a void. In simpler societies the reality of one’s own feeling, particularly but not only if it is shared with others, is as a matter of course identified with the reality of that towards which the feeling is directed. That one has a strong feeling of the presence of ancestors is proof of the reality of the ancestors. And the feeling which persists about a beloved person who has died is proof enough that the beloved person is still somewhere and shares one’s feeling and one’s memories of the memorable days spent together. ‘We shall long for each other, although you

21 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part IX, Song 4.

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have gone away’, that is what the Klama singer seems to say, ‘and we—you and I—shall long for a certain day gone by, which we shall always remember—you and I.’ Can one temper the suffering due to the loss of a beloved person if one spontaneously feels she is still there and continues to share one’s feeling? Does it increase a man’s suffering if he is so unrelentingly aware, as many people in differentiated societies are, of the difference between reality and fantasy? However it may be, the Klama singer lived in a society where the self-consciousness in that respect was far less strict. The inner voice which tells us ‘you are dreaming’—the unrelenting voice—does not yet speak or not yet speak very firmly. For in differentiated societies a fairly strong and quite unrelenting pressure is brought to bear on the child so that he learns to distinguish between his wants and that which he [is allowed to] want. He is taught from early days on[wards] to impose upon himself very firm restraints almost all-round with regard to the expression of feelings and the attainment of emotional desires. Less differentiated societies leave far more scope for beliefs according to which one can attain one’s desires if one knows the right way. Or if one cannot satisfy one’s wants, it is because someone prevents it. If people die, they no longer exist in the same way as before, they obviously become different, but one’s feeling in relation to them—though it may change—does not disappear and they are as real as one’s feelings. The lover or friend in this Klama song does not say: I shall ever long for you. Friday’s child and Saturday’s child, as the singer who first composed these lines felt, are now separated. Alas for both. Both will long for each other. The one who lives speaks for both. It is not today that we shall remember, but a day gone by, we shall always long for that day. Even though one does not understand the language, it adds something to the quality of one’s understanding if one hears rhyme and rhythm of the original: Afi o lē! Ami o lē! Wa he ma dsa liglo ko he. Pi me ne no he, ligblo ko he, Wa he madsa ligblo ko he! Ga: Afi le y ō! Ameṅ le ō Wo hie ba tse ye gbi ko hewo Dsee ṅmene hewo; ye gbiko hewo Wo hie bātse ye gbiko hewo.

A comparison between African and European funeral customs is illuminating. We may be tempted to say that it is illuminating for differences in attitudes towards death. But the phrase itself already prejudices the issue. For ‘death’ is

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one of those general terms which people brought up in the European tradition treat, when they speak and think, almost if they had an existence of the same kind as persons or things. Perhaps one can have an attitude towards ‘death’ in the abstract; it is a problem which deserves serious consideration. Perhaps one can have an attitude towards ‘death’ in general. But if one thinks of African societies it is certainly more appropriate to speak of attitudes towards ‘the dead’. Or perhaps of attitudes towards people who have died, or towards people whose relatives have died. Europeans are often perplexed because African funerals, although they follow conventions which give scope for the expression of sorrow and sadness, also give scope for gaiety, laughter, drinking and dancing. In this respect too the degree of departmentalisation of the European social life, which is so closely connected with the high level of generalisation of the classes [categories] or pigeon holes used for ordering experiences, contrasts with the closer connection which all human activities have with each other in the social life of traditional African communities and with the actual feeling of people in that situation. According to the European tradition, all people who attend a funeral should behave with serious dignity whatever they may feel. Expression of gaiety and particular laughter is banished. If it ever occurs it is regarded as a sign of bad manners or tactlessness. It is supposed to show lack of respect for or sympathy with the bereaved relatives, who on their part too—whatever they may actually feel—are supposed to be invariably serious, solemn and sad. The classification of funerals as occasions for solemn ceremonies and serious demeanour is most probably closely connected with the by now firmly established development of the Christian churches according to which religious ceremonies are occasions for serious solemnity, from which laughter and gaiety are normally to be excluded. To some extent, however, the differences in funeral conventions is probably also connected with the different degree of identification with others which distinguishes people of simpler from those of more differentiated societies generally. For Europeans, attendance at a funeral serves as a reminder of one’s own mortality. To some extent one identifies oneself with the person who has died. And this character of every funeral as a memento mortis for everybody concerned contributes to the convention which standardises funerals as uniformly serious occasions. In societies whose structure makes it inevitable that more people die in everybody’s lifetime which, by and large, is considerably shorter than the European average—that at least was the case in the past in which the traditional form of African funeral customs is rooted—the whole approach to funerals cannot be quite the same. During wars, in Europe too, burials lost a good deal of their solemnities. Among National Socialists, the identification with the dying and the dead broke down almost completely and regressed far behind the present African

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level. African societies, as far as one can look back, lived under conditions in which forms of warfare and the frequent outbreaks of violence were endemic. The degree of identification with others as human beings was correspondingly lower. Moreover, while according to the European conception those who have died are no longer the same person and have ceased to have any power in relation to the living, in traditional African societies, they retain something of their personality and their power; in fact they may gain considerably more power. The dead are what the living feel about them. The African feeling about the dead is strong, but, lacking the strong identification and the grain of self-pity which goes with it in the case of death, it also lacks the peculiar sentimentality which so strongly colours the European attitudes towards the dead or towards death in general. The African attitude is far more a matter of fact. It is far more directly and openly determined by the concrete issues raised by the death of a person who has died, and particularly by the reshuffling of human relationships including property relations which follows from it. Funerals were one of the occasions at which Klama singers performed their duties. The Klama songs, the variety of feelings appropriate to the occasion, were and are communal occasions. If a respected, wealthy man dies, a great many people from his village and all family members who live somewhere else take part. If a poor man, a child or another person of little consequence dies, the following may be very small. The Klama singers, one may assume, made their appearance above all at the more important funerals. The songs left to us fit a considerable variety of situations, a much greater variety than European funeral songs which are all in the same key; they are all tuned-in to solemnity and sadness. The Klama singers, apparently, were able to adjust their singing to the changing mood of the occasion. Though not predominant, the very personal note of sadness was not lacking in their repertoire: I was cutting wood on the banks My axe fell into the river!

Or in the original: I po tso ṅe pa yi Gbie kpo no pa mi!22

22 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part IX, Song 19.

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The singer, according to Noa Azu’s comment, means to say that his brother or the like who is dead is lost from sight forever. It is just the same as his axe which fell into the river and he could not swim after it and get it back. As in many other cases the two rhymed lines with their tune may have been invented generations ago and may have become in course of time part of the repertoire of Adangme Klama singers, to be used whenever they were felt to be suitable to the mood of the occasion. To us the loss of an axe may seem too trivial an analogy to be used as an image for the loss of a person. It is a very serious and not at all a trivial thing in this society in which iron is rare and expensive. Seen against the background of another society, one becomes more strongly aware of the dependence of the choice of poetic metaphors in the European tradition on specific social conditions. A good deal of this tradition is probably coloured by the fact that in Europe the dominant poetic tradition was that of groups who did not work with their hands. Even most of the songs which have come to us as European folk songs seemed to have been selective or transformed under the influence of distinct middle and upper classes. The Klama songs are the songs of peasants and most probably above all of young peasants who worked on the land, though they too have been to some extent influenced and transformed by the first social group (first in developmental terms) which was able to devote its time to other pursuits than the production of food—by a group of priests. Still, the immediacy of the peasant’s detailed knowledge of his surrounding world is very noticeable in the Klama songs. The silk cotton tree where the weaver birds nested has been cut down The birds are bewildered and scatter.23

Noa Azu’s comments are: ‘The silk cotton tree’ means a father or a mother in the family. ‘The weaver birds’ are the children. When a father or a mother dies, the children become sad and bewildered. Or again: When the ox has gone astray The cow is still left in the field.

Noa Azu’s comment: When the husband is dead, the wife can hardly know how to manage her livelihood.

23 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part IX, Song 23.

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Sorrow and sadness are not lacking an African funeral but they do not provide the dominant mood. The dead want to be honoured. If they are not honoured by a funeral which befits their former status, they will be sullen and angry and avenge themselves on their miserly heirs. In order to do justice to the rank and status of a dead person, as many people as possible must be invited; they must be given food and drinks. A band must be hired which will sing and play dances. In Africa even more than in advanced societies the death of a relative is an occasion for status consumption. And status consumption—conspicuous consumption as Veblen24 calls it—is not, as Veblen implied, a way of spending money freely chosen by individuals in order to impress others with their wealth; it is a social duty imposed on the individual families by their group—a duty from which one cannot escape, for do to so would means losing face or risking the contempt or even the ostracism of one’s fellows. Funeral costs in fact are in many cases, as the costs of status spending often are, a very great burden for the relatives. But they cannot be avoided. There are songs which say that a rich man has died and now we shall have plenty to drink. One does honour to the dead man by drinking and singing and dancing throughout the night. Among the Klama songs there is a dialogue which indicates what people say if someone leaves too early. The first lines again directed towards Afi and Ami, to Friday’s and Saturday’s child, to all and sundry is the short song of the person who wants to leave the dance. Farewell! I am going home! Afi and Ami! Farewell! I am going home!25

This is the song which his fellows sing in answer to the one who wants to take leave of the company. A special dance, as Noa Azu explains, the Ohmesabe dance, is played in the night of the funeral to keep people awake. Persons who play and dance the whole night until daybreak are considered to love the deceased very well: Let the day break, And we shall know friends

24 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1899]).—eds. 25 Azu and Azu (1929), Part IX, Song 20.

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A brother in the darkness is not known We shall know friends!

That is to say: A person who leaves the dance in the darkness of the night before the day breaks is not a good friend. We shall know our friends if we see who dances with us till the sun rises. There are special praise songs for those who bury their dead splendidly. There is a proverbial song, used for such an occasion in which the dead man is addressed like this: Thou shalt get someone to bury you as Mr. Dom buried his father.26

Mr. Dom, the comment says, to whom this song refers, is said to have spent an enormous sum of money during his father’s funeral. This is simply to tell the soul of the deceased that he must not grumble for he will be buried with great honour. The feeling that the spirit of the deceased is present, that he is watching the proceedings and has to be pacified is very strong. But if the deceased is a person from whom one has not a particularly high respect, one does not mind in the least to say what one feels about him and to make jokes at his expense. Again there are songs, remnants of such occasions which are probably revived when similar occasions arise. The Klama songs referring to funerals, like all others, demonstrate most tellingly the capacity for expressing one’s feelings in a particular situation quite directly; they demonstrate not merely the capacity for doing so but also that fact that to do so, within certain limits, was socially permitted and standardised so that feelings, which in more differentiated societies have to be hidden or repressed in accordance with the standards of society, can find a clear and unhampered expression. It is natural that many of those who attend a funeral of an important man look forward to the drinks and the other good things that will be offered to them. It might even be impolite not to express one’s expectation and one’s pleasure. ‘We’ll drink under the large pot’, says one Klama song, which means they will be treated to lots of drinks as the deceased was a great or a rich man. There are occasions when one wishes to express the rather low opinion one had of the deceased man. The Klama song provides a suitable form for doing so. Perhaps it is misleading to say that they provide an opportunity for expressing one’s feelings

26 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part IX, Song 17.

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directly. One does not say: ‘What a nasty mean old person the deceased was.’ But the Klama singer had a rich store of songs, some of which refer to previous occasions well remembered by the initiated and perhaps by the whole community, in which an unpleasant and mean old man has died and it is enough to intone one of these songs in order to indicate what one thinks of the deceased. To the non-initiated the lines may seem harmless or even incomprehensible. To the initiated the allusion is clear. It is a form of indirectness quite well known in small circles of differentiated societies too—oblique allusions by references to past events which express one’s feelings perfectly clearly. The following example: Even through the entrance of the fence Were we forbidden to pass Now the fence has come down Here we are coming in!27

The story to which this song refers, according to the comments, is this: There once lived a cruel old man who did not allow anybody to pass through his compound. He therefore made a fence around his compound; and within this enclosure he made a garden and planted a variety of crops. Not long after he had done this he was taken ill and died. When the bandsmen were going to play in his house during the funeral, they composed this song. The pretended to be dancing, and danced roughly against the fence until it fell down; then they danced over the broken-down fence into the house singing these lines and the people who saw them and heard them singing—‘Here we are coming in’—could not resist laughing. Thus the whole funeral made the dead man ridiculous; the people were laughing rather than mourning. And whenever situations arose which aroused similar feelings, whenever the young people wanted to express the feeling that the dead man was really a mean old bastard, they were probably apt to strike up to begin to sing this song. Complex societies do not lack equally robust expressions [of what] a mean old bastard [is dead]. The difference is that they seem almost completely relegated to private communications behind the scenes. In simpler societies, the scope for expressing this publicly is greater—this gives great relief to one’s feelings and [never] occasions for quarrelling and strife.28

27 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part IX, Song 18. last four sentences are in Elias’s very difficult handwriting. In this instance, square brackets indicate words that seem to make best sense, but of which we are not quite certain.—eds. 28 The

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There are other examples of this robust sense of humour permeating African life which does not stop at the fact that someone had died. Where the identification with others is not particularly strong, one does not hesitate to talk about the funny side of a situation at the expense of another person with great directness. Death, especially the death of old, poor and sick people is not particularly terrible. The following story is an example. An old woman called Layo was covered all over her body with sores and wherever she went she carried a twig in her hand in order to drive the flies away which buzzed around her, feeding on her sores. Another poor woman living at the same time, whose name was Kosi, was very lean as she had little to eat and was starving, but she had no sores on her body. One morning quite unexpectedly the news of the death of mother Layo was announced to the public. The people were quite surprised and laughed at death, saying ‘Death is too fond of meat. Surely mother Kosi, though her flesh is meagre and lean, would be better to have than mother Layo. What a meal to have on this flesh full of sores.’ This is what the Klama singers mean when they sang: I should prefer Kosi to Layo If I would be asked to make a choice.29

There are others equally robust, direct and unsentimental, one of which has already been mentioned: You went away and were hanged Father told you, mother told you too! You went away see what happened: You were hanged You were told, you refused to hear, You were hanged30

Perhaps the following song shows best the matter-of-fact manner in which people feel and think in every situation and in which they can use similes to express their opinion. The lines are sung to tell the sister of the deceased that she has to look after the orphans.

