“Remote areas”

Abstract

Previous articleNext article Free"Remote areas" Some theoretical considerationsEdwin ARDENEREdwin ARDENERPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI hope that this title will be pleasantly misleading. I have gone behind the theme of this conference, to the idea of places, or peoples, or locations, that anthropologists have considered to be 'fit' for their study. For, if there is anything controversial about the idea of the social anthropologist working at home, or relatively near home, it is because some may fear that the very nature of the subject may therefore be transformed out of all recognition. There is clearly something in the idea that distance lends enhancement, if not enchantment, to the anthropological vision. Yet the work in Europe, for example, has clearly yielded results of great general interest. This paper therefore starts from a deliberately obscure and ill-defined term: 'remote'. I choose it from the natural language, and show that in an anthropological sense it can be 'unpacked' in rather striking ways. This paper is related to my basic theoretical papers on the nature of social space (Ardener 1975, 1978). I shall refer to the new concept of 'event-density' or 'event-richness', which (since the space is analysable at all levels in essentially the same way) is the event-homologue of the phenomenon of 'semantic-density' described in the concluding parts of my recent paper on social anthropology and reality (Ardener 1982). 'Semantic density' is a statistical feature, at the point where definition and measurement intersect and collapse together. We have a number of difficult paths leading away from us, so let us start.1The problem of identityIt will be no surprise that interest in 'minorities', 'embedded groups', 'plural societies', and the like, has led us to problems of definition. The term 'ethnicity' was a useful step on the road, which produced its own difficulties. The resort to 'identity', as a term, was an attempt to restore the self-definitional element that seemed to be inherent in the idea of 'ethnicity', but which was shared by [39] entities other than ethnicities as normally conceived = many kinds of entities have identities. As far as 'minorities' are concerned, majorities are just as important for our comprehension of this problem. We know (at least since Ferguson in 1767) that the definition of entities by mutual (binary) opposition is part of the point.2 There is always the danger, however, that we may run the risk of so relativizing the distinction that we forget the original problem. The excellent volume called Belonging (Cohen 1982) has a title from a fuzzy part of the English lexicon which leaves all options open.Let me remind you of the statement, that 'among the many things that society is or is like, it is or is like identity' (Ardener and Ardener 1965). The social is, in virtue of its categorizing and classifying structures, a space that 'identifies'. It is a chief source of any concept that we severally have of identity. That there is a multiplicity of identities that coexist together from any single perspective is not strictly speaking a problem theoretically. It is one of the proofs — and one of the costs — of the apparent paradox of the continuity between the space and the individuals that constitute it. They are defined by the space and are nevertheless the defining consciousness of the space.We hear now a great deal about 'reflexivity'. Before that word loses its concreteness, let us remember that (to state it oversimply) our heads are full of categories generated by the social, which we project back upon the social. Perhaps, in the 'normal course of events' (as we put it), the 'native actor' does not perceive this interaction, for the social space is not for him or her an 'object', except intermittently. For the non-native social anthropologist the act of interacting with an alien social space, even relatively successfully, forms the basis of that 'daily experience of mis understanding'3 (at not only the ethnographic level but the theoretical level) which is the undoubted source of our greater readiness to see the space as object (of study), and thus, like Durkheim, to see 'social facts as things'. To treat the social space as object is almost literally child's play, when it is located in unfamiliar scenes and is already, in any case, predefined as 'other' in relation to our own world. 'Reflexivity' has become a popular, as opposed to a specialist, term in social anthropology as those conditions have changed. The task has not changed, however, save in that the individual/social interaction must be more minutely scrutinized. The currency of the term arises from an increase in theoretical awareness. It will no doubt acquire soft-centred connotations and be abandoned as the situation which produced it becomes commonplace. Nevertheless, it should not be confused with 'subjectivity'.There was a time when the relativity of cultural categories was raised to a philosophical bogey as 'relativism'. Anthropology was then discovering a mismatch between the categories of the observer and those generated by the purported object — other people. When the differences are more subtle, the gap is narrower between these two; the mismatch is virtually simultaneous. Since mismatch is our experience of relativity, then the reduction of 'transmission time' (between the observer and the purported object) and the [40] narrowing of the mismatch (between the categories of the observer