Memory Against Culture. Arguments and Reminders

by Johannes Fabian
Duke University Press, Durham and London, USA/UK, 2007
208 pp., illus. 13 b/w. Trade, $74.95; paper, $21.95
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4056-0 ; ISBN: 978-0-8223-4077-5.

Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg
University of Plymouth

martha.blassnigg@gmail.com

In Memory Against Culture, Johannes Fabian, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, presents a collection of essays written between 2001 and 2005 for international conferences, lectures and published essays. [1] Each promotes, what Fabian calls, an ‘ethnography of memory and remembering’ which understands ethnographic enquiry as processes of re-cognition, cognizing and remembering. Fabian introduces this collection in his own words: ‘They reflect on insights and knowledge gained in the past as a way of “remembering the present”, addressing questions of theory and research practice that are currently debated.’ (p. 141) It is a self-critical account of his reflections on his own field-practice and anthropological research by tracing movements of remembering and forgetting in the documentation, interpretation and presentations of his findings. (e.g. Fabian, 1983, 1990a/b, 1992, 2000, etc.) He proposes that:

“…if it is true that recognizing others also means remembering them, then we should see relationships between self and other as a struggle for recognition, interpersonal as well as political” (p. 25).

By highlighting the tension between presence and representation in the construction of the ‘other’ in anthropology, in the way presence is given to those who are otherwise spoken of in absentia, Fabian reminds us of the importance of an inclusion of intersubjectivity in the accounts of anthropology, if his call for coevalness (a sharing not only of but in time) as a condition of communicative research is to be realised. In this Fabian builds on his intervention in Time and the Other (1983), in which he proposed that: ‘… in order to be knowingly in each other’s presence we must somehow share each other’s past.’ (p. 25) In the present collection he addresses some further consequences of his innovative approach to time by introducing a focus on recognition — the activity of remembering the past in the present.

Following his interventions with a focus on language-centred anthropology Fabian treats the act of memory as ‘culture-in-action’ or ‘cultural praxis’, what he calls ‘the work of memory’ as a dialectical notion expressed in acts of communication (not in the sense of information transfer but shared experience). In this context he reminds us of one of anthropology’s core aims to speak with others not about others, and his previous call for deconstructing the devices of temporal distantiation in order to recognise presence as a fundamental condition of the knowledge practice of shared experience. Fabian’s understanding of presence as the sharing of time, as a kind of time that is not given but being made (p. 38), recalls H. Bergson’s approach to time as quality, as intersubjective, inter-relational qualitative being in time. Hence ethnography (anthropological fieldwork) becomes empirical when it happens in or through communicative events occurring in shared time (p. 50), and evokes a quality of experience that has to be accomplished and is not simply a question of being in a place at the same time and consequently also can be denied. [2]

In what follows Fabian introduces a discussion of memory into the theorizing of language in anthropology with particular reference to ‘languaging’ (as referred to by A.L.Becker, p. 39), and proposes a perspective on language that includes time and memory. He discusses how remembering always implies forgetting and how the issue of ‘forgetting Africa’ needs to be situated in the coexistence of both the recognition and the denial of its presence and contemporaneity in the discourse. Based on his fieldwork he addresses the popular discourses of memory in local varieties of Swahili of the Shaba/Katanga region of the Congo in written texts, performances, and popular paintings. The distinction between kumbuka (to remember as a way of thinking) and kumbusha (to remember as a way to remind) (p. 73) appears as crucial structural framework in his reflections on remembering and forgetting in ethnographic field recordings. He refers in particular to the ‘History of Zaire’ consisting of more than 100 paintings and narratives (completed in 1965 by the painter and historian Tshibumba Kanda Matulu), which in Fabian’s view stand for a way to think and express ideas rather than to depict or recount. He further reflects on his conversations with Léon Ngoie-Nday, a pioneer in the history of Elisabethville/Lubumbashi, capital of Katanga, and Albert Kalundi Mango, Fabian’s occasional research assistant, and their comments on the Vocabulaire de ville de Elisabethville: A history of Elisabethville from its beginnings to 1965, a document written in Swahili, published by André Yav. [3] In this context Fabian makes transparent how forgetting should not be seen as something happening but as a social act of commission rather than omission, which has to be included in accounts about remembering. (p. 75) He regards this denial of recognition — in interviews sometimes expressed as disinterest — as a ‘forgetting with a purpose/reason/motive’. (p. 88)

What Fabian does not elaborate on here, however, is the differentiation between forgetting as cognitive (voluntary or involuntary) activity and forgetting as expressed in language in communicative acts. Although what his focus on language makes clear is that any act of memorising needs an act of mediation in the present, be it in a subject, a writer/observer or a reader/listener. Through this language-focus Fabian points to the problematic of text/language as a means to manifest memories and makes the interplay between remembering and forgetting visible in its textual shape by pointing to silences, pauses, multiple starts and repetitions in ethnographic documentation. He calls for an approach to forgetting and remembering not as either-or question, but to study them in their degrees, layers and complexities of intersection and as complementary activities of choice as well as intrinsic events. It is in this sense that he understands the work of memory as acts of communication and as a cultural practice. (p. 82) Instead of ascribing an exclusively positive value to memory and remembering, he argues that we need to include the subversive act of memory in its critical, contestatory potentials. Fabian consequently speaks of ‘memory work’ (p. 78), by which he invites to think remembering and forgetting together as constitutive activities. Although there is no narration of remembering that is not at the same time a narration of forgetting, in his view, it is not the forgotten content in itself but forgetting as an act that should preoccupy us. (p. 79)

