hannerz_ulf - the world in creolisation 1987

8/12/2019 Hannerz_ulf - The World in Creolisation 1987

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International frican Institute

The World in CreolisationAuthor(s): Ulf HannerzSource: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 57, No. 4, Sierra Leone,1787-1987 (1987), pp. 546-559Published by: Cambridge University Presson behalf of the International African Institute

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Africa 57 (4), 1987

THE WORLD IN CREOLISATIONUlfHannerz

A people s judgedby historyaccordingo its contributiono the cultureof otherpeoples flourishingat the same time and according o its contribution o thecultureswhichariseafterwards.T. S. Eliot(1948/1962): 6]I'd given myselfa nickname ustfor fun: 'SimonTemplar'.But beforethatI'dcalledmyself El PasoKid',arealcolonialnickname.ThenonedayI changedt to'SimonTemplar'.Yousee, at this time I had readthis novel-The Saint-whosemain characterwas named SimonTemplar.This guy wasvery, veryclever.Infact,he impressedme as beingso cleverthat onedayI went into the classroom,straight o the blackboard ndwrote,'Don't call me El Paso Kidanymore. I'mnow SimonTemplar,'Ohhhhh,canyou imaginehow stupidI was then, man?[FelaAnikulapo-Kuti,n Moore 1982):48]

From the time when I first became entangled with the Third World, in thelate 1950s and early 1960s, I have been fascinated by those contemporaryways of life and thought which keep growing out of the interplay betweenimported and indigenous cultures.1 They are the cultures on display inmarket places, shanty towns, beer halls, night clubs, missionarybook stores,railway waiting rooms, boarding schools, newspapersand television stations.Nigeria, the country I have been most closely in touch with in an on-and-offway for some time, because of its large size, perhaps, offers particular scopefor such cultural development, with several very large cities and hundreds ifnot thousands of small and middle-size towns. It has a lively if rather erraticpress, a popular music scene dominated at different times by such genres ashighlife, juju and Afro-beat, about as many universities as breweries(approximatelyone to every state in the federal republic), dozens of authorspublished at home and abroad, schoolhouses in just about every village, andan enormous fleet of interurbantaxicabs which with great speed can conveyyou practicallyfrom anywhere to anywhere, at some risk to your life.During my stays in Kafanchan, a multi-ethnic, polyglot town close to thegeographicalcentre of Nigeria, I have often found myself somewhat irritatedand embarrassedas various townspeople have seen me as a possible resourcein implausible schemes for going abroad or getting into some lucrativeimport-export business (often import rather than export, really). To beginwith, I only saw this as a distraction from my purpose of finding out whattown life was actually like. With time, I came to realise that these schemeswere indeed one part of what it was all about. Such hunches about the goodlife belongedwith the populartunes aboutthe life stylesof the rich andfamous,with the hole-in-the-wall commercial school where adolescents may pick uptyping, book-keeping and other skills designed to take them from the villageto the city, and with the star system of urban folk lore, the tales told in beerbars in which politicians, high militaryofficers and business tycoons becomethe new trickstersand hero figures.ContemporaryNigerian culture may seem almost overwhelminglyrich andvaried in its manifestations. Even so, it is of a kind that practically every

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THE WORLD IN CREOLISATION

anthropologistwho has beenworking n the Third World s wellacquaintedwith. Most of us, on theotherhand,seemto choosenotto writeabout t; notabout the kinds of phenomena have just enumerated.Or at least not incultural erms.A considerable umberof anthropologists,f course,have ndeedbecomepreoccupiedwith the fact that many people in Africa, Asia, OceaniaandSouth Americaarenowadaysnot huntersandgatherers r swiddencultiva-tors butworkon plantations r in mines or microelectronicssemblyplants,oreke outa living n someurban informal ector'.In the lasttwo decadesorso, anthropologists ith such interestshavefocusedon issuesofdevelopmentand underdevelopment,metropolis-satelliteelations,dependenceand thecontemporaryworld system. But, on the whole, they have been moreconcernedwithbodiesthanwithsouls.Therehasbeenmoreof aneconomicand political anthropologyhere than an anthropologyof structuresofmeaning.2Meanwhile,manyof the anthropologistsoncernedwith ideas-and-symbols,with culture n the strictersenseof the term,have tended toretreatdeeper ntothe hinterland,o thevillagesand the forestdwellers-asfarfrom59th Streetasyoucanget.Theiranthropologys sharplydefinedasastudyof the Other,an Otheras differentaspossible roma modern,urban,post-industrial,apitalist elf.Consequentlyhe kinds of thingsI exemplified romNigeriahave beenmostlyneglected.Thereis surprisinglyittle of a post-colonial thnographyof how ThirdWorldpeoplesee themselves ndtheirsociety, tspast,presentandfuture,and tsplace ntheworld;acultural nalysis f their antasies ndof whattheyknow for a fact. A majorhistorical hangehas beentakingplacehere,beginning ong ago,forsure,butproceedingwithparticularntensitynthe twentiethcentury;ThirdWorldcultureshave been radically hanged,and more than ever they must be seen as involvedin an intercontinentaltraffic n meaning. Galton'sproblem'keepsgettingmore difficult o solve.T. S. Eliot, Fanon, Naipauland Said have addressed hemselvesto theproblems of this new cultural order, in their different ways. Yet asanthropologists e seemto havemadenogreatprogress venin developingvocabulary or talking about such things in an acceptablysubtle, wellinformedway. So, when calleduponto say somethingaboutthem,we mayspeakpiouslyof livingin aninterconnected orldoreven a globalvillage,orwe may lapse(withor withoutembarrassment)nto the simplerhetoricofdenouncing ultural mperialism, r we comeup with one moreimprovisa-tions on the 'between wo cultures' heme;allof which,we probably ealise,arerather imitedintellectual esources or actuallymakingmuch sense ofthese things. A macro-anthropologyf cultureis apparently equired,toprovideus with an improvedoverallunderstandingf how ideas and theirpublicmanifestations reorganised,n thosesocialstructures f considerablescale and complexitywhich now encompassThird World lives just ascertainlyas they encompassour own. And it is requiredalso because noentirelycoherentand crediblemacro-orientederspectiven cultural tudiesseemsto havedevelopedanywhere lse in the humansciences,either.To beginwith, two contrastingpicturesof Nigeriansocietyandculturemay give an idea of what shapesuch a macro-anthropologyould take-Nigeriawill servegenerally o providemy ethnographic orpus.I will just