and the other), demonstrates that the process that we first called relativization is not a form of anti-objectivity, but (as its application to 'familiar' experience more clearly shows) is on the contrary our only mode of objectivization. This is quite an important theoretical proof of what has for social anthropologists been intuitively sensed, and it will be illustrated in the treatment that follows.4Remoteness: some phenomenologyAfter these essential preliminaries, I start here from another English term: 'remote'. For the moment it has no theoretical taint (sadly we may change that situation). I wish, by using it, to recapture the feature that started the personal interest of many anthropologists in their traditional areas of study. Elsewhere, I have pointed out that, for Europe, 'remote areas' of the globe have had a different conceptual geography, and have been perceived to exist on a different time-scale from the 'central' areas (Ardener 1975, 1985). But we are not now opening up a familiar 'centre/periphery' discussion — if only for the reason that most such discussion depends on an acceptance of known centres with known peripheries. On the contrary, the age of discovery showed us that the 'remote' was actually compounded of 'imaginary' as well as 'real' places; yet they were all of equal conceptual reality or unreality before the differences were revealed. 'Brazil', 'California', 'India', 'Africa', 'Libya', 'Ethiopia' — all were to one extent or other imagined (names ransacked from various sources), yet all were located eventuallyin limited and specific places.5 Occasionally we are conscious of a loss. Almost the most imaginary of all: the Antipodes (once the outlet of the Celtic Other World, and a home of King Arthur), and Australia (Terra Australis), are now almost the most mundane of all.6 On the other hand, and conversely, pockets of imaginary places have remained still unrealized within the European centre. When the far Antarctic was made real, Brittany and the Gaels were still 'unrealized', still 'removed' from the canons of Western realities, or indeed remote (Latin removeo). In the West, we are 'space specialists': we easily realize our conceptual spaces as physical spaces — for that is, in many respects, the European theme. 'Remote' areas are, for us, conventionally physically removed, but this obscures the conceptual phenomena associated with 'remoteness', which are real enough for biological anthropologists (for example) to perceive commuter-ridden villages of Otmoor (5-10 miles from Oxford) as 'remote'.Let me begin from a naive point of view, with a little personal anthropology. The fact has frequently been noted that the discipline of social anthropology itself belongs to a part of the 'academic vocabulary' that is concerned with marginality, regarded from a Western perspective. In that sense, anywhere an anthropologist chooses to go is likely to show the quality I have just called 'remoteness'. There are, however, interesting nuances. I [41] went first to the Ibo of South-Eastern Nigeria. It had, however, been expected that I would go to the Plateau area of Central-Northern Nigeria. I had read all the available literature on the many peoples of that zone at the International African Institute in Waterloo Place, guided by the quizzical attentions of Miss Barbara Pym, the then unpublished novelist, who was then embarking on her own peculiar fieldwork.7 In the event, the Nigerian government vetoed the worker who was going to the Ibo, and I went there instead. I did not personally like the change, for various reasons, and strangely, the Ibo never came to seem 'remote' to me. The Plateau certainly had seemed so. It was not that the Ibo were lacking in conventionally exotic features. In fact, no people were more 'anthropological' or 'ethnographical' in other ways than the Ibo, but they never fitted the qualities I now examine in retrospect as 'remote'. Of course, once there, parts of Ibo country began themselves to acquire the purely topographical characteristics of 'remoteness' — places more than walking distance, then more than cycling distance, then places in the north and north-west of the area. Nevertheless, I now see that the Ibo were, in the particular sense I am trying to unpack, essentially definers of remoteness in others, although with normally unperceived pockets of internal remoteness — in a way, rather like England itself. Indeed, taken as a whole, Southern Nigeria has that quality, compared with certain other African countries. For the moment, I am merely trying to pinpoint the quality; what I mean may become clearer if one opposes Nigeria to the Cameroons, which are, in contrast, commonly experienced as 'remote' — not only by me, but by almost everyone else who visits the country, and it retains this quality even when after ten or twenty years you are an 'expert' in the area. The more expert, the lonelier you seem to become. To know the Cameroons well is to feel that you are outliving your contemporaries. The Cameroons does not become less 'remote': you become more and more remote yourself. Perhaps this condition is, at a higher level of opposition, one that is characteristic of all anthropologists — as against (say) sociologists. I am feeling towards the statement that although there are always 'real' centres, and 'real' peripheries which move relative to each other, there is an added feature of a more puzzling kind.There are certainly some topographical elements that are relevant. Mountains conventionally add