Geometry.Net - Basic K Books: Kabre Indigenous Peoples Africa

At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic "out of the way" African culture—subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything "indigenous" or local. Through analyses of everyday and ceremonial social practices, Piot illustrates the intertwining of modernity with tradition and of the local with the national and global. In a striking example of the appropriation of tradition by the state, Togo's Kabre president regularly flies to the region in his helicopter to witness male initiation ceremonies.

Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, Remotely Global aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion.

Interstices of the traditional and the modern
Piot's book is a work of ethnographic mastery.

The author shows how we can think gift economies, translocalities, ritual, commodities, gender, etc. in terms of dynamic interplay in which traditional societies are not passive absorbers of colonial power, but rather inform their own cultural categories by appropriating the colonial.

Piot here exposes the error of seeing traditional societies as ahistorical, static societies, when they are actually as much modern as traditional; societies which dynamically communicate with the 'outside'.

Piot's reflexivity in writing is stimulating as it rejects the Western analytical gaze, informed by individualization, essentialization and all too often seeking for mechanical solidarity.

A new "take" on the history of colonization in West Africa.
The thesis of Remotely Global is complex yet condensed: current Kabre culture, a classic remote African people of Northern Togo, illustrates a specific melding of influences both modern and traditional, global and local that is clearly driven by the desire to imitate or usurp the powersof the colonizers.

"As should be amply clear by now, the Kabreworld is one ofpromiscuous mixing, in which sacrifice and MTV, rainmakersand civil servants, fetishists and catechists exist side by side andcoauthor an uncontainable hybrid cultural landscape...They (the Kabre) areas at home in the world of so-called tradition as in that of the modern,and see the mixture of the two not only as unproblematic but also asdesirable...An empty signifier whose content is forever shifting, modernityitself is not only intrinsically impure and hopelessly hybridized, but alsoincorrigibly plural and forever incomplete." (page 178)

RemotelyGlobal has a refreshing, astringent tone.It is clearly written with richdetail.As an ethnographer's outlook, it provides a new 'take' on theprocess of colonization and offers much to challenge or complete the commonWestern viewpoint of colonial civilization. ... Read more

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