Pocket-worlds

I often wonder who I would be without the pocket-worlds I have inhabited throughout the course of my life. The unreading life is one I can barely imagine and if truth be told, shudder at. I know there are societies where literacy is not a needful or valued cultural skill. Yet, in this cultural reality, the one in which I live, a world where the tradition of reading is not cultivated and nurtured seems cruel, sad, barren and terribly narrow.

Now, I do know that the arrival of the printing press and the dispersal of reading set in motion some of the epochs most barbaric episodes and still does. Some literary traditions' fearmongering is subtle. Ever notice how in most epic fantasy series the bad guys are the products of miscegenation, have interesting skin tones or live nomadic lives in the desert. One doesn't need to be overly worldly to get the operation of alterity going on there. So yea, books have as much potential to close down the world or reiterate its ugliness as to open them.

And yet ... I would read all the ugly necessary for those moments when the world crafted by an other allows me to transcend my corporeality, the banality of my everyday routines, the narrowness of my thinking. Yea, barring the experience of the sublime, I would just read for the connection (as false as that intimacy might be) to the world of another. To cry with them, laugh those crazy giggles with them, to shudder with discomfort with them, to just feel the human condition with them.

Some books are at the centre of ritual and traditions. I'm sure you have heard of the Torah, the Bible or the Quran. Or how about Dianetics? These books no longer inhabit the realm of the ordinary text, their sacrality is maintained through time-worn rituals which every generation reinterprets for their own needs.

I think of academics as professional readers with their own traditions of reading, their own ways of valorising certain texts and their own way of waving certain magical texts to silence an other. Being an academic, even as one strives to uphold the tradition of being innovative, is to be deeply bound by tradition. We even get the  rituals with the gowns and strange hats when we have read a significant amount of things to signify our moving through our stages. There are titles to go with different levels of demonstrable reading and writing the texts for others to read. In the disciplines one is not really fully a member of that society if one hasn't become familiar with the writing of some of the significant ancestors. There are some things we just do, because it has always been done that way. When we write for others to read, it has become traditional to acknowledge who we read. Failure to do so is a punishable act. Our traditional ways are understood by outsiders and we can even get the law and media to help us vilify and sanction our transgressors.  

Do you remember when more people would lick their finger to turn the page? Now of course, in our more sanitised world, it is kinda gross. Well, if you're a licker, I'm sorry, that is a tradition you need to stop, right now! Or how about reading and trying to keep the pages pristine? I don't anymore, I follow a different tradition now. You know, the one where you leave your conversation with the author inked on the pages. You might know some people who follow the new post-it traditions or perhaps the yellow or green highlighter ones. Or perhaps, you still prefer quieter, less insistent conversations with your favorite books.

Anyway, books are pocket-worlds: little worlds that can be transported in your pocket. Even though ones relations with pocket-worlds are idiosycratic and bound by traditions, life without them would be to tragically miss too many journeys.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Tradition 101: Seminar 1, Footnote 1(e)

 '(A) fully traditional belief is one which is accepted without being assesed by any criterion other than its having been believed before. The unthinking or 'unconscious' acceptance of beliefs which in their substance are rationally and empirically demonstrable as true is a real possibility. Scientific and technological beliefs are often 'unthinkingly' accepted, i.e. they are accepted without analysis by the acceptor of the grounds on which they are could be demonstrated. Such beliefs are clearly traditional in their formal properties, even if they are not substantively traditional. Edward Shils, 1971, Tradition

Tradition 101: Seminar 1, Footnote 1(d)

'Tradition is never static but a process that transforms knowledge and creates new meanings. The context for experience is not only woven by a desire for knowledge that objectifies an event, but also by a desire for the capability for representing such an event within the historical dimension of a culture that will have an effect on society.' Angelika Rauch,  The Hieroglyph of Tradition: Freud, Benjamin, Gadamer, Novalis, Kant

(Photo: Guy Stubbs)



Tradition 101: Seminar 1, Footnote 1(c)

'Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name. The reformers of every age, whether political or religious or literary, have protested against the tyranny of the dead, and in doing so have called for innovation and insight in place of tradition. ... (T)he dichotomy between tradition and insight breaks down under the weight of history itself. A 'leap of progress' is not a running broad jump, which begins at the line of where we are now; it is a running broad jump to where we have been to where we go next. ... For during much of our history, insight has often come through the recitation and rearrangement of materials from tradition. .... The growth of insight - in science, in the arts, in philosophy and theology - has not come through progressively sloughing off more and more of tradition, as though insight would be purest and deepest when it finally freed itself of the dead past. It simply has not worked that way in the history of tradition, and it does not work that way now. By including the dead in the circle of discourse, we enrich the quality of the conversation. Of course we do not  listen only to the dead, nor are we a tape recording of the tradition. That really would be the dead faith of the living, not the living faith of the dead.' Jaroslav Pelikan, 1984 The vindication of tradition.

Tradition 101: Seminar 1, Footnote 1(b)

"Once this false opposition (between tradition and modernity) is set aside and the problem of tradition ceases to be defined as a resistance to modernity, tradition becomes again a means of raising essential questions about the ways in which we pass on the life of cultures - questions that necessarily include issues of authority  as well as invention, practice as well as interpretation." Mark Salber Phillips, What is tradition when it is not 'invented'? A historiographical introduction.  In Questions of Tradition, edited by MS Phillips and G Schochet.