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CULTURE AND LANGUAGE

sketch one of these pictures very briefly, and develop the other more fully.When 'serious journalism' in North American and Western Europe iscalled upon to provide a background to the tumultuous events of Nigerianpolitics, it draws the picture of an entity made up of some 250 tribes, withabout as many languages. Nigeria comes across as an artefact of Britishcolonialism, with inevitable conflicts among its heterogeneous population. Asimilar view seems to be reflected in the conventional format for writingNigerian anthropology, the monographabout some particularethnic group-Yoruba or Hausa, Nupe or Tiv. Where there is no culturalhomogeneity, noshared indigenous language, it may appear that there is no such thing as aNigerian culture to study.Yet Nigeria is a reality, of a certainkind. Countrieslike it are the results ofthe expansion of the present world system into non-Western, non-northernareas, and they have developed cumulatively through interactions within theworld system, in its political and economic as well as its cultural dimensions.Their emerging social structures have provided the matriceswithin which aninternational flow of culture has continuously entered into varying combina-tions and syntheses with local culture. In this manner pre-colonial cultureshave turned into colonial cultures, and colonial cultures into post-colonialcultures. The entire process must be viewed in historical terms, where thepresent is also part of history.The second view of Nigerian culture, and others more or less like it, then,places it in a world system framework, and its emphases are rather differentfrom that of the ethnic mosaic. First of all, it is true that as they moved intoAfrica a hundred years ago or more the colonial powers may have drawnboundaries which were at the time entirely arbitrary rom the point of view oflocal life. And countries like Nigeria may have inherited some of thearbitrarinessat independence. It is also a fact, however, that, these days, thecreation of a State tends, to some degree at least, to be a self-fulfillingprophecy of the development of a nation. Even if it has been an uphillstruggle in many cases, including that of Nigeria, and in the end anunsuccessful one in some of them, the former colonies have continuouslyaccumulated more common history, and each one of them now has anoverarching apparatus of administration, education and media power.Gradually, if still quite incompletely, they have become more nation-like,and at least some of the varied currents of meaning flowing through theirsocial structures, and hardly insignificantones, can now well be described asnational, rather than local, regional or ethnic in their circumscription. Onecould only ignore this by bracketinga century or more of history.At the same time, from the very beginning and continuously since, thesenational cultures have been parts of a wider whole. The world system as aninternationalorder, according to the view which came to the forefront in thesocial sciences in the 1960s and 1970s, is integratedthrough largelyasymmet-rical links between centres and peripheries, with Third World countries likeNigeria at the peripheries. And the system of centres and peripheries alsocontinues into the national society, to order it internally. In broadterms, thenational culture becomes similarly organised. It may in fact seem to beginalready outside the national boundaries, with the migratory flux betweenmetropolitanand Third World countries. Asians, Africans, Latin Americans

