The State and the Social. Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
cultural context of Tswana traditional practice. Western democracies, of course, have had considerable influence on Botswana starting in the colonial experience. But they are grounded largely in a very different history characterized by an egalitarian ethos and a comparatively historically recent culture of individualism (e.g. Macpherson 1964, Dumont 1986, Taylor 2007). The values of consensus that have been appropriated into the governing apparatus of the Botswana nation-state are grounded in a system of ranked hierarchy associated with the still persisting, though of course continually changing, clan/lineage system of the Tswana merafe and chiefly (kgosi) rule. In other words, in effect a kind of democracy, though far from reducible to the Western kind, existed in the context of a hierarchical order and continues to have effect in the altogether different hierarchical bureaucratic structures of the contemporary Botswana nation-state which nevertheless gives ideological support to Tswana kin-based chiefly hierarchical value. What to outsiders might appear to be anti-democratic in Botswana (the continuing value placed on rank) has a democratic participatory aspect which gives the general populace a marked say in events despite what may otherwise appear as anti-egalitarian features in contradiction of western democratic ideals (themselves thwarted by what many might see as growing class inequalities).
Gulbrandsen engages his own comparative knowledge both to sharpen his understanding of processes in Botswana and to draw attention to differences that may be glossed over in superficial similarities that overlook important distinctions. Most anthropologists would argue that comparison is unavoidable and the merit of Gulbrandsen's approach is to make explicit the source of his own evaluation of the Botswana situation – and in a way which reveals crucial dimensions of it. Furthermore, Gulbrandsen's comparative orientation is not based on simple oppositions of a We/They kind and is oriented to the uncovering of differences which nonetheless contain crucial similarities at least in effect. I should note here that throughout the book Gulbrandsen is concerned to avoid an anthropological relativism whereby his discussion is merely deemed relevant to Botswana. What he achieves is to indicate the significance of the Botswana materials for wider discussion on the nature of state/citizen processes but with a strong attention to the cultural conditionality and limitation of his observations and conceptualizations as well as the tendency to universalist assessment or judgment more characteristic of other disciplines.
This work is an excellent example of anthropology as a discipline of the ‘minor discourse’. The social philosopher, Gilles Deleuze (1991) – whose work constitutes a major reference in Gulbrandsen's analysis – develops the notion of the minor discourse to draw attention to arguments, orientations or understandings that are typically marginalized and not infrequently suppressed by and in the interest of ruling orientations or theories which, as Foucault also argued, support the status quo. Anthropology has conventionally worked among marginalized populations whether those suppressed in imperial expansion or those otherwise reduced in circumstance and excluded. The discipline has made important contributions in contesting dominant/dominating opinion and thought and this is especially so concerning largely Eurocentric theoretical assertions and the submerged cultural assumptions that frequently underpin them. This received further impetus from an internal critique in anthropology that questioned its colonialist or imperialist associations which for many anthropologists was an uncomfortable aspect of its specific development as a discipline of the minor discourse.
Gulbrandsen's overall conception and analytical direction in this volume is thoroughly in line with anthropology as a distinctive discipline of the minor discourse and further establishes it as such.
Throughout the book Gulbrandsen not only addresses issues central in the anthropology of Africa but also gives practices in Botswana authority and position in the evaluation of opinion and theory (particularly political science) conditioned within largely Western frames of reference. In other words, what is made into a minor discourse or suppressed through the hegemony of Western thought inevitably tied to imperial cum globalizing power achieves authority that it might otherwise lack. In this work Gulbrandsen demonstrates the importance of the Botswana case perhaps leading to a major reconsideration of much conventional or conventionalizing opinion.
Gulbrandsen's analysis focuses on Botswana's apparent exceptionalism. Contrary to the relatively dismal picture painted by many students of Africa, Botswana is a relative success story. The society that has taken form in the context of the establishment of the nation-state has weathered the potential hazardous effects of Colonial Rule and taken advantage of globalizing forces. The myriad ‘discontents of modernity’ (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1993) that have been described for elsewhere in Africa do not appear to have taken disastrous hold. The dangers of new wealth (e.g. diamonds) have not been markedly divisive (although Gulbrandsen does not rule out such an eventuality). The conflicts born of class and ethnicity have largely been avoided and the ‘politics of the belly’ associated with the emergence of greedy elites, although by no means outside a public consciousness, has been averted in the main. What Gulbrandsen indicates is that factors which are seen widely in Africa to be associated with political and social conflict and war in other parts of Africa are shown in the Botswana situation to be far from inevitable in their consequence. Here I should add that Gulbrandsen does not present Botswana as a harmonious exception. Antagonisms and conflicts founded in class and ethnicity are developing but they have not taken the thoroughly disastrous turn that often seems to have been taken elsewhere.
Clearly various dualisms and oppositions that continue to bedevil anthropology and other disciplines pose major difficulties for understanding, and the minor discourses of the hitherto dominated, such as Botswana, expose them. Gulbrandsen presents the Botswana situation as quashing such oppositions, and powerfully questions the reasoning behind their continuing centrality in the analysis of processes in the now post-colonial margins. Much that receives a negative value in parts of Africa, in Botswana has a more positive effect. Common dualisms that would oppose tradition to modernity or change to stasis, for example, are shown by Gulbrandsen to be inadequate to say the least.
In the Botswana context what might be conceived as tradition is a powerful force both of change and of control in contemporary circumstances. Gulbrandsen approaches the idea of tradition through the cultural orientation of anthropology that both sets it within historical processes and conceives it as a continual dynamic, always open to redefinition, within contexts of practice. In this sense the traditional is not outside contemporary forces but continually being re-created in ongoing social and political relations realizing original import and achieving often innovative effects. The traditional in this approach is not a mere product or an outcome of historical forces but is ingrained within them, vital to the various directions that societal formation in Botswana is taking as this is bound up with the structuring process of the state. In this way, Gulbrandsen goes beyond the ‘invention of tradition’ perspectives (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) that operate with a kind of hiatus between the contemporary and the past (perhaps paradoxically itself engaging in the invention of tradition) without invoking a kind of primordialism.
In Gulbrandsen's analysis there are no clear pre-colonial/post-colonial or before/after demarcations for the understanding of the formation of present-day Botswana. Prior to the advent of colonialism the Tswana could not have been considered as some kind of static cold society and a hostage, as it were, to the heat of change brought by external forces. Gulbrandsen presents the Tswana polities before the advent of European forces as being powerfully expansive and incorporative. He shows how, as an aspect of this, Tswana socio-political processes were built on the basis of change, bringing other African populations within their suzerainty and as part of this oriented to engaging foreign would-be colonizers in accordance with their own terms. They were not the passive subjects of colonial conquest but engaged colonial interests to the pragmatics of their own cultural/political discourse. Official colonial policy of Indirect Rule (which so often through southern Africa involved the creation of political institutions that had no prior existence, see Van Velsen 1967) found a ready utility in already existing Tswana conception and practice. Different orientations towards political and social control within the colonial and post-colonial contexts were in some degree able to co-evolve in a way that was probably very different from some of the peoples in surrounding territories (e.g. South Africa). Undoubtedly this was facilitated by the fact that the territory that became Botswana, from the perspective of the colonizers, had few exploitative resources other than cheap labour. The Bechuanaland Protectorate that became