The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

      Lurking behind the unease and unequal encounter between postcolonialist ambition and postmodernist doubt have always been larger issues concerning the nature of human cognition itself. Both postcolonialists and postmodernists have been in the habit of making large and often unexamined assumptions about how we know what we know, and what we can do about changing our minds and thus the world. Cognitive philosophy is a huge discipline, but for my purposes, we may start with an anthropologist’s observation that ‘in each culture … reality is distinctively conceptualized in implicit and explicit premises and derivative generalizations’ (Albert, 1970, 99). Yet such distinctiveness is not a conceptual trap, but a cultural diversity worth celebrating. It may be true that ‘accurate and systematic knowledge about the world’ (Hartsock, 1987, 205) is hard to attain and even harder to convey across cultural divides, but that does not disqualify the effort or the results. When Linda Hutcheon concludes her examination of postmodernism with the thought that ‘There is not so much “a loss of belief in a significant external reality” as there is a loss of faith in our ability to (unproblematically) know that reality, and therefore to be able to represent it in language’ (1987, 299), she is not counselling despair, but informed awareness of the difficulties entailed in making sense of the world, particularly across cultural boundaries.

      In anthropology, as in history, fierce debates surged between the 1970s and the 1990s around issues of representation, cultural translation, narrativisation and the so-called linguistic turn in a number of disciplines, all deemed to deprive the subject under investigation of its intrinsic identity (White, 1973, 1978, 1980; Geertz, 1973; Marcus and Cushman, 1982; Fabian, 1983; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Himmelfarb, 1987; Spencer, 1989; Schwartz, 1994). One polarity in the debate is represented by Peter Mason: ‘To understand the other by comprehension is to reduce the other to self…. All ethnography is an experience of the confrontation with the Other set down in writing, an act by which that Other is deprived of its specificity’ (1990, 2–13).

      Obviously such an elision in which knowledge becomes synonymous with theft or erasure must once again lead to cognitive anomy, a helpless confrontation with a world in which an exchange of minds and cultures is impossible. If we are indeed ‘prisoners of the conceptual system that we are enabled by’ (Battersby, 1992, 55), the outlook would be bleak. Terry Eagleton, reviewing Stanley Fish’s The Trouble with Principle (1999), which effectively proposes just such a cognitive strait-jacket, expresses the intuitive dismay elicited by such an assault on cognitive flexibility: ‘To imagine that we are either the helpless prisoners of our beliefs or their supremely disinterested critics is to pose the problem in an absurdly polarised way’ (2000, 11).

      Eagleton was responding to Fish’s exposition of a Billy Pilgrim-style logic that, as we saw earlier, inevitably follows on the awkward alliance between postcolonialism and postmodernism in the indictment of European imperialism: ‘A historically conditioned consciousness’, Fish had argued earlier,

      cannot … scrutinize its own beliefs [or] conduct a rational examination of its own convictions … for in order to begin such scrutiny, it would first have to escape the grounds of its own possibility, and it could do that only if it were not historically conditioned and were instead an acontextual and unsituated entity (1985, 10).

      Such a deterministic conception of a ‘hard-wired’ human mentality obviously leaves no room for either change or progress in human understanding. Barbara J. King, reviewing Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought (2008), calls it a ‘reductive abyss’ that takes no account of ‘the great plasticity of the human brain’ and its infinite mutability: ‘Our brain circuits are sculpted and resculpted’ constantly (2008, 5). In the words of Susan Haack, challenging the ‘Higher Dismissiveness’ of cognitive sceptics such as Fish, ‘it doesn’t follow from the fact that people disagree about what is true, that truth is relative to perspective’ (1999, 12). Truths can be both foundational and negotiable, and we see such truths in operation around us every day.

      It became clear from views such as these that my own attempts to assess what Europeans over the millennia had known about Africa, what they had thus regarded as ‘true,’ and how they had processed and expressed such knowledge would demand further investigations into how human ‘knowing’ actually works. Megan Vaughan nicely pointed up the dilemma for my own researches:

      If Orientalism is more than a set of misrepresentations, but is rather a system of academic knowledge outside of which it is impossible for any (western) scholar to stand; and if this system of knowledge constituted an active force in the operation of colonial power, then the possibility of writing histories which are in some sense ‘better’ reflections of lived experience seems to be denied us (1994, 3).

      Simply put, the question is whether we are all helplessly strapped to Billy Pilgrim’s cognitive flat-car, or whether cognition is a fluid, interactive and revisionary process whereby we constantly adjust our ‘take’ on the world. Martin Kreiswirth offers one useful approach, distinguishing between a ‘mimetic epistemology’ and a ‘poetic epistemology’ (1992, 636), and suggesting that at different times we employ different ways of knowing. ‘Mimetic epistemology’ is Cartesian and definitive, based on recognition, in which the mind matches things, perceptions, events and so on with concepts already known, including language. ‘Poetic epistemology’ turns on cognition as an inventive, narrative process creating its reality out of an experiential and linguistic repertoire. Paul Ricouer (1971), Paul Feyerabend (1975), Hayden White (1978, 1987), Jean François Lyotard (1979), and Richard Rorty (1979) may be said to espouse versions of a poetic epistemology, which underlies much of postmodernist thinking. Versions of a mimetic epistemology, on the other hand, may well inspire much of the binarist thinking imbedded in Western thought and values; for example, the Judaeo-Christian tradition of Good and Evil, God and Satan, Abel and Cain, and eventually, white and black as reified in Western racism. This has also been called the ‘spectator theory of knowledge’, presupposing ‘a naïve relationship between a body of objective facts and the individual consciousness of the observer who records them’ (Washington, 1989, 61). It clearly also underlies much of the postcolonialist discourse we reviewed earlier.

      Yet, if the historic pressures favouring a Cartesian judgemental and binarist mimetic epistemology may be immense, to the point of coming to seem foundational and archetypal, the very fact that human beings have an imagination constantly invites the invocation of a poetic epistemology as well. We can and do change our minds. Our reception of the world is not a one-way, predetermined process, but a conversation, a revisionary loop, an ongoing dialogic encounter such as made famous in Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘dialogic imagination’ (1981). Norman Mailer remarked that we live in ‘a universe based upon metaphor rather than measure’ (cited by Harris, 1996, 27), an insight in line with the notions of both a ‘dialogic imagination’ and a ‘poetic epistemology’. That we may at any given time and in any given place be conditioned as to what we regard as ‘knowledge’, true or false, and that seeing beyond ‘a horizon of expectation’ (Jauss, 1982, in Selden, 1989, 127) requires effort and application, does not mean that we are hopelessly trapped in historical prejudice.

      The ‘Gestalt switch’ or rapid change in conceptual paradigms proposed by Thomas Kuhn (1962) and implied in Foucault’s notion of radical shifts in the dominant episteme (1966) does indeed occur, and is for my purposes most dramatically instanced in the way Third World postcolonialists now have little hesitation in excoriating the efforts of nineteenth-century missionaries or colonial educators and philanthropists who in their own time were universally taken to be selfless