Tradition 101: Seminar 1, Footnote i(a)



Lamb that died for tradition



"(W)e may view tradition as the way society formulates and deals with the basic problems of human existence. In other words, it is the way society comes to terms with the insoluble problem of life and death, including such life and death matters as food and water in a world of scarcity. In this respect, of course it is not different from modernity. Since the fundamental problem of life and death is truly insoluble, it has to be attacked, formulated, and dealt with each time anew under a different aspect. Tradition therefore is and has to be bound up with the ever-shifting present. Hence the irritating flexibility and fluidity of tradition." Heerstemann, J.C. The inner conflict of tradition: essays in Indian ritual, kinship and society.

Pimping pain while talking tradition

Is there a way to avoid pain and ugliness while talking tradition? A lot of things are done in the name of tradition that are just plain hurtful. Many a time I am stumped how to process claims about tradition such as in the story about beading.

I caught this story on beading (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/05/11/kenya.children.beading/) on CNN this morning, but the Daily News, a leading newspaper in Kenya, reported of a similar story over a year ago about then four-year-old girl called Itoms (http://allafrica.com/stories/201001270906.html). The reporters said she was on the run "first from her own parents, who want her circumcised before marrying her off for 10 cattle, and from Samburu morans (Maasai warriors), who for a beaded necklace called saen, are free to have sex with a girl barely out of her diapers." Apparently, in Samburu tradition, kids as young as Itoms are "old enough to fetch bride-price" for their fathers. Itoms "had already been booked for sex and eventual marriage to a 27-year-old moran, in a common ritual called Aisho saen (wearing a necklace)."

So is there a way to avoid the ugliness that passes under the cover of tradition? How can parents willingly do harm to their offspring? Are all such claims about tradition to dismissed as false consciousness or simply irrational forms of thought?



It doesn't seem possible to evade the awfulness. Of course there a plenty other things labelled tradition whose real purpose is to make young girls and all females fear men, the young to cower before adults, the poor to blame themselves for their wretchedness. We don't have to go to a village in Kenya to learn about that.

I am aware that you don't need to rope in tradition to rob, rape, disfigure, shoot or enslave. It is more often the case that those who claim tradition to push misery don't have guns or money or other more modern instruments to induce fear. Though some of them are dressed in expensive suits while others cover under animal skins, all of them are really pimps of power, modern or traditional.

Impressions of Addis

Here are some images from our trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The trip's mission was to do on-site check of conference venues, hotel accommodation, restaurants (and did we eat and drink coffee!), markets and such like for a pitso we will host come November 2011.

The pitso is an event hosted every two years under the auspices of the project Changing Traditions (http://www.unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=25441). Changing Traditions is a granted flagship initiative of PoTT, a programme of the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa. Changing Traditions revolves around two main drivers, namely, a pitso and an e-kgotla. Building transdisciplinary, international African-centred knowledge traditions is an important impetus for Changing Traditions.

The theme for the second pitso, Traditions 2, is Changing Traditions: Everyday Lives of African Men. The intention is to get to Ethiopia and have men and women (yes, men and women) talk about the hellishly interesting, dynamic relationships African men have with tradition, itself understood to be dynamic. The event is meant for scholars, artists, journalists, film-makers, photographers, and whatever label you use for yourself, so long as you have an interest in what African men do, and do well or could do better, to make Africa work.

This year's gathering will be organized around questions pertaining to not only the exceptional but also quotidian experiences of being a man in or from Africa. These images of the city of Addis are a taster then, aren't they. We hope you will tell others about the event (http://www.unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=25483). Or why don't you make your way to Ethiopia.

Will Smith on a shop-front in Addis Ababa 



Fruit stall





Building site




Podium for the king and queen of Ethiopia



A woman with a load on her back

Statue of man on a horse

A dozen leading thinkers working in Africa who take men seriously

Over and over we get asked the question: Why men? Few people realize that it is possible to be male, a feminist, an African and to recognize that men as men should be a serious object of inquiry. Not because men means human, as earlier feminists have taught us but that feminism itself has changed. Here are 12 leading thinkers working in Africa, in alphabetical order, who consider masculinities a critical object of study. You should invite them to your corner if you want to know why investigate African men.



Mbuyiselo Botha



1 Mbuyiselo Botha

2 Lindsay Clowes

3 Malose Langa

4 Anne Mager

5 Nyameka Mankayi

6 Sakhumzi Mfecane

Anne Mager

7 Robert Morrell

8 Dean Peacock

9 Kopano Ratele

10 Graeme Reid

11 Tammy Shefer

12 Thembisa Waetjen 

 

Of course this isn’t an exhaustive list. But it is pretty close. There may be others whose work you believe belongs alongside these thinkers. Tell us.

You will notice something peculiar about the list. Almost all of these people are based in South Africa, which is open to several interpretations.


Above all though, it is concerning. How can it be that there are no thinkers working in the rest of Africa who consider men’s genders as worthy of critical intellectual attention?  And if it is not the case, why have we not heard about them?