Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object

Time and the Other is a classic work that critically reexamined the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "here and now," that their subjects live in the "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He also pinpoints the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time in the history of anthropology that set specific parameters between power and inequality. In this edition, a new postscript by the author revisits popular conceptions of the "other" and the attempt to produce and represent knowledge of other(s).

History

Fabian, Johannes

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Columbia University Press

Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire (New Directions in Anthropological Writing)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

University of Wisconsin Press

Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations Through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire (New Directions in Anthropological Writings)

Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Power is eaten whole ("Le pouvoir se mange entier"). In 1985 the distinguished anthropologist Johannes Fabian, engaged in fieldwork in the Shaba province of Zaire, first encountered this saying about power. Its implications - for the charismatic religious movements Fabian was examining, for the highly charged political atomosphere of Zaire, and for the culture of the Lub peoples - continued to intrigue him, but its meaning remained elusive. On a later visit, he mentioned the saying to a company of popular actors, and triggered an ethnographic brainstorm. They decided it would be just the right topic for their next play. This book examines traditional proverbs about power. Above all, it relates how the performance of "Le pouvoir se mange entier" was created, rehearsed, and performed by the Troupe Mufwankolo. The play deals with the issue of power through a series of conflicts between villages and their chief. Both rehearsal and performance versions of the text of this drama are included, in Swahili and in English translation. Observation, to Fabian, is itself a social process so throughout, he and the actors worked together to enact, analyze, interpret, and concretely "unpack" the meanings of the saying. The result is a book containing reflections, asides, evocative descriptions of settings and events, yet with a continuing concern for the limitations of the ethnographer's perspective and of the power relations that are never absent from ethnographic works. Much of what ethnographers study as "culture" is performance, says Fabian, and his work is an attempt to redirect the anthropologist's work from "informative" to "peformative" ethnography. His discussions of collaborative strategy of "performance" vs "text" as goals, of translation, and of a host of other issues will enrich current theoretical debates about power, representation and the dialogues of ethnography that go well beyond the immediate African context.

In this study, inquiry will be directed to the past, and it will, for many reasons, have to reach into a past which is rather remote from present-day Shaba Swahili. The author's principal concern remains with a contemporary situation, namely the role of Swahili in the context of work, industrial, artisanal, and artistic. When it was first formulated, the aim of my project was to describe what might be called the workers' culture of Shaba, through analyses of communicative (sociolinguistic) and cognitive (ethnosemantic) aspects of language use.

Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880-1938

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of California Press

Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire

This book combines ethnography with the study of art to present a fascinating new vision of African history. It contains the paintings of a single artist depicting Zaire's history, along with a series of ethnographic essays discussing local history, its complex relationship to forms of self-expression and self-understanding, and the aesthetics of contemporary urban African and Third World societies. As a collaboration between ethnographer and painter, this innovative study challenges text-oriented approaches to understanding history and argues instead for an event- and experience-oriented model, ultimately adding a fresh perspective to the discourse on the relationship between modernity and tradition. During the 1970s, Johannes Fabian encouraged Tshibumba Kanda Matulu to paint the history of Zaire. The artist delivered the work in batches, together with an oral narrative. Fabian recorded these statements along with his own question-and-answer sessions with the painter. The first part of the book is the complete series of 100 paintings, with excerpts from the artist's narrative and the artist-anthropologist dialogues. Part Two consists of Fabian's essays about this and other popular painting in Zaire. The essays discuss such topics as performance, orality, history, colonization, and popular art.

Arts & Photography

Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new view of those early European explorers and their encounters with Africans. Out of Our Minds shows explorers were far from rational--often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence. Johannes Fabian presents fascinating and little-known source material, and points to its implications for our understanding of the beginnings of modern colonization. At the same time, he makes an important contribution to current debates about the intellectual origins and nature of anthropological inquiry. Drawing on travel accounts--most of them Belgian and German--published between 1878 and the start of World War I, Fabian describes encounters between European travelers and the Africans they met. He argues that the loss of control experienced by these early travelers actually served to enhance cross-cultural understanding, allowing the foreigners to make sense of strange facts and customs. Fabian's provocative findings contribute to a critique of narrowly scientific or rationalistic visions of ethnography, illuminating the relationship between travel and intercultural understanding, as well as between imperialism and ethnographic knowledge.

Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa

Africa

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Books by Fabian, Johannes