to the 'remoteness' experience, but so very frequently do plains, forests, and rivers — so much so that the inhabitants of 'unremote' places sometimes say that they do not have 'real' mountains, plains, forests, or rivers — only something else, hills (say), woods, or streams. Contrariwise, some areas (like Brittany) call their hills 'mountains'. The Scots, resisting the 'remote' vocabulary, perhaps, call their mountains 'hills'. The actual geography is not the overriding feature — it is obviously necessary that 'remoteness' has a position in topographical space, but it is defined within a topological space whose features are expressed in a cultural vocabulary. The Bakweri of Cameroon cannot really be said to be objectively remote from the [42] coastal belt of that country. Their more elevated settlements overlook an area of superficial commercial modernization and the sea. Yet they live up the Cameroon Mountain, and the higher seems to be the remoter in this elastic semantic realm.With the Cameroons we are getting close to the problem I want to discuss. For example, the feature I describe of 'remoteness' (this term you see now is a label for something which is only gradually casting its shadow in language during my exposition) persists when it has lost its geographical correlates — that is, when the 'remote' area has been reached, and when it should now be merely present. Thus people would visit the Cameroons, and (as it were) stagger in to see us as if they had surmounted vast odds; as if the Cameroons had a protective barrier. Yet, from the inside outwards, there was an almost exaggerated contrary sense of the absence of any barrier to the world — a peculiar sense of excessive vulnerability, of ease of entry. With every improvement of communication over the decades, the more speedily did people appear to pour in uninvited; and yet the more they seemed to be on the last stages of an expedition to some Everest that terminated in the middle of your floor. That is a law of 'remote' areas — the basic paradox, for that is how you know you are in one. The West still maintains ideals of such places. 'Shangri La' is an image used by French visitors to the former British Cameroons, and by United Nations visitors to both Cameroons. You know you are 'remote' by the intense quality of the gaze of visitors, by a certain steely determination, by a slightly frenetic air, as if their clocks and yours move at different rates. Perhaps this is why the native of such an area sometimes feels strangely invisible — the visitors seem to blunder past, even through him. I think that to formulate this point you have to have stayed for very long successive periods in various spaces, in order toseparate out this quality, which I take to be a real one and connected to the experience of time. It is, of course, a conceptual experience. The one-way invisible barrier is a singularity of in the social space, which I have mapped already in formal terms in the Munro lecture (Ardener 1975).Yet, as I have mentioned, remoteness does not appear to protect the 'remote areas'. In the Cameroons we penetrated more and more parts which, on the ordinary level of the relativity of conventional geographical remoteness, were remote even in the Cameroons. There were areas so 'remote' anthropologically that there was nothing written on them. Yet, when reached, they seemed totally exposed to the outer world: they were continually in contact with it. Why were they not known equally to 'the world'? Remote areas turn out to be like gangster hideouts — full of activity, and of half-recognized faces. As the years went by, we had the choice of the blankest part of the Cameroon map: the Fungom area of the Bamenda Plateau, and within that area the Chiefdom of Esu. A thatched house was built on a hill, round which the village-capital nestled. The paradox of living in that blank area summed up the experience of remoteness very well, some of [43] which I shall touch on soon. For the moment I will note that an uncompleted dirt road led to a log over a stream, and a path that wound up that hobbit-like hill. From its top any distant Land-Rover could be heard approaching for miles, its cloud of dust being visible for further miles, until its minuscule occupants alighted and began their ominous ascent, gathering children and helpers as they came.To the strange arrivals the village was either a scene of 'traditional hospitality of a simple highland folk' or the location of incomprehensible reticences. The very act of having arrived was its own justification. Years later, the new arrivals were a unit of gendarmerie, for this was the remote area of all remote areas for the new Francophone government and, like all areas of this peculiar type, not only perceived to be Shangri La but also the home of purported smugglers and spies. How shall the inhabitants of a 'remote area' evaluate the arbitrary love-hate of its visitors? Are alternating periods of 'unspoiledness' and violence their inevitable fate? After the of one of how is it that they are to the of society to the before being or out of by the The of remoteness in Cameroon the of my discussion is to show its in of will by now that Western is an area in which levels of 'remoteness' are to be some may that this has been an of the really basic and important as the for example, cannot from That would be a opposition, although the of the of the was with levels of what like of much more than what the undoubted and more easily of the like the out of their so that