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and West Indians n Europeand North Americaareusuallyconsiderednsocialscienceresearch nlyasimmigrantso themetropoles.Simultaneously,however,they form extensionsof their homesocieties,of whichthey oftenremainactivemembers.In thiswayLondon,Paris,Brusselsand Miamiareamong he majorThird Worldcities,and a variedcultural lowpassesfromthemthrough he networksof migrantworkers, tudents,exiles,internation-al petty entrepreneursndtourists.In the late colonialperiod he 'been-to',who had been to England,became a conspicuoussocialtype in Nigeria,portrayed,orexample, n CyprianEkwensi'snovelJaguaNana (1961).Bynowthe passengeroadcapacityof air trafficbetween,say,WesternEuropeandLagosin a weekwouldprobablybe largeenoughto hold severalentirehighlandNew Guinea ethnic groups. And a ratherlarge part of mediaproductionspecificallyfor the Third World, such as books and newsmagazines, o no smallextentcreatedby ThirdWorlders, s also basedinLondonand Paris.Lookingatthingswithintheterritorial oundariesn simplespatial erms,there is a culturalspectrumwhere the capital,and perhapssome smallnumberof otherlargecities,are at one end;in Nigeriaplaces ike LagosorIbadan,Kano or Kaduna.The concentration f certainentities within theinstitutionaland occupational tructures n these centresturn them intobridgeheads or the penetrationof metropolitancultural influences ntoThird World national cultures. I have in mind here, for example, theoccupationalubcultures swell asthegeneralife stylesof certaingroupsofpeoples who are at home in metropolitanculture as any EuropeanorAmerican,whomayhavespenta considerable artof their ivesabroad,andwhomaycontinue o constitute henational etset. (Andwho, furthermore,may potentiallybe a part of the brain drain from the Third World tometropolitan ountries.)Academicsbelonghere, as well as peoplein theprofessionsand the media, and management taff in large, often trans-national,enterprises see, e.g., Sauvant, 1976; Golding, 1977). On thenational scene they may serve as cultural models of metropolitanism,manifestedn theirstylesof housing, ood anddrink,clothing,carsandotherconsumptionpatterns,as wellas-at leastin somecontexts-in theirmodesof speech.At the other end of the culturalspectrumwe may find a remote ruralvillage.If internationalultural nfluences eachat leastsomeof thepeople nthe large city quitemassivelyanddirectly,they perhapsmake theirwaytothatvillage n fragments, ndindirectly.But between hecityand thevillagea relativelyopen network of relationshipss stretchedout, including,forinstance,suchprovincialowns as Kafanchan.Meaningsaremadeavailablein one wayor anothernot onlywithinsmall,self-encapsulatingegmentsofsociety,andnotonlyintentionally.Sopeoplecandevelopa certainawarenessof, andfamiliaritywith,cultural ormswhicharenotprimarilyheirs,atleastnot at the given moment;even if these forms are out of reach,not quiterelevantto one's presentsituation,or not actuallywell understood.Onestandsto lose many insights nto the dynamicof this totalityby lookingatonly one of its parts.As the peopleof differentcommunitiesand regionsbecome more entangledwith one another,what were previouslymoreself-containedcultures(not least in the eyes of ethnographers)urn in-

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creasinglyinto subcultures within the nationalculture. And at the sametime,the national culture is much more than a mosaic of such subcultures; for theflow of meaning and the construction of perspectives within it organisethemselves in such a way as to createmuch cross-cuttingand overlapbetweenclusters of meaning of varied derivation and salience.The two pictures of what sort of entity Nigeria is should of course not justbe placed side by side; they should be merged. An analysisof Nigeria whichleaves out ethnicity and ethnic cultures cannot make much sense. Theemphasis on a developing, internally diverse national culture, with somecohesion of its own and at the same time a part of world culture, on the otherhand contributes a greatdeal to an understandingof what Nigeria is now, andof the way Nigerians in Kafanchanand elsewhere look at life. But here, andfor the purpose of synthesising the two views, a reconsideration of ourassumptions about culture seems necessary. Some of what I have to say aboutthis relates to anthropologicalthinking about culture generally, while some ofit has more to do with what kinds of understandingswe can evolve about theworking of the world system.What most of our textbooks say about culture in their opening pages doesnot help us much in the study of complex societies and their cultures. Thisshould not lead us to ignore the realities but to re-examine our conceptualconventions. 'A culture' need not be homogeneous, or even particularlycoherent. Instead of assuming far-reachingcultural sharing, a 'replicationofuniformity', we should take a distributive view of cultures as systems ofmeaning.3 The social organisation of culture always depends both on thecommunicative flow and on the differentiationof experiences and interests insociety. In the complex society, the latter differentiation is by definitionconsiderable. It also tends to have a more uneven communicative flow-thatis, differentmessages reachdifferent people. The combined effect of both theuneven flow of communications and the diversity of experiences and interestsis a differentiation of perspectives among the members of the society. Hereand there these can be collectivised into subcultures, so that cultural sharingrecurs at a lower level of organisation. But in a differentiated society peopleare also to some extent in contact with (or at least aware of) others whoseperspectives they do not share, and know they do not share. In other words,there are perspectives towards perspectives; and one may indeed see thesocial organisationof a complex culture as a network of perspectives. I wouldalso argue that we need to see cultures generally, but perhaps especiallycomplex cultures, in more processual terms. There is a 'management ofmeaning' by which culture is generated and maintained, transmitted andreceived, applied, exhibited, remembered, scrutinised and experimentedwith. Often this is something much more than just a routine maintenance ofculture. Where there is strain between received meanings on the one handand personal experiences and interests on the other, and where diverseperspectives confront one another, cultures can perhaps never be completelyworked out as stable, coherent systems; they are for ever cultural 'work inprogress'.4So much for fairly generalconsiderations of culturalanalysis. A little morespecifically, with what intellectual tools may we best be able to grasp thenature of culturalorganisationand process under circumstances like those of