29 Azu 30 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part IX, song 25. and Azu (1929), Part IX, song 15.

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Your sister has laid eggs Go and sit on them!31

The same matter-of-fact approach, the same directness, is shown in one’s feeling and thinking about the dead man himself. One may have to guide him and to help him and also to prevent him from getting angry with the living. He will try to find his relatives in the world of the dead and if he cannot find them, this is what he should do: If no lodgings, when you got there, Lodge at the fig tree!32

This, as the comment says, is sung to the dead body so that he may know where to go in the world of the dead. The fig tree is mentioned because people used to sit and to amuse themselves under this tree. Meeting places of the Adangbe people generally were planted with this particular tree; so were their market places. Hence, if the deceased soul were to wait under the fig tree, sooner or later someone would come and lead him to his relatives there. The factualness of this outlook does in no way counteract people’s sorrow and sadness at the death of a relative. That the traditional African approach to life and death is unsentimental does not mean it lacks feeling. It is a fairly recent European tradition to identify feeling and sentimentality.33 The touch of sentimentality which colours a good deal of the European’s scale of feelings, particularly in literature from the end of the eighteenth century on, and the lack of this quality in the scheme of African feelings are facts which one can study. The problems they raise could be studied if one approached them with preconceived ideas about their relative value. To state these facts does not mean that one thinks it is better that one’s scale of feelings has one quality rather than the other. It is an enrichment for someone brought up in the European manner to encounter other possibilities of feelings. One can discover them easily enough in the products of past ages of European history itself. Differences in the modes of feeling are connected with differences in social structure. Not all, but a good deal of, the highly individual-

31 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part IX, song 7. and Azu (1929), Part IX, Song 5. 33 See Elias’s later long essay ‘The loneliness of the dying in our time’, in The Loneliness of the Dying and Humana Conditio (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010 [Collected Works, 6]), pp. 3–52, originally published in German in 1979.—eds. 32 Azu

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ised poetry which has entered the European tradition, particularly since the time of the romantic movement, seems to have been born of pent-up emotions, of half repressed longings for the unattainable. Feelings are imagined to be permanent or at least to be long-lived. The predominant concept of love as an even lifelong feeling binding two people together is an example. It is characteristic of societies within which people are trained, as a matter of course, not only to a fairly high degree of identification with others, and therefore to a repression of many feelings opposed to the demands for the ultimate respect of human life, but also to a high degree of self-awareness, the concomitant of the high degree of conscious and automatic self-control all round bred into individuals in differentiated societies as one of the conditions of their functioning. The folk songs of simpler peasant societies bear witness to conditions of life in which people are brought up to greater spontaneity in the expression, and the greater transience, of feelings.34 Our categories, terms such as ‘greater concreteness’ or ‘matter-of-factness’ are not wholly suited to expressing the difference. Essentially it springs from the fact that in these societies feelings are attuned more firmly and more closely to a specific situation. They are not conceived as something which persists if the situation changes and if the situation changes they do not in fact persist. But within a given situation, as long as it lasts, they are forceful, strong, unhampered by a constant critical self-awareness and the voice of a firm stable and unrelenting conscience which helps to keep the complex organisation of differentiated societies going. One of its expressions is the sense of time, the self-discipline necessary if all the varied activities of a great variety of people are to be attuned to each other. Unpunctuality, though in fact not infrequent, is regarded in differentiated societies as a minor moral lapse. It is hardly regarded as such in simpler societies. Imagine the attitude of a latecomer to a funeral in European societies. He is half-ashamed of himself and may try to sneak in as unostentatiously as possible. Compare this attitude with that expressed in the following Klama song which the comments describe as ‘a greeting to the mourners by any latecomer’: Ye Drummers, Singers, Shooters, And you Priestess and Priest. Lo! Here am I now coming

34  See also another posthumously published essay by Elias, ‘Spontaneity and self-consciousness’, in Jan Haut Haut, Paddy Dolan, Dieter Reicher and Raúl Sánchez García, eds., Excitement Processes: Norbert Elias’s Unpublished Works on Sports, Leisure, Body, Culture (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2018), pp. 23–76.—eds.

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Home like a swift bird from Up the river.35

The following example throws light on the Dipo institution, the traditional longlasting preparation of Krobo girls for marriage. Marriage arrangements were traditionally made by the parents of the two people concerned. It was the task of the boy during that period to provide for the expenses of the training and for [the girl’s] food. But the parents of the girl were expected as part of the bargain to show their gratitude by presenting a drink to this man. Such drink, according to the comments, is called ‘Le dā’ which means literally ‘feeding rum’, probably rum given by the parents to the man who has fed their daughter. On such occasions all relatives and friends are gathered together in order to witness the presentation of rum to the prospective husband and to enjoy the occasion. The song refers to a girl named Bele who had been maintained during the course of her Dipo training by Mr. Padino Onyoku. But she disliked this man because he had a nasty mouth. Her parents invited all relatives and friends to the customary ceremony of giving Mr. Onyoku ‘feeding rum’, but when all were gathered the girl abused her fiancé as the song shows: A drink of thanks was given to us! Yet Miss Bele protested against it! Mr. Padino Onyoku you look like a bird! Pointed is thy mouth as an Owl! Mr. Onyoku Is Onyoku the one to tease us and To disclose our private parts?36

As all other societies, the Adangbe had their standardised forms of abuse. The Klama songs reflected them. Here is one of these teasing songs. The comments explain that although the song speaks of lack of cleanliness it may also apply to someone who, though not externally dirty, is considered to be dirty because he is a fool or because he cannot sing the Klama songs properly and doesn’t understand their meaning.

35 Azu 36 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part I, Song 6, p. 24. and Azu (1929), Part I, Song 15.

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Mr. Adu! Dirty fellow! Sluttish! Come! Let me train you as mother did me! In my hair not a louse was ever seen! Come! Let me train you as mother did me.37

That people long for another person who is no longer there occurs in simpler as in more differentiated societies. But if it is evident to everyone that the person for whom one longs will never come back, particularly if it is one’s own wife, he is likely to become an object of derision. If it is obviously unrealistic to expect something to happen, as the comments suggest, it is somewhat ludicrous to go on longing for it. The song refers to Mr. Teter Aboyỏ, an Adangbe man whose wife was kidnapped by some people from Fante Gomoa.38 It was said that this man fruitlessly kept watch for several nights firmly believing that his wife would return. His friends tried to cheer him up and to persuade him not to sit up all night looking out for his wife, but to go to bed, but he refused, always calling out: ‘Gbeki, my wife! Gbeki, my wife! My fetishes are alive. They will bring her safely home.’ He waited and, as the comments say, still waits to this very hour, but Gbeki, his wife, never appeared. Hence, the song was sung whenever the singers wanted to deride someone who earnestly expected something which everybody else knew he would never get. But this song like many other Klama songs had a variety of meanings and applications. It could be sung, for instance, in a situation in which a man was, or pretended to be, possessed by a spirit. People gathered around him in order to play the Klama dance on his behalf. For in that case he was expected to be the soloist and to entertain the bandsmen who helped him by making the music. But when a man cannot sing and dance well, which he is expected to do if the spirit really has taken possession of him, then the people deride him by singing this song. What they intend to is say is: the man doesn’t know his craft. He is simply keeping us awake to watch as the Fante Gomoas kept Teter Aboyỏ awake, yet they did not return his wife to him.

37 Azu

and Azu (1929), Part I, Song 21, p. 46. is a state of the Fante (an Akan people) in Ghana (Gomoa district).—eds.

38 Gomoa

African and Western Civilising Processes

The Formation of States and Changes in Restraint Norbert Elias

There’s nothing wrong with controversies. I think and sincerely hope that we shall thrive on controversy. Certainly what I have to say will be a little controversial. I’m trying to demonstrate that it is possible to do work on long-term processes which is non-ideological and, to the best of my knowledge, reality oriented. That means, of course, that it is fragmentary. Like all research it is at an early stage. It is, if you want to say, experimental. But maybe a scientific work has to be continued by others taking it up, or be rejected in a controversy. Perhaps I should say if one insists a little in that one exercises self-constraint and does not allow one’s wishes and fears, as far as possible, to enter one’s research that is not done because of a l’art pour l’art consideration. It is not science for science’s sake that one does it. One does it because the only reliable guides to action are the results of non-ideological scientific research. In a way we are like doctors. We

This manuscript is archived under the number 708, The Formation of States and Changes in Restraint. Speech by Professor Elias (Korrekturen vom Juni 1986), in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. It is a transcription of a tape-recording of Elias speaking at the conference on ‘Civilisations and Civilising Processes’ that he hosted at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung, Bielefeld, on 14–17 June 1984. It has also been published in Artur Bogner and Stephen Mennell, Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity: A Debate (New York: Palgrave, 2022), pp. 65–79. Sub-headings were added by the editors of the present volume. This manuscript was mainly edited by Arian Post. -eds.

N. Elias (*)  Wiesbaden, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_10

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have to make a diagnosis which is, as nearly as possible, reality adequate. And therefore, a corruption of knowledge, ideological or otherwise, is harmful to the patient. And we at the moment are very much in a situation—we, threatened by a war—are certainly in a situation where the most realistic form of knowledge is the best which may help to guide us. Certainly, this has a great deal to do with what I wish should happen, namely, that there should not be a war. I think that one of the indispensable things that is necessary in order to bring us in that direction is not merely military disarmament, but ideological disarmament. And that is an additional reason why I think that non-ideological research has in fact the greatest chance to be of practical value‚ in a world threatened with a terrible disastrous war.1

I Survival Units and the Struggle Between Nomad and Sedentary Societies What I have to say I think I can best introduce by taking my cue from one of the finest books Professor McNeill has written. It is certainly not one of the best known of his books, but in my view certainly one of the finest, on the European steppe frontier. In this book he discusses the nomadic infiltrations, which in waves came into Europe again and again prior to the sixteenth century. In fact, it is a staggering picture: if one, as it were, looks at it as a big picture, then one can see how the Huns, how the Hungarians, how the one wave after the other comes until around the sixteenth century the European powers were finally able to stop the inroads being made. He writes here, We may perhaps detect a natural ecological cycle in the political history of the Danubian Europe between the eighth–seventh centuries BC when men first fully mastered the arts of steppe nomadry and the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries when firearms, standing armies and the superior elements of modern civilised warfare reversed the old balance between steppe and sown and drove the nomads into permanent retreat. Prior to this reversal in the roles whose more detailed analysis will

1 In

his last years, Elias was fairly pessimistic about the risk of a ‘third great war’, and at the time more specifically a nuclear war between the USA and USSR. See, for example, his book Humana Conditio, in Elias (2010 [1979; 1985]).—eds.

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be the theme of this essay, a pastoral conqueror was likely to celebrate his victory by brutal harassment of any pre-existing human inhabitants who were so imprudent as to await his coming.2

I’m not sure that I would call it an ecological cycle—there is a slight difference in approach between Professor McNeill and myself—I would call it a sociological cycle. But the substance of the quotation is very clear and very graphic. It shows graphically a condition in which not only European countries, but practically all state societies, lived up to the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries. In fact, we have to see it as one structure. The nomads were not there, as it were, by accident. But we have to see it as one structure of former ages: city-states or larger states immersed in a sea of tribal people or nomadic people. These both belong to the same structure—the same figuration, you may say—and again and again the nomadic people ran up against the walled cities or tried to break the big walls which emperors in China as well as in the Roman Empire erected against them. This has to be seen as something which starts from the very time when from the mass of the nomadic people one city area first emerged as a larger form of society, as a survival unit, with a greater number of people and a higher organisation. In fact it is symptomatic of what I mentioned this morning,3 namely the fact that the development of humanity always went on unevenly. Small groups pioneered new forms and it was really those who did not immediately follow the pioneering model, and could not follow it, who then formed the assailants who stormed against the more advanced groups or were alternatively dominated by them. Professor McNeill sees this regularity from the sixth century BC till about the sixteenth to seventeenth century AD. But, in fact, I hope you will agree, this regularity of city-states and territorial states emerging from the nomadic multitude can be traced much earlier. It is from the time when, as far as we know, for the first time the greater organisation of a city-state emerged from village-state, from the tribal level. Ever since the tribal people, nomadic people stormed against the city walls and were either defeated and driven back or assimilated, and themselves gradually took over the state rules. That was, roughly speaking, in a con-

2 William

H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier: 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 7. Professor McNeill was one of the other key participants in the 1984 conference in Bielefeld.– eds. 3 See Bogner and Mennell, Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity, pp. 56–7.— eds.

