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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 an 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, this text 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.
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This study is an attempt to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place (Tsing 1993)-a society in the savanna region of West Africa where Meyer Fortes, Jack Goody, and Marcel Griaule conducted their ethnographic research. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
This study is an attempt to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place (Tsing 1993)-a society in the savanna region of West Africa where Meyer Fortes, Jack Goody, and Marcel Griaule conducted their ethnographic research. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Anyone who has read several ethnographies will know by now that some are full of facts, and no stories and others are full of stories and no facts. Remotely Global is full of facts but did not hold my interest. The author tries not to mention his experiences too much and by the end of the book you are left asking 'who are the Kabre?'. You can talk about their rituals and kinship systems but cannot identify with these people. Piot is also unsuccessful in trying to put forward the argument that Kabre society is quite modern. Sometimes we get facts about the traditional Kabre life and sometimes we get ramblings about how modern Kabre Society is. It is far too disjointed for my liking.
Read it if you have an interest in Africa and the effects of colonialism.
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2 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Interstices of the traditional and the modern
7 Mar 2009
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
A new "take" on the history of colonization in West Africa.
5 Mar 2000
Format:Paperback
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 powers of the colonizers.
"As should be amply clear by now, the Kabre world is one of promiscuous mixing, in which sacrifice and MTV, rainmakers and civil servants, fetishists and catechists exist side by side and coauthor an uncontainable hybrid cultural landscape...They (the Kabre) are as 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 as desirable...An empty signifier whose content is forever shifting, modernity itself is not only intrinsically impure and hopelessly hybridized, but also incorrigibly plural and forever incomplete." (page 178)
Remotely Global has a refreshing, astringent tone. It is clearly written with rich detail. As an ethnographer's outlook, it provides a new 'take' on the process of colonization and offers much to challenge or complete the common Western viewpoint of colonial civilization.
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