Read an Excerpt
The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World
Consumption, Commoditization, and Everyday Practice
By Brad Weiss Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9849-3
CHAPTER 1
AN ORIENTATION TO THE STUDY
* * *
Changing Perspectives
From plateau atop the escarpment in the Muleba District of Tanzania one can look out over a long slope to the valley below. This valley presents a vast hilly expanse, a field of broad savanna plains interspersed with rocky outcrops and compact villages, whose verdant flora stand out sharply against the surrounding terrain (fig. 1a and b). The sloping face of this escarpment leads down beyond the valley and villages to the western shores of Lake Victoria. In the Haya language (oluhaya) Lake Victoria is Lwelu, "the great out-there," and from this plateau it does indeed seem a distant place that lies beyond the lands tended to by Haya villagers.
However, such a view is possible only from a particular perspective, a perspective that is not merely a topographical vantage point but also, and more importantly, a particular way of perceiving this region. This description of that view represents what was often my own way of looking at a landscape. And the very idea of a "landscape," approached in this way, presupposes a distance between an observer and a visual scene, and a perspective that exemplifies a separation between subject and object. There are, however, ways of apprehending this region that do not reduce it to an observable backdrop. These Haya villages and the lands between them are not merely an arrangement of positions, for they are dynamically integrated into a unified order of space and time. Haya do, in fact, recognize distinctions between the regions I referred to. Valleys and plateaus present different life possibilities for those who reside in one or the other. The savanna grasslands that predominate are not treated like the villages they surround. But these contrasts within the region are conjoined in the course of actual Haya activity and experience. Savannah encroaches on untended village land, or villagers may attempt to reclaim farmland from the desiccated bush. Migrations from plateau to valley or from village to village occur with every generation as social relations alter the contours of these physical spaces. The material environment thereby becomes incorporated into the practical organization of Haya society and culture.
The same is true for Lake Victoria. While the lake is distinctly "out-there," it is also clearly a part of the regional world configured in Haya experiences. As a place of trade and travel, Lake Victoria is also a means of establishing concrete connections between the Kagera Region and the rest of Tanzania and East Africa as a whole. The image of rural isolation on the shores of the imposing lake, implicit in the objectification of the "scenic" landscape, is undermined by Haya interactions with their world. Through these interactions, Lake Victoria becomes in fact metonymic of the interpenetration of "local" and "global" communities, a "great out-there" that is simultaneously inseparable from the lives of rural Haya villagers.
This book explores Haya ways of inhabiting their locales, and examines the forces that shape and transform these processes over time. I argue that in the course of mundane, everyday activities the Haya construct a lived world, an order of concrete spatial and temporal relations that is not only imbued with cultural meanings but also serves to direct creative cultural activities. This lived world is therefore a product of everyday practices at the same time that it produces these practices (Bourdieu 1977; Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1971).
By drawing particular attention to the productive dimensions of this spatial and temporal world, I am also attempting to highlight the importance of human agency in the Haya (or any) sociocultural order. While numerous studies address the construction of subjectivities, as dictated by the rigors of specific spatiotemporal "regimes" (a field of inexhaustible grist for the now legion Foucauldian mills), the fact that the lineaments of these regimes are themselves generated through creative human activity often remains unexamined. Central to my analyses, in contrast, are the ways in which Haya actions and experiences (i.e., their capacities as subjects and agents) are anchored in their physical locales and built spaces (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Munn 1971; J. Weiner 1991). Through these anchoring processes, the lived world comes to incorporate and integrate both objective and subjective dimensions. Actual locations like a domestic hearth, a grave site, or a river are configured in the course of Haya activities as recognizable places, and in turn the spatial and temporal parameters of "place" shape the agents of those activities. The lived world is simultaneously an objectification of social agency and intentions as well as a field of material relations that situates and informs these specific forms of subjectivity.