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tinuous setting from the fourth millennium BC on, when first the Sumerian towns emerged from the village stage. We can then already see wave after wave of nomads coming on, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Horites, the Hittites, you name it. There are wave after wave. They settle down; it is like a crystallisation process in which at first the small Sumerian towns emerged on the order of magnitude of perhaps Evidu. Old Evidu had about six thousand inhabitants. Then we have the various city-states, on an order of magnitude between thirty and forty thousand citizens. And so it was on to the Persian Empire, which had a much larger number of states [inhabitants]. I’m going to take size of survival unit as my cue. Perhaps I have to explain that in greater detail. I mean this growth in the size of a self-ruling or survival unit is not simply a numerical fact. What I wish to say, and wish to say very firmly, is that these figures are not just quantitative figures. They are indicators of a change in organisation—of the transition to a higher, more effective, and usually more productive form of organisation. Perhaps I can use a quotation from one of Keith Hopkins’s papers, ‘Economic growth and towns in classical Antiquity’, in which he observes, in passing, that the very fact of the transition to a higher form of organisation means a higher aggregate production. This is what he says: The gross product of the whole Roman Empire significantly exceeded the gross product of the hundreds of tribes and city-states which existed in the same area in the fifth century BC. Settled agriculture, flourishing towns, impressive monuments, the whole panoply of classical culture and of archaeological evidence from north Africa to the north of Britain provide convincing demonstration that a sizeable surplus was being produced and consumed throughout the Roman Empire, and that the average standard of living was higher over a wider area than ever before.4

I know that probably Professor Hopkins would not agree with me if I use this as a paradigmatic example for a much more general phenomenon, namely, the phenomenon to which I have just alluded—that if one finds units of a greater number of people, from a certain point on this signifies, as I said, that a different form of organisation, that people have succeeded in integrating more people into a single organisation. In order to do that, in order to integrate more people into an organisation, you have to re-shuffle—you have, in fact, to invent new means of constraint and control and, therefore, a different form of organisation.

4 Keith Hopkins, ‘Economic growth and towns in classical Antiquity’, in Abrams and Wrigley (eds), Towns in Societies, pp. 35–77. Professor Hopkins was one of the key participants in the 1984 Bielefeld conference.—eds.

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What we have here—the very graphic description—I would generalise. You have everywhere at first very small survival units or self-ruling units and gradually out of the struggles between these survival units there gradually grow up larger units which, as I say, demand a different form of organisation and a different surplus and so on until—well, we will see what ‘until’ means. But let me go back to one of the early stages: for example, see this chart on the blackboard (Fig. 1). You will note how small were the survival groups in which Peking Man lived; probably twenty-five to fifty people were the average unit then. And we have to think very hard how we can explain that there is a directional process which, over the centuries with all the setbacks, again and again enables human beings to coalesce, to integrate, to organise themselves into larger and larger units. Here you have an example of an unplanned process. Most of you probably know the figures which you see there. It is vaguely known that the population of humankind has grown. But the question of why there should be such a continuous movement in one direction—that question is very rarely asked. Here you have—and this is really one of the reasons why I put it before you—one example of a period-transcending process. As history is written today, it is usually confined to periods of three or four centuries or more, and historians are experts in short periods of three or four centuries. This limitation has had great advantages. It was the condition under which the enormous mass of evidence, of records, could be sifted and could be made available to all of us. But I do think that now the time has come where people will sit together and will say to each other that the traditional form of history writing

The size of survival units Date

Unit Peking Man Early Sumerian Towns 4000–3000 BC (Evidu, Lagash) Persian Empire c.400 BC Roman Empire c.AD 1 China c.AD 1 England AD 1700 France USSR c.1980 USA c.1980 China c.1980 (Figures in italics have been inserted by the editors.)

Fig. 1   Elias’s blackboard diagram (partial reconstruction)

Number of Members 25–30 15,000–30,000 15 million? c.60 million c.60 million c.5.2 million c.19.7 million > 250 [262] million > 200 [226] million > 1,000 [982] million

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is only one way to look at the human past. At the moment, the short-term history begins to be a serious blockage for a further synthesis at a higher level. What I am here trying to discuss before you is such a synthesis on a higher level, a periodtranscending movement—of which there are many. The next task, it seems to me, is to provide models—testable models—of period-transcending processes which go as this process which I have in mind here, which goes from the very beginning of Homo sapiens sapiens to our own time. There’s a continuous change, not simply a numerical change but a change from organisations at a lower level of integration and organisation to the next higher level to again the next higher level and again a different level. Let me take the first example, a very well-known example, the example of what Gordon Childe called the urban revolution.5 By that he meant the emergence in the valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris, in the delta where they debouch into the gulf, the emergence there from the village-state level of larger units which deserve very well the name of cities. What he perhaps does not see is that these cities were in fact self-ruling states. So from the stage of selfruling villages there emerged in Sumer self-ruling city-states.

II From Village States to City States I can briefly tell you what in my opinion is the distinguishing characteristic between a self-ruling village and the self-ruling city-state. The self-ruling village certainly has agencies, decision-making agencies, which take decisions for the whole community, but the people who form these self-ruling agencies are not permanently differentiated for this end; they are the same people who grow their own food on the fields, the same people who act in religious cults; the same people also sit together as a group of elders perhaps and take decisions for the whole village.6 I myself, in my stay in Africa, have seen many—and that is really where the concept of village-states comes from. I’ve seen many of these villagestates in action, the assembly of the elders, perhaps in many cases surrounded by the rest of the male community [who were] sometimes making remarks to the negotiations of the council of elders. There the same elders are the people who

5 V.

Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London: Watts, 1936). argument was elaborated further in Norbert Elias, ‘Towards a theory of communities’, in Essays II, pp. 119–54.—eds. 6 This

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grow their own food and who perhaps do religious duties as they all do. Priests are sometimes7 the first people who are differentiated as separated professionals. Now, what distinguishes the city-state from the village-state is that in their case the people who form the decision-making bodies are permanently specialised. They no longer grow their own food, but they are permanent specialists in ruling, in one way or another. And they are usually at a slightly later stage. They usually have at their disposal an equally permanently specialised staff of administrators, and above all of military men, because … the monopoly of physical force and physical coercion is characteristic of all states from the city-state level on. So there is a very distinct structural difference—a higher form of differentiation. ‘Higher’ is a word I don’t like very much—I usually try to translate it into the ‘later’ form of differentiation. I like to speak of earlier forms of society, then later forms of society, to take away the stigma of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’. So we have here a later stage of differentiation and integration. The representatives of the integration are permanently specialised for that particular job. It’s a form of specialisation like any other. I want to say here that this organisational change, as Keith Hopkins points out with regard to the Roman Empire too, certainly had the making of organisation which promised a greater productivity, a higher product aggregate and above all a higher ability to protect life and limb of the community against the attacks of the surrounding people who had not made this ascent to the next higher level of integration. That in fact is today very often [overlooked]. The Gordon Childe model is really rather simple. Gordon Childe, whose great merit is that he first discovered—and perhaps if he had not been a Marxist he would not have discovered— that the productivity, the increase in food supply, which occurred in the Tigris and Euphrates valley was, as he saw it, one of the conditions for the growth of towns. That is roughly his model. Rich soil, more food supply, growth of population, population organising itself into a higher form, into a later form of organisation, namely the city-state. I think I would put up a counter-model, and I think many people, many archaeologists today, have themselves made this step. They have said that it was precisely because of the lacking security—physical security—that people gave themselves into the protection of a temple, and at first priests and later specialised kings were the specialists who protected the group of population from physical

7 In

other writings, Elias does not make this qualification; see for example Elias, ‘The retreat of sociologists into the present’, in Essays III, pp. 107–26.—eds.

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annihilation by organising special warlike units and, at a later stage, by surrounding the settlement with walls. Now perhaps I should say that the process from the village-state to the citystate is a process which we must estimate as [lasting] at least fifteen hundred, perhaps two thousand, years. It’s not a sudden change. And we know that the first central figures of this process were priests. I am not able in this talk, simply for reasons of time, to tell you of one of the most fundamental aspects of these early transitions to a higher organisation, but I will at least mention it. I think the earliest problem which we have—and I have discussed it in the paper of mine about the retreat of the sociologists to the present8—the reason why actually in former days merchants and businessmen were not the ruling classes. But we have to ask ourselves what structural characteristics of societies are revealed by the fact that all the earlier power holders were either priests or war leaders in the form of kings. What does it tell us about the earlier stages of societies? If there were merchants, they were usually dependent on kings and on priests, if for no other reason simply of physical security, because you cannot make trade and contracts and other things if there is not a war leader or a commander of troops or police forces who guarantees the security which trade on a larger scale demands. So that is the basic issue: that we have at first a crystallising process, in the course of which, from shall we say a village-state where impermanent ‘elders’— which means the family heads—probably ruled, we gradually find a differentiation of functions where at first priests and then after a struggle between priests and kings, the kings became the effective exercisers of constraint. It was, of course, one of the fundamental problems of this whole change, of this whole state-formation process of that level. People who gathered together in a city were now to a greater extent dependent on the strongmen, the priests or the king, and it was he who now organised them in such a way that the fields could be more productive, that the irrigation channels could be maintained. He was the man or they were the men who protected the irrigation fields and channels outside the city against the invaders who came from time to time and who, as I said, are a structural feature of this thing, and without the physical protection by an army simply, purely as Gordon Childe put it—he gives a rather idyllic picture—you grow more food, the population grows and then you form cities. But the reality is far less idyllic. The reality is that there is a constant struggle, a physical struggle between survival units. And it is this physical struggle—the struggle for survival on a new level, on a non-biological level—which provides one of the main driving forces, if not

8 Ibid.—eds.

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the main driving force for what we see here. [That is,] smaller units fighting with each other as a result of their survival struggle, [out of which] a smaller number of larger units emerges—from whose survival struggle [in turn] an [even] smaller number of units with even larger [territory and population] emerges, and so forth. Incidentally, I have set out this model clearly in the second volume of my book on the civilising process under the name of a monopoly mechanism.9 But although it is, as I believe, very fruitful, although without this model one cannot explain the change in figures—population figures—which I have shown there, one is so little used to get at competition dynamics or to look at the interstate level as the principal driving level that this model has not yet been taken up. I’m sure it will be in the future. Now, I fear there is too much to say, but I do not want to forget one thing. One thing which I tried to make clear is that there is also an initial struggle between priests and kings, which is one of the standing features of early societies up to our own time. You find in antiquity again and again priests and kings in competition. You find that the Sumerian towns are grouped around both a temple and a palace. You find in Sumer that gradually the priests, the temple, which are the main enterprises, really the first large-scale economic enterprise that we know. There is no accident that writing is invented in Sumer, because these temple organisations comprising sometimes as many as twelve hundred people had to have some means of control. And writing in these early days was really simply a means of control for outgoing and ingoing goods in the temple stores and later also in the stores of the kingly palace. But you have this competition between kings and priests going on up to our own time. You can see it in the struggle between the Emperor and the Pope in the Middle Ages. You can see it in the struggle—well, I need not remind you, between Khomeini and the Shah.10 It’s again and again this struggle and it is a very revealing picture because it is probably also invisible. Some of the nomadic tribes, the Indo-Aryan tribes for instance, those who became Hindus, in their setting the priests gained the better of the warriors. In the Hindu caste system the priest takes pride of precedence of all others, and the warriors are the second-rank caste. In the tribes which migrated to Greece, to Hellas, you find that the warriors are the first-ranking people; and it is quite possible that if the struggle, the conflict between priests and warriors, had taken another turn—had had another result in Greece, among the Greek tribes—we would not

9 Elias,

On the Process of Civilisation (Dublin: UCD Press, 2012 [1939]), pp. 301–11.— eds. 10 See note above.

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have had the flowering of the first philosophy and science. Because that was the first secularisation move, which would hardly have been possible in India as long as the priest groups had the better over the warriors.