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present-dayNigeria?Overthe yearsanthropologistsnd theirneighboursnrelateddisciplineshave trieddifferentapproacheso complexityandchangein theThirdWorld.At one time-let ussay,between he 1930sand1950s-agreatmanyanthropologists,speciallyn theUSA, weredoingacculturationstudies.Oneproblemwith thesewas thattheyusuallynvolvedaratherweaksense of socialstructure,of the overwhelming owerof Westernexpansionandof the materialbasesof change.Theywerealso inclined o conceptualisesituationsof culture contact as if they were new or at least recent. It isquestionablewhether his was often realistic hen;certainlyhereare not toomanysuchsituations roundnow. A littlelater, n the 1950sandearly1960s,'modernisation' asa key concept,althoughanthropologists ereprobablynever quite as enthusiasticabout it as some other social scientists.Theovertones f ethnocentrism ndunilinearismwere,afterall, fairlynoticeable.For ourpurposes, urthermore,t is noteworthyhatmodernisationheoristsoften dweltonsocialpsychology ndpatterns f socialorganisation,trippingcultureaway.A verydifferent rameworkwas thatdealingwith thenotionofpluralsocieties,drawing speciallyon research xperiencen colonialplanta-tion societies with conspicuouslyheterogeneous opulationsn SouthEastAsia and the Caribbean.Heretheemphasiswasstronglyon institutionalisedculturalseparateness, n ethnicor racialdivisionof labour,and the domi-nance of a single group in the polity. This remainsone of the fewmacro-anthropologicalpproaches o the overallorganisationof culturalcomplexity,but at the present tagethereareprobablyn most ThirdWorldcountries onsiderablywiderareasof the socialstructurewhicharerelativelyopen, not the restrictedterritoryof any particulargroup. There is alsousuallya moredevelopedoverarchingulturalapparatus,orcefullybreakingdownsomeof thebarrierso a society-widelowof meaning.Suchtendenciescreateratherdifferentconditionsfor the developmentof moreintricatelyorganisednational ultures.I mayhave eftout one or two otherformulae, rameworks rorientationsdealingwith similarproblems.Clearlyenough,however, t is not that wehaveno past of attempting o understandarge-scale ulturalsystemsandtheir change.It is ratherthat much of this past does not now seem veryusable.So culturalstudies could well benefit froma freshstart n this area,onethat sees the world as it is in the late twentiethcentury.Scatteredhere andthere n anthropology ecently, herehavebeen ntimations hatthis worldofmovementand mixture s a world in creolisation;hat a conceptof creoleculture with its congenersmay be our most promisingroot metaphor.Movingfrom the social and culturalhistoryof particular olonialsocieties(wherethey have tended to applyespeciallyto particular acialor ethniccategories)o the discourseof linguists,creoleconceptshave become moregeneraln theirapplications.5 ndit is with ausagealongsuch inesthattheyarenowbeingretrieved.Drummond1980;see also1978) hus moves romaconsideration f internalvariability ndchange n the symbolicprocessesofethnicity n Guyanao a generalview thattherearenow no distinctcultures,only intersystemically onnected, creolisingCulture. Fabian (1978: 317)suggeststhat the colonialsystemin Africa-'frequentlydisjointed,hastilythrown together for the purpose of establishing political footholds'-

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produced pidgin contact cultures. In the following period there was creolisa-tion, the emergence of viable new syntheses. In Zaire he finds this repre-sented in popular painting, such as in the mamba muntugenre of mermaidimages; in the Jamaa religious movement, based on a Belgian missionary'sinterpretation of Bantu philosophy; and in Congo jazz. Graburn (1984:402 ff.) sees new creole art forms, anchored in the reformulatedconscious-ness of Third and Fourth World peoples, expanding beyond the restrictedcodes of tourist art.Current creolist linguistics probably has enough theoretical diversity andcontroversy to allow for rather varied borrowings into cultural theory. As Isee it myself, creole cultures like creole languages are those which draw insome way on two or more historicalsources, often originally widely different.They have had some time to develop and integrate, and to become elaborateand pervasive. People are formed from birth by these systems of meaning andlargely live their lives in contexts shaped by them. There is that sense of acontinuous spectrum of interacting forms, in which the various contributingsources of the culture aredifferentiallyvisible and active. And, in relation tothis, there is a built-in political economy of culture, as social power andmaterial resources are matched with the spectrum of cultural forms. Anumber of important points seem to come together here.If the 'Standard',the officially approved languageof the metropolis, standsat one end of the creole continuum of language, metropolitanculture in someprestige variant occupies the corresponding position on the cultural spec-trum. But what are the mechanisms which place it there, on the range ofvariations of a national culture, and how do the members of the society cometo be arranged n some fashion along that rangeon the basis of their personalculturalrepertoires?I sketched such a spectrum above in spatialterms, fromcity to village, but this tends not to explain much in itself. If we should lookfor the mechanisms which are more directly involved in the distributiveorderingof culture, we must note first of all that in Third World societies, aselsewhere, the division of labour now plays a major part in generatingcultural complexity. Anthropological thinking about culture seems too oftento disregard this fact. On the one hand, the division of labour entails adivision of knowledge, bringing people into interaction precisely becausethey do not share all understandings. By not sharing, of course, they canincrease their collective cultural inventory. On the other hand, as people aredifferently placed within the division of labour, they develop variedperspec-tives going beyond that knowledge which is in some sense commoditised,involved in material transactions.Within the division of labour one set of specialisationsmake up what, witha term from C. Wright Mills (1963: 405 ff.), we may describe as the culturalapparatus, where a relative few control a largely asymmetrical flow ofmeanings to a great many more people. The culturalapparatusencompasses,for example, formal education, the mass media, the arts, spectator sports,organised religion, and a large partof secularrituallife. Some segments of thecultural apparatus reach out to everybody in society. Others have moredifferentiated audiences.This cultural apparatus contributes a great deal to the centre-peripheryorganisationof national cultures, and to the channelling of the international