This emphasis on the mutual construction of human agency and concrete orders of space and time in lived experience also leads me to explore the interrelation of persons to their world and its objects as a central feature of this ethnography. Throughout this work I offer analyses of the ways in which Haya men and women are implicated in or confront an array of material forms and items (e.g., food and money, houses and crossroads, automobiles and buckets) as part of a more general interest in processes of engagement as they are culturally constituted. I find the concept of engagement productive because it nicely captures the sense of reciprocal interchange between persons and the world that is entailed in any activity. A Haya person who engages in uprooting a tree, buying a fish, or naming a child (to cite three examples discussed at length below) approaches and appropriates such objects and others from a particular perspective, but at the same time this person is appropriated by these features of the world. The form of activity or practice itself directs and configures—indeed, engages—the person who carries it out. Because of this reciprocal character of engagement, when people act to define, transform, and make the world they inhabit, they also work to make themselves (Comaroff 1985b; Munn 1986).
The process of engagement as I have described it here also provides a focus for my analysis of transformations in the Haya sociocultural order. These transformations can be assessed at a number of levels. To begin with, any particular action may always have an unforeseen outcome, and this can have real consequence for the persons engaged in that action. A man's attempts to feed his wife and children may prove unsuccessful, which will diminish his standing as a household head. Courtship gifts may be rebuked, or accepted from more than one suitor—leading to suspicions about a man's ability to control money or a woman's ability to control herself. Each of these instances (explored in the following chapters) suggests that as an action unfolds, it presents the possibility for redefining and repositioning (reengaging or disengaging) the agents they involve. Such transformations, in turn, have consequences for future actions and future outcomes.
At another level, the cultural constitution of engagement can most forcefully reveal the effects of widespread sociocultural transformation. As distinctive kinds of action become possible and even commonplace (as with the emergence of new forms of housing or new agricultural techniques), the terms in which persons interact with each other and their world are necessarily altered. Most analyses of social change examine the use of money or the introduction of a variety of consumer goods into a regional world, and these phenomena are explored here as well. What I hope to contribute to such studies is a recognition of the specific capacities and potentials for making and remaking the Haya sociocultural world that are introduced by the practices that surround these commodity forms. The sense of dislocation that characterizes Haya views of selling certain kinds of land or the experience of excessive heat and desiccation many Haya associate with certain media both exemplify transformations in the manner in which Haya men and women encounter their physical environment. Exploring Haya forms of engagement through such practices allows me to trace the changing character of social action and experience; and to ground the relation between action and experience in an object world whose qualities are dynamic and often ambiguous.
These theoretical issues—the interrelation of action and experience as processes that both generate and are anchored in a meaningful order of spatial and temporal relations—motivate the ethnographic analyses presented in this book. In the remainder of this introduction I spell out more precisely some of the terms that recur in these analyses and discuss some of the arguments that have influenced my thinking on these questions. To orient the reader to the organization of my argument and to suggest some common themes that can be traced through the ethnographic discussions of its chapters, I also provide a brief synopsis of the book as a whole. Finally, I offer some background on the Haya in order to locate them in the context of East Africa.
The Lived World
I began this chapter with a description of a Haya landscape in order to convey a contrast between this way of perceiving a visual scene and the process of inhabiting a world. This notion of inhabiting space and time is essential to my ethnographic analysis. My understanding of what it means to inhabit a world and how this is relevant to cultural constructions of space and time derives directly from Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological descriptions of consciousness and being, as well as from a number of anthropological studies that develop and apply these concepts in specific cultural contexts (Hanks 1990; Hugh-Jones 1979; Lass 1988; Munn 1986; J. Weiner 1991). Recent ethnographies of sub-Saharan Africa that explore the connections between inhabiting and embodying a social world—an important dimension of Merleau-Ponty's arguments—have also been especially influential to my thinking about this as an issue for ethnographic analysis (Boddy 1989; Comaroff 1985b; Devisch 1983, 1985; Jackson 1989).