III City States and Empires I do not want to enlarge this branch of my long-term picture, but I want to show you that certain very lively conclusions can be drawn from a long-term picture of this kind. One more point needs to be made, and that is if you look at these early societies, our conceptual apparatus, the conceptual apparatus which is so much a matter of course to us and seems so absolute in our terminology—namely, the division of activities or spheres into political, economic, cultural, religious and other spheres, particularly the division between political sphere and economic sphere is hardly applicable—is conceptually distorting—if you apply it to early state societies, such as those of Sumer. It’s still difficult to apply it even to the Roman Empire because if you have societies where the main source of riches is war-like booty, if those who can lead successful wars are likely to be the richest in the land and at the same time the most powerful in the land because they command the army, I think the separation between the economic and the political is just not possible. There is a very nice saying, a Sumerian proverb which runs: ‘It accumulates but does not suffice. It is expended without pause. Upon the property of the king lift not your eyes.’ That is to say, the king has so much to pay out. You must understand that he gets all the riches. Don’t lift your eyes against them. What we call the class struggle in our societies against entrepreneurs was there, if at all, directed against the king as the richest. And for a very long time we find that merchants and traders are, as it were, private people only whenever the government of the kings get weak. That is also true of the priests. As a rule we find an alliance between priests and kings in which the priests play a somewhat subordinate part, but are together with the king upholding the rule. That is the same solution we find in later states too. Now, you find this setting: a powerful city as the core and an exploited rural countryside as the area on whose surplus the town lived well; you find this pattern pretty well till the end of the Roman Empire. In fact, Rome in its early stages till the late empire is still such a conquering state which, driven by the competition with others—with Carthage, with the [Mithridatians, Sarmatians?] and others—accumulates a hinterland, on which it can live, from which it can [gain] rich booty, from which its civil servants can get tribute, from which its civil servants can, as it were, rob and bribe as much as they can. That you cannot quite

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understand unless one sees that Rome was an island set in an ocean of tribal people. They tried by means of a Roman wall to keep the tribal people out and prevent them from threatening their own towns but, for reasons into which I don’t want to go, they did not succeed. Let me say, in this slow progress through time which I am making, let me say at once that for me perhaps one of the most useful though terrible examples is the running down of the rest of the Roman Empire. Just as you can see the growth of the state organisation as you go from Sumer to Akkad, to Babylon, to Persia, to Alexander and you see how they experiment with new means, always to have a larger and larger organisation to control. Just as you see this building up of the large-scale organisation, which is really a learning process, a process in which rulers learn how to control larger and larger groups of people. Now it’s the opposite in the running down of the Roman Empire. You can see there, if I can put it in a nutshell, that a high state organisation is based on the functioning of the two central monopolies of physical force and taxation. And you can see very clearly how gradually both are running down. Less taxes are coming in; as a result it becomes more difficult to maintain an army; and, because you cannot maintain a large army, fewer and fewer taxes come in. And then you can see how gradually out of the money economy, which pre-supposes a large state-society, there comes a return to the natural economy. The taxes begin to be levied in the east of the empire, and in the western Roman Empire as well, in wheat and other things. And that is used by the kings, by the emperors in order to feed the army; and then you can see how gradually the people from the cities were stormed by nomads—often three or four times in a year. Trier, I think, was stormed four times in one year. You can see how it runs down. The people abandon the towns. They go into the countryside. And the monopoly of physical force gradually disappears; and you find what you would expect to find if you make an experiment. Namely, the strongmen who are large estate owners organise their private armies and they rule. Now as the central authority no longer can protect them, they rule by protecting the peasants against marauders, but also by exacting as much from the peasants as they can. No doubt states are exploiter organisations in the initial stages, and for a long time they take ruthlessly what they can by means of taxes. And here I should make a general remark about constraints. It is a moot point whether humanity could have attained the level of self-constraint which we represent today without going through long periods of external constraint. If I put survival units—such as villages or states—in the centre of my picture, it is not because I am a lover of states. I am not. The state is a compulsory organisation and I personally don’t like compulsion from outside very much. But I don’t think I am allowed—or can allow myself—my personal feelings in these matters

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to guide what I can see in history. And what I can see in the human past is this: that in fact human beings learnt to act on insight and self-control and with kindliness only through long periods of external constraint. You cannot expect human beings to do that, as it were, from the beginning. This is one of the long processes in which they learnt to live with each other in a reasonable way. That, we have learnt—it is certainly not there from the beginning. And certainly survival units and states were one of the main real forms of grouping in which people began to learn, but which of course were enormously cruel and were at first administered entirely for the sake—and quite ruthlessly for the sake—of those who had the power. So, if you look at the Roman Empire and its downfall you have a very good example as to how the organisation of constraint which the Empire represented gradually gives up its constraint function, can no longer exercise it. And then it happens as we would expect it to happen as I say, [there forms] the pre-form of feudalism, the local strongmen who in later times were also armoured knights, sitting on their horse.11 At that time they were probably still foot soldiers, and they exercised the real power of constraint. Now I do not want to go here into the whole process and the reasons why European countries then succeeded in a new integration process, in a new stateformation process. Part of it I have set out in the second volume of my book On the Process of Civilisation, but there is much more to be said than I could say today. The main point which I want to make here is that you see the breaking up of a large unit into smaller units and then an unplanned process in the course of which [there is] a reintegration partly through, or in connection with, the existence of the Christian church—so first into smaller and then into larger and larger centralised units. I personally do not think that this new reintegration process could have happened without antiquity. I think in fact one of the most important aspects, which I can here only mention in passing, is the continuity of the knowledge tradition, which surpasses various periods, which runs from Mesopotamia over the later antiquity, the Greco-Roman antiquity, to the Middle Ages and to our time. I think one can show very well, and with great exactness, that this is one great tradition of knowledge transmission and without this immense knowledge transmission

11 Elias

is alluding to the fact that in many European languages, the word for ‘knight’— such as Ritter in German, chevalier in French, caballero in Spanish, cavaliere in Italian, riddare in Swedish—means ‘rider’ or ‘horseman’.—eds.

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this whole process could not have taken place. Here you have another of my heresies. I think that the development of knowledge is just as fundamental a process, as basic a process, as the economic development or as the development of the physical force in the form of states. So I mention here in passing that the tradition of the Latin language which goes through the Christian churches to our time, which transmits knowledge to our time, is a very important one. Perhaps you will allow me to give at least one example. Development: what I am discussing here is in fact not history, but a development. I think in the near future one will see that the historical relativism which puts one epoch on the same level as every other is not tenable. There are differences of levels in the development of the past, and so one will have to replace, or rather to supplement, the concept of the human past in the form of history by the concept of the human past as a development—no longer in any speculative manner but as a purely theoretical concept which can be verified by the evidence. You see for instance that the church of the Middle Ages certainly was a going back to a pre-secular, pre-scientific stage. But it was not a going back to the same level which existed before science came up in Greece and Rome. It was a religious, priest-dominated, kind of knowledge on a new level. So, for instance, concepts such as theology would not have been possible without the preceding concept of philosophy. Concepts such as cause and effect, which was taken over by the church theology, were not existing in the mythological cult knowledge prior to the Greek science. So if one speaks of a sequence of stages, as one must do, it does not mean, as usually supposed, a going back to a previous stage. Also, feudalism was not a going back to the tribal level because here, too, you have a new stage, a stage which was going back from the centralised stage but it was not a going back to the earlier stage as it was before. So let me just make a big jump and remind you of the fact that you can see the processes of integration of smaller units into larger units very well in our own time. And there you can feel the enormous force which the mechanism of competition has in that respect. You see it in Africa. You might very well ask, ‘Why do not the African groups go back to the pre-colonial tribal level which they had before? Why do they now integrate on the state level? Why do we live today for the first time in an age where all tribes, all units on the tribal level, have practically disappeared, or are so powerless they don’t count any longer?’ You can see that the state-formation process goes on in Africa and you can see the same process going on all over the world. You see it, for instance, in Europe. The European countries are under very great pressure at the moment to integrate into larger units. And you can predict— if you want to say what options there are. There are the options that the European nations integrate around the two superpowers, so that the eastern European states

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coagulate and integrate as a Russian bloc, as a larger Soviet empire, and the western states concentrate, become part of an American empire. That is one possibility of integration at the higher level. You can take as an option that they integrate among themselves into a larger unit of a European federation of states, or they can remain fragmented as they are today. Those are the three options which they have before them, but I don’t think that there are many more. And you have the same process now going on at an even higher level. You can see that there are pre-forms of integration of all states. The question there too is ‘What options are there?’ There are the options that one great power may attain hegemony over the whole world and then integrate the rest of the world—that it, the world, becomes a Russian, Chinese or American empire. That is one option. The other option is that we remain for a time fragmented with a danger of wars as we are today. And the third option—still rather Utopian, but to me at least very desirable—is the option of a world federation of states in which all violence is excluded between states. Because that, of course, is what we are aiming at. We are aiming certainly at a condition where the old tradition, that conflicts between states can be worked out by means of violence, should give way to a condition in which people go to a law court and give their quarrels and conflicts to a court of law. For that one has to establish a unified federation of world states. I think it very unlikely that any one of us shall see that in our lifetime. But it is the option. All this development, of new state organisation on a different level, has very much to do with civilising processes. Because the external constraints structure, which is represented best through the various levels of state formation, expresses itself in various forms of self-constraint. I’ve actually described in my book that the decisive thing about a civilising process—or one of the decisive things—is the extent to which the external constraints are arranged in such a way that they can transform themselves into self-constraints. That one can easily exemplify. If a child is beaten every day to do what it should do, it never learns self-constraint. It learns only to beat others in order to follow its whims. In order to produce selfconstraint you have yourself to be very much more civilised and to exercise constraint yourself—as a fair parent, as well as a ruler. But that may be enough. I want to say this is what we are aiming at. We are aiming at greater civilisation, which means to me acting more on insight, self-constraint, on regard for others, on kindliness, than on external constraint and compulsion of others. We have to see what external conditions are necessary to achieve this aim and I think, though it will not be realised in our time, that the federation of states which excludes war from our doorsteps, and a gradual ideological disarmament of the great antagonisms of our time is one of the necessary steps in that direction.

Sociology and Anthropology Norbert Elias

I Introduction There is much confusion about the relationship between sociology and anthropology, not only among students, but also among the representatives of the two disciplines themselves and among the general public. It would take more time than that at my disposal at this conference to disentangle the confused relationship. But it may be useful to make at least a beginning. Here are two disciplines closely related and yet, as close relatives often are, not always on the best of terms and not quite clear how they stand in relation to each other. The problems with which one is confronted are largely problems of the sociology of knowledge or, more practically, the sociology of sciences. And sociology as I use the term is largely developmental sociology. The frame of reference for observations of social data, including data about the sciences of society themselves, is their own development and, in a wider sense, that of the countries where they are practised. For neither the development nor the relationship of the two sci-

The manuscript is archived under Soc.Anthrop., no. 1 (pp. 1–23), Sociology and Anthropology (1963-eng-1, Sig. MISC- E XI) in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. It is a paper read at the Second Annual Conference of the Ghana Sociological Association—April, 1963. Headings are supplied by the editors. Elias characteristically used just roman numerals to mark sections, but, also characteristically, in this lecture forgot to do so after section III. This manuscript was mainly edited by Behrouz Alikhani. —eds.

N. Elias (*)  Wiesbaden, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_11

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ences is the same in all countries. The relationship of anthropology and sociology in America is in some respects quite different from that in Britain; it is different in Britain from that of the corresponding disciplines in France and Germany. I have chosen this topic for my talk to you because apart from any intrinsic interest it may have, one has also to examine the simple practical question of what the relationship of the two disciplines is likely to be or, as far as one can say, should be in Ghana. Is it simply to follow the pattern set by the relationship of the two disciplines in Britain? Or can, will and should the relationship of the two disciplines change in accordance with the special conditions of Ghana and its development into a nation state with an expanding industrial sector?

II Development of Social Sciences and States Of course, the development of sciences has a degree of autonomy in relation to that of the country at large. The development of physics not only passively follows, but also, to some extent, also actively shapes developments in society at large. And the same true, though to a lesser extent, of the development of social sciences. But the autonomy of the development of sciences within that of a country at large is relative. It is greater or smaller; it varies in degrees, but it is never absolute. In some respects, then, anthropology and sociology are the same, and their relationship is the same, whatever the society in which they flourish. Perhaps one should better say that their function within the scientific universe is the same. Traditionally, sociology is concerned with the study of societies of all kinds, particularly with development from simpler to more complex societies which occupied the minds of sociologists from Comte and Spencer to Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber, while anthropology when it gradually branched off from the mainstream of sociology as a specialised discipline confined itself to the intensive study of simpler pre-industrial and above all of tribal societies. There was some need for such specialisation. For with the growing contact between European societies with their industrial and scientific equipment and the pre-scientific, pre-industrial societies outside Europe during the period of Europe’s colonial expansion, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the information about less-developed societies which had formerly been scanty began to grow enormously; and so did the need for such information felt by all kinds of Europeans who were brought into closer contact with less-developed societies, particularly by colonial administrators and missionaries.