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cultural flow into them. The role of education is particularlysignificanthere.Education is cultural process, an organisedway of giving individuals culturalshape. At the same time, in much of the Third World, the growth of formaleducation is a facet of its penetrationby the world system (see, e.g., Ramirezand Meyer, 1980). Many Third World societies have also become intenselymeritocratic; their critics suggest that they are afflicted with a 'diplomadisease' (see Dore, 1976).I would like to insert some Nigerian evidence here. Those at all aware ofthe political history of Nigeria know that it has been intensely ethnicised,with a majordivide between the north and the south of the country. This mayseem to fit the notion of Nigeria as a collection of tribes, united mostly inconflict. A major political figure in the years around independence wasAhmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, premier of the Northern region, andleader of the dominant political party. The image of Ahmadu Bello, amongpoliticised southern Nigerians and among many expatriate observers, wasthat of a Muslim feudal aristocrat, an emirate man, a spokesman of the oldorder. Yet a recent biography by the political scientist John Paden (1986)presents a rather different picture. Ahmadu Bello was indeed a northernerand a Muslim, but at least as much an intense moderniser, deeply concernedwith the problem of bringing the people of his region into the emergentnational structure on acceptable terms. So one of his majorfields of activitywas the rapid expansion of northern Nigerian education, including crashprogrammesto establish northernersin the new meritocracy.Relate this to an inside account of that firstmilitaryputsch n 1966 in whichAhmadu Bello was killed. The author, Captain Ben Gbulie (1981: 12-19),was one of the young southern officersengaged in the conspiracy. It turns outthat, apart from everything else that was going wrong in Nigeria in themid-1960s, one of the things they found most scandalous was the rapidpromotion of northern officers. The northerners had been sent to whatGbulie and his friends saw as inferior British training institutions:

The implicationswere quite clear-and most disturbing.Not only had theseNortherners ecomecommissioned fficersbeforewe werehalf-way hroughourfirstyearat Sandhurst,heyhadall risento the enviable ankof Captain eforewecould even appear at the sovereign's paradewhich served essentiallyas apre-requisiteor ourpassingout as SecondLieutenants.. A coupd'etat, hen, Iwasfullyconvinced,wouldgo a long wayto remedy hewholesituation.

The conclusion, it would seem, is that the emphasis on ethnicity in analysingNigerian national society contains no more than half the story. Contests mayrepeatedly be defined in ethnic terms; but the prizes are defined in terms ofthe new, world system-oriented national culture and the social structurepredicated on it.Education, to reiterate, becomes a key factor in sorting people into thedivision of labour and determining their life situations, and thereby bothdirectly and indirectly their perspectives-Peel (1978, 1983)and Berry(1985:30 ff.) have recently written perceptively about local understandings of thisamong the south-western Nigerian Yoruba. I believe anthropologistswoulddo well to take more interest in education in the Third World, as a partof theendeavour of understanding the social organisation of culture.6 Not least is

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this important because schools tend to impart something more than theknowledge and skills they are officially expected to teach. The notion of a'hidden curriculum' is now common currency in debates over education inthe metropolitancountries. It is hardly any less relevant for an understandingof Third World education and its place in national cultures. And this hiddencurriculum often appears to involve, centrally, one orientation or other tometropolitan cultural influences. More classroom ethnography, of a typehitherto carried out mostly in the metropolitan countries, would allow us toexamine not only what is formallytaughtand learned but also the workingsofthe hidden curriculum. My Nigerian experience suggests that not leastboarding schools at the secondarylevel have often been virtualhothouses forthe development of metropolitanorientations (see also Masemann, 1974).

At one end of the national cultural spectrum we thus usually find thepeople with a greater degree of formal education, which has also probablyserved them as a passportto socialpower and materialaffluence. Occupation-al and status group subcultures are constructed around their perspectives.Further along the spectrum other groups and subcultures come into being,again to a greateror lesser extent on the basis of shared levels of educationalcapital. Observers of many Third World societies are familiar with 'theproblem of school leavers', mostly young people who may have finishedprimary schooling, or who have not quite completed it, or who have droppedout at a fairly early point in secondary schooling. They also often formdistinct subcultures-at times, of a disreputablesort: they are the 'rascals',or'sons of the wind'. That formal cultural capital they have acquired does nottake them very far. At the same time they may have been strongly influencedby the hidden curriculum; the modelling of consumption patterns by schoolteachers, attitudes to manualwork, to rurallife, and so forth.With the school leavers the world system in its cultural dimensions mayreach the remote village; in their sunglassesand raggedT shirts they areat itstail end, as it were. But they are also pioneer consumers of the products ofanother part of the cultural apparatus-popular culture. We have alreadyseen that at least in Nigeria it is all there; music, fashion, television, a popularpress. It has intense reflexive qualities, telling us how producers as well asconsumers see themselves, and the directions in which they would like theirlives to move. Clearly it also helps order the continuum of creole culture.And, like education, it has mostly been ignored in the anthropology of theThird World.7Much of the popular culture of the Third World is certainly in some waydependent on international nfluences. Its technology, its symbolic modalitiesand its genres are often not entirely indigenous. We may even think of theconcept of popular culture itself as an import to Third World studies from ametropolitan vocabulary. As we cannot be sure that it is easily transplanted,it may require some critical examination.In the analysis of contemporarymetropolitancultures we contrastpopularculture especially with some more refined 'high culture', produced andlargely consumed within a cultural elite. Such a contrast may have somerelevance in many Third World contexts as well. It is also important torecognise, however, that the involvement with popularculture often seems tobe less precisely a cultural expression of a system of social stratification,and

