21A.460/SP.620 – Medicine, Religion, and Politics in Africa and the African Diaspora February 15, 2005 Johannes Fabian: Out of Our Minds, 2000. • Analyzing myth of exploring, adventuring, and understanding across cultures Background • 1987: University of Chicago; Professor • Chair of Cultural Anthropology in Amsterdam • Focuses on history of Anthropology Book • Outlines the elements taken into consideration in explorers’ accounts of their travels in Africa • Explorers were engaged in scientific investigation based on subjective measures of time – they were biased and unscientific in methodology and analysis • Issues with hygiene could have affected their methods: fever, dysentery, melancholia seriously affected explorers. o Issues of hygiene not just limited to issues of physical cleanliness. Hygiene also considered a set of practices of body and mind, represents cultural values • The realities of travel made exchange of food, other goods a part of the process of making science • Explorers had issues with nostalgia/melancholia that strongly influenced how they interpreted their surroundings • They also had superiority complexes that gave them preconceived notions and affected their methodology in interacting with ‘natives’ • Science values putting forth a method to study phenomena objectively, but Fabian is arguing that what the explorers did did not follow true science • Explorers had assumption that Europeans only have civilization • Exploration was chaotic, did not allow systematic methodology or careful observation, and the explorers may have lost control of their own rationality • Notion of ecstasis: how to move across cultural boundaries • Africans were sexualized in the accounts of the explorers o Could be a reflection of what they actually saw, or reflects the explorers’ own preconceptions or evaluations based on their own cultural standards • Explorers were not able to understand a different context o Ex. Moods and Feelings: explorers were condescending about humor and what makes something humorous. Did not understand true original context • Questions of methodology: o Trying to absorb things that may not even have a category in Western society o Creates cognitive dissonance as they attempt to rationalize and ‘create’ new categories 121A.460/SP.620 – Medicine, Religion, and Politics in Africa and the African Diaspora February 15, 2005 o When environment, psychological comfort zone is taken away, things can be confusing • Symbolic interaction as tool of power. Europeans thinking that Africans consider certain things to be fetishes served as a method to maintain power and status quo, by categorizing Africans as incapable of rationality, hence inferior • European collecting curios as they traveled could also be described as fetishistic in their own way • Fabian’s book describes period just before Belgian colonization, or the “Race for Africa” • African exploration done in a period when European countries were seeking new territories • Colonization was expressed as a matter of state and nation building • Anthropological work done in this time implicitly reflected these issues Power of Medicine: • Power becomes invisible, not overt (Foucault) • Science and western medicine, exerted through the practice of medicine is something that is done to physical forms, but shapes perceptions, bodies, practices • All part of Foucault’s biopolitical process as control over a population • Science is a process in which replicable steps are taken to create reliable knowledge • Victorian era: valued order, propriety, chasteness in women – these were parts of cultural identity in Europe, which were reflected in the ways the explorers described Africans, particularly women • All these are inextricably linked to issues of market. Time and Other • Fabian is diagnosing the politics involved in the construction of knowledge about the Africans • Describing their methodological approach as ways in which Europeans are establishing superiority • Anxieties about identity, self, bodies all reflect the Victorian sensibility of the explorers • Page 3 – explorers are as “out of their minds” as they perceived the Africans to be • Page 4 – what was created as forms of knowledge hides other projects that were simultaneously affecting how knowledge was created • Revision of history as it is currently known • Epistemological leap to know • Can people transcend culture/social barriers? Modes of Perception • Europeans have visual tradition – sight and visual elements are given primacy • There is a sensory hierarchy, with vision at the top 221A.460/SP.620 – Medicine, Religion, and Politics in Africa and the African Diaspora February 15, 2005 • Nancy Scheper-Hughes: slums in Brazil and policies on maternal neglect reflect implied moral judgments. • Do you think ecstasis is a valid way to produce knowledge? Is it a realistic goal? Ecstasis is a physical, emotional method of research • Is this a valid methodological approach? Personal experience vs. professional methodology o Motive of ethnography is self-reflexivity, or understanding how self shapes data and knowledge that is created o The explorers were protoanthropologists who wrote about their experiences and attempted to analyze. However, they were not necessarily trying to understand culture or practices • 1st half of book: what are the stereotypes present about Africans • 2nd half of book: describes experience of explorers in Africa. Explores question: most texts were written by outsiders – is this a valid way to collect knowledge of an ‘Other’? o All throughout explores forms of control, controlling properties, resistance