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It is thus understandable that in the era of colonial expansion a subdiscipline specially concerned with the study of simpler non-European societies branched off from the mainstream of sociology. It is this branch of sociology, sometimes called ethnology, sometimes social anthropology, and sometimes, in rival forms, sociology of simpler societies, with which I am concerned here. In the nineteenth century, pioneering sociologists such as Comte, Spencer and others constantly included in their writing attempts to form a unified theory of the development of society based on both the knowledge of simpler and of more differentiated societies. More direct was the influence that the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) had on the emerging specialised study of simpler societies, on social anthropology. Durkheim was, to use the words of Evans-Pritchard, ‘a central figure in the history of its development, both on account of his general sociological theories and because he and a band of talented colleagues and pupils applied them with remarkable insight into the study of primitive societies.’1 But for Durkheim, sociology—the scientific study of society—was still indivisible. The idea that one could study simpler societies without studying at the same time more complex and differentiated societies, or more differentiated societies without studying the less differentiated societies from which they sprang, would have been alien to him. It was perhaps inevitable that with the influx of more and more knowledge about simpler societies in the wake of Europe’s colonial expansion the study of simpler societies should become a sociological specialism with techniques, with traditions and with university institutions of its own. But hardly in any other country did the tendency towards separating the sociological study of simpler societies under the name of social anthropology from the wider sociological study of all types of society go quite as far as it did in Great Britain.

III The Traditionally Low Status of British Bociology I shall have to devote some of my time towards describing and, to some extent, explaining, the peculiar relationship of social anthropology and sociology as it developed in Britain, because it had and still has repercussions on the relationship of the two disciplines in this country which a Head of Department of Soci-

1 E.

E. Evans-Pritchard, Social Anthropology (London: Cohen and West, 1951), p. 51.

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ology in Africa can hardly fail to notice. The high degree of separation between the specialised anthropological study of simpler societies and the overall study of societies in the form of sociology which is characteristic of the British academic tradition makes itself quite strongly felt, for example in the education of Ghanaian postgraduates. […]2 The shortest, and perhaps also the most realistic way in presenting to you the situation in Britain is probably that of considering the different standing of anthropology and sociology within the academic world of Great Britain. The separation between the two disciplines in Great Britain is particularly great because of the differences in their status as academic disciplines. Until very recent times the status of sociology in Great Britain was probably lower than in any other highly developed country. It was very much lower than it was in the United States and in France or in Holland and noticeably lower than even in Germany. Social anthropology on the other hand enjoyed in Britain a particularly high social prestige within the academic universe. London had between the wars two chairs of sociology, one of which was for a long time unoccupied. There were, so far as I am aware, no departments of sociology and hardly any academic positions for sociologists outside London in Great Britain before the war. There were certainly none, and in 1963 there still are none, in the high prestige universities of Oxford and Cambridge. By contrast, chairs and, I believe, departments of social anthropology have existed for a considerable time in a number of British universities including Oxford, Cambridge, London and Manchester. The Royal Anthropological Institute is a venerable institution. Even at the present moment there are far more sociology departments and academic positions for sociologists in Holland, to say nothing of the United States, than in Great Britain. The relationship, and particularly the degree of separation, between anthropology and sociology in Great Britain is indeed rather exceptional. Academically, sociology in Great Britain had a rather bad name. There is a saying ‘give a dog a bad name and it will become a bad dog’. The situation is now changing. But up to the war and for a little while after the war, British sociology had relatively few achievements to its credit. Social anthropology had many. Above all, quite in contrast to the United States, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium and other European countries, in Britain no sociologist after Spencer and, perhaps, Hobhouse ever succeeded

2 At

this point, the following sentence was crossed out by Elias: ‘And even in undergraduate training, the teaching of sociology and anthropology, the relationship of anthropology to other aspects of a sociology training is often not very clear.’ Unfortunately, his handwritten reformulation of this sentence could not be reliably deciphered.—eds.

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in commanding sufficient respect and authority outside his own academic field to raise the relatively low prestige which sociology had in that country. Morris Ginsberg3 tried between the wars to uphold almost single-handedly the tradition of philosophical sociology connected above all with the name of his teacher Hobhouse. And Ginsberg’s intellectual integrity, his critical clarity gained the admiration of all who like myself know him personally. But his strength lay in his critical faculty and in his strong moral sense rather than in a constructive and original contribution to sociological theory and research which [would] have convinced the reluctant academic world of Great Britain that more sociology was needed at British universities. Neither as a field of studies for its own sake nor as a contribution to the professional training of teachers, managers, or civil servants did there seem to be any need for sociology.

IV British Anthropology The position of social anthropology was strikingly different. It had in the context of British social life two functions both closely connected with problems of empire. One was the duty felt by many people in Britain to collect and to preserve as far as possible the available information about traditions and customs of simpler people, particularly those under under British rule, before it was too late. The other was connected with the growing awareness that colonial administrators as well as missionaries could not fulfil their task properly unless they had a more thorough knowledge and understanding of the people over which they ruled. Thus R. S. Rattray in the preface to Ashanti:4 It must be remembered that the creation of Departments of Anthropology in Colonies and Protectorates where Governments are dealing with people who are classed as ‘backward’ or ‘primitive’ has been advocated long and earnestly by scientists …

3 Morris

Ginsberg (1889–1970): born in what is now Lithuania, he emigrated to Britain at the age of 15 and became a student and later collaborator of Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse, who held one of the first two chairs of sociology in the UK at the London School of Economics, in which Ginsberg followed him. In this key position he played an important part in the formation of the discipline in Britain, and was founding chairman of the British Sociological Association in 1951 and President 1955–57, though his kind of ‘philosophical’ sociology declined in influence.—eds. 4 Robert Sutherland Rattray, Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 5.

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The objects and reasons for the formation of such Departments are concisely summed up in the findings of a Royal Commission on University education which sat in 1913 … It is as important that officials and others intending to spend their lives in the East, or in parts of the empire inhabited by non-European races, should have a knowledge of their racial characteristics, as that they should be acquainted with their speech, and we believe that the Colonial Office5 shares this view’ (Royal Commission Report). And again: ‘An accurate acquaintance with the nature, habits, and customs of alien populations is necessary to all who have to live and work amongst them in any official capacity, whether administrators, executive officers, missionaries, or merchants, because in order to deal effectively with any group of mankind it is essential to have that cultured sympathy with them which comes of sure knowledge.

Rattray, as we all know, performed the task of securing such knowledge admirably. We owe him a great debt for bringing together and for presenting most lucidly knowledge about the beliefs and customs of the Ashanti, much of which might have been lost by now without his effort. As he himself wrote, when he was seconded from the political side of the Gold Coast6 administration in order to become the first head of a new anthropology department, he set out above all to make a ‘detailed investigation into the beliefs and customs of this people’.7 He had in full measure the cultural sympathy of an English gentleman with a simpler people for whom he felt a profound respect. Thus while the wider study of society in the attenuated form in which it survived in Britain up to the last war was not felt to have any social of professional function in Britain that seemed to warrant more university teaching in that field, social anthropology, the specialised study of simpler peoples, most decidedly had such a function. When Evans-Pritchard in his excellent little book Social Anthropology, the reprint of six lectures he gave on the Third Programme of the BBC

5 Between

1854 and 1966, the Colonial Office was a British department of state responsible for the administration of most British colonies (but never India). Its political head was a member of the Cabinet known as the Colonial Secretary. Four years after Elias gave this lecture, as most of the colonies gained their independence, it was merged with the Commonwealth Office and in 1968 the resulting merged entity was further merged into the Foreign Office.—eds. 6 Strictly speaking, the term Gold Coast denoted one of four Crown Colonies, along with Ashanti, the Northern Territories and British Togoland, that made up the territory of Ghana before it gained independence in 1957, although the four together were commonly called the Gold Coast.—eds. 7 Rattray, Ashanti, p. 7.

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in the winter of 1950, posed in his final lecture the question: ‘What is the purpose of studying social anthropology?’ or, in another formulation: ‘What is the use of knowledge about primitive societies?’,8 he answered his own question by pointing out first that the discussion about the problem had to be divided into a discussion about the use which social anthropology had for the primitive people themselves and its value for those who are responsible for their welfare, its value, as he wrote,9 ‘to the men who study it—to ourselves’. And he went on to point out the bearing which social anthropology had on the problems of the administration and education of primitive peoples. He explained that this value had been recognised from the beginning of the century by the Colonial Office and colonial governments, that for a good number of years past colonial cadets, before taking up their appointments received, among other courses of instruction, instruction in social anthropology at Oxford and Cambridge and more recently in London, that in addition administrative officers have often taken the Anthropological Tripos at Cambridge and occasionally the Diploma or a postgraduate Degree in Anthropology at Oxford; ‘and a great many have kept in touch with anthropological developments through membership of the Royal Anthropological Institute’.10 And he observed shrewdly that the British type of colonial rule made it particularly necessary to study the traditions of simpler people themselves: ‘It will be at once acknowledged’, he wrote, ‘that it is the policy of a colonial government to administer a people through their chiefs it is useful to know who are the chiefs and what are their functions and authority and privileges and obligations.’11 And a preoccupation with chiefs and indeed a tendency to view the simpler societies from the chief’s, from the ruler’s, perspective, in terms of norms and obligations which it was the task of chiefs and elders to enforce, has remained a strong trend of British anthropology ever since. Thus it is easy to understand why, in the context of Britain’s overall development, social anthropology as a field of study enjoyed a particularly high prestige. And as so often, differences in the social standing of academic disciplines made themselves acutely felt in the kind of people they attracted and in their achievements. In contrast to sociology in Britain, social anthropology attracted or produced during the interwar years a galaxy of men who, thanks to the calibre of

8 Evans-Pritchard,

Social Anthropology, p. 105. Social Anthropology, p. 105. 10 Evans-Pritchard, Social Anthropology, p. 109. 11 Evans-Pritchard, Social Anthropology, p. 109. 9 Evans-Pritchard,

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their anthropological work and their personal stature, commanded respect outside their own field and gained prestige for their discipline, thus completing the virtuous circle. […] From the great father figures, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, to Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, Firth, Gluckman, Schapera, Nadel, Little and, last not least, that remarkable lady now with us in Ghana, Audrey Richards,12 to mention only a few, in spite of all differences of opinion and specific traditions of British anthropological procedure and outlook, they grouped themselves in a number of schools in which the tradition of the master was handed on, or, as the case may be, modified and transformed by the next generation. They were aided by the fact that certain areas, such as the English-speaking parts of Africa, remained the almost exclusive preserve of British anthropologists. In this way, British anthropologists were able to do what until very recent times British sociologists were never able to do, to produce a growing body of work which, if not always outstanding, preserved by and large a good level of workmanship enforced by the fairly tight social control which British anthropologists exercised over each other. […] But now that the specific social conditions under which this tradition of social research emerged have begun to change very radically, one can see better perhaps than before its limitations and shortcomings. Firstly it was and remained an exclusively British tradition. Nothing that was done in the field of anthropology by people outside Britain counted for much. Even in Africa, French-speaking anthropologists and British anthropologists succeeded in disregarding each other’s work to a very high degree. Teaching and reading was largely confined to the cult of one’s own; and even what the Englishspeaking American anthropologists did, by and large, seemed of minor interest for British anthropologists. And it was not only that the general insularity made itself felt in a kind of national exclusiveness, each school of British anthropology

12 Elias

gives a catalogue of great names in twentieth-century British anthropology. The ‘father figures’ were Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942), Professor at the London School of Economics and A. R. Radclife-Brown (1881–1955), Professor at Oxford; both are associated with somewhat different varieties of ‘functionalism’. All but one of the others in Elias’s list were still alive and active at the time of the lecture: Sir Edward EvansPritchard (1902–73) who followed Radcliffe-Brown in the Oxford chair; Meyer Fortes (1906–83), Cambridge; Sir Raymond Firth (1901–2002), London School of Economics; Max Gluckman (1911–1975), Manchester; Isaac Schapera (1905–2003), London School of Economics; S. F. (Fred) Nadel (1903–56), Australian National University; Kenneth Little (1908–91), Edinburgh; Audrey Richards (1899–1984), Cambridge. Of these, EvansPritchard, Gluckman, Fortes, Schapera, Little and Richards were Africanists.—eds.

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developed canons of work peculiarly its own. In the long run, the strong leadership exercised by a few men of stature engendered in many cases a parochial and sectarian outlook among the followers. It showed itself among other [things] in the canons of selection, the canons of what British anthropologists regarded as relevant for an anthropological study and what not. So far as I am aware, these canons of selection have never been explicitly […] seem to be used almost unconsciously as something which one takes for granted. Many anthropologists do not even seem to be aware that they work according to a specific canon of selection, that they do not study as they often seem to believe the working of simpler societies in the round, but to certain specific facets of these societies and almost totally neglect others which to a sociologist seem at least as relevant. It is in that respect, in the narrowness of their canons of selection, that one must seek one of the main differences between an anthropological and a sociological approach to the study of pre-literate peoples. I have been aware of it before I came to Ghana; I have always felt that books written in the tradition of British anthropology fail entirely to give any information on certain very vital and relevant aspects of societies. The workmanship in most cases is undeniable. But it is a workmanship which conveys a curiously unreal and artificial picture of the societies studied by anthropologists. It is this difference in the canons of selection that is one of the main obstacles to a more interrelated teaching combining the anthropological study of simpler societies with the wider sociological study of all types of societies past and present. And since I came to Ghana and have done a bit of fieldwork of my own, this impression has become strongly confirmed. There are many aspects of the life of pre-literate communities which to a sociologist appear highly relevant to their studies, while […] neglected by the anthropologists. I can only mention a few of them. The simplest example is a case in which a British anthropologist, a man of the highest repute and intelligence, refused to accept postgraduate work on the Asafo companies13 because it was not really a problem of interest to anthropologists. Generally, one can say that anthropologists tend to overemphasize the family organisations, as if they were in simpler societies the basis of all others. In fact, military functions and military organisations are in no way less relevant for the understanding of the lives of simpler people.