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moredirectlya reflectionof the centre-peripheryelationshipsn the worldsystem of culture. In Nigeria popularcultureappearsabove all to be amanifestation f a metropolis-orientedophistication nd modernity,con-trastingnot so much with 'highculture'as with 'bush',the derogatoryermfor anythingrustic, uncouth, at least by implicationconnectedwith theidiocyof rural ife. In somewayspopular ultureheremayeven be more ikewhat it was in earlymodernEurope,as describedby the historianPeterBurke(1978);a field of activitymoreor less unitingelites and massesinsharedpastimesandpleasures.Popularcultureengagespeoplein fantasyandplay;but to whomdo thegamesbelong?Especiallyn the debateovertheimpactof themedia, he viewis oftenstrongly xpressedhatthrough adioandtelevision,massjournalismand advertising,and other relatedinformation echnologiesand culturalforms,the culturesof North Americaand WesternEuropethreatenotherculturesn the worldwithextinction,a sortof deadlydiffusion.8ndeed, t istrue that 'Dallas'and'Charlie'sAngels'maybe seen on Nigerian elevision,andthat hawkers n Kafanchanell piratetapesof metropolitan op musicfrom the back of theirbikes. But the morepopularsit-comsare madeinNigeria(seeOreh,1985).And MichaelJackson,AbbaandJimmyCliffhavecertainlynot destroyed he popularmusicmarket orFelaAnikulapo-Kuti,SunnyAde or VictorUwaifo.I believethere s roomfora moreoptimisticview of thevitalityof popularexpressive ormsin the Third World, at least if the Nigerian example sanythingat all to go by. But, of course,these forms areby no meanspuretraditionalNigerianculture.The worldsystem,rather hancreatingmassiveculturalhomogeneityon a global scale, is replacingone diversitywithanother;andthenewdiversitys basedrelativelymoreon interrelations ndless on autonomy.Yetmeaningsand modesof expressinghem canbe bornin the interrelations.We must be awarethat opennessto foreignculturalinfluencesneed not involveonly an impoverishmentf local and nationalculture.It maygivepeopleaccess o technologicalndsymbolic esourcesordealingwiththeirownideas,managingheirownculture, n newways.Verybriefly, what is needed to understand he transformingpowerof mediatechnology, from print to electronics,on culturesgenerally s a subtleunderstandingf theinterplaybetween deas,symbolicmodalitieswiththeirvaried potentialities,and the ability of the media to create new socialrelationshipsand contexts (as well as to alter old ones). Of that subtleunderstandinghere s asyetlittleintheanthropologyfcomplex ultures,atleast in anysystematicorm.Along the entire creolising spectrum,from First World metropolistoThird World village, througheducationand popularculture,by way ofmissionaries, onsultants, ritical ntellectuals nd small-town torytellers,conversation etweenculturesgoes on. One of the advantages f a creolistview of contemporary hird Worldculturalorganisation,t seemsto me, isthat it suggeststhat the differentculturalstreamsengagingone another ncreolisationmayall be actively nvolved n shaping he resultant orms;andthat themergerof quitedifferent treams ancreatea particularntensity nculturalprocesses.The active handlingof meaningsof various ocal andforeignderivations an allowthemto workas commentariesn oneanother,