the could be of being a in another great of The in was to this point from its A once in a When the anthropologist with the of you it was the all in as had the same but did not like that The are as we shall for in how the very definition of and was at and how the of it had led to a of the seemed to the experienced reality of being a Nevertheless, for the first the paradox of was out from the of that had it for years like the of experience for the In her showed how the language with the native who were as by their This time it was the who the with their I am personally the work of and will as The Gaels and the have a They want to then are They as if they were indeed enough to to know something that no one can It is, however, an important feature of the 'remote' social spaces — as I it is of the peculiar of such spaces — that the and so far it is that we have the of only one of the problem. On one 'remote areas' are indeed parts of an imaginary world. I have for some years an image to as a to this of our and I it to to on it is from the said what do you think about you if about where do you I am of said be only a of in that there King was to added go out — — just like a The of the image of another is a puzzling I have the Barbara that is a strange of her is which is in its to that by visitors to a remote area. on Barbara now begin to appear who know more about her than or than any single those of us her become merely There never in any purely physical that Barbara — it is all perhaps, but it never The new is a of in a fuzzy of whose general the of the the Pym, the that who has these and in what space are they the the and others, have had the experience of being as part of a They have like Pym, at a at The 'remote' social spaces merely in an exaggerated a feature which all to some Yet we that we are still in some experienced way, behind the — at least we are still The social space of so it is that the Gaels and should we are perceived or in the of others, nevertheless there are real is not with this to say that the Western do not see themselves as that or They are quite ordinary — as ordinary as can be who has the experience of through The social space is a one. A of being as a you an ordinary — a as an you just an — A of being in a remote you an ordinary the we must some Remote areas are full of I know people who experience the idea of the of as The does not a world of To a perceive a must be by such that is likely to be As a can really they are to away with that, however, in the every social interaction has its as a are you or the in remote areas have a definition of so that, the real of the there will always appear to be a of them. This however, with the undoubted for perceived actually to in remote We must be in this of the for so that the of We can see already the of of 'real' when are well But even this is not for the kinds of that in remote areas are quite peculiar and all over one can and as we shall Some of these categories have been at all different those of and Remote areas are full of in a remote area feels to There is always a new being and always some or the For the Western there is always the new and The on the There is always a new for new road We are always the of some the new is the and behind the the even The Cameroons have had an of since or even since yet the seem to have a The paradox is that there is always change and in remote in seems to Remote areas are full of of the The of the is that the of and of the There is another paradox that remote areas out for but they are the of of The Cameroons has a of and The and has been in long enough for its already to be by the of its own on the of on to the even of — before the itself away as another age of the Remote areas of or of change and in their The are, as a whole, a great at one level to a on a that most of the that with with their own Remote areas are full of is a of the Remote areas are the home of because is not a is that people to up the an belongs to the that remote defining do of course, perceive their own their own full of In the feel to your Remote areas are in contact with the world. We must this Remote areas are with the one the one the of the the improvement of the the on or even on the The world always — the road to or the or it is, is an to the for it from your very to It is quite different in this from a The road to does not from The with which the is in remote areas has a particular A on the is away as part of the of that at or Are we the statement that, after remote areas are not it seems like that, it is a of out that remote from the feel and — the one-way and or remote areas are full of is on the very of the road from the one of the there are an English and one The until an will work the The 'social does the to and home in the The real will be the A many Gaels will frequently from the of another is a that the has been penetrated — we may call it the The as which we have been gradually is a of the phenomenon is On one the is run by an — a The it for is at the of a from who on traditional such as Almost all of the are run or by The may not all the that but the their to the of that of would turn but their is used to with those who have no at It is to the that are recent But when one at the there the of of and of — internal former of may easily that will be an that they are from a of and on the it is a of that the of has taken to the hospitality to a In the the and of for can be the or that is the is likely to be A number are not Indeed, the is to by the Gaels in