Re-Cognizing the Humanities: Toward a Complex-Adaptive Discipline
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Paper presented at
"Rethinking the Humanities in Africa"
Obafemi Awolowo University
Ile-Ife, Nigeria
June 2006
Published under same title as chapter in
Rethinking the Humanities in Africa
(Nigeria: Cedar Productions, 2007)
ABSTRACT:
Humanism has traditionally searched for something everlasting, for some truth of our human condition. The underlying assumption that there is something that is innately human affords the possibility of delineating the works of the Dantes and the Picassos and the Beethovens of the Western Canon from those that fail to strum that fundamental chord. The works found to be taught in university courses in the humanities, unsurprisingly, are of the canonized variety.
Unfortunately, in Africa to a much larger extent than anywhere else in the world right now, this type of study of the humanities is deeply problematic for many of the same reasons I confronted in my studies1 of contentious politics, the main one being institutional history.2 What is to be studied when an entire truth manufacturing and reinforcing structure is imposed upon a population?
By utilizing research and works in contentious politics, post-colonialism and complexity theory, I offer an organizational framework for the humanities discipline in Africa—and abroad—consisting of a complex-adaptive system in which minimal hierarchy and organizational heterogeneity facilitate the type of humanistic activity grounded in what Said illustrates to be at the heart of the humanities: the idea that "history is made by men and women, and that we can know things…by the way they were made."3 When different value judgments of what constitutes a work in the humanities (organizational heterogeneity) are given equal gravity (minimal hierarchy) in the humanistic discourse, the discipline, because it will be more adaptable than adapted, will accommodate both the reconciliation of past perspectives on the manufacture of truth and its representation in the humanities, as well as the pedagogical and classificatory issues facing scholars today. Only then will the humanities be performing true humanism, i.e., self-critique through understanding of its own ontogeny.
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1 "Graphic Demonstrations of Democratization: A Comparative Study of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire," unpublished research, 2003; "The Amharization of Oromia: African Colonialism at its Finest," unpublished research, 2005.
2 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996); Michael Bratton & Nicholas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997); Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, Princeton UP: 2001).
3 Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) 11.
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