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through never-ending interminglingand counterpoint. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti,or Fela for short, the creatorof Afro beat music, political radical and hero ofNigerian popular culture, tells his biographer that he was Africanised by ablack Americangirlfriendin Californiawho gave him a consciousness-raisingworking-over (Moore, 1982: 85). Third World intellectuals generally-writers, artists or academics-may be close to the point of entry of theinternational flow of meaning into nationalcultures, but, like intellectuals inmost places, they are to some extent counter-cultural,carriersof an adversaryculture. While far from immune to the charms of the metropolis, theyrespond to them critically as well, self-consciously making themselves thespokesmen and guardiansof Third World cultures (at least some of the time).What they may broadcastabout metropolitanculture throughthe channels ofcommunication reaching into their society, then, is not necessarily thatculture itself, in either a pure or a somehow diluted form. It is their reportonthe dialogue between the metropolitanculture and themselves-as they haveheardit. Back in the provincialtown a schoolteachermay speak admiringlyofthe classic ethnography of his people, from the heyday of colonialism,although he may be critical at points on the basis of the oral history he hascollected himself. Receding into the past, the 'serial polyandry' of theirforefathers and foremothers now seems as titillating to the sophisticates inKafanchan as Mormon polygamy may be to many Americans. They cannottake the subject as seriously as the missionaries and the first generation ofChristian converts did.The dominant varieties of world system thought which have developed inrecent times seem mostly to leave anthropologists uninterested, ambivalentor hostile. This may in part be due to the tradition of anthropologicalpractice, with its preferencefor the small-scale, the face-to-face, the authenti-cally alien. Another reason, however, would seem to be our distrust ofapproacheswhich seem too determined not to let small facts get in the way oflarge issues, too sure that the dominant is totally dominant, too littleconcerned with what the peripheries do both for themselves and to thecentre. World system thought sometimes indeed breeds its own rhetoricaloversimplifications, its own vulgarities. It seems a little too ready to forgetthat the influences of any one centre on the peripheries may not be whollymonolithic, but may be varied, unco-ordinated and possibly contradictory.In its typical figures of speech there may be no room for recognizing thatthere may be several centres, conflicting or complementary, and that certainof them may not be the products of colonial or post-colonial periods. (ForAhmadu Bello, the northern Nigerian politician, the real Mecca was notLondon; Mecca was Mecca.) And, last but not least, too often in worldsystem thinking there simply seems to be no room for culture.9A macro-anthropology of culture which takes into account the worldsystem and its centre-periphery relation appears to be well served by acreolist point of view. It could even be the most distinctive contributionanthropologycan make to world system studies. It identifies diversityitself asa source of cultural vitality; it demands of us that we see complexity andfluidity as an intellectual challenge ratherthan as something to escape from.It should point us to ways of looking at systems of meaningwhich do not hidetheir connections with the facts of power and materiallife.

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We can perhaps benefit from it, too, because an understanding of theworld system in cultural terms can be enlightening not only in Third Worldstudies but also as we try to make of anthropology a truly general andcomparative study of culture. Creolecultures are not necessarilyonly colonialand post-colonial cultures. I spend most of my time in a small country whichfor the last half-millennium or so has been nobody's colony, at least not as faras politics goes. Yet we are also drawn into the world system and itscentre-periphery relations, and the terms of debate in these 1980s seem to bethose of creolisation. What is really Swedish culture? In an era of populationmovements and communication satellites will it survive, or will it beenriched? And the questions are perhaps just slightly changed in the realcentres of the world. What would life be like there without swamis andwithout reggae, without Olympic Games and 'the Japanese model'? In theend, it seems, we are all being creolised.

NOTES1 This article was first presented n the CentennialLecture series of the Department fAnthropology, niversity f Pennsylvania,n March1986.Partsof it havebeenadaptedromapaperpresentedn colloquian theDepartmentsfAnthropologyftheUniversity fCalifornia,Berkeley,StanfordUniversity nd heUniversity fCalifornia,antaCruz,AprilandMay1985.I amgratefulor commentsmadeon thoseoccasions. havealsobenefited romdiscussionswith

my colleaguesn the WorldSystemof Cultureproject n the Department f SocialAnthro-pology,University f Stockholm,StefanMolund,HelenaWulff,andC. BawaYamba.2 Nash(1981)has reviewed hisbodyof anthropology,singthe notionof a world ystem.3 Myinterestndistributivemodelsofculturehasbeen nspired ythewritingsnthis areaofWallace 1961:26 ff.), Goodenough1971)and Schwartz1978a,b), althought has takenaratherdifferentdirection.Sperber's1985)notion of an 'epidemiology f representations'sanother ecentexpression f a concernwith the distribution f culture.4 Althoughmost of Eric Wolf's Europeand the PeoplewithoutHistoty s not directlyconcernedwithcultural nalysisn a stricterense,his'Afterword'n itsownwayoffers hiskindof moreprocessual nderstandingf culture Wolf,1982:387-91).5 Fordiscussions f regionallyestrictedonceptions f creolism,n theNew Worldcontext,see,e.g. Adams 1959)and Brathwaite1971:xiii ff.).6 Cf. Eickelman1978:485): 'the studyof education an be to complexsocietieswhat thestudyof religionhas been to societiesvariously haracterizedy anthropologistss simple ,cold or elementary .'7 Ontheneglectof popular ulture n African nthropologyeeFabian 1978:315)andHart(1985:254-5). For onebriefcomment nNigerianpopular ulture ee Rubenstein1978).8 Schiller 1971)and Hamelink1983)exemplifywritingsn this vein.9 In the workof ImmanuelWallerstein,with whom the worldsystemconcept s at presentmostcloselyassociated, ttentiono cultures very imited,assomecommentatorsavepointedout (e.g. Collins,1981:45 ff.; ChirotandHall, 1982).To the extentthat he doesdiscuss hetopic, he sees the differentiation f nationalcultures argelyas the outcomeof ideologicalmanoeuvringnthepartofdominant tratanboth he corecountries fthe world ystemand heperipheralreas Wallerstein, 974:349ff., 1984:170ff.).