In Fabian’s account, memory in action, intrinsic to time in action, emerges as crucial faculty that may help to render the activity of communication and knowledge transfer more transparent, self-reflective and above all critical. Central is the need to identify agency, that is, practices of selection. In this — it could be said in a very political sense — culture in action can be understood as shared practices of remembering and forgetting, of individual and collective memories. (p. 96) Ethnography in this sense functions as a critical intervention into memory practices (p. 102), since, as Fabian reminds us, ‘cultural knowledge, once articulated, is memory-mediated.’ (p. 132) In this way anthropology ultimately constitutes a politics of memory, since, in his view, how we investigate, publish and exhibit may define and change collective memory. (p. 96)

Fabian is, however, careful not to give any agency to ‘culture’ per se, which is helped by his disciplinary emphasis on a grounding in empirical data and the engagement with the direct experience from fieldwork. Culture, as he has argued elsewhere (2001), should be addressed through a dialectical understanding, since only by including its negation in real-life situations it can provide a constructive concept to guide anthropological enquiry in its research as a science, not of human life, but of human survival (p. 42) — it could be said: drawing on memory as it is at work in the present. The book’s title ‘Memory Against Culture’ provocatively evokes this critique, while as Fabian admits, the book really is about ‘the ethnography of memory and remembering’. (p. ix)

Fabian further points to the significance of the encounter in the making of anthropological knowledge, provides reflections on the construction of otherness in objects as well as reflections on theoretical and practical consequences of virtual text-archives on the Internet for ethnography. In the connection between memory and collecting (with reference to material culture and museums) Fabian makes a crucial, often overlooked and underexplored, separation between objects of memory from the practices of memory. It is to be seen against this background that he expresses his critique of the studies and emerging research fields of so-called ‘memory-cultures’ (Erinnerungskulturen), which in his view are in danger of confusing memory with culture by sometimes neglecting not only the historical socio/political specificity of memory, but most importantly, practices of counter-memory and forgetting with their inherent tensions and contradictions. He warns against a domestication and homogenisation of memory — what he calls ‘pacification of memory’ — by subduing the concept of memory to a treatment of identity, integration and normativity. He asks:

“Is the merging of memory and culture in Erinnerungskultur not inevitably a domestication of Erinnerung, something that passes too quickly from describing what may be a chaos, an anarchy of memories to ordering/integrating such practices in a “culture”? Behind a well-ordered culture of memory there may lurk a “culture of amnesia”.’ (p. 103).

Instead, he highlights the importance of retaining the contradictory fractions and tendencies within memory activities and processes, as well as amnesia, anachronisms and counter-cultures of forgetting as constitutive activities and forces in the production of memory. This is also evident in his critical reflections on the transnational future of anthropology, in which Fabian conceives of the term ‘world anthropologies’ as a mobile concept that allows for spaces of resistance to contest hegemonic claims and to provide sources for innovation, by building on the proven productivity of critical anthropology’s self-reflective discipline.

The sometimes provocative potential of Fabian’s thinking is stimulating, refreshing and timely in its relevance to current research into what could be called an anthropology of mind. The concise format of the lectures/papers sometimes required a necessary reduction of materials and scope from Fabian’s substantial fieldwork and theoretical body of work and may invite the reader to further contextual reading to substantiate certain core lines of thought and arguments. Notwithstanding the book offers many concrete examples from his fieldwork, and his self-conscious disciplinary awareness provides rich ideas, materials, suggestions and stimulating questions to apply and transfer also into other disciplinary contexts. In this way the book will also be found very useful and thought provoking in contexts outside of the discipline of anthropology, such as in cultural studies or the social sciences where recently a wealth of studies and publications engage with a rather dynamic understanding of memories in diverse cultural contexts. Although the book evokes some close intersections with scientific treatments of memory as cognition, Fabian distances his own work from a cross-fertilisation with psychological approaches and in this way remains strictly within his own discipline. He does, however, also acknowledge the crucial question how we should address unconscious or involuntary memories through reactions, emotions, depictions, or imagination, which opens an approach beyond text and language as further investigation in ethnographic inquiries. By this Fabian recognises the necessary convergence of cognitive/scientific studies with social practice and memory at work, which directs the discourse towards a significant new field of interdisciplinary inquiry.

Notes:

[1] The four sections of the book are: Anthropology at Large; Language, Time, Objects; Forgetting and Remembering; Ethnography.

[2] In Time and the Other (1983), Fabian has alerted us to the pragmatic significance of time in the ways anthropology produces knowledge about others by applying devices of temporal distancing. He segues that if sharing time is a condition of social inquiry before it can become an object, then, so Fabian in his warning against a generalisation of organised time, a ‘transcultural as well as transhistorical perspective’ cannot be attained. (p. 51)

[3] Both the Vocabulaire and the History of Zaire have been published by Fabian (1990a/b, 1996), the conversations relating to the Vocabulaire have been published as part of the web-based project ‘Language and Popular Culture in Africa’, set up by Johannes Fabian and Vincent de Rooij at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, with the main aim to document and further the study of expressions of popular language and culture in Africa. See http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca/

References:

Fabian, Johannes. 2001.Culture with an Attitude: Critical Essays. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

___2000. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

___1992. Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880-1938. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.

___1990a. History from Below. The 'Vocabulary of Elisabethville.' By André Yav; with texts, translation, and interpretive essay (edited, translated and commented by Johannes Fabian with assistance from Kalundi Mango. With linguistic notes by W. Schicho). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

___1990b. Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba (Zaire). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

___1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.