13 The

eds.

Asafo companies were the warrior groups in the traditional Akan states in Ghana.—

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V Comparing Anthropology and Sociology Before we go on, let me clarify two basic aspects of social sciences generally which one has to keep in mind if comparisons between two of them are to be of any use. First the relationship between students and the object of their studies. It is up to the present different in the two fields of sociology and anthropology; and this difference indicates again how dependent sciences, in spite of their relative autonomy, are on conditions in society at large. Until now anthropologists have been sociologists who studied societies other than their own, while the term ‘sociologist’ came to be reserved for those sociologists who studied and study societies to which they themselves belonged: Western sociologists in the first place study, and often draw their conclusions for society generally, from western societies; and their counterparts in the East, whatever the label attached to them, study—and often theorise in the first place—from the standpoint of eastern societies. Sociologists of this type often have great difficulties in gaining intellectually some distance from the stereotypes about their own and other societies, and from the ideologies current in their own social group as weapons of defence and attack in relation to other groups. They often accept without examination as instruments of scientific research categories and modes of thinking about society used and universal in the country at large. They are too involved to be able to emancipate themselves from the concepts, the types of classification, the very words used constantly around them with reference to social phenomena and to gain greater autonomy for their scientific enquiries into social problems in relation to the modes of social thought with which they have been brought up. I have tried to explain the problems of detachment and involvement elsewhere.14 Among other things, I have stated there that a high degree of involvement of people who themselves belong to the type of society that they study has been one of the principal stumbling blocks in the development of sociology. Anthropology, in this respect, has an advantage because its representatives until now have usually been teachers who study societies other than their own. It is easier for them to gain distance in relation to the object of their study. They can be more detached.

14 Norbert

Elias, Involvement and Detachment (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007 [Collected Works of Norbert Elias, vol. 8]).

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The situation is now changing rapidly. And this change brings into better focus another aspect of the greater ‘distanciation’ embodied in the traditional anthropological, as compared with the currently dominant sociological, research procedures. It brings into better focus the fact that the greater detachment embodied in anthropological procedures, by comparison with that of sociological procedures in the narrower sense of the word, was not only due to the position of anthropologists as outsiders in relation to the societies that they study; it was also due to the fact that the societies to which they belonged had reached a higher level of development and of power in international relations than the societies they studied and that the latter were in many cases subjects of the former. Now that the situation has begun to change, one can already observe the first signs of the anthropologists’ growing involvement. They are unmistakable in cases where members of the former subject societies themselves as anthropologists or sociologists undertake research into aspects of their own societies or of societies at a comparable level of development. Social stereotypes with which they have grown up, in Ghana for instance that of the ‘Akan family’ of which I shall say more, start seeping into sociological discussions. European anthropologists, willy-nilly, become involved in the struggles between the traditional and the new African authorities and their writings, often unwittingly, tend ideologically to reinforce the claims of the traditional rather than those of the new rulers. Emotionally many anthropologists seem to feel a strong attachment to the traditional order of African societies which they know well and which, traditionally, formed the primary object of their studies. And this too is an element of involvement. By and large European anthropologists in Africa begin to lose the special position they had as ‘White men’, fellow members in many cases of those who ruled over the populations whom they studied, and become foreign specialists who study populations in countries ruled by their own elites, and increasingly representatives of these elites themselves fill the roles of anthropologists who, as such, study groups of less advanced compatriots with whom they may be connected by family ties or political groupings. And, wherever that is the case, distortion of observations under the influence of their own involvement, of, for example, their own national and social aspirations, as is so often the case with European sociologists, is bound to grow, unless the problems of detachment and involvement are explicitly studied and brought to their notice as part of their training. The second point I want to make before coming back to the canons of selection peculiar to British anthropologists is this: sociologists have a long tradition of theory building. From the earliest days—from Comte onwards—sociologists were not satisfied with describing social phenomena. They formed hypotheses. They tried to find explanations. Anthropology has remained in what is eve-

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rywhere in the development of sciences in earlier stage. The main activities of anthropologists are those of collecting and of classifying social data. Their training is largely confined to these two types of activities and it is in respect of the collection and classification of data that standards of competence and workmanship are high. One cannot say the same with regard to explanation. Every now and then anthropologists put forward explanations for data they have collected and classified. But it does not form part of the canon of British anthropology that one should try to explain. In fact, the systematic search for explanatory hypotheses and theories indicating connections between phenomena which at first stand unconnected side by side and which are de rigueur (obligatory) at least in some schools of sociology are rather suspect among British anthropologists. It does not seem to agree with what they regard as the empirical character of their science. One often has the impression that, at least to some of them, ‘empirical’ means that all that is needed for social research is close contact with the people one studies and a systematic noting down of everything one observes. I have in fact known some younger anthropologists who did precisely that: they went, lived among the people whom [they] meant to study and collected data—endlessly. Everything they saw was interesting, fascinating and new. But if they tried to write up the observations they had made, the data they had collected, it was just that: a collection of data, a hotchpotch of varied information about phenomena, the connection of which remained obscure. Even these extremists among the factcollecting anthropologists are not entirely without theories or hypotheses which provide some principle of selecting data. And so have the more articulate schools of anthropology. They usually possess a more firmly established canon of selection which determines what is regarded as relevant in their circle and what not. But even there the canon of selection is rarely something that they are used to formulating explicitly and examining critically in the light of growing evidence. It has hardly ever the form of a concisely reasoned theory. As a rule, the canons of selection, even of the most highly reputed schools of British anthropology, are usually handed on in the manner in which skills have been handed on from time immemorial from one generation to the other, by the example of the master, by training pupils in the traditions of a school rather than by explicit and systematic justification of the canons of selection themselves. This traditional mode of selecting data can sometimes be modified by events in society at large, as for instance in the case in which after the last war the study of ‘political systems’, formerly rather neglected, moved into the centre of attention among British anthropologists as a problem worth selecting and hallowed by the example of some of the masters. It moved up in the scale of anthropological values until it almost approached in relevance what had been until then the principal focus

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of attention of anthropologists—the family in the widest sense of the word. Kinship relations according to anthropological canons always appeared and apparently still appear as the basic organisational form of society. For a time, many anthropologists apparently held the view that family relations were in all societies the basic forms of relationship so that the specific forms of family relations which one could find in any specific society appeared to provide as it were the explanation for the specific forms of all other relationships in that society. This assumption was rarely stated explicitly but it was implicit in many of the traditional approaches of anthropologists to their professional task and to the training for fieldwork which was handed on from one generation to the other. The first thing members of most schools of social anthropology tried to ascertain was the traditional anthropological classification of kinship relations to which one could ascribe the kinship relations in the particular society which one studied. Family relations appeared to them as they do to every child as the primary relationship. They seemed to provide the principal clue to the study of others. In recent times, challenged both by changing conditions in under-developed countries and by empirical and theoretical advances of sociological studies in other fields, anthropologists have tended to give almost equal weight to other types of organisation, particularly to political organisations. But they have done so, by and large, without critically examining the implied premises of their own traditional modes of procedure which rested on the assumption that clans, lineages and other aspects of family organisation formed the basis and provided the explanation for the specific characteristics of other types of organisation, among them of political organisations in a society. The relationship between family organisations and other organisations in a society has hardly ever been examined by anthropologists, and so one can usually find that in their description the various types of organisation are simply juxtaposed. One can read such statements that this or that type of religious, political or community organisation cuts across the lineage system. But as the latter, as family relations still have the highest status in most anthropological studies, anthropologists are usually content with such purely descriptive juxtapositions. They do not set out to analyse the interdependence of the various types of organisation in society; they do not examine for example how changes in military techniques and organisations affect the family organisation or how differences in the political regime of closely related groups are related to differences in the family structure. They are satisfied with describing society X ‘patrilineal’ and society Y as ‘having a double descent system’. With a few notable exceptions they traditionally envisage what they observe in the group where they do their fieldwork as static. And they so much lack any theoretical framework allowing them to look for explanations of changes that the

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canons of training and observation evolved in the colonial period (when simpler societies could appear to outsiders as static) still largely prevail and often show clearly enough their unfitness for enquiries into changes, if changes are taken into account.15 The predominant techniques of training and observation in sociology on their part have remained very backward in the development of precisely those techniques in which anthropologists excel. They have remained backward in the development of techniques of fieldwork or participant observation, as distinct from survey work. One can understand that in the study of large and complex societies quantifying techniques have come to appear as a principle and often enough as the only reliable instruments which empirical sociological research requires. In fact statistical techniques, while indispensable, can really do no more than provide a superficial and often enough an extremely one-sided picture of a society. They provide those who study one or the other fields of social life with the most elementary clues; before one goes any further one must undoubtedly have an idea about the relative quantities of people, of attitudes or whatever it may be. But to regard as the end of sociological enquiries what is at the most a beginning is one of the most devastating fallacies of present-day sociological research; it has cast its shadow over the whole contemporary development of sociology. While on the one side the increasing use of statistical techniques in the study of society has greatly helped towards an advance of sociology from its more speculative and philosophical stage to another where theoretical and empirical advances can go hand in hand, the inclination to regard statistical techniques alone as a scientific instrument in sociology has led to an immense impoverishment of sociological studies. People trained in these techniques often remain wholly unaware of their limitations. And as their skills—thanks to their surface similarity with techniques used in high prestige sciences like physics and chemistry—enjoy a relatively high status, they tend to reject as unimportant and irrelevant sociological problems which one cannot attack with the help of the quantifying techniques in which they are skilled. In many cases their conviction

15 It does happen that specialists with an anthropological training break through the blockages which it creates and liberate themselves from its chains. Up till now perhaps the most notable example is M. G. Smith’s book Government in Zazzau, 1800–1950 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). But this exception merely underlines the fact implied in all that has been said here, that if one achieves a breakthrough from the traditional anthropological techniques, particularly those prevalent in the study of traditional African societies, the distinctions between anthropology, sociology and history cease to be meaningful.

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of the rightness, the exclusiveness, of statistical methods which goes with their high social status entirely blocks the perception of sociological problems that remain inaccessible as long as these techniques are regarded as the only scientific techniques to be used in sociological research. Surveys and other quantifying techniques are highly extensive16 procedures which provide answers only to a limited group of problems. For practical as for theoretical ends, the result can be highly misleading and, indeed, quite useless unless they are supplemented by other more intensive techniques of study, above all by techniques of intensive sociological fieldwork. One might think that in that respect sociologists generally could have benefited—even for inquiries into more complex societies—from the anthropological tradition of methods of procedure and training. But the unnecessarily high barriers between branches of the same discipline, which have often developed into rival departments, have proved a handicap. The main blockage was undoubtedly created by the exclusiveness with which statistical sociologists—in what they believed to be the succession of natural scientists—claimed, and claim, that they alone possess the monopoly of scientific reliability and certainty in sociological research. But an additional factor, preventing the spread of anthropological models of fieldwork to the wider sociological field, was certainly the narrowness of these models. As the anthropologists’ canons of selection, particularly in the British tradition, are mostly static and lack any firm developmental range of reference, their use for the practice of sociological fieldwork is questionable.

VI Overcoming the Separation Between the two Academic Disciplines Thus the barriers which separate today the sociological study of simpler from that of complex societies are not as is often assumed simply due to differences in the nature of these two types of societies—not simply to differences in their subject matter. They are largely due to specific historical conditions in the course of which the study of different stages in the development of human societies— hardly more different and certainly as inseparable as, say, the study of Roman from that of medieval society in Europe—developed into what are often regarded

16 One

version of the typescript says ‘extensive’, the other ‘expensive’. Both words make sense. We have adopted ‘extensive’ simply because he goes on to draw a comparison with ‘intensive’.—eds.