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Brathwaite, Edward. 1971. TheDevelopmentof CreoleSocietyinJamaica, 1770-1820.London: Oxford University Press.Burke, Peter. 1978. Popular Culture n Early ModernEurope. New York: Harper &Row.Chirot, Daniel, and Thomas D. Hall. 1982. 'World-system theory', AnnualReview ofSociology,8: 81-106.Collins, Randall. 1981. SociologysinceMidcentury.New York: Academic Press.Dore, Ronald. 1976. TheDiplomaDisease. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press.Drummond, Lee. 1978. 'The transatlanticnanny:notes on a comparativesemiotics ofthe family in English-speaking societies', AmericanEthnologist,5: 30-43.- 1980. 'The cultural continuum: a theory of inter-systems', Man, 15: 352-74.Eickelman, Dale F. 1978. 'The art of memory: Islamic education and its social

reproduction', Comparative tudies in SocietyandHistory,20: 485-516.Ekwensi, Cyprian. 1961.Jagua Nana. London: Hutchinson.Eliot, T. S. (1948) 1962. Notes towards heDefinitionof Culture.London: Faber.Fabian, Johannes. 1978. 'Popularculture in Africa: findings and conjectures',Africa,48: 315-34.Gbulie, Ben. 1981. Nigeria'sFive Majors.Onitsha: Africana Educational Publishers.Golding, Peter. 1977. 'Media professionalismin the Third World: the transfer of anideology', in Mass CommunicationndSociety, James Curran,Michael Gurevitchand Janet Woollacott (eds.). London: Edward Arnold.Goodenough, Ward H. 1971. Culture, Language, and Society. Reading, Mass.:Addison-Wesley.Graburn, Nelson H. H. 1984. 'The evolution of tourist arts', Annals of TourismResearch,11: 393-419.Hamelink, Cees T. 1983. CulturalAutonomyand Global Communications.New York:Longman.Hart, Keith. 1985. 'The social anthropology of West Africa', Annual Review ofAnthropology,14: 243-72.Masemann, Vandra. 1974. 'The hidden curriculum of a West African girls'boarding school', CanadianJournal of AfricanStudies, 8: 479-94.Mills, C. Wright. 1963. Power, Politics, andPeople. New York: Ballantine.Moore, Carlos. 1982. Fela, Fela: this bitchof a life. London: Allison & Busby.Nash, June. 1981. 'Ethnographic aspects of the world capitalist system', AnnualReview of Anthropology,10: 393-423.Oreh, O. 0. 1985. 'Masqueradeand other plays on Nigerian television', in MassCommunication,CultureandSocietyin WestAfrica, Frank Okwu Ugboajah(ed.).Munich: Hans Zell/K. G. Saur.Paden, John N. 1986. Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto. London: Hodder &Stoughton.Peel, J. D. Y. 1978. 'Olaju: a Yoruba concept of development', Journal ofDevelopmentalStudies, 14: 135-65.1983. IjeshasandNigerians. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.Ramirez, FranciscoO., and John W. Meyer. 1980. 'Comparativeeducation: the socialconstruction of the modern world system', Annual Review of Sociology, 6:369-99.Rubenstein, Joseph. 1978. 'On Nigerian pop culture', Dialectical Anthropology,3:261-7.Sauvant, Karl P. 1976. 'The potential of multinationalenterprises as vehicles for thetransmissionof business culture', in ControllingMultinationalEnterprises,Karl P.Sauvantand Farid G. Lavipour (eds.). Boulder, Col.: Westview Press.Schiller, HerbertL. 1971.Mass CommunicationsndAmericanEmpire.Boston, Mass.:Beacon.

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Schwartz,Theodore,1978a. 'Where s the culture?Personality s the distributivelocus of culture', in The Makingof PsychologicalAnthropology, eorgeD.Spindler ed.). Berkeleyand LosAngeles:University f California ress.- 1978b. The size andshapeof aculture', n ScaleandSocialOrganisation,redrikBarth ed.). Oslo:Universitetsforlaget.Sperber,Dan. 1985. 'Anthropology nd psychology: owardsan epidemiology frepresentations',Man,20: 73-89.Wallace,AnthonyF. C. 1961.CulturendPersonality. ew York:RandomHouse.Wallerstein,mmanuel.1974.TheModenWorldystem.New York:Academic ress.- 1984. The Politicsof the WorldEconomy.Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress.Wolf,EricR. 1982.Europe ndthePeoplewithoutHistory.Berkeley nd LosAngeles:University f California ress.

ResumeLe mondeencreolisation

L'etude des culturescontemporaines u Tiers Monde, et pas des moindres enAfrique,a encore a tenir comptede la reorganisationt de la transformation esstructuresde sens et des formessignificatives ui ont resultede leurincorporationdansun systememondial.En se basantparticulierementur desexemplesnigeriens,on denote ci que l'imageconventionnelle 'unemosaiquede culturesethniquesquicontinuede predominer la fois dans e domainedes connaissancesnthropologiqueset du journalismeest peu satisfaisante t que la diversiteculturelledoit etremaintenantcomprisedans un vaste cadre de relationscentre-peripherie, iu lesculturesnationalesmergenthistoriquementracea une interaction ntre escourantsculturels ransnationauxt les cultures ocaleset regionales.Le systemedel'enseigne-ment,la culturepopulaire t les media ontmarques ommeetantdes domaines iu esinfluences ulturelles ransnationalesouentun roleimportant ansla formation esnouvelles ulturesnationales.I estegalementuggerequel'etudedes transformationsculturelles u TiersMondedansuncontexteglobalbeneficierait 'uneperspective ecreolisation ui permettrait e reconnaitre e faqonadequatees reactions ulturellescreatives es societesdu Tiers Mondeaux influencesmetropolitaines.

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