Merleau-Ponty's discussions of space (and, less centrally, time) proceed from a critique of both "empiricist" and "intellectualist" epistemologies (Merleau-Ponty 1962). He characterizes such theories as positing a separation between an objective "spatiality of positions" (100) as against an independent consciousness that exists "in space, or in time" (139). This separation suggests that space is "the setting in which things are arranged" and implies that consciousness becomes merely the "content" of this "container" (243). In contrast, Merleau-Ponty asserts that space and time are inseparable from the active consciousness that inhabits them. Indeed, consciousness is being in the world:
[S]pace and time are not, for me, a collection of adjacent points, nor are they a limitless number of relations synthesized by my consciousness, and into which it draws my body. I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them. (140)
In Merleau-Ponty's work, this process of being-in-the-world is rigorously grounded in bodily experience. For Merleau-Ponty, the body not only mediates all experience, it is "our general medium for having a world" (Merleau-Ponty 1962,146). The body is not detachable from a surrounding spatial context because "To be a body, is to be tied to a certain world ... our body is not primarily in space: it is of it" (148). The fact that the body is in the world in this way means that spatiality is not configured by a set of "external coordinates" (100) or independent positions that determine the locations of objects "in" it. Rather, spatiality exists as a set of orientations. The anchored perspective of the body inhabiting space establishes the orientations that define a spatialized world. And this spatialized world is also, as Lefebvre makes clear, a social world:
For the spatial body, becoming social does not mean being inserted into some pre-existing "world": this body produces and reproduces—and it perceives what it reproduces or produces. Its spatial properties and determinants are contained within it. (1991,199)
Bodily being, then, configures a world, at once lived and thus necessarily social, in the body's ability "to make out boundaries and directions in the given world, to establish lines of force, to keep perspectives in view, in a word, to organize the given world" (Merleau-Ponty 1962,112).
The analyses in this book attempt to illustrate some of the ways that Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of inhabiting, anchoring, and establishing orientations of space and time are important not only to an anthropology of the body but to an understanding of sociocultural activity and practice more generally. Phenomenological approaches in anthropology, and in the social sciences more generally, have often been criticized for focusing on individual experience and failing to situate that experience in the context of wider social forces and relations (see Levi-Strauss 1987). The advantage of the kind of phenomenology offered by Merleau-Ponty is that it insists on the simultaneity of "being" and the "world," a position that makes it impossible to reify individual experience, or to isolate it from the encompassing order of activity in which it is engaged. This perspective does not attempt to define a particular "type" of experience and identify it with a particular cultural pattern. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the temporal character of consciousness that "always finds itself already at work in the world" (1962, 432) seems compatible with many contemporary perspectives on the processual and dynamic character of culture.
Certainly Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, fundamental to his theory of practice and enormously influential in numerous ethnographic analyses, can be traced directly to Merleau-Ponty's account of the "body image" as a set of dispositions and "potential source" of habitual actions (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 98). In my descriptions of a Haya world I argue that there are important orientations that are built into a lived order of space and time and which therefore extend beyond the body. I identify certain kinds of practices that situate a given location as a recognizable place, and thereby establish a meaningful orientation to the space and time it inhabits. For example, through certain routine ritual procedures, or by offering important media like food, coffee, beer, or money, a Haya person can instantiate a concrete set of orientations in the world. That is, any particular practice establishes a certain organization of directions, sequences, expectations, or potential relations to other persons and places; in turn, this organization gives a determinate form to ongoing Haya activity. These orientations provide the bearings for Haya social life.
These orientations are tangibly laid out, and constituted in social practice. They have their ultimate origins in the situation of the body and, in Merleau-Ponty's words, in "the body in movement [which] inhabits space, [and] because movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time, it actively assumes [space and time and] takes them up in their basic significance" (1962,102). At the same time, I attempt to demonstrate that orientations grounded in the body's situation can also be concretized in certain physical places. The Haya house, for example, has a concrete set of orientations embedded in it, orientations that are not imposed on it by a fixed, objective map, but that derive from the ways in which the house inhabits a world. The internal organization of the house and its relation to other houses, and the encompassing environment (which are intrinsically connected dimensions of a house) situate a Haya house as a recognizable place. Similarly, a grave site is a physical place that projects important orientations of time (and space). That is, the identifications of Haya generations with particular graves or with the agricultural cycle of banana crops (all of which are detailed below) do not merely exist through time, they actually produce and organize temporality itself. These physical places establish orientations (e.g., of sequence, direction, periodicity, beginning, and ending) that constitute the concrete form of Haya space and time. The Haya lived world, then, is an oriented space and time that emerges through the process of inhabiting a world. This process is anchored in the situation of the active body and may be concretized in meaningful places and objects. As we shall see, sociocultural activity is continuously making and unmaking dimensions of this lived world, as the orientations embedded in persons and places become intensified or diffused, empowered or dismantled.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World by Brad Weiss. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