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as two independent academic disciplines. And in both cases the high prestige which those two disciplines derive, not so much from their own achievements but in accordance with the prestige scale in society at large, contributed to a hardening of the barriers between them. Hence the separation of these two branches of sociology goes far beyond the demands for a division of labour. If these were the principal reason for the distinction we make customarily between anthropological and sociological studies one would expect in many fields close cooperation and above all a united discussion about the basic concepts and the theoretical framework used by sociologists and anthropologists. And in some countries, movements towards greater unity or at least a continuous discussion and exchange with regard to the basic concepts and theories about society are indeed noticeable; but in others, particularly in Britain, barriers are still so high that anthropologists often hardly read any sociological literature and sociologists hardly read any anthropological journals or books. There is little doubt that this separation is harmful for the progress of sociological studies in all fields. It is particularly harmful for sociological studies undertaken in African societies. Here, the type of fieldwork customarily undertaken by social anthropologists prove increasingly inadequate for the observation of the structural changes which many African societies undergo now that they approach organisationally the level of independent nation states. The fieldwork in contrast to many quantifying techniques is highly intensive. But the customary anthropological canons of selection are so narrow and so much concentrated on traditional aspects of African societies, on what is old, yet with the best of will one cannot easily adapt such an anthropological tradition to the study of changes and of what is new. Or if one does so, the distinction between anthropology and sociology becomes wholly meaningless. The unity of the sociological sciences becomes quite unequivocally clear as soon as one ceases to regard simpler societies as eternally simple and more differentiated and complex societies as eternally differentiated and complex, and instead views and investigates both as stages in a development that can go in both directions: from simpler to more complex and from more complex to simpler societies. For in that case a common theoretical framework uniting the studies of societies of all types as structures which can develop one into the other helps to break down the purely academic barriers between the sociological studies of simpler and those of more differentiated societies. To do that, to break down these artificial barriers is much more than a theoretical exercise. The present training and skills, in the value systems and the canons of selection of anthropologists and sociologists, have many practical and scientific disadvantages. There is indeed much to be done in order to study before it is too late the great variety of traditional societies in Africa and elsewhere. There

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must be many hundreds and probably many thousands of such societies all over the world which are still more or less unrecorded. The difficulty is that many schools of anthropology with their overwhelming interest in certain areas such as kinship groups or social norms and obligations, and their often complete neglect of others of equal relevance such as military organisations, of structural tensions and conflicts and above all of a systematic quest for explanations secures only a very fragmentary picture of the disappearing groups which leaves many questions unanswered to which one may wish to have an answer in the future if one wishes to make systematic comparisons with an explanatory function or to build up a clearer picture of the development of human societies. To make all this possible, the anthropological canons of selection which serve as a guide for surveys and for fieldwork in simpler societies would have to be systematically re-examined and revised in the light of a wider sociological theory. Closely connected with the problem of selection is the simple practical problem of the value which a purely anthropological training can have for African postgraduates. The prestige of an anthropological PhD in Oxford or Cambridge for instance is in Ghana as high as it is in England. But the training and skills provided by a postgraduate study which is confined to the study of simpler people, to an anthropological study, is under the changed conditions of most African societies of limited value. But the limitations are by no means all on one side. A sociological training which does not take account of the structure and development of African societies—at least to the same extent to which sociological studies take account of the development and structure of highly developed European or American societies—is also of limited value for Ghanaian postgraduates whose task, whatever their profession may be, will be connected, explicitly or not, affected by problems which can only be understood in terms of development—of the development of their country. If they are not trained to think in terms of the development of societies and are not familiar with the specific problems of a rapidly developing country, they will not be well equipped for their task, whether they become teachers in a university department, in schools, or administrators or welfare workers. And this is true not only with regard to the training of Ghanaians. Sociological training which accepts the present barriers between anthropology and sociology departments will be of limited use also for Europeans whose picture of the world has for too long centred on Europe itself; and who in contrast to many American [countries] no longer have any simpler societies, apart from groups of their own kind, within their own countries and whose theories of society as long as they do not draw on experiences from African, Asian, and other non-European societies tend to remain rather incomplete.

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To sum up, I believe that the academic separation of anthropology and sociology as fields of studies is no longer justified. One can only understand it as the result of a particular historical situation as part of which Europe’s colonial expansion played a considerable part. In particular, the separation is not justified by the nature of the subject matter of the two disciplines. A degree of division of labour between those who do fieldwork in simpler and those who do fieldwork in more complex societies might be useful. But without constant exchange and coordination, without a unification of efforts by means of a unified theoretical work, the layout and the teaching of a study of society must remain inadequate to its task. The impoverishment will make itself under present conditions more strongly felt in the training and skills handed on by many schools of anthropology because studies directed alone towards traditional societies without regard for, and without understanding of, the nature and characteristics of the social developments into which they are bound to be drawn sooner or later will become less and less revolving. In systematic terms the existence of anthropology and sociology as two different academic disciplines has no justification. The sociological reasons for the temporary separation of the study of simpler and of more complex and differentiated societies are easy to see. What has been said points at least in the direction towards a sociological explanation for the high barriers which at present separate the two types of departments in many cases from each other. These barriers have been heightened and hardened by status factors extraneous to the scientific task itself. They find expression in specific academic ideologies which serve as justifications of the separate identities of each field, for example the anthropologist’s assertion that only his own type of fieldwork is truly empirical and the assertion of many sociologists that only their own statistical procedure is truly scientific. Neither is correct. Academic traditions in institutions often persist long after the situation to which they owe their existence and with it their raison d'être has disappeared. There is no longer any justification for carrying on the study of simpler societies and that of complex societies in the form of two separate and fundamentally independent academic disciplines. A degree of specialization within the same discipline is justified and useful. But it can be useful only if it goes hand in hand with a high degree of cooperation and integration and with provisions for a steady exchange of experiences. That, it seems to me, is the goal towards which one should work.

Epilogue: Off to Ghana—the Encounter of Norbert Elias and Malcolm X Arjan Post

A chance encounter towards the end of Elias’s two years in Africa is intriguing. One day in 1964—probably Sunday 10 May—he was waiting at Lagos airport, Nigeria, for his flight to Accra, Ghana, when he bumped into Malcolm X,1 who was also on his way to Ghana’s capital. This meeting in postcolonial Africa raises many questions. Given the polarisation of public opinion regarding immigration, racism and identity in many countries in the early decades of the twenty-first century, it becomes all the more intriguing. How, to start with, is it possible that this encounter of two giants in their own respect seems undocumented at all? The only clue we have is a remark of Elias in a Dutch newspaper interview.2

1 Malcolm

X (born Malcolm Little, 1925–65), was an African-American civil rights activist who became a Muslim and became prominent as spokesman for the Nation of Islam, advocating the separation of the races. After his journey to Africa, he embraced the mainstream civil rights movement and renounced the Nation of Islam, a breach that led to his assassination in New York in February 1965. 2 Hubert Smeets 1984. ‘Pas integratie als Turk of Surinamer in de Kamer zit,’ NRC Handelsblad, 27, January (1984). For Elias’s contribution to a conference on racism and discrimination in Amsterdam in 1984, See Post 2016. ‘The Prinsenhof Lecture: Transcript of …’, Human Figurations, 5: 1 (2016). Here I gratefully make use of the interview notes the journalist Hubert Smeets so kindly handed over to me after all these years. A. Post (*)  Norbert Elias Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 D. Reicher et al. (eds.), Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37849-3_12

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Two years before, Elias (1897–1990) had been appointed Professor, for the first time in his long career, as well as Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. He was already 65 years old at that time, when retirement from his post as Reader in Sociology at the University of Leicester was compulsory, though after two years in Ghana he returned there are continued teaching until well into the 1970s. The eight years since his appointment to Leicester in 1954 had been productive. He and his friend Professor Ilya Neustadt had built up a very large and very distinguished Department of Sociology, through which numerous subsequently prominent British sociologists passed either as junior colleagues or as students. He had published the first important statement of his sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences.3 He had recently, together with John Scotson, finished the paradigmatic study The Established and The Outsiders,4 and was just beginning his collaboration with Eric Dunning on the sociology of sport.5 He was also in the throes of leading a major empirical research project in Leicester, the ‘Young Workers’ study of the transition of working-class teenagers from school to work—a project disrupted by his departure for Ghana and never brought to a satisfactory conclusion.6 But he was still virtually unknown outside the circle of his personal acquaintance. The Leicester department had an established connection with the University of Ghana, which had been founded only in 1948; Leicester traced its origins to 1921, but had achieved full university status only in 1957. Between a university in the British colonies and one in Great Britain the link was typical of the period, and Ilya Neustadt had earlier spent a period in Ghana. When the request came for someone to take over the chair of sociology there for two or three years, Elias said, ‘I’ll do that’. Later, he remembered that

3 Norbert

Elias, ‘Problems of involvement and detachment’, British Journal of Sociology, 7: 3 (1956), pp. 226–52. 4 Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008 [1965] [Collected Works, vol. 4]). 5 Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013 [Collected Works, vol. 7]). 6 John Goodwin and Henrietta O’Connor, Norbert Elias’s Lost Research: Revisiting the Young Worker Project (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

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Many of my friends thought me mad—after all, I was over sixty. But I have an immense curiosity about the unknown, so I went to Ghana. … It was a magnificent experience, and through it I gained a deep liking for African culture.7

Apart from curiosity, it is clear that an important motive was that it gave him the title of Professor, a lifetime ambition hitherto unfulfilled. But that is not to deny that in Africa he would find fertile soil for growing empirical–theoretical insights, some of them ending up in more or less advanced manuscripts that form the basis of this present collection of essays. Indeed he described Ghana as ‘an indispensable experience for someone like me’;8 his learning here was as ‘water on my mills of developmental sociology’.9 In Ghana he laid the groundwork for his ‘theory of community’ and a de facto village-state theory, thus elaborating on a sociology of (very) long-term processes, way before and way beyond the Western nation-state.10 Here he would conduct fieldwork, engage with students and their parents, learn about local customs, rituals, ‘magic’, the expression of emotions through art—the whole gamut of moulded behaviour and affects, or in Elias’s vocabulary, the ‘social habitus’. And no less would he learn about the fundamental and methodological opposition between sociology and anthropology, between which he tried to manoeuvre himself a position those years.11

7 Elias,

Interviews and Autobiographical Reflections (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013a [1984] [Collected Works, vol. 17]), p. 131. 8 Elias, Interviews, p. 132. 9 Elias, letter of 1 November 1962 to René König, quoted by Hermann Korte, ‘Der ethnologische Blick bei Norbert Elias’, Biographische Skizzen zu Norbert Elias (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2013), p. 60. 10 See Norbert Elias, ‘Towards a theory of communities’, in Essays II, pp. 119–54. See also Crow and Laidlaw, ‘Norbert Elias’s extended theory of community: From established/outsider relations to the gendered we-I balance’, Sociological Review 6: 3 (2019), pp. 568– 84; and Ulrich van Loyen, Strände der Vernunft: Norbert Elias im inneren Afrika (Berlin: ­Matthes & Seitz, 2012), p. 19. 11 See Katie Liston and Stephen Mennell, ‘Ill Met in Ghana: Jack Goody and Norbert Elias on Process and Progress in Africa’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26: 7–8 (2009), pp. 1–19; Mennell and Liston, ‘Introduction: Elias, Freud and Lévy-Bruhl’, Supplements and Index to the Collected Works (Dublin: UCD Press, 2014 [Collected Works, vol. 18]), pp. 1–12; and Van Loyen, Strände der Vernunft, pp. 23 ff. It has been contended by several authors— see Mennell and Liston, Introduction, p. 9; Korte, Der ethnologische Blick …, pp. 55–66;

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Malcolm X came to Africa to flee and to testify. He was invited by a small African-American expatriate community around Ghana’s socialist president Kwame Nkrumah (1909–72), where he was in the care of the black civil rights activist and author Julian Mayfield (1928–84) who had fled the US after disturbances. In Accra many people engaged in the pan-African cause had gathered, among them the author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou (1928–2014), the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (b. 1868, who would die in 1963 at the age of 95) and his wife, the author and activist Shirley Du Bois (1896–1977). Malcolm himself also took refuge in Africa after being ‘radicalised’12 under the aegis of the sectarian Nation of Islam. But he was in Africa in the first place to regain his ‘roots’ and, at the same time, to find allies for the internationalisation of the black American struggle for freedom and equality. In a global light, the racial oppression in the US would no longer be seen as a domestic issue, but as a violation of international human rights.

and Jack Goody, ‘The “Civilizing Process” in Ghana’, European Journal of Sociology, 44; 1 (2003), pp. 61–73—that Elias advocated closing down the Anthropology department, in favour of a Sociology based on the methods he had developed in Leicester. This soon led to a conflict with students, who saw themselves deprived of a necessary means to ‘understand their own history’, as Korte states; soon thereafter Elias changed the curriculum and introduced case studies. George Steinmetz, ‘Child of the Empire: British sociology and colonialism, 1940s–1960s’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 49: 4 (2013), pp. 11–12, has a different reading: based on a letter to Jack Goody, who would soon become his long-term critic, Elias did not intend to close down Anthropology but to cooperate with it as much as with Goody himself. This corresponds to the increasing demand in late colonial Africa for a kind of social science that studied ‘civilised societies’ instead of an anthropology which acted as ‘the handmaiden of colonialism’. This whole incident, as Liston and Mennell, Ill Met in Ghana …, pp. 5–6 stress, is highly indicative of fundamental disagreements about theories of long-term social development. 12 For his ‘radicalisation’, see Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (London: Penguin Books, 2011). See especially where he refers to the ‘pairing’ and ‘mutual assistance’ between the American Nazi Party and the Nation of Islam (pp. 199–201, 267). Earlier the black American sociologist Patterson pointed to the interchangeability of the words ‘white’ and ‘black’, and the similarity between white supremacism and black nationalism; see: Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s ‘Racial’ Crisis, (Washington DC: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1998); p. 102. At the same time Marable, Malcolm X, p. 487, emphasises Malcolm’s ‘radical humanism’; he would certainly have condemned the 9/11 attacks in the US in 2001 as the negation of Islam’s core tenets.

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One of Malcolm’s goals in Africa was to find at least one country to charge the US with human rights violations at the United Nations.13 After his tour through the Middle East, where he went on the hajj to Mecca and met with the Muslim Brotherhood in Beirut, Malcolm had not uncommonly turbulent encounters. Nigeria itself had been in the throes of political unrest since its independence in 1960. Only two years after Malcom’s visit, the military junta would make its appearance. But also during his speeches and talks at universities—invariably fiery and passionate, ‘sprinkled with parables and analogies’, write biographers Les and Tamara Payne—several riots broke out. During one of those meetings at Ibadan University, attended by almost five hundred excited members of the National Union of Nigerian Students, a West Indian lecturer, who dared to express his criticism of Malcolm’s address, barely managed to escape the crowd.14 Against this backdrop the encounter with Norbert Elias—of whom Malcolm in all probability had never heard15—becomes all the more interesting. Would Elias have introduced himself as the so far unnoticed author of Über den Prozess der Zivilisation? And if so, would he have pitched to him the second, more controversial ‘etic’ part of it?16 This was of course the time when, not coincidentally, developmental theories in general were dismissed by anthropologists themselves. And would Elias have elaborated on his experience of being a Jewish outsider, his exile and migrant status in England? Would he have delicately alluded to what Nathalie Heinich terms a ‘sublimated resentment’?17 No, in all these cases that

13 I

have drawn upon the excellent and comprehensive biography by Marable, Malcolm X, pp. 313–20. In Nigeria, for example, he was handed a membership card depicting the name Omowale, which in Yoruba language means ‘the son who has returned’. See also Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020). 14 Marable, Malcolm X, p. 312 ff; Payne and Payne, The Dead Are Arising, p. 445. 15 In the interview Elias says, ‘I knew who I was with’ (my translation), implying Malcolm did not. 16 ‘Elias recognised his use of the term “civilisation” provoked opposition, as indeed did the use of several other related terms […]’ (Liston and Mennell, Ill Met in Ghana, p. 2). 17  Nathalie Heinich, ‘Sublimating resentment: Following Elias along five paths toward another sociology’, Human Figurations 2: 3 (2013).

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would have been most unlikely. Those who knew Elias think it far more likely that he would have been firing questions at Malcolm X, gently leading him to reveal his own views. However, between the lines of the Dutch interview mentioning Malcolm X, an intellectual disagreement hovers over crucial concepts such as ‘soil’ and ‘belonging’, integration and identification. Whatever they talked about, Elias invited his interlocutor to give a guest lecture at the University of Ghana in Accra. The place, Accra, is relevant here; Ghana was the first British colony to achieve independence in 1957, while remaining part of the Commonwealth (as it remains to this day). Governed by the pan-Africanist Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party, the young nation was seen as model of a peaceful farewell to British rule and transition to a proud and modern self-rule—not that it lasted long: in 1964 the republic of Ghana became de facto a one-party state. In 1966 Nkrumah was overthrown by a military coup. In his lecture of 13 May, which is presumably the one hosted by Elias, Malcolm elaborated on the issue of racism and discrimination in the US, the ‘deplorable position’ of about 22 million African-Americans in the ‘hypocritical system’ known as democracy, and the so-called American Dream which turned out to be an ‘American Nightmare’. But here in Ghana, with President Nkrumah’s efforts at ‘restoring the African image’, as Malcolm stressed, he did not see himself as a visitor: ‘I feel that I am at home. I’ve been away for four hundred years, but not of my own volition, not of my own will. […] We went in slave ships, we went in chains. We weren’t immigrants to America, we were cargo for purposes of a system that was bent upon making a profit.’18 In his address, Malcolm works up to the rebirth of African unity against the background of colonial rule. Despite the lack of comprehensive documentation, there is actually a small but meaningful indication not only of Malcolm’s account of his apparent encounter with Elias, but also of the geopolitical and ‘postcolonial’ tenor of their conversation. Here Malcolm X looks back on his flight from Nigeria: When I was coming from Lagos to Accra on Sunday, I was riding on an airplane with a white man who represented some of the interests, you know, that are interested in Africa. And he admitted—at least it was his impression—that our people in Africa didn’t know how to measure wealth, that they worship wealth in terms of gold and silver, not in terms of the natural resources that are in the earth, and that as

18 Malcolm

X ‘Malcolm X at University of Ghana (May 13, 1964)’, (1964).

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long as the Americans or other imperialists or twentieth-century colonialists could continue to make the Africans measure wealth in terms of gold and silver, they never would have an opportunity to really measure the value of the wealth that is in the soil, and would continue to think that it is they who need the Western powers instead of thinking that it is the Western powers who need the people and the continent that is known as Africa.19

No doubt, there were more white men in Africa those years who identified with the people they met (in Malcolm’s own wording: ‘I’ve never seen so many whites so nice to so many blacks as you people in Africa’), but the person Malcolm is referring to here was, in all likelihood, Elias.20 We could picture ourselves the professor, sitting in his aircraft seat, raising his voice against the engines, unfolding with characteristic gesticulations his insights on expanding interdependencies, asymmetrical power differentials, colonialism, the subsequent differences in development, and shifting ‘We’ and ‘I’ images. Although Malcolm’s speech could be understood within the boundaries of a classic emancipation discourse, his underlying argument stems from his latest stance on integration—that is, the necessity of segregation. Only two weeks before, in an interview for a popular American magazine, he had urged American ‘Negroes’ to arm themselves with guns ‘for defence against white people’. His efforts for black nationalism, after leaving the Nation of Islam as a spokesman (which eventually led to his assassination in 1965), would comprise the creation of ‘a separate homeland for Negroes’. Integration would not work, according to Malcolm, because it required intermarriage. ‘And that would result in disintegration of both races.’21

19 Ibid. In Payne and Payne’s account of probably the same speech, Malcolm continues this more or less ‘historical materialistic’ argument: ‘You don’t like Africans but you do like the minerals Africa has under her soil.’ Again, we might hear an echo of Elias’s anticolonial views here; see Payne and Payne, The Dead Are Arising, p 445. 20 Still, why would Malcolm refer to him as just a white man and not his host? For one thing, because that would have thwarted his narrative of being ‘at home’ among his fellow ‘blacks’; for another because he, in front of his mixed audience, was accusing white people of hypocrisy, murder and subversion. Payne and Payne also refers to this disparity between Malcolm’s public ‘fieriness’ and private ‘relaxation’ and ‘openness’; Payne and Payne, The Dead Are Arising, p 445. 21 U.S. News & World Report, ‘Now it’s a negro drive for segregation’, (2008 [1964]).

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The differences between the two are smaller than one is apt to think. Both Elias and Malcolm X could be considered as outsiders, but of course on different grounds. Simply put, Malcolm was a radical activist in a highly divided country, who converted to Islam; Elias was a Jew and a rather unnoticed sociologist at the time. Both struggled with structures of social superiority in a way. In his ‘Maycomb model’ (published in 1990), for example, Elias touches upon the same race relations in the US as Malcolm experienced first-hand, and the same correlations between monopolies, physical safety, exclusion and self-image.22 The main difference between the two, setting aside the endorsement of revolutionary violence,23 lies in their orientation towards reality in terms of ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’. For an activist it would be impossible not to be involved; for a professor it used to be the other way around, although Elias had already (in 1956) argued for a non-objectivist, more engaged ‘detour via detachment’.24 Here Elias touches upon a fundamental sociological argument about the interdependence of knowledge and its growth on the one hand, and social positions and power relations on the other, taken as a long-term process. In short, it takes a relatively fortunate position over time, not to say a privileged one, devoid of dangers, fears and hardship, to gain more ‘reality-congruent’ knowledge allowing for stronger controls over emotions and fantasies, be it magical-mythical thinking, ideologies or monopolised (political, religious) means of orientation. This also effectuates their diverging conceptions of ‘integration’: as the coexistence of given or ‘constructed’—but anyway isolated and fixed—identities, as opposed to the unintended interweaving of social functions and the mutual identification they bring about. In a word, integration as an intended moral-political act, or as a capricious long-term process. Malcolm was obviously deeply disappointed over earlier efforts to achieve ‘racial’ integration; Elias would most probably have shared this feeling, but at the same time he would not see the ‘failing’ integration of blacks and whites as a foregone conclusion. In this, Elias’s processual

22 Elias,

‘Further aspects of established-outsider relations: the Maycomb model’, in Elias and Scotson The Established and the Outsiders, pp. 207–231. In many places in his work Elias reflects on colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism; not only in On the Process of Civilisation (2012 [1939]), but also for example in Elias, Studies on the Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013b [1989] [Collected Works, vol. 11], pp. 83–4. 23 See Marable, Malcolm X, p. 485. 24 Elias, Involvement and Detachment (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007a [1956] [Collected Works, vol. 8], pp. 48–52.

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c­ onception of ‘integration’ is manifested. Where in everyday use the concept has a normative and harmonious connotation, Elias took it as a technical term, referring to the expansion of social functions, or interdependencies. Because this interweaving is accompanied by severe power struggles, integration brings all sorts of social and psychic tensions to the surface as conflicts. Once the interdependencies branch out further, decreasing power differentials pave the way willy-nilly for (more) mutual identifications and thus for more control over conflicts. This is the crux of romantically involved and static concepts such as ‘roots’, ‘soil’, and ‘belonging’. In his talk in Ghana, Malcolm X presented himself as the ‘rootless’ person who finally found his ‘home’. As biographer Manning Marable recounts, that was a rather different person from the ‘multicultural American icon’ as whom Malcolm X displayed himself in his extraordinarily successful autobiography, co-authored by Alex Haley.25 And that persona, in turn, was again rather different from the ‘angry black militant’ he used to picture himself as earlier. But when he was killed, the legend-building would really take off, leading Marable to demythologize a self-assured, muscular all-American icon, who had grown up as a little criminal known as Detroit Red who in the 1990s would become the hero of the hip-hop generation and the star in the famous 1992 film Malcolm X by Spike Lee.26 One way or another, he was an American. Malcolm X was as much an African as Elias was an Israeli. As the Dutch interview indicates too, it was clear to Elias that the person he met at Lagos airport was a US citizen. That is, not only in legal terms, albeit excluded from civil rights, but also following Elias’s fundamental reasoning of individuals being born in social figurations of competitive and interdependent relationships in which their social habitus is formed. In the interview Elias touches upon the way US immigrants were assimilated by an ‘exaggerated’ policy that was going ‘too fast and too cruelly’, thus implying several degrees or phases of integration and the two-way relational dimension of it. But to him it would be a mistake to think that black people in the US, no matter how oppressed and wretched they were in a ‘caste system’ (as Isabel Wilkerson calls it),27 would not be Americans. Thus, he abandons the concepts of race and ethnicity in favour of dynamic power relations—like Wilkerson—and interdependencies to explain

25 Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987 [1964]); Marable, Malcolm X, p. 7 ff. 26 Marable, Malcolm X, p. 1–11, p. 15, p. 486. 27 Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, New York: Random House, 2020.

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deeply rooted inequalities and its concomitant utterances of ‘superiority’ and ‘inferiority’.28 And here Elias refers back to Malcolm’s actual lecture, in which he focused on his ‘stolen’ roots by white people; as Elias recalled, this sounded ‘very funny’ to the Ghanaian students, hearing those words from ‘an unmistakably American black man’.29 For these students Malcolm X was an endearing, overwhelming personality, but also a stranger. They did not share the same ‘panblack’ we-image and we-ideal. Arguably, the meaning of this encounter lies in the clear distinction of two different dispositions and the concomitant perspectives referring to the same social reality. The activist and the sociologist: an unreserved engagement versus a more or less distanced view. Here we see Malcolm’s cause and Elias’s ideal of process sociology coming together. Conventionally, this might be seen as a strict dichotomy but, as we have seen, this does not mean that Elias and Malcolm did not share a basic understanding of deeply problematic social and political relationships and their historical contexts. According to the interview notes, the two even alluded to the possibility of the US having a black president.30 For them, perhaps still sitting in their aircraft seats, this was just wishful thinking; but as history records, the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009 was in itself a ‘reality-congruent’ prophecy indeed (of course they could not even think of Donald Trump gaining the presidency). In Isabel Wilkerson’s phrasing, the election was nothing less than a huge departure from the script of the American ‘caste system’.31 The exchange of all these tantalizing thoughts not only took place on the integration level of postcolonial Africa, but is in itself an intrusive illustration of that new level.

28 Elias

and Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders; Elias, An Essay on Time (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007b [1984] [Collected Works, vol. 9], p. 112. See also Eric Dunning, ‘Dynamics of racial stratification: some preliminary observations’, Race, 13: 4 (1972), pp. 415–34; Dunning, ‘Some comments on Jack Goody’s “Elias and the anthropological tradition”’, Anthropology Today 2: 4 (2002), pp. 413–20: Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration; Post, The Prinsenhof Lecture. 29 My italics. Marable’s biography is a lengthy testimony to this notion; when Malcolm X encountered Egyptians they had a similar observation as Elias; Marable, Malcolm X, p. 313. See for a similar reasoning, Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed (Chicago: Aldine, 1968). See also Diawara 1994, 221. 30 As the notes say, ‘When will Americans have their first black president?’ (my translation). 31 Wilkerson, Cast.

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